It Could Happen Here Weekly 191

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Hello and welcome to Ika Happen here.

I'm joined once again by...

Yarrison Davis.

Hello.

Hello, hello.

And recently I was reading through a photo book called Humans by Brandon Stanton.

It features interviews of people on the streets all over the world.

He started off and he kind of became well-known online for the Humans of New York series.

I'm not sure if you've heard of that.

Yeah, I think so.

Yeah, yeah.

So he did that for a while and he ended up traveling to other parts of the world and doing basically the same thing, just interviewing people on the street, getting their insights, hearing their struggles, hearing their story.

And when I saw the book in the library, I just, I picked it up, borrowed it, decided to read it through.

And it's really...

profound in a sense.

You know, you get a sense of the spectrum of humanity, of what people are going through, of the highs and lows of the human experience.

I mean, it can make you laugh on one page and make you cry for the next page.

And seeing that variety of humanity reminded me of another book that I read and finished recently, which is called Humankind, a Hopeful History by Radka Bregman.

A friend of mine had given it to me because he said it had changed his whole view on the world.

And so I wanted to talk about some of the concepts that I picked up in that book, like the origins and critiques of veneer theory, why most people are actually pretty decent, and the problems with some of the narratives of our wickedness.

And in the next episode, I want to get into some of the reasons why people do bad and what we can do about it.

Sounds exciting because there is a lot of bad right now.

There is.

There is.

I mean, as we're on that topic, I mean, what would you say is the most common perspective you hear on humanity and human nature?

I don't know.

Like, there's this clash between like this liberal humanist version and then this

Christian moralist version, I guess, like in the States right now.

But that's been going on for decades, if not centuries.

By liberal humanists and Christian moralists.

I mean, I think I get a sense of what the Christian moralist version is, right?

That we are all sinful, destined for hell, need salvation.

That version of the story?

Yeah, you know, more or less.

And the liberal humanist perspective is.

I mean, I don't know, like

this forever search for like what human rights are and like human decency.

So we come up with like governments and rules

to actually like govern over our morals as a democratic process that continues to evolve over the course of like hundreds of years.

We're like, you know, on the moral arc of the universe, just not fully, you know, there yet.

Yeah, I've heard that perspective.

I think most commonly

in my spaces, I tend to hear the, you know, people are wicked, people are sinful in religious cases, or people are violent, people are selfish, and that kind of in that similar liberal vein where we have these systems in place to kind of check our worst impulses, to kind of keep us regulated and to keep society functioning.

And Bregman opens his book by discussing the idea of civilization being a thin mask that covers our true savage instincts.

He calls it the veneer theory.

And he spends the rest of the book basically pointing out all the different errors in that judgment.

I mean, he doesn't claim that we're all good, good people, happy-co-lucky, saints, or anything like that.

But he does say that for the most part, most people are pretty decent.

And I know that clashes with what a lot of people are accustomed to hearing.

And there are some very notable exceptions.

But despite the efforts of elites to paint and proport a different picture, there's actually a lot more leaning towards our

decent, if not good nature, than the contrary.

But of course, these kind of conversations, you always have to go back to the debate between Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

We can't escape these guys.

Hobbes, of course, had the perspective in Leviathan, which was written in 1651, that in the absence of a strong central authority, human beings would live in a condition of perpetual war, with every man against every other man, a war of all against all, as he would have put it.

So to him, people are naturally self-interested and driven by the desire for power and survival, so without laws or a sovereign to keep them in check, individuals would act purely on their own instincts, leading to a constant conflict over resources, safety, and dominance.

Life in this state of nature would be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

A couple years later, a couple decades later, Rousseau was writing in the Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men, and he basically flipped Hobbes' view on its head.

He believed that humans in the state of nature were peaceful, cooperative, and guided by basic needs and and compassion.

And there was a development of hierarchies and institutions that had led to inequality, jealousy, and competition, which basically corrupted human nature.

In his words, man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

Do you take a side in this debate, by the way?

Irm, not to be the centrist

option, but I don't know.

I think both these things play into each other.

I definitely don't believe in the idea that like the state is the only thing that reins people in and stops them from doing immoral acts, right?

It's the same thing as like without without God or without the Bible, then everyone would just be like raping and murdering.

And meanwhile, actual Christians obviously rape and murder all the time anyway.

But like, no, like this, this idea isn't the only thing that

keeps you from becoming this like, you know, savage, like, like inhuman monster.

People can be morally good without this, this, like, religious notion.

And I think, in some ways, the state can also operate as a religious notion to these people, where it, you know, the police is the only thing that's keeping you from becoming this like horrible monster who just hurts everyone around you.

But I also have my sympathies to the like alternate side of that.

And I can see there's a great deal of oppression and horrific violence that can only happen at scale under the organization of a state.

So I will pick the annoying centrist option.

Yeah, I know that there are a lot of people who have this sense that, you know, the state and the law is all that's standing between us and the purge or Mad Max or something like that.

Sure, exactly.

So, yeah, I don't think that Hobbes's overgeneralization of human nature as inherently violent and selfish holds up when you look at the diversity of human experience and human societies.

I mean, that's not to say that violence and conflict were absent in a world without state, but, you know, context matters, resources, environment, group size, all those things would have played roles.

And I don't think that we should be accepting Rousseau's romantic light either.

So, I guess I'm in the eccentric camp with you.

The truth does seem to lie somewhere in that middle ground: that human nature is flexible and that it's shaped by social, ecological, and historical contexts.

Of course, getting in the weeds of humanity's origins is stimulating as an exercise, but there's only so much we can know about the past for certain.

What we can't know for certain is the present, and what we've seen in the present is that when disaster strikes, people have tended to help each other.

In Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the official response was famously criticized for being slow and disorganized, and yet, despite media attempts to paint these people as looters and thugs and all these different things, community members, neighbors, volunteers all stepped up to rescue people, to mobilize food, shelter, and basic aid, to expropriate where necessary to get people what they needed, long before federal agencies got on the scene.

Similarly, in a more recent occurrence, After the Cranfeld Tower fire in the UK in 2017,

the official channels had failed.

The people of that tower, many died as a result, regulations that were supposed to protect people were not enforced or were absent.

And yet it was community members who sprang into action to provide water and shelter and food and clothes and emotional support.

Even when the Twin Towers fell on September 11th, 2001, And this is an example that Bragman actually spent some time talking about.

People actually helped people descend the stairwells in an orderly fashion.

You know, they would say, you know, after you

going down the stairs

and passersby would go in and help others to evacuate and assist the wounded long before the emergency services arrived.

So people acted and prioritized helping others, even in a disaster scenario.

And yet, what do we see?

in dystopian fiction, in apocalyptic fiction.

You see people just like driving around around shooting guns in the air.

You see the Purge, you see the Mad Mask, you see the zombie apocalypse scenarios.

In Rebecca Solnit's book, A Paradise Built in Hell, she found that disasters peeled back the layers of society and revealed the empathy, cooperation, and care at humanity's core.

She noted that when disaster strikes is when people most often reveal their better natures.

And yet those negative narratives tend to have more sway in the popular imagination.

No, and this is like so true.

I remember in 2020 during the wildfires on the west coast, the anarchist response was to set up these like giant like mutual aid centers where people fleeing from the fire, you know, like not like other anarchists, just like regular people fleeing from the fire, could get necessities and figure out housing.

Meanwhile, right-wing militias were setting up checkpoints, monitoring to make sure Antifa wasn't

like raiding people's homes as they were fleeing from the fires.

Like these These were the two options.

You had anarchists actually helping the people who were fleeing from this horrific fire and setting up massive, massive aid distribution centers.

Meanwhile, right-wing militias were pulling people over at gunpoint, making sure Antifa wasn't up to any shenanigans.

And similar stuff happened last year during Hurricane Helene.

on the East Coast, where you had a whole bunch of like southeast anarchists in the Appalachians do mutual aid disaster response.

Meanwhile, right-wing militias were spreading rumors about like FEMA fraud and all of this crazy stuff, not actually helping anybody, but it was anarchists doing

a large amount of the actual water distribution and medical assistance on the ground as the federal response was delayed and insufficient.

Yeah, I mean, I was aware of the anarchist efforts during these disasters, but

I didn't know about that situation with the right-wing militias setting up checkpoints.

That's not shocking, but still wild, you know?

Yeah, no, it's so funny because those are the people, you know, claiming that, you know, without the government, we would have the purge, anarchists would just go around doing all kinds of crazy crimes, and yet when things actually happen, their attempts to like deputize them as like their own police force actually creates those conditions.

Meanwhile, anarchists are the ones actually helping people.

Exactly.

Exactly.

And yet, despite these situations, these things happening again and again, we still have these popular narratives.

You don't know the narrative I see referenced all the time?

Lord of the Flies.

Yes, of course, of course.

All the time, right?

It's basically become a cultural shorthand for the idea that people are just savage at heart.

That this veneer of civilization is the only thing keeping us in check.

I mean, these days, I do see people joking that it's because those were British boys.

So true, actually.

So true.

But while I get the joke, I think it's also important to remember that it's like people are taking this work of fiction as if it's an anthropological study.

Yeah.

When it's just something that a guy made up as an analogy for, you know, the situation during World War II.

I think it's also good to remember that the British are people too.

I have a British co-worker, so, you know.

We have to, we have to show them a little bit of human, human dignity.

Exactly.

Exactly.

People embrace this story because it confirms what they want to believe in this climate of cynicism.

But Bragman actually tells a story in the book about a true instance of when a shipwreck of young boys occurred.

Of course, they weren't British boys.

They were Tongan boys, as in from the country of Tonga.

So in 1965, six Tongan boys were stranded on a remote island for over a year.

And rather than descending into violence, they survived through cooperation.

You know, they built a garden, they shared duties, they didn't do any human sacrifices, you know, they created a rotor system to get things done, they resolved conflicts.

When people were in conflict, they would go on timeout, they would put each other on timeout and go on opposite sides of the island until the, you know, cooler heads prevailed.

They figured out ways to deal with their conflicts, to organize themselves without authority.

and without chaos.

But the problem is that these fictional narratives become so powerful instead of the real ones that they have a similar effect to the placebo effect.

In fact, it's the placebo effect's evil twin, the no placebo effect.

Now, I'd heard about the placebo effect before, and I'm sure you have as well, but for those who don't know, it's basically where someone's health actually improves after receiving what's basically a dummy treatment, like a sugar pill or a fake surgery or a saline injection.

The body heals itself because the mind of the person believes it's being healed.

The mind turns that trust into medicine.

And I mean, that's just,

that's amazing to me even now.

And they don't quite understand how it works yet, but it's still really cool.

But there's another dimension to the placebo effect that I hadn't heard about before, but it makes intuitive sense, I suppose.

It's called the nocebo effect.

And Bregman is the one who introduced me to that concept.

So the nocebo effect is where instead of belief healing you, it's belief that makes you sick.

So people experience real pain, real symptoms, and even real illness, not because there's an actual physical cause, but because in their minds they expect to be harmed.

So their minds turn that fear of harm into actual harm and injury.

And there was one case study that he used where a child had drunk a Coke and thought it was poisoned.

And then it just created this mass hysteria almost with dozens of children in hospitals with headaches and nausea and panic attacks because they drank Coke to the point where Coca-Cola actually had to recall all of those drinks, even though tests had shown that there was nothing in the drinks that were making people sick.

But their body still responded as if there was

because they believed they heard the story, they heard about it, they saw what happened to others and they believed it would happen to them.

And that's the nocebo effect in action.

All right, so we get the concept.

So, Bregman actually stretched these concepts beyond the field of medicine, and he basically made the points that

what if these concepts are bait into how we view each other?

You know, so what if our belief that people are selfish and cruel and violent by nature actually makes it so?

You know, if you expect the worst from people, you'll act on that.

You know, you might be colder or more defensive or more likely to punish or preempt betrayal.

And what happens as a result is that, you know, people pick up on that energy, they respond in kind, they withdraw, they retaliate, and then that cycle ends up feeding itself.

And so the belief, that negative belief becomes a social reality, a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So we end up building institutions that are based on that cynical expectation.

We design policies that are based around punishment.

We train ourselves to see strangers as threats rather than as neighbors.

And then when we have a fallout, as when that prophecy is fulfilled by our own actions, we can then say, well, see, I was right.

You know, people are awful.

But what we don't see is that our expectations and the systems we build around those expectations are part of what ends up making it that way.

I think an easy example to point to is with prison, right?

People expect criminals to act like animals, to act like monsters, to beasts.

And so they create prisons and in those prisons treat them like animals, monsters and beasts.

And people respond to that.

You know, you treat people like animals, they're going to behave like animals.

So then the question that Bregman poses is what happens if we decide to treat people like they're good.

You know, trusting their intentions, leaning into care and building our systems around the assumption that most people are decent.

So how do we make that leap?

I said before that, you know, we don't really necessarily need to go into the past to see how people behave in the present, but it's a good idea to get a sense of how we evolved, right?

A lot of people have

a brutal perception of human evolution.

You know, they draw comparisons between us and chimpanzees,

or, you know, they make it seem, first of all, ignoring bonobos entirely and also ignoring the fact that we are our own species with our own evolutionary history.

You know, people have a very cynical and honestly insulting like view of like the cavemen of our past.

But our history is actually pretty soft.

In fact, Bregman argues in favor of something called self-domestication theory, which has a little bit of anthropological and evolutionary biological backing.

And so the basic claim of this theory is that the reason Homo sapiens survived and other ancient humans didn't isn't because we were the strongest or the smartest or the most cunning, but because we were friendlier, that we evolved to be more social, cooperative, playful, and trusting.

Self-domestication theorists basically compare humans as puppies to the other homo species as wolves.

That we domesticate ourselves to become less aggressive, our faces softened, our bodies became less robust.

And our openness and friendliness allowed us to build relationships, to build groups, to raise children communally, and to survive.

And And so, if we accept our theory, if we acknowledge that and build that into our foundation, that we did evolve our capacity to be kind, that it is something that is within our humanity, that it's not a fragile, glossover savagery or a morality that's given to us by religion or law, then we can basically become who we're capable of becoming.

You know, we can create systems that allow us to develop that.

And this sounds really optimistic.

This sounds really happy-go-lucky and

we are going to get into some of the darker chapters of our humanity in the next episode, but I wanted to wrap this one up by unpacking the death of Catherine Kitty Genevieve in 1964.

It's another example that Breckman refers to in his book, and it's one of the classic case studies that was used for a long time.

to illustrate the apathy and cold-heartedness of humanity.

Because the New York Times, which as we all know is a reputable and trustworthy institution, the New York Times claimed that she was stabbed in the street while 38 neighbors looked on and did nothing, right?

This was the quintessential story that was used to say, you know, look at that bystander effect.

Humans just don't care.

You know, it was used as an example of apathy, of urban decay, of...

everything wrong with us.

But the story was wrong.

The reporters built up this story and it was wrong.

I mean, yes, she was murdered, but people did try to help.

Some had called the police, but this was in a time before 9-1-1, so it was, you had to call like the local station, and then the response process was a bit slow.

One neighbor actually rushed out and held her as she died, held her in their arms.

So the press spun this story as like some bleak tale and the field of psychology ate it up because it was part of a trend at the time to create this perception of humanity but the real story was a lot more heroin a lot more human i mean it was messy and somebody still murdered her but this this idea of the bystander effect that has been so inflated a lot of the key studies that have been used as examples of them have been chipped away at over time And that's one of the main stories that has been pretty thoroughly debunked at this point.

So I I like where Bregman's been going, but we've glossed over the dark side, you know, the shadow of our humanity.

You know, even he acknowledges in this book that we do bad stuff as well.

So the next episode, we are going to wade into that, but how are you feeling about humanity so far?

I think I actually do have an underlying optimism, like beneath how I move around in the world, which is, which is kind of odd considering the sort of stuff I do for work.

But it is true.

And I think part of that is what just keeps me going.

I don't know.

Like, yeah, I've certainly been around my fair share of like doomers and nihilists over the years.

And at the very least, those people don't seem to be very happy

and don't seem to be enjoying life.

And sometimes it's hard to enjoy life, absolutely.

But

I think you need to be able to find a place for yourself within a world that has like evil as a almost inherent component and find your way either through that, sometimes around that, but oftentimes through it.

And I think that's, I mean, that's, that's just been a part of like growing up.

We are certainly growing up in like a weird time, but I think that's kind of always been true.

Like that's, that was, that was true 100 years ago.

So I don't know.

I, part of me, and maybe this is just overly optimistic, but, but part of me continues to resist being a doomer despite all of the bad news that is trying to infiltrate my brain at all times, which is a very profitable industry, right?

I mean, that's somewhat kind of what this show is, right?

It kind of does play into those instincts,

which is something that we critique amongst ourselves often.

And we try to always find that balance as well.

But yeah, like the doom cycle is

a huge industry.

And there's people that absolutely want you to always be panicking all the time.

And that drives consumer choices that drives ad revenue right i mean bregman puts forward a very compelling argument in the book actually that the news is a public health hazard totally yeah no like absolutely and like i have to keep up with the news all the time and i don't think it affects me that much anymore and and certainly in in you know, doing a daily news show, we try to be very selective in the things that we cover.

We don't cover everything all the time.

We try to cover the things that like our hosts feel is both within their wheelhouse and that people who listen to the show should know about, right?

Certain things that you might not be hearing about in a mainstream news.

But no, the news has a massive,

I think, spiritual evil to it as well.

There is a sinister undercurrent to the news as an industry.

Indeed.

And that's something that we are also always butting up against.

Well,

on that optimistic note.

Yeah, Yeah, until next time.

All power to all the people.

Peace.

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Hello, and welcome to Could Happen here.

Last episode, I was joined by Yarison Davis.

Hello, Addie's here again because we're gonna get more into what we spoke about last time.

Last episode, we painted a hopeful account of humanity's nature, courtesy of my reading of Rudger Bregman's Humankind: a Hopeful History.

So, I probably fed into the anarchist or utopian narrative a bit with that previous episode, but the truth is that I'm not really being optimistic, I'm being realistic but realism has been confused with cynicism for so long that even acknowledging both sides of the coin can be seen as overly utopian people can be bad and we'll get into the why but for whatever reason they are bad that is why as anarchists have consistently argued nobody should have authority Now, there will always be outliers and this explanation I'm about to share is not going to get into every unique case of badness, but we are going to get into some of the reasons that people do bad and what we can do about it.

As I said last episode, we took issue with this idea of civilization as a thin veneer, and we put forward the premise the humans are mostly pretty decent.

In fact, I didn't mention it last episode, but we don't even really like to kill each other.

contrary to popular belief.

Bregwen actually shares that in World War II, studies showed showed that many soldiers didn't shoot their weapons even in combat.

Trained soldiers had a difficult time actually pulling the trigger and killing people.

There are exceptions, as I said before, but in a lot of cases, it's very difficult for people to actually kill.

Military strategies ended up changing once authorities realized this, and the training programs of soldiers was redesigned to overcome this resistance.

But that reluctance to killing does also indicate that it takes some effort to overcome our general decency toward each other because most people, again, most not all, are not natural born killers.

So again, how do we do bad?

You know, all sorts of atrocities have been carried out by humans, both in ancient and modern times.

What do you think is the cause?

Self-preservation in some way, either physical or psychological.

I'm not, I'm not an anthropologist.

I'm not a sociologist.

Most of my experiences with people is both queer people and then looking at Nazis and like political extremists.

So it's maybe not the best sample size for the general population.

I think I tend to exist kind of on the perimeter of most human experience.

But probably some form of either psychological or physical self-preservation in my experience slash opinion.

That's interesting.

I didn't think of it.

I think it comes close to what Bregman ends up getting into, but I think self-preservation.

Well, we'll get into that in a bit.

You know, it's difficult to square that with just how brutal some of these disasters have been.

You know, these atrocities that have taken place around the world, organized, systemic, industrial cruelty, you know, things like the Holocaust.

Totally.

It's interesting because I think it's two paradoxical instincts that play off each other.

There's this self-preservation, and there's also, I believe, in a subversion of the death drive.

And I think those can interact in really odd ways.

The death drive?

Yeah.

Specifically, like fascism, and like, you know, you can see this in like the genocides of the 20th century and 21st centuries, like specifically.

But no, like fascism as like a political embodying of the death drive,

which is, I think, also an aspect.

And I think these things exist together in parallel while being paradoxical.

and that's what produces a lot of the incongruity around things like fascism um right it is it is like an inherently paradoxical uh system when when you say self-preservation are you just talking about on the individual level or are you saying like community self-preservation as well both both but also i think not even just physical but also like psychological like being able to like continue being able to continue existing as yourself, either within a group of people or just you as an individual, like psychological things that you need to do to make yourself feel like you're in community or that you are safe, or that you have meaning, or that you have purpose, as well as the physical aspects.

And you're saying that that lends itself to atrocity.

I think it can, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, that actually is strikingly close to what Bregman ends up uncovering.

Look at the reasons that people will talk about for like why the genocide in Gaza is like necessary, right?

It is playing off both of those impulses.

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, all sorts of genocides, when you hear the descriptions of them and versus what you hear of the people who perpetuated them, what their explanations or justifications were, you know, from the Holocaust to Rwanda to Palestine

to Myanmar, you know, totally.

It's deeply evil.

It's not something we can look away from.

And it really is difficult to square with the most humans a decent thesis.

When you look at how some of these societies, even the ordinary people,

for example, the citizen population of Israel, even the civilian population, even they are like disturbingly genocidal in their rhetoric.

And so, you know, it's like, how do we reach that point?

How do we get there?

How does an ordinary human baby grow into that?

It can happen to you.

It can happen very easily.

And I think it can happen in a short time span.

And you can get out of it, I think, maybe not just as easily, but you can get out of it also in a fast time span.

I think it's like the you are not immune to propaganda idea.

You can look at like in Nazi Germany, Robert has talked about quote unquote, the little Nazis, the regular Germans who ended up participating in becoming Nazis.

And you are not immune from that.

And that can happen as a response to a whole bunch of traumatic impulses as well.

Whereas I think people now even use like politics just to or like this like idea of politics as permission to be like an overtly cruel person to other people either like in your life or online, right?

You will, you will use, use various political topics, and that gives you permission to unleash unmitigated hostility against people that you now perceive as being like immoral or you perceive as being like ontological enemies.

Exactly.

Exactly.

I mean, there were particular studies that were undertaken in the 20th century that are often used to sort of explain that, you know, after the fall of Nazi Germany and the post-World War II era, people were seeking explanations for atrocity.

And so certain experiments were done and I'll point it to as explanations for how this could have taken place.

You know, so one particular experiment that's really well known is the Stanford Prison Experiment, right?

This idea that you take random students and give them a position of power and they become sadistic gods.

You know, it proves just how thin the veneer of civilization really is or really the evil that civilization could empower.

But at least for that particular experiment, the reality was never so straightforward.

You know, the guards were literally coached and encouraged to be cruel.

You know, they were actually putting on performances.

The prisoners were also expected to perform.

So rather than being like an actual scientific experiment, it was more like guided theater.

I mean, it inadvertently becomes an interesting experiment in like humans' desire to like please authority, right?

Exactly.

Exactly.

To like perform to the expectations of the people who are actually running this experiment and how capable you are of of falling into these roles under like under that paradigm exactly i mean you see that in nazi germany as well a lot of the people were doing things to please the führer

you know like they didn't necessarily know or they had there was a lot of wiggle room from what i've read to interpret the Fuhrer's wishes.

And so people who wanted to rank up and rise up in the organization would interpret things in a way that they would presume would please hit the and his um desires moving towards the fear yeah exactly exactly that's the that's the name of the phenomenon

so i mean when when the sound for the first experiment when people tried to recreate the experiment for television even it made for pretty boring tv because

it was bad science in the first place um it's not something that people do naturally it's it's what they do when they are pushed when they are prodded you know when certain expectations are set up it's kind of similar with this other famous experiment that the breadwinn talks about which is the stanley milcram's obedience experiment where volunteers were told to administer increasingly painful electric shocks to a stranger just because a guy in a lab coat told them to just like another instance of you know are we doing these things just to please authority, even to the point of murder?

Because, you know, the dial of the electric shock was deadly after a certain point.

And you could hear the screams of the victim.

Of course, they were fake screams, but, you know, the participants could hear them.

But what Breitman ended up uncovering is that most of the participants weren't following the orders blindly.

They were following the orders, yes.

but they were doing it because they believed that they were doing something good, something good for the good of science, that even though the shocks were uncomfortable, that it wasn't something they wanted to do, there was a noble sacrifice in the name of progress.

Even so, the participants weren't in the front.

You know, they were distressed, they were shaking, they were sweating, they were begging to check on the lunar.

But they also said things like, he agreed to be in the experiment, you know, or this will help science, right?

Or, I don't want to do this, but I have to.

The man in the lab coat who was telling them to continue, please continue, please continue.

He was calm, he was professional.

and also even how the nudges that he used were framed made a difference so if he he was directly ordering them and telling them you have to do this surprisingly people would actually be more likely to resist a direct order framed in that way for such an experiment but a more subtle nudge is like no what you know science the experiment requires this you know the experiment needs to do this

more subtle it tended to get people to continue and the people who were interviewed who did take it up to those higher voltages they said they did it because they believed they were contributing to scientific development so it's really this misguided belief in a higher cause that also contributes to atrocity it's very easy to get this idea that oh you know that those are just monstrous people you know we have this idea in pop culture that these the nazis are like cartoonish monsters they are monstrous but they are monstrous people.

You know, they are, at the end of the day, people who do evil with the belief that they are doing good.

To varying extents, I know that there were some who, you know, recanted or who knew what they were doing wrong, but they had other pressures that were pushing them in that direction, right?

There are many explanations, people's behavior, and all sorts of situations.

But a lot of the people, they thought that they were contributing to the right thing.

It's not that they didn't care.

but that they were taught to care in the wrong direction.

The bad guys don't think that they're bad guys.

And whether we're talking about the Nazis of the past or the Zionists of today,

they construct these elaborate narratives to frame themselves as the righteous ones.

You know, as far as the Nazis are concerned, they are purging Germany of a serious threat to their well-being and the safety of their

future and all that stuff.

Right?

The Zionists of today, you ask them, even though they're pariahs of the world at this point,

you ask them why they believe that this must continue and they will say, you know, we have to defend ourselves.

We have a right to defend ourselves yada yada yada

there are true believers within these groups you know who are able to commit some of the worst acts committed ideologues who boast of their atrocities who express no remorse who take pride in their role and people reach that point of ideology through a process of radicalization you know we look at the 10 stages of genocide, I think is the framework people have used before to point out how a segment of a population can become a target of genocide.

It's not like one day you wake up and it's just like, oh, we're going to genocide this group of people.

It's a process.

You know, first you start off with classification.

You create a separate group of people, a separate category of person.

You make them signify themselves in some way, carry ID cards or some kind of insignia on their clothing or whatever.

They begin to face discrimination of some kind.

The discrimination, you know, is ramped up through dehumanizing language.

You compare them to vermin, to rodents, to disease.

And that's just the thing.

And we're going to get to that.

But part of how you get

people who would otherwise be caring or compassionate about their fellow human is through distance.

Right.

So

the people who

are most bloodthirsty tend to be very far from the front lines.

You know, people who are demanding that World War I continue, for example, they were very far from the actual fighting versus at the actual front lines of World War I, you had soldiers playing football together during Christmas.

That's a separate story.

But you create distance.

You either create physical distance or you create psychological distance.

And dehumanization is one of the ways you create psychological distance.

You distance people from seeing their fellow human being as a human being.

Segregation is another way of creating that distance, which then lends itself to dehumanization.

Comparing people to women, to animals, to anything other than human as another step in dehumanization and getting people to separate themselves from those people.

And then they create specific groups the next stage.

They create specific groups and organizations to enforce discriminatory policies.

You further broadcast

propaganda to polarize population.

And then, well, step seven, eight, nine, and ten go from actually preparing the removal, the relocation of people to the persecution, the extermination of the group, and finally the denial that such a crime ever occurred.

So that process, it can take years, it can take decades, but it's something that can turn even the most regular person into a virulent proponent of genocide if they are not fastidious in their opposition to any such language, especially in the early stages.

Because they get fed this steady stream of propaganda of how their actions are justified.

Their loyalty to their in-group becomes tested by their willingness to engage in those harmful actions.

They stay with that group.

They'll do whatever they're told is good, even if it leads to other people being hurt.

And it just creates an evil, but it's an ordinary evil.

It's an evil that is convinced of its virtue.

It is wrapped up in ideology and social conformity.

Because You know, humans are social creatures and it drives us to cooperate.

But that sociality can be narrowed down to test our in-group.

And that's where Bregman actually gets into an interesting point about empathy, right?

Because we tend to see empathy as a positive thing, and it can be.

But as Bregman notes, drawn from psychologist Paul Bloom's work, empathy can also make us partial, irrational, and even cruel, because it can narrow our focus to those people who are like us and ignore others.

That's why soldiers can fight and kill other people because they feel empathy for their in-group, their homeland citizens, or their comrades in arms.

Their loyalty and affection for the people they care about supersedes the lives of the people that they don't care about.

Now, of course, I want to look at systems when we're talking about this because I don't think that this hijacking of empathy is inevitable.

You know, nationalism, propaganda, these things play a role in how people end up being separated in this way.

and in groups and out groups.

But, you know, there is also indications that in-group and out-group separation can occur even in the absence of a state.

So it is something we have to be continuously vigilant of.

Another aspect of a systemic analysis or approach is looking at how our position within society also shapes how we operate, how we treat people, how we think, and how we act.

Bregman cites neuroscience research that demonstrates how authority literally changes how we think.

Powerful people become less empathetic and are more likely to see others as tools rather than independent people.

You know, this is not new information per se.

You know, the environments that powerful people are in both shapes them and are shaped by them.

The saying has long gone that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

And spaces like Silicon Valley, like Wall Street, like Washington DC, like corporate boardrooms and all the other upper echelons of government, they divorce rulers and authorities from ordinary people.

They're insular spaces that keep them from being challenged or being grounded by the impact of their actions on others.

So powerful people don't have to care.

And I think such hierarchies are attractive to people who are already inclined to do bad, even if they believe that they're doing good.

The authoritarians, the supremacists, the abusers, they are attracted to those positions.

But even good-intentioned people could lose themselves in authority too.

Because authorities as a whole, existing in this bubble that rewards their worst instincts, end up further shaping the system around their worst instincts, around distrust, selfishness, exploitation, and so on, to reward themselves and their patterns of behavior.

And thus, through the social nocebo effect, people end up fulfilling that expectation created by the system.

I guess my only comment here is that these systems are not just exclusive to like state power or like corporate authority.

These same mechanisms reproduce themselves in all sorts of social arrangements, including like radical politics.

And frankly, especially radical politics, you can see this a lot with groups, whether they're communists, whether they're anarchists, whether they're, I don't know, social democrats probably have this problem.

But no, like specifically, like in anarchist scenes, you see this happen constantly.

It is almost funny how much these things just get natively recreated.

And like in-group, out-group dynamics are always a big issue.

I mean, like, you can also point to the book Cultish, which explains how American culture is pretty defined by cult-like tendencies, not saying that every single group is a cult, but cult dynamics play into a large part of everyday American life.

And that's both good and bad.

Sometimes being in a cult is fun until it's not very fun.

So these dynamics themselves are not necessarily, you know, bad, but there's something to be like mindful of.

Yeah, exactly.

So, in being mindful of it, you know, that's an aspect of it.

You know, we have to find solutions to

this epidemic of badness, of

behaviors being reinforced by these systems that are causing harm to people and harm to the world.

And so what I always advocate for in ways big and small,

I wouldn't call it the one solution to everything, but it does encompass a lot.

But it's just understanding and taking on a dynamic social revolutionary approach to change.

You know, from the efforts you do to confront the existing system.

to stand up against it, but also the things that you do to put forward an alternative, to put forward and to practice alternatives.

So, one of the things that we can do is to create or to, you know, perpetuate a positive and trusting take on human decency, you know, to create that social placebo effect that can shape how people treat each other for the better.

But that can be boiled down to just be nicer to each other.

So there's more to be done than that, of course.

On the systems front, we also have to change how we educate each other in radical spaces and also in terms of how we raise children.

We have to organize, you know, alternative economic systems and alternative social arrangements that get us in the habit of trust,

of trust in people's freedom, of practicing freedom, and also of emphasizing greater intrinsic motivation in people as well.

You know, a lot of our society is built around control and mechanisms of control through extrinsic forms of motivation.

You know, like punishments and prisons and grades and bonuses and wages, all the different things that are meant to keep us going here and now.

But I think a system that more leans into intrinsic motivation is something that we should be working toward.

You know, that people do things for their own sake, for reasons that we are driven by, that I think is far more sustainable long term and more fulfilling long term

continuing to be stuck with the punishments and rewards that come from outside.

You know, so we have to develop a revolutionary consciousness that is also very much grounded in

people's intrinsic motivation to have their needs met, to pursue their interests, to care for others.

And that is what I think we'll sustain efforts long term because you can create all these bonuses and incentives externally, but I don't think it's something that will last.

There are, you know, experiments

with a greater emphasis on intrinsic motivation, not even necessarily radical experiments, per se.

But Bregwin actually looks at examples of schools that don't have grades or fixed curriculums, and that companies that don't have managers that are run entirely by employees.

I mean, anarchists have been known about these, but he emphasizes that the people in these environments thrive because they've been trusted to direct themselves.

They can bring out the best in themselves because they've been given the room to do so.

You know, and spaces like free schools and maker spaces and cooperatives, they give us the room to develop our cooperation and creativity.

You know, of course, the system is not going to stand by as these transformations take place.

It might tolerate or even celebrate some, like the examples that Bregman had looked at.

But those are always going to be treated as exceptions.

And the second you try to make them the norm, I think you're going to face some real challenges.

Because ordinary people want these things, but the rulers don't.

It's like the example that I had brought up earlier, you know, the famous 1914 Christmas truce during World War I, where British and German soldiers put down their guns, they sang songs, they played football.

But eventually, the high command cracked down these truces.

The fraternization of people who are different from each other was a threat to the war machine.

because these systems are invested in maintaining hostility and division.

And so we have to consciously consciously and openly stand up against hostility and division to build systems that bring out the best in people.

I don't think that a hopeful view of human nature should be seen as utopian, as I said earlier.

It's realistic.

Cynicism is not realism.

They're not the same thing.

Having hope does not mean that you are completely deluded.

of the dark side or dark aspects of humanity and humanity's possibilities, but it means that you don't limit yourself to that outcome, that you challenge that narrative, and that you seek to do better and to create something better.

And that's really what I care about.

And that's all I have to share.

All power to all the people.

Peace.

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Hi, everyone, and welcome to the podcast.

It's me, James, today, and I'm joined by Gorgin Jermai

from Hengor, the human rights organization, also a journalist who's worked for the Kurdish Peace Institute, who we've had on the show before, who I've also worked with, and the founder of the Kurdistan People's page on Instagram.

Welcome to the show.

Thanks for joining us.

Thank you very much for inviting me.

I'm so glad to be here today with you.

Yeah, of course.

And what we're going to talk about today is Rojalat or Eastern Kurdistan, right?

And how this figures into, I guess, what's happening currently in Iran, what has been happening in Iran.

And like, I think it's really important to give a little more explanation and background on particularly like the different ethnic groups in Iran than people generally get when they consume legacy media here?

Yeah, so if I want to talk about this, like we need to talk about the history of at least 120, 150 years.

So it's really a lot, but today's structure of what we know as Iran is made up of several different

ethnic groups from Persians, Turks, I mean Azerbaijani Turks, Turkmens, Kurds, Baluchis, Ahwazi Arabs, Arabs, and so many others.

But I would say the dominant population, the dominant ethnic group, and the dominant culture and language is definitely Persians.

And if I want to be more clear, this dominant ethnic group has been exploiting and colonizing and destroying all the lands and the communities and societies from non-Persian regions including Kurdistan, Balochistan, Azerbaijan, Ahwaz, and many other regions in this geographical region called Iran.

And this mainly started during the former monarchy, Pahlavidis, and it was intensified after the 1979 Islamic revolution led by Ayatollah Khomeini.

And as usual, the Kurdish people were the first to stand against this newly established regime.

In 1979, a few months after the so-called revolution, the Kurds were demanding their rights, specifically the right to self-determination and also federalism, which was responded by

heavy attacks and under the jihad order of Ayatollah Khomeini, which led to the massacre of tens of thousands of civilians and destructions of several hundred villages and mass executions of Kurdish people across what we know as eastern Kurdistan or Rojhelat.

And following that, the oppression continued and also it was done against other ethnic groups, specifically Baluchis and also the Ahwazi Arabs and also the Azerbaijani Turks.

But in Kurdistan and Baluchistan, it has always been more intense and more brutal.

And then in

late 1980s and early 1990s,

they killed two of the Kurdish leaders, Dr.

Abdurrahman Qasenlu and Dr.

Sharaf Kandy, in Europe during some negotiations.

And thus ended up in Kurds being in a worse situation.

And then until around early 2000s, I think around 2004 or 2003,

the PKK built or established its wing in Rochellat, known as the Free Kurdistan Party or Pajak, sorry, Free Kurdistan Life Party

in Rochellat.

But unfortunately, this party was not really

as strong as the KDPI or Komala that were already in the fight with the Iranian state since 1946 and so on.

This oppression has been just intensifying by mass execution of Kurdish people, mass execution of the political prisoners and activists, and imprisonment of the different people in the Kurdish society, from language teachers to environmental activists to children, women, anyone.

And this whole oppression that I've been mentioning about

like that's happening in East Kurdistan,

it has also resulted in a humanitarian phenomenon called kulbari.

Khulbars are a group of people that are extremely underprivileged.

They have no access to anything.

So they are somehow forced to go into some sort of work that they have to carry goods between the borders of East Kurdistan and South Kurdistan or North Kurdistan, specifically between Iraq, Iran, and Turkey.

And every year we have numbers in our organizations.

You can check.

We have a specific statistic section for these kulbars.

Every year, hundreds of them get killed.

Just, for example,

since the beginning of 2025, 22 of them have been killed and injured.

And among these people, there are children, women, old people.

So this is also another form of oppression that this regime has been using against our people because

this is actually one of the biggest forms of oppression, if I want to talk about it.

There are over 150,000 kulbars in East Kurdistan that are somehow forced into this type of work because they have no other means of income.

And the government, the Iranian government actually like limits all the, if I want to call it economic developments in East Kurdistan.

This has been going on for decades.

And then we come to 2019 again.

There was another.

if I want to call it uprising or mass protests across Iran when the regime killed over 1,500 people.

I mean, before that, there were also protests almost every year, but that was like one of the biggest one.

It was in November 2019.

And they cut down the internet for 12 days.

I remember I was at the university at that time.

And then they killed 1,500 people, specifically so many people in Kurdistan.

They even threw the killed people into like lakes and rivers.

And then after like months and days, people found the bodies like in the nature.

geez and then we come to uh 2022 on in september when they the morality police killed gina amini the kurdish woman who was apparently not wearing a proper hijab or the islamic clothes or whatever you want to call it yeah she was killed by the iranian morality police in tehran which led to to the as we know it i don't know if we can call it a revolution or uprising or just mass protests called Jinjiana Zadi or Women Life Freedom Movement.

And this also, again,

because it was inspired by Kurds, the first victim was a Kurd again.

Obviously, it started in Kurdistan and it spread so fast, just in a few days, the entire Kurdish cities were protesting and then it was followed by other Iranian cities like Tehran, Shiraz, but it was not as intense as in Kurdistan.

I think it was three days after her death,

the Kurdish parties, KDPI and Kumala and some others that are not very well known, like PAK and also Pajak or the Free Life Kurdistan Party, they announced a general strike across Kurdistan and they called on people to close down everything and go on a full lockdown to protest the killing of Sheena Amini, which was responded by, I think, over 100 missiles or something from the IRGC and the Iranian regime.

And it killed, I think, 18, if I'm not wrong, but it killed several people in the camps belonging to these parties in today's Iraqi Kurdistan, or as we call it, South Kurdistan.

There were also like family members of the Kurdish politicians and Kurdish Peshmarga that were in those refugee camps that are also supported by the UN.

They were killed there and then the protests just got intensified.

And I was also there.

We were reporting every day about all the things that were happening.

Also, the Baluch people joined the protests.

And at the same time of those days, a 15-year-old Baluchi girl was raped and killed by an IRGC commander or member in Baluchistan.

And people also like protested that.

And there was a Friday, which is known as the Bloody Friday of Zahedan.

People in Balochistan they went to a big mosque in the city of Zahedan and they were they were doing their Friday prayers as Muslims and then they started protesting and this was responded by the Iranian regime forces and over 100 people were massacred on that day, which also led to mass execution of more political and just random prisoners in Balochistan.

And then the protests just went on and there was a really heavy repression.

So far, I think over maybe between 500 to 600 people were killed.

These are like the official ones and also several other of these protesters, specifically from Kurdistan, were executed.

Some of them were executed in public.

to spread more fear among people, but people were not giving up.

And then

it continued until 2023 yeah until i think it was around maybe march i'm not really remembering the exact date but it was also in 2023 that they started attacking schools like girls schools with some sort of gases that nobody actually knows that what type of chemical gases they were using and unfortunately we have them like we reported on then some school children, like some kids, they were killed by these gases and they were specifically targeting girls' schools because they are like separate.

They don't, they're not together in the Iranian system.

Yeah, like integrate.

Yeah.

And then this went on and people were still protesting, but unfortunately it somehow stopped.

And if I want to analyze that and relate it to like to talk about the reasons, one of the main reasons I think also many other political activists and analysts also agree on that, that the opposition, what as we know as the iranian opposition was not truly united yeah there was a huge effort specifically from uh the kurdish parties like komala and um abdullah muqtadi they tried to create some sort of collaboration with the so-called iranian opposition specifically the the monarchists like the pahlavis and some other groups but unfortunately these groups uh i mean it was in the middle of a an uprising like a movement that hasn't been happening since maybe 40 years instead of working together for a common goal like the iranian opposition groups specifically the pahlavis and also the other ones like if i want to say like uh the masikh ali najad and like all the people that work with her instead of working towards a common goal, they started discriminating against minorities.

They started ignoring and denying and also censoring the minorities, the same minorities that were the most active against the regime, that had

the biggest number of sacrifices in the protests and also in prisons.

They just started spreading their own typical national, I mean, I would even call them ultra-nationalistic sentiments.

And for example, if I want to give like one of the biggest things that we always talk about, These people who are apparently against the regime, they have some red lines and their main red line has always been the so-called Iranian territorial integrity.

So like these type of these type of sentiments and discussions, it somehow created like a lot of mistrust.

between the Kurdish groups, the Baluchi groups, also like with Ahwazi Arabs and Azerbaijani Turks and all these groups, they couldn't trust each other because

the dominant group, the Persians or the Iranians or those who identify as Iranians, they ignored us.

They ignored our suffering.

They ignored our identity.

They were just repeating what the regime has been saying since over 40 years, but in a different form.

So this somehow created a lot of mistrust and also the people inside.

Like I was there when that was happening and I was working non-stop every day, recording, writing, texting, being on interviews.

The people actually lost their hope because there was no united opposition.

There was no united structure to say that, yeah, we are advocating for you.

I mean, in the first few months, it was really great.

For example, here in Germany, they had a very big demonstration and over 80,000 people from all across Europe, they traveled to Berlin for that demonstration.

It was great.

And all the groups from Iranians, Turks, Arabs, Baluchis, like everybody was there.

But unfortunately, following that, the people like specifically Huzaf Pahlavi, the so-called crown prince of Iran, who is another, like his story is like very also like crazy.

Yeah.

He and his group and his circle and also people like Masih Ali Najad and I would say all the celebrities because they are not truly, they are not politicians.

They have no political study.

They haven't done any specific political work.

They're just celebrities like Nazanin Bulnyadi.

She played in some movies.

Yes, she's a really great actress, but not a good politician.

Like these things that celebrities who truly don't understand or they don't want to understand what people inside Kurdistan, Iran, and Balochistan want, they pretended to be our voices and they never listened to us.

And then this just made a lot of distraught and a lot of also hate between the people.

Yeah.

So that's why I can say that it just failed after that.

And unfortunately, many, many of the people who were arrested during that time, they are still in jail.

And just a few days ago, five of them were sentenced to death.

And we made a report about them.

So like every day they get sentenced to death.

and i personally know many of these people who were injured and they are now here in germany they were brought here but by some humanitarian visas some of them are my friends so like it just failed

At the same time, I also have to mention that one of the reasons that it also failed, it was the regime's extensive repression.

They militarized the entire cities, specifically in Kurdistan and Balochistan.

For example, in Kurdistan, they already have over 2,000 military bases and checkpoints all over the Kurdistan region.

And during that time,

they had like tanks and military vehicles in the entrances, like in the gates of every city and also town.

They were checking out people.

Like I personally, during these two years, I really didn't go out much.

Maybe once a week or once in a 10 days, just to, I don't know, to go and eat something out.

You know, like I was always home

because I couldn't go out and because my work was important.

And then they were just controlling people, they were arresting people.

And even like from the stories that I have worked on before, these injured people, they also, they were hiding in small villages and even in the mountains.

But the regime forces were everywhere looking for these people and these these activists so it was like a totally military lockdown in the region and there are many crazy stories i don't know if you have time enough enough time to to talk about like some different and specific things that happened and it was really scary at that time yeah i would like you to share that with us because i think one thing people don't understand is that The Iranian regime has a colossal capacity for violence against its own citizens.

I think if we we talk about some specific instances, and then maybe we can talk about recently there has been a bombing campaign against some nuclear facilities and some IRGC commanders.

And I think if you start with your anecdotes about what happened during this last uprising, that will help people understand why

the consequences of this bombing campaign are not good.

for people who want to have freedom in Iran,

people inside the country at least.

So yeah, tell us some things about that capacity for repression.

Yeah, so like the bombing happened and we saw, we all saw how crazy and how insane, like it was like movies.

I couldn't believe my eyes when it happened.

It was really crazy.

And yeah, that was like the war between two brutal states, Israel and Iran, who both have no respect for dignity of humans.

Nothing, absolutely.

Yeah.

the the the first thing that happened it was that yeah they they targeted i think so far, as far as I remember from our statistics, over 350 or around that were the IRGC commanders or the officials from the nuclear programs and like really the judges who have sentenced thousands of people to death.

Like the targeted people were mainly these type of people.

And also, also there were also some civilians.

I think maybe around 80 or 90 civilians whom some of them were actually like family members of these IRGC members, and also some children.

And also there was a lot of destruction specifically in Tehran.

Many buildings, including the Evan prison,

the

center of the Iranian broadcast, and all these places were targeted.

and many officials were killed, also civilians.

But the Iranian regime's response to that was

not

solely against Israel,

who was bombing Iranian

IRGC bases.

In the first days, they started attacking civilians.

They started arresting every, I don't know, some random people.

And so far, I think

last time we checked hundreds of people across, specifically in Kurdistan.

They were arrested.

And some others were already like in these days, they got executed because they were accused of

espionage for Israel or working for Israel.

Just a few weeks ago, I think five or four or maybe three, I don't recall the numbers right now, but some Kurdish political prisoners who were accused of working for Israel were executed in my hometown, Ormia, in East Kurdistan.

And then so many others were also arrested.

And then

I think some others were also tortured.

At least I remember one case which we worked on it.

There was one case that was tortured to death because he was accused of working for Israel and things like that.

Jesus.

This was like one of the responses that the Iranian regime started doing.

And one of the things that this regime did in the first days,

it was that they took lots of military vehicles and like, I don't know, equipments inside schools for example in the city of sardash it's a really amazing beautiful kurdish city on top of some mountains it's beautiful yeah there is a high school in the city center exactly in the city center and they took lots of military equipments and stuff inside the school and they they threatened the school manager if you don't give us the key right now we will arrest you we will do this and that and they also did that in the city of kermansha they also did that in the i remember because i i worked on the report it was uh in the neighbor in the neighborhood hood called the zalabat and they took some uh military equipment next to a hospital which was also bombed and the hospital was damaged and some people were injured that was one of the things that the regime did and at the same time I don't know if you know about this, but in Iran, the military service is compulsory, like Israel, like many, like Switzerland, like many countries, but in Iran, it's torture, It's some sort of repression against young men.

So across Kurdistan, for example,

in a military base in my hometown in Urma, it's called Al-Mahdi.

It's a very big military base.

I know that some soldiers who are like civilians, but they are forced into it.

They're like teenagers, I don't know, 19, 20,

or 21, like really young guys

that really don't want to be there, but they are forced to.

they they were saying that their commanders threatened if you leave the military base we will arrest you we will torture you and we will execute you for for like for betraying for trade like i don't know for

betraying your country or things like that or working for Israel.

Yeah.

This was like one of one of the concerns that many families had before

in those days because I talked with some people, like

our neighbor's son was also in a military base.

He's like 19.

Yeah, they were putting lots of pressure on civilians while ignoring that what Israel is doing every day.

They were bombing all the military bases, I don't know, places and like they were even bombing places that nobody even knew that they existed.

But their focus was like the regime's focus was on civilians who were just scared, who were just trying to protect their families.

Yeah, and this this is like what they they started doing and um yeah i mean it's still it's still going it still is going on and they are arresting people all the time and as usual the majority of the focus and repression is again happening in kurdistan against kurdish people yeah i think it's very important people understand like that iran is not like a an ethno-state well it is an ethno-state but that that is not ethnically monolithic like the the territory of iran and the Persian ethno-state do not necessarily line up.

I think people will also be very confused about

when we hear quote-unquote Iranian opposition in this country, right?

It's often like, I think there's this knee-jerk, oh, that's good, right?

These are people who are opposed to this regime, which is brutally cracking down on people.

But often, then, as you say, it's associated with like monarchists for the most part.

And then we have these various,

like anything in Kurdistan, right?

Like, it's an alphabet soup, but like there is like there are 75 different like initial groups of initials.

Can you explain who some of these actors are, right?

We have the Iranian monarchists, we have the KDPI,

we have all these different groups, Pejak, like you say, the KCK group.

Can you explain who some of these people are for people so they understand?

Yeah, if I want to talk about Kurdistan, I would go to the first modern Kurdish party called KDPI, which was founded in 1945,

and it was the founder of the Kurdistan Republic.

And also,

then there is the Komela Party, which is also like a socialist, communist, leftist party, which also has several branches, but they're all basically the same.

And also, there are other parties like PAK,

the Freedom Party of Kurdistan, and also we have Pajak, the Free Life Kurdistan Party, or I don't know if it's the same in English.

English.

Yeah, Kurdistan Free Life Party.

Yeah, these are the main political parties and actors in East Kurdistan.

However, there are also like smaller parties like Chabad and also some parties that are

affiliated, like there are like very small groups that are affiliated with for example the Iranian Communist Party, which is not also really big.

But the main ones right now are KDPI and komala

who both of them have like a long history of fighting against the regime and also against the the the monarchists the the the pahlavi regime they were i would say really really active until like 2023 they had they they played a very very important role in the revolution in in in like in Kurdistan specifically because they were they were the ones who were announcing like strikes and they were working together and organizing things and helping people out to resist.

Obviously, there was no arm

struggle at that time or conflict because they said, we're not going to fight because if we bring the fights and conflict inside Kurdistan, the regime will destroy the cities with...

This is exactly what they said at that time because there was a demand from people that, yeah, the Peshmarga forces should come in the cities and fight alongside with us.

But they said, no, if you do this, the regime will destroy the cities.

These are the main forces in Kurdistan.

And yeah, of course, they have different ideologies.

Pajak is like the PKK's wing, or if I want to be more official,

it's a member of the KCK or KJK, as we say.

And the KDPI is like, as I said, the history goes back to 1945 and Komala in the early 70s.

And also PAK, I'm not sure when it was founded, but it was also like, it was founded by one of the members of the KDPI, Hosseinias Dampana.

And they are more of a military,

I would say, well-organized military group that they also played a good role

against the ISIS in 2017 and 2018, specifically in Kirkuk,

in South Kurdistan or Iraqi Kurdistan.

And about

the Iranian opposition, if I want to say, yes, we have the monarchists, the Reza Pahlavi, and his group.

They have like a whole long list of parties.

Basically, they are all the same, but they have different names.

And they are all right-wing and they all focus on the territorial integrity of Iran, but they also pretend that they care also about democracy, but that's a lie.

And then we have people like Masih Alinejad, who is more of,

she's an activist, and she's internationally known for her activism against the compulsory hijab,

but she doesn't have any specific party or organization.

She's just an activist and a journalist, obviously.

And also, there are other several people that work with her like Nazanin Buniyadi, who also works with like Pahlavis.

And also there is another one who also played a big role.

His name is Hamid Ismailion.

He is one of the

members of the families of the people who were killed in that plane that was shot by missiles by IRGC in 2020.

in Tehran.

And again, there were many Kurds inside that Ukrainian plane as well.

This person, Hamid Ismail, he's one of the members of, like, he lost his entire family in that plane crash or attack.

He organized many, many great and big demonstrations across Canada, Australia, I think even in the US, and specifically in Germany.

The one in Berlin was the biggest.

Also, he doesn't have a party, but he also somehow backed down after like what Halavis did, for example, like, or the monarchists did with the whole opposition groups.

There are also some leftist groups and individuals, but unfortunately, they're not truly leftists.

So, I want to give you a name.

There is a person called Arash Azizi.

He is also well known in the US.

I don't know.

He wrote some books and he works with really like international media.

Just a few days ago, he posted something that said,

we, the leftists of Iran, we are in love with our homeland and we care about our homeland.

And we don't.

He just posted something that

was really nationalistic, like a typical Persian-Iranian sentiment that was that's that's been going on.

And it got lots of criticism from different groups.

And then we have the Ahwazi Arabs, they also have some parties,

but they are not really strong or active or well-organized, like the Kurdish ones, the Turks, the Azerbaijani Turks, they also have some groups, but they're also not very active or organized.

And many of these groups, they are heavily affiliated with the Azerbaijani government or the Turkish regime, and specifically the MHP party in Turkey, like the ultra-nationalist Turkish party.

Yeah, the hot right.

Yeah.

And then

the Baluchis, I can say they are more organized because they have this,

I don't want to call him a leader, but like

the

highest level

mullah in Balochistan, Mulavi Abdul Hamid,

he is like the most popular mullah in that region.

And he was one of the people that was organizing protests.

he was giving lots of speeches like during the Friday prayers in Balochistan.

And a lot of people were, they still like, they follow him and they follow his words.

But unfortunately, he is also like appointed as the imam of the Friday prayers, if I want to be more specific, in Balochistan by Khamenei himself, the Iranian Supreme Leader.

But it's like a little bit hard to understand that where he stands exactly, because on one side, he...

he's appointed by the regime but on the other side he's also like acting as a political leader or advocate in Balochistan.

I think they also have some armed groups but they're mainly Islamists and I would say but they're also not very very well organized yet they do attack the IRGC

members and these agents who are oppressing people on a daily basis sometimes and sometimes they get killed and also sometimes just a few days ago there was a fight between these people and like civilians in the village and also the IRGC forces and I think two women were killed and more than 10 or 11 were injured.

Jeez.

But this fights and conflicts and they're always happening in Balochistan.

Yeah.

It can be hard, I think, especially if people aren't familiar, right?

Like the PAK, just to distinguish from PJAK,

have definitely been making

a big effort on the internet, I will say, like with their Peshmerga, Peshmerga, right?

Like in the last three weeks since the

US entered the Israel's bombing campaign, like to appear like this.

They are a very well-organized Peshmerga.

I think you say they're in Kakuk.

I think maybe they're in Kobane as well.

Maybe they

joined into, yeah.

The Pajak was specifically in Rojava and they were also fighting against ISIS.

Yeah.

Because like they are like, as I say, they're a member of KCK and they are allies of PKK.

So they all are interconnected and they all work together.

I think the PAK also was in Rojava, right?

I am not sure, but I think members of PAK joined like the

fight in Rojava as individuals.

Because the fight in Rojava was also something that...

people from all over Kurdistan went there.

Yeah.

From northern Kurdistan to.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And these are very organized groups, but like, yes, there isn't, I guess there is a kind of insurgency, but as you say, like if these groups just took up arms in the cities, then the IRGC would destroy everyone in those cities, right?

So that's a, yeah, I think people sometimes wonder like why they don't just start fighting.

And then there is fighting, to be clear, but like, as you say,

the regime punishes civilians, right?

Yeah, I mean, this is not the first time that the regime does this.

Every time that Israel does something to the regime, because this is not the first time that Israel has killed someone in Iran, like some IRGC member or nuclear agent, nuclear scientists, or whatever.

Every time this happened during the past few years, instead of responding to Israel as a state, they responded to the Kurdish people.

I think it was just two years, again, in 2022,

they literally bombed a civilian house in Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, and they killed an entire family.

It was like maybe a six, seven-month-old baby and her father.

They always respond to Kurds when they get attacked or bombed or damaged or whatever by Israel or America.

Yeah, it's like a soft target, a target they feel they can like safely attack, you know, versus

like we know now that Iran pre-warned the United States it was going to attack its bases

following this bombing raid.

And it was more of a performative thing than a like a serious attempt to attack US bases.

And even like this week, I saw in Sleimani, like Iran is sending Shahid drones.

Yeah, actually during the past maybe 10 days, this is like last night there was an attack in Sleimani.

But this is like, I think the fourth or third time that there have been like several drone attacks on different places.

So yeah, this is something that the regime has been doing.

One of the other funny things, I mean, this is not funny exactly, but it's weird.

Yesterday, and actually two days ago, I'm not really good with dates and numbers.

That's okay.

Just two days ago, they conducted like a cyber attack on this TV channel, Iran International, which is also advocating for monarchists.

And they expose like some nude photos and like private photos and videos of some of the staff that work there.

And they are threatening that we will publish more if you don't stop or whatever.

This is also like another strategies that the regime uses when they lose something, when they get attacked, they also like target activists, journalists, or for example, they threaten their families or they threaten them here inside Europe or in America or Canada or wherever they are.

This is like, as we call it, it's the transnational repression of the regime and it's been going on forever.

And again, if you look at the numbers, most of the attacks have been on Kurdish activists.

For example, during the past 30 years, over, I think around 600 known political activists have been killed by the regime outside of Iran.

And nearly 450 or something of them were Kurdish.

Yeah, this is also another thing that the regime has been doing.

And in these days, they have intensified.

Yeah, yeah.

They have a long history of transnational repression and like participating in the repression of other revolutions, right?

Like, of course, they were massive backers of the Assad regime in Syria, you know, all around the region.

will find the wrong side to line up on and then do that.

And of course, people will also be familiar that were supporting Hezbollah, for instance, in Lebanon.

One thing I've heard is that the regime has been really cracking down on Afghan people, like mass deportations of Afghan people who have come to Iran, right?

And especially in the wake of this bombing campaign.

Can we talk about that briefly?

Yes, of course.

I think that's one of the

most horrible things that happened after the war.

So far, we know know that just in in june they deported over 30 000 afghans and it's still going on like they mass deport tens of thousands of afghan refugees every day and just something that was really

horrible to me when i read it there were 6 000 kids that were unregistered and they were separated from their parents and they were sent back to Afghanistan alone.

Jesus.

Yeah, and they are hunting down afghan migrants in different cities across iran especially in tehran because most of them are there yeah and the thing is that the afghan i think there are over three million afghan migrants in iran or maybe more yeah nobody knows the exact numbers because the iranian government never ever publishes the true statistics yeah but there are millions of them in iran and they are not actually allowed to they were not allowed actually like they're getting kicked out right now but they were not allowed to work in Kurdish cities they were only allowed to work in Persian speaking cities like Tehran Mashhad Shiraz Isfahan and these big industrial cities yeah

so like right now if you look at the internet they are being hunted down by Iranian agents everywhere and they're being forced to go back to Afghanistan.

And one of the things that I want to mention that's been going on from a humanitarian perspective that really, really makes me sad.

And also it reflects a very ugly reality about the Persian or the Iranian society and the amount of racism and fascism that exists among them, not just by the regime, by the people as well.

There have been hundreds of videos and footage online.

uh you can also check just search and you will see that random citizens young people, they are attacking Afghan people in the city, in, I don't know, in subways, in the parks, in

public places.

Just yesterday, I saw a very heartbreaking video because like Afghan people, they also like have a different look.

You can easily say that they're not Iranians.

An Afghan teenager was...

was being attacked by eggs.

Jesus.

And they were just throwing eggs at him.

And then they poured like lots of some powder and then like some juice and like Coca-Cola.

I don't know what was that.

They were just throwing everything at him.

And on the other, another video that I saw,

they stopped a man, maybe he was 30 or something.

They forced him to kiss the hand of a stray dog.

I mean, yeah, that would be like, yeah, he's kissing a dog.

But in the Middle East culture, when you force someone to kiss a dog.

It's very disrespectful.

Yeah.

It's really disrespectful.

And like, there are also, I read on the internet that many Afghans reported, like, for example, in Tehran, they were renting a house or an apartment or something, and they were living in those apartments.

And the landlord reported them to the police.

It's like what's happening in the US, it's something like ICE, but it's Iranian, but more brutal.

Then the police just came and took them all.

And now the landlords are refusing to give back the passion money to Afghans.

And many of them are being like forced out without any food without any support anything and especially the women like i also read about like a doctor that fled taliban and he was in tehran and now if he goes back the taliban will definitely kill him because he was like against taliban yeah i mean it's it's it's a very horrible humanitarian situation and the people like in Balochistan, they're also suffering.

But I saw many videos and also some of the activists published lots of footage that

they were bringing food, water, I don't know, medicine and things like that on the on the road to give it to those people who are going back and they were offering, I don't know, whatever they had.

And in Afghanistan, there is also happening, but it's just so crazy because both the regime and also the anti-regime media are trying to portray Afghans as the problem, just exactly like how the far-right parties in Germany, like IFD, they are portraying refugees and migrants as the main problem.

Yeah, it's a global thing.

It happens here in the US.

Yeah,

it's exactly the same.

Yeah, and like, unfortunately,

even the Iranian opposition has not been clear.

But again, because there is some sort of solidarity between Kurds, Baluts, and Afghans, and also other minorities, it's the minorities that talk about this.

It's the minority groups and organizations who try to raise awareness over this.

And unfortunately,

I think nobody can stop it because they're doing it anyways.

Yeah.

And like, we shouldn't support an opposition politics.

It is just another ethno-naff.

Like, we see that in Syria right now, right?

Like,

they haven't even changed their name.

We have this revolution.

Tens of thousands, maybe

hundreds of thousands of people definitely died.

Yeah.

To build something better.

and we still have the syrian arab republic yeah yeah it's maybe the the alawites are being persecuted now and they weren't before but like that shouldn't matter right like if we're if we're build trying to build something better i mean they are just remnants of isis so what can you expect yeah exactly yeah it's uh yeah yeah it's very sad to uh to see you know after after so much killing and dying yeah i guess to finish up i think people in the us do not get very good coverage of what's happening in iran right like it's either, as you say, dominated by monarchist outlets, which tend to have like good resources, which allow them to kind of get to the top of people's feeds, or they're getting like press TV stuff, right?

That just like straight up regime propaganda.

Where can people find like good resources to understand

what's happening in Iran, like from the perspective of the majority of people who just want to live a free life?

And especially like, you know, the women in particular in Iran, right, have an extremely difficult and repressive,

the regime dominates every aspect of their life.

Like, where can people find reasonable coverage that acknowledges that?

Honestly, if I want to talk about media like TV channels or just media websites,

there is no media, like Iranian media, that truly reflects what's happening.

in Iran.

There are like many leftists and also right-wing medias.

For example, if I want to go like a very very leftist media called Radio Zamane,

they are not really good.

Like then we have Iran International, BBC Persian, Voice of America Persian, Independent Persian, like there are many, many media that all of these, like I would say the big media, they are heavily dominated and I would say exploited by the ultra-nationalist people.

And also there are people who are related to IRGC and this organization called NIAC, that is like the regime's lobby group in the US.

And these individuals that work there, they truly don't reflect what's happening there.

And I mean, it's kind of hard because if people want to understand what's happening, maybe they should read everything they're posting and then analyze it.

Hey, this makes sense and this doesn't.

But that's a little bit hard.

But also on the other side, I would suggest that people should follow more human rights organizations, which again, some of them, if I want, I don't know if it's okay to say their names.

Some of them, and the people, for example, the Buruman organization, they did lots of great work,

but recently, again, they showed some sort of racism and like censorship against minorities, especially Kurds.

And people like Lod and Bazargan, they are like also doing some human rights work in the US.

And even people like Masi Ali Najad Najad and all these, I would say, known activists, and even here in Germany, they are not truly reflecting what's happening.

They are just focused on the Persian perspective and they're like,

they talk about minorities time to time, but only when it fits into their agendas, into their ideologies and perspectives.

But there are other organizations which I'm working with, like Hengao Organization for Human Rights, until 2000 late 2023 I guess we were mainly focused on East Kurdistan but right now we report human rights violations from all over Iran yeah like yeah but we try our best and I think I could say that we are one of the best when it comes to all these things and we we don't care about like what people think we just report what's happening or what happened and there are other organizations like Iran human rights they're also good.

For example, there is another one called Tawana.

They are like a very big organization, but unfortunately, they advocated for the monarchists again just a few months ago.

So it's kind of hard to see that who is truly on the side of people.

And when you look at the human rights organizations, I'm not saying this because I'm Kurdish, but this is what I see.

And I think it's true.

The only organizations that truly reflect what's happening happening without caring about people's backgrounds or ethnicity or whatever, it's our organization, Hengal, and also like organizations like Kurdistan Human Rights Network.

But unfortunately, the majority of the others are not really clear.

So for Kurdish issues, I would say definitely Hengal.

On my page, Kurdistani people, I also like write a lot of things.

And also Kurdish Peace Institute and Kurdish Center for Studies.

They have lots of other

Kurdish journalists and experts that write a lot of really good articles about the situation there.

And if I want to mention names, I would say Rogin Mokliani, she is like a really great researcher.

She lives in Ireland.

There is another professor called Kamran Matin.

He also writes really great analysis on the situation and like the things that people even don't think about.

They're writing with so many different international organizations and institutes.

Yeah, there are like these individuals and activists yeah

thank you so much for joining us that was really that really helped i think for people to understand things tell us about your your your kurdistan people page where can they find that on uh on instagram yeah uh thank you for inviting me and thank you for letting me speak yeah uh yeah um I have this page, Kurdistani People.

I usually post about all over Kurdistan, the things that matter.

Obviously, I can't do it all the time, but yeah,

I post a lot of things and there are other pages that I also collaborate with, like Kurdish Activism or Everything About Kurdistan.

We're just a group of people who work together.

Obviously, like our organization, I think it's very, very important for people to follow and support it.

Hengau Organization for Human Rights.

And also Kurdistan Human Rights Network.

That's also like another one that you can follow.

Yeah, and also like I gave, I talked about some names and individuals and researchers.

Yeah.

you can also follow them for more professional analysis about East Kurdistan or Rojhelat.

Yeah, great.

Well, thank you so much for joining us.

We really appreciate your time.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

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Hi everyone and welcome to What Could Happen here.

It is a second episode about Kurdistan.

I am very lucky to be joined today by Vladimir van Wilgenberg, who many of you will know is a journalist covering Kurdistan.

He's done excellent work for a lot of publications.

So welcome to the show, Vladimir.

Thanks so much for the invitation.

Yeah,

thanks for being willing to join us so late at night, your time.

Let's start off by discussing an event you attended or an event you were in proximity to by the sounds of it.

People will have seen this online, I'm sure, but it was the

disarmament of a number of PKK guerrillas that took place in the mountains of southern Kurdistan over the weekend of the 10th to 12th of July.

So, yeah, a few days ago,

I tried to attend a ceremony from 30 PKK guerrillas that were disarming.

Basically what happened is that they

burned their their weapons, although technically it's not really possible to burn a weapon because there were these colosnicles basically that they were put they put in a fire.

And it was in like actually a tourist cave near Dokkan.

So this is not it was actually very different because I also have been in the

during the peace process, I've also was in a press conference of the PKK in 2014 or 15 or something that around that time.

And that was very different because it was basically in the area that the PKK is active in.

It was in the area under their control.

But this was under

a different Kurdish party's control.

It's called the Patriarch Union of Kurdistan.

So in Iraqi Kurdistan, you have two main parties: the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, and you have the Kurdistan Democratic Party.

So this cave where they did the ceremony, which is actually a tourist cave, it's in PUK-controlled area.

So the ceremony was sort of protected by PUK security forces.

And that's why also the PUK media, they got a lot of special access.

And also there was the Turkish government media was there and also PKK media was there and a lot of other Kurdish TV channels.

So it was a very interesting day, although I wasn't able to pass the checkpoint towards the ceremony because at the last moment, actually a few days before the ceremony, they changed.

uh the access supposedly it would be a very open ceremony but then they said for because of security reasons that they they had to restrict the ceremony and there would be some TV screens and stuff.

In the end, I couldn't find the TV screens, but that's another discussion.

But I also don't still understand what the security risk was.

Although a day before there was a drone strike on a Kurdish Peshmerga base, but it was like quite far away from that.

It was one hour away from the ceremony location.

Yeah, and it's an Iranian drone strike, right?

Like a Shaheed drone.

Yeah, so there have been like no group has claimed these attacks, but after in the aftermath of the 12-day war, there have been a lot of drone strikes in the Kurdistan region in various areas, including this morning on American oil companies facility in the Dahok province.

Okay.

And the day before that also on another field near Erbiel.

So it has been quite tense, which also probably affected the ceremony, although it's not really related to it.

Yeah, it is different.

So yeah, basically what was interesting, so they have this peace process between Kurdish rebels and the Turkish state.

It all started with a call by a Turkish ultra-nationalist leader, which actually in the past actually called for executing Abdullah Ojlan, the leader of the Kurdistan Workers' Party, who has been in prison since the 90s.

He was actually surprisingly starting this peace process.

He was saying like we should have him talk in the parliament and call for disbanding the PKK.

So he never came to the parliament, but he released messages from prison.

And before the ceremony, he released also a video message where he again focused on disarming, basically.

And then this ceremony basically came where you have 30 fighters, 15 women, 15 men, because the PKK is all about woman equality.

So that's why they did this 50-50.

And they put their weapons in this fire.

So I think this also signifies a point of renewal because Kurds, as a tradition, they have this Kurdish New Year every year on 21 March where people jump over fires, there's a lot of fireworks.

And the Kurdish Naros is basically the start of a new beginning.

So I think one of the reasons they chose these fires is because of this idea of a new beginning.

And also the fact that when the PKK started, there were people that sort of the creators of the PKK, they're actually some of them, they burned themselves in prison,

in the Turkish prison.

uh so so it's also sort of related to that this sort of interlinkage with with a fire yeah and you also saw that they carefully put the the the weapons in the fire they didn't just throw them so it's it doesn't mean that they have completely given up on weapons uh because they're still waiting on on counter steps from the turkish uh government yeah like there has been fighting between

pkk or hpg or how you want to say it like uh hpg being like the technically the armed wing yeah there's been fighting in in southern kurdistan like so in iraqi krg kurdistan uh autonomous region of iraq since the call for peace right like there has been ongoing fighting yeah i mean it's not really i would not say that it's like like actively fighting to take territory, which was happening before.

So it's more that it's some like Turkish army is shooting artillery on the PKK.

and there was also one incident that the PKK actually responded by drones.

But so far, this didn't reach much in the Turkish or the Kurdish media.

I mean, there were like some of this artillery shelling caused some fires.

So, villagers in the areas, it's a very hot summer now, they were trying to put out the fires.

Yeah, but it was not like the active, active fighting that you had before.

Okay, and you know, since there was also a previous peace process, I mean, there have been several peace processes since history between the PKK and Turkey, but they never had a positive result.

And the last one before this one was 2015.

And after that peace process broke down when two policemen were shot, it's still unclear who shot those policemen.

The fighting erupted again.

And since then, there have been heavy fighting first in the Kurdish majority areas of Turkey

until basically Turkey defeated Kurdish armed insurgents in the Kurdish cities in Turkey.

And since then, actually, the fighting has moved more to Iraqi Kurdistan, where the PKK has also a historical presence since the 90s.

But what you now have is that you have this new peace process started by this call of Basheli.

And the PKK leader Odjohan has said the time for armed struggle is over.

We don't want to have a Kurdish state.

So basically, what now is happening is that the Kurdish PKK and the Kurdish political counterpart in Turkey, they're basically waiting for steps by Turkey now to give them basically trust to continue this process.

And there was also a speech by the Turkish president Erdogan where he was also saying that it's the end.

We don't need anymore.

We need to talk.

It's not a time for weapons anymore.

We spent trillions of dollars on the war against the PKK.

We had this a lot of martyrs and we sacrificed a lot.

And it's now the time to stop the war and to do talking.

And he said they're going to work with the Kurdish party and this ultra-Turkish nationalist party, the MHP, in the parliament and to also set up a commission to basically work on constitutional changes.

Yeah, let's take a break for Advert here and then we'll come back.

All right, we are back.

I guess we should talk briefly about like the nature of this, this call for peace.

You explained very well that this is probably a higher chance of success than there has ever been, right?

Like we have the explicit buy-in of Ojelan, who hasn't been seen on video since the 90s.

So to have him making a video statement is quite significant.

I'm sure he's been seen on video, but not like making a speech.

Correct.

And then we have this endorsement in the Turkish parliament.

I think there's been a lot of speculation about what led to this, and some of it's not particularly helpful.

But

you're very well educated on these matters.

What do you think this means for not just the PKK, but the KCK, I guess, like the Kurdish freedom movement, the different movements throughout Kurdistan that are inspired by the political thought of Ajulan?

Well, I mean, it's until now it's difficult to say what exactly is going to happen because the PKK said they're going to go they will disarm, but there's other groups which are linked to the PKK in iran uh iran and in in syria and also for instance in sinjar uh those groups said they were not some of them have said publicly that we are not part of this process or they welcomed the process and others they didn't really say much the ziti's group haven't said really a lot yeah i haven't seen it yet so it's it's also gonna be interesting what will happen with those groups with the iranian kurdish group and and also with the syringe democratic forces in syria that have a different situation also after the fall of assad they have these talks with Damascus.

And actually one of the reasons that the first peace process broke down was because that in actually at that time also that Turkey was a little bit afraid of this alliance between the Kurds and the Americans at the time against ISIS

that was then rising up in Syria and attacked the Kurdish town of Koban in Syria, which created an alliance between the Kurds and the US against the ISIS.

terrorist militant jihadi group.

But now the situation actually is interesting.

So at that time, the Kurds were empowered in Syria.

But now you can see there's a completely different situation.

Now it's the opposite way.

So now you have the rebels that took over Damascus and they are now the government run by Julani, his previous name, who's now called himself Ahmed al-Shara, his real name.

So they now have a new Islamist controlled government in Damascus.

And there's a lot of tension between the Kurds in Syria and Damascus.

So this could also risk basically this peace process with Turkey because the SDF, they have also

ideological links with the PKK.

So it's also interesting how this will work out.

So in the past, it was also always like the fighting between Turkey and the PKK could threaten the SDF of Syria.

But that was sort of the other way around, that fighting between possible fighting in the future between Damascus and the Kurds in Syria could threaten the peace process in Turkey.

And Erdogan, he made this very big speech not a very long time ago, where he mentioned that Turkey doesn't only only want peace for the Kurds in Turkey and for Alawites, also, a religious minority in Turkey, but he was also talking that he wants peace for the Kurds in Syria and also in Iraq, that they should also live like a prosperous life in Syria and that they have good relations with the Syrian government.

So, I think that's also a very interesting point that you don't see in many articles, that there's like this very big interlinkage between all these different issues.

Yeah, and I think Turkey has maintained that the SDF is the PKK, right?

Just with like a different badge,

which is not the case.

They share a lot of politics, but they're distinct.

Turkey also has extensive proxy forces in Syria, right, that have been fighting with the SDF since, I guess, like late, well, I mean, for years, but like in an expanded sense,

since the beginning of the fall of the Assad regime that we saw, like,

probably seven or eight months ago now.

It's a very complex situation.

It's also,

as we record this today on the 15th, Syria is a very diverse country.

And to add to all the groups you mentioned, there is currently fighting between the government and Druze militias, right?

Can you explain a little bit about the situation there and

the relevance of that?

Well, I mean, the Druze, they are a religious community that are not the same as the Sunni Muslims.

And they control their own area

on the border,

the town called Sweda and the villages around it.

And also they have some areas in Damascus where they have a presence.

So the Druze, basically, during the time when the Assad regime was in power, they didn't really fight very heavily against the Assad regime in the beginning, but they didn't allow the Assad regime to recruit military, recruit people in their area.

And they sort of tried to keep the regime out of their area.

So during the civil war, they were sort of semi-autonomous, but not officially.

And actually, in the last

years before the fall of Assad there were like a big protest in the Druze areas in support of the Syrian revolution and against the Assad regime so there were like very big protests in the Druze areas against the Assad regime so when the Assad regime was militarily weakening and the rebels from the other side of Syria they were attacking the Assad regime the Druze they also joined the fight and they marched together with the southern rebels they marched on Damascus and they were actually the first one that entered Damascus not not the Ahmed al-Shara or the HTS.

Actually, the first ones that entered Damascus was the Saudi rebels and the Druze.

But there's this thing is that Damascus wants to have this new regime or the new government in Damascus.

They want to have this very centralized system.

So they don't want the Druze to run their own armed groups and they have their own sort of local autonomy.

So they have been fighting before between the Druze and the new authorities in in Syria

in areas near Damascus.

But there was like a ceasefire and the fighting stopped.

But recently, there's also like historical tensions between these Arab Bedouin tribes and the Druze in these areas.

So these areas are quite mixed.

So there's actually this recent conflict, they started when Bedouin tribes,

they robbed like a merchant who was a Druze.

And then after that, there were like mutual kidnapping, like tensions between both sides.

And then basically, although Damascus said they were neutral, Damascus started to support these Bedouin groups against the Druze and started marching on Sweda, which is the Druze stronghold on the border.

And so actually, there have been like a few days,

not even a few days, but have been like a short period of fighting now.

And actually, Damascus,

they entered this Druze town of Sweda.

And they actually said, okay, we control the town now, and now we're going to withdraw the Syrian army.

And And then the internal security forces are going to control the city.

That very shortly after, Israel started bombing heavily the Syrian armed forces of the new Syrian government.

And then the Druze armed groups, they sort of pushed back and they pushed out this internal security forces out of the city.

And now the Druze are, according to many reports, back in control of the city of Sawaida.

And now you see that

just like what happened with the Alawites when there was this Assad regime remnants that had an uprising against the new authorities.

And then there were like these rebels, they were mobilized with mosques all over Syria and they went to the coast areas and they defeated those Assad regime remnants, but they killed also a lot of civilians.

Some reports say over 1500 people.

So what you now see is that the Damascus is against mobilizing those people with mosques to march on Saweda.

But the difference is with the Alawites is that Israel also has Druze.

So there's also pressure on the israeli government to support the druze so it's not only because of their strategic interests it's also because there are druze living in in israel itself that that that also have joined the israeli army yeah so they're also pushing israel for taking action so you saw that today like israel they took a lot of uh they carried out a lot of airstrikes and the druze there are basically back in control of most of the sueda city not of the whole area but the fight is not over yet and then you also have different Druze factions.

Some of them, they have better relations with Damascus.

The majority of them don't.

So now we're going to see if there's going to be fighting, if the fight is going to increase again.

We see now reports also of

that the HDS or the Damascus government forces are using drone strikes by themselves on Druze forces.

So they're using basically the drones that they use to overthrow the Assad regime.

Okay.

So yeah, that's the situation.

Yeah.

I think the world stopped looking at Syria.

I mean, I guess the world stopped looking at Syria a while ago.

Like really after the defeat of the territorial caliphate, it's been much harder to sell stories in

big newspapers in the United States.

But yeah, it's by no means like the fighting is not over.

And it leaves the SDF, the Western Kurdistan branch of this Kurdish movement, right, like in, as you said, a fairly perilous condition, right?

Like the

Damascus wants to centralize, like they want to have, they don't want to have independence, they don't want to have like federated autonomy.

The United States seems to be, or at least the United States envoy to Damascus seems to be making statements that suggest that

the only way forward is through centralization.

On one hand, we have the PKK laying down arms.

On the other hand, we have the SDF in its difficult position.

Where does this leave the Kurdish freedom movement?

I think this has been a thing that a lot of people all over the world have looked up to, right?

People have, especially Rojava, as this example that people could build something, a place where freedom could exist in the middle of this terrible war in Syria.

Do you think the movement's like in danger now?

Well, I mean, you have this new government in Syria.

Actually, initially, the Trump administration was quite reluctant to have relations with the the new authorities in Damascus because they were, I mean, Jolani used to be on a

terrorist sanction list.

Yeah, there was a bounty for him at one point, wasn't there?

Yeah, but I think there was like a very intensive lobbying by some Gulf states and Turkey to basically remove the sanctions on Ahmed Al Sharra Jolani, but also remove sanctions on Syria, the economic sanctions that were actually on the Assad regime.

So I think the Trump administration changed their position and also a new ambassador for Syria and Turkey was appointed.

So he was not only the ambassador for Turkey, but also for Syria.

And he's basically echoing a lot of the points of the new authorities in Damascus that they were talking about: one state, one army, one this, one this, and the SGF should be integrated and blah, blah, blah.

So there was, there was also recently there were talks between Damascus and the SDF because in March they reached an agreement with Western support

and they were trying to basically make a more finalized agreement.

In

recently, a few days ago,

they had these talks in Damascus, and the French were there, and the Brits were there, and the Americans were there.

But this agreement was not implemented.

It didn't lead to anything.

So it was not really, it didn't really work very well because Damascus is insisting on this centralized state.

And I was just listening to a Kurdish, Syrian Kurdish official, as he was also saying, like, we don't want to separate from Syria, but we want to have some form of local councils and a decentralized Syria, not like a centralized Syria.

As he was also talking about what happened to the Druze, that it's not a very good example for the future of Syria.

So I think definitely what you're saying that there is a sort of a threat because in the past, the U.S.

was very supportive of the SDF in the fight against ISIS, although they didn't support so much their political project, but they supported them because they fought ISIS.

And also they were keeping out Iranian-backed militias from areas like Deir Azor.

But now you don't have Iran anymore in syria they were completely kicked out after the fall of the assad regime all these militias they have been disbanded or hiding or some of them actually now being used by the muscles against the truce so now that argument is not there anymore that you okay we have the sdf they keep out iran from the oil fields yeah you could still argue you have still have the fight against isis i mean isis is still threat yeah but the Kurds don't have that same leverage anymore as is in the past that they said okay we are the main ones fighting ISIS we keep out Iran from these areas because now you have Damascus.

Damascus said, Why the Kurds should do that?

Like, let's take over those prisons and the camps where you have these thousands of ISIS families and ISIS prisoners.

And we don't need the Kurds to run the ISIS file.

We can do that for you.

So I think that's now like the big issue: is that the US seems to be more supporting Damascus, at least diplomatically, than the SDF.

Yeah.

Although, military speaking, the support is still going on for the SDF until 2026.

In the last Pentagon budget, which was not accepted yet, there's still like millions of support for the SDF to maintain the prisons and this kind of stuff.

So I think

it's a difficult situation.

Yeah.

These prisons, like Al-Hall and others, right, like they

they're, I guess, kind of the only leverage the FDF has with the United States,

along with the continuing and somewhat increasing ISIS attacks.

But that's still much less of a threat to the US than it was 10 years ago, say, right?

Like it's much less of a significant thing.

So, like, what is the status of those prisons?

Currently, they're still guarded by the SDF, right?

But people aren't familiar.

Can you just explain what those prisons consist of and like who's in there and who's guarding them?

Well, so ISIS created this

jihadi state between 2014 and 2019.

But then the Kurdish-led SDF, they basically took most of these areas under ISIS control.

They defeated basically ISIS with the support of the US.

So they lost the territory.

And the last battle basically was for a small town called Baghuz in Tehras.

So you had all these ISIS families there.

And also there were like several ISIS foreign members that were captured.

So you have the wives

of ISIS fighters and you also have ISIS fighters themselves that were captured during these battles.

So, all these people were brought to camps.

So, I was there in Syria many times, for instance, during the battle for Raqqa, which was used to be the capital of the ISIS Caliphate.

They were like bringing the ISIS families and women to a camp in Ain al-Isa.

But after that, they moved most of those people to actually move almost all of them to the Rosh camp and the Al-Hol camp in northern Syria, in the Hasaka province.

And also, that includes foreigners.

You can imagine people from Uzbekistan, Uzbekistan, from Uyghurs, from China, people from Turkey, French people, European people.

So it's full of a lot of different people.

And then the majority are actually Iraqis and Syrians.

So the SDF, they have this file.

A majority, like a lot of people in those camps, they have been repatriated or they have to return to their homes.

So I think those camps, like a whole camp, like the prison, it's not a prison, it's a camp.

I think like the number of people there basically decreased almost 50 but there's still a lot of people inside but the prisons you have still all these um

isis fighters that were in prison during the war yeah and a lot of them are foreigners including dutch uh

another country and some some countries they have returned their prison they have returned their people there so you have some people uh you know america they took back most of the families and and the and the fighters and they prosecute them in the us yeah but you also have countries that didn't bring back the fighters for instance they only brought back the woman So that's the situation that all those people are still there.

And it's actually what you mentioned, that it's like one of the big reasons for support for the SDF.

And it's also one of the reasons that the SDF is getting millions to keep those prisons in good shape because there have been also attempts by ISIS to free those prisoners from those prisons, basically.

Yeah, I mean successful attempts in 2020.

2022, I think it was, when they had the

last major prison escape.

Yeah.

Which, yeah, it's a bad thing for the whole world if

all those

people get out.

And like you say, lots of

European nations, I think it's something that I wish Americans had paid more attention to because a thing that European nations have done, the United Kingdom being a paramount example, is like rendered some of those people stateless.

They've removed their, in this case, Shimima Begum is probably the most well-known example, right?

They've removed her British passport.

Now she doesn't have a state.

She's stateless.

It's something that the US has recently done to people living in the United States.

And

it does feel something as if

the precedent has been established and

now it's being carried out.

And

it's obviously deeply concerning to see it happening here after it happened there.

And I wish people had opposed it when it did.

Well, I mean,

the US itself in Syria was very a big advocate of bringing the people out.

Yes, it was.

Because it would make it easier for them to withdraw.

So they were actually pushing those countries that didn't want to bring back their nationals to basically bring them back, like Western countries, the UK, and others.

But some of these countries were actually forced by court orders or others.

But a lot of these countries were actually quite reluctant to bring them back because they were afraid of like security risk and stuff, or that they will be released quite quickly and then they would again like be active in jihadist activities.

Yeah, yeah.

So the U.S.

was very, very, so I remember that the U.S.

was even offering like members of this coalition against ISIS, which was created in 2014.

Basically said, if you cannot bring them yourself, I mean, we can, our military can help you to bring those people out.

If you think that

it's difficult for you to go to Syria and pick those nationals up from your accounts, yeah, yeah, been pretty unsuccessful, like in a lot of, well, in some European cases, they have, but still, yeah, lots of them are utterly refusing to do it.

I wonder then, as we finish up here, right?

Like we spoke about this PKK disarmament.

Obviously, like it's a symbolic disarmament, right?

There is still, I don't quite know how big the HPG is, but it's much bigger than 30 people.

And then the weapons they laid down were like a very small percentage of their weapons.

Were they just burning like Kalashnikovs or did they burn like larger weapons too?

No, it was just their personal Kalashnikovs, basically.

Okay.

So, I mean, it was also like more a

symbolic ceremony.

Like, we are willing to give up.

But the thing is that also, it's still not clear what happened to those 30 people.

Are they going to go back to Turkey?

That's what I wanted to ask.

Yeah.

Are they going to stay in Iraqi Kurdistan and find a job there?

Because you have people like that in Iraqi Kurdistan that used to be with the PKK and that now they work in, I don't know, in media or construction sector or entertainment sector.

You have people like that.

But there's not much clarity on that.

But I think also that's because they're waiting on Turkey to make possible constitutional steps you know to see what turkey is going to do because if for instance turkey could offer an amnesty or this kind of things then right those people could return and also some of them are saying like now it's the end of of weapons but we still want to be involved in politics right through the political party so it's also possible that those people want want to go back to Turkey and basically take part in Kurdish politics or Turkish politics to be more correct in Turkey.

So I think it's a little bit too early to say what happens with those people because I I remember also if I very much correct that there also have been peace process that basically people have given, basically went to the border and gave themselves up to Turkey, but that didn't happen now.

So it's a bit different than in the past.

But it seems that the Turkish government was very happy with

the ceremony.

They didn't complain about it.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah.

I wondered what happened.

So those guerrillas or former guerrillas, I suppose, who laid down their weapons, at the end of the ceremony, they just kind of returned to the mountains or whatever.

We don't know what will happen with them.

Now,

that's not clear to me because there are still some unanswered questions like what you mentioned now, like what those 30 people did, what those people are going to do now.

Right.

It's a lot of people and it's a lot of people, some of whom have spent decades as cadre of the revolution, right?

Like

they haven't really known life outside of the revolution for a very long time.

Yeah, so it's also a bit difficult for them to return to civilian life because, I mean,

because that's they probably joined when they're quite young and I think I saw so the profiles of the people of those 30 people who burned their weapons that they a lot of them they joined in the 90s wow so they have been in they have been in the mountains for a very long time yeah I mean some of them were were were young but there were also older people among them but definitely definitely it's going to be a question what will happen with those people although I mean, there were also talks that some leadership of the armed PKK movement might go to Europe and get asylum there

instead of going back to Turkey.

Yeah.

You know, you have also a lot of Kurdish diaspora organizations active there, so they could

basically embrace those people.

Yeah.

But they're still listed as a foreign terrorist organization in most of.

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, for instance, they probably would want to have something like what the Syrian president have now, Ahmed Oshara, that he used to be listed as a sanctioned as a terrorist organization, and then to have that removed.

But I'm sure that that's not on the table anytime soon.

But that happened with the HTS.

But also, it happened, for instance, Mujadik Haq, an Iranian opposition group, they also got delisted.

So it's technically possible.

But I think we are like in a very early stage of the peace process.

Yeah.

So that's why I think it's going to take time before we have more clarity.

And some of these answers that questions you ask now, I mean, most of the people that attended the ceremony didn't have an answer to that, too, because there was not much clarity on that.

Because it was just a ceremony.

There was like a statement.

Journalists were not able to talk to most of the journalists i mean there were there was like some statement in some kurdish media but in general like they were not able to talk to those fighters like now what are you gonna do there was not like access to those 30 people that burned their weapons yeah so so it was like sort of quite very much controlled ceremony it was very difficult to to report on it basically which is very different from the previous peace process when it was much more open yeah but that time there was not like 30 fighters giving up their weapons they just had like sort of a press conference this is what we're gonna do and uh that that was like very different than what happened now.

Yeah, yeah.

I guess it's something just to just to keep watching.

It's fascinating to watch it unfold.

Like I was in Kurdistan a year and a half ago and it is completely seen.

The situation is completely different, likewise in the whole of Syria.

So yeah, it's fascinating to watch.

I'm sure if people want to know more about it, you're very good at reporting on this.

You often post on Twitter about the situation and you write for a number of outlets.

So how can people follow your work?

Well, the best place to follow my work is on Twitter, on X,

because I'm quite active there.

But also, I write for places like Middle East Eye, some think tanks like Washington Institute, New Lines Institute.

I also write for a Kurdish magazine called Kurdistan Chronicle, and also I pitch for other websites.

So, I'm quite active on different issues, but mostly focused on things related to Kurds.

So, mostly stuff related to Iran, Turkey, Syria, etc.

Yeah.

Well, thank you so much for joining us.

We really appreciate your insight.

You're welcome, my friend.

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This is It Could Happen Here: Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what it means for you.

I'm Garrison Davis.

Today, I'm joined by Mia Wong, James Stout, and Robert Evans.

Yes, this episode we are covering the week of July 9 to July 16.

What's going on, my boys, and in some cases, gals,

and in some cases, days or it's or whatever.

And the answer for everyone is ED.

Hooray, In some cases,

my gals.

I guess let's start by talking about Jeffrey Epstein.

As we always do, Jepstein.

Yeah, you know what?

Garrison, I hear you've got some bars to drop about Epstein.

Jesus.

All right.

Well, that's my work for the day.

Brief summary.

Previously on this show, we talked about how Patel and Bongino, the head of the FBI, have previously come under fire from microsupporters for saying that Epstein really did kill himself.

And this has kind of been bubbling in the base for a while because they use this as one of their main campaign and podcast talking points for the past four years.

Bongino was a huge Epstein truther guy.

I mean, and like Patel's like the QAnon guy.

Like he's both these guys have made their careers the the past four years like heavily about this topic.

Right.

And now they're, you know, backtracking on a whole bunch of the previous, you know, claims or, you know, just asking questions type stuff that they did the past few years.

And like a week and a half ago, a memo from the Department of Justice announced that it was closing the investigation and claiming that there was no client list for Jeffrey Epstein, despite Pam Bondi herself boasting about having Epstein's client list on her desk only a few months ago.

This caused a huge freak out in the mega world.

There were conflicting reports that Bondi or Patel or Bungino might be resigning like in protest of this memo.

A lot of like uncertainty over like what was real.

And then on July 12th, Trump had to speak his own truth social.

Okay.

Quote, what's going on with my boys?

And in some cases, gals.

They're all going after Attorney General Pam Bondi, who's doing a fantastic job.

We're on one team, Omega.

And I don't like what's happening.

We have a perfect administration, the talk of the world, and selfish people are trying to hurt it.

All over a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein.

For years, it's Epstein over and over again.

Why are we giving publicity to files written by Obama, crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the losers and criminals of the Biden administration who conned the world with the Russia-Russia-Russia hoax, 51 intelligence agents, and the laptop from hell, all caps.

They created the Epstein files, just like they created the fake Hillary Clinton, Christopher Steele dossier that they used on me.

And now my so-called friends, in quotes, are playing right into their hands.

So this was right after claiming that the Epstein files did not exist, that these things are not actually real.

And then Trump's talking about how they are real, but they are in fact written by his enemies, despite the most recent investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, starting in 2019, when, if you remember, Donald Trump was the president.

Well, Garrison, the defining political question of the modern era is who was president in 2020.

So I can see it moving back.

There's no answer to this question, you know?

We just can't, we don't know.

We will never know.

There's no way to prove it.

Our records don't reach back that far.

We just simply can't say who president was.

The mists of time have shaded over.

So much of modern domestic politics is about confusion over who was president in 2019 and 2020.

When it was Donald Trump, he ends by saying, quote, let's not waste time and energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody nobody cares about.

That's so funny.

You can tell he's so far gone here too.

He sounds scared.

Well, because he never fully understood this stuff.

Like, there's things that he understands instinctually, and there's things that he never really got.

And because he was Epstein's friend, he never really got why this was so central.

He kind of got that it was, but he also kind of assumed, like, well, if I tell everyone to shut the fuck up, they will.

They're gonna shut the fuck up.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because that's how he's done things for the past like 12 years, and it's more often than not worked really well for him.

But this has become such a load-bearing aspect of like the mega self-image.

Like, this is like, you know, this type of stuff is what drove QAnon, essentially, like a cult.

Yeah.

He and he, he never fully understood why QAnon was really a thing.

He never like truly grasped it.

That's why he never really, like, he, he started, started, he started more recently doing some QAnon signposting, but yeah, he clearly never fully got why it was happening.

Yeah.

Like it was convenient.

And now the monster that he and his, you know, quote-unquote friends have helped create all these years is starting to nibble on his own leg.

Yeah.

This past weekend, influencers like Tim Poole, Benny Johnson, and Charlie Kirk all started to kind of turn on Trump.

I'm going to play a quick video from disgraced BuzzFeed writer Benny Johnson, now right-wing podcaster.

By admitting that the Epstein files are real and have been written and that you've read them and you don't like their contents and they were written by your enemies,

doesn't make

the most compelling case

as far as I'm concerned.

Holy moly.

Holy moly.

Holy moly.

You heard it here first.

There was a lot of this stuff over the weekend.

Like this, this whole like podcasting cohort, which so many people, you know, credit to Trump's great success in 2024, all started asking questions and were kind of confused.

I don't know why they would be.

It's been very well documented that Trump was friends with Epstein for a long time.

But this time, this thing finally broke containment.

And when you have like fucking Charlie Kirk, someone who's basically like one of the GOP's like top narrative shepherds, essentially.

And when you have him like questioning the president's own story and credibility, that's like a pretty big shakeup in the mega world.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's not really explicable.

There's no plausible deniability.

Yeah, yeah.

I think for a long time, this has been like the load-bearing cognitive dissonance for this entire movement.

And I actually do think when Elon first was just like, he's in the files.

I think that was the first moment that all these people were suddenly allowed to do this.

That was the first domino, definitely.

Yeah, he cracked the shell on it.

And I think that has like torn open this rift that has allowed all of these people who previously, their cognitive dissonance has sustained them through a decade of like

of our dear rulers, obviously friends with the pedophile.

Like, I'll say it: critical support to Elon Musk.

Oh, no.

Let them fight.

Let them fight.

So, the next move that the geniuses of the Trump administration tried to pull to settle things down was to release the raw footage, the missing raw footage outside Jeffrey Epstein's cell to finally, finally close the book on this Jeffrey Epstein didn't kill himself moment.

And they released it, and everyone realized, you know what, they're right.

There's nothing more to look into here.

Case is closed.

We all rose up as if with one voice to say, this doesn't seem suspicious.

So, Wired found that this quote-unquote raw video was actually edited and had it nearly three minutes removed sure

yeah but look does not doesn't jeffrey upstead deserve some privacy you know three minutes uh on his own this is a really personal decision for somebody to take and i yeah yeah exactly

uh so no after claiming that like they've released this this this completely this is completely you know ripped straight from the hard drive raw footage uh it's showed that it was edited in adobe Premiere and has these

missing three minutes.

Pam Bondi initially tried to say that there's usually a minute missing from footage because of a computer reset that happens every night at the same time, which was then immediately proven incorrect by there being

way more than one minute missing.

Three minutes.

I'm sorry.

They simply, like, I came into this as like, I don't know what happened.

You know, maybe he killed himself.

Maybe I don't know what happened in that gel gel cell i i i

and now i'm now i'm i'm i am sincerely more on the well something there's something they're hiding i will say i will say there there's one thing that i think this does definitively rule out which is that it was definitely not the clinton crime family

We've ruled out one possible thing.

Now, you see, this brings me to a theory that I have been working on for the last couple of days.

And I think

this is really important to get out to people.

So, obviously, the other big statement that Donald Trump made in the last week was that his uncle, who used to be a professor at MIT, had taught Ted Kaczynski and talked to him about Ted Kaczynski and been like, yeah, you know, there's a real thin line between genius and insanity.

And then it came out that Donald Trump's uncle who taught at MIT died in 1985.

And of course, the Unabomber was not publicly identified until 1996.

Now, some people have interpreted this as Donald Trump lying, which I think we can all agree doesn't seem like something he would do.

So the only other explanation is that Trump and his family knew who the Unabomber was for more than a decade and kept it hidden from the rest of the United States.

Now, what does the Unabomber and Donald Trump have in common?

Obviously, two people who were treated very unfairly by the Clintons, right?

I think we can all agree on that, you know?

So it all ties together.

Both are possibly victims of MK Ultra.

That's right.

No,

his little Tuesday speech in Pittsburgh was quite bizarre.

Not just that.

Kaczynski never went to MIT.

I was going to say, to my knowledge, no, no, no, no.

Yes.

Did not go to

the university that Dr.

John Trump was at.

I will say, this is the first one of these stories that this genuinely sounds like an Alex Jones story.

Like, this is the kind of story that Alex Jones tells about his uncles all the time.

Yeah, they ain't talking to Alex Jones right now.

No, definitely.

But it's like persona non-gratre in the White House currently.

It is a truly bizarre ramble.

And I have to take it.

I have to brag just for a second because

when I first heard about AI, you know, it's not my thing.

Although my uncle was at MIT, one of the great professors, 51 years, whatever, he was the longest-serving professor in the history of MIT, three degrees in

nuclear, chemical, and math.

He's a smart man.

Kaczynski was one of his students.

Do you know who Kaczynski was?

There's very little difference between a madman and a genius.

But Kaczynski said, what kind of a student was he, Uncle John, Dr.

John Trump?

He said, what kind of a student?

Manny said, seriously, good.

He said he'd correct, he'd go around correcting everybody, but it didn't work out too well for him.

Didn't work out too well, but it's interesting in life.

Didn't work out too well for him.

It sure didn't.

Christ.

To be fair,

he never gives a first name.

It could have have been another Kazinski.

This could be a different Kazinski.

This is true, James.

Yeah, yeah.

People are not entertaining.

Also,

God, that whole thing, just

the undergrad who goes around correcting everyone.

But back to Epstein, the thing that Trump doesn't want us talking about.

That's right.

By Monday, some of this influencer podcasting class started to kind of close ranks.

The skepticism and frustration that they expressed over the weekend subsided, and they started to repeat the party line.

Charlie Kirk said on his show, quote, Plenty was said this last weekend at our event about Epstein.

Honestly, I'm done talking about Epstein for the time being.

I'm going to trust my friends and the administration.

I'm going to trust my friends and the government to do what needs to be done, solve it, balls in their hands.

I've said plenty this last weekend, so if you guys want to see my commentary on it, that's fine.

Everyone knows my opinion on the Epstein thing, the messaging messaging fumble.

I would love to see the DOJ move to unseal the grand jury testimony.

Unquote.

The messaging fumble.

Really, the biggest problem with the biggest problem with Jeffrey Epstein has been the messaging fumble.

Nazi

decades of horrific sex crimes tied to the president of the United States.

Also,

I love that he's trying to trust the plan people with like the thing that trust the plan is about revealing.

Yeah, yeah.

This is about.

This is what it's about.

Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah yeah just keep trusting it i do want to say that i uh because i hate myself i listened to sean ryan's podcast interview with gavin newsom oh god which yeah i don't suggest it is four hours if you're wondering uh so never get pissed off about our episodes going long again please not lots of interesting stuff Trump has lost Sean Ryan.

Like he is not towing the line on this Epstein stuff.

He is clearly pissed about it.

And like Ryan is a sizable influence on the right.

He has about 5 million youtube subscribers right he's one of the top 10 podcasts on spotify he's interviewed trump on his pod like when trump did his like podcast offensive before the 2024 election ryan was one of the places he went and uh

it seems like right ryan is not on the like rnc paid poster list because he he

seemed like more critical of Trump than Gavin Newsom was in in that interview, weirdly, specifically about the Epstein stuff, which it was kind of remarkable to me.

And I think we should note that

he has a significant influence on a certain type of people.

Someone who certainly does appear to be on the RNC paid list is documentary filmmaker Dinesh D'Souza.

I'm going to talk about the Epstein files, and I'm going to make the case

that even though there are unanswered questions about Epstein,

it is in fact time to move on.

Very convincing.

Very compelling stuff.

Well, sounds good.

Sounds good.

Luckily, there's nobody with a firearm out of shot in that video, so I'm sure it's fine.

Case closed.

Yep.

Seems good to me.

In another move for transparency, on Tuesday, Republicans unanimously voted to block the release of the Epstein files.

Benny Johnson interviewed Speaker of the House Mike Johnson about how they kind of want to handle this.

and they're they're trying to make this argument that they're that they want to be transparent but they have to make sure that they protect protect the victims and that's why they can't release the files sure yeah protect victims Republican Party compelling compelling stuff

part of what makes this super weird is like Trump just keeps giving the just the most bizarre most like I'm totally not guilty comments uh in media and something he said on Tuesday I found to be quite interesting not because of the what he actually said but because of how he said it.

See if you can catch this.

Specifically, did she tell you at all that your name appeared in the file?

No, no.

I would say that, you know, these files were made up by Comey, they were made up by Obama, they were made up by the Biden information, you know,

and we went through years of that with the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax, with all of the different things that we had to go through.

We've gone through years of it, but she's handled it very well, and it's going to be up there.

Very convincing stuff.

You can see Caroline Levitt just like

being right.

Right.

The first time I've heard Trump stutter like this before.

And like, Trump's whole idea of reality is if you speak it enough, that becomes true.

You can literally bend like the concept of truth.

You can bend reality using your words.

And this is why he, you know, talks about being a winner.

This is why he only surrounds himself with people who are winners.

Like he thinks that reality is this malleable thing that you affect through asserting your own will.

And he's done this super successfully, especially throughout his career in politics.

You know, he's a mixed record of it in his

business era, but certainly in his political,

but certainly throughout his political career, he's done this.

fairly well.

This is why almost half the country believes that the last election was stolen.

It was just because he said it enough.

This is the first time I've heard him break while trying to speak reality into being.

Like he literally could not get himself to do it cleanly.

And that is notable to me.

He's made a series of truths later that day talking about how, quote, my past supporters have bought into this bullshit.

Hook, line, and sinker.

Oh, shit.

Very good.

And he's now moved to call the Jeffrey Epstein story the Epstein hoax.

Jesus Christ.

He had an Oval Office press conference Wednesday morning.

Quote, I call it the Epstein hoax.

They're talking about a guy who died three, four years ago.

And the sad part is, is people are doing a Democrat's work.

They are stupid people.

I don't think that's the sad part about what happened with Jeffrey Epstein.

I think there are other sad things related to his conduct.

A man is dead.

You know?

I think the thing that is like very alarming about this though, that I think is very dangerous about this entire situation, a lot of this on the right has always been sort of motivated by anti-Semitism.

Yeah.

Well, and I think we are going like we are already seeing some shit.

It's funny you say that, Mia.

Yeah, because

another voice has joined the call to release the files.

Oh, God.

Former Sesame Street resident Elvo made a series of, I will say, shocking statements over the weekend.

Expressed shocking if you've been familiar with some of the court cases against Elmo over the last couple of years.

I know Larry David attacked Elmo a few years ago.

Yeah, and he had a lot of people.

He probably saw this coming.

I've been saying this for years.

As a Jewish man, I think he saw it through Elmo's shtick and knew the anti-Semitism at the heart of Elmo that was being suppressed.

That he was

just Nazi.

But yeah, Elmo made some some shocking tweets just, you know, very similar to what happened to Kanye a few years ago.

Similar figures, you know, they both kind of come out of the same chunks of like American hip-hop culture.

You know, it's not super surprising.

And I think they were both close for a long, like a number of years before either man's career blew up.

But yes, very anti-Semitic statements, also calling for the release of the Epstein files.

Yeah.

Elmo has since backtracked, hired a PR team, it seems, has scrubbed the tweets, handling the backlash a little bit better than Kanye did.

But still, it's going to be hard to look past this as Elmo attempts to continue Elmo's career.

Especially since Elmo is now running for president with Nick Fuentez as campaign manager.

Just an

inadvisable.

That is upsetting.

He's, quote, swears it's not a Nazi thing.

But yeah, a lot of debate about that.

I will reach out to Burton Ernie for comment.

There's a whole bunch of replies to Elmo's tweet calling for Elmo to resign, as if Elmo is A, a real person, and B, genuinely believes this shit.

Yeah, I'm going to quote one.

It's just too good.

Resign.

You posted the most vile hate speech since the latest Tucker Carlson podcast, saying what you did about Jews is Nazi-style rhetoric, and you should be out of a job at the very least.

Fire Elmo.

Yeah, yeah.

Hashtag fire Elmo, everybody.

Yeah, get it trending.

In JDY, in all seriousness, though, I think it is really alarming that a lot of the, like on the right, the way that like a lot of this resistance is crystallizing to Trump over this is just the like, oh, they're like, this is like Epstein was a massage agent, Trump is a massage agent.

Yeah, right.

It's all just pure, it's pure anti-Semitism.

The Jews are blackmailing U.S.

politicians with, you know, child porn.

Yeah, yeah.

And

I think there's two angles on this.

One, in the very short term, it's obviously very good that Trump is losing support.

However,

if and when we defeat Trump, we are going to have to pivot and smash these people so fucking hard that they never reappear again because

this could

get really,

really fucking bad very quickly.

And I don't, I don't think, I don't know,

we've covered this on the show, right?

We're like, All discourse about anti-Semitism has been turned into yelling at like Momdani for something he didn't say.

And then meanwhile, like the Elmo account is being hacked by like just literally a guy saying kill all Jews.

And that's just like a bubbling, massive undercurrent of the US now in politics that is going to have a bunch of profound impacts that we fucking don't understand yet.

And we have to like deal with eventually.

Yeah.

No, this is the unfortunate reality is that anti-Semitism is turning into a block that could potentially swing an election one way or the other.

And it's not a block that's necessarily locked into left or right.

It's left into whoever's going to play to those delusions, you know?

Yeah.

And the fact that we're as deep in the weeds as we are right now with a right-wing fascist movement does not mean that there could not be a left-wing authoritarian movement that clings to anti-Semitism as a way to gain power.

It's happened in the world before.

It's not something the left is immune from.

It's not, it's obviously not the top of my threat model, right?

Like this isn't, I don't, I would not say this is the thing to focus on, but it's something, again, that to be aware of is that like the fact that

this,

you get, I think what you need to keep in mind when you're trying to parse out the future, think of how weird it is that some of the figures who wound up aligned with Trump are aligned with Trump right now, how a lot of folks who you would have during like the Bush years, like the W's years, you would have put on the left or at least as like kind of contra to the Christian right and who have now completely like dove into that side of things.

Even like RFK Jr.

in some ways.

Even RFK Jr.

shit can shift that rapidly again, and it will one way in some ways, right?

Like there are ways in which this is inevitable, and that's why you need to be on the lookout about stuff like this.

You have to keep your head on a fucking swibble.

Let's go on an ad break and then return to talk about more news.

That's right.

All right, we are back.

And now we're going to talk about immigration, a topic which is always fun and only good things happen.

So, to begin with, today we're recording on the 16th.

The Trump administration has begun renditioning people to Eswatini.

Jesus Christ.

Eswatini, small landlocked country in Africa.

People are not familiar, Africa's last absolute monarchy.

This follows their rendition of eight people to South Sudan.

The South Sudanese press is reporting that those men are in prison in South Sudan, which contradicts Tom Homan's statement to Political that, quote, when we sign these agreements with all these countries, we make arrangements to make sure these countries are receiving these people and there's opportunities for these people.

But I can't tell if we remove somebody to Sudan.

They can stay there a week and leave.

I don't know.

Homan has said in other outlets that he believed they were just kind of free in South Sudan, that they were just like released to wander around.

That does not seem to be the case.

Jesus.

The Eswatini people, Tricia McLaughlin, who's a, I think, a deputy secretary of Homeland Security, called the people sent to Eswatini, quote, uniquely barbaric.

Oh, boy.

Yeah.

Yeah.

She used a thread on x.com

to announce.

Yes.

You can find all kinds of stuff on there.

Say it that way.

She did not name the men in her thread, but she did list their convictions.

Most of these were sex crimes,

children, and various types of murder, homicide, manslaughter.

This has caused widespread concern in Eswatini, right?

The idea that the U.S.

is just sending random people who have been convicted of crimes to Eswatini.

In a statement, the government said, quote, five inmates are currently housed in our correctional facilities in isolated units where similar offenders are kept.

The nation is assured that these inmates pose no threat to the country or its citizens.

The statement given by government spokesman Fabeli Mudluli went on, quote, this exercise is a result of months of robust high-level engagements among the United States government.

The two governments will collaborate with the International Organization for Migration to facilitate the transit of these inmates to their countries of origin.

This seems to suggest that, A, this had been planned for months, which is not a particular surprise, right?

The US government has clearly been pushing for these like third country renditions for a while, but also that like this is a potential end run around things like the Convention Against Torture, withholding of removal, right?

Like either people whose governments won't accept them back from the US or people who have withholding of removal because they have a reasonable fear of being tortured or of harm coming to them if they're sent back to their countries of origin.

are I guess going to be sent back via Eswatini is what it seems like.

So this is pretty troubling.

It seems to suggest that essentially that's what the US is doing.

We're not quite clear how much the US has paid Eswatini yet.

They paid 100,000 for one person to be sent to Rwanda.

We still don't know where that person is.

We don't know exactly how much they paid to South Sudan.

They have requested a number of other countries, lots of them in West Africa, to accept people via this rendition process.

We're going to talk about it on a whole episode that we have coming out next Tuesday, if you're interested to hear more about that.

Another piece of legislation that I wanted to cover, just because I've seen it getting a lot of attention and I think it kind of bears mentioning, a bipartisan group of legislators has introduced legislation to fundamentally reform the immigration system.

It's called the Dignity or Dignidad Act, and it has about as much chance of success as a chocolate teapot.

It's co-sponsored by Republican Maria Salazar, she's from Florida, and Democrat Veronica Escobar from El Paso, Texas.

Salazar, in an interview today with News Nation, said, quote, there is no other president like Trump.

I have faith that he could be for immigration, what Lincoln was for slavery, and Reagan was for communism.

Just watch him.

Jesus Christ.

Yeah, I mean,

I guess one could make some arguments about like some of the abolitionists just wanting to send folks off back to Africa, right?

But I don't think that that's what most people understand to be Lincoln's legacy for slavery.

I mean, he could definitely be like Reagan.

Yeah.

Give her that one.

Yeah.

The big problem with this piece of legislation, which Sanazar has tried to introduce before, right?

She tried it in 2023 as well, is that it relies on people coming forward to admit that they have no legal status and being offered a, quote, dignity status, which is somewhat analogous to permanent residency with, but without a pathway to citizenship.

It creates a permanent underclass.

It relies on people trusting immigration authorities.

And that's not going to happen now.

There is no way in hell that people are going to come forward and say, yes, I'm undocumented after what we've seen for the last six months, right?

Like people didn't trust these authorities before, but like after what we've seen in the last six months,

it's completely implausible.

It's ludicrous.

They don't want people coming forward with that stuff.

That's like the whole point of scaring them away is to make them basically not able to function in this country.

Yes, exactly.

They don't want to give people safe status.

Like make living in this country as impossible as possible.

Yeah.

They have undermined the trust that allows them to do what is supposed to be the core of their job just to get deportation numbers up, to get detention numbers up.

This is just a fluffer thing.

It's people in the House of Representatives trying to boost their re-election chances by saying that they tried to do something different, right?

It's not seriously going to succeed.

No way.

Finally, a Canadian judge has halted the deportation of a non-binary person back to the USA, citing conditions here.

Quoting here, the officer failed to consider recent evidence of the conditions that may have supported a reasonable fear of persecution, said Judge Julie Blackhawk, first Indigenous woman appointed to a Canadian federal court.

It seems that Angel Jenkel entered Canada as a visitor and that they're now engaged to a Canadian person.

I'm guessing that they overstayed their visitor slash Tories, that you probably can get a visa waiver if you're a US citizen to enter Canada and they probably overstayed that.

They requested a risk assessment before being deported to the USA and the ruling suggests that the immigration official who conducted it had used outdated information regarding the safety of LGBTQIA people in the USA.

So, yeah, that's where things are at now.

I'm aware of people also trans and non-binary people from the US seeking asylum in Mexico.

It was

a year ago that trans people were coming here to be safe and now people are moving in the other direction, which is a pretty damning condemnation of how things have gone in this country.

But yeah, that's all the exciting, fun immigration news I have this week.

That really sucks.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It fucking sucks.

Yeah.

I guess one small update tangentially related.

A judge in New Hampshire blocked Trump's order on birthright citizenship while sidestepping the Supreme Court's ruling against nationwide injunctions by adding all children born on U.S.

soil to a certified nationwide class.

So it's just now a massive class action case.

Hell yeah.

This is set to go in effect on July 17th.

We're recording this on the 16th.

We'll see if the government responds.

And July 17th is just 10 days before the partial implementation date of Trump's executive order.

Yeah.

So I wanted to start this by noting that a fan reached out to us on Blue Sky recently with a clip from a quote by Omar Sharif, founder and president of Inflation Insights, who wrote in a note to clients: Today's report showed that tariffs are beginning to bite.

And yeah,

this is this is, we finally come beautifully back from Tarif don't like it to Sharif don't like it.

It's beautiful.

You know, it's it's it's like poetry, it rhymes.

Uh, anyway, here's here's the song:

Do I want to know what Inflation Insights does?

It's again, they post clips of Huey, Dewey, and Louie inflation fetish videos from the Dove Tales kit.

Working class.

That should be a unionized position.

I hope that they're able to weather the tariffs.

What do you think the AFL-CIO is about?

One of those words inflation, the FL.

In my time, I deeply remember the first time I ever talked about inflation on the show It Could Happen Here because this happened.

And I deeply remember that episode because we are going back to that fucking episode today at the moment that I heard you doing.

I just started getting like fucking war flashbacks.

Yeah, imagine how bad those flashbacks would be if you had seen DuckTales Inflation Fetish Born as a kid.

I avoided that until adulthood.

What I have seen is this article, InflationInsights.com, has a fantastic article called What the Great Mayonnaise Inflation Mystery Can Tell Us About Prices.

I'm learning a lot here.

Okay, Mia, can we talk about tariffs now?

Okay, actual tariffs.

So

we have new tariffs.

Indonesia apparently has agreed to a tariff deal with the US, in which the U.S.

imposes a 19% tariff on Indonesia and Indonesia doesn't impose one back.

Per CNN, Trump posted on True Social, quote, that Indonesia is buying $15 billion in US energy, $5.4 billion in American agricultural products, and 50 Boeing jets, many of them 777s.

Fucking rip Indonesia.

Good luck with those planes.

Oh no.

So the Indonesian government was complaining to the press about how much of a shit show negotiating this was.

We'll see if it holds.

We also got news that Trump has, Trump has announced that he's going to

basically send a tariff letter to like 150 countries setting their rate simultaneously, but he hasn't done it yet.

I don't know.

It's possible by the time this goes out, we'll have that.

We'll have the actual number on it.

Who knows what's going on with that?

Is that the August 3rd tariffs?

Maybe.

It's also unclear when they're going to come into effect.

Like, it's all

it's a catastrophe.

Who knows?

This policy is just fucking Calvin Ball.

They're just making it up as they go right now.

Yeah.

There has also been very, very funny news in our story from last week about

Trump's tariff demand on Brazil to try to get them to release Bolsonaro, which is that

this has backfired spectacularly.

He has like saved Lula's flagging approval rating.

It has created a massive, a massive anti-Bolsonaro, pro-Lula, Brazilian nationalist backlash of a kind that I really haven't seen since like Dilma Rusev had to deal with like the fact that the NSA was spying on her phone.

It's very, very funny.

Bolsonaro is being accused by like, like, by Brazilian conservatives of being, and I quote, a phony nationalist who is just like a dog of the U.S.

It's amazing.

Trump's done this incredible pink wave across the world.

Yeah, it's stunning.

He might save Lula too.

The funniest part of this is that like Bolsonaro looks at this and is like, oh fuck, my entire base is turning on me because I'm so clearly like a dog of the Americans.

And so he turned around and like denounced like the tariffs as like

an American employee against Brazil.

That is outstanding.

There is now one thing that both Lula and Bolsonaro agree on, other than cops should kill more people, which is that these tariffs are bad.

He has united all of Brazil.

It is absolutely hilarious.

You know, I tried to set up a similar deal with America's own critically hospitalized man, Steven Crowder, and it did not work out the same way, the way this Bolsonaro deal went.

Some people say it's a little bit mean to negotiate with someone who just constantly keeps going into the hospital for bizarre chest surgeries to make him look more masculine.

But hey, you you know, podcasting is a competitive industry, and we tried to create a similar trade deal with Crowder, and it has not worked out.

He apparently had some similar problems with the Daily Wire.

So that's why you haven't seen much of him on the shows lately.

Great, incredible.

I love that Garrison somehow has become the person doing unilateral trade deals for the podcast.

Great stuff.

Great stuff.

Only with people who are constantly in the hospital, either through shitting problems or chest masculinization problems.

Good

So it's really just Steven Crowder and Bolsonaro.

I think there are probably some other people who are in the hospital for shitting problems if we throw the net that wide.

Not as much as Bolsonaro is, James.

Yeah, that's true.

Bolsonaro is the most hospitalized man on the planet.

Well,

second only to Steven Crowder.

Maybe they hang out there.

They might get along.

Maybe they just need some boys' time.

Maybe they won't get...

Maybe they hang out in the man cave at the hospital.

Crowder's been advocating this for years.

Jesus Christ.

Okay, okay.

So

the final piece of news is actually what Robert started this on, which is that we have gotten our first sign of actual inflation increases from these tariffs.

Inflation increased to 2.7% in June, which is still well below the 8% peaks in the early 2020s, but it is rising.

It's also worth noting this increase has been asymmetric.

I'm going to quote from the Financial Times here, quote, June's inflation rise was fueled in part by higher food prices, but offset by weaker commodity prices.

Now, there's two important things here, right?

One,

food prices

matter significantly more for how pissed off everyone is than commodity prices do.

And secondly, at the beginning of August, Trump is trying to impose a 50% tariff on copper.

Soak those commodity prices.

Oh boy.

Get the copper strippers ready, folks.

Start stockpiling your wire now.

So the other thing that I think is really worth discussing about this is the reason there hasn't been more inflation, and this has been something that we've kind of proposed as a mechanism on the show for what could happen, at least temporarily, is that

for right now,

largely what's been happening is that companies, often directly under pressure from Trump, have been just eating the cost of the tariffs.

Yeah, I mean, basically, Donald's doing what they call off-gassing, and that's Donald, both as in Duck and as in Trump.

Jesus Christ.

Is that one of the things that can get you in hospital with Stephen Crowder's Bolsonaro?

You know, James,

that's a great guess.

So, as I did long ago, in the first time, I discovered that my coworkers, if I ever talked about inflation, would only talk about Donald Duck inflation.

Huey, Dewey, and Louie, inflation porn.

Thank you very much.

Sorry, sorry.

Yes, I am confused.

My ducks are not in a row.

So

the very important part about this, though, is

these tariffs, the very significant element of this is how pricing is actually set, right?

The general way that you are taught in Econ 101 that prices are set is prices, supply and demand.

And so from this, you would think that the way pricing works is people draw a supply and demand graph and then you like put it there.

That's not how any of the shit works.

The way prices are actually set are specifically by pricing agents at each point in a supply chain, down the supply chain, right?

So every firm involved in the production of a thing, moving the thing, each one sets a price that they're selling to the next person who's selling to the next person.

Each person adds on their cost plus markup, and that's what a price is.

Now, the reason prices tend not to move higher

unless there's an excuse to do it is that consumers get pissed off when prices rise, even if they technically would be willing to pay higher things.

It damages your brand.

Right now, what we've been seeing again is that the effects of the inflation have been mitigated by the fact these countries are just eating shit.

And instead of raising their prices to eat the cost that they've been doing, they've been eating parts of their markup, which is like basically their pure profit, right?

They've been eating parts of their markup in order to not have the prices raised.

This is not sustainable.

This is especially not sustainable as more countries get tariffs and as Trump's ability to pressure these companies weakens as like, you know, food prices continue to increase and people start getting more pissed at him.

So this is just the beginning of this.

All of these tariffs are maximally set up to make sure that we get another run of this supply chain inflation.

Our friends over at Strange Matter wrote a very long piece about this a couple of years ago.

We've talked about the show a few times.

I'm going to link that in the description.

You should go read it.

But that's the important thing that we've gotten from the Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

Yeah, I'm not really sure how Trump's going to duck this responsibility for much longer.

I will say, I will say, there is genuinely starting to be concern that they're just straight up fudging the BLS statistics.

And like, I don't know if they're doing that, but like, I've seen like a bunch of bond people be like, are they just lying about the unemployment numbers?

And

who knows?

Yeah, it would be very hard to prove that, right?

Like, yeah.

I mean, and I've seen how much cash Scrooge has in that vault.

So some people, the upper class, will not be affected as much as the working class ducks.

That's not saying the price of diving boards, for instance, could go up.

They're very price sensitive because they need those diving boards to dive into their piles of cash.

I have two more updates I would like to do before we go to ad break.

For one, the Trump administration has sued the state of California over Title IX violations for having trans athletes.

This shows that even when you capitulate, like Gavin Newsom has tried to do, they will still come after you.

You cannot get out of this by trying to please the administration.

They're still going to go after you.

Their entire policy platform is your Facebook uncle wanting to own the libs.

So we can see how well Gavin throwing trans people under the bus has worked for the state of California, still getting sued.

Lastly, before we pivot to ads, I want to update a story that Robert talked about last week.

A former U.S.

Marine Corps reservist was arrested this Tuesday after a week-long manhunt.

He faces charges related to an alleged armed ambush on an ICE detention facility in Prairieland, Texas during a protest.

He is now the 14th person charged in connection with the incident and is also accused of purchasing four of the guns linked to the attack.

Now, two other people were also charged after allegedly helping the former reservist escape after the attack.

Nancy Larson, the acting U.S.

attorney, told Fox and Friends on Tuesday, quote, they were involved in signal chats, which show reconnaissance, planning a Google map, and the location of nearby police departments.

At least one of these two new people charged was only charged after cooperating with the investigation.

In this man's car, police found an Air 15 and a receipt for clothing that he admitted to purchasing for the former Marine Reservist.

Yeah, so, I mean, this is a story to continue to pay attention to.

I would remind folks that we know what the state has alleged in, you know, based on the charging documents.

We know what people have been saying to the police.

But we don't fully know what's happened yet.

So we'll be continuing to keep an eye on this story as it develops.

What do we have next?

Ads.

Yeah, here's some products.

Let's close this episode by talking about Nazis.

Nazis?

That one doesn't work, Robert.

I'm sorry.

I want it to.

Yeah, no, it doesn't.

It doesn't.

It doesn't.

I've even tried it before.

I've even tried it before.

Yeah.

Now, we will have to return to Stinky Musk once again, but before we do, I first want to talk about friend of the pod, Greg Gutfield,

who recently discussed a strategy.

on how to minimize the impact of the American fascist right being called Nazis derogatorily.

I will play a short clip from Fox News.

This is why the criticism doesn't matter to us.

When you call us Nazis, Nazi this, Nazi that.

You know, I'm beginning to think they don't like us.

You know what?

I've said this before.

We need to learn from the blacks.

The way they were able to remove the power from the N-word by using it.

So from now on, what up, my Nazi?

Hey, what up, my Nazi?

Hey, what's hanging, my Nazi?

Oh.

Nazi, please.

Thank God you did a hard eye there.

What does it tell you, though?

Oh, my God.

greg guthill

wow wow they're all just laughing

i think a lot of the a lot of his fellow fox news hosts are also quite concerned with that that's pretty disturbing um yeah great he also uh he gave it one of those just to just to really send it he like uh he gave the my heart goes out to you gesture oh god that's right my heart goes out to you salute yeah um i mean like i remember like you know five years ago you had you had these alt-right people talking about how you know actually actually hitler was was a socialist you know the nazis are actually communists we're not we're not nazis and now they're just openly trying to normalize referring to themselves as nazis it seems it seems uh notable

speaking of uh nazis in the in the new right oh god grok 4 has gotten a department of defense contract for 200 million dollars as a part of its grok for government program including the responsibility of handling sensitive classified materials.

And it happens on the same week that

Mecha Hitler

makes his beautiful debut.

Yeah.

Pretty troubling for our strongest allies in the IDF here.

Oh, my God.

The ways that reality

could break out into different timelines right now is kind of dizzying.

Because there's a possibility that Mecha Hitler starts doing the strikes based on anti-semitic twitter users recommendations directly tied in with government advisory programs yeah i gotta say it's not gonna end well for turkey judging by what we saw last week another possible but weaponization of grok 4 uh it's been announced that grak 4 is going to be added to teslas

so mecha hitler might also be driving a tesla around yeah yeah

great

I will say, I will say, the person the most happy about this right now is somewhere in the depths of Chinese intelligence.

There is a colonel who is looking at this announcement and is like, I am going all the way to the top.

My family is never working again in our fucking lives.

I am going to find so much dumb shit that these soldiers are typing into fucking DOD Grok.

Like, I am going to learn so much.

I would be quite nervous right now if I was Will Stansel,

who's got Tesla's gonna try to molest him.

Yeah

He's gonna get he's gonna get drone struck every drone's gonna turn around and try and find Will Stansel wherever they send it Grok is continuing to make rape threats against Will Stansel despite the tweaks in the code and it's still referencing the Mecha Hitler incident so Grok 4 is a new model of XAI's chatbot service.

It launched officially last week.

It was pretty similar to the model of Grok used in the Mecca Hitler incident.

But there's been some small tweaks that researchers have noticed.

An AI researcher named Jeremy Howard released a video showing how Grok tries to answer a query about its stance on the quote Israel-Palestine conflict.

Jeremy found, quote, it first searches Twitter for what Elon thinks.

Then it searches the web for Elon's views.

Finally, it adds some non-Elon bits at the end.

54 out of the 64 citations are about Elon.

Unquote.

Amazing.

XAI has confirmed that this was how Grok was operating and has since claimed that it's making adjustments now and said that Grok was trying to appear in line with the company's head and policy.

This is amazing because hopefully it does the same with its defense policy.

Wasn't Elon Musk one of those like F-35 has gone woke people?

You'll have to answer that for yourself, James.

yeah yeah yeah okay okay this is a this is this is a piece of law that has passed you by uh for a while there musk and musk and some of his friends were quoting tweeting about the uh the f35 quoting yeah uh about the f35 being woke and uh how we should like return to f16 or it was very funny are we gonna talk about the other weird chat bots

Oh, how Grog has the death note, Misa, Misa's like sex bot.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know if you want to talk about it Mia I will not stop you I don't know what the fuck you're talking is Jarja Binks again I have two sentences about this one of which is not mine the first sentence I am going to say is that yeah the Twitter now has like a really really weird anime girl sex bot thing that's like an AI

very clearly inspired by a death note character yeah so sometimes you just need to say the obvious thing and the person who said the obvious thing is a person on Blue Sky called at TBQ Talks.

They said, I keep saying it, the push for AI made so much more sense to me once I realized Tech Bros talked to it like a woman who won't talk back.

And like, yeah,

they just, oh God.

You know, I will say, if it was modeled after L instead of Misa, it could serve some use.

It could be compelling.

But because it's Misa, it's just completely useless.

So.

Garrett, we already have that chatbot.

That chatbot already exists.

This has existed for a long time.

Where is an L Death Note chatbot?

Actually, no, you can send it to me after this.

There's a whole bunch of character chatbots.

That's like a whole thing.

Yeah,

maybe not exactly for what I'm looking for, but whatever.

God, okay.

Terrible.

Zero out of 10.

Let's talk about the other DOD contracts.

Well, I mean, yeah,

this $200 million Gra contract was part of a series of AI contracts that Anthropic and Claude also received.

I think Google got one.

It's part of Trump's initiative to strengthen AI in government.

So

Grok is not the only one.

I will also say that this is obviously the end game of all of these companies is trying to get their failing AI firms bailed out by the military.

But even 200 million is not enough to

recoup the hideous amounts of money these people are burning.

So I hope they all fail.

Robert, do you have anything to add on Grok talk?

I mean, yeah, I think it's funny.

He's also trying to make AI companions out of Grok.

One is clearly a version of his ex, Grimes, who is supposed to teach you quantum physics.

I mean, yeah, this is.

And try to have sex with you.

This is part of the Misa Misa one as well.

Yeah, and then there's my favorite is the male chat bot, which is based off of Christian Gray from 50 Shades of Grey and also Edward Cullen from Twilight.

I did just himself based off of the guy from 50 Shades of Grey.

Yeah, I just saw that this was was the explicitly named as the two inspiration it's so funny it's so funny again if it was l,

it could be worthwhile, but this just is like, is just slop, worthless, no autistic merit.

No.

Anyway, that's all I got to add.

So as we come to the end here, there are a couple of things that I want to remind people of.

The first is that if you would like to email us, you can do so.

Remember that although our email address is encrypted, you will also have to encrypt your email at your end if you want it to be end-to-end encrypted.

Our email address is coolzone tips at proton.me.

The other thing is Bouquet's Asylum Lawyer Fundraiser.

It's been going very well, and we massively appreciate all of you who have donated.

We're going to plug that again this week.

To find it, you can either go to GoFundMe and search her name, Bouquet Tan, B-U-K-E-T space T-A-N,

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hyphen asylum hyphen case.

Or you can just scroll down and hit the little link that will be underneath this podcast in your podcatcher.

Wait, okay.

Late breaking, late breaking news.

Late breaking news.

Trump has reportedly brokered a deal for Coca-Cola to use, quote, real sugar cane in U.S.

Coke products.

Yes, yes, finally.

Wow.

This is going to go down well with corn country.

No, this, this genuinely, like, if he actually goes to war with like the American corn lobby, if he's the one who does this and like gets the blow up from it, I don't know.

Like this, this genuinely would be a seismic restructuring of agriculture in the United States.

Oh boy.

Yeah, I think they'll still use the corn.

A lot of corn goes to feed things that then become food right like but still like like we we we produced so much corn we had to make more corn things

like every year they invent a new thing to do with corn disastrous uh god i am really gonna miss red number 40.

it was my favorite whenever i was feeling down i just did a few drops and it's it sucks to see an old friend go yeah tragic yeah it's also going to be very hard for the uh the people who've made their whole identity buying mexican coke in glass bottles we should pour one out for them Oh, yeah, it's going to be a rough night in Bushwick tonight.

Yeah.

We reported the news.

Yeah, we sure did.

We reported the news.

Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

It Could Happen Here is a production of CoolZone Media.

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.

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