It Could Happen Here Weekly 188

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

So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want.

If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.

Sometimes there is a topic that is too big for just one one podcaster.

Sometimes a simple medical podcaster, a simple wartime journalist can't handle a topic on their own.

They need to combine forces.

A special team-up has to happen.

And that, my friends, is what's happening today on the special crossover edition of the House of Pod.

And it could happen here in HOPICH

Hoppitch Special.

Myself, Dr.

Cave Hoda, hope I'm saying that correctly and james stout are going to be talking to you along with two very special guests about what's happening out there in the protests what risks the protesters are facing what health concerns we have for them how they can best prepare and more

james hey buddy hey it's nice nice to be podcasting with you again You really enjoy our team-ups here, our special Marvel team-ups that we do.

It's a fun one.

You're my favorite collaborator, Kavi.

Hey, I'm going to take take that as total sincerity, even though I'm not entirely sure.

So I thank you for that.

Yeah.

Because I think that sounded sincere enough.

I like these.

I like it.

It's fun.

Me too.

I do too.

Let's introduce our guests.

We have some very special guests.

I will actually ask you guys to introduce yourselves.

Let's start with you.

Miriam, can you tell us a little bit about who you are and what your background in this field?

is sure hi i'm miriam i use she or they pronouns my background in the field of podcasting is that I'm with the collective Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness, which puts out the podcast Live Like the World is Dying, as well as the podcast Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness and The Spectacle.

And my experience in the field of what I think we're here to talk about today is that I've been a street medic for over a decade, which means I have treated a lot of injuries on people who've been messed up by interactions with police.

I mean, we're going to talk about this more, but my first question is, is it pretty much much 90% or more violence from the police that you encounter?

Do you ever encounter anything else like violence amongst protesters themselves or something else that happens along the way?

Or is it solely what you're experiencing is treating violence from the side of the police?

So that's a good question.

It is mostly violence from police.

Sometimes it is violence from non-state affiliated or at least not on duty fascists.

So, you you know, your proud boys, you know, other people like that, or just generally sort of hostile right-wing actors.

Sometimes it is also, you know, sort of underlying medical stuff more so, like somebody has been out at the march all day and they didn't bring their medication with them.

And so they're having a seizure.

And, you know, then there's also environmental stuff, your heat stroke, your hypothermia, your,

I was running to catch up with the march and I stepped off the curb weird ow, you know, stuff like that.

But in terms of violence, yeah, it's, it's mostly coming from the cops.

I've, I've certainly never seen a, a friendly fire incident of violence amongst amongst protesters.

I'm sure it could happen, but, um, but I have not seen it.

I've seen people that, that I'm in the streets with or wherever with attacked by, by people who wish them harm who are people from the

state or, you know, like I said, not currently on duty as cops, but, you know, basically cops.

I'm no, I'm I'm digressing too far and I need to introduce our other guests, but I have another follow-up question that I need to ask because I'm so curious.

Please.

Have you ever had to take care of, say, someone on the other side who's been injured?

So as anybody who works in any kind of emergency, you know, medical response will tell you, anybody who's an EMT, or even anybody who's like a lifeguard, the first thing you do before you approach a patient is establish scene safety.

So if a Nazi has has been hurt, it is not safe for me to approach that patient because there's a Nazi over there.

I see.

Okay.

I think I'm picking up what you're putting down on that one.

So it has not happened.

Yeah.

Anybody who is acting as a street medic is acting under what are called Good Samaritan laws, you know, which protect you from any kind of bad outcome if you start taking care of somebody, you know, start helping somebody out in the streets based on whatever training you have.

You know, same thing.

Like if somebody collapses at a bus stop and you start doing CPR based on the Red Cross class you took, that's good Samaritan stuff.

Same way.

It does not obligate you to intervene, especially in approaching somebody who is actively seeking to do you harm.

So I would not consider that

within my lane.

Understood.

Well, let's introduce our second guest.

We have Dr.

Richard Farrow, who is a doctor in the Los Angeles area and is a family practice physician.

May I call you, Richard?

Yeah, you may.

Okay, very good.

Richard, welcome to the show.

Thank you very much, Javier.

It's a pleasure to be on.

You know, you kind of mentioned it already.

I'm Kelly Medicine.

I've also had experience in street medicine in the LA area.

Also,

you know, this is obviously something that's really important to me right now, given everything that's been going on in the city.

And also important for me, just given the fact that I'm a Latino.

I'm a proud Costa Rican Cuban.

And just that's part of the huge reason why I'm in medicine.

So I'm really happy to have an opportunity to talk about the ICE protests and the stuff that's been going on to protect our community.

That's great to hear.

Can you tell us a little bit about what you've been involved with recently down in Los Angeles?

So I, as far as what I've been involved in in Los Angeles,

I've been coordinating with some of my colleagues who I knew from residency.

and just other colleagues just who are all involved in social justice as well as the CIR, the Physicians union, you know, who are engaged in trying to like provide medical support to the protests in the area.

So I've had experience working on some of the protests that have occurred both in LA and OC.

Yeah, that's really good to hear.

I think people will have been spending a lot of time watching footage of the protests, right?

In the last, I don't know, what we a weekend now.

Fuck knows.

It seems like a long time.

I haven't been sleeping very much.

Give or take, eight to 12 years time has meant nothing since march of 2020 yeah yes exactly yeah it is it's a flash

16th of 2020 and here we are i uh

people will have seen a lot of people get hurt right and i like as a journalist like i was in la last week you kind of tend to get towards the more violent end of things because that is our job most people who go to protests don't get hurt, right?

And I don't want people to like hear anything we're saying today and think, oh, God, I'm going to get fucked up because most people don't get fucked up.

And like, my scientists are you don't fight fascists because you think you're going to win or you think you might not get hurt.

You fight fascists because they are fascists.

And sometimes people do get hurt.

So let's talk about the ways that people get hurt.

Either of you is welcome to answer this, but like,

what are some of the common mechanisms of injury that you see when you are out there street medicking when the cops are out there hurting people?

I would say that like in terms of the things that we would typically see, I just want to start off by saying like, absolutely, we're not out there just because we know that we're going to be successful in any type of advocacy.

If that was the case, then we wouldn't have that many people, you know, on that front.

You know, a lot of people know that it's, you might be losing ground, but you're not there because you're trying to win you're doing it because you know that you want to be on the right side of history.

You want to do the thing that you believe to be morally right.

As far as like the type of injuries that you would typically see, I think in order to answer this question, I would kind of break it off into two sections.

Like you have mainly protests that have not devolved into violent confrontations with law enforcement.

And you have protests where things like, you know, for instance, riot control agents have been deployed in like the like the non

dangerous side of things.

Like you might have the kinds of stuff that you would encounter in any sort of major events.

You know, you're going to deal with dehydration, you're going to deal with people who are like in overcrowded areas that might accidentally fall, hit and trip over one another in those kind of circumstances.

You know, when we enter into the space where

riot control agents are being involved, the quote-unquote less lethals, non-lethals, which I'm going to kind of go into later is a bit of a non-a misnomer.

In those circumstances, we look at like chemical exposure to things like tear gas.

You know, there's a lot of different ways that that manifests that type of exposure, and we can kind of get into that a little bit as well.

And then also, we have, you know, projectile weapons like rubber bullets, you know, flashbangs, those type of things that you might encounter, you know, like sort of blunt trauma to people's bodies.

Yeah.

Anthony, you'd like to add, Miriam?

I mean, first of all, like you're doing great out there.

Good for you for being out there.

It's a hell of a time.

There's regional variation, I think, to some of the stuff that we see.

So I am based in New York City.

Not all of the work I've done has been in New York City, but most of it has.

And in New York City, we don't have tear gas.

They just don't do it here because the police found out after deploying tear gas extensively during the RNC.

that the thing about tear gas is it gets sucked into vents.

And when it gets sucked into vents, it gets on all kinds of people in the subway and in buildings.

And that causes lawsuits.

And the NYPD does not enjoy that.

So they use pepper spray instead because pepper spray is more directed.

It doesn't linger in the air the same way.

You hit the people that you are trying to hit, you know, and anybody else who's walking by, and also your buddies who are standing next to you because you fired into the wind, which is always a good time.

Many such cases, yeah.

So many.

There's a whole series of what we are calling locally Peppa pigs,

which are Peppa pigs.

It's what you think it is.

So yeah, we see a lot of pepper sprite.

We also, because one of the primary weapons of the NYPD are just sheer overwhelming numbers, we see a lot of just direct hands-on violence, just cops.

hitting people, punching people, throwing people to the ground.

We see a lot of very rough takedowns.

Now, if you're acting as a street medic in that situation, you don't get to treat those people because if they are taken down by a cop, they are then swarmed by many other cops and they get taken away.

Then that's something that we might see when we meet that person later at jail support.

But the other weapon that we used to see quite a bit, but haven't in more recent years is the LRAT, which is a sound cannon.

They do still use it, but they use it to like make announcements and annoy people.

They use it to like make obnoxiously loud announcements, but not to

blast out people's eardrums, which was sort of its weaponized form.

We haven't seen that recently, though.

Police will use, you know, they all carry tasers.

You don't tend to see a lot of that at protests, but it's certainly something that we're constantly aware that they have the ability to do.

But yeah, it is here.

It's mostly pepper spray, night sticks, fists, knees,

you know, that kind of thing.

I would assume that a lot of what they do, like for example, tear gas was, to my understanding, first developed in World War I, really to cause confusion amongst the enemy.

And what I assume a lot of these things that they're using, the sound cannons, is to create panic and confusion and hopefully get people to run and move in in mass, unorganized ways.

And I wonder if you're seeing crush injuries, if you're seeing injuries related to just the people moving and being scattered around and running in different directions, is that something that

you have seen in this process, either of you?

Yeah, well, just real quick, like to the first thing you said, the absolute, like the purpose of every police weapon is to cause fear.

One of the reasons that I think they so often use things like tear gas and pepper spray when they could simply choose to not is like, one, because they have it, because their budgets are outrageous and they have, you know, all the weapons they could ever dream of.

And

why not?

You know, well, we have it.

But I think that the other reason they use it is because it does freak people out.

It scares people.

And so, you know, a lot of people have had like a big dude shove them before, you know, that's like not a super unfamiliar situation.

It's not a great situation.

People don't like it, but they kind of, they're familiar with it.

They're, they, they're familiar with the concept.

Getting sprayed by a mysterious chemical that makes you feel a thing you've never really felt before.

That's a lot scarier.

And you don't know what's in it.

You don't know what's on your body.

You don't know why it hurts the way it hurts.

Like, you just know, oh, yeah, I mean, I guess this is what tear gas feels like.

I guess this is what pepper spray feels like.

It's frightening.

And yeah, people absolutely get hurt running away.

It makes it difficult to see.

Like squeezing your eyes shut is like a very immediate reaction.

So people run, they lose whoever they were at the action with, they get separated from their group, they get disoriented, they may be having trouble breathing, they may be panicking because they're having trouble breathing, then they're having trouble breathing because they're panicking, you know?

So yeah, you do absolutely see all of that.

Yeah, I mean, I really want to second what Miriam has been saying here.

You know, as far as like the most common agent that you see in tear gas in the United States at this time, it's believed to be agent CS.

And this is something, like you mentioned, it was developed right around the time of World War II.

they started like be coming into effect in like the in the in like the late 50s a point of thought for this is it was actually um made illegal for use in warfare in the 90s by the geneva convention so you don't see the u.s or other armies like using this on soldiers but we're using it in protests well you don't You don't necessarily see the U.S.

military following the Geneva Convention.

Okay, well, we can, that's a fair point.

Of the wars of law, the tear gas is one that is

wars of law, laws of war.

People do be using tear gas sometimes, but yeah, they shouldn't be.

Yeah.

And you're right.

It was first in the Geneva Conventions in 1945, but then in 1997 specifically, it was prohibited.

The thought behind that is they did it because they didn't want someone to get one gas and not know exactly what it was and then use the really nasty stuff like Serean gas, etc.

And the reason our police are able to do it on our protesters is because they're pretty confident that our protesters don't have or wouldn't use sear and gas.

So they

feel free to use it on our protesters.

But speaking of sound cannons and disturbing noises being shot into your ear holes,

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All right, we're back.

We should talk about noxious gases.

There has been this persistent rumor, I don't just mean in the last like 10 days, there has been a persistent rumor every time that people have been tear gased, that this time the cops are using super tear gas, special tear gas, cancer tear gas.

To be clear, like the effects of tear gas on people,

especially to my understanding, like people who menstruate, are fucking long-term and nasty.

So let's just address like what are the reagents in tear gas

and what are some of the outcomes we can expect short-term and long-term?

And then do we suspect that the cops are using super tear gas this time?

Well, I guess in terms of like the agent, like we kind of mentioned it a little bit ago, agent CS, the more complicated long name, O-chlorobenzylidine, melanonitrile.

So this is actually a, it's, so that's absolutely the kind of thing you talk about in dinner conversations.

But

the compound itself, it's actually not in a gas form, it's actually a solid, it's a crystalline um substance that's released, it's aerosolized, um, after any type of um like explosion from um you know a grenade or canister.

And it's um, as far as you know, the types of things that you will experience, it takes effect in the first 20, 60 seconds of contact with the body.

Um, it's a nucleophilic substance, so that means it will adhere to tears, it'll adhere to moisture on your skin, like sweat, um, any type of like saliva or mucus.

And like the first things you'll typically notice are the tearing, the redness, burning, blurred vision in your eyes specifically.

On your skin, you could develop burns or rash.

A contact dermatitis has also been associated with a development of this on your skin.

Burning, irritation in your mouth.

You can also develop runny nose.

The more kind of more serious long-term effects that can be more systemic, you can actually develop shortness of breath, wheezing, or chest tightness.

You can also develop nausea or vomiting if you ingest much of it while you're in the protest.

And you kind of already brought it up as well.

Unfortunately, we don't have a lot of systemic research that has been done on the impacts of agents like CS that are in tear gas on people.

But we have a couple of things that have come up about pregnancy outcomes.

We do see increased rates of uterine cramping, menstrual bleeding, breast tenderness, and delayed menstrual cramping as well in pregnancy.

We also don't know how well it crosses into breast milk.

So, you know, it's this kind of challenging question.

And the CDC's official stance on it is this idea that they don't believe that it crosses.

But again, we don't have that research, so we can't know for sure.

Great.

Cool.

Good thing to be fogging large city blogs with.

Yeah.

Well, we don't know everything it does, so probably some of it is fine.

You know, James, when you're mentioning how it keeps coming up and there is these concerns of there being like it causing cancer, we have no proof of that right now, but I mean, we really don't know.

So, it is a little concerning long-term, especially journalists like yourself who are exposed to it a lot.

So, that is something I would love to see, but I mean, how are you going to study it?

Who's going to fund that?

I mean, I don't know.

RFK Jr.

might.

Who knows?

It might be like we're not funding real research anymore, like vaccine.

So, if we get on the right podcast, we could probably make that happen.

So, before we move off of the gas, let's just talk about the treatment of it and what you, what you will do out there in the field.

Someone comes to you and let's try to address some of the most common misconceptions about what you should be treating or how you should be treating.

Yeah,

I'm so ready to go.

So since forever, there have been like, rumors that there are these, I think because of sort of the way that it is mysterious, like the cops have these,

you know, containers of this awful, poisonous, magical potion that they spray on you.

And then we have to find the antidote.

So, things that I have heard as being good for tear gas and pepper spray include raw onion, lemon juice, apple cider vinegar, Coca-Cola,

avocado.

Delicious so far.

It sounds

sounds like a nice salad.

Great, actually.

And then the classic milk,

as well as mailocks.

My personal favorite is when somebody like jumps in to correct somebody on milk and is like, no, no, no, no, actually, it's milk of magnesia, not regular milk.

So

you got to get it from a magnesia cow, which is.

What you actually do is flush out the eyes with water.

I mean, that's it.

That's the only thing.

It's water.

The number of things that should go into a human eye are basically water and any medicine that is designed for the human eye and saline solution, I guess.

You know, and definitely you could do an eye flush with saline.

It's just that if you have saline in your bag, it weighs just as much as water and you can't drink it when you get tired.

Well, you can.

Well, you can, but it's not recommended.

It shouldn't be.

And you can't refill it from a tap.

You can drink anything, James.

Yeah, if you know it counts.

But if you have a bottle of water, you can do a bunch of eye flushes.

And then when it starts to run low, you can refill it from a tap because that has water in it, too.

It's very readily available water in most places.

And all of the other

things that are out there that people will tell you you should use, you should not use.

I have never seen any good evidence that any of them are better than water at getting pepper spray or tear gas out of your eye.

All of them are kind of predicated on this idea that there's like a chemical reaction you are trying to affect.

And then that is sort of further based on the idea that the reason this stuff hurts is because it is acidic.

Because I think people think like, what's a chemical that burns?

Acid.

Right, right.

These are not acidic.

That is not how they work.

They are chemical irritants.

And you don't want an acid-base reaction in your eye anyway.

You want to be doing chemistry experiments in your eye.

Yeah, you actually usually wear goggles when you do chemistry experiments.

I'm not like a chemist, but

water, sure, is great, but what about all that fluoride you're getting into your eyeballs?

Okay.

Have you thought about that?

That'll prevent eye cavities.

Richard, anything else to add to that?

No, I think you hit the nail on the head.

I think that

when I look at what physicians typically recommend in terms of response to tear gas, I always think back on the Dr.

Glockam Flecken thread that became very popular on Shorter.

I'd be very interested to hear what your thoughts are on that, Miriam.

I think like one of the things that tended to come from that particular thread, because he does have experience as an ophthalmologist.

He mentioned washing your eyes with baby shampoo and rinsing copiously.

I think like the challenge with that is obviously like what Miriam had mentioned, one, water, saline are the better options for irrigating your eyes, especially after exposure.

For one,

the fact that it's, you know, you never know what else, like it's, it's better to avoid any other type of irritants that you could, you know, be exposing to your eye.

Also the fact, like we already mentioned, the fact that the agents into tear gas, they're nucleophilic, meaning they're attracted to water.

So by using water itself, you are effectively going to help to irrigate it.

And, you know, we typically recommend anywhere upwards of 20 minutes for that type of exposure.

And then, uh, as far as I'm not sure if you mentioned milk already, Miriam.

Milk haunts me.

Yeah.

We can't mention it enough.

Eyeball cheese.

We cannot mention eyeball cheese enough.

What about 2%

is the percentage?

So let's think about what the context of where we are in a protest.

It's very typically outdoors for many hours

usually in summertime i think exactly

who likes the idea of putting this uh you know this this culture on people's eyes like i think um far too many people

just yogurt actually yogurt you may as well you may as well go and get some get greek yogurt and uh pour it on their eyes yeah So, you know, he really gets back to the idea of like constant irrigation, clean water is perfectly fine.

If you have water at the protest, usually the best thing to do is have the types of water bottles that have like a flip-off cap.

So that way you can easily, you know, pour it over their face and then recap it for later use on someone else or yourself.

I think the other thing too that's really important to discuss is you know, because it's this solid aerosolized substance, it can sometimes adhere to your clothing.

So, you know, there's a couple of different approaches.

You know, Physicians for Human Rights has a PDF that I strongly encourage anybody who's listening to review.

If you find yourself in the position of either being a protester at a protest or being a medic at a protest, they recommend if you've been exposed to tear gas to hang your clothing afterwards in a heavily ventilated place for up to 48 hours.

If you're not able to do that, placing your clothing in a plastic bag, including your shoes outside and not mixing it with any of your other non-exposed clothing clothing is the ideal response afterwards.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'll add when Dr.

Glocken Flecken was on our show talking about this back during George Floyd.

We discussed it and the other thing that he recommended, and he is actually not just a very, very funny internet person.

He's also a very good ophthalmologist.

And he also recommended initially when it happens, soon as you can, blink rapidly.

That really helps initiate the tear response.

You're still going to need water, but it's going to help start get that jump started for you.

And it's going to require a lot of water, about one to two liters is generally what people will say.

So it's hard to have that much with you on hand when you're out there protesting.

But if you're able to, I feel like water is one of the more important things you can bring with you.

Yeah.

So to the thing about the baby shampoo, first of all, yeah, I think.

The recommendation with that is to wash the skin around the eyes with the baby shampoo, not directly in the eyes, but that that's like a less harsh way of removing the chemicals from the skin there because you would definitely wash skin with soap and water.

But I could see maybe using like a gentler soap directly around the eyes.

That makes sense.

As far as like my technique with doing an eye flush,

in the streets, a continual 20-minute irrigation just is not feasible.

Now, sometimes at big actions, you know, medics will set up clinic spaces, tents, stuff like that.

And occasionally, very occasionally, you can do the like true gold standard of eye irrigation, which is 20 minutes of continual saline irrigation, where you like have a bag of saline, like in a hospital, and you plug it into a nasal cannula and you tape that to the bridge of the nose and just let the person lie down.

That works, but like, it's just not feasible in most street situations.

So, what I do is I will

basically put on gloves, I will get consent because, you know, anytime you're treating somebody who's been brutalized by the police, you are like, you are treating an assault victim and you should prioritize their consent as much as you can.

So I, you know, do a quick like, hey, what's up?

My name's Miriam.

I'm a medic.

Can I help you?

I guide them out of the area of immediate danger if they can't see.

And then I flush first one eye twice and then I have them blink a whole bunch and then the other eye twice and I have them blink a whole bunch.

And then they're usually able to open their eyes and navigate safely on their own.

Sometimes they need another round with that, especially if I didn't, you know, if I missed being, you know, if it's dark and their things are moving around and I missed the eye or something.

But usually that gets enough out that they are going to be able to navigate the situation.

And because they are tearing a lot, that's part of the flush too, right?

The body is doing that on its own.

And flushing too much with water, I think in that initial moment, you're just washing away tears at that point.

So doing like a first round of like forceful, a forceful flush, you know, you're really like using a forceful stream to push the chemicals out.

And then, okay, their eyes are open.

They're still in pain.

And like, that's just going to last for a while.

Your eyes are going to continue to hurt.

And like, that sucks.

You've been harmed.

Somebody did a harmful thing to you.

And you are going to continue to have pain for a little while.

But if you can see that your immediate danger is reduced and you can get out of there and you can, you know, in a calmer moment, maybe do another couple eye flushes, maybe, you know, use soap and water on the face, clean up a little bit and like be a little bit happier with how you feel.

But my priority in the immediate moments after somebody's been sprayed is to like help them so that they can get out of there if they need to, because they probably do.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, speaking of things that will make you tear up.

I'm sorry.

I'm terrible.

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And I guess let's talk about rubber bullets or various impact nutrients.

And then let's talk about how people...

Actions people can take to keep themselves a little bit safer, right?

Understanding that like you are not the one who gets to choose if violence arrives at your protests.

The cops are.

And we're recording this on Sunday, a date in June.

And people had their big no-kings march yesterday.

They were largely like extremely non-violent.

And they still got attacked by the cops in LA.

So let's talk about impact munitions, right?

One thing we didn't mention actually was pepper balls.

I've had the...

It was a combo.

Yeah, right.

I've had the ill fortune of receiving some pepper balls in the balls.

Oh, yeah, very uncomfortable.

Cops will try and shoot you in the groin.

I had a colleague who encountered this just a few days ago.

I'm sorry.

They fucking suck.

Like, there's no,

yeah,

it happens with such frequency that you'd have to be really trying to believe that it was an accident.

So let's talk about things that can hit you, right?

If we start with pepper balls and then move on up to like what people call rubber bullets, which I think baton rounds is like a more technical description of what they are or marker rounds right big foam or rubber things that hit you sometimes they leave a little puff of chalk on you in theory like that identifies you for uh the cops to arrest you i guess in practice it's just another thing that they can use to smash into you but like let's let's talk about some of the things that the cops can shoot from their little guns beanbag rounds is another one right that comes out of a shotgun and it's what it sounds like right it's a beanbag traveling very fast somebody here in san diego lost their eye eye to one of those in 2020 um but let's talk about some of these impact munitions and uh like what the potential risks are for people there yeah i think that um i mean just the the the one point i want to bring up in terms of um these they're often called in the media non-lethal and uh or or or quote unquote less lethals yeah and i think that what's really important to recognize and you kind of already hinted to it james people have been killed with rubber bullets um plastic bullets We actually have Amnesty International did a report in 2023 that

showed that over the course of

about five years,

dozens of people have died as a result of the use of rubber bullets.

We showed that between 1972 to 1989, just in Ireland, 16 people were killed.

In Palestine, between 87 and 93, 20 people died just from the use of rubber bullets.

And, you know, that's reports.

We don't know how many in truth actually were impacted by that.

Yeah.

I would also add that the British Medical Journal back in 2017 looked at about 2,000, a little bit under 2,000 people who had been affected by these projectiles.

And 3%

actually did cause immediate mortality.

And then 15% was long-term chronic injury or illness or some sort of being maimed from the event.

So yeah, you're exactly right.

It's pretty significant, especially with the number of these that are shot.

You know, they don't have to keep record about how many of these they shoot.

So actually, one other question I have for you, Richard, that you could help answer.

I have two.

One, in LA, did you see them shooting these things?

And you kind of alluded to that you felt that they were actually directing them towards you.

Did you feel that being there as a medical professional that you were being targeted?

I myself was fortunate and not hit by a rubber bullet.

From witnessing my colleagues who were actually there present at this protest, they themselves were hit with rubber bullets below the navel.

He had previous experience from an earlier protest that week where he had actually been struck.

And the thing

he told me that I remember is like, I'm never going to one of these things unprepared again.

Because he did have that situation where he was kind of hit closer to the groin.

So we ended up wearing, I remember he was wearing a kind of a fanny pack for this particular protest that we were at.

And you could very clearly see the dust marks, like the chalk marks of the rubber bullets struck on this, on his, on his fanny pack.

You know, it's definitely something that we noticed.

Many of the other medics at this event commented that they had been previously struck or targeted once the police began firing rubber bullets.

As far as we fortunately, we didn't see anybody who was struck closer to the face, but there were reports after the No Kings protest yesterday that

several people had been struck in the eye or on the forehead.

There was one picture, I think, earlier from earlier this week that one of the reporters in downtown LA had been struck with a non-lethal foam round directly in his forehead.

And it was this, you could see this very clear, enormous wealth, the size of like a grapefruit

and bleeding.

And it was, it was, you know, very clearly like aiming above at the face in these cases.

Yeah, there was a huge number during the Chilean protests in 2019, 2020.

Eye injuries were huge.

There were hundreds.

There's a club somewhere of journalists who've lost eyes

to rubber bullets.

I think they call themselves the Cyclops Club or something.

They're writers.

But yeah, like these things are incredibly dangerous.

And eye injuries, especially, are really common.

They are less lethal only in that it is less likely to kill you than being shot with live ammunition.

But like

most things are less likely to kill you than live ammunition.

A grizzly bear is less likely to kill you than live ammunition.

My friend Rebecca Watson says you know samurai blade is less lethal than a you know AK-47, but it's still not something you want them to have

to use against you.

The ideal if you weren't being attacked, doing what is a constitutionally protected right in the US.

Yeah.

Hey, everyone.

I just wanted to record a little pickup here to explain a little bit more, I guess, about 40 millimeter and 37 millimeter less lethal projectiles.

They are sometimes called baton rounds.

I saw baton round written on the Safariland 37 millimeter one, but they are not the same as the baton rounds you will have seen the British military using in Northern Ireland.

Most of the modern ones that I am aware of are not designed to be skipped off the ground, albeit there certainly are, or at least were, rubber bullets that were designed to be skipped off the ground at one point.

The use of a bullet made out of rubber that's fired out of a conventional rifle is very rare in the United States.

There are things called simunitions, which are munitions that fire out of a conventional rifle using a different bolt, and they are generally used for simulated force-on-force training.

You can think about it like going paintballing, but with regular guns, albeit with a bolt that makes it so you can't load live ammunition into that gun while it's set up for sim munitions.

Those were used extensively, I believe in Colombia.

I identified some simmunition casings.

I've not seen those used by police anywhere in the United States.

What the LAPD uses is a 40 millimeter exact impact round.

It has a plastic body and a sponge nose.

is designed to be point of aim point of impact right so shot at someone like you would shoot a gun at somebody There are other less lethals in use, even in LA.

I saw a 37 millimeter safari land round.

I saw FN303s, which is like 17 millimeter.

I saw pepper balls, various different versions of less lethal munitions, but most of the ones that I'm aware of in 2025 are designed for point of aim, point of impact.

They're also extremely dangerous.

And as we've said here, they can kill you.

Just wanted to clarify that.

So like, yeah, these things are dangerous, right?

Like they have caused serious injury or death.

Let's assume for a minute that like the folks listening have not attended many actions before, right?

That they are either younger or like they just haven't been in that world, in that part of their life, and they've seen what's happening recently and they're pissed off and they want to attend, but they're afraid, right?

And they want to know what they can do, what they can bring, how they can prepare themselves in the understanding that like it isn't 100% safe because the cops can decide to attack you whenever they want.

What can people bring?

How can people repair to be as safe as they can be?

Bring water.

I mean, not just the eye flushes, but like bring snacks and water.

Like you're going to be out there for a while.

You need to keep yourself going.

You need to keep your friends going.

Bring friends.

Like be there with somebody who is going to watch your back, somebody who knows a number for like your emergency contact, you know, if you get grabbed, stuff like that.

Especially if you're new to this, like try not to run alone.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Even Even if it's like just hooking up with people when you get there.

You know.

Yeah.

I've been at a protest that was starting to look scary.

And

a woman turned to me and said, I'm here alone.

Are you here alone?

And I said, yeah.

And she said, now, now we're here together.

I'm like, okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Which is beautiful.

It's a good place to make friends.

It's a very like honest feeling to have.

I mean, you're seeing for the problem for many people, it's probably the first time that you're seeing someone aiming a projectile at you and

aiming a firearm at you and firing.

So yeah, you know, there's a good reason to feel worried.

That's like the fact that we have to worry about that in this country, period, is, you know, it's very chilling.

I think that, you know, Miriam mentioned it, bringing friends is really important.

Something else that like we've talked about in circles in LA, I think, is like really understanding going in.

What is the amount of risk that you are willing to take entering into these spaces, I think is extraordinarily important.

I think, you know, some of my colleagues who were at the UCLA protests earlier during the Palestine movement, they kind of asked the question, like they kind of framed it in like green light, yellow light, red light.

Like in terms of green, meaning like, I'm okay with, you know, whatever risks might be involved, like as far as like what my understanding of what this protest could entail.

Yellow being like, I'm not prepared to go so far as to be arrested, but I'm willing to be present on record if necessary, serve as a witness for my other colleagues who are going to be in this space.

Red, meaning, you know, I'm not necessarily prepared at this point to go that far.

I don't, I'm, I want to support, but I also don't want to get arrested.

And I think it's important to like, you know, recognize that, not necessarily shame other people in terms of like where they're at in this.

Yeah, yeah, 100%.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

Cause because everybody comes at this from different places.

I think it's really important like when you're in these spaces to like, you know, kind of understand the risk of the other people who are alongside you.

Because if you're a medic and you're trying to treat other people and then you have all of a sudden you're by yourself because the other people are like, well, I, you know, this is what I signed up for.

I'm out.

Yeah, that is also scary, even if you're, you know, you're very willing to be there.

Yeah.

So I think just having those conversations and planning more than anything, planning, planning, planning is extraordinarily important.

Yeah.

I think that's very well said.

Great points.

And everyone has a different level of risk.

And just to be totally clear for our listeners, there was over 2,000 different protests yesterday, and there was the the minimal amount of violence, and they were all peaceful.

I mean, the protesters were the vast, vast, vast majority peaceful, and things went fine.

And some were, like the one I attended, was actually kid-friendly.

So it was a safe place.

But particularly in certain places, there's always a small chance, if not large, and depending on the police presence there, that things could go the wrong way.

And it is something to keep in mind.

So I particularly like your point point regarding everyone has a different level of risk and that's okay.

You're still contributing.

I'm not, I mean, I'm not a place myself where I'm planning on getting arrested.

That's just not something I want to do.

But I would like to protest that I would like to support.

And along those lines, what are ways that other people who have medical backgrounds could potentially contribute or support you?

In terms of the ways that like medics can respond in these situations, I think for me, I have a box of medical equipment that

I want

to bring on site.

Like I'm obviously, like Miriam said, I'm bringing water because that's going to be foremost, like my most useful tool to help anybody who's going to be affected by things like to your desks.

You know, as far as other things, like having extra masks, I think is really, really important, you know, because it's a huge way of reducing respiratory exposure to the aerosols that are going to be in the air.

And then eye protection, eye protection, eye protection.

Now, the thing about like, you know, we've seen different types of protection for your eyes that are effective.

We've seen goggles being used, like the ones that you would see in a lab.

They're not actually effective unless you close the sides, the vents with tape, because otherwise the aerosols actually can still get inside the mask and irritate your eyes.

So if you are going to be like bringing that type of eye protection, it's important to think about that.

There's like some higher end,

you know, more effective tools that provide both eye protection protection and helping to filter particles.

Just using a basic goggle mask with the vents covered in an N95 for just about anybody, I think is a useful tool.

So having those types of supplies for people who need them is helpful.

For sure.

Yeah.

And as far as like a really low risk thing that people with medical training can do is show up to jail support.

because that's like that is a huge way you can help not just people who are arrested but anybody coming out of jail is by doing jail support and what that entails is hanging out where people get released people will usually bring food drinks clothes shoelaces people often get out without shoelaces belts and like a couple of you know extra layers of clothes if people get let out and it's cold.

And check out people's injuries.

Often people will be taken to the hospital during processing if they have something that the police can't ignore.

But people often get released with injuries.

And it can be really good to have somebody there who can evaluate them.

Honestly, it's often just giving them like a judgment call on, do you think this needs somebody else to take a look at it, you know, in a professional environment or can I put some ice on it and go home type thing.

And almost everybody getting out of jail has handcuff injuries if they were arrested in a mass arrest, because in mass arrest situations, cops tend to use the plastic zip ties, which can get incredibly tight, even more so than metal handcuffs, which have a little bit, a little length of chain.

They strain the shoulders, especially larger people,

especially if somebody has a bag on their back.

Cops will often cuff them in such a way that the bag pushes on their hands and makes the cuffs increasingly tight.

And having a medical professional or a street medic or even somebody who's like just there to like take a look and be like, yeah, man, I see that.

That's really fucked up that they did that to you.

I'm so sorry can be useful.

Having somebody there to witness and acknowledge and to document if somebody is planning on doing something with that,

you know, then that's important too.

So if you cannot be arrested, find out what's happening with jail support and go support them because that's chill.

That's calm.

Now, I mean, there are no guarantees in this world, but

it is far more likely to be chill and calm.

Yeah.

And you can hang out and eat snacks.

Oh, and this is the one situation where medically speaking, bring cigarettes.

People want cigarettes when they get out of jail and they need, they deserve a fucking cigarette.

Is it good for them?

No.

I know.

I just, I'm sorry.

I hate cigarettes so much.

Listen, I'm not going to say you can't, but I will never give someone a cigarette.

It goes against

them.

Listen, there's certain lines I will draw as a doctor.

One, I have to help everybody, even if I don't like them.

Two, I can't give them cigarettes, even if I like them.

So I just can't.

Those are two things I can't bring myself to do.

The cigarette one really drives me crazy, but

that's scary.

In that case, maybe bring some cards for whatever your local public transit is,

or failing that,

you know, have some cash on hand to send people home in a taxi or have somebody standing by with a car to help people get home.

Yeah.

Stuff like that.

That's really important for jail support.

Perhaps even more important than a cigarette.

I would add that another thing you can do if you're medically like a medical professional, especially, is help other people learn really basic skills.

You don't even have to be at a protest, right?

It could be a week later.

There are medical professionals who do street medic training.

You can teach people stop the bleed in a day and potentially save someone's life.

And so if that's something that you know are skilled enough to teach and you need to be honest about whether you're skilled enough to teach that or not, you know, if you've watched a few YouTube videos and you're not, that's something you could use to really help other people who are going to be there at times when you're not comfortable or safe being there.

I guess for the end of the show, to wrap up, if people are just attending to be fucking mad, and there are a lot of people who are fucking mad right now, what should they bring?

And if people want to access training, right?

Like what are some resources that you would suggest?

What are some types of training in terms of like first aid that people can access, that people should access if they're either thinking of attending these things and they're worried.

I mean, I think in terms of the type of first aid that you need to be really conscious of, especially in any type of like event where you're going to be with a lot of people and you're going in as a medic, and this isn't just for protests, I think it's for any type of event.

We do live in a world where, unfortunately, there is a lot of mass shootings.

Even if they're firing rubber bullets, we don't know who else may also attend, who may also be

going with the intention of being violent.

So, I mean, you mentioned it yourself: stop the bleed, having a basic understanding of how to, what types of on-the-field first aid should be done for individuals who have got received a gunshot wound, I think is really important if they've been struck by a car.

We've already seen earlier this weekend that there were shootings in, I believe, in a couple of different cities.

I'm missing which one unfortunately happened, but I do know of at least one report of a Tesla being driven into a crowd of protesters this weekend.

So it was, yeah.

If I get killed by a Tesla, I'm going to be so fucking mad.

The fucking indignity.

That is actually the thing that concerns me the most at most protests is some actor coming in from outside to do something like that.

That part really does concern me, especially because so many of these are, like I had mentioned, kind of family-friendly.

And they should be.

I think families, for the most part, should be able to come to these things.

So that is something that I am always constantly on the lookout for.

Yeah, cars fucking scare me.

Like I've experienced car bombs in my career, but also just like cars driving into crowds can cause

untold damage.

And Americans do be loving large cars.

And the cops won't stop them.

Like at least in LA, my experience with the cars were kind of in and out the whole time and that did not make me feel secure we had one individual who was stood in front of a van that was carrying ice agents and that person essentially got run over

in that situation you know they were not at all stopping for that yeah big cars it's a big risk like uh i guess

With that in mind, one thing I think about sometimes when I'm with these things is like,

you don't want to be going into this, like traumatizing yourself by doing this, but a degree of situational awareness to include what are my points of cover and what are my ways out is good to have.

Yeah.

It helps.

It helps me feel safer anyway.

Yeah.

And that's another huge reason to always run with a buddy, right?

Because if you're running with a buddy, especially, I mean, I think, I personally think that if you are doing medical stuff, you should always have a buddy just because if you're going to be stopped and like somebody's got to watch your back and like it's and you know you you might need a second opinion you can call in that buddy for a consult you know yeah the the medic collective that i that i run with um on really big action days will put together like little bingo cards that we'll distribute to all the medic buddy pairs as a situational awareness game so like if we're all rolling out to um this you know to a big big action we'll put like there'll be squares for like a cop who who clearly is not awake or um your ex

or you know person who forgot sunscreen or you know just uh just things to to look out for yeah yeah and i think honestly like making a little bit of a game like that if you're going to be out all day can be kind of fun and it also makes you keep looking it makes you not just look down at your feet as you as you march another mile you know yeah

please uh another great reminder please prepare for the weather prepare for the elements bring water bring sunscreen bring hats, all that stuff.

Sunscreen can trap the chemical irritants next to your skin.

I like to wear a sun hoodie, like a you can get hoodies with an SPF.

I am a pale-ass person, right?

Some of you can see me.

For listeners, it is indeed true.

I was gonna say, is that sun hoodie?

Why you in no way have a watch tan?

Yeah, okay, yeah.

Friends can see my absolutely brutal tan right now.

Absurdly white.

When I was a bike racer, I used to have the logos of my sponsors burned into my back, and that was cool and normal.

That's unsettlingly literal.

Yeah, right, yeah, yeah.

That was a political moment for me, actually.

Yeah, I like to wear a sun hoodie because sunscreen

can trap irritants against your skin, but if it's a creamy kind, right?

I think after a point it absorbs and it doesn't, but I've definitely experienced that kind of paste on your skin kind of situation.

Interesting.

Some of the gnarliest

injuries I've seen have been heat-related at protests.

If you're organizing a protest, don't send it straight up a fucking hill.

Just don't.

Go easy on people.

People will be bringing a lot of stuff and they have signs and stuff.

They might not wear their comfy shoes.

It goes easy on them

with the hill climbing

because you're doing it in the middle of the day often as well.

Don't hurt people.

Richard, I know you were going to mention something else.

The thing I was trying to mention,

this is less so for, I'd say, EMS, non-physician individuals.

Actually, before the podcast, I had a chance to talk with one of the regional vice presidents for CIR, the Physicians Union, that I was formerly a part of when I was in my residency.

Kayla, she has a lot of experience being involved in protests in street medicine.

And the thing that she likes to mention is like physicians have a tendency to want to do a lot in a moment.

And so Miriam mentioned situational awareness.

I think situational awareness is extremely important.

Being able to know when you have the time to do a certain intervention versus when it's time to like get this person out of here and to a safer place, I think is like very, very important.

Yeah, yeah.

So less does more in these situations

is what I would say is pretty important.

Yeah.

Yeah.

One thing I do, like as a journalist, primarily not a visual one, I often work with photographers, right?

As a two-person team.

I have been a photographer protest in in the past, and your world is very small in that viewfinder.

And it's kind of the same if you're helping someone, right, who's injured.

That becomes your whole shit.

I will have my physically have my hand on my photographer a lot of the time on their back, right?

And if they need to start moving backwards, I am going to start moving them backwards.

Obviously, you don't want to leave someone who's hurt, but like if you're the buddy, it's good to be that close to the person who's providing care so that you can have a way out if you need to have a way out.

This was so incredibly useful, helpful, and insightful we appreciate both of you uh coming on yeah let's close up here what i would like to do is not only plug something for yourselves but what i'd like to hear and our listeners actually enjoy is to hear something that's bringing you some joy in these times some piece of media art film book podcast anything you name it a good restaurant that you really love you want to give a a shout out to whatever it is something that's bringing you a little bit of joy so let's do those two things uh miriam let's start with you what can we plug and what's something that's bringing you some joy um so thank you for uh for having me on this was delightful So I will plug Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness, which is the collective that I'm a part of.

You can find us at Tangled Wilderness on Blue Sky and Instagram and nowhere else.

And we have a website, which is Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness.

We have a Patreon, all that stuff.

But the main thing I want to tell you about those guys over there is that James and I did a podcast recently for the show Live Like the World is Dying on protest health and safety.

And we go really in detail on specifics of gear, specifics of first aid techniques.

And I think people should maybe check it out if

they're going to be out there.

We'll put it in the show notes.

Yeah, because we're professional podcasters like that.

You can cruise on over to It Could Happen Here if you would like to find the Shinites.

Right.

Wait, wait, Miriam.

So, what's the thing that's bringing you joy?

Oh, I have remember that?

Joy?

I'm familiar with the concept.

I have been re-watching the She-Ra and the Princesses of Power cartoon.

Wow, nice.

Love it.

What about Jim?

She is outrageous.

You know, they didn't remake that as an overtly queer Netflix series, so I have had less exposure to it.

But, you know, cartoon sword lesbians can't argue with it.

Yeah, that sounds pretty awesome.

All right, Richard, what about you?

As far as something to plug, I have a huge pleasure of being able to work on Blue Sky, helping to put together the MedSky feeds.

So if you're on Blue Sky, be sure to subscribe to our labeler.

So that way you can get your medical specialty on your account

and you can get your posts on one of our 40 different feeds and then also um as a latino i can't uh leave the podcast without mentioning also we are working on latin sky and uh it's a it's it's a it's the amount of uh latpinidad and joy that i've been seeing on that feed over the last few days um despite the pain um it's been very inspiring so i think that's like a the plug that i i want to put out there.

And as far as a thing that brings me joy right now,

I was torn.

I hear that like a bunch of people have already plugged Andor.

So I'm not going to plug Andor.

You can.

You can.

Yeah.

You know,

I'm going to give some love to Ryan Kugler's Sinners, which is easily one of the

best movies I have seen.

in at least the last five years.

It is an extraordinary movie.

Everything about that movie is like art.

I just hope that ryan cooler can just make original movies for the rest of his life and that he doesn't have to like be stuck doing franchise stuff because when he's just given a canvas he he makes beautiful beautiful art yeah right on right on pura vida pura vida that's for the uh pura vida so james uh

what about what about you what what we plug what can you plug for you what can i plug i know there was a hot dog guy who went on the freeway uh in los angeles when everyone else went on the freeway.

So that person's a fucking hero.

I would like, you know, if you're, if you're in the, I'm vegan, so you know,

maybe the bun, but for the rest of you, get after it.

You know, you can, you can listen to my podcast.

You maybe already are on It Could Happen Here.

If you haven't listened, it would mean a lot to me if you would listen to the podcast I made in the Dalleying Gap last year when I traveled with migrants who were on their way to the United States.

Those people people and their stories are really important to me.

So if you would listen to one thing I ever made, it would be that.

You can find it by searching Dadian, where dreams die, and then it could happen here podcast, and it will come up.

Unless you're using a really shit search engine, or Google has been even more fucked by AI.

And then in terms of stuff that gives me joy, recently I have been listening to like the music of the anti-apartheid movement again.

I kind of, when I was a very young person, my sort of first exposure to activism was through people who had resisted apartheid in South Africa.

And they were very inspiring to me and they still are very inspiring to me.

I listened to that music with them, right?

Like apartheid, to be clear, ended when I was like eight years old.

But like it was cool because it seemed like at that point the good guys were winning.

Right.

And so

here we fucking are.

Anyway,

I listened to that because it reminds me that they always lose in the end.

Yeah.

So yeah, enjoy like the specials and Eddie Grant and even the incredibly eclectic Sun City album.

Great choices.

Great choices.

And for if you happen to be listening on The House of Pod, you've heard James come and talk about the Darien Gap.

That was a really amazing story and it resonated with a lot of listeners.

And you should listen to the full.

multi-part series that he put out on that.

It's so much better.

So please do that.

For me, if you happen to be listening on It Could Happen here, listen to the House of God.

You'll like it.

You'll hear James and lots of people you already know and love, and meet some new people.

And you'll hear us make fun of medical grifters and the wellness community and that sort of thing as well.

And members of the cabinet.

And

I can't believe it.

Yeah.

As for the thing that's bringing me joy, I recently had a chance to expose my kids on a long drive to the work of Jeff Buckley, who is,

for you younger listeners out there, you may not know who he was because he unfortunately passed away when he was only 30, but he was really a once-in-a-generation talent.

His voice, his songwriting transcended different genres.

There was rock, there's jazz, there was folk.

He could span a vocal range that just really is amazing.

And he only had one studio album, Grace, but it is amazing.

And I highly recommend that or really any of his live albums, Mystery White Boy.

They're all fantastic.

His cover of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah is the best version of it, in my opinion.

I will fight you.

I will fight you if you say Rufus Wainwright's better.

I will physically fight you.

So it's just raw and beautiful.

And I hope you guys check it out if you haven't already.

Last thing I'll plug, June 28th, if you happen to be in the Bay Area, my band will be playing at the the Hotel Utah in San Francisco.

It is one of my favorite places to watch or play music, and it's just super fun.

Come up and say hi, and we'll chat, and we'll maybe share a drink if we have time.

Okay, thank you all so much.

Thanks, James.

This was fun, huh?

Yeah, that was fun.

That was beautiful.

I had a nice time.

Yeah, let's do it again.

Okay, bye.

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Hello and welcome to It Could Happen Here.

I'm here once again with...

It's James again.

Great to talk to you again, James.

Yeah, likewise.

Glad to be here.

You know, I spend a lot of time thinking about the world and how it works and all that jazz, and I assume you do as well.

I do, yeah, yeah.

Increasingly worrying about the world and how it works.

Yeah, this place, this home is quite the puzzle.

And much like a puzzle, it has been carved up and divided in so many different ways, sliced, labeled, ranked, and measured from all kinds of different angles.

And that's really what I'm interested in talking about today.

the different ways that we try to explain the differences we see on the global stage.

So going from the concept of civilized and primitive, to the east and west binary, to the imagined communities called nations, to the clash of quote-unquote civilizations, to the concept of first, second, and third worlds, to the development spectrum, to the global north and global south, and finally to the core and the periphery.

So, we have a lot of ground to cover in this episode.

Yeah, I really like this stuff.

Like, as a historian, like, we're always kind of forced into certain divisions, right?

Like, even when you apply to your to your funding, right?

Like, you're normally in like a geographical area or, like, you're trying to shoehorn something that's just interesting into one of these boxes that gets funding.

And I think, like, often that impacts like how we see the world.

So, we have to write with that goal.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

I find the way that we approach the telling of history so fascinating.

And in another life, maybe I would have been a historian.

I know if I can recommend it.

Yeah.

But yeah, I enjoy the doing of history.

It's the doing of academia that I don't enjoy so much.

So I suppose as a historian, I'm going to ask you a discomforting question.

Great.

Would you consider yourself civilized or primitive?

Oh, that's a fun one.

I don't know.

Like,

I don't like that binary

because I think it's a value statement, right?

And then I think, like,

James C.

Scott talks about this.

Actually, this is a a really interesting thing.

I've had this, James C.

Scott, right, talks about the idea of people who exist outside of the state being labeled as primitive by the state.

It's in the art of not being governed.

And that's a sort of the narrative there, the inherent message is that the state is the final and superior form of human organizing.

And people who have chosen to exist outside it

are not because they chose to, but because they haven't made it there yet.

And of course, Scott problematizes that, suggests that maybe it's a choice, not a failure, to accede to that civilization um and it's a concept that like young Burmese fighters have have echoed back to me I don't think they're aware of James C Scott if I'm being honest but they

they will say to me like when because when they left the cities to live with the ethnic revolutionary organizations there they had always been told that the reason those people lived outside of the Burmese state was because they were primitive and violent

but then they came to live and fight alongside them and they were like no these are our these are our our family they are brothers and sisters and siblings and like they want the same thing as us like

they're not primitive they just don't want the state uh so i guess in that sense i would want to be labeled as primitive too i think the primitive people are doing cool and and then the civilized people are not yeah yeah i mean that's one of i think one of the more enduring global binaries one of the oldest you know you'd hear that sign of a kind of juxtaposition or civilized and primitive or civilized and barbarian.

You know, in ancient Rome, you see that distinction between the civilized Roman citizens and the barbarian other.

Yeah.

And in that instance, and in a lot of instances, it's used as this ideological tool to assert superiority.

Definitely, yeah.

And like,

I think we have to be really careful as historians about these assumptions that we make.

Historians will often make a lot of assumptions about revolutions too.

And I would wager that I've attended more revolutions than many of my academic colleagues and i think many of those are grounded in the truths that people accept as truths without ever testing them and like i think this sort of civilized barbarian one it's kind of the same like that yeah it's it's a classic one i mean do you know where the word barbarian even comes from Isn't it the language thing?

Like, because they didn't speak, is it Latin?

They were just going like bar ba ba ba ba ba ba.

Is that right?

Yeah, it's because of what, you know, Rome did this all the time, where they just borrowed wholesale from what the Greeks were doing.

Yeah.

So in greek barbaros meant anyone who did not speak greek okay as the romans just kind of took that and expanded its use yeah to talk about anybody who wasn't on their whole wave of urban planning and you know codified legal systems the philosophy the education the art all of that stuff yeah yeah the barbarians didn't have those those refinements right yeah you know but of course the relationship between the two is is

not

so simple, right?

Because later on in Roman history, as you'd know, barbarians, quote unquote, were incorporated slowly into the state and became very useful armies and a reserve pool of labor and all these different things for what Rome was trying to do with the expansion.

Yeah.

And luckily, contemporary American right has been very normal about that and isn't using that for like its sort of eugenic, eugenic agenda right now.

Yeah, very, very much eugenics vibes these days.

Yeah.

Where my father lives is uh right on the border between england and scotland and you can visit uh hadrian's wall i rode my bike all along it a couple of years ago oh wow it's yeah it's like a fun edge of empire kind of thought experiment like you know you know beyond this line are the barbarians or the uncivilized people

today it's like unremarkable you know like like it's literally it keeps some people sheep in their fields at points along yeah it's like a two-foot yeah yeah

feet high exactly yeah like it's some stones kind of piled on top of each other.

And it's kind of an unremarkable novelty.

But it's funny to think that at one point there was this binary world, right?

And they felt that

the outside was so dangerous to them that they had to provide a physical barrier.

Something we're still doing.

Indeed.

And as we're speaking of walls, by the way, this reminds me of another major empire

where this sort of dichotomy was occurring.

You know, it wasn't just taking place in the Mediterranean world.

You had, and of course, ancient China this whole identity constructed around these moral and cultural and political ideals.

Of course, you had the whole Confucianism, Taoism, and legalist thought all shaping what it meant to be, you know, conducting yourself properly and in a civilized manner.

Yeah.

And so those who did not ascribe to those ideals would have been people who are labeled barbarians.

Yeah.

Often the people on the other side of the Great Wall.

Yeah.

We are the United States is literally doing the exact same thing, right?

Like it's

we're building a giant wall and labeling othering the people on the other side of it.

Yeah, you definitely see the genealogy there.

Yeah.

But I think there's a closer genealogy we could draw upon for that particular reference, though, which is how later European empires would appropriate the Roman civilized barbarian binary.

to justify their assimilation, extermination, and colonialism.

Definitely.

One of the things I

like to do, even with the United States and its informal empire, right?

Like

I love to show my students cartoons, like political cartoons.

Like there's the one of the white man's burden, which like distills, you know, sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words, but it distills that whole binary so well

in a way that seems like repugnant

to most of my students today, I guess.

I don't know, maybe, maybe folks are moving back that way.

But like the imagery and the distinction between the way, or even like Lewis and Clark, when they're addressing the indigenous people they meet and calling them children, right?

Like this binary distinction is so it's so apparent.

And like it, I don't know, it seems so outlandish, I think, to most folks today.

But then we do similar things, I guess, in,

you know, in just in a slightly more subtle way sometimes.

Yeah, exactly.

i mean when you look at what was taking place with the enlightenment and that whole development of this particular order was steeped in these particular values where the european culture was the ideal standard and everything that did not measure up to that standard was barbaric or primitive it's just that has never really gone away you know and it's continues to be used to justify the domination of western powers yeah particularly in the way that they've instilled these european norms and practices across the world when it comes to things like relation to the land when it comes to things like the divisions between people uh between genders all these things all these attitudes that that are now so widespread originated from in part this this elevation of one above the other

and speaking of i mentioned the word western there and that's really another way that we've sort of

maintained this binary in a different coat of paint, although it's not quite the same.

So there's this

sort of lingering framework of the notion of the East and the West, right?

In the ancient times, it was China versus Rome.

These days, it's probably China versus America.

Yeah.

China really is that old.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And okay, this is probably a very probably very gen z reference for me to make but i don't know if you've seen these edits circulated on social media of um

the chinese president qi jinping

going like what's up beijing and then there's like a whole bunch of like

skyscrapers and and like like hardcore like electronic music edited to show like all these advancements and then people in the comments are always saying things like be china do nothing win.

I have not seen those.

Yeah, yeah, that's definitely dating me a little bit

in terms of my social media diets.

But yeah, just seeing the dynamic between China, between the East and the West, the Orient and the Occident, to use an older term, it's just another way that we've...

created this sort of boundary between people that either on one side or the other there's a necessary tension between the two

you know this concept of the orient and orientalism is something that edward said yeah identified famously as something that was constructed by the west as an exotic irrational decadent and dangerous place

and so that whole dualistic narrative was then put into the imperial project to legitimize their domination and to position the East as a passive subject without a voice of their own and constant need of Western intervention and guidance.

So this West becomes a sort of stage for modernity and science and region and progress, this whole idea of the protagonist of history.

And the Orient, the East, they're the primitive, I guess, side of that binary.

Although, unlike the civilized primitive binary or civilized barbarian binary of old, I think while there could have been racial components to it in the past, this one is more explicitly racial and geographic in its division yeah because i mean in ancient rome anybody could ostensibly become a roman citizen you know it wasn't necessarily racially

you know pure area and sense that a lot of neo-nazis and stuff today like to look back at that period as you had a quite a diversity of phenotypes in the roman empire yeah but you know when you come to this orient and occident dichotomy it's it's very much racialized you know A lot of times when people talk about the Western world,

it really tends to be, I guess, a more politically correct way of seeing the white world.

Yes.

At least in my observation.

Yeah, yeah, definitely.

That's often the subtext.

Because, I mean, that's something I've always struggled with pinning down, right?

Because why isn't Brazil considered part of the West?

You know, why isn't Mexico considered part of the West?

Right.

What are we West of?

Like, like, what it what it's not even, it's not the Western Hemisphere.

Like, as you say, that.

Yeah, I mean, Western Hemisphere is more straightforward, but is it because there are too many colored people

in Mexico and in Brazil?

It seems to be, right?

Like, it's not even countries strongly either from Western Europe or strongly impacted by settler colonialism from Western Europe because the entirety of Latin America is impacted.

Then they should be included, but they're not.

But they're not.

Yeah, yeah.

And yeah, it's I've always struggled with that one, other than

neoliberal capitalist white white countries.

It's it's it's what people don't want to say and Japan somehow sometimes, yeah, yeah, Japan just strangely enough, yeah, yeah, yeah,

like an honorary member of the club, yeah, or like sometimes also not Spain.

This is a particular like bugbear, I guess, of Spanish historians.

Really?

I don't think I've seen that one, yeah, for years.

Like, literally, you would be excluded from European history, like uh, like Africa starts at the Pyrenees, is the sort of phrase that used to be used.

That's hilarious, yeah.

Like, I guess it compounded because Spain was so isolated under Franco, right?

But like, yeah,

they called it the black legend that like Spain does not belong to Europe.

And like, and it's not, again, it's racialized, right?

It's because Spain had this exchange with the Muslim world, right?

And like that culture deeply impacted Spanish culture.

Indeed.

And even after the conquistador,

it's like, it's like, you know, the French historians were just like, no, you guys are tainted.

Like, you don't get to come back.

It's kind of a similar situation with the territories of the former Ottoman Empire as well.

Technically part of Europe and yet, you know, maligned in some way.

Yeah, yeah, a little less than still.

It's like, ah, y'all had too much, too much Turkish, too much Muslim influence.

Y'all got a...

Yeah, you need like a thousand years to decompress before we let you back in.

Yeah, I mean, honestly, if the Pope wasn't based in Italy, I'm sure Italy would have a similar dynamic.

I mean, Italy is a recent construction, right, in terms of as a country.

But when you look at the two Sicilies, for example, that was under North African rule for a significant period of its history.

But let me not get too far off track.

One more tangent, and that is,

I'm far from being a dengueist by any means, or a Maoist or anything of that nature.

But there is something to be said

for

the way that the East, the Orient, has been sidelined, marginalized, treated as lesser than for so long.

And now they're at a point where their geopolitical sway has to be respected.

Yeah.

I'm not rooting for them by any means.

I'm not one of those people who's like, yeah, multipolar world.

I'd rather we have no polls, you know, as an anarchist.

Yeah, yeah, I do know what you mean.

But it's like, it's a bit of shot in Freud, I guess.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It is, you know, ironic in a, but yeah, not

necessarily in a good way.

Like, I've just seen Xi Jinping meeting with Min Anhuang, the dictator of Myanmar today, and I'm like, I'm not excited for that poll of the world not at all not at all yeah i feel the same way about the way that

the sahel federation has kind of kicked out france i'm like yeah stick it to france but also uh military juntas you know

yeah yeah like the rebranded wagner corps now like uh yeah and the the the collaboration close collaboration with russia but you know a lot of this thing is really yeah a lot of these relationships these geopolitical relationships are so opportunistic.

It's all opportunism.

At the end of the day, they're not really necessarily guided by principles.

Yeah, like the difference, I guess, between like, for instance,

I've been thinking a lot about anarchists at war, right?

And people who go and fight in other people's to defend other people, right?

Like,

the people who went to Rojava to fight, people who went to Myanmar to fight.

There's a difference between doing something out of a sense of solidarity and doing something out of root opportunism.

And like that always shows itself in the end.

Yeah, I mean, the Wagner group's involvement in Africa is the most blatant, capitalist-driven opportunism.

These people are not there for the anti-colonials, they're not like standing with the oppressed peoples of the world,

yeah, yeah, like watching the battle of Algiers and setting off to uh immediately liberate the people of Africa, literal mercenaries, right?

Yeah,

yeah,

but getting back on to the main topic,

talking about all these ways we divvy up the world, out of the linguistic and cultural and geographical differences that we observe around us came this concept of nations, right?

Nation as an idea also came out of the European imagination.

It's commonly defined and it's used worldwide today, but it's commonly defined as a large community of people who share common identity, often through language, culture, history, and sometimes ethnicity, and who usually inhabit a specific specific geographic territory with its own political organization.

There can be nations without states as simply a cultural community for some people who feel a collective belonging and shared destiny.

But nations are, as we know, mostly tied up with states today, hence nation being used as a synonym for country.

Yeah, this is

one of my bugbears, I guess, as an academic.

Like,

I tried to develop this concept of Catalan nationalism that, like, at the time was inherently anti-fascist, I think, or was trying to be, like, but it ain't now.

Like, like, that's a very, very Catalan right now.

And

yeah, I do still find it hard when people say nation instead of state, especially Americans.

Like, it's very hard, right?

Because state is like a subset of the state here, like this sort of merited division of the federal state.

So it can be hard to explain those differences.

And as you mentioned, the sort of

way that Catalan nationalism has shifted

really, I think, gets to the whole weakness of the nation idea.

So Benedict Anderson famously called nations imagined communities because the community exists as a collective fantasy.

You know, they imagine a deep comradeship with people who they've never met.

And this fantasy has boundaries, not just about who is included, but also famously who is excluded.

And this fantasy is not necessarily something that is automatic or natural as we tend to see it today.

but it's really the rise of things like print capitalism with the mass production of books and newspapers.

And that's what really shaped the standardization and

formalization of these imagined communities through the creation of like common cultural reference and a shared sense of history.

Yeah.

And then, of course, you had the nation idea further being developed by liberal revolutions and through the shared experience of colonial rule, you know, where subject populations would mobilize nationalism to claim self-determination.

Yeah, definitely.

Like, it uh, I'm sure I'm not the only one, I'm trying to remember, I've borrowed this from Samuel, but the idea of like identity entrepreneurs is one I like.

Like, it's when religion loses its claim on universal truth, specifically in Europe,

that's like a market for identity that is open.

And the creation of nations is like, to my mind, like a bourgeois project, right?

Like, it's an entrepreneurial

endeavor that they seek to create something and benefit from it.

And, like, yet to a degree that's turned against them, it's still an entrepreneurial endeavor, right?

Like, still, you could be creating a nation which wants to kick France out of Morocco, right?

That nation may not have space for everyone who inhabits that territory of Morocco.

Like, it's still

a for some people

construct.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

I think the elite intellectual current of a lot of nationalist movements can go understated.

You know, oftentimes what stirs up the masses toward that specific direction, because I mean, the masses will revolt against their conditions, but what sort of directs it in that national independence direction and this concept of nation is tends to be that sort of elite intellectual current.

I often look at the history of Trinidad and Tobago.

as a reference point, seeing that's where I come from.

The whole process of nation building is always ongoing.

And we are in a position where there's an effort, there's a very strong effort to both push for a nation building, but also recognize our divergent pasts.

You know, because we have this sort of almost equal in population, Indo-Trinidadian and Afro-Trinidadian populations, and then a mixed population as well.

And then you have some Chinese and Syrian and Lebanese and and Venezuelan and Filipino and all these different groups come into Trinidad.

And because of that colonial past, there are tensions between those groups and things that still play out to this day.

But while those tensions are playing out, there's also an effort to create, to construct a unity through an allegiance to the nation of Trinidad and Tobago, to create a sense of national identity.

And as a very young country, it's still quite difficult to do.

I could imagine, especially in the United States, it might have been a similar situation where you have all these different European populations and different populations from around the world who are in the US,

and there hasn't quite yet been a fully built-up American identity yet.

And so, a lot of those tensions are still kind of playing out.

And so, it takes a couple of generations for there to be a sense of American identity that arises out of that.

Yeah, definitely.

Trinidad, being one, a younger colony, and two, only recently becoming independent in 1962, it hasn't had enough time yet to, I suppose, develop that patriotism that America is so known for.

And so you still see a lot of people continue to have allegiances

to their ancestry, to their heritage, even before they have any sort of sense of connection to the country concept of Trinidad.

Yeah.

The American one is interesting because the people who did the American Revolution would often call themselves English, right?

Like,

and it's this kind of post hoc

nationalism that is applied, right like they did begin constructing a nation but after they after they uh gained the apparatus of a state right like and sometimes they'll talk about their freedoms in terms of english freedoms which they themselves are not granted right like they don't have the same freedoms as english people in england when they are a british colony this concept of freedom they will elucidate like and like so much of it is based on like english common law right they didn't necessarily see themselves as distinct that comes later and like the us one one is interesting because they have to develop this kind of civic nationalism much i guess france does that too of course but like france probably the og there but like um indeed this idea that like you subscribe to these ideals therefore you're an american uh because they're like this this nation

constructed by people from all over Europe for the most part.

The phrasing is universal, but the implementation is not, right?

It's also a country where people own other people.

Yeah, yeah.

I think, I mean, like I was saying earlier, it does help in our struggle for autonomy and independence from colonial rule to have this construct of the nation, right?

But it also obscures a lot of the real material divisions in society, you know, between the working class and the elites.

And so you have this national identity that is constructed by intellectual and

economic elites.

And it's overlaid onto a population that does not really have a say in that construction.

And so these nationalist projects will try to downplay or suppress differences and conflicts.

And that is part of why nationalism so often lends itself to fascism.

Because fascism is an outgrowth of this idea of nations where they promote this vision of national unity

and stifle class conflict and create a collusion of classes that pushes aside the people who don't fit within their concept of the nation.

Yeah, yeah.

I often think, like, when I'm talking to my undergrads about nation, like, the most succinct way I can say it is like the salient we through both space and time, right?

Like, it's the people you identify with, it's the us.

And fascism weaponizes us against the rest of humanity.

or against us mostly like against a scapegoat group who become them, right?

And then like the nation is for us, the state is for us, it's not for them, thus, they must be exterminated.

Exactly.

Is an obvious outgrowth of nationalism.

Hence, xenophobia, hence, anti-Semitism, anti-blackness, anti-indigeneity, all these prejudices.

I mean, and that's the thing about nationalism.

It's not necessarily consistent because you'll say, oh, people from this land, you know, we should visit united, except for those people who are also from this land.

They don't get to come, you know.

They are perpetual outsiders.

They don't share the true culture, uh, they aren't part of our destiny.

So, even if they're legally citizens or legally long-term residents, or they have been residents there for a long time, their entire lives, for generations, whoever the case may be, they don't count.

They're outside forever.

Yeah, yeah, they can never ascend to like a

sort of higher status of being one of us.

British people like to mobilize this one a lot, right?

Like, you can be British, but you can never be English.

Yeah,

I forget who coined that coined the phrase cricket nationalism

uh but it's just particularly kind of ridiculous like oh if you know if if there's a test match between britain and pakistan or britain and trinidad tobago who do you support like like it is that like are you really going to make that the core of your national identity like the sine qua non of being british is like which flag you take to the cricket match like

it's particularly like ridiculous oh yeah and as if it doesn't reflect exclusion right?

People aren't taking their flags to cricket match because like that's the core of their entity.

They're just like, yeah, well, kind of, I get treated differently because of my ethnic boundary, like makeup, right?

My ethnic presentation.

So I guess you guys don't like me.

So like, it'll be funny when we kick your ass at cricket.

Like, it's, it's, it, the causal arrow points in the wrong direction, I guess.

I can imagine.

I will not be bringing any flags to any cricket match because I don't attend cricket matches.

I'm not too big of a fan of cricket.

I can't be doing it.

I'm going to stick to my football.

And I say football in the international sense.

Good.

Yeah.

Yeah, I can't stand around long enough to play cricket, to be honest.

As we're talking about national liberation, these struggles often took place in the context of the Cold War, right?

Which is where we get this other sense of this other framework for divvying up the world.

Now, growing up, I was always told that, you know, Trino Bagu is a third world country.

I had a social studies textbook and I taught first world, second world, third world.

But I didn't teach first world, second world, third world in the context of the Cold War because I grew up in a post-Cold War world.

And these terms came from the Cold War, but persisted after the Cold War.

So what happened?

I was taught.

We are third world because we are still developing.

We're not at that intermediate stage of development where we could say that we're second world and we're not at that first world level of development like America.

Right.

And

that's a

small aside for me, but I've always found it mildly irritating when I see people use this famous social media catchphrase, oh, America is a third world country in a Gucci belt.

I haven't seen that one there yet.

That's annoying.

I'm sure you've seen similar sentiments.

This idea, oh, America is third world, America's third world.

Yeah, I have.

It's just annoying to me.

Fuck off.

Yeah, it's annoying to me.

For one, it completely divorces the concept of the third world from its actual origins.

And two, it also, I think, reflects a kind of a blindness to what's happening in the rest of the world, in the countries that are actually considered third world and the differences between them.

You know, for everything that we can express frustrations about in the US, anybody in the third world, I think, and I've, when I, when I've visited the US, I've seen it with my own eyes, you know, there's still things there that Americans might take for granted

that are just not

100%.

That would never be taken for granted in other contexts.

And I see, of course, the division in America's version of the first world versus some of the European social democracies' version of the first world.

So I get that frustration, the lack of free healthcare and that kind of thing,

investment in infrastructure and all that.

But

let me just get into the background behind the two, right?

As we step into the Cold War, you have this concept of the three-world model that came after World War II.

The pre-war status cool was over and you had new conflicts on the horizon.

And so the term First World originally described the capitalist bloc led by the United States and Western Europe.

where capitalist markets, liberal democracy, and economic progress were celebrated.

And then you had the second world bloc which referred to the communist bloc led by the soviet union where what i would consider state capitalism and centrally planned economies shaped their societies so in the first world you had countries like the us australia africa today

might be shocking you know iran was even considered part of the first world bloc yeah during the cold war that might be shocking now because when we think of some of these countries like oh those are third world countries those are underdeveloped countries they're not at the developed level of the West yet.

But

in the context in which this three-world model originated, these were countries that explicitly aligned themselves with the policies of the United States and its allies as capitalist nations against the Soviet bloc.

And in the Soviet bloc, you had, of course, countries like China and Vietnam, Laos,

Ethiopia, Yemen,

Cuba, all these different countries aligned themselves explicitly with the Soviet Union.

But in the third world, and where the third world concept came in, was with all the countries that stood against picking a side.

A lot of these were former colonies and nations that chose not to side completely with either.

And so this whole concept, this whole idea of the non-aligned movement, it really kicked off thanks to the joining of the Indian Prime Minister, the Khanian President, the Indonesian president, and the president of the United Arab Republic alongside Yugoslavia.

And so all these countries who all had very different economic arrangements, Yugoslavia famously was kind of doing its own thing compared to a lot of the other countries associated with socialism.

India and Ghana, they were also kind of doing their own thing, kind of a mix.

Trian Tobago is also considered part of the non-aligned movement.

And so these classifications at the time, these were geopolitical.

And they were about political ideologies, not necessarily economic development.

So technically speaking, the terms shouldn't even be relevant to us today.

I mean, the Cold War of the 20th century is over.

But over time, the narrative began to twist.

You know, so because you didn't pick a side, you didn't pick the red team or the blue team, you didn't pick the first world or second world.

This narrative developed where, oh, you didn't pick a side.

You're politically independent.

So you're poor.

You're chaotic.

You're a failed state.

All these different things.

And of course, there were incidents in part influenced, of course, by state actors in the US and state actors in the Soviet-line bloc who would have contributed to this outcome.

But over time, you get this sense of, oh, the third world is failure.

All these states were trying different paths of development.

different approaches to governance from either of the two camps, mixed hybrid approaches.

But in the end,

this just got them stuck with the label of underdevelopment and at having them being seen as laser.

Now, today, people don't use third world as much as they use developing, at least in

the more above-board discourse.

But that division also has its own implications, right?

The developed countries versus the developing countries.

It's kind of a softer

sort of version of the same.

Yeah, it's kind of gentle.

gentle yeah same shit what those terms do implicitly is like you know what you're a fish in water so you can't recognize water it's how to recognize these things these ideological impulses when we're submerged in them if you take a step back you realize oh these terms developed and developing they have very heavy implications and the implication is that there's a single linear path to progress modeled after western capitalism that all societies are progressing towards towards through industrialization, through consumerism, through the almighty GDP growth.

And so development or your underdevelopment becomes a tool of intervention.

It becomes a way to mask imperial interests with the sort of veneer of, oh, we're just kind of helping you out.

You know, it's like we move from you're a savage, you're a primitive, to you're just not developed yet.

But don't worry, we'll help you out.

And that's how you get the whole sort of IMF and World bank introductions of models of debts and policy conditions and metrics and all these different things to sort of shape these countries into client states states that can be used to further western development the cold war is technically over now as i said so i suppose we've reached the end of history

as the famous saying goes but not exactly in the early 1990s samuel huntington came up with a thesis to explain the conflicts that would define the post-Cold War world and as we entered into the 21st century.

And so he argued that the future of global conflict would not be defined by competing ideologies or economic systems, but by cultural fault lines.

In his 1993 article in Foreign Affairs, which later expanded into his 1996 book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order, Huntington predicted that the primary source of conflict in the new era would be between distinct civilizations.

His model would have pointed to clashes between the West and other groups, Islamic nations, the Confucian East, and of course set up this sense that the West is this pinnacle of rationality and modernity and all these others are in competition with the fantastic and amazing West.

And I always like to call out some of the strange ways that he has divided the world, right?

So sub-Saharan Africa is all grouped up into the African camp.

All of North Africa, the Middle East, into

West Asia, all of that is considered part of the Islamic civilization.

Forget all the differences between any of them, by the way.

Indonesia is also part of the Islamic bloc.

You have the Sinic or the Confucian bloc that includes China, both Koreas, Taiwan, and Vietnam, except for the parts of China that are under the Buddhist camp, such as Tibet.

So Tibet is kind of carved up on its own on its own camp.

Mongolia is also under the Buddhist camp.

Thailand and all these others in Southeast Asia are considered part of the Buddhist camp.

Yeah.

And then you have the Latin American bloc, which is everybody part of Latin America.

And even people who are not technically Latin American are kind of swept in there.

And I'm going, by the way, based off the map that I saw on the Wikipedia article on the subject.

Yeah, I found that map now.

Fantastic stuff.

It's some very bizarre divisions and ways to cut up this world.

They have the Western world versus the Orthodox world, which includes Kazakhstan and Greece and Ukraine and Russia, all under that civilizational banner.

The Philippines is somehow part Islamic, part Western and part Sinic.

It's a very unusual blend.

Yeah.

And then he's just got like Japan.

It's just hanging out there by itself.

Oh, yeah.

I forgot to mention.

Japan is kind of its own own thing.

Yeah, it just literally says Japanese.

I forgot about that.

And then he goes on to freak out about like

the like Latin world as he sees it, like

it fucking dividing the United States, right?

Like in his,

it's it called like who we are or where we are or something, his book about migration in the United States.

It was after Clash of Civilizations.

He wrote this book about like how the like, I think, I don't know quite remember how he terms it.

Like does he use Latino or hispanic or something else uh but like that that that population increasing in the united states will like divide the united states into two fundamentally opposed civilizations yeah yeah he has some interesting compulsion yeah

and unfortunately his thesis

found its voice following the events of 9-11 Politicians, the media, these people were taking his ideas to kind of justify the war and terror that would unfold.

It would also create sort of cultural divides that settle into place at home.

Well, not create, but shape those cultural divides as you create the sense of, oh, if we're experiencing a clash of civilizations right now, then this flood, quote unquote, of people from another civilization is a threat to an invasion.

It's something that needs to be...

targeted and fought against.

And so in a sense, his clash of civilizations is kind of a repackaging of a lot of the binaries and divisions we've spoken about before.

You have elements of nationalism, you have elements of civilized versus barbarian, you have elements of East and West, the Cold War dichotomies, all of that kind of comes together in this neat package.

Finally, we enter the 21st century, and there are two very popular ways that we now categorize the world.

People tend to use the phrases global north and global south as a softer or more politically correct alternative to develop developing or first and third world it's considered less loaded more neutral sounding and is originally popularized via un frameworks and the brand line which was done in 1980 which drew a literal line across the globe separating the wealthier north from the poorer south to be clear though despite the geographical language it's not literally about hemispheres Australia is considered part of the global north and Mongolia is considered part of the global South.

But generally speaking, the Global South refers to the post-colonial regions, and the Global North refers to the wealthy, industrialized countries of the world.

To me, again, it's not really a flawless framework.

It has all the same binaries and smoothing over of complexities,

of internal class divides between, for example, rich elites in the global south and poor communities in the north.

It gives the impression that entire countries share a unified class experience, I think.

Yeah.

I think it also has the potential to obscure inequality between south south relations so yes two countries may both be a part of the global south but there could be a massive power differential between them that you know sets them up for interventions and equal treaties um and also sort of different sorts of meddling yeah for example saudi arabia at least in one map that I saw, is considered part of the global south.

But as we know, Saudi Arabia is famous for its medlin across Africa and the Middle East, its interventions, its financing of different conflicts across the region.

Now, I get why the term is used.

It creates a sense of shared struggle, especially in anti-imperialist and climate justice spaces.

But I think it has weaknesses, you know, in how we construct solidarity on that basis.

Yeah, very much so.

Yeah, and the other and final system that I wanted to mention that has gained popularity these days is world systems theory, which is actually older than clash of civilizations.

It came out of Immanuel Wallerstein's work during the Cold War.

And he kind of stood out and said that he was rejecting the three-world system and the simplistic country-by-country development models.

Instead, he created this world systems theory that saw capitalism as a single global system.

not a patchwork of individual national economies.

So the focus was on labor roles, on commodity flows, and on power concentration.

And I think in an even more globalized world, it makes the most sense.

So to Wallestine, they have three different zones of the global economy.

You have the core,

which has, you know, have strong states, financial capital, tech-heavy industries, control over global institutions, and they tend to exploit the labor and resources of the periphery.

while exporting high-value goods and debt structures.

And the periphery of the countries that tend to have weaker institutions, extractive or crarian economies, reliance on export and raw materials, debt dependency and structural adjustment policies, and they're often the dumping grounds for pollution, waste, and arms from the global north.

The semi-periphery are then considered under his model the countries that mediate between the core and the periphery.

These are industrializing economies with mixed labor and capital exports.

They sometimes exploit others while being exploited themselves.

And these include countries like Brazil, India, Mexico, Turkey, and South Africa.

And they tend to serve as the buffers that stabilize the system while chasing core status.

I think this model is very dynamic.

It could be more dynamic, but it does have the capacity to highlight the systemic interdependence of this local system, that one region's wealth is contingent on another's dispossession.

It makes it very useful for understanding that poverty is not something that just happens.

It's something that is very clearly structured and developed by the wealth of the north.

And I think also with the core periphery model, you see the sense of a one-way flow where value and labor goes from the periphery to the core.

But there is another direction that flow goes, right?

Because

the migrants from the periphery, they go to the core, they fill precarious roles and core economies.

like care work and agriculture and logistics.

And so they almost become an imported periphery within the core.

And their absence from the periphery also deprives the periphery, hence the phenomenon of brain drain, where people are siphoned away as labor and the educated population tends to leave their countries of origin.

But

I'm saying it's not just a one-way flow because you also have that sense of diaspora and diasporic networks that kind of reverse the flow.

Remittances for some countries can be a significant chunk of their national income.

I think the Philippines is a classic example of this.

Some of the Caribbean countries, either historically or presently, were very dependent on remittances from their diasporic population, sending money back home.

Lebanon is another example.

El Salvador is another example.

They become key parts of the national GDP, that sort of relationship of migration.

Yeah.

But I think what I want to do with this core periphery model or this core periphery semi-periphery model is expand it.

And one of the ways that that I found very useful to do so comes from fellow podcaster, shout out to Elia J.

Ayub.

I read an article of his that was on the anarchist libraries called The Periphery Has No Time for Binaries.

He made this very crucial point and I quote, We are as peripheral to the global south regimes crushing us as they are perceived to be by the Western think tanks and foreign ministers who view their imagined space as the center of the world.

China and Russia and Iran are peripheral to the West, and any and all activists in China and Russia and Iran are peripheral to their governments.

So I kind of like this sense of not just looking at the country level, but looking at particular populations, populations within countries, the relationships between them, bringing in that class dynamic

between populations more prominently.

Yeah, like if you look at the

like the example I'm familiar with, right, like the,

well, we could look at Kurdistan or Myanmar, right?

There are ethnic groups within that country that subject to colonialism by the core groups within that country, right?

Like Assad's Arab Belt star for the Burma majority using classic colonial divide and rule tactics right now against Rohingya in Myanmar.

And like, I think it doesn't make sense to see that whole country as peripheral, right?

Like that binary.

doesn't function when like the salient colonial violence happening, especially in Myanmar, is happening within Myanmar.

But it doesn't make it any less salient.

And like the experience of colonialism is still violent.

And if we only use this state-level binary,

we will totally miss that.

Exactly.

Exactly.

And I think it's important to be clear.

Obviously, I've rejected a lot of these frameworks in covering them.

You won't see me using the civilized primitive binary anytime soon.

But some of these concepts can be useful.

You know, they do shape the way that we view the world, how we see ourselves.

They're imperfect, of course, because they're trying to map onto reality and reality is a shifting beast.

But I think it's good to have some sense of or some language to understand the inequality and power dynamics present in the world.

So we can reclaim these frameworks or we can reject them.

You know, we could use them for solidarity or for division.

But the question I want to leave us with to wrap up this episode is: how do we build a world where these divisions are no longer descriptive or relevant?

And that's all I have for today.

All power to all the people.

Peace.

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Hey and welcome to the Could Happen here.

I'm Andrew Siege and I'm back with James.

It's me again.

Welcome back.

Yeah, it's good to be here.

Great to have you once again or for you to have me.

I'm not sure the dynamic is here.

Yeah, yeah, immediately.

It's nice to be together.

It's an egalitarian dynamic.

You know, we're both having each other in a sense.

Yeah, we're sharing this podcast.

Yeah.

I think there are a lot of concepts that it's good to grasp to get a sense of how this world works.

Kind of continuing from the previous episode where we spoke about all the different ways that we can divide up the world and understanding the world.

And so in today's sort of

pursuit of that endeavor, I wanted to get into a particular concept that is so benign yet so pervasive in this system.

And it's the idea of externalization.

You get what I mean by that?

Yeah, like

making people or or things other.

Yes, but specifically, I think I want to address how capitalism persists by pushing harm onto the other.

Yeah.

Onto the someone or something else.

Shifting the costs of particular actions, either environmentally, socially, or economically.

I think the easiest example I could point to is how a company may choose to save on disposal costs by dumping their waste into a river, which can thus poison the water supply, the ecosystem, and the health of all those human and non-human lives who rely upon or live near that river.

Do you have another example you could probably point to?

Yeah, I mean, there are lots of them.

One of them that I think of a lot is like how in the US, right, like products that we can't recycle or that we can't landfill, we will literally ship to somewhere else to be dumped.

Like our consumption creates so much excess and so much waste, and we can't be confronted with that waste.

So we ship it to places where people consume less.

Yeah, it's uh, I mean,

I don't know if you've seen any of the footage of some of these places.

The whole coasts of fast fashion waste, for example, in Africa

or just e-waste leaching into the soil.

It's really quite tragic.

Yeah.

I remember someone I met once was telling me that like one of the things that children did where they had come from was they would pick through e-waste, specifically charging cables, to get the copper out

with this would result in them having like these terrible injuries to their fingers because they were like prying the cables apart and you know over time they would get little pieces of little shards of metal embedded in their fingertips down yeah that's terrible yeah it's pretty pretty grim condemnation of our way of consuming yeah it's messed up it's messed up and i think

When you see that sort of stuff, it's hard to unsee it.

When you see that impact onto the world, it's hard to unsee it but that's part of how this concept thrives this externalization thrives it's by obscuring itself yeah so that's what we kind of want to do this episode get a full breadth of its history its present and its apparent future so that we can not not see

all the different ways that this occurs Now, this pass and honor of costs may have always been an option on the table, but we can see that a lot of traditional economies did not go that route.

Because traditional economies were often human economies, as David Grable used the term in Debt the First 5,000 Years.

You know, these were economies focused on human relationships.

They were embedded in kinship, in land, and customs, in obligation, and reciprocity.

So what you owed was really financial.

It was to your neighbor, your elder, your clan, the land itself.

And so you could not really avoid the costs of your actions on others because that was at the center of it all, others.

But the transition to capitalism was a shift in what the economy was.

It enforced the idea that everything is or should be up for sale.

The economist Carl Polanyi called it the Great Transformation, when land, labor, and money were turned into fictitious commodities, treated as if they were products for sale.

Polanyi saw the modern state and the capitalist market economy as a packaged deal.

Graeber also made this very clear in debt as well.

For this new kind of economy to take hold, people had to change how they thought about work and trade and relation with each other and seeing the world.

Those conditions had to be created by the state.

So you could look at how a lot of traditional economies and commons had to be disrupted to force this shift.

In

England, you had people pushed off of common land that they had used for centuries and they had no choice but to sell their labor to survive and go into the factories.

But you have to remember that it never started in the factories.

it actually started in the colonies.

This dispossession of people and from place

started through that colonization process or really amplified through that colonization process, extracting the wealth of people or of labor, of land, of resources from one place to concentrate it in another, to displace people and land and costs.

And so colonialism was capitalism's sort of training ground for externalization.

You plunder a little bit over here, you profit a little bit over over there.

And this is really where we get to the core of capitalist externalization with the shifting of the costs.

On the small scale, that looks like the river pollution example, but on the global scale, it looks like what Wallerstein was getting into with world systems theory: how the wealth and stability of the core nations depend on the exploitation of the periphery.

So, slavery and genocide and ecological ruin, all of these are costs that create the wealth that the core enjoys, but is made invisible to that core.

Because when you're part of an ongoing relationship with community, with land, with ecology, with people, the actions have consequences that matter.

They reverberate, you can feel them, and that demands a level of responsibility on your part.

But when you take the things that have been woven into a relationship and tune them into plain old transactions, Those transactions can then offload the costs, offload the consequences, make them someone else's problem.

So yeah, clothing is very affordable now, but it's affordable because somebody somewhere was underpaid and overworked.

The smartphone, it's convenient, it's useful, it's accessible, but its parts were mined under dangerous conditions.

You know, your food, it's delicious, nutritious, not exactly affordable these days,

but it's picked by hands that cannot afford that same meal.

So the harms of these systems, the harms of these actions, of this level of consumption doesn't cease to exist.

It's just externalized.

So it can be rendered invisible to one point of view.

Yeah.

And it's not something that can be set up without a fight.

You know, people would resist.

Enclosures were met with resistance.

Colonizations met with resistance.

And even today, workers' strike, you know, people do fight back.

It's not just this.

sweeping, inevitable process.

But because of the collaboration between state and capital, that collusion of statist and capitalist interests, the whole system has managed to persist thus far.

It's a very formidable foe we're dealing with, so we can set it back here and there, but we have not defeated it yet.

Yeah.

And I say yet because, you know, as we get into there, are ways to loosen its grip.

I think what's fascinating about capitalist externalization today

is just how much it has scaled and gotten more sophisticated.

In terms of the work that makes the world run, the most essential labor is often the most invisible and undervalued and precarious labor.

You know, when we're talking about the work that's necessary to clothe ourselves,

the work that's necessary to feed ourselves, the work that's necessary to build infrastructure, such as in the Gulf states where you have literal modern slavery taking place to build up those countries uh where they're talking about gig work

transportation delivery that sort of thing or reproductive work stuff like what is called housewifery or domestic labor sure you could think of other examples as well yeah i like the one you gave about your cell phone right like those rare earth materials like it's not some slick safe mining uh operation that brings those out the ground it it it's human hands in dangerous conditions that kill people.

Exactly.

Poisons people.

It's not even necessarily a quick death.

It's often a slow,

lifelong death.

And it poisons that part of the world for general.

Like we could stop right now.

And it would take generations for the damage to stop.

Exactly.

That's the thing about destruction, right?

Destruction can be very quick.

It's the rebuilding.

It can take a long time.

Yeah.

And if you look at how quickly Gaza has been flattened versus how long it's going to take to recover from that, it's like night and day.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like it uh I mean, I'm very familiar with that particular example, right?

Like how quickly you can destroy something with a bomb from an airplane and how hard people had to work to build it.

In October of 23, I was in Kurdistan and like.

I know how hard people work to build up Rojava, right?

To try and build a little island of democracy without the state in a place where the state has been weaponized against tons of different ethnic groups who are not Arab and even against Arab people who didn't agree with the state's particular line on a thing.

And

one night, you know, like the power station's gone.

They bombed while I was there at a oxygen bottling plant for people who need supplemental oxygen, either temporarily or permanently.

And like, it's gone now.

And now to build that back up in a world where you are largely alienated from the system of states and capital, right?

You're trying to build stuff back up as much as you can from networks of solidarity and ingenuity.

And that takes years.

And

yeah, but it's not visible.

And that's not even getting into the emotional and mental toll of something like that.

Yeah, yeah.

Oh, that can be a setback as well.

Yeah.

Like we're not even talking about resources, we're talking about, yeah, that loss.

Yeah.

That, that, that pain.

Yeah, yeah, the pain.

Made even worse when the skilled people, skilled workers who are responsible for upkeeping such something like that, are also wiped off by that same bomb.

It makes it all the more difficult to recover.

Yeah, or drawn away, right, by conditions becoming unlivable.

So you have this like brain drain where people who have skills that are considered to be commercially valuable have an opportunity to leave and people who

don't have those have the opportunity to stay or don't have the opportunity to leave, I guess.

Like, or even like, you know, the U.S.

made a different version of externalization, I guess.

But like, the U.S.

made a big thing of how it defeated the Islamic State in

2019.

I guess I can't remember when the last Athlet Albergoose was.

I think 2019.

But like,

we externalized.

It offloaded the cost of that struggle.

Yeah, the dying part.

Like, the U.

Yeah, U.S.

pilots did a whole lot of killing, but the dying part,

yeah, we externalized that, right?

To Kurdish and Arab and Assyrian.

Yeah, to people whose lives didn't matter.

Yeah.

And like,

I remember a time standing in a cemetery there, just looking at lines and lines of graves.

And I just left the house of someone whose 13-year-old son was killed in a drone strike.

And just thinking, like, each of these is a mother burying her child.

That, like, we essentially asked for the most part, right?

Like, to do that.

We said, hey, well, you guys do the dying part because we don't want to.

Like, it kind of sucks, sucked for the United States and Britain and Iraq and Afghanistan.

So we'd like someone else to die now.

And then, you know, here we are a few years later, right?

And like the night before Turkey has been bombing the place where I'm looking at these graves.

And

the US ain't doing shit to help, right?

Like, even though these people had made this massive sacrifice, the US wasn't like, yeah, we're your friends.

It's not a friendship relationship, you know, like it's like you said, it's like an interaction, like a

purchase more than a solidarity-based thing.

Yeah.

And once again, we really see that core externalizing its costs onto the periphery.

And we see that both in the sense of on the global stage between countries or between populations, cores and peripheries, but even internally within countries, as we've mentioned in the previous episode, talking about that divide between the core and the periphery, where you have what a lot of people have called the economy's biggest trick.

You know, you socialize failures and privatize profits.

So in 2008, with the financial crash, people were evicted, other banks got bailed out.

In the early stages of COVID, corporations got relief, gig workers were exposed.

Yeah.

You know, in the process of austerity resulting from neoliberalism, social services get cut in order to balance the books, but there's never any consideration of order strike cutting profits.

Yeah.

You know, that's one thing that can never go down.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Like, or even like within,

you know, we all all food come from the soil at some point, right?

But, like,

I can't tell you how many people I know that my family are in agriculture, right, who have died or lost limbs on farms.

The same is true if you're in the mining industry, right?

Like, that's not something that's visible.

You know, you don't like go to the supermarket and buy your bread, right?

And you don't think that someone got their arm in the combine harvester when they were doing the field that went to the flower that made your loaf of bread that cost one dollar

And now that person doesn't have an arm.

It's invisibilized.

Yeah.

I mean, it's the same thing when you see like these natural disasters taking place, right?

Floods or burn-ins, right?

When California is on fire and when Pakistan is completely flooded out, those are the consequences of the actions of corporations, of the actions of this entire global economic system.

And meanwhile, corporations are getting carbon credits to continue doing what they were always doing.

Yeah.

You know, and so the actual consequences of what they're doing, they're paying for carbon credits, but the actual consequences of what they're doing are being paid for by the communities that are displaced by the consequences of this climate change.

Yeah, yeah.

And we never talk about when we talk about migration, right?

Like that's a great, the climate change is a great example that we don't talk about how.

the bulk of people coming to the United States are coming from the places most heavily impacted by climate change.

Yep.

Or like I was in the Marshall Islands a few years ago, and

there will be no more Marshall Islands within our lifetime

because of the consequences that massive corporations have made.

But, like, they don't have any agency.

It made me really like, it was hard because they're doing stuff like they use a

to get it to get around the atolls, right?

They use little like two-stroke outboards and they're trying to build solar canoes instead and solar boats so that it's, it's cleaner energy, right?

And like less than a percent of a percent of the the world's carbon emissions come from the Marshall Islands.

And they're like trying their hardest to do their part to reduce their emissions, but like

they can't make the impact that needs to be made to stop the sea levels rising.

And arguably like when the world had a chance to do so, like you see them speaking at the United Nations and then the UN being like, line has to go up.

Yep.

That means your island has to sink.

And that's why, you know, reform is not and can never be enough, because this is how how the system is designed.

It's designed to push risk downward and outward onto the working class, onto the global south, and onto the next generation.

Because that's another dimension of externalization, right?

Time, even our future gets externalized in a sense.

You know, all of our resources are limited or finite resources that can use up now at an increasing velocity.

Right?

Yeah.

The national debt of some countries is being sunken further and further into now.

Right?

The emissions that send out all those emissions now.

Fossil fuels, you know, all that stuff.

Because we don't have to deal with the consequences.

It's the future that has to deal with the consequences.

As the system digging its own grave.

Because even though the system needs stability, it will sacrifice future stability for present profits.

It will sacrifice nature, which is the basis of the economy.

It will sacrifice nature to the economy in service of the economy.

It will treat nature as disposable and infinite, and something external to the way that we run things as if it's not going to catch up to us.

And so, as collapse will accelerate, as the consequences become more apparent on the sacrifice zones of the periphery, the powers will ben't interested in fixing it.

You know, they're going to fortify themselves against it through border patrols, through climate walls, through militarized disaster response.

They're just going to double down.

Yeah, make it harder and harder to see the consequences of

our excessive consumption of capitalism, like until the levy breaks, I guess.

Literally or metaphorically.

Yep, literally or metaphorically.

And I want people to keep in mind who are listening, you know, this corn periphery isn't just the periphery out there, it's also the periphery within that we're talking about in terms of consequences, the internal dumping grounds, whether it be, you know, indigenous reservations or the neighborhoods of black and brown people or the prisons that often serve as the holding tanks for discontent and for poverty and for all the nasty consequences that society doesn't want to deal with because of the way society has been structured.

Yeah.

Or just like

under the bridge near your house, you know, like we

treat our homes.

Like

San Diego has this particular legislative initiative, which I find like, obviously, it's fucked, but also like it's very,

it's so obvious.

Like they passed a thing called a camping ban, where they're going to make it illegal to be unhoused on the sidewalk.

Like you're like, it's a ban to it's a ban against camping on the sidewalk, right?

And all it does, it doesn't provide housing for people, and thus it doesn't solve the issue.

It moves people.

Our city is very hilly, and we have lots of canyons in which they can't build.

So it moves people into these canyons.

Wow.

And it just makes the same people invisible, right?

Like, that's the goal.

The goal is not to provide any form of solution.

It's just to move these people away so they don't have to be poor in public.

And so the people who

use homes as a vehicle for wealth creation, not as a place for humans to live, don't have to see the consequences of their actions.

Exactly.

It's all about what they want, right?

I mean.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, you know, in a sense,

depending on how you look at it, any one of us can be a core.

And any one of us can be a periphery.

You know, to our rulers, we are all the periphery that they can push their consequences onto.

Um, in another sense, you know, I am part of the periphery, and you are part of the core, James.

Yep, and in another sense, you know, I might be considered part of the core in my own country in some ways because

of my class position, because of my educational background, because of some of the ways that I can be insulated.

Whereas,

you know, other ways, you know, you might be the periphery in the United States to the core, to the elite, to the ruling class.

And so this isn't to diminish the very real differences between the global core and the global periphery.

It's also to make it clear to those of you in the global core that you should be in solidarity with that global periphery because their consequences are ultimately your own.

You know, ultimately, we are all the ones who are going to be holding the costs, cleaning the mess, surviving the fallout.

And I understand how tough it is because when you live with a system that is based on externalization of harm, you can end up lashing out on others as well.

You know,

that logic, that systemic logic becomes internalized, becomes part of how you navigate even your relationships.

But we don't have to accept that way of doing things.

The periphery, regardless of which periphery you're referring to, does hold the potential for change.

And so, you know, in the beginning, when we were speaking of externalization, of economic, in the economic economic dimension specifically, it's important to understand capitalism relies on these flows, these very smooth flows of labor, energy, and resources and data from periphery to core, however you define those terms.

And so when we interrupt those flows, even briefly, we can shake those foundations.

And that sort of approach, that effort to interrupt is really part of what social revolution is about.

It's how we make the changes that we want to see.

Yeah.

You know, I speak of social revolution as not some flashy one-time event or moment in history, but as an ongoing process, as something that is taking place right now at different levels, in different ways all over the world.

And so we can speak of the things we do to oppose the current system, like the strikes and blockades.

that have taken place around the world,

the indigenous land defense struggles that are taking place around around the world, the rent strikes and mutual aid that have taken place around the world,

and then beyond that sort of opposition, talking about the things we do to propose an alternative, to construct the kind of world and the kind of life that we need so we don't have to rely on these systems anymore that exploit us, to make these systems obsolete, to build cooperatives, to build worker control, collectives and disaster response outside of the state, to sort of crack the system system and to create in those cracks the space where a different system, a new life can grow.

Yeah.

To not become one big machine

or one centralized struggle or movement, but to multiply and interconnect and adapt to the niche circumstances we're all dealing with.

Like mycelium, you know, like the mushrooms.

Yeah.

Yeah, like that analogy.

Like it's sort of,

you're like opening a crack thing, paraphrases Zapatista texts, right?

Like, and they have this, either this phrase I like from Suko and Dante Marcos that translates as like,

we don't have to change the world because we're building another one right now.

And, you know, you don't have to, we don't have to conquer.

Like, there's this obsession on the left with like revolution as, like you said, like an act that occurs at a point in time.

Capital R revolution.

Yes.

Yeah.

As opposed to like building the world where the things that we don't wish to see become irrelevant through our actions every day.

Like use the example of people being unhoused, which I mentioned before, right?

Like the way we'd build a world where those people aren't externalized is by not externalizing those people.

Like,

you know, it's not hard to do.

You probably talk to human beings every day anyway.

Like,

just continue to do that.

You know, take your neighbor a sandwich.

And like, that's the revolution that you can build slowly.

And maybe it's not as exciting as like, you know, the one where you,

I've, I've attended the revolutions where people fight against the state, but that you still have to do the hard work.

You still have to do the like day-to-day building of a different way of relating to one another, even in those revolutions where things change quickly and violently.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I mean, even before we get to that point, you know, to be able to change the way we relate to each each other, it starts with mindset, it starts with shifting

our realm of possibilities,

you know, not necessarily killing the memes of capitalism.

And I mean, memes in the sense that Richard Dawkins originally used the term as these cultured ideas that persist, that spread, that adapt.

It's difficult to kill those memes,

but you can replace them with better memes.

And so replacing and popularizing those memes, those ideas, you know, challenging the idea that, you know, rest is laziness, you know, challenging the idea that, you know, the end goal is profit, that there is no other system besides capitalism, that something better isn't on the horizon.

Shifting that sense of reality, I think, is a very important part of the struggle.

And with every act, because I think ideas have to be accompanied by acts, with every act, I think it helps to break the spell, to cut off, to put an end to that externalization.

Because even though capitalism will continue to try to push its harm outward and downward and away from view, we can continue to challenge it inwardly to push our struggle upward and to center our struggle in the center of our view.

So that we can see it, so that we can feel it, and so that we can act against it.

And that's all I have for this episode.

All power to all the people.

Peace.

This is it could happen here.

I'm Garrison Davis.

Today I'm joined by Mia Wong.

I am reporting from the beautiful and sunny People's Republic of New York City, and we are Zoe back.

It is quover.

Dimes Square is on Suicide Watch.

Zomentum is sweeping the nation.

Zoran Mamdani has won the Democratic primary for the mayor of New York City, beating veteran sexual harasser Andrew Cuomo.

It was quite a night in New York last night.

We are recording this Wednesday morning.

The final ranked vote will be done done in about a week, but Cuomo has conceded the race to Zoran, who has declared a pretty decisive victory.

It's been very funny.

Seeing the gnashing and weeping of the Cuomo camp has been very funny.

New York has officially been upgraded from a tier two to a tier 1.5 Chinese city.

Give it another decade,

it will have entered Chinese civilization.

The vibes are good.

The vibes are good.

Well, the only difference is that now we will have an actually communist government in a city instead of the fake state capitalist governments of the Chinese mega cities.

Objectively more communist.

1.5 Chinese city government.

An American Boji lie.

It was a pretty exciting night in New York last night.

I, and many people, were not expecting a clear result so soon.

I think Cuomo conceded around 10.30 as the vote was still coming in.

But it it was pretty clear that Zoron did a like very, very impressive, very impressive sweep, really solid turnout across the boroughs.

Just to like get a sense of like where we were at, I got to announce to a pretty, a pretty large room full of trans people at the Metropolitan Bar that Cuomo conceded to Zoran and Zoron has won.

And I had not felt better in months.

It was really invigorating.

This was like the first like ray of hope in a political sense that I've, that has been like so deeply felt.

Nothing ever happens, Camp is finally, finally taking it.

So Jover for Nothing Ever Happens.

The sheer like joy and excitement being in like a room of like a hundred a hundred queer people as Cuomo gets defeated.

and Zoron securing the primary,

it was just invigorating.

In many many ways, this feels a lot bigger than even like AOC's win a few years ago.

And it feels so much more real than the Sanders campaign really ever did, because New York is

such a condensed, concentrated area.

Now it has not quite an inevitability, but

a pretty strong certainty of what's going to happen come November in the general election.

Yeah, and I think the thing that's maybe in some ways the biggest deal about this is that New York was like the capital of the giant sort of right-wing backlash inside the Democratic Party to 2020.

Yeah.

Right.

Like this is the city that elected Eric Adams in 2021, right?

Like it just straight up a cop.

It was ruled for like four years by just like this unhinged, corrupt alliance of like fucking real estate developers and like unhinged right-wing billionaires and the cops who ran this really, really effective sort of politics of like the demonization of unhoused people and like anti-immigrant politics and

the shift right in this in the New York Democratic Party like single-handedly shifted the entire country to the right.

You could literally see where the New York media market was in the 2022 elections.

You could see on the map who was getting the news because it was so right-wing.

And that's just broken.

That whole thing, like this place, which was like the capital of the counter-revolution broke.

And that whole tide, like you can, it's, you know, in the same way that like Huntress Thompson talked about how you could see, like, you could see where the tide of the 60s broke standing in Vegas.

Like, sitting here right now, you can see the place where the tide of that right-wing surge in New York broke.

And it was last night.

We saw their high points.

Yeah.

They couldn't elect the fucking sexual predator.

That was as far as they could go.

A Cuomo, too.

Like, like,

I know some people are slightly annoyed about like the outsized influence of the New York mayoral election affecting everybody who's like online and cares about politics in the United States and even abroad.

But this is

like, not only is New York like the biggest city in the country, this is like more so a representative battle for the future of the party and like what the future of democratic politics, not just the Democratic Party, but literally like democracies and like what the future of politics in this country is going to be.

is kind of emblematic over how this race went.

Are we going to go back to like the same old establishment, Dem party stuff, Clintons, Cuomo's, Obama, Biden, Harris?

Or are we actually going to legitimately chart a new course forward to counter this fascist element taking power across the country?

And against nearly all odds and like $30 million,

the underdogs actually won and pulled it off really strongly.

And this really is like the battle for the future of the party.

Early turnout was massive for this primary.

In the final three days of early voting, we saw the youngest demographic of voters come out in high, high numbers.

One quarter of early voters were first-time Democratic primary participants, and young voters between the ages of 25 and 34 made up the largest share of early turnout.

And this was all up against the entire forces of the Democratic Party establishment coming together in the past few months just specifically to stop Momdani from taking the primary election.

There was $25 million of super PAC funding behind Andrew Cuomo, which is the largest in New York City mayoral history.

This PAC was backed by Michael Bloomberg, DoorDash, Bill Ackman, a Trump funder.

And this PAC allowed Cuomo backers to spend three times as much money than what Cuomo's actual campaign legally can.

In comparison, Momdani's PAC had just $1.2 million plus $500,000 in anti-Cuomo spending from the Working Families Party.

In an attempt to seal the deal, the Cuomo team got the coveted Bill Clinton endorsement, really, really forming the touchers alliance with Cuomo and Clinton.

Bill Clinton, Bill Clinton, there's one more sex pest for you to endorse.

It's time for you to endorse Donald Trump.

One moral job.

That really was like emblematic of the type of Democratic Party that Momdani was up against, right?

And the one that working people of New York and people around the country were hoping might finally get defeated after it's won one over on Sanders for the past like eight years.

And last night it finally happened.

Yeah, and I also want to say like this is not just

when we're talking about the sort of political apprehension of the Democratic Party being deployed in support of Cuomo.

It wasn't just like the DoorDash guys like bringing out their checkbook.

It was like the actual internal political machines of a whole bunch of very, very important and influential local and sort of mid-level political officials threw their entire political machines behind Cuomo and then got fucking rolled in ways that are just absolutely hysterical.

Entire political machines basically just got annihilated trying to stop this.

It was, it, it reminds me in a lot of ways of like the way that like a bunch of the old machines broke in in Chicago with with brandon johnson where like you're like mike madigan making one last appearance the most powerful figure in illinois politics for 30 years and just gets crushed in that election so this was this was both a money effort and a we're using our political machines on the ground to try to do this and they fucking lost

and it rules They were photoshopping images of Zoron to make him look more brown and Muslim.

They were making his beard longer.

They were making his skin and his hair darker.

Like they were pulling out all of the stops, and it didn't work.

It was like Clinton 2008, like Barack Hussein, Obama, like birther conspiracy shit.

Yeah, like that's the last time I remember this party being this racist, like very, very specifically in these lines.

And it failed, and it didn't work.

It failed.

Yeah, we'll talk about some of the actual results and Zoran's campaign itself after this break.

All right, we are back.

It's a beautiful sunny day in New York.

It's actually way too hot.

There's a massive heat wave

going through the entire East Coast.

New York has been like 100 degrees the past few days.

Thank God it was 100 degrees on the day of the election.

It kept all those Cuomo supporters home.

We're calling him Mandate of Heaven Mandani.

Good stuff.

So

let's talk about the actual results so far.

So

as of this morning, Wednesday morning, we got 93% of the vote in on the first rank.

Mundani has 43.5% versus Cuomo's 36.4.

And Zoron ally, Brad Lander, with 11.3, followed by a whole bunch of others.

Now, really, as soon as numbers started coming in, after the early vote, which we expected would lean in favor of Zoron, but after more and more results started coming in, Manhattan started looking more and more orange.

And that's the color the Times is using for Zoron.

And this was the first sign for me that Zora might be having a pretty good night because people were expecting that pretty big chunks of Manhattan and certainly Staten Island and the Bronx would be going towards Cuomo decisively.

Or at least

if this was going to be Cuomo's night, that's what we would be seeing.

And that's not what happened.

The northern tip of Staten Island leaning towards Mamdani and really most of Manhattan except for the upper west side and the upper east side went to Zoron and that is like super super i guess like surprising but like positive surprise like surprisingly this is this is like this is great yeah like a really really strong night yeah one of the most interesting trends of this was that mandami just just absolutely annihilated like every asian district up up 15 up 15 and not

okay so you would kind of expect this in south asian districts he he went in to a bunch of what are generally pretty conservative like like Chinese districts and like Queens and shit

and just fucking rolled them.

Yeah.

Like in like South Brooklyn, like a very, very powerful sort of like right-wing Chinese political machine like went to war against them, just got annihilated, right?

The Asian vote in general had kind of been trending right in the last half a decade based on sort of like anti-immigrant shit, anti-homeless shit, and all of that just like instantly pivoted.

Everything Everything south of Astoria and Queens just full, full Zoron.

Yeah, and like just rolled these districts.

And I think this is a thing where I think we're going to talk more about the ICE stuff later, but I genuinely think part of what we're starting to see here is like, Brad Lander, who

MVP Brad Lander, honestly, like a critical part of this.

Kudos to him.

Like absolutely.

Like we certainly have different opinions on some key issues, but he really pulled out the stops to make sure that Cuomo does not get in and helped Mamdani defend against some pretty, pretty horrific Islamophobic attacks.

Yeah, and like, and that alliance, I think, was actually really, really important because it meant that the kind of like left flank of the liberals and the progressives and sort of social democrats weren't fighting each other, which has been what's happening in like fucking every other city, is that these two factions go to war and then like just the fucking sex predators win the election because of it.

And here

you get a very, very important strategic alliance that allows a bunch of people to vote for Momdani who wouldn't have.

And this, this sort of alliance that they forged here was

just like stunningly successful, basically, like outperformed expectations basically everywhere.

I think this is also a kind of decisive anti-ice thing because both Momdani and Lander have been actually straight up on the front lines of like anti-ice stuff.

Lander famously got arrested for trying to get in the way of a just hideously illegal disappearance of one of his constituents and got fucking arrested for it.

And I think that stuff, we're seeing the political impacts of everyone being like, holy shit, they're trying to deport like every non-white person in this country.

Yeah.

Momdani up six points with the Hispanic, up five with white, plus 15 Asian.

Cuomo is up 18% with the black vote.

And Cuomo like underperformed there too.

He did underperform.

Yeah.

One thing that's interesting is the medium income levels.

Momdani did better with middle class and high income vote.

Middle class up 10, high income up 13, whereas Cuomo did better up 13 with lower income, which, I mean, this is like some classic, we see this a lot in like national elections where like people vote against their own interests.

This is weird.

This is like what the Republican Party gets so much of their support from.

Some of this is also like education bracket difference.

Yeah, and I think some of it also is like a lot of the voters who would have voted Lander and would not have supported Mamdani were given permission to back him and that boosted his vote share a lot.

Yes, but like in terms of like why lower income is swinging towards Cuomo, specifically people making under 50K a year

swinging more towards Cuomo, even though Zoran is running a campaign specifically for those people that is also largely up in the Bronx.

I will also say like the other thing that's very weird about the way these are tabulated is because it's tabulated by area, not by the actual people yes correct which means you can get these things where like you see this with trump sometimes where like it looks like he's doing really well in like a district with like a really with like really low median income but what's happening is like every single rich person in that district voted and then no one else did yeah so the numbers are a bit weird when it when you're looking at these sort of like precinct counts yeah votes but yeah it's it's been a i don't know it's a it is a constant trend in the barrier although again this is another thing that was actually very very different from chicago where in chicago it was like basically pure income line for Brandon Johnson, the sort of like vaguely left person.

There is like New York is a very like middle-class city in a lot of ways.

Like there's a lot of people in the middle class bracket, a lot of people in the lower class bracket as well.

But in terms of like medium income levels, there's like a huge, huge number of like middle-class voters specifically.

Like the vote map for the middle income is so much bigger.

I think it is worth highlighting what made Zoran's campaign special, right?

Like people are probably pretty familiar with like the slick videos, which, yeah, he was really good at making videos.

He is a great communicator.

Probably his like biggest, like biggest strength is his ability to be like personable and is just a pretty good public speaker.

It's great at communication.

His mom's a...

relatively well-known filmmaker.

It's not super surprising that

he put a lot of work into making making sure his online and TV ads were top-notch.

One of the more unique things that he did is a huge focus on multi-language outreach, which like obviously New York is a city of like dozens and dozens and dozens of languages.

And the Cuomo campaign did not focus on that, but this was a huge, a huge focus of Zoron's campaign.

Like when you signed up for phone banking, you got to go through a massive drop-down menu of languages to phone bank in.

And Zoron himself was like speaking multiple languages on the campaign trail.

He had a huge, huge volunteer ground game.

It was canvassing, door knocks, phone banking.

My apartment had people stop in multiple times in the past week alone.

The biggest focus of his campaign itself was a focus on affordability.

I want to play an ad that started running on TV and online about two weeks ago.

This is one of his like less personal ads, right?

Like as opposed to his ads where he's like walking around New York, talking to people, like addressing straight to camera, that kind of stuff, which has kind of been the staple of his campaign.

So, like, this ad is, is not that.

It is more of like a classic political ad, but I think it still hits really hard.

And, like, this, this one, like, kind of brainwormed itself into my head because of how like concise it is.

And it hits so many things that even because of like the last like general election, right?

Like the 2024 presidential, it reflects the things that a lot of voters are concerned about, which is affordability, even if that means they will vote against their interests and vote in support of these like crazy tariffs.

But I'm going to play this 30-second out here.

you ready for a city we can afford?

Are you ready to win this race?

Paid for guys around for it.

So that was the main ad that's been going across TV the past two weeks.

This is this is his like final final push.

And it addresses this like a conception of New York that's definitely been in my mind ever since I was a kid.

I always thought this is a city you can only live in if you're very rich, if you're well off.

And like upon visiting here for the first time, I just realized how much that isn't true, how much this is like actually a working class city, how many people keep this massive like concrete machine running who do not live in like a Manhattan penthouse, obviously.

And yes, it can be challenging, but we've like almost abandoned this place as like a zone of combat, as like a place to actually build like an affordable, an affordable, stable life.

And to see a candidate just directly address this is so invigorating.

He ran on freezing the rent, free buses, a pilot program for city-run grocery stores, free to low-cost child care, raising minimum wage.

And he didn't cave or waver on controversial issues or apologize or redact for past statements.

He got really good at deflecting when people were asked him about like previous statements about how, you know, the NYPD is terrible.

He did really good about moving towards talking about how NYPD should not be handling people in like mental health crises, how there should be other public safety workers who can help people in distress who are not the NYPD, and just a very, very slick job handling some like massive, massive amounts of anti-woke attacks referencing like the 2020 era of politics.

Let's go on a break and then talk about his acceptance speech and the reaction from the National Democrat and Republican parties.

Okay,

we are so

back.

So the past few months, Democrats have been asking this question, like,

how do we reach young voters?

How do we reach the young white male vote?

We need like a Joe Rogan of the left, all these types of crazy things.

And you had this guy, Zorod, who started to get massively popular with young people, including young men.

And you saw this entire party mobilized to stop him, to suppress any movement that Zoran was able to make.

And David Hogg, who is currently also being rat fucked by the Democratic National Committee,

has been campaigning with Zoron the past few weeks.

And he said a few days ago, the same establishment that is spending millions to destroy Zoron will say in a few months that we need to spend millions on polling and testing to win back young people.

Open your goddamn eyes.

It's free.

And yeah, he's right.

This is the solution.

The solution is staring them in the face and they were wanting to stop it.

Young people are begging you to co-opt them and they won't do it because they don't want.

They would rather have Nazis and 1% higher taxes.

They want to be co-opted.

And actually fight for something, like actually have something to strive for.

And that's something that the Democrats have been so resistant to the past eight years.

Even Joe Biden's campaign wasn't like fighting for anything.

It was to like return to normal.

Kamala Harris's campaign wasn't really fighting for anything either.

It was just to stop Donald Trump.

And this is like, this campaign wasn't just about beating Cuomo.

It was also about like envisioning an actually positive future of the city.

And I was legitimately surprised that Cuomo conceded so early on in his speech.

He said, quote, tonight was not our night.

Tonight is his night.

He deserved it.

He won.

And from the moves that Cuomo is making, it seems like he's probably not going to run as an independent in the general like he maybe have been planning to if it was closer.

It does not seem to be going that direction.

It seems like he's kind of realized that his career is finished.

Yeah, he got rolled.

Go back to the suburbs, motherfucker.

Chuck Schumer called Zoran Wednesday morning and posted, quote, I've known Zoron Mamdani since we worked together to provide debt relief for thousands of beleaguered taxi drivers and fought to stop a fracked gas plant in Astoria.

He ran an impressive campaign that connected with New Yorkers about affordability, fairness, and opportunity.

I spoke with him this morning, and I'm looking forward to getting together soon.

Hakeem Jeffries said, congratulations to Zaran Mamdani on a decisive primary victory.

Assemblyman Mamdani ran a strong campaign that relentlessly focused on the economy and bringing down the high cost of living in New York City.

We spoke this morning and planned to meet in central Brooklyn shortly.

The top dogs are bowing down.

All these Chuck Shuberts are just straight up, please don't primary me because AOC is going to beat him by 30.

He's going to get primary.

Like, he's done.

He's going to get obliterated.

Like,

I was expecting slightly more resistance.

And it seems like parts of the Democrats have, like, realized that this actually is the future of the party now, and there's no use fighting it anymore.

This is the way to go.

Yes, it goes against what all like the consultants are saying, right?

To be like, you know, the Democrats went too woke.

We went too far to the left.

We have to return to the center, even though that's what we've been doing for the Democratic Party for eight years.

This election shows how much of that is like a complete bullshit lie.

That no, it's not about going too far to left.

It's about actually wanting to fight for something real.

And I'm kind of surprised that the, these, these two top dogs are giving in to the zomentum.

I think also, and this is the thing like someone of my friends brought up, is that like, Momdaghny like isn't

really like AOC.

No, no, no.

And this is something like very, very important for like New York politics, which is like, he's not like, like, obviously politically he is, but like, he's not a a complete outsider to new york politics all these people know him they know him from like legislative shit right and he has like relationships with them in a way that would be very very different if it if he was like i don't know just like some like a complete outsider who'd been like a protest leader or whatever

he has he has proven himself he has like tense relations but like yeah but like like he like these people know him and that's something that can matter a lot in terms of like how these reactions play out and in terms of like how desperate they are to stop him.

The attorney general of New York was making like Obama 2008 references, being like, this was the energy in New York last night.

And I wasn't around for the 2008 presidential election.

I mean, I was alive.

I just don't remember because I was also in Canada.

But it did feel pretty exuberant last night walking around Brooklyn.

And like, this absolutely still is like a rejection of the Democratic Party establishment.

That's what these results show.

And we have to like claim a firm victory now, like hard line

with such a strong fist that like any potential fuckery in the future, whether it's from like other Dems or from the Republicans, like from Trump, right?

Like they're obviously willing to arrest the New York City controller.

So like any potential fuckery needs to look so much worse.

People have to close ranks around Zoron like immediately and like strengthen him.

He needs, he needs to be like the face.

Like if they're going to take this guy down, he needs to be like the face of everything for like the next while.

We're sort of seeing like slightly smaller sharks like trailing around the wake of the shark.

Like you were talking about the Democratic Attorney General Letitia James, who gave a really, really compelling speech.

Like I actually think she's like a better speaker than any of the people involved in this race.

And she is like, she is 100% primary in the governor like next year, not 100%, but like probably primary in the governor next year.

Like this is, you know, like people, people are sort of, people have been flocking around this for a while.

And I think, I don't know,

this is some real does it take a weatherman to see which way the winds are blowing shit.

Like, they are,

they are, they are, they are living in fear.

They are,

they are bending the knee.

They are, et cetera, et cetera.

Very funny.

And now the Republican Party is going to be on the attack.

The batons being passed from the establishment Dems to the Republicans

to try to take down Zoron, or at least paint Zoron as this new, like, radical face of the Democratic Party.

Like, like, racism levels are gonna, they're gonna reach never-before-seen heights.

It's gonna be like post-9-11 all over again.

Yeah.

The National Republican Congressional Committee is already calling Zoron the new face of the Democratic Party, which, yeah, he should be.

That's like,

fucking bring it.

If you want just like a breath of fresh air, I would recommend watching some financial news from

Wednesday morning.

Oh, it's so good.

Hot comie summer, baby!

Hot comie summer!

Woo!

I am, am.

Executions in Central Park are about to begin.

The Workers' Republic is established.

The Commonwealth of Labor rules.

We're waiting for Chairman Mamdani to make the final call.

Lists are being made.

Only you can form the Soviets.

Seize your workplaces.

The time is now.

I do want to play a brief click from CNBC.

If you've seen

what Batman is up against in Gotham and what

the guy running from Air is up against?

That's what it reminds me of.

They're taking Wall Streeters and making them walk out onto the ice in the East River

and then they fall through.

I mean, there is a class warfare that's going that

way.

Eat the rich type.

There's a division within the Democratic Party.

Woo!

That's right.

There is a division.

Long live the revolution, baby.

Eat it, Rich.

There is a division of the Democratic Party.

Walk them out onto the ice.

We're sending them onto the ice.

Zoron, hand in hand with Bane and Killian Murphy, are going to be sending them on to the Hudson.

The spirit of Occupy lives.

Oh my God.

Bill Ackman, crow and Trump backer.

Said, quote, I was a bit depressed when I woke up this morning, but now I'm optimistic.

I have a great idea on New York City, and I will share it as soon as I can.

We are looking into legal issues.

Good luck.

Good luck, Bill.

Have fun out there.

Oh, no, they're going to wait.

They're just going to do birth race again.

Who cares?

Oh, no.

Bring it.

Bring it.

I will say, like, this, this coverage, like,

people don't understand how unhinged his coverage is going to be.

Like, in Chicago,

when Brandon Johnson won the election, Brandon Johnson is like significantly to the right of momdani right when brandon johnson won the election the the chicago press went so insane that all of them pretended to be pro-immigrant oh yeah like do you understand how unhinged the press has to get here because like like one of johnson's things he was like over like immigrants here and he was like is the immigrant the shelters are being put in where substandard and people are getting sick and like we had the best coverage of immigration issues under biden in the country because specifically that was the thing they were using to attack him i'm super curious what the times is going to to do because like they've also pulled out all the stops the past the past few weeks to try to try to stop Zoran.

It's going to be unhinged.

The wind's blowing in his direction now, though.

Like I don't know what they're going to do.

I don't know.

Like I think that specific class of people is just going to hate him until the end.

Like I think I think like

David Brooks is going to be writing columns about how there are like pogroms going on like on the streets.

Like Brett Stevens is going to be like, I don't know.

They're going to call it like super Lebanon.

Like it's going to be like levels of unhinge no one's ever seen before.

Now, speaking of the Times, Obama's chief strategist was quoted in a New York Times article Wednesday morning, quote, there is no doubt that Trump and Republicans will try and seize on him as a kind of exemplar of what the Democratic Party stands for.

The thing is, he seems both principled and agile, and deft enough to confront those sorts of confrontational plays.

I do want to read off from a Fox News screenshot this morning showcasing Zoron's horrific, terrifying communist platform, which includes housing, freezing rent, building affordable housing, creating city-owned grocery stores,

fare-free buses, raising the minimum wage to $30 by 2030, and LGBTQIA plus protections, expanding and protecting gender-affirming care citywide, making NYC an LGBTQ AI plus sanctuary city, and proofing NYC to end ICE cooperation.

Hell yeah.

Thank you.

Thank you, Fox News, for that great list of reasons.

It's so great to like Soran Mamdani.

I think I think it's actually genuinely really important because he's like the only Democratic candidate in fucking ages who actively campaigned on like putting more funding in the trans healthcare, like $65 million of funding.

Being pro-trans wins, being anti-trans gets your ass kicked back to the suburbs, like fucking Cuomo, eat shit, eat shit.

democratic strategists, fuck off and die.

Eat shit.

You will be the ones in the fucking graves that you're digging for us.

Like, fuck off.

We have dug your electoral graves.

This is why when I was at this like trans open mic at Metropolitan last night, like the whole room just like lit up in cheers because yeah, like we've been, we've been dealing with the past like six months, this idea that like trans rights is like the thing that's killing democratic politics.

And fucking no, it isn't.

Yeah, and

Cuomo Red is a fucking transphobe because he is.

And it didn't work.

This is the joint feminist transgender victory over the forces of the TERF sex predator.

Fuck him.

To wrap up my stuff here, I do want to play one minute from Zorant's acceptance speech, which I think speaks for itself.

And it's where the mayor will use their power to reject Donald Trump's fascism

to stop mass ICE agents from deporting our neighbor

and to govern our city as a model for the Democratic Party

a party

where we fight for working people with no apology.

A life of dignity should not be reserved for a fortunate few.

It should be one that city government guarantees for each and every New Yorker.

If this campaign has demonstrated anything to the world,

it is that our dreams can become reality.

I sure hope this is the model for the Democratic Party going forward.

Mia, you wanted to close on a sad note?

Yeah, I was really depressed this entire night because I remember feeling a lot like this in like 2023.

In Chicago.

Yeah, because this happened in Chicago.

Yeah.

Well, not this, but a version of this.

Yeah.

And like, obviously, Brandon Johnson was like significantly to the right of like everything that's been happening in New York.

Like, not, he wasn't like a right-winger, but he was like, you know, like the local DSA had conflict with him from other stuff.

But like, you know, I remember feeling like this.

And then one year later, like, SWAT teams like deployed by the mayor that he claimed he didn't send were beating up art students outside, like literally in the middle of downtown for trying to have a Palestine encampment.

And, you know, like, my bitter cynical personally got rat fucked by the mayor's office.

Yeah.

Like

cynicism on this is like, it's going to be weird.

There's going to be a lot of shit that sucks.

This, this guy is, like, advocated defunding the police and has attacked like the NYPD for years.

And now he's ostensibly going to be in charge of it.

And he's not going to be able to abolish the NYPD.

That's not going to happen.

No.

So there's going to be a degree of

mortal crisis.

He's going to have to work against some of the things that he's stated he believes in.

Yeah.

And on a structural level, there's a really significant problem here, which is that the moment you become the leader of a capitalist city, right?

It becomes your job to keep the economy running.

And the problem is that

keeping a capitalist economy running means you have to you your job is now maintaining growth for the for this economy right and maintaining growth through the economy means figuring out how to how to have corporations continue to make more and more money and that's not compatible with being a socialist and everyone who has ever tried to like deal with this crisis you either like you you you have two paths it's like one

you become a capitalist, right?

And we see this fucking all over the place, right?

It's like, you know, it's, it's, it's Barcelona and Camus coming into power, which is like this sort of like left-wing council kind of like Bookchinite thing.

And then they immediately start like evicting migrants, right?

Or two,

or two, you actually do the thing.

You do the thing.

You do, you do the actual socialism.

And we fucking, we like, you know, this is, this is the beginning of the end of fascism in a way where we see a fundamental change in the structure of our economic system.

And that can be the outcome of this, but we have to build it, not him.

Like,

I think the most he's going to be be able to do is provide a bit of a safer zone for us to operate in in New York.

Yeah, yeah.

He's going to be introducing more like social democratic like policies.

Like he's going to make the city financially easier to live in.

Yeah, things will suck less, which is good.

He is going to, to the extent of his power, fight against Trump's efforts to deport your neighbors.

And like that is...

So much better than both what Cuomo would do and Eric Adams, who is actively collaborating with the Trump administration.

So this man's not going to actually be the Lisa Elghee.

He's not actually going to be

the guy that ushers in the Red Revolution, which is not even something I necessarily want.

But I think what he can do is make this an actually better place to live right now.

And specifically make it a better place to live as the national politics in this country are controlled by a fascist and a cabinet full of fascists.

Yeah, and he can make the largest city in the country the rock upon which the tide of fascism breaks.

And that matters.

That does.

Well, that does it for us today.

Greatest city in the world.

Tier 1.5 Chinese city.

Let's go.

Oh,

who's got ED?

That's not how we start these episodes.

Wow.

That's how we're starting this one, Garrison.

It's already begun.

Welcome to Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what it means for you.

Yay!

That's right, motherfuckers.

That's Robert Evans.

I'm Garrison Davis.

I'm also joined by Mia Wong and James Stout.

This week, we are covering the week of June 18 to June 25.

That's right.

A good week where nothing but good things happened.

Assuming you are someone who manufactures 30-pound gravity utilizing bunker-busting bombs.

30-pound.

That's quite a small one.

30,000.

30,000.

30,000.

Sorry.

Anyway, we're talking about Iran.

We're going to start with Iran.

We're going to start with Iran's nuclear program.

And I think we should start.

We need to start by giving the CoolZone Media Cool Kids Guide for How to Enrich Uranium.

Oh, no.

I don't want to get arrested, Robert.

Now, Mia, it's not illegal to tell people how to enrich uranium.

Google will do it.

And I assume they're correct.

Robert, it is legal for white people to do this.

I don't know if it's legal for me to do this.

It's okay.

It's okay.

It's okay.

Look, if I've learned one thing, it's that it's okay for white people to talk about any kind of bomb on the internet.

So we'll be fine.

I'll be fine.

That's what matters.

Robert, do I have kidnapping insurance?

Do we have an extraction team for me when I go to ice prison?

No, we don't.

We have an extraction team, but it's not the cool kind.

Anyway, so let's talk about how to make nukes.

Because one thing you'll constantly hear whenever the U.S.

or Israel talks about Iran's nuclear program is that they're just three to eight months away, right?

Or weeks away.

Weeks away.

This is what you'll hear sometimes.

It's just technically, if three months is a number of weeks away, whatever.

And they've been saying saying this for longer than I've been alive.

Yeah, for longer than Robert and I have been alive.

Here's the thing.

It's technically correct.

Not in a way that like is correct in the way they are trying to push it, but in a way that is like literally correct, which is that Iran paused their nuclear program in 2003.

The current Ayatollah has not given the command to start it up again.

There is no evidence that it is currently operative.

Back in March, U.S.

military intelligence, the DIA, concluded that there was no indication Iran had decided or attempted to restart their nuclear program.

That said, it has been true since 2003 that they are potentially about three months or so away from having a nuke because of the way that making nukes work.

So in order to make the standard kind of nuclear weapon that we're talking about here, you need a bunch of enriched uranium.

right and there's two kinds of uranium there's 235 and there's 238 and naturally they always show up together and there's always a lot more 238 than 235.

And 238 is fucking bullshit if you're trying to make yourself a bomb, right?

You want the 235.

And I'm not going to go into a ton of detail about like how you do this, but because of just the nature of how uranium-235 and 238 work, they're chemically identical.

So you can't use chemical reactions to separate them.

right so you can't use any of the easy ways that you would like separate one from the other in order to concentrate the kind of uranium that they want The only way to actually do that is by using a centrifuge, which is it, in short, uses the magic of spinning in order to separate out the uranium that you want from their uranium that's not very useful to you.

And Iran has a substantial quantity of like 60% enriched uranium, which is basically one step away from 90%, which is like what you need to actually build the bomb that they need.

And they've had a shitload of this uranium sitting around for a while, right?

Because it keeps well.

And theoretically, if they were to start their program up again, it would be theoretically possible to enrich it in fairly short order to the concentration that you need, right?

And at that point, once you have a sufficient quantity, and you'll hear slightly different numbers, but generally agreed that they have a sufficient quantity of uranium that is fairly enriched, that if they were to finish the process, they could make somewhere between like eight to 10 warheads with it, right?

Like something, somewhere in that vicinity, and they could have a functional warhead within a matter of weeks after enriching, because enriching the uranium is the hard part.

Once you've done that, it's very easy to make a nuclear weapon, right?

Sufficiently skilled people could do it with like fairly minimal technology if they had, like getting the enriched uranium is the hard part.

So it's technically true that Iran is that you know, close to having a weapon.

They have been since 2003.

But the more important part of the story is that they have not been working on a weapon.

And there's no evidence, even the DIA concluded in March that they were not actively working on a nuclear weapon.

So what's actually been going on here is that while the Ayatollah has not reauthorized the program in quite some time, pressure has been, it's been generally agreed by people watching Iranian politics that pressure has been building on him.

in order to reauthorize the program, right?

There's a good CBS News article on this that notes that the U.S.

intelligence community assessment stated that there was an erosion of a decades-long taboo on discussing nuclear weapons in public, brought on by all of the pressure against Iran by Israel, right?

In other words, the more Israel and the United States threaten and actually do bomb Iran, the more public support there is and

the more acceptable it becomes to talk about restarting the program, right?

Because continuing to bomb and attack them makes the case very strongly that, well, we probably need one of these fucking things, right?

Because like other, like otherwise they're simply simply not going to stop.

And that's been the lesson of the 21st century, which is if you are a country that has beef with the United States or any other nuclear power, the safest thing to do is get a nuke and then get more nukes as quickly as possible, right?

So that's the situation that we're in.

Iran has not moved any closer to having a nuclear weapon over the last 20-some years, but because they've got this uranium, you can always technically say, well, they could be months away, right?

So this all leads us up to last week's strikes on Iran.

These were using a wing of B-2 bombers.

There were actually quite, there was quite a few aircraft involved.

Prior to the bombing attack, there was a lot of discussions like the United States preparing for much more extensive action in Iran because we flew all of these different like refueling planes all around the world and were like setting up very clearly this like massive set of infrastructure to refuel and keep a bunch of planes in the air.

Now, the reality is that all of these refueling planes and whatnot were part of this bombing mission.

And the bombing mission did not just include the seven bombers that actually struck Iran, but another wing of B-2 bombers that flew in the opposite direction as part of a feint, as well as fighter jets and recon planes that were necessary to help set up and protect the whole apparatus that we were setting up to get these seven B-2s to the target area, right?

Now, The actual mission was about 37 hours, which is not the longest mission B-2 crews have flown.

That was 44 hours and it was over Afghanistan in 2001.

And keep a pin in that because we will be talking about how successful that mission was because there's some similarities between it and what was done in Iran.

Now, the B-2s that we flew over Iran were armed with these big 30,000-pound bunker-busting bombs.

And we'll talk about these as well in a while, but I want to, I found, there's a very interesting article on CNN politics by Michael Williams that interviews one of the guys who was part of the longest B-2 mission, that mission over Afghanistan, who talked about like what you have to do in order to carry out a mission like this.

And I want to bring it up because, you know, in the middle of this very shameful episode for the United States, it reminds me of what makes me proud of this country.

And what makes me proud of this country is our tendency to dose bomber pilots with massive quantities of amphetamines so that they can be absolutely spun off their asses when bombing a foreign country.

And that's exactly how you get bomber teams over to a country like Iran for 37 hours of flight time is everybody is prescribed amphetamines and they are high as shit.

They are pissing in Ziploc bags full of kiddie litter.

They've got a chemical toilet in the back.

They're just spun off of their asses, pissing into cat litter.

And that's how strikes like this are managed, which I think is beautiful.

Yeah, except for the whole, you know, Trump starting a little war aspect of it.

Yeah.

Sure, sure.

The massive civilian casualties are always a tragedy.

Yeah, the death of innocent people.

But, you know, it also, it was from fighter pilots that we get swinger culture.

And it's from fighter pilots and swinger culture that we get popularized amphetamines in the United States.

And without that, you know, I don't know.

We actually probably wouldn't miss out on much that was very good.

No.

But the 70s would have been different.

I don't think the value was lost.

It might have been better.

Yeah, it might have been better.

I don't know.

I feel like Jefferson airplane wouldn't have been as good.

And maybe they'd have been called something else.

Jefferson Tray.

Yeah, maybe they'd have been called something else.

So the primary munition that these B-2s were supposed to be dropping over Iran, and the whole reason why the United States was needed because israel had carried out a bunch of strikes on iranian nuclear facilities yeah but basically iran being intelligent knew that like well they're gonna bomb these facilities like as long as they exist and it's very difficult to get like these centrifuges made right like that that's the hardest part of getting a nuclear weapon is getting the equipment that will allow you to enrich uranium and so it's very precious and you can't you don't just have you can't just remake it super easily so iran buried this shit right um they had a number of different sites, which were hit by both the U.S.

and Israel, the most deeply buried of which was at a place called Fordo.

And the actual facilities were buried underneath like the ridge of a mountain beneath 90 meters or about 300 feet of rock, right?

And we have this tendency in the West, in part because of generations of like military industry propaganda, and in part because the Air Force really wants you to believe this, that bombs are a lot more powerful than they are.

Now, bombs are great at blowing blowing up buildings that are just hanging around on the surface of the earth.

And they're great at killing people.

They're great at killing civilians, people who are not, you know, armored or defended against them.

They're awesome at that.

You know what bombs suck at?

Is going more than a couple of feet below the earth.

They're terrible at it.

Even really big bombs, even the scariest bombs we've ever made, absolute dog shit at getting through, especially like stone and rock.

And so Israel was like, we don't have the capacity.

We don't have the technology to actually like crack a facility like Fordo.

The only thing that can is these bombs that can only be carried by the B-2, which are these 30,000-pound bunker busters, right?

And the question that comes up then is like, okay, well, this Fordo is 90 meters, it was beneath 90 meters of rock.

How deep can these GBU-57s, these massive ordnance penetrator bombs, which had not been used in combat before, how deep can these fuckers go, right?

That seems like a simple question.

You will usually see most of the graphics on the news will show that it penetrates 60 meters, right, or 200 feet, and then it detonates, right?

Which, you know, could do damage to a facility that's buried deeper, right?

If you're detonating it like 60 meters down and it goes down 90 meters, that explosion could do enough extra damage that could damage a facility that's just like another 30 meters below, right?

Theoretically.

However, that doesn't tell the full story.

And

I'm very indebted in this part to an NPR article by Joff Brumfeld, who did actually like the math, right?

So we figured out a long time ago when we started bombing things, there's like a mathematical equation to how far a bomb that's a given weight and dropped from a given height and has a given explosive payload can penetrate through different kinds of substrates, right?

That you can just kind of plug that equation in.

And yeah, I want to quote from Jeff's article right now

because it does a very good job of like looking at kind of why this was sort of a dog shit plan from the start.

I went back to take a look at the math from those early studies and and I found it was actually straightforward.

The so-called penetration equations have existed since the 1960s and depend on a limited number of factors, including the shape of the nose cone, the weight and diameter of the weapon, the speed at which it hits the ground, and crucially the type of earth it gets dropped on.

It depends enormously on the kind of rock, says Raymond Gene Laws, the professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of the original authors of the 2005 National Academic Study on Earth Penetrators.

When I ran the calculations using a key equation from that study, I found that the GBU-57 could go up to 80 meters underground if it was dropped in silty clay.

In medium-strength rock, things looked far different.

The GBU-57 could only go around 7.9 meters beneath the earth.

So that's not nearly the 60 meters that you're seeing claimed on most, and it's nowhere close to 90, right?

And there's a good amount of data.

We already have, Trump obviously claimed as soon as we did this bombing run, because we, you know, dropped a fairly heavy cluster of these bombs, 12, on Fordo.

And Trump's claim was that, like, yeah, it was completely destroyed.

His press secretary said, when you drop 12 30,000-pound bombs with perfect precision on a target, there's only one result: complete destruction.

And that's not true, even if you just look at the past of us using these weapons.

I mentioned earlier that 2001 mission to Afghanistan, that was us trying to blow up that purported like cave fortress that bin Laden had.

Yeah, you may have seen the diagram in Tora Bora.

And we didn't.

It didn't work because it's really hard for all of our technological might, it's very hard to blow up something buried under rock.

Like it doesn't matter how many of these giant bombs you have.

We're shit at it, right?

Now, there's still some debate.

The DIA assessment says that basically we did damage, but it was at most maybe enough to knock them back by eight months and probably less than that, right?

It's kind of debatable and we don't have perfect data on this, right?

I don't know that Iran has perfect data on this because one thing we can confirm is that the bombing sealed the entrances.

So it's possible they can't get into Fordo quite yet, right?

Like there's going to be some work needed to do to be able to get these facilities if they're if they were to do that, which again, they were not based on U.S.

military intelligence were not doing prior to the bombing.

But based on satellite imagery, it does not look like there's not really good evidence that we did any kind of significant damage.

There's some reports that some centrifuges were damaged, but those reports state that other centrifuges were intact.

So it's one of those things where like there's not any strong evidence.

And in fact, the DIA's report suggests that that like the damage done was fairly minimal, given the extreme cost of this operation and the brags that the administration has been making that like they totally destroyed this, uh, these facilities, right, right?

We, we simply did not totally destroy these facilities.

Now, it's a little too early to say so precisely like how bad is this, right?

But, you know, again, that's kind of the early data is that like the DIA assessment says we set them back maybe a few months at most.

One of the fun things about this is that Iran Iran moved their uranium prior to the bombing, right?

Like you can't really move these giant centrifuges or these big underground facilities, but you can take the uranium and you can just drive it places.

And we don't know exactly where they hit it.

The head of the IAEA, which is the International Atomic Energy Commission, has already come out and said, like, I have no idea where Iran's uranium is.

And it's the job, the IAEA's job is to account for every fucking gram.

of uranium held by every country in the world, right?

They are supposed to know at all times where it is.

And he's like, I have no fucking idea.

Like, we don't know where it is.

And we don't know how much damage was done.

We don't know where this is.

There is at least one report stating that Iran's plan was basically load this up into the trunks of a bunch of cars and park them in public parking lots because they probably're not going to bomb a public parking lot outside of like a store, which is really funny, actually.

To be fair, the U.S.

might do that.

Israel will certainly bomb a fucking parking lot.

They hit a prison.

For which parking?

There's so many.

Yeah, yeah.

And they'll pray a shell game, right?

Like, they will send hundreds of trucks and vans from every location.

Yeah, right.

They'll send way more.

It's just the funniest thing.

In terms of, it also points out how doomed efforts like this are, where you're just like, well, with our technology and our fancy stealth bombers,

clearly, we should be able to figure this out.

And it's like, nah, we're just going to park.

We need 100 cars.

We'll bring in 600 cars and we'll park them randomly all around the country.

Fuck you.

What are you going to do?

Bomb every parking lot?

Like,

it's very funny.

Quote from parking lot bombed.

What are you gonna do?

Bomb me?

Yeah, anyway, that's uh, what's going on with us bombing Iran.

And so, again, very expensive.

Yeah, probably did not do much.

Trump the dove strikes again.

The peacemaker, they're calling him the peacemaker.

Yeah, we'll talk about the peace bullshit after this.

We should throw to ads first.

Thank you, Northrop Grumman, for sponsoring this segment.

We're back.

So, like the Fordo nuclear enrichment facility, Trump is between a rock and a hard place with

this whole carrying out illegal strikes on a sovereign nation thingamajig.

In that

he came to power in large part by promising, I'm not going to do a World War III.

I'm not going to, all these Democrats are crazy warmongers, but not old Donnie T.

You know, you can, you can trust me to be a peacemaker.

And then he fucking bombs Iran, which is kind of a major escalation, right?

So, and we're not going to, there's been people arguing, would this have happened under Kamala?

Yada, yada, I don't think, I don't, I don't give a shit.

I don't give a shit.

It's happening now.

Fuck it.

Fuck off.

Like,

it's not worth talking about.

We'll talk about what's happening, which is that this is a major escalation, but Trump has had to, he's kind of been hedging between like, yeah, look at how fucking cool our weapons are.

We fucked them up so bad.

And also, and now it's time for peace.

We have to stop the violence.

Why don't you guys come to the table?

Let's all be friends.

And getting pretty pissed at.

the Israeli government.

Yes, because he announced a ceasefire.

And Iran was like, after striking back and hitting U.S.

bases in a number of countries, was like, okay, we're done.

Like, we did the thing.

We did the face-saving thing.

We have to launch missiles after you bomb us.

We can't not do that.

Yeah.

But we did it.

We got our strike off and we're not going to continue if you guys don't continue.

Right.

And Trump was like, I did it.

I made peace.

Look at, look at how good I am.

And then Israel immediately starts carrying out more strikes.

And Trump is,

are we going to play the audio of him cursing on TV?

Because it's very good.

Here's Trump being confronted about this like within hours of this Israeli strikes.

You know what?

We have, we basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don't know what the fuck they're doing.

Do you understand that?

So that's a pissed off man.

And he's pissed off.

Again, I do think people are generally wrong when they're like, oh, Trump's much better on Israel because he can confront Netanyahu.

That hasn't really proved to be the case yet.

But unlike Biden, Trump clearly doesn't care about, like, he's willing to be pissed at Netanyahu.

And he was really pissed in this.

Like, openly, like, yeah, absolutely.

Openly, very, because again, he's hanging a lot on like, nobody would dare go back to war when I said they were at peace, right?

Like, that's that, this is like an ego thing for him more than anything.

He certainly doesn't give a shit about the human cost of any of this.

No, certainly not.

But yeah.

And so that's where we are right now.

Are we done?

Will there continue to be more strikes and retaliation strikes?

Something's got to happen.

It's not done, right?

None of it's done.

No.

But, you know, also Iran's not stupid, right?

This is a country that has been in these circumstances and in variations of this conflict for a long time.

And they are neither foolish nor suicidal.

So they're not going to be completely reckless here, right?

Like, I think you're seeing, and what you've seen is pretty calculated responses where they are aware of how much they think they can push when and where, right?

And so I, you know, I think we're likely to like,

I don't know that I think the escalation ladder is in like a runaway state.

I don't see that evidence right now, but this is not the end of this, right?

Yeah.

So something we got news of today in the last, this is Wednesday, we got this in the last like hour or so, is that Trump like said on TV the thing that you're not actually supposed to say, which is that the U.S.

and Iran coordinated to have the Iran shoot these bases.

Oh my God.

Just like, okay.

Like they like literally went on TV and said, quote,

you saw that working vessels were shot at us the other day.

And Iran was very nice.

They said, we're going to shoot them at one, at one, okay?

I said, it's fine.

Everybody evacuated out the bases.

So like, obviously the U.S.

has always done this, but like, we've never had the president go on TV and just say, yeah, we let Iran shoot empty military bases.

Yeah, we worked it out with them.

Yep, yep, yep.

This highlights something that's so interesting.

And when I, when I say this, I, I don't mean to ignore the fact that real people are dying, like, particularly in Iran.

That's horrifying.

But there is a massive degree of this at the, at the, at the nation state level that is KFAB, right?

And that, that proves it.

Like, Iran is like, okay, look.

Kayfay with the cost of like thousands of lives people will die yeah it's it's it's dick measuring the the fact that iran is willing to talk with the us about like okay what can we strike that's not going to escalate things for you and like yeah we'll pull you know whatever and also that's to a degree that was going on with the strikes on iran right where they got enough of a warning that they were able to move their fissile material right like this is there which is not to say that like things are like copacetic and friendly but everybody's got everybody but israel has like a vested interest in things not escalating too much even the trump administration right Has a vested interest in like, there's a line we don't want to cross because we just don't see any like benefit in it, right?

And that is, that is a part of what's going on here.

Yeah.

Anyway, that's probably enough talk about Iran and nukes and stuff.

But anyway, remember, folks, you too could be a nuclear power if you can just figure out how to make a functional centrifuge and

get a shitload of uranium, you know?

It's not that hard.

It just comes out of the ground.

Yeah, depending on where that ground is.

Depending on where that ground is.

Should we talk about immigration?

Sure.

All right.

I love immigration.

Sadly, Robert, Congress does not agree with you.

They rarely do, James.

They rarely do.

Yeah, that is one of the things they say about Robert Evans.

I want to start, actually, with a little, I don't know, disclaimer,

rant.

Almost every day.

for the past six months, someone has sent me a tip saying that ICE are raiding a hospital.

This has happened almost every month for the past 10 years.

I have received this tip thousands of times.

To my knowledge, it has never been true.

Nonetheless, this rumor persists, especially among people who might be newer to migrant advocacy or newer to observing immigration enforcement.

What is happening in 100% of these cases that I have looked into is that Customs and Border Protection or ICE or some other immigration detention agency is taking somebody who is in their custody to the hospital, and then that person is getting treatment, and then they are released again to that immigration agency.

Normally, those immigration agents can't enter non-public areas of the hospital, i.e.

treatment rooms, but they can enter public areas, i.e.

lobbies.

This rumor, which continues to spread, which I've seen people, including journalists, sharing on social media, kills people, right?

I'm aware of one instant in which someone was having a medical emergency and and didn't want to go to hospital, a medical emergency which could very well have killed them within hours and didn't want to go to hospital because they had heard that ICE was at the hospitals.

I understand that people are coming to this with varying levels of experience.

It's cool.

It's great that people are showing up for migrants, but people need to exercise caution around this because it is not harmless to spread that rumor unless you are absolutely certain that it is true.

It hurts people.

And I keep seeing it.

And I think it's important to say something about it, including to other journalists.

Okay, with that said, let's start with some good news about immigration.

ICE agents in San Diego scattered from the San Diego court when the newly appointed San Diego bishop, Michael Pharm, who is himself a refugee.

He was an unaccompanied minor from Vietnam.

entered the court to accompany people to their immigration hearings.

Bishop Pharm was joined by Imam Taha Hassane, I hope I'm saying that correctly, of the Islamic Center of San Diego and Our Lady of Guadalupe Church Pastor Scott Santa Rosa.

They say they're going to keep doing this, quote, as needed.

So, like, this is actually one of the very few things,

at least in courthouses, that seems to have worked, right?

We've covered this in previous weeks, that what is happening is that the government is dismissing the case against people and then immediately detaining them and forcing them to fight for their asylum while detained, right?

This has been happening all across the country.

San Diego is the only place I'm aware of where religious leaders, right, from across the religious community are accompanying migrants to their detention hearings.

So we saw Brad Lander doing this in New York, politician, but this is the only instance I'm aware of where clerics are doing it.

And it seems to have worked.

It seems to have, in this instance or in these instances, prevented ICE from detaining people.

And like, I'm not a religious person myself, but I will say that I respect this.

I I think this is

cool.

I've reported before,

I spoke a lot about Jesuits in the Darien Gap and how impressed and in awe of their work with migrants I am.

And I think this is another example of like

people organizing with groups who they might not normally organize with, but that having really beneficial results, right?

It's a huge win for the woke Marxist Pope as well.

It's always good to see.

Yep.

Hell yeah.

Huge win for Marxism this week.

Yeah, generally a big week for Marxism.

In other news, a district court has ordered another man, Jordien Alexander Melgar Salmaron, returned from El Salvador.

He's Salvadorian, but he was removed 30 minutes after a court order barred his removal, and thus he was removed in violation of that court order, right?

And the district court has ordered him returned.

I'm not aware if he's been returned yet on Wednesday.

We shall see, I guess, because the Supreme Court has allowed the Trump administration this week to continue removing migrants to countries which are not specifically noted on their removal orders, right?

We spoke about this before in the case of the attempt of the DOJ to remove people to South Sudan.

We've spoken about it in terms of removing people to El Salvador who are not themselves Salvadorian, right?

This isn't really deportation.

I think rendition is a more accurate way to describe it.

And it will certainly result in people facing hardship and more likely than not, people facing torture and probably being killed.

It is a disaster.

It was a very short and unsigned order, and the justices did it, wasn't a final decision, right?

But they paused the Massachusetts District Court ruling, which had in turn paused the process.

So the process is now ongoing again.

It's worth noting that the Massachusetts District Court ruling didn't stop them doing it.

It allowed them a meaningful attempt at expressing their reasonable fear of torture.

Right?

Three justices dissented: Sotomayor, Keegan, and Jackson.

Sotomayor wrote the dissent.

I'm just going to quote from it here briefly.

Apparently, quote: The court finds the idea that thousands will suffer violence in far-flung locales more palatable than the remote possibility that a district court exceeded its remedial powers when it ordered the government to provide notice and process to which the plaintiffs are constitutionally and statutorily entitled.

As she pointed out, the government was seeking relief from this order in the Supreme Court, but had also been openly flouting it, right?

This flouting of lower court orders lines up with Arez Rouveni, a DOJ lawyer who was fired for, I guess, not following the DOJ line in the Aberdeen Garcia case.

He filed a whistleblower complaint in Congress this week that the NYT has seen.

You can read the whole article in the show notes, but in there, you can hear Emile Bove, who's,

he was Trump's personal lawyer in 2023.

Trump has now nominated him to be a judge, but he tells DOJ lawyers that they need to be open to responding, fuck you, to court orders.

The allegations in a whistleblower complaint are pretty concerning, right, in terms of the ability of the courts to stop the DOJ doing anything.

I would urge you to read it.

It's going to be linked in the show notes.

We don't really have time to summarize all of it here, but I think the fuck you comment summarizes it pretty well.

Yeah.

And speaking of things that you should buy, here's ads.

We're back.

And since we've just done ads, let's let James give an ad for something that's not a product or a service, but is better than either of those things.

If you have any money left after investing in all the wonderful gold that our advertisers want to sell you, one of the people who we have interviewed on this show extensively, who came into the United States through Hokumba and who provided us with a really in-depth account of his immigration detention, has let me know that he is struggling.

to find a lawyer and pay for a lawyer.

So far, he's been taking care of all of his legal paperwork himself, which is very admirable.

But obviously, like many migrants, he understands that his chances of success will be much, much better with a lawyer, something he himself is struggling to pay for right now whilst also supporting a family.

If you would like to help, the link for that is www.gofundme.com slash F slash standing with our family.

It will also be the first link in the sources for this episode.

So if you're listening on your podcast app, you can scroll down to the show notes, find it there, click it, and help out if you'd you'd like to.

Well, I think it's time for Gare's good news roundup.

And let's start with some actually like fantastic news.

Mahmoud Khalil has been released after 104 days in ICE custody.

He missed the birth of his first child.

Was it his first time meeting his child, or did he get to meet his child?

I think he'd gotten one visit where he got to meet his kid, if I'm remembering correctly.

It's still kind of about two-thirds of the way through his detainment.

Yeah.

But now he is back in New York as his case will continue.

This is a good step in the fight against disappearing people for political differences.

This is possibly one of the most important national pieces of news that's still a developing story right now.

I've seen some responses that are like, yeah, so after 104 days of being illegally detained, a guy finally got released.

This is still a bad thing.

And like, that's true.

This is a bleak story, but like, it's actually kind of like foolish to not acknowledge this as a significant win, right?

Like, it's important.

They did not want to release him.

They wanted to keep him locked up forever.

They did not want to release him.

Yes.

This is good.

This is a good thing.

And it's proof that it is worth fighting because you can win.

Yeah.

Like every day he's not in jail and that he's with his family is a better day.

Yes, is a win.

Yeah.

It's a victory.

Yes.

Also, some good news in New York.

It is so quover.

Zoran Mongdani won the Democratic primary for the mayor of New York City Tuesday night.

This is quite exciting.

I got to announce to a massive room full of trans people that Cuomo conceded to Zoron, and I have not felt better in months.

It was like

one of the brightest rays of hope that we've had and a rejection of like the old Democratic Party establishment.

Yes.

Zoron had to beat $30 million of super PAC funding against him.

He mobilized the youth vote in ways we've never seen before in New York.

A quarter of early voters were first-time Democratic primary participants.

Zoron ran a very, very solid campaign with slick videos online and on TV, multi-language outreach, 50,000 like on-the-street volunteers, canvassing, door knocks, phone baking, and a distinct focus on affordability, including freezing rent, free buses, a pilot program for city-run grocery stores, free-to-low-cost childcare, raising minimum wage, and resisting Trump's efforts to use ICE to deport New Yorkers.

Myself and Mia did a full episode yesterday if you want to have a more in-depth look at the New York mayoral primary.

Yeah.

We should also note here that per a CBS New York interview with former Governor Cuomo, He has stated that he is considering running against Mamdani as an independent.

So we'll see how that goes.

We might get to see Cuomo lose twice in a year, which would be pretty funny.

Yeah, I mean, honestly, I would be surprised if he actually decides to run in the general.

A lot of like Ackman is going behind Adams, it seems.

They're certainly going to be targeting from like Republicans and maybe even some like establishments.

Oh, yeah, sure, definitely so.

To like remove Zoron as like a viable candidate.

They're going to pull out some crazy, like Red Scare communist shit from the 50s.

Absolutely.

They might try to remove his legal status as a citizen.

Like, they're going to pull out the stops.

But this is like after the 2024 election, this is like the first, first like clear look at what a new Democratic Party could look like.

And right now it is the face of Zorong.

Yeah.

That's all I have.

Yeah.

And, you know, it's nice to see a win.

Again, it's like the Mahmoud Khalil thing, right?

It's, it's nice.

Absolutely.

Like, this is, this is good things can happen.

Now, does this mean, is this a part of a fucking progressive wave that's sweeping the country?

Does this prove that, you know, being pro-Palestine and pro-trans is the best electoral strategy in 100% of districts?

No, like this is, this is New York.

We, we, like, this is one election.

But it's like good news.

And it, it, I think it, there's a very solid possibility that we will see this as like part of a growing trend that when candidates are actually left-wing and unabashedly so, when they don't try to tack to the middle, when they don't try to embrace

a hodgepodge of like contradictory policies in order to please some sort of like farcical median, theoretical median voter, that they do better.

I do think that like maybe that's what we'll see.

But obviously, one election in New York City is not a one primary in New York City isn't enough to prove that like this is going to be the same kind of thing we see nationwide.

I mean, but it did show how to mobilize like a huge number of like young people and like a lot of a lot of like young men, which the Democratic Party's been like whining about for the past few months.

They're terrible about.

Yeah.

And that's a big deal.

Like how, how, how do we reach out to the young men in this country?

And like Zoron showed you how to do this.

You're actually fighting for like real things that make your life better.

You can get people excited about your candidacy if you're standing for something and getting people excited.

It's even more important than just being like, well, this theoretically polls the best.

Cause if you do it, take all the positions that poll well, but nobody gives a shit and you don't have any kind of excitement or the ability to build like a grassroots ground game, then you'll do worse.

Like if you have that behind you, if you have all that enthusiasm, you can make less popular positions more popular.

That's how politics works, right?

Look at Trump, you know, like

the whole, everyone's always wondering, like, how does he get away with all these things that were forbidden for so long?

It's because he had a lot of enthusiasm behind them.

And that wave allowed him to push a bunch of boundaries.

And, like, that's how it works.

It can work the other way, too, if you try, if you're not just gutless, if you're not a fucking Schumer.

So, in less good news, and by less good news, I mean really, really horrible news.

Terrible news.

Yeah.

So last week, we got the results of the United States versus Scrometti.

I think most trans people have been expecting that this was going to be really bad, but

it was, I guess, technically not as bad as it theoretically could have been.

But this ruling was

a 6-3 ruling that upholds Tennessee's ban on gender-affirming care for minors.

That ban is, I mean, just like hideously illegal.

It's like very obviously sex discrimination.

The Supreme Court gave

genuinely like,

I had a friend describe it as like we're just in pure Calvin ball land

Like it's if you read the decision, it's fucking nonsense.

It's gibberish that also makes it hard to figure out what it's gonna do because the the legal reasoning is just so unbelievably nonsense like it leaves it it leaves in place the 2020 ruling on sex discrimination in the workplace for trans people intact but it invents this new justification that you can discriminate against trans people if you're discriminating against gender dysphoria as a diagnosis, specifically not necessarily them being trans,

but the ability to treat gender dysphoria.

Yeah, it's really, really fucking weird.

I'm probably going to do like a full episode looking at like bringing in actual legal people to talk about what the legal impacts are going to be.

This is really bad.

This means that like 25 states bans on gender affirming care go into effect.

Yeah.

One of the worst parts of this, right, is that, you know, and this is, this is one of the biggest issues with like targeting trans kids in general, is that just the structure of the family and of childhood makes it really hard to help these kids because they're significantly more isolated than trans adults, right?

It's harder for trans kids to find community.

It's harder for the community to find them.

Yep.

And because of the structures in place here, like they are denied the autonomy to keep living.

And if their parents decide to

just be like, fuck you, we're just doing, we're going to do conversion therapy on you by refusing to let you transition, they can do that, and it's extremely hard to resist it.

Yeah, the root of so much authoritarianism, I would argue, like the absolute core of the fascist movement is the idea that parents own their children, yeah, and that, like, that is the most, that is the single most important property right that exists is your ownership of kids.

I was going to say, it's bedtime if we really get to the core of it, isn't it, Robert?

Yeah, it's it's no, Robert's going full like no future queer theory.

Like, I

agree with you.

No, he's right.

No, this is the I don't think this is even debatable as someone who was raised in it.

It's this, and it's it's not a simple problem, right?

Because, like, kids are not adults and shouldn't, like, have full autonomy about choices, like, you know, because they'll, they don't understand the world fully.

There's a degree to which kids need to be like guided.

Yeah, you should stop a child if they're going to walk into the street and get hit by a bus.

Right.

Yeah.

Like, grab a fire.

Or if they only want to eat candy for dinner, right?

Like that's there are limits.

But the idea that like, and so parents own their kids, they're like, that, that is just, it's pure poison and it's killing us all.

And like more broadly, like guys who hate their kids are the fucking forefront of fascism right now.

Like, yeah.

Elon Musk bought Twitter because he hates his daughter.

Yes.

More than if any other thing.

Like it's

a repugnant ideology.

It's disgusting.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Anyway, we'll do some sort of more detailed look at this that like that at some point, but I think we've, you know, covered the news.

Yeah.

I mean, I think the last, the last thing I want to say about that is like, if you're trans, and I know this was a bigger thing in the immediate wake of last week, but keep living.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Stay alive.

Maybe get a passport because you can do that right now.

There's a lot of benefit, even if you're not going to travel, if you don't have the money to travel, there's a lot of benefit in having that ID.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We're all going to see the sunrise together.

Like, we are.

And it's going to be beautiful.

But do you know who won't is a man from Norway who will probably never be seeing the United States ever again?

Oh my God.

Oh, my God.

Okay.

Garrison.

So to finish this episode, we're going to talk about the one deportation we're kind of allowed to laugh at.

Not because the guy is bad.

The guy seems perfectly fine.

But the circumstances around the deportation are so bizarre.

It's wild shit.

And it affects Norway.

So it's, you know, it's it's like whatever.

Garrison.

Anti-Norwegian action.

Okay.

No offense to Norway.

I'm just like, it's not like this guy's getting deported to a place where he's in danger.

I love you, Norwegians, even if Garrison doesn't.

This is not a guy who's going to suffer.

He's not going to South Sudan severe or life-threatening or whatever.

He's fine.

Yeah.

A Norwegian man was coming to the United States for vacation.

And at the border checkpoint, at I think Newark,

he was questioned and handed over his phone.

On the phone, Porter agents found a photoshopped picture of baby JD Vance.

Sorry, of bald baby JD Vance.

Yeah, yeah.

And

for this reason, she was baby JD.

Denied entry into the United States and deported back to Europe.

This is the dumbest country on earth.

Anyway, said photo has now been shown in the Irish parliament because we live in a, it's beautiful.

The world's beautiful.

They're deporting norwegians for jd vance memes now this is the level that we are at like like

the party of free speech deporting people who has who have jd vance memes on their phone like i on the one hand i think you can make the argument that fascism has always been this stupid like google google mussolini's headquarters and look at that building is this dumb but like good lord like i just oh my god

personal vanity there's such tiny babies about it like that's like that's like the really defining characteristic of this era of fascism is that if you make fun of them the tiniest bit it is the worst consequences they've ever suffered in their entire lives and they lose their mind that everyone doesn't love them yeah they they're they're fully like willing and like desire to use the the complete might of the state to uh to step on anyone who dares defy their authority even even when that defiance is manifested through having a picture of baby JD Vance with a bald head?

Like that, that is too far.

I don't know what else to say about bald baby JD Vance.

You know,

get a tattoo, get a full facial tattoo or like a Ben Affleck.

Or you got back tight piece.

A bald JD Vance.

You're going to get denaturalized for your JD Vance back tattoo.

Can't punish you.

Not for a tattoo.

No,

it is funny how much Vance and the Board of Patrol do not understand the Barbara Streisand effect.

This picture is now everywhere.

It shows how hurt J.D.

Vance is by these Photoshops, even though he's tried to laugh along in the past.

Yeah.

I'd love to know, like, how...

Is there a directive that has come down?

Like, no Vance memes?

Yeah, who made the call?

Did some Office of Field Operations guy.

Did they send it up to Stephen Miller?

Yeah.

With like, hey, Stephen, is this okay?

It seems like, no, no, no.

Didn't I somebody at the border to take offense on behalf of Vance?

That could be very likely.

I think that is what what happened.

Like all of the data suggests that's what happened.

Roberts talked about this, like working towards the Fuhrer stuff before, but like we're seeing a version of that here, right?

Like, oh, yeah.

I mean, like, all of the current border agents are like Trump cultists, essentially.

Like, they are, they're the most evil people you will ever meet.

I mean, of the of all the federal agencies, right?

It's CBP that has had the lowest vaccination rate.

They're playing one American news in their break rooms.

Like,

they are more ideologically sympathetic with what's happening than I would imagine most other feds are.

Certainly, like ICE are pretty much in lockstep with the Trump administration.

Yeah, if

you want to help Amos, I guess, don't send a JD Viant's baby meme, but you can send your money again

to

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They'll be in the show notes too.

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