It Could Happen Here Weekly 174

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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.
Hi, everyone, and welcome to the podcast. It's James today, and I'm joined by Jenny Keesden, who's a writer, activist, and someone who's been in and out of Northeast Syria for long time, working with the women's movement.
And today we're going to be talking about the situation in North and East Syria since the fall of the Assad regime, some of the conflict that has been happening and the resistance of the SDF. Welcome to the show, Jenny.
Hi there. Yeah, first of all, thanks not for having me.
I'm really happy to be here. Yeah, you're welcome.
Of course. course so i think if we start off people have been messaging me a lot of various platforms about the uh the letter abdullah ojolan wrote and i don't want to address that in its entirety today because we've got something coming up on that we're going to talk to some people from uh the freedom for abdullah ojolan campaign but i do want to use it as a jumping off point because I think it, A, has reminded people, as we spoke about before the show, that North and East Syria exists and the SDF exists, which has been largely missing in the legacy media reporting on Syria.
But B, there's been atrocious reporting on what it means for the SDF, even though there's a very clear answer to that. So for people who have been reading papers which either just ignore the existence of the FDF entirely or speculate as to what they're going to do when they've given a very clear answer, could you explain to people where this leaves the SDF? Yeah, sure.
No, so thanks for that. And yeah, I've also been getting a lot of questions about O'Tan's letter.
And I'm really glad to hear that you guys are going to do a program on it because Western media wants to report it in this way. It's very snazzy and there's like bolts of the blue and something crazy is happening.
And really, unfortunately, it has to actually be spoken about in a kind of more long term and intelligent way that sets the context and like and like yeah puts that um makes things a bit more clear because it is something with a background and it's connected to a lot of things and of course that whole political process that ojlan's recent statement is a part of is going to affect the situation here in north and east syria um because the situation here a lot of the time depends on the actions of the turkish state expansionism and aggression from there. And so as the political situation changes, it will affect that.
What it is not is like a call or a statement that means that the SDF has to lay down their arms and start with this thing. This is for several reasons absolutely not what it is.
The main one of those being that the SDF is not and never has been the PKK and that's something that they've tried many times over the years to make very clear but unfortunately has not always been like heard and acknowledged and so whatever this statement means and you guys will go into that in your program whatever it is for the PKK but the situation in Northdistan it's a different situation here um and so the sdf is in a moment of like a big question and a big change but it's much more to do with what's been happening in syria politically and to do with the government and the interim government i'd say yeah interim government have installed themselves here and the regime change and of course the ongoing war and situation of invasion that they're facing so there's a lot of big questions for the SDF but I think it's important right now that we don't kind of confuse and misunderstand with this sort of parallel process that's going on. Yeah definitely and I think if people are hearing this and you're new to the show this is your first time hearing the sea of acronyms that is the Kurdish freedom movement, I could direct you to the Women's War, which is a series that Robert made.
I have a book, but you can't read it yet. Still editing it.
Or you could listen to one of our numerous other. If you search for Rojava or North East Syria or Syria in our feed, I'm sure you'll find a lot to explain those acronyms to you.
yeah we've had this situation right where since december the situation in syria has drastically changed and we now have two state actors well we have lots of state actors we always had lots of state actors intervening in syria but we have this new state actor in the syrian state right and i think people if they're you know, if they're uh reading the new york times or god forbid seeing charles lister then they'll have a certain vision of this that sort of exempts the sdf it sort of just ignores this whole area of syria and says like oh well the syrian revolution has succeeded i think we should address like what has happened to the sdf to northern east Syria since the collapse of the Assad regime in December yeah so obviously what's happened to northern east Syria in northern east Syria and to SDF is very connected to the whole overall Syria process and you're right when you hear the reporting on it I think lots of parts of it can get erased and kind of depending who's talking and what their angle is or whatever there are a lot of things left out not just the Kurds in north of east syria but other minority ethnic groups or like women organizing across syria like all of these things um it's a very complex situation uh which i won't pretend i can completely lay out and summarize for everyone in five minutes but yeah what you did have was the culmination the end of a period and a massive change when as you say there was a regime change there was a change of government and that happened with this like offensive sweeping down from idlib to damascus succeeding in taking over the government in damascus from the assad family which was the end of a 61 year reign which caused absolute jubilation it's safe to say all across Syria and that includes where I am and not to me Syria because anyway just yeah people were very happy and celebrating but also there were cities here when you look at the map and you see this like semi-autonomous region what you had to understand was that there were actually within the cities there were neighborhoods and sections that were still under the Assad government it wasn't as simple as like the whole city is in the autonomous administration so here as well even there were still statues of Assad and people took the streets and tore them down and really close to actually where I'm recording this today there's a roundabout where they took the statue of assad and it's been replaced by pictures of the martyrs so people who have fallen um fighting for the autonomy of the region here and fighting for their political system so it's you know it's very very beautiful yeah people celebrated and were happy with a qualifier with a very big qualifier you know you saw the jails opened as well and the flags went off but yeah it was a real moment of jubilation celebration but unfortunately the force which eventually succeeded in toppling Assad and installing itself as the now as they're saying the interim or transitional government of Syria you know we can say it was not one of the many like progressive democratic um alternative forces that originally in the uprisings weakened the assad government yeah back in 2011 since then things have changed and this isn't a podcast directly about that i'm sure you guys speak about it as well at other times but yeah instead what you have is hds who are kind of conglomerate of these different militia groups. There's another acronym for you there as well, James, I think.
Yeah, three languages, acronyms. Pointing people to resources is always very useful.
They're a kind of mixed up amalgamation of different militias who are operating in Syria. and what's crucial to say about them is that their you know their political background and perspective of a lot of people in these organizations are like really really similar unfortunately and all too familiar to the people here who fought against ISIS um the Islamic State because they're coming from similar backgrounds um and also to uh Al-Qaeda and the organizations who were kind of the syrian branches of al-qaeda but like yeah i've played a really direct role in founding it yes and they want to now sort of put on a new face put on a suit go out and shake the world's hand and become world statesman and become the government which unfortunately it looks like all of our governments um are all too willing to very quickly accept um and we'll get uh in a minute we can talk a bit specifically about the role that um and almost your listeners are in the states and that the american government has been playing here but um yeah so there's a big qualifier on how much people are celebrating because of the very dodgy history and the real like threat um that hdc's politics holds particularly for ethnic minorities and women yeah and they're establishing their power and it's by no means a kind of non-violent or peaceful process um and there's a lot of like tensions flaring up and a lot of problems however yes it is the case that in a lot of syria the majority of syria outright like warfare on warfare on the ground has for now to stop because this one group we've taken power.
And so we're in a different moment. We're in a different kind of process.
So what's different up here? What's different up in the north and east? And what's not being discussed as much? And the point that I'm often trying to make when I'm trying to write articles and doing interviews at the moment is that, like, actually the war in the whole of Syria has not stopped yeah very much so mostly yes we can say in most regions but significantly here in north and east syria it's not just that there is still classes or flare-ups between different groups like there might be in other regions there is like a full-scale invasion um a ground invasion with air support that has also been going on yeah and that was timed where does that come from like what is that what does that look like this is another group another three-letter acronym for you um but the important thing to understand is that this offensive was tying to coincide with the hcs takeover hcs also has a lot of links with the turkish state and i wouldn't i personally would not go so far as to say that that government is a turkish public government or that the relationship is that direct but there is a relationship there um and what you saw when they kind of successfully went on the offensive uh was at the same time other armed groups which operate are kind of loosely affiliated and mostly operating on a mercenary so of paid basis, rather than being kind of ideologically driven or whatever, but are affiliated under the name the SNA, the Syrian National Army, which is even more confusing because they're not and were never the National Army of Syria. Yeah, yeah.
What they are is, yeah, these paid militias, which, yeah, we can describe, you might describe as jihadist gangs um mercenaries etc etc and it kind of depends it's like a mix of different forces yeah what's very important there is the very close relationship that they have with the turkish state essentially the turkish government has made the choice that it wants to continue its aggression and its expansionism on not only Syria and rather than immediately sending their own army they instead pay and fund and direct and support these militias who are also operating for their own benefit yes but the relationship between them their actions right now in the Turkish state is much more direct so at the same time as you had this um this sweep to the south that caused the regime Syria, heading to the east, so to originally the region of Sheba, followed by a city of Minbij in the region around there, you had this onslaught from the SA. And that is what the SDF, which you originally mentioned, are currently up against.
And that's the situation that we're in. And it's still ongoing.
It's very much not stopped. It's still very much like hot engagement and hot fighting that is happening yeah and it like sometimes to introduce another acronym we use like tfsa to refer to some of those groups like the turkish free syrian army and that they're essentially it's operation by the turkey state to co-opt what was initially a democratic grassroots revolution more than a decade ago yeah and like if you haven't been following i suppose it would be easy to be confused by this but uh the sna have not been backwards in documenting their war crimes in the uh advance toward i guess their advance westwards towards the euphrates and even over the euphrates and there have been some really horrible things uh some of them like i've shared online if people want to they're not to find if you want to find them, but I'm not going to put them right in front of you because they're horrible.
And as the SNA have advanced, they've reached a couple of locations that are very crucial, right? And that's where they've been kind of stopped by the SDF. Yeah.
Because the SDF haven't been in like such a large sale conflict for the last couple of years. They've, of course against like islamic state splinter cells and to a degree the sna but like the sdf has modelized a lot more than the sna have i guess in the past years right they've embraced the use of first person view drones they've even shot down several turkish biraktar drones which they previously if they had ability to do it, then they weren't able to use that ability until very recently.
So like they, in a sense, their resistance has been very impressive, right? Because we have on the one hand, it's the second largest army in NATO, giving its like full support to the SNA. And on the other hand, we have the FDF, which is in theory, u.s partner force right there are u.s bases still in syria there are u.s troops still in syria well yeah for now but like i mean i remember when i was in rjava in october of 2023 the u.s shot down a birektar drone over a u.s base and then it did not shoot down the dozens of other Birektar drones that were bombing the cities.
The city that you're in right now, the city that I was in, other cities. I met a mother who had lost her 14-year-old son to one of these drone bombings.
Really horrific and just cruel bombing of very clearly civilian the U.S. is there, but they're not doing anything to help supposedly their friends, supposedly their partners.
And, like, every interview I conducted began with, like, five minutes of me being asked why the Americans weren't being friends when the SDF had been friends to them in a battle against ISIS. and like that's not something I have a good explanation for other than like I think most Kurdish people can understand the difference between

people and government and people and state and uh like i might have a belief but it is not the same as the government of the u.s so can you explain the role of the u.s here because people will be very confused right and i think it's easy to to sort of simplify this as like america is in syria for oil but there's a little bit more to it than that right yeah absolutely and again it's it's such a big question and it's a question of how far back do you go how far do you zoom out uh because in both senses as you keep as you keep moving back from today the plot kind of thickens um and as you you know

if you imagine if you're looking at the google maps of syria and then you you click the button that takes you out and out and the map gets wider and wider yeah the story kind of fills itself in as well like that um things make more sense when they are put in that context yeah and i think a good place to start maybe is yeah this consistent for a long time like american attitude to this whole region not just syria which is to play yeah to play very carefully to your advantage um and make alliances where it suits you and continue them where it suits you and not stick to them where it doesn't and that is yeah that one aspect of that is the resources which is goes further than just oil is also gas and is also the resource of the space to create a trade group right like that's a really important question yeah in the middle east at the moment and it's one of the reasons that kurdistan is such an important place politically a lot of these like lines of potential trade routes and these kind of lines of power and money they intersect and they cross over here yeah so there are all these different like resources at play and i think another thing that's important to look at is that yeah the the us as the us government as you put it as as distinct from the citizens in any way doesn't just go into this blind and kind of react day by day it's not like a reactive force in the world the us government is and would you know proudly announce i think as well the crevice thing on this one point that they are no matter who the administration is and where it's politically leading at the time a very proactive force they have a plan where that they go and they try and put it into practice um and famously historically and very intensely a lot of that has played out in the middle east because of the middle east position in the world resources and the role that it's played in kind of who gets to be the big dog in the world over the years and throughout history. It's become, for those various reasons, very important.
And so, yeah, again, without its many podcasts of its own, and I'm sure you are making them, so I won't try and, like, summarize it, but I think you can't talk about America's role in Syria and the Middle East in general without mentioning, like, Israel and the role the Israeli state plays for and with America. And things like, you know, we're all sort of following, and for you guys, following more closely, because we're all following the current american administration and leadership and what's been coming out of there and sometimes you think like god is it just nuts and when you look at something like you know the video for like the new gaza that we're gonna make for example yeah and trump's gaza whatever that was yeah yeah so i mean it makes it sick And then you're also not sure if it's serious or if it's mad.
But I think, unfortunately, it's actually, yeah, it's quite an intelligent play. And what it speaks to that is relevant to what I'm saying here is this kind of long-term plan, right, that to annihilate a region to the best of your ability so that you can move in and develop yeah is a tried and tested method of many many governance um and america's not the only one yeah but at the moment we're at a kind of crucial moment in the middle east when one sort of wall of forces are trying to greatly reduce the role and power of some others um so that they can put their plan into place and so that they can yeah so they can so they can make money you know it's always worth following money and where development can be made and where trade routes can be made and so what what happened the timing of the regime change that we've just discussed the timing of hds being able to move into damascus and take it over it's no coincidence that it came after like a shift in the Israeli like genocidal war on Gaza and after what the then military action they were taking against Hezbollah in Lebanon yeah which they felt then had up to a point achieved what they wanted to achieve and then things kind of moved to Syria right yeah so I'm not saying that the new government has kind of come from has been sponsored by that at all I think there's a huge amount of tension there but the withdrawal of like the weakening and or withdrawal of forces like Iran and Hezbollah here played a huge role with them being able to establish themselves as a government so that is also something that you know that's not directly um necessarily every step sort of kind of puppeteered by the U.S.
at all but it is a part of politics that the US has had a long historical influence on and that it backs and that it's in conversation in the whole of the Middle East. It's this kind of greater Middle East plan, this vision for it, if you will.
And the other aspect that I think is important to talk about is the US's relationship with uh relationship with north and east syria specifically you mentioned there like you know this like supposed friendship with we can say the like friendship with the kurds as people will refer to it or the alliance and coalition between the sdf and u.s which was sort of most uh most famous and most well known during the fight ISIS, when the international coalition, which is obviously spearheaded by America, was bombing and providing air support for the SDF, as they called it, the boots on the ground, the actual ground force that could go and take territory back from ISIS, which, yes, did look like like a friendship but i think from both sides everyone always knew that that was a tactical alliance perhaps perhaps a strategic alliance at best we can say yeah but i think that the u.s has not got a history of operating on a basis of like friendship or of that kind of commitment to the forces it works with and I love a lot of history and modern recent history can attest to that um and from the side of people here I think it's really important to say that yeah people were angry and that you know what you heard there you were talking about interviewing people and then kind of being like what are they doing like we we fought a war with them partly on their behalf like and then they, people are angry, but the more kind of politically engaged someone is, sort of moving up that scale, I think the less faith they ever had in the US. Yeah.
So, and now you've got the US kind of muttering about withdrawing their troops from Syria, right? Yeah. And it's deja vu, because they said this before.
I was actually here, Wayne, they said this before.

Back in 2019, I also happened to be in North and East Syria.

And it was, if I'm not wrong, it was Trump again, if I was turned around.

Yeah, it was.

And they said, we're withdrawing our forces from Syria.

Did they actually withdraw?

Not exactly, no.

You still saw them driving around in big cars,

mostly right next to the oil fields.

It was almost comical, sort of like when parked next to the oil fields. But that withdrawal was symbolic.
That withdrawal was, they withdrew from bases right on the border with Kirki, which lies just to the north of Syria and as such just next to north of East Syria, for anyone without the map immediately in their head. head and they announced it very very clearly and very publicly and so it was a kind of it was a green flag to say to turkey yeah come and only come yeah we're not going to stop you we're not gonna um because what you don't want to do is hit an american by accident as you gave the example of they you know they brought down a drone because it was over an american base not because it was bombing civilians nearby which dozens of other were and so that you had that kind of symbolic withdrawal which led to in 2019 was one of the times that turkey has like annexed section essentially annexed a section of syria north and east syria under the remit of the autonomous administration but nonetheless still technically syrian territory um and in that time it was Surikhania and girisby uh which people may have heard of and so that yeah that was the like green flag to turkey to take that step and at that time i yeah i'll maybe share it's a lot of a lot of political stuff a lot of acronyms a lot of all this and maybe i'll just share a wee anecdote yeah at that time when they made the announcement they were going to leave people organized a march to an american base um and i was here at the time and i joined it with some of the women's organizations it was the most amazing day like i sort of went home and wrote this massive journal entry because i've already been here for a very long time but my mind was still a bit blown by it um for one thing it was such an example of like how the social movement here works and what society is like and all the complexities, because, yeah, a lot of people here are very wedded to the liberatory, progressive, grassroots democratic, women's freedom, ecological movement that I'm sure you've spoken about in your programs on Reshava.
And thousands and thousands of people completely take ownership of that and see themselves in that and are the driving force of that. Obviously, that doesn't mean every single person here is 100% sold on government at all.
Yeah, some of them are just trying to get on with life. Some of them are just trying to get on with life.
Some of them are, you know, I mean, if you talk about women's freedom, there's always going to be a few men who are a bit like, what does this mean for me? What do I have to give up? So it would be silly. I've encountered that.
It would be silly and new topic to say that everyone's totally sold. However, nobody wants to get invaded by one of the largest armies in NATO.
Yeah. So you have this sort of actually even broader than usual kind of coming together, like groups from the sort of like tribal clan structures here that are still like a really political force um and that don't you know have a kind of uneasy truth and sort of slowly learning each other relationship with yeah with the movement you can say but they really came out in in force as well um as well as like the kurdish movement as well as like lots of different ethnic groups and we marched and to be honest i didn't know we were going to an American base a lot of people didn't it was quite a confusing day because I think you didn't want to announce things too widely until they got there yeah um and we went and did this kind of that yeah they like read out a letter symbolically I think in some of the Arabic community leaders went up to the base and we the majority of people there's sort of hundreds of hundreds of people in this crowd and they stayed back at a distance and i found out later that that is because the american soldiers said if two bigger group of people come close we will like we will open fire like that that information was given yeah um i don't know what they were scared of you know it's like like any mart here the people in the front row are always rags yeah yeah it's old ladies no different on that day's no different on that day.
I mean, they're a bit scary to be said. I don't, I think that it's a bit embarrassing if they and Eric and Solzers work together.
But anyway, that stuff makes a judge. But while we were there by like pure tanks, a fleet of, not tanks, but big armoured cars rolled in.
And there was just this moment that I really clearly remember. It pause and they rolled through the crowd and the crowd parted and turned and looked and nobody teared or clapped obviously there was no sense of oh it's the americans right yeah but nobody sort of threw you know for anything or through insults or chanted anything negative either there was just this stillness and this really palpable energy of this kind of sense of people looking at you know obviously they're just these soldiers that happen to be driving these trucks but they really symbolize something more than that and people were kind of looking sort of insisting that you look them in the eye saying like hey if anyone owes anyone you owe us after everything we fought for and everything we've done yeah 13 000 martyrs if they would call them exactly exactly yeah so many people lost in the fight against isis and so much like blood and sweat and tears given and there was just yeah this palpable sense of like at least have the decency to kind of look at us and admit what you're doing because you know what you're doing yeah and it really yeah it really felt it was very kind of uh moving at the time and it but i feel like it's very symbolic into politics here of how you know someone asked me the other day what was it like for people to rely on america knowing that they'd betray them and i said well they didn't they never relied on them Yeah, one was relying on america yeah but you know there's that kind of the the expectation of at least some sense of dignity that is a very important concept for people here dignity and yeah so yeah that that is i always remember that that yeah say again i know it's confusing that was um five five and a half years ago now yeah and now

you've got this sort of is history repeating itself they're talking about with the troops

i think it's important to understand what that means what that means is they're talking about

potentially giving a green flag for more military aggression and i think they kind of haven't

decided yet if they're really going to do it um and there's a lot of things in in the balance

and in terms of i'll just say one more one more thing um and it's out if it gets a bit long

Thank you. it um and there's a lot of things in in the balance and in terms of i'll just say one more one more thing um and it's out if it gets a bit long in terms of like the plan for syria and america's role like this is my opinion yeah i can't say for sure that this is the the definite reality but my understanding of the situation is that once again people here in this in this movement are kind of caught between a rock and a hard place and the rock and the hard place now looks like you've got the new government that set itself up in damascus hbs and their goal if they can wangle it and get the outside and international support is to build your sort of socially at least if not politically the model is going to look a bit like afghanistan and the taliban right like from the signs of yeah changes they've made to the constitution incidents of like violent sectarianism and feminicide have been rising attacks they've already made on women's rights like very rapidly and things that have been put in like the president that legally has to be a muslim like this um all of this stuff right yeah um that's sort of their plan but on the other hand i think if you kind of let the american government loose on syria to build up its plan at the moment i think they are seeing an opportunity to use this kind of formula from iraq in dvd yeah and i think they want to create um this sort of very to capitalist markets, which creates kind of space in which the north and east area, with the majority, though not entirely Kurdish, can sort of play this role that the Kurdistan region of Iraq has played.
Yeah, I don't know what you call it, like a safe conduit to capital. Like it's a very stark difference if people haven't traveled in that part of the world to be in howler a bill and then to cross into rojava like you can see the uh the impact that a decade of that specifically at tishring dam because that's something that a has been reported on and b like it mirrors mirrors what you saw in 2019, in that it's not just a military resistance, right, but also a civil society resistance.
Can you explain, maybe if people have seen anything, they've seen that horrible video of people dancing and then SNA drone just dropping a mortar bomb right in the middle of them. But can you explain how we got there? Yeah, of yeah great i'm glad you asked about that because in some senses you know there is some horrible stuff in there but this is the this is the beautiful bit this is the great bit the bit that um yeah we should be talking about at the moment so yeah the tissue dam is a big hydroelectric facility that is on the euphrates river if you look at map of syria euphrates is kind of in the middle at the top and that is the region roughly where this offensive that we spoke out of the turkish funded militias which has come from from the west across the east yeah at times closer and further away from river and currently like a few kilometers away that's where that offensive has been stopped by bsda and cannot progress any further yeah and despite intensive air support from turkey and they're sort of increasingly putting pressure on that but it hasn't got anywhere um but it's close right you know it's not too far away and people are following the news and what's right on the other side if you get across the river there there's the dam and then there's a bridge further to north the kerakosak bridge that's similarly kind of crucial um and you get across the river there, there's the dam, and then there's a bridge further to north, the Karakuzak Bridge,

that's similarly kind of crucial. And if you get across the river, you're not far away at all from the city of Khabani, which I'm sure most of your listeners will have heard of.
This is a massively important symbol of anti-fascist resistance. It was one of the ignition points of the revolution for the social movement here, and it was really important in the fight against ISIS.
and I think it's safe to say that Turkey via the

SNA had its eye on

the back revolution for the social movement here and it was really important in the fight against isis and i think it's safe to say that turkey via the sna had its eye on kabani again and that this is in fact an attack on kabani which has been kind of held back yeah and so the dan is important symbolically as this like strategic river crossing it's this kind of no pass around like they they will not pass moment um it's also important logistically like for the society here um because it's a hydroelectric facility it supplies electricity helps with the supply of water for various reasons for thousands and thousands of people it's now out of action yeah should go might go without saying but when you're in the middle of an active war zone you can't keep running a place like that yeah um so that is directly attacking and impacting the society and normal communities here and so yeah it's no wonder that those normal communities and that society always feel very very implicated and are kind of ready to to stand up and defend themselves um it's not as yeah the the military assault is not um kept separate from the society here the society is also under attack yeah indirectly attacks on infrastructure such as that and directly by like drone strikes on many many civilian targets unfortunately yeah in recent times that has increased particularly in villages surrounding barney and you seem like kids also hospitalized and killed as a part of that so on the 8th of january what began was that what they call a convoy like a big big trek of um different vehicles yes got together and arranged and organized from different towns in across not only syria to go to kishin dam as this very like the symbol this very clear like important physical location and also very symbolic thing where war

has also been fought before there's also in previous campaigns against isis for example

there was fighting in the region so people feel like you know their sons and daughters have fought

for history river crossing before it's still you know it's there in the historical memory as well

yeah and people went and since then which is almost exactly two months as we're recording

this we're right around the two months anniversary mark and there's been a constant presence there

Thank you. And people went and since then, which is almost exactly two months, as we're recording this, we're right around the two months anniversary mark.

There's been a constant presence there, a protest on the dam. And that's got several different kind of aspects to it.
It is mostly to raise the voices and raise awareness and make visible what's happening. and yeah if it's hard to understand why like hundreds of people would go from their homes to somewhere that is closer to the active fighting to somewhere that's in a very unstable region like yeah first of all you have to understand that nowhere in noughty syria is actually safe right like in kamas of the city where i am there's been residential buildings bombs dropped on them from drones like within the last couple of months as well it's not like yeah and there's this yeah sense of safety wherever you are the difference is a sense of doing something about it and of standing together and coming together in these like amazingly brave and amazingly creative ways that only the communities of northern syria can manage so yes unfortunately during these two months um there have consistently been airstrikes on the dam and i don't have the exact statistics and you wouldn't necessarily get an honest answer about how many of them have come directly from turkey and how many have come from sna drones right but the sna drones are paid for by the turkish state anyway so at the end of the day yeah morally how much difference does it make yeah um and they have attacked the the civil protests there and up until now i believe 25 civilians have been killed and many more than that hospitalized but despite this and in the shadow of this with the most beautiful defiance like that protest has continued um and what the videos that maybe don't get shared as much or shared enough that people might not have seen are also these images you know which are very i can attest are very real because um i went there myself a few weeks ago um which is everybody getting out and dancing um at the slightest opportunity or slightest excuse or lack of an excuse and the most amazing art that's been made like paintings of the people who've been killed or they would say here fallen martyr in these two months.
There's been made like paintings of the people who've been killed or as i would say here fallen martyr in in these two months yes um there's been theater like theater performed using the bits of the bombed out cars that were bombed just a few days before as props to kind of like yeah tell the story of what's been happening um like the most like creative things also statements for the press and all your different organizations show up so like the organized youth show up as the youth and obviously the women's organizations as women saying like you know this is our revolution this is our community and we know what it looks like when it gets occupied we're not just going to stand by and see it happen again it's our land it's our water and it's our kids is the refrain that kind of gets repeated over and over again and of course they're there in solidarity as well with the with the SDF themselves with the military force it would be it would be crazy if they weren't yeah because yeah they are also embedded in their communities no they're not extracted from the society the way that most kind of state armies are so yeah the situation at Tisrin is is still ongoing um and when i was there it was it

really was the most amazing experience there were bombings while i was there and tragically one of the people i got to know there who was a journalist his name was egid brush just less than two weeks after i got back i found out that he's also been killed in another drone strike so it was yeah it's very very um just kind of it doesn't it doesn't stop the aggression doesn't stop but nonetheless people kind of coming together to resist it doesn't stop either and once i've been there it seemed a lot less crazy or hard to imagine that people would come together around it because you see like the immense power that it has and you see that how everyone here has lost someone no like the vast majority of people here have lost members of their family you said yourself 13 000 fallen in the fight against isis alone right um and since then like war one way or another has been going on so people know what loss means already they've already lost but they're not gonna let that make them step back back they're gonna do their fallen loved ones justice and continue to stand up in their name and yeah it's a it's a very sort of big thing but it's really powerful when you see it in in person and in all its kind of humanity and and humor and joy despite the situation yeah no that is a very unique thing to kyrgyzstan and like the kurdish freedom movement it's just sort of joy i mean i've been it's very similar in burma actually where they'll also do they love to dance oh well uh in a war and like uh it is one of the things that i think like the joy is hard to explain i know we're sort of running low on time here but i'll just like when people hear syria and to when they hear Myanmar, they'll think of wars. But like, you should also think about all the people who exist outside of the conflict or who don't exist outside of it.
That's the wrong word, but who are not fighting at the front line. Like the experience of revolution is very joyful one, even amidst very difficult times.
And it's difficult to explain it if you haven't experienced it because it sounds so juxtaposed yeah but it isn't necessarily like i have actually really fond memories of meeting kurdish people coming into the united states in the mountains at the time when the united states was retaining people outdoors in very difficult conditions and like dancing with them there uh at a time when like it was miserable the ability to salvage joy uh like it gives you a sense of sovereignty i suppose and i can understand why that's such an important part of the kurdish freedom movement when every expression of kurdish identity has been suppressed for so long like yeah the ability to seize your moments what james c scott would call like little small acts of resistance like it's important it's uh it's more important i think people understand and if you're understanding it from a western military doctrine it doesn't fit yeah but that's because you're using the wrong framework yeah exactly jenny if people are interested in following your work about this or perhaps they're're interested in doing what they can to support the revolution in what is a challenging time, a very changing time, how can they do both those things? Yes. So, well, if they are interested in following the sort of updates and so on that I've been doing, I've got Instagram and TikTok channels, which are both at jke keesden i'm assuming you can stick that written form somewhere yeah we'll put it in the show notes and telegram channel as well if people find it easier to sort of get yeah that's just the most condensed way to kind of download information videos or whatever which you can find under the same name and there's also links to it on the on instagram tiktok um and on there we've got a wee link tree that uh has some suggestions for if people want to support like ways to donate say to the kurdish red present and stuff like that and then specifically yeah i mean there is a lot that people can do and whatever it is it all starts with getting more i wouldn't say informed i would say getting more connected right so getting informed is a part of that but not just in the sense of information learning like it's also connecting with like the feeling of things here and why it's become so important to so many people across the world not just people from here yeah um and the more we learn about that the more we'll start to see like how we can be a friend to the movement here and where how our role can fit um and i know that there are specifically in america a couple of organizations um is it that debbie bookchin's been really prominent in organizing one of them yeah emergency committee for rojava emergency committee for rojava that's the one yeah and you had emergency in there somewhere that That's definitely worth looking up and following a lot of the work that they do.

And you've also got like think tanks

like the Kurdish Peace Institute

that do kind of lobbying.

And so, yeah, there are some,

there is some stuff from,

coming from the United States as well.

But I think, yeah,

the more people get a chance

to kind of learn about stuff here

and see the connection

and be able to see and find themselves in it. And I think that's got a lot to do with what you were just speaking about daring you put so well i wouldn't extend it much more but yeah like people here it's really there's always war happening and always war kind of filing on top of you but that's never what it's about the question is always what are you fighting for and what you fighting to defend? And what would you be doing if there was no war? Everyone here will always say, if there was no war, we'd still have enough work to do.
With all the really ambitious social transformation that people here are really committed to, there's enough going on. And it's very big.
And as you put it, it's very beautiful and very joyful. And so that's the bit that I encourage people to joyful and so that's yeah that's the bit that i

encourage people to try and learn more about because that's the bit that makes you stay

and makes people like me stick around for years finding out more and more and making friends and

getting closer and closer to the communities here yeah i think that's a very good way to put it so

yeah i'd encourage people to do all that uh thank you so much for your time jenny i know it's late

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It's time to finally continue our journey through Latin American anarchism. Now, so far, we've covered almost every country in Latin America at this point, including Peru, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Central America, the countries of the former Gran Colombia, like Venezuela, Ecuador, Colombia, and also Cuba and a few other islands in the Caribbean.
And now, before we get to the really big history that I've kind of been saving as the finale, that is anarchism in Mexico, we're going to be talking about the anarchist movement in Uruguay. So my name is Andrew Sage.
You can find me on YouTube as Andrewism. And you can also find the bulk of the research for today's episode in Angel Capaletti's aptly titled Anarchism in Latin America.
I'm joined today by.... It's me again.
And it's been a while. Yeah, it has been a while.
Nice to be back. Great to be back in conversation.
Yeah. So before we could really get into the history of anarchism in Uruguay, I probably should give some context as to how Uruguay became Uruguay.
And well, my source for this history is primarily the Encyclopedia Britannica. So before the whole scourge of European colonialism, what is now known as Uruguay supported a population of about 5,000 to 10,000 people, which were organized in semi-nomadic groups.
You had the Tarawa, the Chana, and the Guarani Indians, primarily. So the first European visits took place first in 1516, and they weren't particularly successful or of interest.
Spain was looking for gold and looking for silver. That was their incentive for colonization at the time.

And they didn't see any of that.

So they didn't have much motivation to stick around.

It was until the 1620s, over a century later,

that Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries set up religious settlements.

But unfortunately, by then, Uruguay's native population had already begun to collapse.

Thousands of people were succumbing to European diseases that they had no immunity to.

I got it. Uruguay's native population had already begun to collapse.
Thousands of people were succumbing to European diseases that they had no immunity to. A couple centuries later, in 1800, Uruguay continued along with a very small population.
At this point, it was about 30,000 people in total, and a third of their population lived in the capital city of Montevideoore. Another third of their population were African slaves who worked on ranches and meat processing plants and as domestic servants.
Meanwhile, the elite, whether they be wealthy traders, bankers, or landowners, mostly traced their roots to Catalonia, the Basque Country, the Canary Islands, and other parts of Spain. We get into 1810, when a lot of the Latin American countries had been fighting for their independence, Buenos Aires, Argentina was among them.
But while Argentina was fighting for its independence, Montevideo was a royalist stronghold, backed by the Spanish military and naval forces. On the countryside, it was a different story though.
Uruguay's greatest independence hero kind of came out of that space. His name was José Gervasio Artigas and he originally led a Spanish cavalry unit but eventually turned against the crown in 1811 and rallied an army of rural fighters, freed African slaves, and anti-royalist leaders from Montevideo.
So with the backing from Buenos Aires, his forces were able to score key victories and eventually oust the Spanish. But Artigas had much bigger ambitions.
He wanted a confederation of provinces that resisted the dominance of Buenos Aires. In fact, he wanted Montevideo to become the center of a rival confederation, as prior to Argentina becoming Argentina, it was sort of a loose confederation centered in Buenos Aires.
Artigas's ideas also included things like redistributing the land to freed slaves and poor Uruguayans, which made him obviously very popular among the poor and very much a threat to the elite. Eventually, he was forced into exile because he made some enemies that basically sat on their hands as the Portuguese-Brazilian forces invaded and took over the region.
Despite his exile, though the fight really wasn't over. You know, after the occupation, which was often called Brazilianization, it was resisted very heavily by locals and exiles.
And of course, Argentina, which had become somewhat of a rival power to Brazil in the region, it saw Brazil's influence in Uruguay as a threat. So eventually, one of Artigas's exiled officers, a guy named Juan Antonio Lavallea, would lead a force that would cross the river and reclaim Uruguay.
The fight would end in a stalemate and then British diplomats would step in because, of course, had their own interests in the region. But eventually in 1828, a treaty was signed officially creating Uruguay as an independent nation, a buffer state between Argentina and Brazil.
In 1830, Uruguay's first constitution was ratified. And at the time, the country had a population of just 74,000 people.
All that war kind of left the country in ruins. A lot of the once wealthy colonial families were devastated, the cattle numbers had plummeted, and the threat of both Argentina and Brazil still persisted despite the treaty had been signed.
So then the nation ended up being split into two rival factions. You had the faction that was led by Uruguay's first president, and then you had the faction that was led by Uruguay's second president.
And they became fierce rivals that ignited a civil war known as the Guerra Grande or Great War. And to make a long story short, the first president's supporters became known as the Colorado Party and they controlled Montevideo.
And the second president's supporters became known as the White Party or the Blanco Party and they dominated the countryside. And so they would fight from time to time, each side being backed by different parties.
The Blancos were backed by Argentina, the Colorados were backed by France and England, and then eventually Brazil. And after about a decade of war, there was still no clear victory as to who came out of it as a success in state.
The interior of the country was devastated, government was bankrupt, its very existence as an independent nation came into doubt. And the divisions between the people who backed either party became, you know, more stark than ever.
Eventually, the Colorados were able to force the Blancos out of power, thanks to their backing by Brazil. And that move ended up alarming Paraguay, who was also afraid of Brazil's influence.
So Paraguay ended up launching what became known as the War of the Triple Alliance, which is something I covered in the episode of Paraguayan anarchism. Eventually, after getting out of the civil wars and all these disputes and foreign powers meddling in its affairs, we have the situation Uruguay found itself in in the 19th century.
A situation iriguan radicalism before anarchism and syndicalism the first factor shaping the radical landscape in iriguaise 18th century was utopian socialism it came to iriguaire with Eugênio Tandenet in 1844, and he was a French utopian socialist and follower of Charles Freire, who was one of the founders of utopian socialism. That whole milieu advocated for a reconstruction of society based on communal associations of producers known as phalanges.
And then with their influence afterwards came the next force of influence, the Italian migrants who had fought in the Civil War. These were Republicans who eventually became socialists.
And in the next influence was the mutualist movement that was inspired by Prud'Hon in the 1870s, first arising in Uruguay among artisans and workers and establishing mutual aid societies to meet people's needs. A friend of Pedro Joseph Pradhan himself, a guy named José Ernesto Gilbert, had actually moved to Montevideo for a bit after being exiled from France.
And while I don't think he did anything too actively political, he did pursue botanical studies in Uruguay. And I believe there was some kind of creature named after him.
So it's a little fun fact. Finally, as we kind of exit the 19th century, you had, of course, the rise of unions and internationalist organizations.
In the 1870s

and 1880s, you had fights for workers' rights, you had the struggle for an international socialism, and you have what Capilati identifies as a Uruguayan section of the Association Internacional de Trabajadores, which was established in 1872 and engaged in a public action in 1875 that had some 2,000 attendees.

They established something of a manifesto where one line had asked,

who better and of greater faith than ourselves can destroy the criminal exploitation to which we are condemned?

As a whole, the manifesto basically asked workers to unite.

And this was in a time where anarchism was finally starting to pick up in the region. Another group formed in 1876.
This was the Federación Regional de la República Oriental del Uruguay, later called the Federación Obrera Regional Uruguaya, or FORU. And they published papers like La Revolución Social, La Lucha Operarienal, La Federación de Trabaladores, La Emancipación, and Solidaridad.
And it was a very small but merging movement, but they didn't take very long to start making some moves. As Capilati notes in, they celebrated the anniversary of the Paris Commune on March 18th and collected 40 pesos on behalf of libertarian prisoners in Lyon.
They also collected money to support their papers and to support papers and efforts elsewhere, like in France. What's interesting about the Uruguayan anarchists is that they were among the most internationalists that I have found so far.
You know, like other parts of Latin America, they did have a large immigrant population. Yeah.
But because I suppose the size of Uruguay compared to other countries, the immigrant population was probably larger proportional to their neighbors. So they ended up having a much greater connection to movements and, you know, things that are happening in other parts of the world, including their home countries.
Yeah, that makes sense. I'm trying to remember exactly when this began, but like there was a movement among anarchists, I guess, more in the early 20th century to learn Esperanto as part of their internationalism.
Yes, that's actually a history that I would love to cover in an episode. I will connect you to somebody who writes books about it with pleasure.
Really? Yeah, yeah. That'd be fantastic.
My first book was about the anti-fascist Olympics and the last surviving popular Olympian, Eduardo Vivancos, died in 2022 in Canada in an old people's home i've been trying to visit him but because of the uh covid restrictions for the in the old people's home i wasn't able to but uh right he he had served as a esperanto translator at the popular olympics and like lived out his whole life with this dream of like if we can if we can uh if we can break down the linguistic barriers between workers, then we can get together and change things. Wow, that is fascinating.
You know what's interesting about the whole Esperanto connection to anarchism is that long before I really got into anarchism, or even learned about anarchism, I actually tried to learn Esperanto. There you go.
It worked. They they see that this is what they wanted you saw the barriers fall down once you uh once you began speaking esperanto i didn't get very far i think it was around the time when like duolingo had first introduced it into their like courses okay and so i saw it and i like did like a brief reading on it and i was like oh this looks interesting and so i tried to pick it up and i studied it for a little while but i didn't get particularly far yeah but now we're looking in the connection between esperanto and anarchism it's like wow you know the seeds were already there in a sense yeah yeah yeah you were ready for it that was a dream of the uh of the 1920s and 30s i'm glad it.
For sure. And actually, we're about to enter, well, at least the 20th century in our little historical review here.
Anarchism was really starting to finally pick up steam by this point, becoming very commonly known across Iroquois. In fact, by 1911, according to Capaletti's research of the official stats, there were 117,000 industrial workers in Uruguay, and of those, 90,000 were affiliated with the FORU.
So, about 76% of those industrial workers were affiliated with an explicitly anarchist organization. That included port workers, construction workers, metal workers, horse drivers, railway workers, and a lot more.
And to be honest with you, I'm not entirely sure what kept them from taking bolder action compared to some of their neighbors, considering their proportion, the numbers that they had, but unfortunately, it didn't take very long for the movement to be divided. Particularly after the Russian Revolution, there was, of course, the influence of Bolshevik ideas that split the movement somewhat, bringing workers onto the Bolshevik cause.
And then, of course, you had Bolshevik sponsorship. It was within the USSR's interest to support USSR-aligned movements worldwide.
And so a lot of libertarian groups around the world went into decline in that time, including in Uruguay. Some of the unions ended up faltering under the pressure of both the state and, of course, the new draw that was the Marxist-Leninist groups.
But, of course, the libertarians never really gave up, as they don't tend to, historically speaking. So the unions and groups continued acting, continued producing papers.
In fact, there was a major surge in unionization in the 1940s, according to Paul Sharkey's De Federación Anarchista Uruguaya, especially among the textile workers, railway men, dockers, construction workers, and meatpackers. And then outside of the union and paper-pushing scene, you also have Uruguayan writers that continue to shape the cultural scene with anarchist ideas.
Florencio Sanchez, for example, was a playwright in the Rio de la Plata region whose experience in nationalist militias led him to align himself with anarchist circles. He worked as a journalist while actively participating in anarchist organizations and publications, including La Protesta in Buenos Aires.
His plays tackled social issues such as class struggle, intergenerational conflicts, and the hardships of the working class. Then you also had other Uruguayan literary figures influenced by anarchism and contributing to the libertarian literary movement, including poet Julio Herrera Irceg, novelist Horacio Quiroga, and bohemian writer Roberto de las Carreras.
And interestingly, there was another notable figure in anarchism connected to perhaps the most or one of the most notable figures in anarchism, and that was the friend and biographer of Errico Malatesta himself, Luigi Fabri. Fabri founded the journal Studi Sociali, which was one of the strongest libertarian publications in Uruguay and Latin America.
And after he died, his daughter, Lucy Fabry, continued his work and edited the journal until 1946. Lucy Fabry was also one of the founders of the FAU, and she also published quite a few books in her time, many of which have yet to be translated into English.
I wish I could, you know, check them out. Yeah.
Paul Sharkey, you just mentioned, he's the guy, he's translated like a library of Anathagist texts. Yeah, yeah.
I think translators, they don't get as much praise as they should. You know, they're really an underrated contribution to the movement and to the propagation of the movement in new spaces.
Yeah, absolutely. I translated some text for a zine last year, and it is a lot of work.
Yep. But yeah, massive respect to people who do that.
Unfortunately, translation is not as simple as just going word for word. You really do have to get the spirit of of the text out of it somehow sometimes with different phrasing and that kind of thing yeah exactly it's difficult google can't do that for you yep i mean i appreciate having the ability to like go on a website and like have google translates translate the web page quickly for me but that has very clear and obvious weaknesses

when you go through it in terms

of actually translating the

information. It's good for

getting a vague gist

but

professional translators aren't going away

anytime soon.

It's a great thing to do if you

have a couple of languages

to make the world visible from

someone else's perspective is such a

wonderful thing to be able to

Thank you. You know, it's a great thing to do if you have a couple of languages.
Like, to make the world visible from someone else's perspective is such a wonderful thing. To be able to try and share that is really special.
Yeah, particularly for the less well-known or less popular languages. Yeah.
You know, although you'll be surprised, some of the most popular languages, most widely spoken languages in the world, are still lacking some key translations or some very key literature you know you'd be surprised like the kinds of texts that we take for granted the theory and stuff we take for granted that's just not available and vice versa you know there's probably a lot of gems out there that have yet to hit the English language. Definitely.
Yeah, yeah.

Like, just because, especially if it's a big language,

like a language of something like Arabic or Spanish, Mandarin,

where so many people speak it already,

like, there's less need to translate it

because, like, it's getting out there, I suppose.

So there isn't quite the same, like, urgency to translate it.

But the ideas get out through sort of paraphrase, I suppose, because enough people can read it in the original language and then paraphrase it in other languages yeah as long as the idea gets there you know the exact words may not necessarily be important yeah there is some beauty in like uh the piece i translated was pretty short but the belgian anarchist who fought in the spanish civil Civil War and then went into exile in South America. But the way he writes about the revolutionary moment is one of the most perfect and beautiful encapsulations I've ever read.
So like, it was nice to be able to share that. You should send that to me.
What is it called? It's called Rejecting or Refuting the Legend by a guy called Louis Mercier Vega was the name he went by. Sometimes he also called himself Charles Riddle.
Neither of those were his real names, but those were names he lived most of his life under. I've been reading a lot of translations of Derruti Column memoirs.
Another wonderful one is called Sons of the Night, which is by an Italian anarchist who fought in Spain and lived the rest of his life in France. And then it's a beautiful book because he was a grounds keeper at the Libertarian Club in marseilles and the young people of the libertarian club were so influenced by his life and his his experiences and the way he talked about the world that after his passing they translated his diary and then wrote this huge historical sort of it the footnotes are four times as long as a book because the footnotes explain that the things that he's talking about and uh who the characters are and it's it's a really kind of beautiful text and it has the authors call themselves the shimenologues like that the followers of antoine shimen is so it's kind of anonymously authored and i think it's a really special like literary project wow that is something that always moves me you know when somebody is able to have such an impact on the lives of others that even in their absence, people continue their life's work.
Yeah. It's a really special thing.
I'll send you a link to it when we're done. I've diverted us a long way from Uruguay.
I'm sorry. Oh, that's fine.
That's fine. I think for this episode, there's just one other interesting moment in Uruguay's anarchist

history that I want to cover.

And I'll leave it at that before the next episode.

But going down this rabbit hole was actually really interesting for me. so there was an experiment in the 50s in Uruguay called the Comunidad del Sur, which was an anarchist intentional community experiment.
And Capulati talks about it briefly as an effort by folks to live and work and eat and rare children together away from the injustices of capitalism and the state. Now anarchism is not about establishing intentional communities, but many anarchists have found great reprieve and great joy in establishing those communities, in finding love and care and connection in those spaces.
So these people spent about 20 years living together, making decisions together, sharing finances and sharing education. But the Uruguayan military dictatorship stepped in and put an end to the project in 1976.
They spent that time afterwards living in exile. First they settled Peru, and then they ended up in Spain.
And then

after that, they found themselves in Sweden, of all places, where they continued their communal life and engaged in international political education. So that's all I ended up learning about them at first, but I wanted to dig a little deeper and find out what happened to them after that.
And I wasn't finding that information in English language sources. So I ended up, unfortunately, having to lean upon Google Translate for the Swedish and Spanish Wikipedias.
But those pages went into a little bit more depth. And so I was able to find out that this group ended up taking part in the occupation of the Mulvaden neighborhood in the late 70s.
And they also translated Latin American anarchist texts into Swedish and vice versa. Cool.
Nice. And then when the dictatorship in Uruguay ended, they returned to Uruguay with the money they raised with the help of their Swedish comrades.
And initially a few stayed in Stockholm, so there was a split effort between Uruguay and Sweden for a bit. But the ones in Sweden were able to send money and equipment home, and so eventually they were all able to focus in Uruguay and set up a printery and established a farm in the countryside outside Montevideo on land purchased with money collected in Sweden, where they focused on collective farming and organic agriculture i'm apparently they're still active today i found what seems to be their website but it's not accessible it's down i tried to dig for it on web archive but i wasn't getting much information out of that but i also found a swedish website that was talking about the activity and i'll drop that in the show notes as well.
Yeah, that'll be cool. So that particular website, they said, and this is the Google translation of what they said, but it was, quote, in parallel with the other activities, the organization runs a farm where it produces sweets from figs, gopher, blackberries, and citrus fruits.
It also preserves vegetables such as peppers and eggplant and produces its own tomato sauce. This small-scale industry that the organization has built up is mainly run by a women's group.
Comunidad de los Sur also participates in the collective Lapitanga that works for equality between women and men and against violence against women. End quote.
So they're doing some really important work in Uruguay after all these years. I can't find their exact location, but it seems they're based somewhere in La Paz.
If anybody wants to reach out for further details, what they're up to these days, their story is really fascinating to me, so I'd love to find out. Just that whole idea of this group facing this dictatorial repression, resettling somewhere else, catching catching their breath engaging actions elsewhere and then me being able to return home and continue the work i find that very inspiring yeah that's really cool that's what we hope for you know when like people are forced into exile to be able to to return eventually and to be like accepted into the community where they find themselves and enable to like like you say catch your breath and build their strength and return it's that's really cool yeah i mean shout out to the swedish anarchists who would have you know moved in solidarity with them and have them set up and that kind of thing if they did yeah swedish have been really good at accepting migrants and refugees unfortunately a number of people who had received asylum in Sweden were killed this week, so that fucking sucks.
ROB to them. Yes, I've noticed the mood is shifting as of late.
Yeah, all around the world, thanks to the wonder of social media, I think. Yeah.
But you see the digression we had about translation that ended up connecting. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
It's beautiful. Yeah.
Everyone listening, start learning Esperanto. I think that's a great hobby.
Although I do question, I think it was like a really cool project in its time. I don't know how well it can pick up today.
Esperanto in the age of AI is an interesting...

I'd love to hear from Esperantis, honestly.

If we have Esperantis who listen,

I still have a great deal of admiration for the project

and for the people who participate in it.

I've had a lot of communications with them

because of their relations to Spanish anarchism,

and they've always been the nicest, most interesting, welcoming people.

So if you want to be our Esperanto guest please uh hit me up yeah yeah maybe eventually i will get back into esperanto and pick it up again i'm still still working on my spanish as listeners can probably tell uh but we'll get there yeah so we'll leave it here for today but next time we're going to venture into how anarchists stayed active throughout the 20th century and also contributed to the development of anarchist strategy internationally until then i've been andrew sage i've been here with james stout and you can find me on youtube.com slash andrewism

on patreon.com slash saying true.

This is It Could Happen Here.

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I am your host, Mia Wong. with me is james stout yeah i'm mia's collaborator today yay this is collaborator good we are talking today about collaborator bad so on friday senator chuck schumer and his allies in an act of democratic collaboration with the regime that looks even more hideous now than it did then in the wake of a series of absolutely horrific deportations in the last few days.
Voted for basically a continuing funding resolution. So this is a little bit complicated, but I believe in us.
We can get through a little tiny bit of Senate bullshit. So basically what's happening is that they need a resolution to keep funding the government for a little bit until more negotiations can happen to fund a budget there hasn't been a budget basically like we keep seeing this over and over again there keep being continuing funding resolutions there keep almost being government shutdowns because if there's not a continuing funding resolution and there's no budget the government doesn't have any money what happened here was that so in the senate you can filibuster this and a whole bunch of senators schumer and others who we will be reading out later after we talk about what this resolution actually did because it's unhinged so you've probably been hearing if you've been hearing about this you've been hearing it called a cloture vote so what that is is basically the absolute shortest version of it is it's a vote to kill a filibuster on the bill um You filibuster by continuing debate, cloture ends debate, etc., etc., etc.

So this resolution is

staggeringly unhinged.

It is not a very long funding

continuation. It includes $13

billion in cuts to non-military

spending and also $6 billion

in military spending cuts.

There are a lot of things that

have been sort of defunded by this, including like a lot of like housing and urban development stuff. It's a research ship, you know, and that's obviously really bad because normally with these resolutions, you're just sort of like continuing the funding, right? But this is not a normal continuing resolution.
This is, It is very, very overdramatic to do the thing that a lot of people have been doing, which is comparing it to the Enabling Acts that the Nazis passed. Yeah, it's not...
But... But...
Comma. This is a completely unhinged continuing resolution.
There has never been a continuing resolution like this ever. And it is genuinely, it is another step down the path of effectively having Trump running the government as a dictator by sort of pure fiat.
and okay you're hearing me say this and you think this is an exaggeration but what this

continuing resolution actually does is normally in one of these resolutions, Congress tells the executive how parts of the budget are supposed to be sent, right? It does allocations. It'll be like, okay, so there's this money for this thing and it goes to this purpose and you have to spend it here.
This continuing resolution just like doesn't do that. Yeah.
And the goal of it is just to let Trump do whatever the fuck he wants with the money by not actually giving out congressional things to specifically allocate it. So this is more of a thing we've been seeing more and more, which is Congress specifically like delegating and abandoning its constitutional power to be the people who set the budget and just handing it over to the executive so there can be a single unitary executive that runs the entire government yeah i mean when you combine it with the open defiance of the courts you saw this weekend with with deportation right like it's not a good not a good outlook actually like it is yeah yeah in terms of the old separation of powers which is you know supposed to thing you could argue about whether the American revolution was about the king being able to set taxes because that was technically a thing controlled by the British parliament but like it is for example the issue that like the revolution of 1789 was fought over right like that there shouldn't be a single unitary executive who gets to fucking set the budget it's fundamentally i don't want to say unconstitutional because i guess i don't get to decide what is unconstitutional and it to the extent that it matters fuck him fuck if we get well it doesn't matter yeah but it is like obviously hideously unconstitutional it's entirely against the basic principles of the constitution right like the sine qua non of the u.s constitution to use a fancy word is separation of powers is it not like the kind of the point of the thing is to not just have one older dude in charge like that that is the english way yeah and this is this is the fundamental like principles upon which the liberal notion of democracy is based.

And I use liberal in like the 1700s, early 1800s sense of the word liberal, right? Which is that like you believe in democracy. This bill effectively just allows Trump to fund and defund programs at will.
I mean, there's, you know, there are specific things like boundaries in which he can and can't do this. but I'm going to read some stuff from Senator Patty Murray,

who is the vice chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, which is the committee that handles like where money goes in the budget. Right.
It was budget appropriations, et cetera, et cetera. So she, you know, is one of the senators who sort of understands this intimately.
She wrote a fact sheet about this, which is fucking terrifying. I'm just going to quote from that because good God.
Quote, under this continuing resolution, the Trump administration could, for example, decide not to suspend funding previously allocated for combating fentanyl, the Support Act and other substance abuse and mental health care programs or specific NIH priorities like Alzheimer's disease and vaccine research,

and instead steer funding to other priorities of its choosing.

It could also pick and choose which military construction,

army core,

or transit improvement and expansion projects to withdraw funding without direction from Congress,

leaving democratic states and priorities in the lurch.

Yeah,

that's,

that is like,

that's not great.

Like,

I don't think people realize how much damage this could do in it like yeah they have a year of just randomly slashing fit not only is it the programs who are affected right things that are cut the certainty that contractors will get paid the certainty that if you have a contract with the government it is a reliable thing like that will have devastating economic consequences if they just start randomly yoinking contracts and not paying people as they did with the usa id suppliers right yeah so like there is also a bunch of funding cuts for things like the army corps of engineers and like there are a lot of valid criticisms you can have about the army Engineers. And for example, the way it like has structurally fucked the entire city of New Orleans.
But the thing is, not giving them money to do hurricane prevention is not going to help that. And the thing about this, right? Because this resolution has 13 billion in direct budget cuts.
And then it also allows Trump to do more cuts on top of it by doing these funding allocation things, right? So it's a fucking double set of cuts here. This includes, you know, he can reallocate money away from the FAA.
One of the most absolutely terrifying ones is that this continuing resolution allows RFK Jr. to eliminate funding for the universal flu vaccine.
Yeah, I was talking to someone in the medical profession about this. there's a serious chance that there just won't be uh one developed in the u.s for next year and that it will just use the european one great stuff you know this is really the substantive problem with this entire thing and why it is genuinely an act of like an act an act of collaboration worthy of vici france to fucking pass this to pass this bill yeah is that again you are handing control of like the budgets right you are handing direct control of just like how budget allocation stuff gets gets fucking dealt with to like elon musk trump and rfk jr and they can just fucking do this shit with it yeah we've already seen some of this like manipulation of federal government funding like with the color with columbia university oh we're gonna get to that yeah okay good exciting yeah so other things uh it defunds fema's disaster relief fund which is bad because a bunch of fema's disaster relief fund has been get this exhausted because there were a bunch of fucking disasters.
Guess what there's going to be more of? Disasters. Guess what there's not going to be money in? The FEMA disaster relief fund.
Yeah, that's bad. Yeah, and here's the thing.
We have not fucking hit the worst part of this continuing resolution yet. Like all of that, right? Like the monopolization of power in the hands of the executive, you know, like the potential defunding of the flu vaccine.
We have not hit rock bottom yet. Rock bottom is this.
Getting resolution, quote, slashes $185 million, 7% of the total program from defense nuclear nonproliferation programs, including the programs to prevent terrorists from acquiring nuclear and radioactive material, remove radioactive materials at risk of being misused or causing a catastrophic accident, and deter and monitor foreign nuclear fuel cycle and weapons developments, nuclear materials movement or diversions, and nuclear explosions. Cool.
So we are defunding the nuke police Again for a third time And this one looks like it's actually gonna fucking stick because I don't think any of these fucking people actually understand what the defense nuclear non-proliferation programs do I don't know because they were on one about Iran and enriching uranium for years have they just have they moved on as we're going to see in a second this budget is being written by just fucking clowns like just absolute dipshits i don't i don't know who the fuck is doing this that's what i sometimes wonder is like who comes up with these numbers like is there like a staffers it's it's literally an army of staffers yeah the senators who are voting for these bills most often have no idea what the fuck is in them uh it's all run by an army of staffers and and the thing about it all being run by an army of staffers and the fact that republican staffers are increasingly drawn from a class of like genuinely the most unhinged people who have ever lived this this class of fucking internet gripers and fucking white nationals bullshit means that

one of the parts of this I think people have heard about is the $1 billion in spending that

was cut just from like the city budget of Washington, D.C. Now, looking at what's happened

next, I genuinely think they did this by accident. That's been the explanation that's been given,

is that they literally did it by accident. And the reason I think it might actually be true,

it's either actually true or they saw the pushback but immediately after this bill got passed there was like a separate bill that was drafted to restore the funding and that was approved unanimously by the second so it might legitimately have been a mistake so it was either legitimately a mistake or all of these people realized that the entire population of dc was about to like fucking march on the capital of pitchforks so i don't know what one of those two things so we're not talking much about the dc stuff because it seems like the funding is going to come back though if it doesn't we'll cover the catastrophic impacts of that and there's one more thing james which i couldn't find details of but one of the things it's supposed to do is eliminate protections for people in immigration courts fantastic great allow the attorney general more power yeah i was just looking this up actually like let me um there was a an office founded under biden that was the office of the office of immigration detention ombudsman which was like supposedly to exist to like examine people's conditions in immigration detention right and i'm wondering to what extent it still exists yeah like i i don't know i was just trying to find that out i would have to go through the resolution and maybe i will at some point but yeah there is stuff that the federal government does right now that provides people with some protections in immigration courts right and yeah i can i mean look to the extent that that matters because they're just deporting people in open violation of court orders right now we we don't know but it's still bad either way right take taking away the very few protections that mike would have yeah it's bad yeah so speaking of bad things uh we're going to go to ads and then we're going to come back. We are back.
So having said all of this about this bill, fully 10 Democratic senators voted to avoid shutting down the government and fucking

pass this unbelievably hideous

resolution which again

defunds the nuke police.

Again, they are

risking global annihilation

by doing this.

I'm just going to read out the names of everyone who did this

because there's been a lot of focus on Chuck Schumer and Chuck Schumer

is probably the primary

person responsible for this but fuck every single one of these people he's a quizzling in this scenario like the capital q quizzling yes yes okay so chuck schumer catherine cortez mosto dick durbin which is actually a surprising one because durbin so durbin's about to retire he was my old senator in illinois actually no he wasn't well complicated i actually fucking don't remember which one of the which one of them i had uh but durbin is you know he's like senior party leadership guy uh he's usually been in like the kind of left i guess of the like old democratic like leadership yeah it's not very far left but he he fucking voted for this uh john fetterman to the surprise of absolutely no one. John Fetterman, to the surprise of absolutely no one.
Kirsten Gillibrand, to the surprise of absolutely no one. Maggie Hassan, Agnes King, Gary Peters, Brian Schatz, and Janine Shaheen.
Now, notably missing from that list, Tim fucking Kane voted against this. Do you know how bad a Republican budget thing has to be for tim fucking kane to vote against it and be like hey guys what the fuck are you doing yeah the thing is like as a democrat the move just if you want to get re-elected is to vote against it and then blame them for everything bad that happens this year because of the budget thing right if you have no moral backbone whatsoever and i'm sure like like there are things in in this continuing resolution which will really screw over rural areas right like some of the funding that was allocated oh yeah and like kane is at least i guess astute enough to see that when things get harder for his constituents he can go yes they did this and i voted it, and you need to return me to office so I can continue opposing this shit, which is a very cynical approach.
But then, yeah, we've just got Chuck Schumer who just kind of bowed down and kissed the ring. Yeah, and the response to this is staggering.
I genuinely, I have never seen anything like the kind of anger I'm seeing. I've seen that true over the past few days this has happened friday like indivisible which is like a pretty so indivisible is like a sort of ngoe thing that's like a like tries to get it's like a sort of vaguely progressive thing it tries to get people to vote for the democrats yeah and like register voters and stuff yeah they've been getting into fights with the democratic leadership because they keep telling people to call their senators to tell them to oppose bills and the nominations the democrats are like we don't want to oppose bills in 2020 in mobilizing the vote in ton territory for instance like an indivisible tohono played a really important role uh so like they're not negligible in their power no yeah and like they are calling for primary Chuck Schumer.
R slash

neoliberal

is calling for AOC

to primary Chuck

Schumer. Do you know how fucked

things have to be for R slash

neoliberal to be

backing AOC against

Chuck Schumer? Like, fucking

Neera Tanden is agreeing with

Bernie Sanders criticizing schumer

for voting for this bill like this is like i i don't know i i i think there maybe there are

probably are people in the audience here who either like weren't paying attention enough or

like don't remember or like weren't old enough to be around for like like the bernie wars but this

is like every faction on every side of like the whole series of fights from like 2015 and like

Thank you. like the Bernie wars, but this is like every faction on every side of like the whole series of fights from like 2015 and like Bernie's first thing through 2020, even like the mid to late 2020s.
Like all of these people were on exactly polar opposite sides. They fucking hated each other.
And they're all like coming together specifically to agree on a fuck Chuck Schumer campaign to the point where like, again, like Arceles neoliberal and like Neera Tandent who are like have been just absolute stalwarts of the party right for ages are like are backing AOC, primaring Chuck Schumer. Yeah, it's a total cultural victory for the Bernie bros is what's happening.
It's a Democratic Party. Well, again, Chuck Schumer is the head of the Democratic Caucus in the Senate.
Yeah, minority leader of the United States Senate. Yeah, he is, you know, he is unbelievably powerful.
And I mean, like, the people criticizing him, he got criticized. There was a joint statement on the funding bill in the Senate from the Democratic minority leader in the fucking House, Hakeem Jeffries, and the Democratic whip, Kathleen Clark, and the caucus chair, Peter Aguilar.
And like Hakeem Jeffries is as ferociously anti-socialist of a politician as there exists in all of Congress. He is like implacably hostile to even like the most like barest progressive things whatsoever.
He is just staggeringly opposed to it and he they released a joint statement against this right what is sort of happening here and it's happening fucking too late to stop anything but what's happening here is like we are genuinely starting to get a kind of and i'm seeing this sort of online i'm we've been i think we've been seeing the sort of echoes of it is like there's a kind of realignment happening among, you know, obviously this has been being opposed by people outside the Democratic Party and by a lot of the Democratic Party's base for ages. Right.
And the Democratic Party's base and also just like people who don't want to get be ruled by fascists forever have had, you know, incredibly staunch opposition to all of the collaboration that's been happening. but what's happening right now is that like the actual like inside of the democratic party there was a fucking rupture happening and inside of the people who are like you know like inside of the politicos there was a rupture happening between people who are collaborationist and people who like want to be less collaborationist and this is to the point where like like nancy pelosi came out against this yeah and the reason they're doing this is because a lot of these people are fucking terrified because they are looking at a couple of things.
One, they're looking at what the Trump administration is doing and they're going, holy shit, like Neera Tanden is looking at them fucking just black bagging, just like just fucking black bagging Mamou Khalil and is going like, holy shit, we are maybe about, I mean, it's maybe eight steps away from that happening to me, but that's eight steps that you can fucking, like that's a path you can walk down. And it's also these people that are realizing just the unbelievable anger among just like regular, what you would call sort of like regular liberals who aren't like, like you vote for the Democrats, but who aren't like.
Yeah. They're not like on twitter with a blue wave emoji yeah but the thing is even the even the people on twitter with a blue wave emoji and again like the r slash neoliberal people are like the most ideologically committed of all of these people right like like even the most unhinged nerds who are like obsessed with like individual house races and like very very specific weird technical policy stuff that allows them to justify supporting all these unhinged policies even those people are turning on them and the reason this is all happening and i think this is a very very important thing to understand about the entire political landscape going forward is that one of the core and extremely important bases of donald trump's support is in the leadership of the democratic party particularly the democratic party in new york right this is schumer this is eric adams this is also increasingly becoming true of people like gavin newsom and a lot of the sort of democrats out of the bay to some extent um and you know and you can you can see this in sort of various border states too where you know these these people fundamentally are doing this because they fucking agree with him that's why that's why that's why they're fucking collaborating yeah or at the very least like and perhaps it's in a sense worse that they don't agree with him but they don't care enough to to not like they're doing it because they think they can personally benefit no i don't think that's true.
And my evidence for why I don't think this is true is I'm going to read some stuff from the New York Times interview that I did with Chuck Schumer right after he did this. Okay, so in this interview with the New York Times times uh he gets asked about trump cutting 400 million dollars of funding for columbia university for i guess not like publicly executing the palestine protesters and again yeah columbia university that is an institution that he represents in the senate right yeah like that's like his that's like his fucking thing and his response was well obviously they didn't crush the campus protest hard enough but but cutting 400 million dollars of spending might hurt students who didn't protest like maybe and he's not even clear about that right so if you read between the lines of what he's saying his argument is that it's actually fine for trump to do all of these fucking budget cuts of all of these people from these universities, as long as it's specifically targeting pro-Palestinian protesters, which is anyone who's vaguely pro-Palestine.
And he also gets, you know, he gets asked about the Trump administration to straight up black bagging Mahmoud Khalil. And he says, quote, I don't know all the details yet.
They're trying to come out and there'll be a court case which will determine it. If he the law he should be deported if he didn't break the law and which and just peacefully protested he should not be deported it's plain and simple i mean how is it

hard to not make an equivocating statement on that no because he agrees with it he thinks it's fine

he thinks it's fine the trump administration fucking black bagged this guy like again who

was who was a permanent u.s resident he thinks that it is okay that he's not even disagreeing with the actual literal black bag and i want to point this out like even if amu khalil like legally committed a crime like that's not a fucking deportation thing yeah the section of the united states law they're using to to justify deporting him it's not one that been used before. This is not he did not do a felony.
And they're not suggesting that he did do a felony. And like if Schumer can't find it in himself to condemn that, like, yeah, like folks need to move on.
Because he agrees with it. Like, that's the thing.
What he is saying here is that he agrees that if a permanent legal U.S. resident commits any crime.
Well, doesn't, though. He's not accused of a crime.
No, no, but this is specifically what Schumer said. Schumer said, quote, if he broke the law, he should be deported.
What his stance is, is that if someone who is a permanent U.S. resident breaks the law while at a Palestine protest, even if it is a misdemeanor, even if it is fucking jaywalking, that they should be deported.
That is the Trump administration line. Like that is it is slightly less than Trump administration line.
But that is that is a genuinely fascist political line. He just straight up agrees with the administration.
He is a slight matter of degree like off from them. But like he's he just like he's collaborating because he fucking agrees with them and he agrees with them both on on the fact that the state should be used to like destroy anyone who supports palestine and he agrees with them on the fucking deportation shit because he you know this is one of the other things that democrats have fundamentally aligned with trump on since 2020 is that fundamentally like they agree that we need more immigration controls and we need to do more border violence you can you can see the evidence of this from when they fucking passed that just unhinged fascist bill to do allow border state of emergencies yeah and the stuff that they proposed and didn't pass because the republicans wanted to kill it and then biden executive order banning asylum like yeah i think what it comes down to is that for the democrats the existence of people who oppose the genocide in palestine and the existence of migrants is seen as inconvenient and they're prepared to do away with any rights those people might have and even do away with those people rather than engage with them in any way right they i'm sure people like schumer continue to blame people from both of those movements for their ass whooping that they took at the polls in 2024 because they decided that it was more important to do genocide than it was to listen to those in this country and rather than listening now they're blaming them blaming them.
And the only logical way for them to go is right. And the only logical place for them to take it is more state violence, right? Yeah, but there's another aspect of this too, which is the thing I want to close on, which is, okay, so why have the Democrats been shifting so far to the right since 2020, right? And specifically since after 2022 when they needed to sort of win a contestant after election.
the answer is that after 2020 all of their politics became about opposing the uprising because they you know that there was a period during the uprising where they were scared enough that like you get like the kenty cloth shit and they're like you know and they're talking about like and biden like runs on a significantly more left-wing platform than like kamala harris did right yeah like because because of the pressure of those protests. Now, obviously, presidential platforms are just lies, right? Yeah, it's just lies you need to tell to get the votes.
Yeah, yeah. But on the other hand, the fundamental politics of the Democratic Party in the last half a decade has been opposing the uprising.
It's the thing that's behind all of their turn to tough on crime politics. the thing behind their sort of anti-immigrant politics.
It's the thing behind the turns they've been taking on trans politics. And the problem with this, specifically like the anti-black, anti-crime shit and the anti-immigrant stuff, you know who else his entire politics like came into the fucking political sphere as the right-wing reaction to the uprising? Oh, wait, Donald Trump.
Donald Trump walked down the fucking escalator in 2015 immediately in the wake of the giant uprisings in baltimore in 2015 which i think people have sort of memory holds like ferguson in baltimore he like it's like right after baltimore that trump fucking comes down the escalator and that and people people forget how fundamentally the the right-wing reaction to those protests deranged people who even the Tea Party hadn't pushed far enough to vote for Donald Trump. It was a reaction to this.
Yeah, that's when we saw the Oath Keepers for the first time as well. This kind of militant right really grew dramatically in response to that.
Yeah. And this is the sort of fundamental thing that's going on, is that there's now an entire class

of people who are running

the Democratic Party, right?

This is like fucking Chuck Schumer.

He is like, I mean,

quite possibly the most powerful Democrat

in the country,

and he is just straight up

a collaborationist.

Yeah, it might legit become

that like AOC is more powerful

than Chuck Schumer

in the next few weeks.

You know, he is...

The reaction against Chuck Schumer from establishment Democrats is stronger than anything I've ever seen from them. He lost Seth Moulton, which I didn't even think was possible.
But I think there's one more important note to say here, which is that the response to this that I've largely been seeing is everyone going, okay, we need a primary of these people. Okay, are you looking at the rate at which stuff is happening in this country? Do you think that we are going to be able to wait until the fucking primaries? Yeah, six years to seven cases, right? Yeah, until we can attempt to fucking do shit here? Absolutely not.
No, there literally is, regardless of what you think about electoralism as a strategy, there is literally not time to wait until the next election cycle. Like, again, they have defunded the nuke police for the third time.
So the opposition to this isn't going to come from inside of the electoral system because, again, the Democrats are being run by collaborators, and there's not enough time to fucking oust them. So if you want this to not continue, you're going to have to find ways to do organizing outside of that system we have approximately one million episodes about this you can also go back to my you already know how to organize episode yeah but yeah look call your senator if you want to but if that's a net total of your political activity then like right now it's probably not going to make a difference in time and really consider if it's the most useful use of your time yeah and maybe make some beans or so something nice for someone instead or as well you could listen to it while you sew something nice you could call them while you're cooking your beans hell yeah well this has been it could happen here uh yeah down with the collaborationists.
Fuck them. Yeah, absolutely fuck them.

Fuck Chuck Schumer in particular.

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This is It Could Happen Here. I'm Garrison Davis.
Tesla derangement syndrome is sweeping the nation. Last week on March 11th, President Donald Trump starred in a 35-minute Tesla commercial broadcast live from the White House driveway to news stations across the country.
This presidential ad campaign started with Trump announcing that he himself would buy a Tesla in support of his unique advisor, Elon Musk, whose business ventures have taken a sour turn as of late. To assist Trump with his purchase, the South Lawn was temporarily turned into a Tesla showroom with five different models parked in a row to choose which shiny new car to buy.
A significant portion of this Tesla sales event was spent by Trump praising Elon Musk's work at Doge, as well as Elon's business ventures, and complaining about people treating Elon Musk unfairly, saying that he, quote, shouldn't be penalized because he's a patriot. I'm just telling people, this man is a great patriot and you should cherish him.

You should cherish him.

You know, I have a little statement. We have to take care of our high IQ people because we don't have too many of them.
We got to take care of them. As for the cars, Trump mentioned that he actually already bought a cyber truck for his granddaughter Kai, which Trump called the coolest design.
But this time he chose a red Tesla Model S. Upon climbing in the car that

Secret Service does not allow him to operate, Trump remarked, wow, everything's computer.

At the end of the live streamed Tesla commercial, Trump said that he would pay with a check,

though for the duration of the event, Trump served as both buyer and salesman. As he read off from a sheet of notes on pricing and features for various Tesla models, like how, quote, Teslas can be purchased for as low as $2.99 a month.
I have a lot of information to put in the price. I want to make a good deal here.
You know, I do notice this.

They have one, which is $35,000, which is pretty low.

What is that all about?

This whole charade was an explicit attempt to rescue Tesla's plummeting stock price

and help foster a new demographic of electric car buyers.

Anti-woke conservatives looking to show support of Elon Musk, Doge, and the new Trump administration through consumer purchases. Trump himself said that he hoped doing ads for Tesla on the White House driveway would help Tesla's stock value and encouraged others to buy Elon's cars.
The next day, Tesla shares did rise 4%, but are now trending back down amid a global wave of protests against Tesla for Musk's involvement with Doge and the Trump administration, as well as Elon's Nazi-curious behavior. Trump has tried to face this wave of hate against his new best friend head-on, truthing on his platform of choice, Truth Social, last week, quote, Elon Musk is putting it on the line in order to help our nation and he is doing a fantastic job.
But the radical left lunatics, as they often do, are trying to illegally and collusively boycott Tesla, one of the world's greatest automakers and Elon's quote-unquote baby, in order to attack and do harm to Elon and everything he stands for. They tried to do it to me at the 2024 presidential ballot box, but how did that work out? Unquote.
There's a lot to unpack there. From Trump calling Tesla Elon's baby, despite Elon carrying around his baby at the White House near 24-7, to bizarrely declaring protest boycotts as illegal.
Not only has Trump called the Tesla boycott illegal, but during the White House car commercial, he announced that vandalism of Teslas will be labeled as domestic terrorism, promising that perpetrators will

quote-unquote go through hell. White House spokesperson Harrison Fields said, quote, ongoing and heinous acts of violence against Tesla by radical leftist activists are nothing short of domestic terror, unquote.
There certainly has been a surge of violence targeted at Tesla vehicles and dealerships, which I will discuss in detail later this episode. But for the past month, there's also been a wave of nonviolent protests and mass mobilization against Musk and Tesla at dealerships all around the country and even overseas, which the aforementioned boycott is a part of.
The quote-unquote Tesla takedown protests call to, quote, sell your Teslas, dump your stock, join the picket lines. We're tanking Tesla's stock price to stop Musk, unquote.
Their website has a map of Tesla dealerships around the world and a list of upcoming protests at various locations, which can be searched through via zip code. There have been reoccurring weekly protests at dealerships every Saturday in cities across the country, with demonstrations at more than 50 Tesla showrooms, attracting crowds of between dozens to a thousand, like in Tucson, Arizona.
Tucson, Arizona! The boycotts and public demonstrations certainly aren't helping Tesla's stock price and international reputation, but they are not the only display of displeasure directed at Elon and Tesla, as others are employing more direct methods to damage the company. Beyond peaceful protests, picketings, short-lived dealership occupations, and waving anti-Elon Musk signs outside Tesla stores, Tesla vehicles themselves have become the nation's hottest graffiti mural service.
Actually, around the world, people have been using Teslas to scribble epithets against Elon Musk and Donald Trump. Even some eco-conscious owners of Tesla vehicles

have defaced their own cars with stickers that read,

I bought this before he was a Nazi.

Which, hey, you can also put on your old Kanye West records.

Speaking of Kanye West,

some individuals have taken to marking Teslas with a swastika,

which at first raised eyebrows and confused some investigators, as typically when there's swastika graffiti, it's supposed to be anti-Semitic in nature. Whereas in this case, based on external factors, this is most likely a public attempt to link Elon Musk and Tesla with Nazism, following Musk's own anti-Semitic posts, far-right politics,

and the whole salute thing. Stickers and flyers have spread from the UK to San Francisco,

reading, don't buy a swastikar. But it's not all stickers and graffiti.

We'll talk about the other Tesla attacks after this ad break. Okay, we're back.
One of the most bizarre instances of Tesla vandalism was when 44 wheels were stolen off 12 unsold Teslas in a Texas parking lot on Valentine's Day. Investigators say they don't currently have any leads since the nearby security cameras weren't recording and the Tesla cameras were not active.
These Teslas were actually being stored in an Amazon parking lot six miles away from their home dealership. Allegedly, Tesla is contracting with other businesses to store their cars amid a wave of vandalism at Tesla dealerships.
On March 11th, wheels were damaged on multiple vehicles at a Tesla dealership in Dedham, Massachusetts. In Myers, California, Tesla superchargers keep being sabotaged with epoxy found in the charging cable and anti-Elon Musk graffiti with chargers marked with swastikas.
Seven Tesla charging stations at a shopping center were arsoned outside of Boston, Massachusetts on March 3rd. And on March 7th, Molotov cocktails were thrown at a Tesla charging station in South Carolina, with long-live Ukraine on the ground in red paint.
A 24-year-old man was taken into custody on March 13th. But it's not just wheel thefts and supercharger sabotage.
Tesla dealerships have been a target for anti-must graffiti, vandalism, and armed attacks. Some commentators have been conflating the picketing protests and graffiti with actual instances of arson and property destruction.
People like libs of TikTok labeling simple spray paint as quote-unquote trans-violence or trans-terrorism. Which is not to say some people aren't taking a more destructive approach towards their Elon Musk grievances.
Whether that qualifies as terrorism is another issue, though.

On January 20th, a man wearing black pulling a wheelie cart approached a Tesla dealership in

Salem, Oregon, and threw a Molotov cocktail at a Cybertruck. Surveillance footage shows the man

pull out, ignite, and throw three more Molotov cocktails from his rolling cart before realizing

an eyewitness is charging their Tesla nearby. The man in black pulls out a suppressor-mounted AR-style rifle and points it at the witness as they drive away, before continuing to throw more Molotov cocktails at parked vehicles.
A rock was used to break the glass of the dealership showroom, and another Molotov cocktail was thrown inside the building. A criminal complaint claims that this incident caused around $500,000 in damage to the dealership, including damaging seven Tesla vehicles.
A month later, on February 19th, the same dealership was hit again, this time with gunshots breaking through windows and hitting vehicles. In early March, a 41-year-old man was arrested in connection to both incidents, with court documents claiming fingerprints were identified on recovered glass bottles used for explosive devices, and the suspect's car was identified in footage captured by a police car parked near the Tesla dealership.
A bit north of Salem, in Tigard, Oregon, there have been two incidents of gunshots being fired at a Tesla dealership just this month. A Tigard police press release reads, For the second time in a week, Tigard police are investigating shots fired at a Tesla dealership.
Early this morning, March 13, 2025, around 4.15 a.m., more than a dozen shots were at a Tesla dealership in northern Colorado.

A spree of anti-Musk graffiti and vandalism started in January,

with Molotov cocktail-style incendiary devices found on the scene.

On February 7th, police responded to a call about graffiti and possible arson at the dealership. A few days later, a security guard confronted an individual, spray-painting the front windows of the dealership.
And on February 24th, a suspect was arrested at the dealership, allegedly in possession of bottles and gasoline. She was charged in late February.
Another person was arrested, allegedly in connection to a similar yet unrelated incident at the very same dealership in Loveland, Colorado. After a Molotov cocktail-style device was found burning between two Tesla vehicles on March 7th.
The rocks were also used to damage

both the building and multiple cars.

At around 11 p.m. on Sunday, March 9th,

four cyber trucks erupted into flames

at a Tesla parking lot in Seattle, Washington.

On Monday, March 17th,

two cyber trucks were set on fire

at a dealership in Kansas City.

Here's how local TV news reported the incident.

Around 11 p.m., officers were called to a fire at a car lot.

Thank you. at a dealership in Kansas City.
Here's how local TV news reported the incident. Around 11 p.m., officers were called to a fire at a car lot.
Core fire at that Tesla dealership in the parking lot. A KCPD officer was close by when he noticed smoke coming from a Tesla Cybertruck.
The officer used his fire extinguisher to try to put out the flames, but the fire continued to spread. KCFD was called in to help.
Our crews got on scene and the fire was in two cyber trucks. It had spread from one to the other.
We were able to get water on them, copious amounts of water, get the fire out. Now federal agencies are getting involved.
We saw an ATF officer with a bag of evidence. They say this incident follows similar reports from across the country of violence at Tesla dealerships.
I mean, you're eventually going to get caught, right? Reaction to this incident has been mixed, with some condemning the crime and others who see it as a form of protest towards the automaker. And just a few days ago on March 18th, an individual dressed in all black fired gunshots and threw Molotov cocktails, damaging five cars at a Tesla service center in Las Vegas.
The Las Vegas Review Journal writes that the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force is investigating the matter. Quote, agents arrived at the scene early Tuesday, according to FBI special agent in charge, Spencer Evans.
Evans said that while it was too early to call the attack an act of terrorism, it had, quote unquote, some of the hallmarks and a potential political agenda, unquote. Now, this particular incident in Las Vegas really got to Elon Musk, who spent the rest of the day complaining on Twitter that Tesla has, quote, done nothing to deserve these evil attacks, unquote.
Attacks on Tesla have not been contained to the United States. In early March, 12 Teslas parked outside of a dealership in southern France were set ablaze, and outside Berlin, unknown persons set fire to a high-voltage transmission line on a power pylon, cutting power to a massive Tesla manufacturing plant in Germany for multiple days.
This follows a series of direct actions and a forest encampment where the Tesla Gigafactory seeks to expand by leveling 250 acres of forest. The German forest encampment lasted nine months before being successfully raided by police this last November, with police destroying treehouses and trashing tents.
After the whole, my heart goes out to you salute and subsequent endorsement of AFD, Musk's reputation in Germany specifically is suffering steep decline. To quote the Washington Post, quote, Tesla stock has fallen by more than 35% since Trump's inauguration.
And last year, the company suffered its first annual sales drop in more than a decade. In Germany, Tesla car sales plummeted by 76% in February compared with a year earlier, according to figures released Wednesday.
And some owners have expressed buyer's remorse over owning a car some now see as a symbol of far-right politics,

a stark departure from the environmental consciousness it once epitomized.

And we'll talk more about how these protests are affecting

Tesla's international reputation after this ad break. Okay, we're back.
Right after the November election, Tesla stock surged to a never-before-seen high of $1.54 trillion. dollars.
But as Musk's direct involvement in the government was ramped up,

Tesla has fallen to about $777 billion. The massively inflated value of Tesla stock is

directly related to the public perception of Elon Musk. And Tesla stock greatly determines

Musk's own net worth, which is down more than $140 billion from this past December peak. When Elon's reputation gets damaged, so does Tesla's, and vice versa.
Tesla stock has been declining for nine consecutive weeks. JP Morgan analysts recently said that Tesla has lost so much value so quick that there really isn't any comparison.
Quote, we struggle to think of anything analogous in the history of the automotive industry in which a brand has lost so much value so quickly. Unquote.
And Forbes writes, quote, last week, JP Morgan analysts described the recent melting of Tesla's perception, especially in pockets of the world in which Musk inserted himself into right-wing politics, such as Germany. About 53% of respondents to a CNN poll published last week said that they hold a negative opinion of Musk, compared to roughly 35% with a positive view and 11% with no take, unquote.
Overseas, Tesla sales in general are way down, even as electric vehicle purchasing is going up. New data from the European Automotive Manufacturers Association show that Tesla registrations in the European Union, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, Switzerland, and the UK have dropped by 45% when you compare January 2024 to January 2025.
And this decline from Tesla comes as overall electric vehicle sales have increased 37% in the same January 24 to 25 head-to-head comparison. China's own EVs are surpassing Tesla in global production and sales in China, which is a huge EV market.
And Chinese manufacturer BYD is on track to overtake Tesla in global sales this year. And so if you consider the Tesla protests as a sort of public display of unhappiness with Tesla and Elon Musk, combined with all these other economic factors impacting the automaker, if these trends continue, Musk and Tesla could be in real trouble.
After the Las Vegas attack this Tuesday, Musk went on to Fox News to explain the situation as he sees it. Yeah, it turns out when you take away people's, you know, the money they're receiving fraudulently, they get very upset.
And they basically want to kill me because I'm stopping their fraud. And they want to hurt Tesla because we're stopping this terrible waste and corruption in the government.
And, well, I guess they're bad people. Bad people do bad things.
Essentially, Tesla is seen as an extension of Elon. And right now, Elon is seen as an extension of the Trump government.
And even if people feel powerless to stop the government, hurting Tesla is seen as a much more achievable goal with ripple effects that reach Elon, Doge, and the Trump administration. And compared to protesting the government, Tesla is a soft target, with cars and dealerships all across the country, not just in state capitals or in Washington, D.C., whereas government facilities are typically hard targets by both being less accessible and more protected.

J.P. Morgan analysts wrote, quote, Mr.
Musk's work with the Department of Government Efficiency has proven controversial domestically. And while as many members of the political right may be pleased as those on the left are displeased, the effect on Tesla sales seems nevertheless less negative, unquote.

Musk is certainly trying to make the best of it by tapping into the previously untapped EV market of mega conservatives. And though the Tesla brand is gaining popularity amongst conservatives, that demographic is just far less likely than liberals to actually switch from a gas to electric car.

Still, the president and conservative media have been doing a lot of free Tesla commercials. Last week, Sean Hannity announced on air that he would be buying a Tesla.
I don't believe in cancellation. I don't believe in cancel culture.
You know, and I know maybe it's not going to make up a difference, but you know what? After I drove my friend's Tesla, I went and I already picked out the one I want. It's called the, what is it called? The S-Plaid.
And do you realize this thing, an electric vehicle has 1,006 horsepower and goes from zero to 62 in 2.0 seconds. And this thing rips and you can go about 400 miles without a charge.
And I don't drive enough to go further than 400 miles. So I'm good.
And maybe it's just a gesture on my part. And I like that.
I like new technology. But it's just a way of saying, you know, look what they're doing to this guy.
On Friday, March 14th, Attorney General Pam Bondi said that she is opening an investigation into the attacks against Tesla. Quote, if you're going to touch a Tesla, go to a dealership, do anything.
You better watch out because we're coming after you, unquote. She released a statement on Tuesday after the Las Vegas arson, writing, quote, the swarm of violent attacks on Tesla property is nothing short of domestic terrorism, unquote.
Musk just can't seem to understand that tons of regular people really hate him now and instead has to invent some grand conspiracy against him. Here's how he explained it on Fox News.
Yeah, I mean, it's really come as quite a shock to me that there is this level of really hatred and violence from the left. I always thought the left, you know, Democrats, were supposed to be the party of empathy, the party of caring, and yet they're burning down cars, they're firebombing dealerships, they're firing bullets into dealerships, they're just, you know, smashing up Teslas.
Tesla is a peaceful company. We've never done anything awful.
I've never done anything awful. I've only done productive things.
So I think we just have a deranged, there's some kind of mental illness thing going on here because this doesn't make any sense. Yeah.
I think there are larger forces at work as well. I mean, I don't know who's funding it and who's coordinating it because this is crazy.
I've never seen anything like this. On X, the Everything app, Musk is much more open about who he suspects are these larger forces.
Musk has spread claims that, quote-unquote, multiple Democrat NGOs are coordinating, quote, attacks on Tesla dealerships, staff, and vehicles. Last night, a number of cyber trucks were torched in Seattle.
Democrats are becoming increasingly more desperate and violent, unquote. People in Musk's replies posted about how protesters are being paid by, quote, Democrat fundraising platform ActBlue, which is funded by Soros, unquote.
ActBlue seems to be the right's new favorite conspiracy topic from claiming that USAID was illegally laundering money to Democrats through ActBlue. And now that ActBlue itself has the ability to funnel money to activist groups.
ActBlue doesn't give away money or directly fund anything. It's a donation-based platform for registered organizations.
This is like saying, GoFundMe paid for your top surgery. No, people donated on a fundraising platform.
But nevertheless, this claim is going gangbusters on X the Everything app and being boosted by Musk and his associates. A popular right-wing politics account on X called Insurrection Barbie posted that, quote,

attacks on the Tesla dealerships, which have been linked to the Indivisible Project, a left of Stalin NGO that organizes street protests for the Democratic Party with shady prepaid debit cards

that they run through ActBlue, are committing economic terrorism meant to tank Tesla's stock and drive a wedge between Musk and Trump, unquote. Elon himself has claimed that a mysterious investigation, quote unquote, has found, quote, five ActBlue-funded groups responsible for the Tesla protests, Troublemakers, Disruption Project, Rise and Resist, Indivisible Project, and Democratic Socialists of America.
ActBlue funders include George Soros, Reid Hoffman, Herbert Sandler, Patricia Bauman, and Leah Hunt Hendricks. If you know anything about this, please post in the replies.
Thanks, Elon.

Unquote.

Now, the main organizations behind the Tesla takedown protests,

two activist groups called the Troublemakers and the Disruption Project,

don't even fundraise on ActBlue.

They have no affiliation.

But that hasn't stopped Elon from targeting specific activists

and accusing them of committing crimes simply for organizing pickets outside stores. Meanwhile, invoking the old anti-Semitic George Soros conspiracy as Elon himself has funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to right-wing politicians this past year and has threatened to primary any Republican congressman who doesn't cave on Trump's agenda.
So anyway, that is what's happening with Tesla derangement syndrome

all across the country and even the world. Every day, it feels like we are getting closer

and closer to the cool zone. See you on the other side.
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The coming has begun. This is It Could Happen Here, Executive Disorder.
Yes. Our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what it means for you.
I'm Garrison Davis. I'm joined by Mia Wong, James Stout, and Robert Evans.
Yes, and as James Stout just noted, the coming has begun, so we're going to also begin. This episode, we are covering the week of March 12 to March 19.
Obviously, the most important piece of news right now is that Minnesota Republican State Senator Justin Eichlorn,

who just last week sponsored or co-sponsored

a bill that legally recognizes

Trump derangement syndrome as a mental illness

which disqualifies you from possessing

firearms, was literally that same

day arrested in a sting

operation for trying to meet up

with and have sex with a minor.

Like,

literally, he was like,

had to have been texting this he thought what he thought was a kid but what was really a federal agent while he was finalizing the language it's it's it's truly phenomenal uh pedo con theory never fails anyway let's move on to the actual important news uh which mostly bad. This has been a pretty rough week.
Yeah, it's been a pretty rough week. It sucked, yes.
So I guess I'll turn to James Stout. It's me.
Hi, everyone. Hi, James.
Well, the day you're listening, it's New Rose. So New Rose, Piroz, babe.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Kurdish listeners.
So I want to talk today about rendition. This has been reported as deportation.
Like, I guess it technically falls within deportation. But what's happening here is that the Trump administration has begun renditioning people who it accuses of being members of Trendyaragua, which is a Venezuelan gang, and La Mara Salvatruchel, the MS-13, as they're known here, right? It has done this based on something called the Alien Enemies Act.
The way it's able to use the Alien Enemies Act is that it has designated these gangs as foreign terrorist organizations rather than as like international crime organizations. And it's used the Alien Enemies Act to expedite their removal.
We spoke about the Alien Enemies Act in a podcast that I made last November with Robin Sophie about parts of the law that Trump administration might use for its mass deportation agenda. They're now using this one.
Very briefly, it's a 226-year-old piece of legislation that hasn't been used since World War II when it was used to justify internment camps, which were a bad thing. These people aren't being deported back to Venezuela, right? The US doesn't have relations with the Maduro regime, although it has deported people back to Venezuela on an airline that was previously sanctioned, which could now land in the US for the express purpose of deportations, which is great.
Instead, they're being sent to El Salvador. They're being sent there with no trial or hearing or seemingly right to appeal.
When they get to El Salvador, they've been paraded in front of video cameras, very degrading treatment, right? Their hair is being shaved. They're sort of being walked with their heads forced down.
They're being filmed on their knees while all their hair and facial hair is removed. And then they're being sent to Secald.
If you're not familiar with this, it was the subject of State Department Human Rights Report very recently. And now we are sending people there.
It's a mega prison in El Salvador. It roughly translates to terrorism confinement or terrorism detention center, I guess.
It's been very recently built by Bukele, who's the president of El Salvador, and is part of his Superman Arturo, like Iron Fist, Super Iron Fist would be the way you would translate it, I guess. It is routinely criticized by human rights organizations for the disgusting conditions that people are kept in, right? The United States government intended to send 300 people there, and in return, it paid $6 million to El Salvador for the cost of their detention.
At the time that I wrote this, 238 people who were accused of being part of Tren del Agua were sent there. And then 23 who were accused of being part of MS-13.
They were removed on flights. The Trump administration is claiming they were removed before a district court judge in D.C.
blocked the removals. But there are a series of timelines that you can see online, some of which will be linked in the source of this episode, which suggests that they were in the air when he blocked their removals.
Nonetheless, the judge very explicitly said, and I'm quoting here, any plane containing these folks that is going to take off or is in the air needs to be returned to the United States. This is something that you need to make sure is complied with immediately.
This did not happen. The planes continued traveling to El Salvador.
It stopped in Honduras. And then these people were paraded before the cameras.
And they're now presumably being detained in this prison, which doesn't meet basic standards of human rights. The government has given various reasons for ignoring this ruling from the judge.
Press Secretary Caroline Levitt claimed that there was, quote, no lawful basis for it. Obviously, the process here is if you don't believe the judicial ruling is correct, you stop doing the thing and appeal it.
You don't just keep doing the thing and say, look, oh, well, I don't believe you. It's not true.
Obviously, this only matters insofar as the judge can enforce his decision. They also claimed in court that a verbal order that the judge gave is not the same as a written one.
And they claimed that because the flights were over international waters, this was a foreign policy matter and that the judge couldn't intervene in a foreign policy matter. That's a power that's reserved to the executive.
I mean, like all of these justifications are really like freaky in terms of constitutional power and stuff yeah this is there are fringes on the flag so admiralty court applies kind of stuff yeah but specifically that last one being like it doesn't count because we're over international waters is like yeah super frightening in terms of like human rights abuses that's not the way anything works especially since it was like a u.s airline yeah yeah yeah in in terms of yeah you basically don't have human rights because really look it's they're forcing a loophole that doesn't exist in the same way that george w bush did in the uh in the early 2000s with guantanamo bay he was never stopped from doing it yeah yeah well i i honestly i think i think the thing that this is closer to is the other things. So I think Guantanamo Bay.
He was never stopped from doing it. Yeah.
Well, I honestly, I think the thing that this is closer to is the other things. So I think Guantanamo Bay is the one that gets remembered, but the other part of the CIA torture program was the US would just ship people off to places like Syria.
Yeah, to Syria. Yeah, Syria, Egypt.
Yeah, Syria and Egypt were the two biggest ones.

Yeah, maybe.

Yeah, yeah, we did Tunisia too.

Syria's torture program had largely been cobbled together by a former SS guy. It's all, it's very good.
Yeah, I also want to read a line from the legal argument that Trump's lawyers made before this judge because it is fucking horrifying. quote enemy aliens are not entitled to seek any relief or protection in the country that

has designated them enemies absent dispensation by the president. See citizens protection league.
And then the imprentices noting common law ruling that alien enemies have no rights, no privileges unless by the King's special favor. So every single part of that is horrifying.
Also horrifying is the fact that if you actually look up the common rule citation, the next words after King's special favor is in a time of war. Yeah.
So, yeah, that's the idea here, right? That we're at war with these foreign terrorist organizations and these people are essentially like spies. Yeah, and this is this thing where like, well, no, obviously we're not.
Like, we don't have it. There's no state of war.
Like, no state of war has ever been declared. But because of the way the on terror sort of functioned they're they're they're trying to claim these things and then again like the fact that they're saying that anyone they declare an alien has literally no protections at all in the country no rights at all can be anything can be done to them it's unless specifically the president decides that they have rights is unbelievably hideous it is pure pure state of exception, total fascism shit.
It's fucking horrifying. Yeah, and it's entirely unconstitutional, right? You have to be a radically left person to believe that humans have rights.
Yeah. I want to really briefly, one of the criteria that was used here, so ICE criteria, so they have to have two identifying signs to be classified as a gang member.
One of them that has been used very heavily here is tattoos. We know from court filings that one man, Hersey Reyes Barrios, he has a football tattoo, like a tattoo of a football with a crown on it.
It's this Dios, like God underneath. It was supposed to be, I guess, similar, like a play on the logo of Real Madrid.
But they've used this to claim that it's evidence he's a member of a gang. Gangs like Tren de Aragua don't have gang sign tattoos, right? Yeah.
They're smarter than that. They've seen what's happened to gangs like MS-13, because who do, like Maras, Central American gangs, have had these things as part of their tradition for a while, and they've been used heavily by law enforcement.
I remember Christmas Eve 2023, I was in the desert with my friends and a large number of my joints had crossed that day. I remember meeting a Venezuelan man who was covered in tattoos.
Head to toe, very heavily tattooed. That dude spent the entire day building a shelter for someone else's sick kid, and then slept by himself in the freezing freezing cold outside and like i know i've been thinking about that guy a lot because like under this ruling right like just his appearance of having tattoos would have him classified as a terrorist and like when thousands of americans living within an hour of that place did nothing and that little girl who was sick had nowhere to sleep like this guy took it upon himself to help even when he himself was in a difficult place and uh it just really makes me kind of sick to think that this is where we're at now yeah no i mean it's it's it's a damning indictment of the character of people who are the voter base in this country.
And it's a damning indictment of like what particularly liberals

in this country. And it's a damning indictment of like what particularly liberals in the left failed to stop because this was a, this was a train that we could see coming for a while, like the propaganda campaign against these folks and a necessary ingredient and the Republicans getting their way on this was democratic politicians and, you know, to be entirely fair, quite a few prominent thought leaders on the left, absolutely folding and not just, not just failing to like counterpoint this stuff, but like diving in on it because they, they either had prejudice of their own or they saw it as like an opportunity.
But like, you know, the whole nativist deal is just disgusting. Yeah.
Yeah, I don't know. I don't know what else to say.
I can't just like keep yelling about it. Yeah, it's not all a slippery slope and I'm not saying that they're both as bad as each other because what's happening now is much worse than anything that happened previously.
But like, when we could detain people, including little children outside, and we could leave them there in the snow and like little babies could be shivering and I could be giving away my own coat almost every day I was out there because I was worried someone's baby was going to die of hypothermia. We kind of conceded that these people didn't have rights.
Right. And the Democratic Party let that happen.
And people on the left let that happen and like that is a stepping

stone on the pathway to where we're at now yep just as like with all the shit that's that's happening right now like in terms of like the disappearing of political opponents and whatnot like you can draw a line from that from like the Patriot Act you know from Obama targeting a US citizen in

Afghanistan. All of these

are obviously things from like the Patriot Act, you know, from Obama targeting a U.S. citizen in, I think, Afghanistan.
Like there's all of these are like, obviously, things were not nearly as bad as they are right now in those administrations. But like, they're not unrelated.
You know, this kind of unitary executive theory is a through line through the last several administrations. And if anyone had pushed back prior to this point,

Trump wouldn't be able to do a lot of what he's doing.

Yep.

Now what we are doing is pivoting to ads.

Yeah.

Right now.

We're back and we're talking crane ukraine i'm sorry that i shouldn't have framed ukraine if you want to yeah i don't know why i did um anyway so if you've been kind of paying attention over the last month or so we've had a little odyssey uh in terms of uS., Russia, Ukraine relations. And the gist of it is that everybody claims to want an end to the fighting, you know, at least off and on.
Putin has kind of like made some motions to that, has absolutely not acted as if this is something he particularly cares about. Trump clearly does want a ceasefire because he wants to be able to take credit for it.
And Zelensky also clearly wants a ceasefire.

But there's been some kind of some pretty significant like holdups.

One of them has been around Ukrainian minerals.

And, you know, in February, you had the administration talking a lot about how the U.S. was going to gain control of Ukraine's minerals in order to pay us back for our support of their war effort.
And Zelensky drew a very firm line, as he often does, saying like, no, I'm not going to, you're not just going to get all of this, all of our country's minerals. And I should note here that like, this is a fairly significant issue in global terms.
It's estimated that Ukraine has about 5% of the planet's critical raw materials, including massive reserves of graphite. They're somewhere in like the top five countries in terms of proven graphite reserves, which among other things is a critical ingredient for batteries in electric vehicles.
They supply about 7% of Europe's titanium. They're home to a third of European lithium deposits.
This is not an exhaustive list. That's just kind of, you know, to start things off.
And initially, when there was this kind of pushback from Zelensky saying, like, no, you're not just going to get all that, Putin came in and was like, well, hey, you know, we've occupied a bunch of Ukrainian land that has raw minerals on it. We'll give those to you.
Right.

And so this went back and forth. And eventually Zelensky and Trump's people put together like a deal that they were supposed to sign earlier this month.
That was like an actual like bilateral agreement on the use of Ukrainian minerals. and essentially what it would have done is the deal did call for Ukraine to use its mineral

sources to repay the United States to the tune of about half a trillion dollars, but not in a manner like where they were just handing us their minerals. Essentially, Ukraine would contribute 50% of revenues earned from the future monetization of government-owned mineral resources and other natural resources.
But these were critically revenues earned from those resources like future monetization, right? So new mines, new oil and gas plants not included in this were like current reserves like actively being exploited for profit. So kind of the key to this is that that mining is not something that you can turn around on a dime.
Generally, once you have actually proven that you have the reserves in an area, it takes about 20 years to actually get mines up and running. And this is an extremely expensive process.
So one of the reasons why Ukraine considered this a good deal for them is that we're essentially putting a lot of those revenues in the hands of the U.S., but it was revenues from minerals that Ukraine was not currently exploiting and that the U.S. would help and provide funding to exploit.
So it was not just paying back the U.S. It was something that would allow the rebuilding of the Ukrainian economy post-war.
There were some issues with this, including the fact that mining is an extremely energy-intensive task, and Ukraine is in the middle of an energy crisis at the minute. But among other things, it would have brought the U.S.
in and given them a financial stake and continued peace in the region, which was seen as positive. That all blew up at a White House meeting a couple of weeks ago, where if you remember, J.D.
Vance and Trump basically had a little like WWE smackdown with Zelensky. It was a pretty ugly meeting.
And after that kind of talk of the bilateral mineral deal faded significantly. Now, what's interesting is that just today, it's come out that Zelensky and Trump have had further conversations.
And there's a new deal, apparently on the table, or at least the White House claimed that there was a new deal on the table. Both the White House and Zelensky's office said that it was a very positive, productive meeting.
There's some evidence that Zelensky, after that big blow up, has been kind of doing the thing you've got to do with Trump, which is like massage him and say nice things to him so that he'll like you more, and that Trump has gotten kind of frustrated with the fact that Russia clearly has not been overly motivated to move towards a ceasefire. But then in the middle of this meeting that everyone seems to agree went really well, the White House comes out and says, and we're working on an agreement where the U.S.
will control all of Ukraine's nuclear reactors. And Ukraine came out and said, no, we're not.
We did not say that that was a deal. So I don't know what's actually going to happen here.
Ukraine is a massive like nuclear energy state. In fact, the only European country that competes with them or that is like on the same level as they are in Europe in terms of nuclear industry is France.
They've got four nuclear power plants with 15 reactors in total. Now, obviously, like the Zafrasia plant is still under Russian control, which is a significant chunk.
It's like six of the 15 reactors in the country. And Ukraine is in the process of like building more.
They've actively added capacity since the end of the Soviet Union. And so one of the promises for sort of future Ukrainian economic stability is that they

will be able to export nuclear energy to the rest of Europe, which is also going through

an energy crisis.

So it's unclear what's going to happen.

There's definitely evidence, again, that Zelensky has kind of figured out how to massage Trump

a little bit. There's a quote from an article in The Conversation that I found very interesting here.
While Trump still leans towards Putin, his relationship with Zelensky seems to have improved. The Ukrainian president appears to have learned that Trump doesn't have a long memory and that flattery goes a long way with the U.S.
president. Trump, meanwhile, is no longer calling Zelensky a dictator, and yet there is no mention of halting U.S.
military aid or intelligence to Ukraine. There's the opposite, in fact, as the U.S.
has said it will assist in finding more patriot missile defense systems after Zelensky mentioned they were sorely needed. By giving Trump credit for the ceasefire initiative, Zelensky is putting the ball in Russia's court, and his apparent receptiveness to Trump's idea about the U.S.
taking over Ukraine's nuclear power plants will appeal to Trump's transactional instincts in addition to offering Trump business deals. And I don't fully know what the conversation is saying here because Ukraine or Zelensky's office has stated like we're not considering handing the U.S.
control. I think this may be something like what happened with the energy deal where essentially what they talked about was the U.S.
having a financial interest in the

rebuilding and expansion of the Ukrainian nuclear power grid, which would be an extension of existing

programs because Ukraine's nuclear power grid is already very reliant on a U.S. nuclear energy

company, Westinghouse, that provides both the raw fuel for nuclear reactors to Ukraine and also

provides a lot of actual technology for different kind of systems in the reactors. So I kind of think that what's happening here is that basically it was floated like, well, we can extend and expand this deal so the U.S.
will have a financial interest in this potentially very large Ukrainian industry. And then Trump and his people kind of took that and said to everyone else, yeah, the U.S.
is going to be in charge of Ukraine's nuclear power. That's my best guess for what happened here.
It really seems like we're relearning one of the last lessons from the administration, which is if you can be the last person in the room with Trump, you can do what he does. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah. Mia yeah do you want to do a tariff talk

wait wait did you say tariff scarison or did you say

Ah, God.

Feels good. Tariff the Latin.
Rocky Casbah.

Rocky Casbah.

Ah, God. Feels good every time.
Okay, Mia, sorry. You can talk about the actual news now.
Let's do this. So, the news we have today is that, effectively, every single thing I have talked about on Tariff Talk before this is just the fucking prelude.
And those have been very, very extreme tariffs, but these are effectively going to be looked back on as the opening series of skirmishes and sort of probing defenses on april 2nd trump is going to crash the entire world economy he is calling this liberation day on april 2nd he is planning to impose reciprocal tariffs on every single country on earth Finally,. You know what? I'm completely on board.
As long as we're finally sticking it to those snotty fucks in Oman, you know, then everything's good. It's about goddamn time.
Now, I'm going to take a fucking victory lap here because I have been talking about this for a very, very long time. I talked about this last year.
I talked about this at the beginning of last year. I talked about this at the end of last year.
The entire media seems to have sort of forgotten about this until they all suddenly remembered this week that Trump had promised to do reciprocal tariffs. So what reciprocal tariffs are in theory is if there's a tariff on something from another country, the U.S.
matches it. So the way the Trump administration thinks about tariffs is deeply weird.
So they're including things like value-added taxes on goods in countries. Wow.
Which is like a sales tax in the US. Yeah, yeah.
But also like subsidies and also, and this is the part that has gotten less things, but quote-unquote currency manipulation? Now, how the fuck do you calculate that for literally every single country on Earth? Who knows? Business Insider has some reporting on this where they talked to some insiders and okay so literally there are not enough people working on tariffs to like calculate out individual tariff rates for every single country on earth it looks like the plan right now and this is all subject to change because again this is the trump administration and who the fuck knows what they're going to be saying or doing in two weeks but what we know right now is it looks like they're going to separate every country on earth into three tiers of tariffs. So there's going to be like a low tier, a mid tier and a high tier.
And it's unclear exactly what levels they're going to be. These are going to be on top of all of the additional tariffs that they've already imposed.
So say, for example, China gets put into high tier one. They put like a 50% tariff on it.
That means the tariff rate is going to be 70% because there's already 20% tariffs on there. Business Insider seemed to think 20% is like the low one.
I don't know about that. I think they're going to be pretty high.
We have no idea. And again, so what's happening here is Trump is declaring this Liberation Day because he has convinced himself – I think I finally understand what's going on in his brain, which is he's convinced himself that like if you have a trade deficit with a country that means the country's robbing you right yes yes again trump's firm lifelong belief is that if you are selling something you've won and if you're buying something you have lost yeah now this is not how international trade works at all for the U.S.
The entire U.S. empire is based on outsourcing a bunch of political violence to other countries so you can buy goods at cheap rates.
That's what the empire is. We love buying things.
It's the entire basis of our civilization. The reason Jeffrey Bezos was at the inauguration is because we like to be buying yes yeah and and so something i mentioned you know back back when i was talking about this in the tariff episode right after the election is that the thing about reciprocal tariffs right is that it means that if if anyone attempts to fight a trade war with the u.s so another country imposes 20 tariffs the u.s will also impose 20 tariffs and this just spirals out of control into a version of a trade war so unhinged like none of us have ever seen anything like it in our lifetimes.
Hell yeah, brother. Yeah.
Yeah, so that's coming. We now have April 2nd as the day everything explodes.
I also want to put like another note here. The hope has always been from a lot of countries and a lot of the financial markets and a bunch of companies that these tariffs are going to have more exemptions because there were some exemptions on stuff

in the initial tariffs on Mexico and Canada.

Well, and he kept going back and forth, right?

Yeah.

But now we're getting into tariffs which have no exceptions.

The steel and aluminum tariffs have had no exemptions at all.

What we've been hearing, so one of the things I've been noting is that Canada and EU have

been basically mobilizing in the trade war and imposing noting is that canada and eu have been basically

mobilizing in the trade war and imposing reciprocal tariffs in the u.s china has too mexico has not apparently mexico still thinks that they can negotiate to be in like the lowest tier of tariffs this won't completely destroy their economy fuck if i know why they think that but who knows yeah but that that's that's a fact that's effectively the tariff news we have right Now we have again april 2nd quote-unquote liberation day the day that this all goes into effect i bet they wanted to do april 1st and realize that they couldn't no yeah i didn't think that no so trump trump announced this during his joint congressional uh address and he openly said uh that he originally wanted to do it on april 1st um at the start of the month but decided not to because he is too superstitious as a person. So yes, originally they were going to be on April 1st and then they pushed it back to April 2nd because they didn't want it to be on April Fool's Day.
That's good. That's a good way to run things.
I'm glad we're... So that a great great extra insight into the into the mind of

the u.s god king cool anyway uh let's go on ad break and then come back to discuss all of the

other bad things that are happening in the country okay we're back the first thing I want to kind of open to a group discussion on is that on Tuesday, March 18th, the federal judge issued a preliminary injunction blocking Trump's ban on trans people serving in the military, ruling that the blanket ban likely violates constitutional rights. Stephen Miller responded to the ruling by writing, District court judges have now decided that they are in command of the armed forces.
Is there no end to this madness? God, fuck. So I know this is a topic that we've discussed a lot as we're not all big U.S.
military defenders. Nope.
It's mostly done bad stuff in my lifetime. But we still take almost like an ontological issue with this ban because it essentially creates just a secondary class of citizen with fundamentally different rights from the rest of everyone else.
And that is never a good thing. It's like...
So right now, one of the semi-positive news stories is that Trump's ATF is going to be for the first time restoring people's Second Amendment rights who had them taken away because they were involuntarily institutionalized. And I've seen a lot of liberals being like, oh, they're just going to let more crazy people have guns.
This is bad. And like, I have to disagree.
Whether or you like it. The second amendment is a fundamental right under the constitution.
And it's bad to say that this class of people forever lose a fundamental right because they're involuntarily institutionalized. That's bad.
And likewise, even if you hate the U S military's role in U imperialism, which, fine enough, the right to serve in an integrated military has been a major underpinning of most of the civil rights movements, like a foundational underpinning of most civil rights movements in this country's history, including going back to the Civil War. You know, black civil rights, including LGBTQ rights and including women's rights, right?

It's like it is significant. And so the fact that the GOP is attempting to peel this back and essentially reverse integration of the military is bad for two reasons.
One, it represents, as you've said, creating separate classes of people and peeling fundamental, what are considered under the law in this country, fundamental rights away from groups of people. And it's also just dangerous for them to remake the military into an all-white organization, right? Like all-white male organization.
There's a reason why that's also dangerous to you. So yeah, I think people should care about this, even if they're, you if they're you know leftists yeah and like especially in this country the military represents one of the few social mobility tools that exist right people don't just join the military because they contrary to what you might have seen on twitter.com they want to go to middle east and kill people sometimes they do it because they want to get a chance to go to education sometimes they want to do it so they get a chance to have health care yep and like trans people serve at a higher rate than cis people may not be the case for very much longer but like that has been the case and they have rights to use however they want they don't just have rights to use how you or i or anyone else would like them to use them well and that's also a broad truth for the u.s military Members of marginalized groups have always served at a higher rate than basically anyone else.
This includes like Native Americans serve as at a higher proportion of like their their population within the country than most other groups, in part because traditionally serving in the military was a way in which to gain like acceptance and entrance into American society. It's also just like another world.
You can feel in some ways insulated from the horrors you might experience in regular suburban life, oddly enough. Yeah, it's a way out of the isolation that so many people experience in the world.
And is it extremely bad that the way that you integrate into American society is by being a part of the imperial war machine? Yes. Yes.
But also, the war machine is going to be there whether you are in it or not. Yeah.
And the actual fundamental important thing here is, again, what we've been saying is that like, the fundamental basis of liberal democracy going back to the American Revolution, going back to the French Revolution, going back to like the original liberal revolutions, the fundamental principle of of liberal democracy going back to the american revolution going back to the french revolution going back to like the original liberal revolutions the fundamental principle of is that everyone is equal before the law and the moment that ceases to be true and it has not been true in this country ever but you know we're seeing increasing numbers of people who are not considered equal before the law we just spent this entire fucking like first part of this episode talking about what happens when people are considered to have no protections under the law which is that the state can just fucking black bag you and send you to a gulag yeah like that is bad not that's what's that fundamentally at stake here not like whether you think the army is good yeah and imagine for those people like when they people could have served 19 years right they could have been just about to get their 20 years and get their retirement and will now not get that like they they signed up expecting a thing right like there was a quid pro quo there that they would give 20 years of their life and possibly a lot of their health to the united states government and in return they would get health care and uh and a pension for the rest of their lives and people are now going to lose that yeah uh in some related news news, the VA just announced that, quote, effective immediately, the VA

will not offer cross-sex hormone therapy to veterans who have a current diagnosis or history

of or exhibit symptoms consistent with gender dysphoria unless such veterans are already

receiving such care from the VA or such veterans were receiving such care from the military

as a part of and upon their separation from the military service and are eligible for VA health care. So basically, they will not be admitting like new patients to receive gender affirming health care.
Well, unless they're cisgender, it seems like. Oh, yes, correct.
Yes. Just to be clear, cis men can still receive gender affirming hormones.
Sure. I mean, like of get annoyed when people do that comparison.
Because that's never... We're falling into this artro trap of we're actually using words to mean what they mean.
And they're not using words like that. Whenever people laugh about, ha-ha, they banned pronouns at school.
Now you can't say the word I. And you're like, no, come on.
like that's not what they mean like you have to understand like the dog whistles that they're using yeah it's i found it interesting though that they seemingly like you try to even get around like that like linguistic thing in their statement sure i mean like it depends what you mean by gender dysphoria right like you could theoretically you could have gender dysphoria because you're a cis male and you want to become more masculine, right? Like all of these diagnoses have like a very fuzzy ontological underpinning, right? These are just categories that we're projecting. But this is, you know, probably not great.
It probably isn't a good thing. Like, for instance, if you already have VA health care, you're not in the military anymore.
And now you decide that you would like to receive gender affirming healthcare. Now you can't, at least through the VA.
So as a related thing, let's see. I think we should kind of close with or like bookend our discussion on like, like the immigration stuff and the black baggings and deportations, which have been happening.
A German immigrant named Fabian Schmidt, who's lived in the States with the green card. Such a German name.
Beautiful. Since 2008.
So like, he has lived here quite a while. He immigrated with his mom.
He was detained and tortured at the Boston Logan Airport upon returning from a visit to Europe. The man's mother says that he was, quote unquote, violently interrogated at the Logan Airport for hours, and was stripped naked, put in a cold shower by two officials and pushed back into an interrogation chair.
I'm going to quote from WGBH, quote, she said Schmidt told her immigration agents pressured him to give up his green card. She said he was placed on a mat in a bright room with other people at the airport with little food or water, suffered sleep deprivation and was denied access to his medication for anxiety and depression.
He hardly got anything to drink,

and then he wasn't feeling very well, and he collapsed, said a senior, which is his mom.

He was transported by ambulance to Mass General Hospital. He didn't know it at the time,

but he also had the flu, unquote. Now, Schmidt has since been transferred to multiple ICE

facilities. He had a misdemeanor charge for marijuana possession in California back in 2015, but that charge was dismissed the following year due to changes in state law.
But I think this incident may have flagged Schmidt on the Customs and Border Protection's database. And Hillary Beckham, CBP's Assistant Commissioner for Public Affairs, gave a short statement reading, quote, when an individual is found with drug related charges and tries to reenter the country, officers will take proper action, unquote.
But essentially, they like tortured, black bagged this person who's had a green card for like almost two decades for a dismissed marijuana charge like 10 years ago. This is like, you know, like a very white man, like Fabian Schmidt.
This is super freaky stuff. Yeah, we should say that a lot of that stuff is not particularly unusual in ice detention, lights being on all the time, not being given bedding.
But like being shoved into a cold shower is not something to go. That say like like being interrogated at like at the airport that's that this is a new one and like being forced to like forcibly like give up your green card uh during this like yeah interrogation session at that very same airport like i think just maybe like a day or so later a lebanese doctor and professor at Brown University, Rasha Alwea, was deported this weekend after traveling to Beirut to visit family and attend the public funeral of Hassan Nasrallah.
Upon returning to the United States, she was detained at the Boston airport, had her H-1B visa revoked, and was deported on a plane to France on Friday, March 14th, before she could attend her in-person hearing that following Monday. According to court documents, her deportation was prompted by deleted pictures on her phone of Shia Muslim figures like Nashwala and the Ayatollah.
Another very, very frightening incident. In those documents, it's unclear how Customs and Border Protection was viewing deleted photos on her phone or like open up her phone.
Because if you recently deleted a photo, it is still contained in your recently deleted folder assuming you have an iPhone or equivalent. But it's unknown how they got into her phone, if she let them look through it, or if they used one of many phone-breaking devices.
Like Grake or whatever. Yeah.
But I think it is interesting that this is at the same airport to slightly related incidents. Yeah, we've seen that a lot with, in the similar cases, people crossing the land border to San Ysidro, but I think a Canadian and German citizen were both detained, which is in san diego county if it's not familiar like it seems like there's some kind of policy at certain border crossings or maybe like the person in charge there is saying do this you know detain people if there's anything on their record at all well so and there's another case of this that's similar where a french researcher who to the best of my knowledge is unnamed so far, was randomly pulled aside for a stop at George Bush International Airport in Houston, which is sort of fitting for all of this.
George Bush has got to be fucking creaming his pants thinking about all this black bagging shit. But yeah, was randomly pulled over and they found anti-Trump texts on his phone and immediately deported him.
This is a guy who was visiting the U.S.

I think they go to a conference.

And the Border Patrol is arguing

that anti-Trump texts are considered terrorism,

which is great,

or the texts that they found,

the anti-Trump-ness of it

can be considered terroristic.

So that's bad.

There was yet another case,

which is a slightly different one,

which is Badr Khan Suri, who is a postdoc at Georgetown, who was detained and sent to an immigration facility, who's here teaching. He's a postdoc at Georgetown on a student visa, who has been sent to an immigration facility based on basically a right wing panic about his wife, his wife's father being Hamas.
And because of this, he's been black bagged in a way very similar to Mahmoud Khalil yeah now Georgetown is backing him on this but this is another one of these fucking black baggings that they're just doing now with someone who is here on a student visa who has committed no crime who Georgetown was like has committed no crime and again also even if they even if they've committed a crime, this is fucking horseshit.

But yeah, all of these things are just continuing to ramp up and they're getting bolder and bolder.

Robert, do you want to read a select paragraph or two

from Khalil's first public statement?

Yeah.

So he put out a letter a couple of days before we recorded this. And you should really read the whole thing if you just Google Mahmoud Khalil letter.
I mean, I think the exact title is my name is Mahmoud Khalil and I am a political prisoner, which is the first sentence of the letter. But I want to read this little bit of him talking about his arrest.
on march 8th i was taken taken by DHS agents who refused to provide a warrant and accosted my wife and me as we returned from dinner. By now, the footage of that night has been made public.
Before I knew what was happening, agents handcuffed and forced me into an unmarked car. At that moment, my only concern was for Noor's safety.
I had no idea if she would be taken too, since the agents had threatened to arrest her for not leaving my side. DHS would not tell me anything for hours.
I did not know the cause of my arrest or if I was facing immediate deportation. At 26 Federal Plaza, I slept on the cold floor.
In the early morning hours, agents transported me to another facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey. There, I slept on the ground and was refused a blanket despite my request.
My arrest was a direct consequence of exercising my right to free speech as I advocated for a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza, which resumed in full force Monday night. With January ceasefire now broken, parents in Gaza are once again cradling two small shrouds and families are forced to waste starvation and displacement against bombs.
It is our moral imperative to persist in the struggle for their complete freedom and again i i really recommend reading the whole thing it's it's very good um but yeah i i get so particularly um upset that trump's admin uses like this like vague anti-semitism justification for for for some of these actions at least um because uh the head of trump's anti-Semitism justification for some of these actions at least. Because the head of Trump's anti-Semitism task force just last week retweeted Patrick Casey, who is from the American Identity Movement, a leading alt-right figure who was at Charlottesville, to quote Shane Burley.
This tweet that was reposted by the head of this anti-Semitism task force claimed that, quote, Trump has the ability to revoke someone's Jew card. Yeah, it's absolutely fucking horrifying.
Are we serious here? It's like unbelievable, unbelievable amounts of anti-Semitism spread by the person who leads the federal task force to combat anti-Semitism. Great.
Yeah, and going back to Colombia for a second, one of the other things that's been happening is that Trump threatened Colombia with the loss of $400 million of government contracts unless they give in to a bunch of Trump's demands. So Trump wants them to ban masks on campuses, allow campus cops to do more violence against student protesters and expel protesters who occupy buildings.
The president is supposed to get control of all discipline and can expel and suspend students, and they want to crack down student groups. They want, and this is also a tie-in to the other thing, they want the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, and specifically Trump's letter to them specifically says classifying anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism, and they want to put the Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies departments in academic receivership, which means stripping away power from the faculty and giving it to someone outside.
Columbia is about to give in to these demands. It seems like they want to try to find another word other than academic receivership, but they're just going to fucking do it.
And does Trump have the legal authority to do this? No, obviously not. But does he have the moral authority to obviously not.
Like, this guy is... No, but none of those are important.
He has guys with guns. That's what it always comes down to.
And anyone who forgets that is only hurting themselves. Yeah, and so he's also doing this thing of, like, attempting basically to dismantle a bunch of the higher education institutions in this country unless they become just pure right-wing sort of laboratories.
And another example of this is, as news stories about columbia were coming out like columbia trying to take the deal coming we're coming out the university of pennsylvania is about to lose 175 million dollars of funding for allowing leah thomas a trans swimmer to swim for their college so this is just going to be a a giant sort of battering ram that trump is going to use to just basically obliterate the education system and impose whatever unhinged right-wing thing that he wants to impose. And we will talk more about his efforts to destroy the education system next week on our next episode of ED as he is continuing to prep an executive order to abolish the Department of Education.

And there's plenty of other news, including the federal judge confrontations

that we will also report on next week.

But before we leave today, Mia has a brief note on the bird flu,

which I'm sure will be fine, frankly.

I'm still eating eggs, but Mia.

Yeah, so as people deal with the boy flu. So the thing about chickens is that they're dying from bird flu right now this has killed an enormous number of chickens this is part of why egg prices are so high now this is a problem that a lot of countries have dealt with china has dealt with this by just fucking vaccinating their chickens um the biden administration refused to vaccinate chickens because it would cost money and because it might make it harder for the U.S.
to export their chickens. So that was bad.
RFK Jr. literally just wants to let the bird flu rip and kill all the birds and thinks that the healthy birds will survive.
And those healthy birds. Herd immunity.
Yeah, yeah. He thinks herd immunity.
Flock immunity. He is a herd immunity guy for COVID because he's a human eugenicist.
He's also a chicken eicist now i'm specifically doing this because i i read multiple virologists reading about this writing about this i talked to virologists and the virologists all basically said if you were trying to design a way to make to make the bird flu like move like mutate in such a way that it moves from birds to humans this is what you would do yeah great so and again cool the the death rate of this thing is in a completely different category from fucking covet it makes covet look like having a mild case of allergies like staggeringly lethal and like it cannot overstate how disastrous this would be yeah and covet And COVID killed more than a million Americans, like just in case people have memory hold that. Yeah.
Right now, current rates, when it has reached humans, is about a 50% fatality rate. They thought initially that they were missing a lot of cases and that it was much lower.
But like the current research points to, suggests that that is not the case, that it is actually somewhere in that range of lethality. Yeah.
So I'm still eating my chicken tartar. I don't know why everyone's so worried about it.
Yeah. And again, we don't know that like the version that actually is able to jump from human to human after jumping from bird to human would be that lethal because that doesn't exist quite yet, probably.
Yeah, but this is how we find out. We really don't want to find out.
Yeah, look, if you don't want to find out, we have to find a way to get RFK Jr. out of that fucking office.
Again, I think we really need to have a lot of different farmers set up photo ops with him where he is just covered in birds. We need to have that man in constant physical contact with chickens.
He would do it. And the problem will eventually solve it.
We could convince him to eat raw chicken. We could definitely do it.
Sure. Yes, absolutely.
Raw. Eat them.
Cuddle them. Sleep with them at night.
Just kind of stand on a pile of their corpses. All right.
All right. If you are a chicken or you know a chicken or you have anything else that you would like to share with us, you can do so.
Well, not anything else. It should be related to the news and things that we can report on.
You can send it to coolzontips at proton.me. And it's only encrypted if you also use encryption to send the

message, end to end. Yeah, it's a ProtonMet address.
That means, yeah, you have to send

from encrypted to encrypted. It still doesn't mean it's not, it's perfectly safe.
That just means

it's encrypted. So send what you think you can send over an email that is that way.

We reported the news. We reported the news.
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