It Could Happen Here Weekly 159

Summary

Podcast Summary: Behind the Bastards – It Could Happen Here Weekly 159

Release Date: December 7, 2024
Host/Author: Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts
Episode Title: It Could Happen Here Weekly 159

Behind the Bastards delves deep into the underbelly of historical and contemporary figures who have shaped our world in nefarious ways. In Episode 159, titled "It Could Happen Here," the hosts explore themes of fascism, indigenous resistance, political coups, and digital security in the context of civil rights.

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1. Fascism and Contemporary Rhetoric

Timestamp: 03:24 - 19:35

The episode opens with Vladimir von Bilhenberg and Robert Evans discussing the resurgence of fascist rhetoric in modern political landscapes, particularly focusing on recent Trump rallies.

• Ethnonationalist Framing:
  Vladimir von Bilhenberg [06:50] emphasizes, "One of the recurring phrases at Trump rallies this cycle was that the United States has become an occupied territory."

• Historical Parallels:
  The hosts draw parallels between Trump's rhetoric and historical fascist leaders. Simone Boyce [07:55] states, "That's textbook fascist shit," highlighting the justification of potential violence against migrants as self-defense.

• Academic Insights:
  Vladimir von Bilhenberg [17:44] references Adorno's work, noting, "Fascist agitation is centered in the idea of the leader... promoting the passive masochistic attitude required of the fascist follower."

• Impact on Society:
  The discussion underscores how such rhetoric fosters a culture of dehumanization and erosion of democratic values, making it challenging to dismantle entrenched authoritarian ideologies.

2. The Mapuche Struggle in Chile and Argentina

Timestamp: 12:44 - 73:59

The conversation shifts to the historical and ongoing struggles of the Mapuche people against colonial and modern state powers in Chile and Argentina.

• Historical Resistance:
  Andrew Sage [12:34] narrates the Mapuche's long-standing resistance, detailing the Arauco War and key figures like Lautaro, who symbolized Mapuche resilience.

• Colonial Impact:
  The hosts discuss how treaties like the Parliament of Kulin (1641) initially recognized Mapuche autonomy, but later expansions by Chile and Argentina disregarded these agreements, leading to forced assimilation and land dispossession.

• Modern Activism:
  The Mapuche's contemporary fight mirrors past struggles, involving land occupations, protests against extractive industries, and efforts to preserve cultural identity. Vladimir von Bilhenberg [26:57] draws parallels to Palestinian struggles, emphasizing the timeless nature of colonial tactics.

• Legal and Social Challenges:
  Despite some legal victories, such as rulings by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, systemic repression continues. The Mapuche face heightened police surveillance and accusations of terrorism, further marginalizing their movement.

3. The South Korean Political Coup Attempt

Timestamp: 84:30 - 156:53

A significant portion of the episode examines a recent failed coup attempt in South Korea, led by President Yoon Suk-yeol.

• Coup Mechanics:
  Robert Evans [126:36] details how President Yoon declared martial law, aiming to suppress the National Assembly. The proclamation included measures to control the press and prohibit political activities, likened to historical authoritarian tactics.

• Public Resistance:
  Contrary to expectations, massive public protests thwarted the coup within hours. Vladimir von Bilhenberg [143:04] notes, "It's so funny because they kept putting out these arrest warrants..." highlighting the populace's immediate and organized resistance.

• Military Miscalculations:
  The military's overestimation of support and underestimation of public mobilization led to the rapid collapse of the coup. Robert Evans [141:08] criticizes the military's disbelief in the capability of ordinary citizens to effectively resist.

• Aftermath and Implications:
  The failed coup has significant repercussions for South Korean politics, including potential impeachment of Yoon and a reassessment of military influence in democratic processes.

4. Digital Security in the Context of Abortion Rights

Timestamp: 157:54 - 195:31

The episode concludes with a critical discussion on digital security for individuals seeking abortions, featuring insights from Garrison Davis and Crystal.

• Risk of Surveillance:
  Crystal [162:22] explains, "People are very afraid... Can I be arrested for giving you my information, sending in my ID...?"

• Protective Measures:
  The hosts advocate for using encrypted communication tools like Signal, enabling disappearing messages, and being cautious about data shared on devices. Garrison Davis [166:49] emphasizes the importance of deleting sensitive information to prevent law enforcement from accessing it.

• Practical Advice:
  Recommendations include:

  • Plan Healthcare Visits: Utilize resources like the miscarriage and abortion hotline (mahotline.org) to assess the need for emergency care without immediate disclosure.
  • Use Secure Communication: Adopt encrypted messaging platforms to discuss sensitive information.
  • Delete Sensitive Data: Regularly purge browser history, emails, and messages related to abortion to minimize digital footprints.

• Legal Considerations:
  The discussion highlights the legal vulnerabilities individuals face, stressing the importance of understanding rights to remain silent and the implications of digital data in potential prosecutions.

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Notable Quotes:

• Vladimir von Bilhenberg [07:10]: "And November 5, 2024, will be Liberation Day in America."

• Simone Boyce [09:20]: "That gives us something to look forward to now."

• Vladimir von Bilhenberg [17:46]: "It all starts with the neutralization of the primal father figure."

• Crystal [163:52]: "Tracking your period is important because if you don't know what's going on with your period and you get pregnant, it can delay your care."

• Robert Evans [141:55]: "This is like military coup. And then military coup being overturned by protesters is the single most South Korean thing ever."

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Conclusion

In this episode, Behind the Bastards navigates through the intricate web of modern fascism, indigenous resistance movements, political instability in democracies, and the pressing need for digital security in the face of civil rights challenges. By intertwining historical context with contemporary analysis, the hosts underscore the persistent threats to democratic values and personal freedoms, urging listeners to remain vigilant and informed.

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For more detailed discussions and continuous analysis on pivotal historical and contemporary issues, tune into future episodes of Behind the Bastards.

Transcript

[Savannah Guthrie]

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[Hoda Kotb]

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[Hoda Kotb]

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[Robert Evans]

Watch.

[Savannah Guthrie]

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[Robert Evans]

More seasonal in here already.

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If your holiday party doesn't have a bartender, then you become the bartender. Unless you've got a Bartesian, because Bartesian crafts every cocktail perfectly in as little as 30 seconds. And I just got it for $50 off.

[Simone Boyce]

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[Andrew Sage]

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[Savannah Guthrie]

Hi everyone. It's Savannah Guthrie and Hoda Cotton from the Today Show.

[Robert Evans]

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[Andrew Sage]

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[Garrison Davis]

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[Simone Boyce]

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.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a show about things falling apart. We are back from our little break and today I'm joined with Robert Evans to discuss Fascism, I guess.

[Simone Boyce]

Yeah, yeah, I'm here. We're talking fascism, listeners. Excuse me, I have a sinus infection. So that's why I sound this way.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

Oh, that's why you sound like that.

[Andrew Sage]

Uh huh.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

That sucks.

[Robert Evans]

It's life.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

Yeah, well it might not suck as much as what I had to do last week, which is watch this six part documentary about the 2024 Trump election campaign. God, called the Art of the Surge. I don't know. Overall it was actually pretty boring. They were obviously trying to edit it like a succession episode.

[Simone Boyce]

Oh my God.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

Really obnoxious. There is some insight into like the inner workings of the Trump team. Like watching him and his team react to the Kamala Harri DNC speech and like workshop counter messaging was actually interesting. And the doc does show kind of Musk's influence steadily ramping up starting in July. The only time you see Trump and Vance together is after Trump's ABC debate when JD like preps him for the spin room. That's the only time. Wow, we see them interact.

[Simone Boyce]

I mean, yeah, that makes sense. Like I wouldn't want to be in a room with J.D. vance more than I had to be. Although the fact that he does want to be in a room with Musk is baffling.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

Yes. And actually Musk and JD get along quite well in the interactions that are seen in the documentary. Melania Trump never appears once. Not a single time.

[Simone Boyce]

Well, it's good to know that they've, they've managed to put together a functional throuple.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

Ooh, don't like that. Don't like that at all. First Buddy. Yikes. My biggest takeaway from this documentary is that it just showed how much his rallies are a religious experience for his supporters. Like, deeply, deeply religious. Especially the Butler, Pennsylvania, rallies, where everyone talks about it like they would like, like a genuine, like, limit experience or religious experience. Right now, this episode, I actually, I want to focus on the rhetoric employed at these rallies in attempts to label Trump a fascist. There's been a lot of discussion on, like, Trump's authoritarian and dictatorial desires and tendencies, and expressions of those fears in particular were not enough to persuade the majority of voters against Trump, let alone siphon Republican support towards Harris. And we on this show have not talked much about the escalation of rhetoric used by Trump and his allies this campaign cycle, with the Biden administration's horrific border policies and the enabling of Israel's genocidal actions in Gaza drawing a great deal of our attention the past few months. But now I do want to draw attention to the ethno nationalist framing that has become all too common, especially with the Democrats just complete submission to Trump and the GOP's distinct focus on immigration as the top issue facing America. So part of what I'm going to do here is I've. I've outlined a few clips and some quotes. I've tried. I tried to limit the clips because I know no one wants to hear Trump and these guys talk for too long, but I will play some. And, Robert, you've spent a lot of your time thinking about fascism the past few years and reading about fascism, so I'm certainly curious on your thoughts, thoughts on some of these clips and quotes as we'll kind of go through, like, three specific rallies, mostly.

[Simone Boyce]

Great.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

And outline what type of rhetoric they are using and what it kind of points to historically. Now, one of the reoccurring phrases at Trump rallies this cycle was that the United States has become an occupied territory. Here's Trump invoking that language at a rally in Atlanta a week before the election.

[Hoda Kotb]

But it will soon be an occupied country.

[Savannah Guthrie]

No longer.

[Andrew Sage]

November 5, 2024, will be Liberation Day in America.

[Robert Evans]

And on day one, I will launch.

[Andrew Sage]

The largest deportation program in American history.

[Hoda Kotb]

We're going to get these criminals out.

[Savannah Guthrie]

I will rescue every city and town.

[Hoda Kotb]

That has been invaded and conquered. These towns have been conquered.

[Savannah Guthrie]

You know, they have been invaded. And can you imagine, just as though.

[Hoda Kotb]

A foreign enemy was.

[Savannah Guthrie]

Was invading.

[Simone Boyce]

A military was invading.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

Okay. I will rescue every city in town that has been invaded and conquered.

[Simone Boyce]

Conquered.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

Yeah. Just. Just as though in an enemy, a foreign enemy was invading.

[Simone Boyce]

Yeah. I mean, that's. I don't even know what to say about that. It's like, that's textbook fascist shit. Right? Like, I mean, among other things, ramping everyone up to justify, you know, at least the potential for violence against migrants. You know, it's self defense. Right?

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

Yeah. Now I like to focus first on the Madison Square Garden rally. Certainly the. The Puerto Rico floating island of garbage comments from the roast comedian got a lot of media attention, but what got less coverage was the much more historically worrying statements made by those within Trump's circle. Let's start with Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.

[Robert Evans]

America is for Americans and Americans only.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

So, Robert, does that phrase remind you of any other phrases that have been used over time?

[Simone Boyce]

Yeah, I mean, like one people, one Volk, one Reich, right? I guess, yeah. I mean, again, like, I don't even know what to say at this point. Right.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

Like, it's so obvious.

[Simone Boyce]

When I started in the warning people about fascism game, you had to like, explain a lot of history and then sort of like walk in. Here's how you know what this is a signpost. I mean, when someone does an 88, this is what it means or whatever. And we're so far past that, like.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

Well, and specifically this one invokes the Germany is for the Germans, which is a phrase that is banned in Germany now due to its use during the Nazi era.

[Simone Boyce]

That gives us something to look forward to now.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

In a rant advocating for election denial in the case of Trump losing the election, Tucker Carlson referred to Kamala Harris as a Samoan, Malaysian, low iq. This is just kind of baffling old school racism. Yeah, I honestly didn't expect this type of thing to have such a resurgence the past year.

[Simone Boyce]

More esoteric than I expected.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

Yeah, it's frankly odd. Now, Tucker also spoke about how the elites are trying to replace the population and the culture and customs of this country. Just clearly invoking the white nationalist, a great replacement ideology that he kind of previously spread on his Fox show.

[Robert Evans]

In a country that has been taken.

[Simone Boyce]

Over by a leadership class that actually desp. Despises them and their values and their history and their culture and their customs.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

Really hates them to the point that.

[Simone Boyce]

It'S trying to replace them.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

Very, very clear stuff. And Don Jr. Invoked very similar rhetoric saying that the government no longer puts Americans first and that the Democratic Party would rather, quote, replace Americans with people who will be reliable voters, unquote. Well, this is types of stuff that we talked about in like 2018, 2019. It's like Lauren Southern YouTube videos.

[Simone Boyce]

And, like, if there's one thing the Dems are bad at, it's getting reliable voters.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

Yeah. Yes. Like, this is the type of stuff that was so. That was much more niche. And then you had a few, like, four chan guys start, like, doing writing on Tucker's show, and now it's being used at this point. The President's rallies.

[Simone Boyce]

Yeah.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

Now, when Trump finally took the stage, he mirrored Tucker's Kamala Harris IQ comments, saying, everyone knows she's a very low IQ individual. Like usual, he called the press the enemy of the people. But he went on to describe the true enemy masterminding the fall of America. The, quote, radical left machine that has taken control of the Democratic Party.

[Andrew Sage]

It's just this amorphous group of people.

[Robert Evans]

But they're smart and they're vicious, and.

[Savannah Guthrie]

We have to defeat them.

[Hoda Kotb]

And when I say the enemy from within, the other side goes crazy.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

Becomes a sound.

[Savannah Guthrie]

Oh, how can he say no?

[Hoda Kotb]

They've done very bad things to this country. They are indeed the enemy from within.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

I do find it interesting the way he describes them as, like, amorphous.

[Simone Boyce]

Yeah.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

It's not like a distinct sect. It's not like a fuse of people. It's this, like, amorphous, almost like ethereal force that could inhabit people.

[Simone Boyce]

Well, you need that because that, among other things, allows you to refocus the lens on anyone. Right. Like, you need the opportunity to keep shifting because eventually, if you're just actually focusing on a real discrete group of human beings, you get rid of those people, you throw them in prison or whatever, and then you don't have an enemy anymore. And you always need that.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

And do you know what we need right now, Robert?

[Simone Boyce]

Products and services.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

Yeah, we do need to go on a quick break and then come back to talk about Duluth, Georgia. So not good.

[Simone Boyce]

Great.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

All right, we are back. I'm going to now turn to a turning point action event on October 23rd in Duluth, Georgia, which I actually just visited for the first time, I went ice skating in Duluth, Georgia. And to kind of get a sense of what this town, it's not even really a suburb of Atlanta, it's so far north. As I was ice sating there, I'm pretty sure like a Christian cult showed up and they had all their members also ice skated because they were all wearing, like, the same outfits. They all had, like, very specific, like, headscarves. A few, A few of like, the more like youth pastry types had like, you know, like, Christ is king type hoodies. But it definitely wasn't Like a regular church. It was more of some kind of like evangelical, like cultish formation based on like the uniform clothing. So that's Duluth, Georgia.

[Simone Boyce]

Yeah.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

Now, Charlie Kirk gave a 15 minute speech which he closed with a spiritual appeal saying, quote, you have a biblical obligation to engage in this election and to fight evil. The Democratic Party supports everything God hates, unquote. Kirk then called this election a quote, unquote, spiritual battle and finally said, quote, this is a Christian state. I want to see that continue. So none of this is like new, right? This is kind of at this point, bog standard Christian nationalism. But this is a rally of about 10,000 people. It's not an official Trump rally. It is a turning point action rally that Trump did speak at. But I'd like to hone in once again on Tucker Carlson's comments. Now, he called this the first speech he's ever given at a political rally. Now, both me and you saw Tucker speak at the rnc. I guess he kind of views the RNC as a little bit different from like a standard, like kind of more like campaign rally type event. But Tucker called Trump a triumph of the human spirit.

[Simone Boyce]

Christ. A triumph of the will, you could say.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

Yes, yes, like what, what's another word for the human spirit? But now I'm going to play, actually, this is the longest clip we have. Just because it's so fascinating and I have a lot written on this already. I'm just going to play this clip.

[Savannah Guthrie]

There has to be a point at.

[Simone Boyce]

Which dad comes home.

[Hoda Kotb]

Yeah, that's right.

[Robert Evans]

Dad comes home.

[Hoda Kotb]

And he's pissed.

[Simone Boyce]

Dad is pissed.

[Andrew Sage]

He's not vengeful.

[Simone Boyce]

He loves his children, disobedient as they may be.

[Robert Evans]

He loves them because they're his children.

[Garrison Davis]

They live in his house.

[Simone Boyce]

But he's very disappointed in their behavior and he's going to have to let them know.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

He's going to have to get to.

[Simone Boyce]

Your room right now and think about what you did.

[Robert Evans]

And when dad gets home, you know what he says?

[Simone Boyce]

You've been a bad girl. You've been a bad little girl and.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

You'Re getting a vigorous spanking right now.

[Simone Boyce]

And no, it's not going to hurt.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

Me more than it hurts you.

[Savannah Guthrie]

No, it's not. I'm not going to lie.

[Hoda Kotb]

It's going to hurt you a lot.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

More than it hurts me.

[Hoda Kotb]

And you earned this.

[Andrew Sage]

You're getting a vigorous spanking because you've.

[Simone Boyce]

Been a bad girl. Well, that's just real sick and deranged. I mean, you can tell he really gets off on spanking little girls.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

I mean, beyond Tucker's shown depravity here, I also just find the willingness of the audience just to eat this stuff up and really enjoy it to similarly be both fascinating and a show of a certain level of depravement.

[Simone Boyce]

Well, it's this. It's leaning into what has always been the core of, like, the most militant conservatism, which is the, like, strict Christian conservative parents rights people.

[Robert Evans]

Sure.

[Simone Boyce]

Be like, my children are my property. And also the right way to parent is like a dictator.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

I mean, this is like, the most, like, openly Freudian display of American fascism that I've, like, ever seen before.

[Simone Boyce]

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. It's amazing, this idea of, like, a.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

Harsh father whose love is replaced with fearful authority. It's really important that, like, America is framed as a bad girl. There's this, like, feminizing of the masses. Right. America is not like a bad little boy. A bad girl is, like, really important. Carlson's almost invoking, like, an incestuous, like, domination. Yeah, it's quite sick. And, like, I had to actually, like, look up stuff on this because I'm like, I know Freud and a few others had, like, written about this type of thing before. And specifically Adorno has written about this in an essay called Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda that I'd like to read. Just a few brief quotes from.

[Simone Boyce]

Oh, I love some Adorno. Yes, please.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

There is either no mention of love whatsoever between members, or it's expressed only in a sublimated and indirect way through the mediation of some religious image in the love of whom the members unite and who's all embracing love they are supposed to imitate in their attitude towards each other. It seems significant that in today's society, with its artificially integrated fascist masses, reference to love is almost completely excluded. Hitler shunned the traditional role of the loving father and replaced it entirely by the negative one of threatening authority. I'm going to pivot to Freud here, specifically his essay on group behavior and how individuals regress to become part of masses. He writes about how a leader of a cult can exploit psychological shortcuts in its followers to embody this, like, group ideal that governs their ego. As a substitution quote, the leader of the group is the dreaded primal father. The group still wishes to be governed by unrestricted force. It has an extreme passion for authority. It has a thirst for obedience. The primal father is the group ideal. This is, like, so displayed on what Tucker is doing. Like, this is. This is just exactly what it is. I mean, it reminds me of the other quote about how like people seek out salvation in subjugation. And I'll leave just one more quote from Adorno here. Fascist agitation is centered in the idea of the leader, no matter whether he actually leads or is only the mandatory of group interests, because only the psychological image of the leader is apt to reanimate the idea of the all powerful and threatening primal father. The formation of the imagery of an omnipotent and unbridled father figure, by far transcending the individual father and therefore apt to be enlarged into a group ego, is the only way to promulgate the passive masochistic attitude to whom one's will has to be surrendered. An attitude required of the fascist follower, the more his political behavior becomes irreconcilable with his own rational interests as a private person as well as those of the group or class to which he actually belongs. The follower's reawakened irrationality is therefore quite rational from the leader's point of view. It necessarily has to be a conviction which is not based on perception and reasoning, but on an erotic tie, unquote. I'm sure someone more skilled than me could write like a whole dissertation just on Tucker's speech here because it invokes so many of these ideas. And without trying to, this is all just subconscious on their part. They're pulling on these things, specifically the passive masochistic attitude. It's like their submission to Trump is this deep masochistic.

[Simone Boyce]

There's another thing in there that I think is important, especially because I'm hearing a lot of people talking about like, well, once Trump pushes through his tariffs or does this or does that, the horrible negative consequences of this will like absolutely destroy the gop, right? That'll finally bring them down when we let them, you know. No, and one of the things Adorno says there is that like the leader doesn't even need to be present. And that's an under discussed aspect of psychology and fascist states. One of the phenomenons within Nazi Germany was there were a number of Nazi policies, Hitler's policies that had serious negative effects on people in Germany. And one of the most common phrases that you would hear from them was if only Hitler knew, right? Usually deployed when you were dealing with a government agency that was headed by just an absolute criminal that Hitler had appointed that like, well, Hitler doesn't know that the Gestapo are doing this, right? He would stop this. He'd put a stopped this if he knew, he wouldn't let this happen. Right? That's What? That's what Trump's believers. I don't know if that's what. The American people writ large may never buy into Trump the way that the Germans bought into Hitler, but Trump supporters are certainly already there.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

And this is something that Tucker saw in the audience when he started on this rant, he started repeating certain phrases because it got such a good reaction from the crowd. Like, this wasn't, like, planned. It was. It was him reading the crowd and realizing, oh, they really like this. I'm going to keep doing it. And specifically, this is also how he closed his speech. And I don't believe this was. This was planned. I believe this is because of the reaction that the crowd had previously. I'm going to play the very end of his speech where he basically endorses, like, a coup if Harris actually wins.

[Simone Boyce]

If they do all of that, they need to lose.

[Savannah Guthrie]

And at the end of all of.

[Simone Boyce]

It, when they tell you they've won.

[Savannah Guthrie]

No, no.

[Simone Boyce]

You can look them straight in the.

[Robert Evans]

Face and say, I'm sorry, Dad's home and he's pissed.

[Simone Boyce]

Thank you.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

They love it.

[Simone Boyce]

Yeah, of course. Of course. All they have ever wanted is to be forced to be right. And to the extent that reality disagrees with their beliefs, which it usually does, to be able to beat reality into place and at least continue to trick themselves until they die. Right? All the fascists I know, the older people, many of whom raised me, that's what it really was about for them was never having to acknowledge the mistakes that they had made, the things that they had supported that didn't work out. It was a rage at the people who insisted on pointing out, hey, you said this was going to happen. And the opposite happened. So that promise of, like, even if they win, Dad's going to come home and beat them into submission is deeply attractive.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

I mean, and even if it hurts your own, like, self interests, your own, like, class interests, right? And it's like replacing all of the anguish you have as, like, an individual person and, like, replacing your own ego with the embodiment of this group ideal that is just someone else. Like, this is why so many people have, like, dedicated their lives to Trump. Like, you look at all these, like, like, boomers and even some, like, Gen X people at these Trump rallies who, like Trump, is, like, become, like, their personality. He's fully occupied their life. And, yeah, like, that's similar into the way that, like, a cult leader has, like, how Freud wrote about it. Freud wrote all that stuff, like, in the 1920s before. Before, like, Hitler really rose to power, but he could, like, sense what was like, coming in Germany. He could. He could feel it.

[Simone Boyce]

Yeah.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

And what I'm going to feel right now is the products and services that support this podcast.

[Simone Boyce]

Huzzah.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

All right, we are back. I like to close by talking about Aurora, Colorado now. A tactic the Trump campaign consistently used this past year is to hone in on particular small communities as being taken over by immigrants who they would call like, criminal migrants. The best known example of this is what happened in Springfield, Ohio. But this also happened in the Denver suburb Aurora, Colorado, after a video went viral showing men walking through an apartment complex holding firearms. A false claim then spread that a Venezuelan gang was forcibly taking over entire buildings in the city. At a Trump rally In Aurora on October 11, massive banners on both sides of the stage read, deport illegals now and end migrant crime. On either side of the podium, there were large mugshots of Latino men with text that reads, occupied America. Stephen Miller, now, like, chief advisor for immigration policy, takes the stage and says that the patriots gathered at this event can, quote, end the invasion and end the occupation by voting for Trump.

[Robert Evans]

Look at all these photos around me. Are these the kids you grew up with? Are these the neighbors you were raised with? Are these the neighbors that you want in your city? No, these are the criminal migrants that Kamala Harris brought into your community.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

Again, it's all pretty brazen stuff.

[Simone Boyce]

Yep, yep. I mean, we call that brazen, but, like, that's just mainstream now.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

Yes.

[Simone Boyce]

Like, the fight to look at migrants as human beings and have any kind of sane justice, you know, for undocumented migrants in this country has been completely botched.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

There's something about, like, the suburban neighborhood idea that is more, like, disturbing to me. Like, like, pointing to actual pictures of people being, are these the kids you grew up with?

[Simone Boyce]

Yeah.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

And, like, the fight to, like, preserve this, like, nostalgic idea of, like, your childhood neighborhood, it's just so dark to me now. Invoking great replacement framing, Miller says that Kamala Harris was bringing these immigrants into your communities and that they are now taking over America.

[Robert Evans]

We don't need in this country homeless migrants, criminal migrants. We don't need migrants consuming and depleting our public resources, overwhelming our public schools, overwhelming our hospitals, taking over our apartment buildings, and, yes, murdering innocent Americans. You have a right to love the community you grew up in. You have a right to love your neighbors as they are. You have a right to want a country that is of, by, and for America, Americans and only Americans.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

Again with that. Like, you have a right to love the community you grew up in. And then, of course, like, Americans for Americans. And Miller later closed his speech by yelling, america will be reclaimed for Americans.

[Simone Boyce]

Oh, gosh. Yep. I mean, look, these people suffered no consequences for what they did the last time. So they're going to keep pushing further. It's done nothing but work for them. No one has ever taught them any lesson that like, hey, there's. You've gone too far and now there are going to be negative consequences that hasn't happened. So, yeah, they're just going to keep getting more and more mask off. This is where they've wanted to be, Miller, certainly from the beginning.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

And they've used these past four years as prep work to build them to this point. And of course, like, none of what they're saying is like, real in terms of, like, you know, buildings being taken over. The famously pro Harris liberal extremist group the Aurora Police Department have continued to clarify that no apartment buildings have been taken over by any gangs, nor have tenants been paying gang members rent money. According to the police, none of the armed men seen in that viral video, who have all been since identified or arrested, none of them have any ties to Venezuelan gangs or organized crime. What happened was slumlords spread a false story about their apartment complex being taken over by a gang as a way to get out of doing repairs on the property, saying it was too dangerous to enter the premises.

[Simone Boyce]

Jesus.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

It was. It was all like a fucking scam by slumlords so that they wouldn't have to fix their own apartment building. Denver7 found code enforcement and inspection records dating back to 2020 that show numerous violations prior to the influx of Venezuelan immigrants in the Denver metro area. The complex is now under new care. But a similar false tale of an apartment building in Chicago being taken over by immigrant gangs went viral in September due to the efforts of Libs of TikTok and Elon Musk with Libs of TikTok saying, quote, first they did this in Aurora, Colorado, and now Chicago. Which city will be next? This invasion happened on Kamala's watch, unquote. The last thing I will mention here is all of the blood comments that Trump has been making the past year. In an interview last year, Trump said that immigrants are poisoning the blood of our country. It's so bad. And people are coming in with disease. People are coming in with every possible thing that you could have, unquote. This clearly invokes, like blood framing used by Hitler and Nazis and like eugenics in general. Yeah, and this is rhetoric that he's continuing to use for the present. In an interview last month, Trump said that immigrants are naturally murderers because, quote, it's in their genes. And we've got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.

[Simone Boyce]

I mean, a lot of what this comes down to is that after World War II, we really needed to execute a lot more people. You know, like, you could have quashed the eugenics movement. We needed to go after a lot of people in the US There were a lot of American fascists involved in eugenics. And after Treblinka and Auschwitz, we really just should have cleaned house. And instead, we let all of these people get into think tanks.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

I'm going to close with a quote from the Atlantic here. When Trump was swaying to music at a surreal rally, he did so in front of a huge slogan. Trump was right about everything. This is the language borrowed directly from Mussolini, the Italian fascist. Soon after the rally, the scholar Ruth Bengate posted a photograph of a building in Mussolini's Italy displaying the slogan, Mussolini is always right, unquote. And that reminded me of what you said earlier about how these people just always wanted to be right.

[Simone Boyce]

Yeah, yeah. That's the core of it.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

And similarly, people can surrender their own individual ego and substitute it with this image of Trump. Right. Trump was right about everything.

[Hoda Kotb]

Yep.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

Anyway, this is kind of what I wanted to put together, just focusing on all of these things, because, I mean, as much as foreign policy in America is always kind of fucked, domestic policy, I think, does often get changed based on who is in office. And this is what we're going to be dealing with these four years, especially with Miller taking a larger and larger role inside the White House.

[Simone Boyce]

We sure are. So everybody buckle up.

[Savannah Guthrie]

All right, we're all set for the party. I've trimmed the tree, hung the mistletoe, and paired all those weird shaped knives and forks with the appropriate cheeses. And I plugged in the Bartesian.

[Hoda Kotb]

Bartesian.

[Savannah Guthrie]

It's a home cocktail maker that makes over 60 premium cocktails, plus a whole lot of seasonal favorites, too. I just got it for 50 off, so how about a Cosmopolitan or a mistletoe margarita?

[Hoda Kotb]

I'm thirsty.

[Robert Evans]

Watch.

[Savannah Guthrie]

I just pop in a capsule, choose my strength, and.

[Robert Evans]

Wow, it's beginning to feel more seasonal in here already.

[Savannah Guthrie]

If your holiday party doesn't have a bartender, then you become the bartender. Unless you've got a Bartesian, because Bartesian crafts every cocktail perfectly in as little as 30 seconds. And I just got it for $50 off.

[Simone Boyce]

Tis the season to be jollier.

[Andrew Sage]

Add some holiday flavor to every celebration with the sleek, sophisticated home cocktail maker Bart. Pick up your phone and shake it to get $50 off any cocktail maker. Yes, you heard me. Shake your phone and get $50 off. Don't delay.

[Savannah Guthrie]

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[Robert Evans]

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[Andrew Sage]

Hello and welcome to It Could Happen. Here. I am Andrew Sage. I run Andrew zim over on YouTube. I'm joined by the one and only Garrison Davis.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

Hello.

[Andrew Sage]

Hello. Hello. You don't sound particularly festive.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

You know, it's. It's been a long week. This is the last work day of election week. When we're recording this. I just returned from my cabin in the woods, which I. Which I got to kind of watch the election unfold. So now I am back in the real world, not just hiding up in the mountains of Georgia, so it feels slightly worse. But we. We carry on.

[Andrew Sage]

As you mentioned, a cabin in the woods. It actually reminds me of this movie that came out to Netflix a little while ago. I don't know if you've seen it. Leave the World Behind.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

Yes, I have seen that.

[Andrew Sage]

Yes. It's. It's pretty apt that you were in a cabin and all this is going on.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

Yes, yes. We actually talked about that movie earlier on this. On this show and some conspiracy theories around it.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah. Oh, the Obama connection.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

That's right. That's right. You understand you're already receiving the messages. You already know.

[Andrew Sage]

Exactly. But we're not focused on the US for this episode, thank goodness. Instead, we're going to be going back into the past and the present as well, because the struggle really doesn't end and taking a look at the struggle of the Mapuche in Chile and Argentina. I'd actually mentioned them in my exploration of Latin American anarchisms that, you know, they would need their own episode. So here we are taking a look at everything that they've been up to. And it's really thanks to the work of my fellow anarchists, M. Gould Hawke and John Severino, and their research, I've been able to put together this elucidation of indigenous anarchist history. So the lands that now bear the titles of Chile and Argentina have long held the Mapuche people, long before borders were drawn, long before the world learned to cage the wild. The land itself is considered Walmarpu, and it's deeply entwined with the identity of the Mapuche people. Wamapu is, of course, not just a geographical term. It is also a spiritual one. It is a tapestry of their histories and their dreams and also their view of the world through a lens of reciprocity, because the Mapuche do acknowledge their kinship with the land, the rivers, the mountains, and that worldview that they hold and have traditionally held, rather champions balance and harmony and respect for all forms of life, which is what has been fueling their ongoing fight against occupation. So, in a sense, the Mapuche struggle echoes an anarchist ethos of autonomy and mutual aid. But I wouldn't go as far as to call them anarchists. You know, I mean, they have a very specific cultural, historical and spiritual context that is distinct from anarchist thought, despite the similarities and overlaps here and there. So today we'll be exploring the history, people and struggles of Amapu that have shaped the Mapuche experience. Now, ancient archaeological finds, from tools to pottery, have suggested that the Mapuche may have settled in present day southern Chile and Argentina as far back as 2,500 to 3,000 years ago. Genetic and linguistic research connects the Mapuche lineage to other indigenous groups across the Andes, meaning that their ancestors may have migrated down the western spine of South America in waves, adapting to the rainforests, coastlines and valleys of what's now Wamapu. Historically and currently, the Mapuche have spoken Mapudungun, and the language itself carries aspects of their cultural identity. As is to be expected, Mapudungun is a polysynthetic language, meaning its words can be formed by combining smaller parts to reflect complex ideas. Mapuche itself combines Mapu, meaning land, and Che, meaning people. Sawampuche lived on the border of the Incan empire, meaning that they were in contact with centralized state organizations and hierarchical societies and would have chosen to differentiate themselves and the societies from these statist peoples. So how did they do so exactly? The Mpuche way of life would have revolved around, as I said, a deep respect for kinship, communal responsibility and spiritual stewardship of the land. The society itself was based around the LoF, or family based communal unit, and each loft holding shared responsibility over a specific territory, ensuring that one's personal wealth doesn't override the interest and well being of the environment and the community. The loft wasn't just limited to the people of that family based communal unit, it also incorporated the ecosystem that unit encompassed and occupied. Nature was, in a sense, part of the family. Rivers, mountains, forests and other animals were treated as living relatives with a spirit and agency that deserved respect. In the Mapuche worldview, all beings and elements possess nguyen the life force, and so they have to be respected. And that belief system also leads the Mapuchated practice the sustainable use of resources and intergenerational land care. And it also compels their, as I said, resistance to colonial resource extraction, deforestation and industrial expansion. In Mapuche spirituality, Wanumapu, or the land of the ancestors, refers to the spiritual realm connected to the physical world. They've traditionally believed that the spirits of past generations inhabit this realm, offering guidance and protection. The machis, or spiritual leaders, serve as the bridges between these worlds. So they're supposed to do things like conduct ceremonies, heal the sick and connect with the ancestral spirits. They've served as the custodians in a sense of spiritual knowledge and medicine, and that makes them an essential component in each loaf. The sociopolitical structure the Mapuche has been a confederation of love groups known as the Ailaraway system, where the different lofs would come together to make communal decisions and joint actions, particularly in times of conflict or threat. Each lof would be represented in these confederations by a longco, who would be bringing their community's voice and perspective to regional councils without necessarily exercising centralized authority. The decisions in these councils are based on consensus, traditionally, and cooperation, compromise, honoring the collective will as much as possible, rather than imposing will from above. And contrary to popular belief, this lack of centralization has actually made them more resilient, not more fragile. Rather than bickering and fighting and splitting and splintering constantly, the Mpuche have historically united and together resisted multiple attempts at subjugation. The decentralized alliances have empowered them to respond flexibly and quickly to the ever changing landscape of the threats that they are facing. And this resistance continues to this day. But let me not skip ahead. The Spanish first made their way to Mapuche territory in the mid 1500s. Initially confident that they could conquer the area with the same ease they had subdued the Inca empire to the north. But the Mapuche were not easily intimidated. Early encounters quickly turned to conflict, and the Spanish found themselves up against a serious resistance movement. From the start, the Spanish had underestimated the Mpuche's ability to adapt. When the conquistadors introduced horses and new weaponry, the Mapuche observed and learned quickly, incorporating captured horses and arms into their own defense strategies. Rather than a simple series of skirmishes, this struggle would become a prolonged confrontation, one of the longest and most determined resistances to colonization throughout the Americas. This was La Guerra te Arauco, or the Arauco War, known for over 100 years of protracted, brutal conflicts maintained by guerrilla warfare. And there would be no definitive battle or grand conclusion to this war. The Mapuche recognized that they were facing vast resources. They knew they had to find ways to level that playing field. And so, using their familiarity with the forests, rivers and mountains of Wabapu, they ambushed, evaded and outflanked Spanish troops, cut off supply lines, and employed tactics that frustrated and exhausted their lost and ill equipped opponents. The Mapuche were fighting on two fronts, defending their territories from physical invasion and preserving their cultural practices from Spanish influence. Though the Mapuche are traditionally egalitarian, they did elect toki, or war leaders, during times of conflict. These figures were limited to their role in coordinating forces during these conflicts and had no other political power to wield above others. One of the more notable of these, Toki, was a man named Lautaro. He was a young Mapuche who had been captured by the Spanish as a teenager and had worked for some time as a stable boy for chief conquistador and governor of Chile, Pedro de Valdivia. While working as a stable boy, Lautaro managed to secretly observe many of the tactics that the Spanish employed. He gained intimate knowledge of what made them tick, in a sense, and he eventually escaped captivity and brought this knowledge back to his people, transforming Puget resistance by effectively using captured horses and new formations to confront the Spanish on even ground. Lautaro was a brilliant military strategist and by all accounts, a charismatic young man that inspired his people through several major victories, including defeating a large Spanish force at the Battle of Tucapel in 1553, which was a confrontation that killed his former master and a good bit of Spanish morale. Unfortunately, the outbreak of a typhus plague, a drought and a famine slowed the Mapuche advance to expel the Spanish, as they had to spend some time recovering. But Lautaro did try to push a band of Apuche as far north as Santiago, Chile, to liberate the country from Spanish rule. Unfortunately, before he could even turn 30, he was killed in an ambush. And, well, his spirit continues to live on as a symbol of Mapuche resilience. As the war evolved, they had cycles of conflict interspersed with uneasy pieces. Spanish settlements, the Mapuche frontier became isolated, vulnerable outposts, subject to sudden raids. So in an attempt to hold the territory, the Spanish had to divert large amounts of their resources to maintain a military presence, which was a very costly strategy that didn't end up being sustainable long term. So finally, after decades of failed attempts to subdue the Mapuche by force, the Spanish had to adopt a different approach, resulting in a series of peace treaties virtually unheard of in the rest of colonial Latin America. Among these was the Parliament of Kulin in 1641, which established a formal boundary between Spanish controlled Chile and the autonomous Mapuche territories, granting the Mapuche legal recognition as an independent people with territorial rights. This is virtually unheard of across the rest of the Americas, not to tell you how powerful their resistance was at the time. The Spanish Crown recognized Mapuche control over land south of the Biobio river and agreed to regular negotiations. And although this agreement was tenuous and at times violated, it did also mark an era of semi autonomy for the Mapuche, allowing them to maintain their land, language and traditions in the face of surrounding colonial expansion. The fact that they could even secure legal recognition of their autonomy from a state power as stubborn as the Spanish in a time like the 17th century, it's just remarkable. But unfortunately, as you could probably predict, that recognition of their autonomy would not last. In the 1800s, Chile and Argentina emerged as independent republics following Spanish Cunard rule, each driven by an appetite for territorial expansion and a nationalist vision that excluded indigenous autonomy. With new ambitions to civilize and consolidate their nations, Chilean and Argentine leaders saw the Mapuche held lands as resources to be exploited. Both governments justified their encroachment on Mapuche land under the guise of national progress. To them, these indigenous lands were free real estate to be conquered and improved, not sovereign regions held by an indigenous population. The Sulwanpuche way of life as a barrier to their economic development, to be replaced with European style landholdings, settler colonies and extractive industries under new management, they would not respect the 1641 Parliament of Kilin. As far as they were concerned, they didn't sign that agreement and they would never sign an agreement with savages.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

I mean, yeah, we also saw that sort of thing. Throughout the Americas, where you would have these, like, alleged treaties that then either under future rule or even sometimes under the exact same rule, would later just be completely disregarded.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah, you didn't sign it with me.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

You know, it's like a common colonial tactic to buy time as well.

[Andrew Sage]

Exactly. Establish and shore up your resources for a later attack.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

And they could justify and say, well, I didn't sign that. You know, somebody else signed it, so I don't have to be beholden to it, pretty much. And so Chile would launch their campaign to annex Mapuche land, known as the Pacification of Araucania, initiated in the 1860s. Some have argued that this attempted annexation was triggered by the events surrounding the wreck of Joven Daniel at the coast of Arcania in 1849, where a wrecked Chilean navy vessel was allegedly looted and its survivors allegedly attacked on Mapuche territory by members of Mapuche society. Despite the Mapuche arguing that there had been no survivors, and despite them handling over some of the accused of looting to be tried by Chilean authorities, even returning some of what was allegedly looted, the perception of the incident as a brutal loot and rape by the Mapuche fueled anti Mapuche sentiment within Chilean society. Although President Manuel Pulnais of Chile dismissed the opposition's calls for a punitive expedition at the time, the conquest would eventually come to pass beginning in 1861. If you dig into this story, by the way, you come to find out that a lot of the lieutenants in Mapuche were accused of was actually members of Chilean society embezzling the resources from the wreck and then playing into office. If the Mapuche were wholly responsible for the loss of the resources, some of the same people who are accusing the Mapuche looters of stealing all the loot from the ship, many of them had received some of that loot from the Mfuche themselves. The Mfuche were trying to return the loot and they decided to keep it for themselves instead of, you know, returning it to Chilean government. So it's like the whole trial was bunked. There was a whole bunch of corruption. It was a real mess. And although the President did, you know, dismiss the attempts to attack at the time, like I said, it would come to pass. The campaign was justified, as every government does by necessity, you know, the reality, however, was a brutal invasion aimed at uprooted Mapuche communities, displacing thousands and absorbing their lands into the Chilean state.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

This whole, like, strategy also just reflects this just general dehumanization. I mean, even the stuff with, like, the treaties and Just like the going back on the treaties, denial of the legitimacy of treaties, that tactic would not be used the same way against, like, other colonial nations. And then every subsequent, like, development and every subsequent incursion onto land, all of it is just based on this, like, underlying level of dehumanization that just sees land as resources and the people there as like, acceptable casualties or just fierce obstacles to overcome in conquest of those lands.

[Andrew Sage]

Exactly. And obstacles they were because Chile knew where they wanted to reach in terms of what they saw as their rightful borders. And the Mapuche were literally a wedge, an obstacle between them and region where they wanted to reach at the tip of South America. It was almost like a race between Argentina and Chile to see who could reach the edge and claim it first. And the future were something that was keeping them from doing that. And additionally, the fuche would have not have been granted the same legitimacy of a claim as Argentina. You know, Chile and Argentina would eventually come to an agreement about where their border would lie, and they respected that agreement. Same could not be said for the Mapuche. I mean, of course there were a lot of border disagreements, of course, yeah, in South America following the, you know, evacuation of the Spanish. But of course those are treated on equal footing. The natives are different matter. So Chilean forces would go on and advance into Araucania, forcibly remove thousands of amputee families from their ancestral territories and subject those that remain to the authority of the Chilean government. The traditional Cuna land holdings that remained were fragmented and redistributed, often to Chilean settlers. And the government imposed European style laws, education and religion to attempt to assimilate the Mapuche and suppress their identity. Military outposts and settlements also established in the newly annexed land, effectively facing the region under martial law and making it difficult for Mapuche communities to resist openly. Replace the words Chilean government with Israeli government and Mapuche with Palestinian. And that's just to tell you how antiquated the current tactics of colonization are. You know, very little has changed.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

No, that's exactly what I've been thinking about.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah. I mean, a lot of the former major colonial powers have found more subtle means of continuing their exploitation and subjugation of people around the world. So it's very rare to see something so open and flagrant. You know, it's something that you expect to see in historical accounts such as this, of landholdings being chopped up and given to settlers and laws and education being imposed onto a native population to suppress and to assimilate the identity. You know, military outpost being established on Julianic Land, martial law being established for the native inhabitants. All those things. Hear about it in question of the American frontier. And you hear about it in throughout South America and Africa. Because colonial history, you don't really tend to think about that here. Now it's happening in four key.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

No, like that's exactly what I was thinking about as you've been going through all this, like how it just sounds exactly the same as what Israel is currently doing. And I think why people latch onto like Israel specifically so much is because of how like out of time, their tactics of colonial expansion feel. And like similarly, like it's just built on this base level of dehumanization.

[Andrew Sage]

Exactly.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

That a whole bunch of other like imperial powers kind of try to like hide or like mask a little bit. And with Israel it's just so mask off.

[Andrew Sage]

So when I think about all the time they were like a century late pretty much.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

If they had started this process like a century earlier, they would have actually probably have gotten away with it, unfortunately.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

Well, and they still might get away with it now to some degree. And that's like, that is true. That's. That's kind of the soup. That's. The super frightening thought is that even though it is this outdated, like style, what if it like still works and if, and if it's proven to still work in Palestine, where, like, where else can this be used? Like, will we just see more countries feel like they can get away with it because Israel did? And like, that's kind of part of looking into the next four years and looking into just how the world is going in this general kind of far right power grab happening all like, all over the globe, will more and more countries be kind of willing to utilize these types of colonial tactics? And it's scary and bad.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah. I mean, when you think about how the severity of the climate situation is just going to worsen and you think about the pressures that places on the most exploited regions of the globe, how that might pressure, you know, migration and how that might pressure sort of efforts to resist the sort of tightening of the hold of exploitation. Up until the call that was reading this book called Warner People's History of Fashion and just thinking about the whole textile trade as a whole and how it impacts different parts of the globe and whatever. And just talking about this now, I'm just thinking like, if workers in those countries were to stand up, well, in all this time, you know, some of the most deadly struggles have taken place in these regions in these settings. But if they were to stand up and Resist now. I mean, it might get even more open and blatant with the suppression of those people and those voices. And as they attempt to try to make their way out of those hot spots, those hot regions of instability and violence and climate catastrophe, we have all this migrant rhetoric to make their struggles even worse.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

That's like the Foucault's boomerang idea of all of these colonial tactics also get eventually turned inward. And right now, you see the same level of dehumanization being levied against, like, millions of immigrants who are here both legally as refugees and are also here undocumented. But it's. It's the same, like, rhetorical tactics that make people okay with this is that level of dehumanization. And you also see that, of course, levied against, like, trans people. You still see that levied against indigenous people. And it's just like, a growing list of people that are no longer seen as, like, real humans.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah. For some reason, you're saying that my mind fixated on the fact that you said undocumented, and this reminded me of the absurdity of all of this. The difference is literally some pieces of paper. The difference is literally a roll of the dice, spawn point from one side of the border or another, and we allow this to, like, totally dominate our lives.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

Yeah. It's like a. It's like a deep spiritual evil. So many people don't even, like, realize the absurdity of it and how just, like, it takes away so much of, like, thought and empathy. And people. People just don't even know. Like, they don't even, like, process that. Like, that's what they've done to themselves by, like, constructing this system that they believe is, like, divine or, like, enshrined by God, their right to exist.

[Andrew Sage]

Defense.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

Yeah, like, it's. It is. So much of it is a dice roll. So much of it is situations beyond anyone's conscious control.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah. And to sort of pull us a bit back onto the track, you can also see the mirrors between the current Palestinian struggle and the ongoing Mapuche struggle, and even going back to this time, that I'll be even discussing the struggle of the past. Because despite all of this colonial expansion, the Mapuche resisted not only militarily, but culturally. They held onto their language. They held onto their customs. They held on to their spiritual practices. They held on to their identity in defiance of assimilationist policies. And across the Andes, meanwhile, Argentina was pursuing a similarly aggressive campaign, which is known as the Conquest of the desert. This was led by General Julio Argentino Roca in the 1870s and 1880s. And this really sought to eradicate and displace all the indigenous groups that were in the area, including the Mapuche, who had lived in the fertile Pampas and Patagonian regions, to secure valuable land for way for cattle ranching, agriculture, and European settler expansion. Cattle ranching, as in, you know, the whole meat trade.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

The cows are more important than the people.

[Andrew Sage]

Exactly. And the demand for the cows is more important. Yeah, than people. You see, there's this violence of agricultural expansion in other places as well. As I said, I was reading one, and one of the things she noticed is that part of what pushed the American westward expansion was that they were growing cotton. And cotton is extremely water intensive. And historically, cotton was grown in a polyculture. It was grown with other plants. Right. With these cotton monocultures, it really quickly strips the soil of its nutrients. And so they were pushing westward because they kept on having to find new land to grow the cotton on. And of course, who was working that cotton and who is working those plantations? Just exploitation all the way down and all that, just to feed this rapacious appetite of expansion. You know, we had thousands of years of sustainable growth and sustainable cyclical economies, but things that would last, and just in these last few centuries, we've just completely lost that, because above all, the line has to go up.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

Well, and like, also part of that quest for agricultural domination, in order to make that possible, there's the invention of the international slave trade, which is similarly built on this level of just base dehumanization. And the desire for agricultural production being way more important than the humanity of everybody involved in that process.

[Andrew Sage]

Yep. And then it's also tied to the petrochemical trade, because to maintain these soils in this unnatural form, you have to basically pump the land with these artificial fertilizers, which are typically derived from petrochemicals.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

And that process of the soil basically becoming dead started even as early as the late 1800s. This isn't even just a modern problem. In the past fifty hundred years, all of that land was overused and starting to get destroyed almost 200 years ago. But specifically, like the late 1800s.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah. And this is what we're looking at here in this. This particular historical narrative. We're just watching the fall of Walmart. Of course, we're also looking at a more grander sense, the fall of the remaining communities that actually were maintaining that connection with land. They're being, in this process, subjugated, so that there is no resistance and no present alternative to the extractive model. That was at least part of the goal of this expansion. As we see in Argentina, the few Mapuche who survived this massacre because they employed all sorts of tactics ranging from scorched earth policies to forced relocations to like outright just, you know, the few that survive were relocated to reservations, stripped of their land and reduced the laborers within this modern or rapidly modernizing Argentina and General Roca's campaign was celebrated by the Argentine elite as a triumph of civilization over barbarism. Where have I heard that before? So in both Chile's pacification of Araucania and Argentina's conquest of the desert, you had this large scale dispossession of Apuche land and Walmart now being fully split by the border of Argentina and Chile. The vast majority of Mapuche now live in Chile. There are only a few tens of thousands left in Argentina to this day. Initially, Mapuche leaders and communities launched uprisings and guerrilla attacks against the Chilean and Argentine military forces fighting to defend their territory. But as military suppression intensified, resistance also had to adapt. Mapuche communities had to adopt more clude forms of opposition, maintaining cultural practices, stories and languages. As an act of resistance, somepuji leaders petitioned for land rights and autonomy through legal channels, seeking to challenge dispossession through the courts. Others continued to resist through armed confrontation, often leading isolated uprisings when government forces overstepped or attempted to seize Monat. Mapuche resistance that follows. This period is basically rooted in the traumas of this period as the people were forcibly integrated into Chilean and Argentine societies, yet never fully accepted. As we move into the early 20th century, Mapuche communities continued to be hit hard by policies that aimed to dissolve their traditional ways of life. The Chilean and Argentine governments squeezed Mapuche onto reservations, while surrounding lands were given to powerful landowners and settlers. Land scarcity was a significant issue as Mapuche families often had plots too small to sustain their traditional agricultural practices. And this dispossession led to economic hardship and widespread poverty, further marginalizing them from national economies. The assimilation attempts to frame indigenous identity as something to be erased in favor of European norms pushed out the Mapuddun language and cultural ties and aimed to impose Spanish as the primary language. Thankfully, today Mapundung still survives as the language of the Mapuche people. At the time, Mapuche were also forced into low wage labour on settler farms, experiencing, of course, very harsh conditions and very little protection. Many of the Mapuche ended up migrating from rural areas to cities as the arable land dwindled, ended up finding themselves in places like Santiago and Temuco. Beginning in the 1930s, and then Mapuche families ended up working as laborers in urban centers where they faced new forms of discrimination. A lot of Mapuche women ended up going to work as servants within the houses of the Chilean elite. And during this period of hardship, early Mapuche political movements began to take shape. In the 1910s, Mapuche leaders organized groups like Societad Capua Lecan, Defensora de la Araucana, which advocated for land rights and civil protections, aiming to reclaim the dispossessed land and fight against the abuse of indigenous laborers. These early organizations marked a significant shift in Mapuche's strategy, representing a movement towards formal political approaches to resistance. The establishment of political alliances with sympathetic groups also strengthened the Mapuche cause. In the 1920s and 1930s, Indigenous organizations began working with the Chilean communist and socialist parties, focusing on indigenous labor issues and broader anti landlord campaigns. However, these alliances often prioritized national labor and agrarian reform over specific indigenous rights, leaving the Mapuche to continue to fight largely on their own terms. But in spite of this limited political power, these early efforts helped lay the groundwork for later land rights activism. From the mid 20th century onward, rapid industrialization, extractive forestry operations and monoculture plantations began to dominate Mapuche land and pollution increased, rivers were contaminated. Forest biodiversity was replaced by non native species like pine and eucalyptus plantations. And all of this leads of course, to soil depletion. The remaining Mapuche agriculture and local ecosystems were naturally threatened, which further compelled their resistance. At the same time, they were still of course, working to preserve their language, their cultural practices, their music, their arts, their spiritual ceremonies. For a small moment, there was some hope as the government of Salvador Allende, you know where this is going. Passed an indigenous law that recognized their distinctive culture and history and began to restore Mapuche communal lands. But I think we all remember how that turned out. Bam, bam. You have a whole coup sponsored by the US and Pinochet is in power. In power. Pinochet calls for the division of the reserves and the liquidation of the Indian communities. He literally sounds like a cartoon villain of everything I've read and learned about him. I mean, who speaks of the liquidation of our people?

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

Pinochet is extremely cartoon villain coded, except he was a real person. So I also have this tendency to not dismiss super evil people as like unhuman monsters, because I think that actually limits our understanding of how evil humans can be.

[Andrew Sage]

Sure.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

And this isn't even just a pure principled like, I don't like dehumanization in general. It's that I think it actually makes these people harder to beat if you view them as, like, some, like, monstrous force.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

Instead of something that's actually deeply human. And, yeah, he is a cartoon villain. He's also, like, a person. And, like, that's actually kind of more scary than just viewing him as some monster.

[Andrew Sage]

Very true.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

And I don't know, it's a frame of thought I've come back on, specifically in, like, thinking about, like, anti fascism.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah. I mean, that's something I always think about when I think of a lot of the most brutal world leaders across human history. I often think, you know, this person did not spawn out of thin air. There was a time when this person was a newborn and they were babbling, learning to speak, learning to walk, became a toddler, small child, preteen teenager, young adult. So much nature and nurture would have gone into the person they became, but they had the same spawn point as everybody else. They all started as a baby. And Pinochet was unfortunately no exception. After the passing of his decree 2568-1979, the number of indigenous communities was reduced by 25%, and several Mapuche leaders were murdered, threatened with imprisonment or exiled. After the fall of Pinochet and return to democracy, the Mapuche had a resurgence in identity and political activism from the 1990s. This revival gained momentum after the passage of Chile's indigenous law in 1993, which acknowledged Mapuche land right to advocate for bilingual education, opening new paths for cultural reclamation. That same year, Mapuche representatives that the UN pushed for Chile to adopt ILO Convention 169, a key indigenous rights treaty. But Chile didn't actually ratify the convention until 2008, despite the establishment of the National Cooperation of Indigenous Development, or Konadi, in 1993 to facilitate Indigenous inclusion in policymaking. Mapuche involvement in such state institutions has not guaranteed genuine representation. Several Kanadi leaders who openly advocated for Mapuche autonomy or pushed against corporate interests have been removed from their positions. In 2015, Governor Francisco Juan Chumilla, a pro Mapuche advocate in Araucania, was removed from his position due to his support for legal reforms recognized in Mapuche rights. You can't go in and change. The system changes you or gets you out of the way. With the intensification of extractive industries encroached on Mapuche lands, a wave of activism emerged, specifically aimed at protecting secret territories and the environment. Mapuche activists frequently have stood up against forestry companies, hydroelectric projects, and multinational corporations that have aimed to exploit their resources. They've engaged in land occupations and protests for land Restitution and environmental protection. The Chilean state's reaction to Mapuche activism is entirely predictable. Harsh repression. Under anti terrorism legislation, Mapuche activists face heightened police surveillance, imprisonment, and accusations of terrorism, a tactic which is universally used to delegitimize resistance to injustice and violence and exploitation and destruction.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

It is kind of one of those magic words that has been increasingly invoked in the past 20 years.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah, terrorist is a magic word. Illegal is another magic word.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

Yeah, they're all just like dehumanization terms, right? Like, you are not a person, you are not an ex, you are not, well, whatever, you are a terrorist. And terrorists do not have the same rights as humans. It's not a war crime if you do it against a terrorist.

[Andrew Sage]

Luke Skywalker was not a terrorist. You are a terrorist.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

Yeah, but no, like, like, whether you're like, fighting in, like an actual resistance movement or you're just attending like a protest in an American city, both of those can now become quote, unquote terrorists.

[Andrew Sage]

Or, or you're some, like, low level clerk who just happens to be within Hezbollah.

[Simone Boyce]

Yeah.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

Or you're a daughter of a low level clerk who's picking up a pager and oops, I guess your dad shouldn't have been a terrorist. And like, Jesus Christ.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah, yeah. And then, of course, the media has a big part to play in all this. You know, terrorist as a term is associated with certain stereotypes about various groups of people. Past few years, it's been the, you know, machete and AK waving Islamist fighter, but in other time periods, it was another prominent stereotype. You know, the black 70s revolutionary or Vietcong. And in the Chilean situation, media portrayals have also reinforced stereotypes of Mapuche violence, which of course serves the role of obscuring the reality of their fight for justice and environmental stewardship. It hasn't all been for naught, the Mapuche struggle, that is. They have had a few legal triumphs. Rulings by the Inter American Court of Human Rights has held Chile accountable in air quotes, as much as any state is actually held accountable for violating Mapuche rights. Grassroots groups and anarchist collectors worldwide have also supported Mapuche efforts. But clearly these small victories and triumphs are really not much. They're not enough. Within the broader Mapuche movement, you do have the reformists and the assimilationists, and you have groups like Kuali Nadora, Arauco Mayko or CAM and their splinter group, which is Waichan Alka mapu. And they've adopted separatist stances, advocating for direct actions such as land occupations and resistance against state forces. Because they view autonomy and territorial reclamation as essential to Mapuche's sovereignty, and they have no interest in compromise with the extractive industries and government that are responsible for their suffering. Traditionally, these groups are focused on acts of economic sabotage against companies that are infringing on their lands and their stewardship. Within wider Chilean society, there's still some prejudice against Mapuche, particularly but not exclusively from the right wing. But Chile's 2019 uprising against inequality and government abuses found strong support and allyship between right wider Chilean society and Mapuche communities, who had seen echoes of their own grievances in national protests. The protests were initially sparked by a metro fair hike, but they quickly became a national movement demanding systemic reform in both urban and rural spaces. Mapuche communities joined or supported protesters while resisting continued government policies that marginalized their communities and undermine their cultural rights. Mapuche's symbols and flags emerged prominently, aligning indigenous struggles with these broader demands for social justice. And the government response, can you predict? Was swift and severe. Military and police forces were deployed to use excessive violence. Mapuche ben knew about this, but some of the Chileans, they're experiencing this for the first time. And this mutual experience of repression reinforced alliances between the Mapuche and other Chilean activists, as both faced a state driven violence of propaganda that portrayed them as radicals and terrorists and extremists. So despite the crackdown, the uprising saw unprecedented support for the Mapuche cause, amplifying calls for restitution of indigenous lands, formal recognition of Mapuche rights in a reformed constitution, and a decolonial approach to governance that respects indigenous autonomy. The 2019 protests laid the groundwork for a national constitutional reform, with significant Mapuche involvement to public support. The drafting of new Constitution 2021 raised the potential for enshrining indigenous rights, with Mapuche representatives actively participating in the process and creating renewed optimism for meaningful legal protections that respect Mapuche culture, territory and autonomy. That somewhat progressive attempt at a constitutional reform, which also included gender equality measures, was rejected. And so there was another attempt just last year in 2023. But it was a very conservative attempt shaped by the far right Republican Party, which stricter provisions on immigration, a ban on abortion and a free market focus that did not resonate with the majority of voters. 55.8% voted against the 2023 draft and 44.2% in fever. Chilean President Gabriel Borek, whose administration had supported constitutional change, acknowledged that further attempts at constitutional reform were unlikely. So for now, Chile continues to be governed by the constitution that dates back to the dictatorship of Pinochet. While its leaders are looking at alternative paths for addressing social, economic and environmental issues in line with Chilean public opinion. If you know anything about me and my positions, you know that I'm not confident in the ability of states to meaningfully respect people's agency and autonomy ever. But I wish Timpuche all the best in wherever their struggle goes, and I personally found their story very impactful. It's one of resilience, adaptability, and phase of centuries of adversity. They've had an unyielding desire to maintain their connection to the land and cultural identity, and the ongoing fight is really just a testament to the power of solidarity. And that's it. For me. This has been it could happen. All power to all the people.

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[Simone Boyce]

Okay.

[Mia Wong]

Hi everyone and welcome to It Could Happen Here today we're very lucky to be joined by Vladimir von Bilhenberg, who's an underground journalist who covers Syria and Kurdistan, has written two books, including one on the alliance between the SDF and the coalition. Is that a fair introduction, Vladimir?

[Hoda Kotb]

Yeah, you can call it like that, yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Okay, thank you. Thank you so much for joining us. There has obviously been a massive increase in a massive change in the conflict in Syria in the last week or so, just under a week. And I think the information that's available to people is often very bad, very delayed or one side or other putting out propaganda things which mischaracterize the situation on the ground. Especially with regard to the Syrian national army who we're going to talk about, would you mind giving us a sort of very brief explanation of what has happened since last Wednesday when HTs, who we'll have to explain later, launched their operation against Aleppo?

[Hoda Kotb]

Well, in general, I mean the current situation Aleppo came to a surprise to many, many people didn't expect it. So just after the ceasefire in Lebanon, the Hayal to which is offshoot of Al Qaeda, so they said they don't have relations with Al Qaeda anymore. They split off from Al Qaeda. Yeah, they launched a big operation in Aleppo against the Syrian government or the Syrian regime, whatever you want to call it. Yeah, I think initially they didn't think that they would go so far all the way into Aleppo city. There have been agreements between Russia, Iran and Turkey and Syria in Astana about the deconfliction zone in the northwestern province of Idlib. So the HTS insurgents, they claim they launched this operation towards Aleppo in response to violation of this Astana agreement. So according that agreement, this area will be in control of the HDS and the other area will be control of the regime. And they wouldn't bother each other. But this agreement was never really implemented. I mean for instance Russia, they were constantly bombing it left sometimes the hcs would attack regime positions. Also according to this deconfliction zone, actually the Syrian government and Iranian backed armed groups, they went actually in that the confliction zone was supposed to be controlled by the Syrian insurgents. So they launched this operation in response to the, they say the violations by the Syrian government. And I think because when they realized that the defenses of the Syrian government were very weak, they pushed further into Aleppo and it was not really planned to take the city of Aleppo.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

Yeah.

[Hoda Kotb]

Although there's also a video of Giulani, the leader of hds saying that my brothers, one day we're going to be in Aleppo. So maybe it was planned, we don't know really for sure. But the fact is that the Syrian government defenses collapsed and for some people in the region it was sort of reminded of the days of Mosul when the Iraqi army they fled Mosul in 201314 and then ISIS took over. Yeah, although the HCS really denied that they are similar to isis, although they have a similar Islamist ideology. So they took the city of Aleppo in three days and they have been trying to go up towards Hama, a city more up. So far they haven't been able to take the city. And on the other hand you also have another group called the Syrian national army, which is groups composed of basic groups that were supported by the Turkish government. They also started to move. They also started to carry out operations against Kurdish led forces, also known as the Syrian Democratic Forces or the ypg. And also they started to do operations against the Syrian government in above Al Bab and also in northern Aleppo. And they took also several towns in northern Aleppo and also they advanced. And I think their main reason of that. So while the HCS is primarily mostly fighting against the Syrian government, I think the Syrian national army, because it's backed by Turkey, they also have an interest to undermine the Syrian Democratic Forces because Turkey in the past they have said they don't want to have a second Kurdish autonomous region in the region because you have already one in Iraq after which was became recognized after the fall of Saddam. So you have a Kurdistan region in Iraq and Turkey was sort of afraid to have a second Kurdistan region in Syria, especially because it's created by a group which has ideological affiliation with the pkk with they follow the ideology of the imprisoned leader of the pkk, the Abdullah Ocean, which Turkey sees as a terrorist organization. So it's very complex, which we always keep saying about Syria, but you basically have two different operations. You have the Turkish backgrounds that are trying to stop the Kurds from linking up with Aleppo. And then you have the hds, the Islamist groups that are trying to go up, and they already took Aleppo and they also took many areas in the countryside of Hama. And actually they now control all of Idlib province. So in the past the Syrian government they controlled some parts of Idlib, but now they control the HCs, they control all of Idlib.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. So I think if we Start by looking. I think most people who listen to this will be familiar with the sdf, with the autonomous administration in Northeast Syria and with the Burjava revolution. And they'll be wondering, kind of the question I get mostly is like, how does this impact that? That's what people are asking. So with that in mind, I think we should explain. Perhaps we've talked before in this show about Operation Peace Spring, Euphrates Shield, or these Turkish incursions into previously SDF controlled areas and the genocidal violence that accompanied that, or ethnic cleansing, however you want to phrase it. Can you explain what's happened in the areas where the SNA have advanced and like what that's meant for the Kurdish people who lived there or in some cases are still there?

[Hoda Kotb]

Yeah. In the northern Aleppo and Aleppo city. So you have two Kurdish neighborhoods called Ashrafiyya and Sheikh Maksut. There are around 100 to 200,000 people living there. Then you have also two small Kurdish towns called Tel Aran and Tel Hassel, which have changed hands constantly during the Syrian civil war between the ypg, the Syrian government and Iran. Then by the rebels, then by isis, then by Al Qaeda. Like it was a big mess.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Hoda Kotb]

Then you have also you have like Kurds that were displaced from Afrin because Turkey, they carried out an operation against the YPG in 2018. So you have thousands of Kurds that left Afrin. So the statistics are a bit unclear, but at least there were around 10,000 IDPS living in camps in northern Aleppo. And you also have people living outside of the camp. So the statistics are always a bit unclear. But it's. They now say that there were around 10,000 families that were displaced. So they were already displaced from Afrin before. And there is this town of Telarafat which has been a strategic location in Aleppo because it was sort of like opening up the way to Aleppo city. And Kurdish back forces, they took actually this town with Russian support from the Turkish backed rebels. So they had like grievances about this town. But Turkey, even during the Afrin operation, they didn't get the green light to take this town from the Kurdish background. Also the Syrian government was there by the way, after agreements. So this town always was like a focal point of contention between the Kurds and the Syrian insurgents. So what happened after HCS took Aleppo? The Syrian national army with the backing of Turkey, they, they moved on towards Tara Rafat. And also because in the past there was more imbalance in Aleppo because you have also two small towns called Nubal and Zahra, they were like prominently inhabited by people from the Shia religion. So there were Iranian backgrounds there and they were in the back of Tal Arafat. So they were sort of as a balance. So they sort of like the Kurds were able to hold out in Tariffa despite like many offensive by the Turkish backgrounds. So what happened? Because of basically all the Syrian government, they were removed from Aleppo and as a result, like they were very weakened and completely isolated. I mean, until now there's Kurdish forces in Asrafia and Sheikh Maksut, but they're completely surrounded and embargoed by the hts, which is not something new. Because before this conflict, this new renewed conflict in Aleppo, the Syrian government was also imposing embargoes on those two new neighborhoods, not allowing food and stopping electricity and bothering people at checkpoints. Because they had like always issues with the Kurdish led forces because they are sort of in the Syrian civil war. They have always played sort of a third role, like they want to have their autonomy. Then you have the Syrian armed groups there trying to topple the Syrian government. And then you have the Syrian government trying to stop this from happening. And then the Kurdish led forces were trying to create autonomous administration and they got some support from the US in the fight against ISIS since the battle of Kobani. Yeah, so yeah, this, this is like the situation Aleppo. So now what, what happened is that Tel rafat, where in 2016, the Arabs of Telephot, they fled. Actually this after the sdf, the YPG took this town. So now the Syrian rebels, they took this town. And this time the people that fled from Afrin to these towns that they were living around 4, 5, 6 IDP camps there, they were forced to flee. So the Kurdish groups, they were like trying to resist the SNA advances, but they were not able to resist them because they were completely surrounded. Because as I mentioned, Nubal and Zakhar fell. So they were like completely pinched from all sides. But before they had always like Nubel and Zahra behind them. So they could not be completely surrounded. But this time they were completely surrounded. They were forced to leave. They were not able to continue the fight. So I think there was like a de facto deal or something because you saw like convoys with actually with fighters, with weapons and armed Humvees. They were like being escorted to checkpoints and they were allowed to cross towards Sabka, actually a town in northeast Syria. And maybe most likely the US they were involved in sort of de facto deal and Turkey. But so far the US they haven't commented on that. But most likely there was sort of a deal for the forces in Tarrafat to leave with the civilians and they're now hosted in camps, in displacement camps in the town of Tabka. And then there are still Kurds living, as I mentioned, in Ashrafia and Sheikh Masood, the two big neighborhoods in Aleppo. And then you have also two small Kurdish towns which are now controlled by the Syrian national army, the Turkish backed groups.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Hoda Kotb]

So the Hayat Al Teri Al Sham, their local administration, they offered the deal to the Kurdish fighters. They said you can leave these two Kurdish neighborhoods in Aleppo without any issues. And the Kurds that are living there, we respect them and they can stay there. But the Kurdish fighters, they have to leave. But then there was a statement I think yesterday by the leader of the sef, the Muslim Abdi. He was saying like we were forced to evacuate the people because we were trying to create a corridor between these Kurdish enclaves in Aleppo with the rest of northeast Syria because they are like Turkish backed rebels in the Syrian government in between. Yeah, trying to, we're trying to make a corridor. So they said this corridor was actually was broken and they were forced to evacuate. But he said that, that the British forces were still in Aleppo resisting. Yeah. So it seems that the YPG didn't completely follow this offer of the hds. But of course we don't know if there was maybe a backdoor deal with the HTS to allow first people in northern Aleppo to leave and then maybe in a later phase that they will also leave Aleppo because they are there in a quite difficult situation.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, very difficult situation.

[Hoda Kotb]

But they're now accused by the Syrian rebels that they are positioning snipers in Aleppo and that they are still Aleppo, but they never left, left Sheikh Masood and Astrafia. When I also talked to people, they saying that civilians, they were offered in Sheikh Masood and Astrafia to leave that area if they wanted to leave. So they were not forced to leave, that they had the option opportunity to leave that area if they wanted. But then the buses didn't show up and they didn't leave because I mean they need only, not only evacuated Kurdish civilians from northern Aleppo, but I think they also evacuated the Shia population of Dubo Zakhar. They were some talks also that they are also evacuated to northeast Syria because they don't feel safe for their lives if those rebels take those areas.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Hoda Kotb]

And they are still there. They don't want to be captured by the rebels and used as hostages or so most likely they left with the Kurds to North east Syria and what will happen to them? They probably go to Iraq or to other areas in Syria.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, you meet like in northeast Syria you meet sometimes like either former regime soldiers or people who have left regime areas and like they've made their lives there. So now we have this situation, right? Well, yeah, we have these two little islands. We'll just call them YPG for the ease of. To not introduce another acronym. Right. Of like Kurdish armed folks in Aleppo to complicate this further. And people will probably have seen this. I want to explain it. In Deir EZ Zor we have a different situation. Right. We have the SDF attacking Iranian backed relations and the regime. Do you feel comfortable explaining what's going on in Der Ezor and why that's a different calculus?

[Hoda Kotb]

Yeah. So since former president or the incoming president Donald Trump, when he pulled out troops from Syria in 2019 when Turkey did an offensive against the Kurds in Talabia, at that point the U.S. they left. But then there was so much criticism from both Democrats and Republicans that he was forced to come back.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Hoda Kotb]

So until now There are still 900 US troops in De Resort province and in Haskell province, which is actually not a lot because if you look to for instance South Korea, there are thousands of troops in, in South Korea and other places. So it's not very a lot. But in the U. S discussions it's always discussed, oh, we have troops in Syria, but actually compared to other countries it's not a very big number. 900 people?

[Mia Wong]

No, not at all. Very small footprint.

[Hoda Kotb]

So they have this small footprint in Derezor and Hasaka and they basically they worked with the Kurdish led forces since the battle of Kobani to basically defeat the ISIS caliphate because it was a threat to European security and US Security and they were trying to carry out attacks in Europe and there were many attacks in Europe and when civilians were killed. So you have this anti ISIS fight. This is one of the reasons actually why the Kurdish led forces, they were forced to go to Datazor because it was their last bastion in 2019 when they defeated the territorial caliphate of ISIS. So since there you have this, the SCF there and they have their own administration in Der Ezor and they have like local forces and Arabs that join them in the fight against isis. Yeah. So what happened that in the last few years, in the last one or two years there have been attempts by, by the Syrian government and Iranian back groups basically to recruit Arab tribes to fight against the sdf. So there have been Several skirmishes and battles since that time. After also the sdf, they arrested a commander of them that they thought he was like going to betray them.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Hoda Kotb]

So since that time there were like several skirmishes between these militias that are calling themselves the tribal army or something in that regard. And then you have the scf, so you had like fights between the Iranian backgrounds and the sdf. And recently with all the changes in Syria, there were a number of villages, around seven, six villages that were actually Russian army was based in those villages. It was like the line sort of dividing the US backed SDF forces and the Syrian government forces. And there's also a river, but those villages, they were like in front of the river. So the river is sort of naturally dividing the areas between the SDF and the Syrian government. But there were like still a number of villages that were not on that line. And actually there were Russian troops based in that villages. Yeah, but with the whole crisis with Aleppo and the fight now between the HCS and the Syrian government in Hama, the Russians, they moved out from those villages. So those villages, they actually are almost empty. There is nothing there. So during this situation, they scf, they just moved in those, those villages and there was actually not so much fighting, although on the social media I see that all there's fighting and this kind of stuff. So there was some. Over this, like the last one or two years there have been heavy fighting between the SDF and Iranian back groups, but in these villages not so much because it was just empty villages and they just took them over and there was no one there.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. Okay, so that leaves us with like the, I guess AANES getting a little bit larger in the south and then smaller in the west.

[Hoda Kotb]

Yeah, very much smaller in the west. And it's even not clear if they can keep their presence in Aleppo because I mean, Sheikh Mokshutan Astrafiya is not completely surrounded by the HDs. And it seems that the HDs, they have been a little bit softer with the SDF and a YPG than the sna, because the sna, I mean they have their issues because they are also backed by the Turkish government. And the Turkish government, they always said their policy is basically to stop the SDF from creating autonomous area. And they also said the SDF is linked to the pkk, although the sdf, they deny links to the pkk, although they don't deny their ideological affiliation with imprisoned PK leader. Yeah, so Turkey always said that they are feeling threatened and they have always claimed that attacks were planned on Turkey. From northeast is Syria. From Rojava on Turkey.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Hoda Kotb]

Although the SDF has denied it. I think there was also. There was not a long time ago there was also an attack in Ankara. And Turkey also claimed that it was carry planned from Kurdish cities in Syria. Yeah, so that's like the situation.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, that gives us a pretty good summary of the situation, I think. So let's talk about HTs a bit because I think you're going to see one of two things. Right. When we talk about the SNA and hts, a lot of outlets will just collapse them under the same descriptor. They will just say Syrian rebels. And I think people will think of the original largely secular uprising in Syria in 2011 and if they have not been paying attention, they'll realize that ISIS has been and gone. But they'll think, oh, these must be the same guys. These are not the same guys. Well, some of them may be the same guys who are originally part. Like Jelani was originally sent there by a Baghdadi way back to be part of isis. But these are not the secular rebels who originally rose up in Syria. And so can you explain like HTS has this very interesting kind of legitimacy project. Right. Like it's trying to build a pseudo state and present like a kind of gentler jihadism. I don't know how to say it, but can you explain a little bit of this transformation of HDS and what you make of it?

[Hoda Kotb]

I mean as you mentioned that Giuliani, the current leader of the hcs, he was sent by at that time, I think it was the Al Qaeda or the Islamic State of Iraq to Syria basically to establish like. But at that time there was no ISIS yet. I think so. So later basically he refused to pledge allegiance and he basically did his own thing. He created Jabalta Al Nusra which was the affiliate of Al Qaeda. But then he decided to basically split from Al Qaeda and he denounced like his links to. I think at that time the leader was Zawahiri, but I'm not sure. So he basically splits from Al Qaeda and you still have a split off group from Al Qaeda in Idlib, it's called Hurrah Saldin.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Hoda Kotb]

Which they actually, they had issues with. They had some problems with them. So HDS, although ISIS territory was defeated 2019, the HDS or they basically with all the craze in Syria because I mean they have been fighting over all the province between the Syrian government and different Syrian armed groups, they managed to sort of cement and control in the province of Idlib. And they created their own little administration there. But despite that, they say that we don't have any links to Al Qaeda. I mean, they're still listed by, for instance, the US as a terrorist organization.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, there's a $10 million bounty on Jelani still. Right. They just never took it away from. Yeah.

[Hoda Kotb]

So I mean, it seems that the US doesn't believe this moderation idea that the HES tries to show them more moderately. But my idea of the hcs, it's more like a sort of lighter or softer version of isis. I mean, they're not like ISIS that they're gonna broadcast people being blown up or beheaded on the film screen. It's just that they do it in the back of the screen. I mean, there's people being executed according to the Islamic Sharia law. There are people being imprisoned. I mean, you also had protests actually in idle against Jelani that they were actually opposed to the authoritarian rule. And I think then you have separate from the sort of this Islamist, which you can actually sort of compare to the Taliban.

[Mia Wong]

Yes, I think that's a good comparison to the Taliban.

[Hoda Kotb]

And also I think Taliban, they have some relations actually with the ATS, and they also congratulated the HTs after they took control of Aleppo. So sort of it's like a Taliban rule. Though, of course, Taliban is very different context related to Syria culture and Afghan culture. So it's different, of course. But they're both.

[Mia Wong]

Yes.

[Hoda Kotb]

Islamist projects with a national project at the same time. So it's Islamist project for Syria and the Taliban have an Islamist project for Afghanistan. Although you also have Pakistani Taliban. Etc.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Hoda Kotb]

So it's not like a transnational jihad, but you can call it like a national jihad, maybe.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, I think that's the crucial difference. Right. At least for the U.S. like, that makes them kind of more amenable than ISIS or even Al Qaeda. Is that. Yeah, they have this nationally contained jihadi.

[Hoda Kotb]

Vision, but they don't do attacks in Europe or in the U.S. but of course, there are several groups in Idlib that are sort of falling under the control of HDs that are possibly could do external attacks, etc. And apart from that, you have the Syrian National Army. So the Syrian national army, it's like a mix of different groups. As you mentioned, in the beginning of the Syrian civil War, you had the Free Syrian army, but then the Free Syrian army, they split in several groups. I mean, some like, linked to Muslim Brotherhood, some linked to Turkmen groups, other groups, secular groups, etc, so all these groups that were basically fighting in different provinces. They were all gathered because Turkey, they did several Turkish military did Several operations since 2016 in northern Syria with the main aim is to stop the YPG from linking up the Kurdish enclaves on the border with Turkey. So they did. I think the first one was Euphrate Shield. Then they had, I think Operation Olive Branch in Afrin in 2018.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, incredible names.

[Hoda Kotb]

And then I think the last operation, I can't recall was in 2019 when they took Talavi out and from the Kurdish forces, the ypg, sdf. So they had these three operations. And these groups are sort of a mix, as I mentioned, of different groups with also different ideologies. Some are more Turkmen in nature, some of them are more Islamist in nature. Some of them are like sort of leftovers from secular groups that used to fight. Some of them, even they. In the past, they received support from the us, from the CIA against the Syrian regime. So some of them, they received support. And this is like a sort of umbrella of several organizations. So HDS is one group and they control also other groups in Italy, but it's one group. But the SNA there are like a lot of different groups.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Hoda Kotb]

And they also have been fighting each other several times in areas under Turkish control. So this is very different. And they are more sectarian in nature. Let's say more. I mean, they have also been less under control than the HCs in the way that there have been a lot of kidnappings for ransom, a lot of like sexual violence against women, rape. Yeah. This is all documented by several organizations, UN organizations. They also have child soldiers. So they have different kind of issues. And. But they have been more accused of like, more sort of gang style of.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Hoda Kotb]

Activity. And that's why also some of them, they were sanctioned by the US and also some of them, they have integrated like isis, former ISIS fighters in their ranks. And you also have like, first you have some groups from Datazord, other or are originally, for instance, from the area around Mara or Azaz. Some of them, they. They're displaced from Ghouta. So a lot of them, they're also. They came because the Syrian government, they advanced with Russian support. And then these groups were brought by bosses to the areas under Turkish control.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Hoda Kotb]

So these areas became a sort of, like, maybe it's a bad word, a sort of a dumping ground for all the Syrian rebel groups that were not completely defeated, but displaced by Syrian government and offenses with the Russian support. So, I mean, before they were in Aleppo and homes and Hama and Damascus, all these Group, they were moved with buses through agreements between Iran, Turkey, Russia and Syria.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Hoda Kotb]

To northern Syria, to Idlib. And now these groups, they are coming back because they were never completely defeated. I mean they had their own administration. So the Syrian national army, they fall under the Turkish backed Syrian opposition, the, I think they call it the Syrian National Coalition.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Hoda Kotb]

Or in Arabic the Italaf. So they have their own interim government administration in the Aries on the Turkish control and then you have the salvation government under the HES. So they are t2 different administrations and they also doesn't mean that they agree with so so just calling them the rebels. It's a little bit like. Yeah, it doesn't really doesn't fit to the reality. But of course you also have to deal with the fact that for media, if they want to explain complex situations to a general public, it's very difficult to just say, okay, you have this acronym and you have this acronym and you have the YPC and the hypothesis and the sna. So people, they will lose their interest. So that's why it always becomes sort of this black and white. So, oh, you have the Syrian insurgents and then you have the Syrian government and then it's already complex enough to also add Kurds to the mix. So they also versus often the Turkish government. They got very angry that the media keeps calling the YPG the curse because, oh, they don't represent the curse. But you can say that with any group in Syria or anywhere in the world. I mean, I mean you have in Americans you have different political parties, you have different parties in Syria, you have different parties in Turkey. So these groups don't represent all the Syrians or all the Arabs or all the Kurds or all the allies. There are always different political factions. Yeah, and that's what it makes so complicated in Syria because a lot of these groups got fragmented. But actually with for instance the support of Turkey, they actually united under one umbrella which is called the Syrian National Army.

[Simone Boyce]

Yeah.

[Hoda Kotb]

And then of course, even on the Syrian government side, there's many different groups. I mean you have Iranian backed armed groups, you have groups from Lebanon that are helping the Hezbollah, Lebanese Hezbollah. Then you have Iraqi, Iranian backed groups that are supporting the Syrian government. Then you have also Shias that were recruited from Afghanistan. And then also in the Syrian government security structure, I mean in the past there was no room for militias. But they have for instance the NDF which is sort of like a Syrian government backed militia which even sometimes fought with the Syrian government itself when they tried to become more too Much powerful. Sort of like what you have in Wachner and Russia that tried to challenge the Russian government and then they got curtailed. So it's like even with the Syrian sort of the forces back in the Syrian army, it's not like so simple. It's also not. You have just the Syrian army. That's it. You have also different kind of militia, some supported by Iran, some supported by Russia that are backing the Syrian government.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, everyone wants, I think Ukraine has really reinforced this. They want war to be like colors on a map and a front line and the front line moves and that's, you know, and that's just not how it like oftentimes those little lines on a map will be. In reality it's people driving around and pick up trucks with tushkas in the back wondering where the other guys are and what's going on. You know, it's not like Ukraine where you have trenches and people firing with each other from trench lines to gradually move. And as much as it would be easy to have modelists, we. We just don't. In Syria.

[Hoda Kotb]

Yeah, I mean in Syria it's different because of. It's more. There are more religious and ethnic groups done in Ukraine. I mean Ukraine is. You have the Ukrainians and the Russians and I mean you also have people speaking Russian in other areas of Ukraine. But it's very, it's much more complex in Syria. Although you obviously also have different groups fighting in Ukraine. But in Syria it's a bit more complex and it's difficult for the media to get a grip on that without like, you know, like trying to also explain to a normal reader what is going on in Syria. But also in general you have all this international media that are cutting down costs and they're closing their foreign bureaus. So also, I mean the money for like extensive reporting in Syria is also getting less or in general in internationally speaking.

[Mia Wong]

Yes.

[Hoda Kotb]

And then you have another problem is that you have the problem of access in Syria. So if you are wanted to go to the Syrian government area is very difficult because if you have reported in Syrian rebel areas, the Syrian government is not going to give you a visa. You have to be like very pro Syrian government.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

Yeah.

[Hoda Kotb]

If you go to the areas under rebel control, to be honest, like it's very difficult for any journalists to go to HDS areas or the Syrian national army area. So even if a journalist wants to report positively about the rebels, it's very difficult. They have like press adequate station in Turkey and they have to cross the border. Very complicated. So there's barely in, in very rare cases, journalists going into northwest Syria and then with the Kurdish controlled areas, if you can call them like that, like northeastern, it's a bit easier. I mean there are people flying to Iraqi Kurdistan and then they can get like permission from the Kurdish authorities here in Iraqi Kurdistan and then they can cross the border. So it's a bit easier. But the number of journalists going there is, is very limited.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Hoda Kotb]

And most of the interest actually of the western media was not so much about the Syrian conflict, it was more about this western ISIS woman and ISIS fighters that were jailed or held in camps in north east Syria. So most of the focus of the western media was most of the time, okay, what's happening in the whole camp because you have thousands of ISIS families there or in persons in the prison. So I mean the American journals were interested in US DAJ fighters and the Dutch were interested in Dutch ISIS families are fighters. And the same for many other countries.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, the British media is terrible for that. They'll go to northeast Syria and then not talk about northeast Syria. And this, our whole just exists as kind of a bubble outside of context in that reporting.

[Hoda Kotb]

Yeah, they just talk about Shamima begun and she became sort of a celebrity in the uk.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Hoda Kotb]

Although I think even that address nowadays it's like very limited because a lot of these Europe countries in the UK they have their own domestic issues. So in general the interest in Syria has gone down a lot. And I think also with this current conflict in Aleppo, it will get some attention in the media for a few days, but at some point it's going to go down again.

[Mia Wong]

Yes, of course.

[Hoda Kotb]

Unless maybe there will be conflicts in other parts of the world again. So I think at some point also this media attention, because the media attention for Sierra already was like very low. Unless it's gonna affect Europe in a large extent because it could also create new waves of refugees trying to go to Europe. Yeah, there's many people that were displaced again. There was a very nice post on X by one journalist from I think a Saudi outlet. And he was saying, it's very sad to see. He was basically saying like at any moment our people can be displaced at any time or can be displaced again. So that's like sort of the life of Syrians that, that live in these different like front lines. Like anytime they can displace like the people at fraternity, they were displaced in 2018 and now 2024 they're displaced again. And then you have people displaced by the Syrian government living in the houses of Kurds in Afrin, and they are also victims of this conflict. So. Yeah, so it's a very complicated situation, people being displaced, moving in the houses of displaced, and the displaced living in other people's houses that are also displaced. So it's like a very cynical and sad situation.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. And a very, very difficult one for civilians. And certainly, like, with the change of government in the US it seems unlikely that we will be reaching out to help those displaced civilians in the. In the near future. And certainly we've seen a lot of Kurdish people who have been displaced either by Turkish aggression or who. There's a whole other situation with Kurdish areas in Turkey at the moment and their elections and such, which we don't have time to go into. But many of them have come to the US And I've interviewed lots of them for this show, so I think people will be familiar with that. Vladimir, I think that's probably about all we have time for, but I wanted to offer you a chance. You have very good tweets. You have a very good understanding of the whole situation. Your articles do an excellent job of making it understandable. So where can people find your writing and follow you?

[Hoda Kotb]

Well, I mean, I. You can find my tweets on my personal Twitter page, which is on my name, Vladimir, at XV Van Duchenberg. And also I write for different outlets and think tanks. Like, for instance, I write for Middle East. I Fikra Forum from the Washington Institute. Also, I've been writing some pieces for Carnegie.

[Mia Wong]

Okay.

[Hoda Kotb]

So, yeah, I've been writing for several places on the current situation. Yeah. And sometimes I also do interviews. I talked on BBC a few times on the Situation and on Deutsche Welle. So you can find my work on my Twitter profile. Always post my articles there. And.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, yep, that's great. Is there anything else you'd like to maybe suggest that people follow? I think it could be really easy to get a lot of propaganda when it comes to Syria. So is there anything, I think, you'd suggest that people kind of get their news from?

[Hoda Kotb]

Well, I mean, I think in general, X is still like a good platform. It has been from the beginning of the Syrian Civil war. Although, of course, you have different accounts with different views supporting different factions. So it's always good to verify any videos posted, although it's, like, more difficult to verify videos than pictures. But it's always good to verify locations and the background of people that are posting stuff. And then also I think it's very interesting and good to follow the maps of the Syrian civil War because you have several places where they publish maps of the civil war. So it's easier to follow it on the map than by tweets or posts on X. Yeah, but I think in general, I mean, I mean, there are still like many international media that are trying to do reporting on Syria, but I think in general, what I've seen, it's becoming more limited and it's mostly based on, for instance, the Serum Observatory for Human Rights.

[Mia Wong]

Yes.

[Hoda Kotb]

So the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights is a good source. They have a page in English and Arabic, although sometimes the English pages are a bit difficult to follow for people if they don't know the background of the conflict because it's more written for locals. And then also you have, for instance, there's this civil society organization that focuses on human rights abuses. I think it's called Syrians for Justice. They have very good reports on the situation, but it's bit slow because it's not like 24 hours. I mean, it's like they do investigative reports on abuses by all sides of the. Of the Syrian. Syrian civil conflict.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Hoda Kotb]

So in general, I think X is very good. And also like Telegram. I mean, a lot of these different groups, they have telegram channels where they post the latest updates. But of course, all of them are quite biased. But bias you will get anyway in such a conflict. It's inevitable.

[Mia Wong]

So, yeah, everyone's biased to a degree. You will see dead people a lot if you go following Telegram channel for the Syrian Civil War. So if that's not something you'd like to see, that's probably not a platform to be on.

[Hoda Kotb]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

But yeah, thank you so much for your time. I know it's late with you and we'll let you get to sleep. And we do appreciate you joining us and hopefully people will follow you on Twitter and get good information about what's happening.

[Hoda Kotb]

You're welcome.

[Savannah Guthrie]

All right, we're all set for the party. I've trimmed the tree, hung the mistletoe, and paired all those weird shaped knives and forks with the appropriate cheeses. And I plugged in the Partisan.

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[Savannah Guthrie]

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[Hoda Kotb]

I'm thirsty.

[Robert Evans]

Watch.

[Savannah Guthrie]

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[Robert Evans]

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[Savannah Guthrie]

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[Simone Boyce]

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[Hoda Kotb]

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[Savannah Guthrie]

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[Robert Evans]

Hey, it's Bobby Bones. Start building before next spring during Morton Buildings Winter. Wind Up Save now until October 31st on select building projects, visit MortonBuildings.com and then just click Get Started. Certain restrictions may apply. Contact your local construction center for more details. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that has increasingly become about it happening and other places in the world. I'm your host, Mia Wong. With me is Gare.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

Hello. Hello.

[Robert Evans]

So if I'm remembering correctly, and it is entirely possible I have forgotten several coups that I've covered, I think this is the second coup that I've covered in six months.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

That feels right.

[Robert Evans]

And you know, when we last left, the dumbest coup I had ever seen in my entire life. We were in Bolivia and it was a truly spectacularly stupid couple that that coup ended with the army running away from a bunch of protesters who were just like yelling at them meanly. So that one had a thing I've never seen before, which is the army. The protesters were trying to bring something up to break a barricade and the army ran away before they could get the like anti barricade thing up to the police barricade. So that was a disaster. Today we are talking about what I having now studied this like since it was since it started. I genuinely believe this somehow is an even stupider coup than the last. Like I you. You have to go back to like the CIA coup in Venezuela where everyone just got like arrested by fishermen to find a stupider coup than this. It is. And even that one, like, at least they like, landed guys with guns.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

It was over so quick.

[Robert Evans]

Like, yeah, I think the official number is that the amount of time the martial law was technically in effect before the assembly voted to get rid of it was 190 minutes.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

Like, people could have like slept through this coup, which is really funny, right.

[Robert Evans]

I made an executive decision, right? And I was like, I'm gonna sleep in for one more hour. So I woke up at 8am instead of 7am and I missed like half of it because I was just. I slept for one hour. So let's, let's, let's get into a bit about what happened here. Because, you know, as, as dumb as this looks now because it failed. This was for people who don't know there was, there was an attempted coup in South Korea. I don't know what day it's going to be when I don't know what day it's going to be in Korea when this comes out. Because. Yeah, but, but on, on Tuesday, on our Tuesday, on our Tuesday in like the. It was I think 10:30 at night there, the hideously unpopular president of Korea, Seok Yell Yoon, tried declared martial law. Yoon is. His approval rating is like half of Joe Biden's approval rating. Like, his approval rating is like 20%. He is staggeringly unpopular.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

He.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, so Yoon won one election in 2022 very narrowly in a race where neither of the candidates were particularly good. And he is a hardline, far right dipshit. He's, you know, I mean, one of his big things, he has this unbelievably hard line in North Korea which is not, you know, doing anything productive at all. He's also, you know, and this is like, if you want to look at like, who are his 20% of supporters left, he was the guy of the unbelievably unhinged Korean misogynist movement, I guess you would call them, who are some of the worst people on earth. I mean, these are guys who will just. There was, there was a court case recently that decided that you can't just like beat someone up for having short hair because you think they're a feminist. Like, that's, that, that's the kind of like unhinged misogynist that we're dealing with. That's, that's Yoon's base. However, comma, a couple of things have happened since then. One is that he's racked by like a thousand scandals. Everyone in his, in his cabinet Keeps getting impeached for doing corruption. There are so many different corruption scandals with him going on right now that I was considering like reading out a list of all of them as a joke, but it's too long. One of the important ones is that he was like basically doing like a pay for play thing to like fuck with his own party's primary process.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

Nice.

[Robert Evans]

And this has pissed off basically his entire party, which is great. Which is exactly the thing you want to be doing right before you attempt to stage a coup is piss off your own political party. So, all right, let's get to the coup. His major problem, well, one of his very major problems is that he hasn't been able to do anything basically since he's been in power. And the reason he hasn't been able to do anything is that his first sort of like off election was this unbelievably crushing electoral defeat for his party, the national assembly, which is their like parliament is just straight up controlled by the opposition Democratic, like Liberal Democratic. Well, okay, let me, let me be very civic about this. Is controlled by the opposition Democratic Party, who are the sort of like Korean Liberal Party and also a bunch of like minor allied opposition parties. And they keep on again impeaching all of his cabinet members, which is very funny. You know, he was trying to get a budget through and the budget got eviscerated and he hasn't been able to do it. So he's been very, very angry and very frustrated. And so his plan apparently to deal with this was just to knock out the National Assembly.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

This is so funny because, like, because of who I am. I was talking about this at the bar last night. Just completely insufferable. And the one thing I couldn't put together is like what his exact motivation was besides like rooting out like political enemies. No one knows that he like labeled as like quote unquote, anti communist. Right. But let's, like we were talking about like how funny this all is and I'm like, I, I still can't quite understand like why he did it.

[Robert Evans]

No one knows. Like this is, this is genuinely. Nobody has, has any idea why the fuck he thought this would work. Like the best thesis, and we'll get to this in a bit, the best thesis that I've seen is that he wanted to do this because he was pissed off with the fact that he hasn't literally been able to do anything his entire time in office. Because he's really mad at the national assembly and also his own party.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

And it's so funny. To do that and then have that be underscored by them. Just like. Be like, no, actually, you can't do a couple. No. No, thank you. Nice try. Legally, you cannot coo me.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Like, the. I think the semi serious part of this is that it doesn't make any sense to me how this could have been done if there also wasn't a faction of the Korean military that wanted this. Right. The Korean military is. I mean, most of Korea's history still to this day, I think it's still a majority of the amount of time South Korea has been in existence has been under military dictatorships of various kinds. There's been a whole bunch of them. They were staggeringly hideous. They killed unbelievable numbers of people. They tortured unbelievable numbers of people. They were fully backed by the United States. And the military has also always had this real chip on its shoulder about sort of liberal civilian politicians. And they have their version of, like, all of the conspiracy things that we have about how all Democrats are communists and how they're all, like, secretly, et cetera, et cetera. So for this, it's like they're all secretly North Korea supporters, et cetera, et cetera.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

Right. And this is something I was also seeing yesterday. People being like, oh, wow, when did South Korea become North Korea? And you're like, oh, my God, that's so. That's like, what a weird, like, orientalist racist comment. This is. This is the most South Korean thing to ever happen. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

This is like military coup. And then military coup being overturned by protesters is the single most South Korean thing ever. Right. Like, this is just how South Korean history has been.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

Having the fucking assembly have to, like, break in in the middle of the night to vote.

[Savannah Guthrie]

Yeah.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

It's so funny.

[Savannah Guthrie]

It's.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. We're going to get to the actual details of it a second, but I want to. I want to go back to what was actually in this declaration of martial law. So the Korean constitution does let you declare martial law, but you're only supposed to do it if there's, like, a war going on or, like, if there's.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

Like, an actual crisis happening, instead of.

[Robert Evans]

Just like, I'm mad I can't pass my budget, which seems to be what was happening here.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

You feel bad on a Monday night and you're like, oh, I guess I'll declare martial law.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. So, okay, I'm gonna read some. I'm gonna read a thing about what was going on here about how unhinged. This was from Hakura, who. Which is the Korean media outlet, quote, Commander Park Eun Soo announced, quote, Martial law Command Proclamation number one. Which, by the way, that's how you know you're dealing with people who have done this before when they start doing their like, decree number one. Decree number two.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

Oh yeah, that's good.

[Robert Evans]

That is an experience. The sign of like very, very experienced military coup. People announced martial law Command Proclamation number one based on the contents of prohibiting all political activities of the national assembly and local assemblies. The proclamation also included contents that controlled the press and publications and prohibited citizens assemblies and demonstrations, as well as strikes and work stoppages by workers. It is also notable that it included the content, quote, all medical personnel, including residents who are on strike, who have left the medical field must return to their original work within 48 hours and work faithfully. And violations will be published in accordance with the Martial Law Act. Now, it's important to note here if the thing you are trying to do is impose martial law on Korea according to the constitution. And obviously if you're, if you're in the state where you're opposing martial law, the law has kind of got out the window. But you can't get rid of the National Assembly. That is not a thing that martial law allows you to do. In fact, very explicitly in the Korean constitution, it says that like the national assembly can't be gotten rid of by martial law. So this, this suggests to me that, yeah, this, this was something that was also being sort of spearheaded by parts of the Korean military. Because if you're not someone in the army who has their own interest in doing a couple and someone asks you to just like overthrow the parliament, which is a thing that they're not allowed to do, you just say no, which, which also makes the failure of this and how unbelievably, stupidly it was all put together even more baffling, right? Because if we assume that parts of the cliques in the army had to have been involved with this, and like, we know, and this is something NPR talks about, Yoon is like, fucked, right? There's no way he's holding on to power. He's screwed. And he's gonna be. That will make him the second Korean president in seven years to be ran out by mass protests. And during the last set of politicians who were getting read out by mass protests, the army actually started drafting like, procedures for how they were going to do military takeover to like knock, to knock out the protests. And they never did it. But this is a, this has been a thing that's been in the background for a long time. And the liberal the sort of liberal establishment has been talking about how the right wants to bring back military rule for ages. This is a situation that in some ways is similar to Brazil where the right has always been a sort of like we like military rule kind of thing. But nobody actually seriously thought they would do it until they did. And you know, I'm going to read one more thing before we go to ads here, which is he claimed that the national assembly was quote, the mastermind behind the downfall of the country which. Okay, that's pretty normal coup stuff, quote monsters and quote, anti state forces seeking to overthrow the system. Now again, he has just described the national assembly, which is the Korean parliament as quote, anti state forces seeking to overthrow the system, which now gives us the specter of the anarcho parliament.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

I do wonder how much of this type of stuff is influenced like by Trump's victory and like the enemy within rhetoric. I'm not sure how much influence Trump has in South Korea. I know he has a degree influence like pop culture wise in like Japan. I'm not sure of his influence in South Korea, but like in terms of just like geopolitics, like that's very similar to the type of like deep state enemy within rhetoric that like Trump used to success.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

Not to like tie everything back to America but like I.

[Robert Evans]

This like subversive shit is sure stuff that you can trace back to like the original dictatorship. Right? Like this is a very, very old long running thing in Korean politics. Okay, we will get to the coup after I guess we get to a faction that didn't back the coup, which is the Korean capitalist class. So here are some ads.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

Salute to our comrades.

[Robert Evans]

We are back. Now I will say it is true that this whole thing folded so quickly that we never really got a chance to see how the Korean capitalist class would have reacted other than the fact that all of the newspapers immediately were like, what the fuck are you doing? So it's also worth noting, if you're trying to do a coup, right, there are four things that you need to do. You need to arrest your senior opposition political figures. You need to seize the radio stations. This includes, you know, today like newspapers.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

TV stations, like podcasts, obviously, you know, streamers, you know.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. We're a vital part of the media infrastructure that must be controlled.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

I show Speed, or whatever his name is, he has to come under your control. You got to get Adin Ross locked in the cage fast.

[Robert Evans]

I think Speed would have fucking just gone sicko mode on their special forces guys given how just like unbelievably, their asses got kicked. You know, you have to seize the airports, you have to take the major government buildings. Right. So how many of these did this coup manage to do?

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

They did, like, zero, Right?

[Robert Evans]

They sort of kind of took most of the National Assembly.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

Yeah, but that lasted, what, like an hour?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, we'll get to that in a second. So it seems like what we have reporting from the Democratic Party of Korea. They claim that the military attempted to arrest the head of the national assembly, the head of the Democratic Party, and then also the head of the ppp, which is People's Power Party, which is Yoon's own party. So he tried to have the head of his own party arrested by Korean Special Forces, and it didn't work because none of them were at their offices.

[Andrew Sage]

It's so.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

It's so funny because they kept putting out these, like, arrest warrants for, like, both, like, the opposition party, his own party, and the assembly was like, nice try. Nice try, sir.

[Robert Evans]

And, you know, they did legitimately shut down some news outlets, and that was, you know, that was sort of genuine.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

I saw reporters, like, fucking, like, fighting with the military in the streets. It was sick.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, well, and this is why this is such a bad idea, right? Like, in the words of a football commentator, whose name I'm forgetting right now, who had the greatest cast line in all of human history. Oh, no. Disaster.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

What a bad idea.

[Robert Evans]

Like, okay, just from the logistics of this, right, Pretty up on the list of countries you don't want to try to hold by military force is South Korea. And there's a lot of reasons for this one. You know, you're dealing with, like, one of the largest Joshua bases in the world. The other thing is, like, this is.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

An entire country of protesters and capitalist protesters. Very scary.

[Robert Evans]

Well, but, like, everyone fucking, like, fucking everyone in this country either, like, was a protester when they were a fucking kid or was one now, to the extent where, like, liberal members of parliament know how to build barricades, it's so cool. This actually mattered enormously. Like, fucking guys who are just like, random aides. Where there are videos of this, of these. Of, like, just, like, random staffer guys, like, holding barricades from, like, against, like, paratrooper units and, like. Like, just random staffers, like, shooting fire extinguishers at armored Special forces units. Like, can you fucking imagine that shit.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

In the US like, it was very cool to see.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Like, this is. This is why this is such a terrible idea because everyone has a whole bunch of institutional memory and experience of this, right? Not just because, you know, the Democratic Party, right, Which is the party that this was largely targeted at most of. Like the elder statesmen of this party used to be Korean, like student protesters, like they're old veterans of the campaigns that brought down the military government. And it's not just that there's like a, there's a memory of it. It's like there are protests outside the national assembly like every fucking day. Right? Like again, the last time they brought down a prime minister with mass protests was seven years ago. This is a whole country of people who know how to do this shit. And for some reason these idiots were like, we have no popular support whatsoever and we're just going to be able to like roll over this entire country in one night. So I think the plan was to hold the national assembly and prevent the national assembly from convening so that there was nobody who could override the martial law order.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

Yeah, that sounds pretty basic, right? Just to keep them out of the building so that they can't do anything.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. So they failed at this easy, right?

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

Oh, oh no. They failed.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. So the thing, the problem here again is that you're dealing with an entire country that has been doing this for fun ages, right? So they do this at like 10:30 at night and immediately what happens is just like a bunch of drunk guys in bars like show up to the National Assembly. Like the moment I knew it was doomed was there I was reading in the New York Times they had an interview with this guy who showed up. This is again the part when I talking about this being a country of protesters. These guys aren't like leftist like revolutionaries, right. One of the guys they were talking to the New York Times, like their journals in the ground pulls over a random guy and he's a 60 year old real estate agent, right? This is a guy who should be like, this should be the base of a military coup, right? This is a 60 year old man who does real estate. And he heard about this. It immediately his lie was quote, this is the end. So he drove for a fucking hour at like one in the morning to show up to the national assembly to go fight the army. There was just no way this was going to work. And so people, even though it's really late at night, people just flood out and suddenly there's all of these protesters in front of the national assembly and they're doing shit. Like there's this unbelievable video of this soldier, like tries to take a guy's phone and this guy has some kind of martial arts training and just grabs his arm and just spins him around.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

It's the coolest thing.

[Robert Evans]

And the guy's like. So just like, well, fuck this. I'm not dealing with this shit.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

And there was such, like, a resignation.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

In the movements of that military officer being like.

[Robert Evans]

He's just like, wild shit.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

We could keep fighting, but why? Like, what's the point? Like, why am I out here? It's midnight. I should be in bed. What's going on?

[Robert Evans]

And part of this too, also, and this is a smart decision by someone, is that these guys weren't issued with actual bullets. So when I say these guys, and this is the actual alarming part about this, is that these were largely Korean paratrooper units. And Korean paratrooper units are some of the most unhinged, like, fascist troops in the entire world. Like, these are people who didn't just fight in the Korean War. A bunch of these guys fought in Vietnam, like, on the American side. They are notorious as the people who the military has always used to sort of put down protests. One of the most famous examples of this is the Gwangju uprising in 1980. This was a pro democracy uprising after one of the various stages of insane military coup stuff was going on in South Korea in 1980. And there's a large democratic uprising from sort of students and workers. There's a bunch of strikes. They take this area and the paratroopers come in and shoot them all. They kill probably several thousand people. And a lot of the paratrooper units that were deployed to take the national assembly were literally the same units that were sent in to crush this uprising in 1980. So this was in some ways very, very scary. Right. Because these are like, again, these are the units that were sent in to shoot a bunch of fucking civilians in the streets in order to keep military rule intact. However, comma, this time, these para units just got their shit handed to them. So it's sort of unclear exactly what was going on in the National Assembly. It seemed like some national assembly members were still there, but somehow. And we know part of how this happened, which is protesters were just. There's a video of. I think it was like the opposition leader. The protesters, like, like, pushed him up over a fence so he could break into the national assembly and get past the military barricades. Like, like 190 lawmakers somehow, like, got into the national assembly and barricaded themselves in.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

This also shows a level of, like, dedication.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

That I suspect none of. None of our lawmakers would Do. No, they're not gonna. They're not gonna break into the Capitol when it's surrounded by military guard.

[Robert Evans]

You know, we had this with January 6th, right? And like, what. What did our congresspeople do during January 6th? They all ran and hid.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

I mean, these are slightly different circumstances.

[Robert Evans]

Yes, this is true. But like, but like, you know, okay, so if you look at. There's been a lot of shit talking of the. The American people's willingness to protest in stuff in the light of, like, watching the Korean people overturn this coup in like, three hours. And I will point out that in 2020, this was. This was literally four years ago. Like, we put the President of the United States in a bunker. People fought the Secret Service hand to hand outside the gates of the White House. Like, the police in this country lost control of the centers of several major American cities. So, like, Americans will fight. Right, but can you imagine, like, Nancy Pelosi or like Chuck Schumer or whoever was around, like, trying to set up, like, setting up barricades to stop the army from like, marching into, like. No, it's unreal. And these were good barricades too. These were very well constructed barricades. These were barricades that, like, are better than a lot of barricades I've seen set up by protesters over the, like in the US over the last few years. And the consequence of this was that the. The national assembly just voted for the coup to be over because they can just vote to say that the martial law is over. And then the military kind of was just like. Well, and just kind of left.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

I mean, they waited in the wings for a little bit.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

And we were all curious to see what the President was going to do after. After the assembly was like, nice try, sir. And I guess we will talk about that after another message from these ads.

[Robert Evans]

And we are so back. We are so back. It has never been more over for President Yoon.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

That is true. It has never been more over.

[Robert Evans]

And so part of the weird part about this is that Yoon just like, vanishes from most of this. Like, we don't hear from him until, like, the morning when he announces that he's gonna roll back the martial law thing, but he needs his cabinet there to do the vote, so he's gonna do it later. I don't know. But the troops have already all pulled out by this point. And they go back to their barracks after the national assembly. It's like, what the fuck? So there's been a lot of hay made about how 190 members of the national assembly showed up and every single one of them voted to end martial law. And like, that's cool, but I've seen a lot of people be like, oh, look at how democratic the ppp, which is the right wing party that Yoon's a part of, is from. Like, they voted to do it. But like, okay, yes, this was a unanimous vote. I need everyone to understand that there are 300 members of the National assembly and that means 110 of them didn't show up. And that of the people who showed up, There were only 18 members.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Of the PPP who showed up to this now. And part of that, like, it is true. It is. It was a bit difficult to get through the fucking military occupation with paratroopers, but everyone else seemed to have managed to. So, you know, and you and Zone Party also just hates him because again, like one of the scandals he's going down for is like fucking with their primaries and like getting a bunch of people who had safe seats, like losing their safe seats so he could put his guys in. And again, he also tried to arrest the head of his own party. So like, these people don't like him for very immediate personal reasons. Not because the PPP is somehow like a party more committed to democracy than the Republican Party is here. Like, no, these people all suck. Like, oh God. But this leaves us with the aftermath of this. And the first thing I want to kind of go over is what the fuck were they doing? Because again, if you look at the sequence of events here, right, there's this coup, right? The martial law goes into effect, the army backs it and tries to occupy the national assembly, but then the national assembly votes that the martial law is over and then the army just leaves. Now what if you go back to remember when I was talking about the beginning of this, right, Seizing the National assembly is not something you are allowed to do during a state of emergency. A state of emergency or a martial law in position, right? That's something explicitly the army is banned from doing. They did it anyways, which means that like, probably like a bunch of generals are also going to prison for this. But then they also immediately backed down when it became clear that, you know, there were going to, there was going to be resistance, and that if they were going to try to stop this, they were either going to have to beat the shit out of or just like actually shoot a bunch of lawmakers in the National Assembly. And I understand that that's a bad idea. And I get why these people didn't want to do that just like from their own thing politically. But if you weren't willing to do that, why did you do this in the first place? Like how did you think this was going to go? The only thing I could think of is that they thought they could just sort of. They thought it was 10:30 at night. We can just shock and awe everyone. We'll just roll them over. But like, do you know what country you are in?

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

I mean, yeah, it's a massive miscalculation. That's what makes this the worst coup since Bolivia.

[Robert Evans]

I think it's worse than Bolivia.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

Oh absolutely. Because it shows a complete disconnection from understanding the country that you're in.

[Robert Evans]

What the fuck were they doing?

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

And the willingness of the people to get mobilized at 10:30 and the willingness of your own lawmakers to try to put some level of resistance to this, even if it's not physically fighting the army, which some of them ended up doing.

[Robert Evans]

Which they did. They fought the army.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

Ah, what a world.

[Robert Evans]

And also with, with Bolivia too, you know, there's. Okay, so a. With Bolivia there's a lot of debate over whether that coup was real or not. I, I lean towards it was. There's a lot of people who think it was staged. But also if it wasn't staged, the excuse they have is that the general who was leading it was about to get fired. So he just had to go, right? It's like, well, yeah, okay, it looked like a completely half cocked coup because it was. They just, they had to go before he got fired. This one, there was no time pressure. He could have just done this whenever with better planning and I don't know. It's all very, very deeply weird in terms of what's happening next. I mean Yoon was finished anyways. Like he again, he had a 20% approval rating going into this, coming out of this there immediately the Democratic Party is trying to impeach him. Like a bunch of the PPP who's again supposed to be his party are also going along with it because they hate him. There was some very funny comments from PPP guys who were like his supporters who were like, well he literally one of them said that he did this. Like has anyone thought about like the pressure and burden placed on him? Maybe someone should have gotten to talk to him. He did this because he was lonely. Which is the most insane thing I've ever heard in my life. Like he just, he just tried to argue that this guy did a coup because he was lonely.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

What the fuck? It's the incel Revolution. It's finally happening in South Korea.

[Hoda Kotb]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And like, he is going to get impeached. The only way he's not going to get impeached is if the judiciary steps in to save him. And I can't imagine them trying it after. Again, he just tried to do a coup. He's going to prison. Like, probably his Defense secretary is going to prison. Like, the Defense Minister is going to prison. Probably a bunch of military guys are going to prison. Like, this is.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

God, it's so funny.

[Robert Evans]

They have just effectively annihilated their own political power for a generation. Like, this faction of people who have been running the country is just gone. I mean, they'll still be the ppp, right? And they'll still be like conservatives, but, like, they just have obliterated themselves in maybe the most spectacular fashion I have ever seen. And you know, what happens from there is sort of unclear, is that right now we're recording this Wednesday. Yeah, Wednesday at like 10am yeah. So it's unclear exactly what's going to happen in the time between when this, when we record this and when this goes out. But Yoon is finished. This is.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

It's pretty over.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And I'm. I'm. I'm hoping that we see a serious attempt to actually, like, deal with the fact that the army is ran by a bunch of people who tried to do a coup.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

We won't and we might.

[Robert Evans]

Well, no, like, here's the thing. In the U.S. absolutely not. South Korea, maybe there's a chance there's like a. There is a slight chance that people get purged from this. Right. In a similar way to like, Lula kind of purging some of the army.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

My South Korea does good things card is already full up because of yesterday.

[Robert Evans]

That's true.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

I can't imagine they're gonna do more because it's South Korea.

[Robert Evans]

Well, I will also say, like, one of the things that's happening is Korea's like, major trade union federation is like doing a general strike until. Until the impeachment happens. So, you know, there is a lot of pressure to clean house here. And like, a lot of Korean liberalism is based on this sort of mythos of like, of those student protesters and like the protesters who brought down the military dictatorship and trying to do a military coup and immediately failing is like, the best possible thing you could have done for them. The consequences of this for Yoon are going to be extremely bad. I hope we get a better Korea out of this. I hope this sort of starts to stem the tide of the unhinged right wing surge that's been happening there for a while now.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

It'd be nice if this was like the tip of the bell curve.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

In the global far right takeover.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. I mean, it's. Wow, it went bad. May every single right wing attempt to do this go this badly because.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

Good Lord, what a heartwarming tale.

[Robert Evans]

Yep.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

Well, that's. That's been it for us today here at. It could happen here. Tune in tomorrow for more exciting tales of political collapse.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And quite quite possibly, quite possibly this is going to happen to you too. And I. I want everyone to understand that in terms of military cues, in the last six months, the protesters are 2 and 0 and the Army's Owen 2. So if this happens to you soon, which he very much might, Go get him.

[Savannah Guthrie]

All right, we're all set for the party. I've trimmed the tree, hung the mistletoe, and paired all those weird shaped knives and forks with the appropriate cheeses. And I plugged in the Partisan.

[Hoda Kotb]

Partisan.

[Savannah Guthrie]

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[Hoda Kotb]

I'm thirsty.

[Robert Evans]

Watch.

[Savannah Guthrie]

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[Robert Evans]

Feel more seasonal in here already.

[Savannah Guthrie]

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[Simone Boyce]

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[Andrew Sage]

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[Robert Evans]

Start building before next spring during Morton Buildings Winter Wind Up. Save now until October 31st on select building projects, visit MortonBuildings.com and then just click Get Started. Certain restrictions may apply. Contact your local construction center for more details. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that is quite often about abortion in this country. I'm your host, Mia Wong. Things have been very bad under the last administration and the administration before that, and the administration before that, and going back a long, long time, things have been not good. They've been steadily getting worse. And there is a lot of fear and I think a lot of it is very justified that things are going to get even worse under Trump. And to talk about what we need to be afraid of and what we don't is Kate Bertash, who's the executive director of the Digital Defense Fund, and also Crystal, who's an abortion worker and also a volunteer for Abortion Hotlines. So both of you two, welcome to the show.

[Garrison Davis]

Excellent. Thanks for having us on.

[Crystal]

Yeah, thanks for having me.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I'm really excited to talk to you both. And I'm also excited to let Kate talk a little bit about what the Digital Defense Fund is.

[Garrison Davis]

Excellent. Thanks so much. Longtime listener, first time caller. I suppose so. The Digital Defense Fund is an organization that's been around for actually since the last election. It was started in response to Trump winning for the first time. And we're an organization that was put together to provide free digital security and technology resources for the front lines of what then was just the abortion access movement. We've since moved to support other variety of autonomy and liberation movements. But we provide free digital security evaluations, trainings. We do a lot of project management work to help people set up what they'd like to change about their systems and security. And we also help people pay for it, which is a really wonderful way to get to kind of see through our values. So I'm excited to be on here today to talk a little bit more about the implications for both organizations and individuals.

[Robert Evans]

The very first wave impact of this election has been a lot of, a lot of sort of fear about what's coming. And I wanted to, I guess, ask you about what kinds of fears you've been seeing and maybe talk a little bit about which ones are more justified than others. Because I think, I mean, there's been some concern that I think is justified and is good. And there's also been some stuff that is kind of not rooted in what the threats are.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, I think it's a Great time. Anytime this happens to sort of I get to ask and answer the question, which is like, how do we know? And I think we're sort of lucky in this way that we know what are likely to be risks now to both people who are seeking abortions as well as people who help them get there. Folks as well, like Crystal, who I know will provide some additional color to this as well. But we know what kind of threats face people facing abortions and those who help them because unfortunately, a lot of these threats have been happening for the last several decades. People have been prosecuted for suspicion of ending their own pregnancies. We get a lot of really incredible and insightful data from organizations like if, when, how, who put out these reports that are called self Care Criminalized. And they look backwards across all of the different cases that have happened in the space and try to come up with sort of like these key aspects. And one of the big things that we know that I'm sure we're going to talk about a lot through this episode is that the core way that people come to the attention of law enforcement for seeking to allegedly end their own pregnancies is through usually someone they know reporting them or someone responsible for their care. So that might be like healthcare workers, social worker, other representative agents of the state. And it can be really devastating to kind of hear and I think internalize that it's often people's family members, like ex or friends, neighbor, who might turn somebody in expecting or misunderstanding that it is a crime to end your own pregnancy. I think one of the things that's really hard about this is that it involves some of the ways in which, like, I guess it's what you would call very, unfortunately, typical policing practices, the way in which people's like, rights are violated when they are interrogated, when they are pressured into disclosing information. There's something called consent search that it unfortunately ends up being a very common feature of these kinds of cases, which is where you're put in a room and you're talking to a representative agent in state or a police officer, and they sort of pressure you into agreeing to unlock and disclose, often your phone and other device or to otherwise share information, quote, unquote, voluntarily. And it's easy to see why people kind of get pressured into that. So that is something that tends to happen in many kinds of prosecutions of crimes or alleged crimes.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

And I think it's hard for a lot of people to imagine what that's like to, you know, be pulled over and searched in this way or like there are often, like, people are not the targeted victims of something like stop and frisk. And so it's sort of hard to imagine in your mind the way in which somebody's information or their data or their case comes to the attention of law enforcement. And so we like, tend to then imagine these other threats that feel perhaps closer to our daily experience, especially as, like, often people who are not racially targeted by police, who are not targeted by the family policing system or have their pregnancies surveilled by the hospital systems. So people like to imagine then that I think a big one that we all hear and I think we're all going to take a deep breath at the same time is period tracking apps. Yeah, I thought it was kind of remarkable as Crystal, I'm sure you hear this too. Yeah. And I would love to leave space, Crystal, for you to add any context to sort of like the threats that are present versus stuff that people imagine. Because I know we're going to spend a lot of time talking about our friend, the period track.

[Crystal]

So at the time of recording, it's been like about almost a month since election day. And, you know, I answer the phones for a couple of different places, places for both work and volunteering. And there's been a lot of fear, you know, and not saying that like abortion access has been without fear up until this point, but people are very afraid. And, you know, I'm getting a lot of questions about people asking like, can I be arrested for giving you my information, sending in my id, giving you my real name, ordering medication online? Can the United States get my records if I order from this provider overseas, such as women on web and just, yeah, people asking like, can I be arrest. Arrested? You know, can I do this? Will I be in trouble? And it is something that is going. We are going to see an increase in criminalization and increase in abortion bans. It is a complicated answer. You know, the straight of it is that yet you can access abortion medication online, even if you're in a ban state, even if you're in a state with a total abortion ban, you can order the medication from reliable resources online and have it mailed to you. And people do this every day. Hundreds, hundreds and hundreds of people do this every day without any issue. But there is also risk. And it's kind of like what Kate was saying, where people tend to. It seems like people don't know what the risk has been or what it looks like because like Kate was saying, there's like been all these years of pregnancy criminalization. And we know what it looks like, and it tends to not be what people are worrying about right now, where people seem to be thinking like, that the police are going to come and arrest them for putting in this order along with hundreds of other people in a given day, or that the police are somehow going to get the. Their period tracker information on their, on their phone. And, you know, like, of course, you know, practice digital security in a way that makes you feel comfortable. Like, if you don't want to use a period tracking app, you know, there are safer ones to use or you don't have to use it. But the fact of the matter is, is that even if you are using pen and paper to record your period, if you have an abusive partner, they're going to be able to take pictures and collaborate with police. So the biggest threats are always, you know, as the data shown, like Kate was saying, going to be healthcare workers and the people that you know, such as partners, family members, neighbors, friends, et cetera, who are going to get access to pictures, screenshots, and of course the police and warrants. It's not going to look like the Handmaid's Tale where somebody's like coming in and going and forcing you to do something and dress a certain way or et cetera. It's not going to be like anything new and fancy. It's going to be the same old police surveillance and criminalization that we've been seeing. But there are ways in which we can protect ourselves when we're doing that. When somebody calls and they ask me, can I get in trouble for ordering this medication online? And people can get really in trouble for anything in the United States. You know, if the police want to go after you for something, they're going to find something. So you just have to not leave evidence. Like, so, yeah, you can order the medication online, but. But you can also use signal and we can. I know that Kate's probably going to go more into this, but you can make sure you have disappearing messages. You can use encrypted emails and search engines. You have to make sure you're thinking about who can see your data and you know where your data is being recorded. And that's really like, if you want to protect yourself in terms of avoiding criminalization for abortion and pregnancy outcomes and, you know, having a secure and safe abortion in the United States, then you have to look at the basics like this. And I'm going to let Kate talk about that a little bit more because I know that you have all the good Information that the Digital Defense Fund has looked into about the apps, and then how to delete data and what data to delete and how to think about this.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, I think one of the really tough things, right, is that like, so like, neither I or Crystal are attorneys, but often people are just getting a lot of advice from attorneys. And some of our work here is to make sure that when you get sort of this idea of when something might be criminalized, or often like in this circumstance where we just like, don't know actually how it's going to show up a lot yet, we're trying to think about sort of what are the ways we can have our digital devices and our technology sort of support us with these by default type of settings. One of the things that's really tough to, I think, understand until you've been through it is sort of like what it looks like when you go through any kind of investigation. I think the other hard kind of like context to get from the way we talk about it now is that a lot of how pregnancy is criminalized, that sort of scaffolding, that infrastructure was built during the drug war. So one of the most common kinds of pregnancy criminalization in America is drug testing people who are pregnant or come to give birth without their consent. And, you know, so we basically consider like, like being an alleged drug user to be the sort of like, primary way that our decision of like, how much the digital evidence matters has like, kind of come to take shape. So often when an investigation is happening, the police will look for where are all the sources of information I can find about this because, like, the human body is like, not super compliant with like, digital forensic evidence, evidentiary processes. I think it's like one of the most magical things about here humans is that, you know, our bodies defy the letter of law in so many wonderful ways. But that means that they sort of have to then go to this, like, digital body of evidence to kind of tell the story or as like all the wonderful lawyers that advise us, like to say, to sort of like, be able to draw the dots or the lines between the dots and form this kind of like, coherent set of facts of what happened between one moment to the next. So often when we're like, imagining all of the data that like, lives in our phone, because unfortunately, in many cases is when you are perhaps coerced into consenting to the search of a device, they will often take your phone and then have you unlock it. It gets plugged into a device that makes clone of the entire drive and then they can sort of, with many different techniques, kind of leisurely look through it for keywords to kind of tell where there might be evidence somewhere on your phone that you, for example, went on the Internet, searched for and purchased abortion medication. So. So yes, like period tracking data might be one portion of that. But unfortunately, in all the cases that we've seen, or at least in most of the ones that we're most familiar with, all of that quote, unquote, plain text data. So where you've just written out in your own unencrypted words into a search bar in the search engine on your phone, or you've sent a text message to a very close contact with somebody telling them how you, like, feel about your pregnancy, that you desire to end it, perhaps your plan to buy pills, even the receipt that comes into your inbox. It's not necessary then to go to all these companies and go file a, you know, for a warrant and get all that information because now it's in just plain text, quote unquote, on your phone. And that is far more information than the, like, abstract information that might come out of a period tracker. So unfortunately, cops don't tend to use these in cases that we've seen because it's quite simply not necessary. That kind of like plain text admission of your state of mind or the statement of your intent has unfortunately been the sort of core evidence that comes up. And I think this has like, a lot of, like, really quite sad implications. I know in prior to prepare for this episode, we were discussing a couple of cases that I know folks might be more familiar with. A big one that came up is, you know, the case of a mother and daughter out of Nebraska who were having a discussion around allegedly helping the daughter to find an end for her pregnancy over Meta's Facebook messenger. And I think what I find really quite devastating about it for many reasons is that these messages were actually ones that like, I think any of us could hope to have with a very supportive parent or other person in our life is like, why we have, you know, these conversations so that we can, like, feel connected and supported through such a complex and affecting process. It then becomes very sad to me that it becomes a criminal matter just because it was in a place that that conversation, you know, Meta did not have this family's back in terms of encrypting those messages or ensuring that they were free to speak of what they wish, when they wish by default. So I think, like, when we start to give out advice, it's been important for us at Digital defense fund to kind of work backwards. I know it's been an existential crisis, I think for everybody in the digital security space to know that like the list of advice I could give you on how to protect yourself when going through these transactions or when seeking support support or like just having a normal, you know, questions and going on the Internet and being able to google them and get them answered, that we have to kind of like start from the basics because like you have the right to find information from reliable resources. You have the right to buy pills from a reliable source. You have the right to like seek that kind of connection and support from people in your life. And so we're trying to cut down on like all the infinite amount of advice that we could give and try to like narrow it to like what is actionable, what has the greatest impact potentially in the cases we've seen. And I know we're going to dig into it, but I would love to leave room to talk a little bit more about that whenever it's a good time in this conversation to go through our top three action items before we get to that.

[Robert Evans]

Unfortunately we are under capitalism, which means we have to do these ads.

[Crystal]

Oh yeah.

[Robert Evans]

We will be back shortly. And we are back.

[Crystal]

Another lawsuit. This is a little different because it's not a criminal charge. It was a lawsuit in Texas that I want to bring up just as an example of like how our, you know, our data can betray us in these moments is there was, and this was a really silly lawsuit. It has been dismissed. But there was a Texas man who filed a wrongful death lawsuit accusing three women of helping his ex wife obtain abortion pills. I believe. I think it was dismissed last year or maybe it was earlier this year. It wasn't even under the aid in a vet in law in Texas. It was actually, you know, they sought a different avenue. There actually hasn't been a successful lawsuit against an abortion seeker under aid event law or any other law in Texas in the last two years. Which I think is just something worth bringing up is that, you know, we actually haven't seen that happen yet other than this case. But what happened in this case is this person was planning on terminating their pregnancy. They were talking some friends who were helping them out and their iPhone was synced up to their iPad. So if anyone's familiar with that, you can have your imessages appear on both devices. So the imessages that are coming to your phone are also going to be going to your iPad. And her ex husband took pictures of the imessages coming through on her iPad. And that was what was used, even though the lawsuit was dismissed, because it was a very silly lawsuit. Total waste of time. But that is the kind of thing that we really. You really need to be asking yourself is, you know, where are my messages going?

[Andrew Sage]

Who.

[Crystal]

Who is seeing my messages? Who is seeing my emails? What is it connected to? Yeah, because. Yeah, because it can just look like that, too.

[Garrison Davis]

I would say that's exactly right. Is I think I had a good friend who works in another area of security who. And this is like, how we learn these things, right? Is that folks who work in the parts of security that deal with, for example, intimate partner violence or the sort of quote unquote, in household surveillance threat model, I think is vastly underestimated. I can't recall the figures at the moment, but one of those more recent reports from IF1 how actually had detailed just how frequently actually that sort of like how it is also this, like, intimate partner violence situation that comes up also in a pregnancy or abortion criminalization case. And so, you know, this person challenged me to think about the exact threat model of the unlocked iPad on the. On the family coffee table and thinking about, like, when we share information and we share devices, kind of like, where does it go? So, like, actually, our first piece of recommendation that we often give is it can sound deceptively simple and it doesn't sound technical at all, but it is to think about, like, who you are telling about your experience and about, like, you know, your abortion or wanting to have an abortion, and then understanding whether you've, like, been clear about your boundaries. Like, do you expect them to not share or tell with others? Like, can you delete any messages with them? Would they ask. If you ask them after the fact to delete things for you, would they absolutely do that? I think it can be really challenging to kind of, like, zoom out and realize, like, you know, it's often not as easy as it sounds to, like, kind of do this mental inventory and think about all the different ways that, like, me and my best friend talk or, you know, when I mention things to people offhand. We don't have a really good, I think, like, social practice of, you know, understanding the implication of, like, sharing other people's information without their permission. And so, like, you know, it's very impactful but also very difficult. And it can't be very individual for all of us to kind of think more carefully about with whom we share things and how we ask people to keep our confidence and how we can even offer Each other, the ability to like, like delete things that we don't want to exist indefinitely. I think one of the biggest sort of existential struggles that crosses over to where people get support for abortions from like organizations also includes the fact that I know it has been discussed many times on this podcast that there is a difference in how much information is kept depending on where you were having a conversation on your phone. So an SMS text message, those little green bubbles that go back and forth between you and popular, possibly other people who are on iOS like, or iOS and Android combination conversation you're friends with in an Android might have a green bubble come back to you. That basically means that that is going as an SMS text message to your phone carrier and that means that it's going, quote, unquote, in plain text, totally unencrypted to the cell tower and it's being held by that phone carrier, unencrypted, readable as it is, as you typed it in, as far as we know forever. It can vary depending on whether or not you move to a different carrier. But unfortunately, phone carriers have a very long history also of disclosing that information readily on request, either from law enforcement or from other agencies. And I think that is troubling. I think no person would really like to know that, regardless of what you intend to do with your text messages. But it's why we often then encourage people as sort of a second step to try and use encrypted chat with signal or another trusted end to end encrypted chat. Again, sounds overly simplistic, but I think having those disappearing messages on, especially between people who are seeking support from one another, whether it's somebody in your life or another organization that's helping you to get your abortion, there really is something to that ability to again, speak freely, to be best friends, helping your friends, you know, allegedly get abortion medication, or to being a mom, you know, there to support your child no matter what. I think it's just something really wonderful about how using disappearing messages with signal, like reflects the values that we actually have already with each other. And just like make sure that technology companies or corporations or law enforcement don't get to get in the way of how we want to live our lives. So yeah, yeah.

[Crystal]

So really supporting somebody through an abortion includes digital security? Yes, same with providers, the people who are answering the phones. Digital security is one of the number one priorities. And yeah, if you're supporting somebody with an abortion, that should be your number one priority as well.

[Garrison Davis]

Well, and like, I bet People like, you know, when you talk to people like, you're often, I imagine one of the first people that they're expressing themselves to at all about what they're going through. And, you know, I know that the point is to help people get to their procedure, but often they're bringing a lot of other things with them and they're not sure if they're important. I remember like you mentioning this, but just the amount of weight that is for, for y'all as, as a sport too.

[Crystal]

Yeah. And like, people are scared for. For good reason. You know, we do live in a fascist country and a police surveillance state. So, you know, their fears are founded. But there, there are a lot of excellent resources. They're not alone. Like, you know, you and I know this tape, but there are so many people who's got the back of everyone who needs an abortion. And, you know, you may not know the safe way of going about it, but there are people who are committed to digital security and safety and you avoiding criminalization. So part of the service is also reassuring people of that too, that it is possible to have a safe abortion. Even still, the next thing that I know that we were talking about about Kate in terms of like, really practical, like what you can do now to protect yourself is having a plan for when you need to go get health care and you have to interface with like a medical team, a medical site such as an er, a clinic, an ob, gyn, a doctor of any kind. Because I think, I believe the number one source of criminalization, like who's reporting who, who is criminal, like who's calling the police, who's reporting these and giving over the information is as often healthcare worker. I believe that is the number one source. So, you know, you do that is something to keep. You know, I am a healthcare worker, but it's just, it's just a fact that that's something that we all need to be mindful of. And as a patient, somebody seeking healthcare, it's completely appropriate to be thinking of your own security and your safety when, when you're, if you need to access healthcare. So, you know, one thing is that luckily abortion is very safe and very effective. And if you don't feel comfortable going to an ER for very good reasons, there are many good reasons to not want to go to er, including cost, including your safety and security, the chance of criminalization. There is a free medical resource and a free legal resource that you can call. I'm going to talk about the medical resource first. There is the miscarriage and abortion hotline or ma hotline.org but you can call and get some, you know, feedback from a doctor about, hey, do I even need to go to the er? Is this normal? Is something wrong? You actually can run that by a safe person before just going to the er. And that's like one example of like having a plan, you know, like, okay, I think I might need to go to the er. You know, let me check with a trusted resource, let me check with the miscarriage and abortion hotline if I can get some feedback on what's going on with some of my symptoms. And, you know, it's like this extra kind of added support that you can access as a pregnant person or, you know, if you're having a miscarriage, if you're having an abortion, to assess your risk and to see if you can avoid even going to a medicine medical site, given that, you know, going to an emergency room in a banned state is something that does increase your risk of criminalization.

[Garrison Davis]

Yes. And I think it was from our peers at M and A hotline and then I know the other hotline that if you have questions. Also the Repro Legal hotline is a wonderful resource that I know in all the show notes will include these we try to include along with the miscarriage and abortion hotline. So you have folks you can call who are professionals to ask about medical questions. You have folks you can call who answer questions about legal questions about your abortion or pregnancy experience. I know that it's really hard because often when folks are in a hospital setting, we're sort of socialized to disclose everything. You know, we want to tell our doctor what's wrong and tell them everything we took. And, you know, you worry it might be relevant. But I was reassured, I think, by many other professionals in the the space that doctors treat based on the symptoms that you present with, regardless of how they got there, you might be in a position where you don't know. So, you know, if you just tell folks what's going on with your body, what you are seeing, what you're feeling and experiencing, it is their job to treat you regardless of what you choose to share. And I would say that that's actually true. Regardless of what healthcare condition you come into the ER with, it is your right to only disclose as much as you feel safe doing so. So I think, like, that was something that I know. Again, we're not used to thinking about that as like a digital security measure, but it is an information security measure and I think an operational security measure that, you know, we've had to like, then realize that that's actually probably almost more important to tell people before we start getting into this nitty gritty of like, things to do with your phone is to understand that those principles that we believe that, you know, the human, again, the human body is very varied in how it experiences something like pregnancy, miscarriage and abortion. And that folks have a responsibility to treat you regardless of what's in your phone or what happened before that or this statement of facts that are relevant to a courtroom and not to your care.

[Robert Evans]

Do you two have anything else you want to make sure the audience knows before we head out?

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, just one more piece. It's our last piece of the puzzle, just to reiterate because I know it's good to hear things repeated again with the actual pregnancy criminalization. Digital security advice. We talk about understanding who you're disclosing stuff to, making sure they are clear on your expectations. Try to, if you can, have conversations with them in a secure place or a private place, like signal with disappearing messages on. For our second item, we're going to make a plan for if we need to get care after the fact and ensure that we're trying to again have our support. People also understand that, you know, doctors treat you based on the symptoms you present with. That is you don't have to tell them anything that you do not wish to disclose. And the third thing is that something that I think as digital security practitioners we kind of forget is super important, which is that like, you know, I think I run into this conflict where as like experts or smart people, we try to like imagine in our mind like how we would have this perfectly like footprint free abortion, you know, like this like use signal, use Tor, use Bitcoin. Kind of like strange way of architecting, you know, privacy in our mind. And I call it the ghost abortion. Like that it's a myth, you can't have one. There's no such thing as an abortion that leaves no footprint. But I think we forget then that it actually is super meaningful to delete what's within our power to delete. So our third recommendation for folks is to be aware of what's collected and then ensure that you know that. You can delete your browser history, you can delete your Google Maps history from like driving to the clinic, you can delete your emails, you can delete messages on certain platforms. And I think just like understanding that deleting what you can is actually super meaningful. I actually didn't know till I got this job that certain platforms like Even Google products, like if you delete something from it, it is purged from the servers like something like two and a half months later. So when you delete stuff, it's very meaningful. I think you get more options than ever to decide like how long you want to keep something. And it does make it so that that primary thing we talked about, like if somebody were to take my phone from me and to like, you know, make a clone of it and try to look through it, at least it's deleted. That copy is no longer on my device. Even if they would have to go to like, you know, get a warrant later, that is still great. It still gives me and my council time to respond and also allows me to access my right to do process. And I think so, like these are like these three simple things I know that we'll give to Linc, that our guide that kind of puts this all in a row in very plain language. We also have a Spanish language guide for it as well. But just to know that like, you know, these things are within our power, I think it's really easy to get tangled up in the idea of like abstract track data and things that are really tough for us to always know when they're generated, like ad tracker data or you know, who is reselling or doing something with my period tracking apps, there are great options that are local only to your phone, like Yuki app. If you are concerned about that other apps, seeing whether or not they use best practices security, if they've responded and said like how they would respond to a legal request, that's awesome. I think that just sort of taking that uncertainty away is great because tracking your period is really important, as Crystal would tell you. So it is an essential way that you're going to know how pregnant you are and find the option that's safest for your circumstance. So yeah, with that I'll pass to Crystal for anything else you think our folks should know before we depart.

[Crystal]

Yeah, tracking your period is important because if you don't know what's going on with your period and you get pregnant, it can delay your care and you know, optimally you're getting the safest, quickest, most comfortable care for you. Right. So it's really good to track that. I use Yuki. What I love about Yuki is that it has a passcode and it stores everything locally and you can set it to auto delete your data. And I love all of those things. So you know, and you know, I don't like using my paper calendar if you love using your paper Calendar, go use your paper cam, you know, whatever you want to do. But it is very important to know when your last period was because it can just make your care more timely. And that's really important. Given the abortion restrictions and the abortion bans now we are only, you know, admittedly they're going to get worse. This is going to get less safe. There is going to be greater risk of criminalization. So when people call, when people call and they ask like, can I access pills? Yes, you can. You know, no matter what Trump does, you're going to be able to get abortion pills. There are countries all over the world that have total abortion bans and they have these abortion pills all the time. You know, it's not new in America, but you know, you do have to have a digital security plan while you're doing that. Like, so, yes, you can order pills online, but yes, also have a digital security plan and keep this stuff in mind. It's really, it's part of your, part of your healthcare plan now.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, because you have the right to use safe, accessible, common sense, like amazing technology products to actually obtain the abortion that you want. We really, really do believe that, like that part of autonomy, it includes digital autonomy as well as bodily autonomy. They're all part and parcel. You can't have one without the other. So thanks for having us on.

[Crystal]

Yeah, thanks, Mia.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And I want to close with one more thing that is related to this, but is also more general advice. Don't talk.

[Crystal]

Oh, God.

[Robert Evans]

You know, I think that the common thing people say is it is legal for them to lie to you. And that is true. But it's not just that it's legal for them to lie to you. It is their job to lie to you. You cannot trust a single word that comes out of their mouths because it is their job to get you to confess to a crime or to get information out of you. They'll let you confess to a crime. So invoke your right to remain silent, get a fucking lawyer, don't talk to them. And you know, this is advice that's not just coming from me, right? Like this is the advice you will get from every single person who does, who does any kind of crim.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

Offense.

[Robert Evans]

This is what you'll get from your public defender. This is what you'll get from anyone who has even sort of interacted with the legal system. And this is also true. Even if they tell you that, oh, you're not a suspect, you're just a blah, blah, blah, we're trying to get information it is their job to lie to you. Think, think about it roughly the same way of, like, if you're, if you're dealing with, like, a country's secret police, how much information would you give them? The answer is do not. Simply do not do this.

[Garrison Davis]

Exactly. And you know, know, no matter what, that there are people, again, like Crystal said, who will support you.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

There are amazing teams across the United States, from medical support to legal support. We're there for you. And they would all, I think, wholeheartedly endorse, as do we. Yes, please do not talk to cops. And that's a great note to end on.

[Crystal]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Well, thank you to you both for coming on. And may we live to see a world better than this one where you could just do this stuff and not have to have any concerns.

[Crystal]

Yes, one day. But until then, we can do this very securely.

[Garrison Davis]

Yes, we got our own backs. We can do this together. Thanks for having us on.

[Simone Boyce]

Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

[Robert Evans]

It Could Happen here is a production.

[Andrew Sage]

Of Cool Zone Media.

[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts you can now find sources for It Could Happen here, listed directly in episode descriptions.

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[Vladimir von Bilhenberg]

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