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- [00:00]
Savannah Guthrie
Hi everyone, It's Savannah Guthrie and Hoda.
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Hoda Kotb
Kotney from the Today Show. Nobody does the holidays like Today. From festive performances and great gift ideas.
- [00:08]
Robert Evans
To tips for the perfect holiday feast.
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Savannah Guthrie
Join us every morning on NBC and make TODAY your home for the holidays.
- [00:15]
Robert Evans
Whether you're in Berlin or Brooklyn, London or Tokyo, every club night must eventually end.
- [00:22]
Hoda Kotb
But what if it didn't?
- [00:23]
Andrew Sage
What if there was a home for.
- [00:25]
Robert Evans
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Danny Thrill
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Hoda Kotb
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Savannah Guthrie
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Hoda Kotb
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Savannah Guthrie
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Hoda Kotb
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Danny Thrill
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Rachel Zo
For example, Juan's as he drifts away.
- [01:20]
Hoda Kotb
To nirvana after only the first chapter is different to Maya's when she discovered the narrator was in fact the evil twin, which is also different to Noah's awesome anytime the cute cyberpunk is mentioned.
- [01:33]
Rachel Zo
Even though in reality he'd be totally.
- [01:35]
Hoda Kotb
Out of his league. From to to Aww. Amazon Books, that reading feeling awaits. This is Rachel Zo from Climbing in Heels with Rachel Zo. As a Delta SkyMiles member, you already know how to experience the world like no one else. Now, with SkyMiles experiences, you have special access to a collection of unforgettable events, from concert backstage passes and courtside seats for your favorite team to one of a kind dining wellness retreats and more. All available by using your miles. Now is your moment to unlock more once in a lifetimes and find an experience for you on delta.com SkyMilesExperiences Not a SkyMiles member. It's free and easy to sign up and start earning miles today. Terms apply. Call Zone Media 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.
- [02:45]
Danny Thrill
Hello and welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm Andrew Sage, I'm on Andrewism over at YouTube and I'm not on YouTube right now. I'm on It Could Happen Here. And I'm joined by the disembodied voice of the one and only Garrison Davis.
- [02:59]
Garrison Davis
Yes, well, one and only that I know of. Unless there's another one going around, which would be freaky.
- [03:05]
Danny Thrill
There might be. There might be. But today I want to continue our journey through Latin American anarchisms and their histories. Now, compared to all the other countries I've discussed so far, such as Peru and Chile and Argentina and Brazil and Cuba, this one had a bit less information about anarchism in its past. So this will be sort of a smaller sandwich of anarchist history perhaps fit in of the country that is sandwiched between Argentina and Brazil. I'm speaking of course about Paraguay. Known for its fraught history of warfare, politically volatile landscape, series of dictatorships, and indigenously intertwined cultural and social fabric, anarchism took root in this rather unique setting and thanks to the work of Angel Cappelletti and a few other scattered sources, I've been able to piece together the history of anarchism in Paraguay without further ado nos komenciemos. For much of its early history, Paraguay's identity was distinct within South America. From its time as a Guarani settlement to to its formation as a Spanish colony in the 16th century, Spanish Jesuit missionaries wielded significant influence and for over a century, Paraguay was a self sustained colony with a rigidly hierarchical system based on the Spanish Casta system. Paraguay's economy primarily revolved around agriculture and cattle herding. Unlike the mining economies in other Spanish territories, the Guarani people had a significant cultural impact throughout Paraguay's history and their language and traditions remained central even as Paraguay evolved through the centuries. Even today, most of the population speaks some variety of Guarani alongside Spanish. Fast forward to the early 19th century as South American nations began declaring independence from Spain, Paraguay took a unique approach. Rather than aligning with the neighbouring revolutionary movement, Paraguay, under the leadership of Jose Gaspar Rodriguez de Vale financier, declared independence in 1811 and adopted an isolationist authoritarian path. Francia ruled as the country's supreme dictator for nearly three decades. Envisioning a self sufficient hermetic society, he strictly controlled foreign influences, banned European migration and restricted trade. By the mid 19th century, Paraguay had built up a significant state infrastructure under Francia's successor, Carlos Antonio Lopez. However, this era of economic development was short lived as Paraguay entered the catastrophic war of the triple alliance between 1864 and 1870 against Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay over territorial disputes. This conflict proved disastrous for Paraguay as they suffered staggering losses. Nearly 70% of its population died, its economy was shattered and its territory was significantly reduced. And yes, you heard me right. Nearly 70% of its population perished, including most of its male population. In the war's aftermath, Paraguay was plunged into political chaos, economic ruin and a period of foreign interventions. Due to the economic devastation of the war, the country became indebted to British creditors. With that leverage, Britain pushed for the development of a free market economy and privatisation, which brought Paraguay into closer contact with the global economy and eventually led to a more pronounced class divide and the establishment of an exploitative agricultural export system. Land that had once been communally managed was swiftly privatised, driving indigenous communities and small farmers off their land and into the workforce of larger estates. On those estates, workers would find themselves in debt bondage tied to the estates, as small debts that workers owed to landowners would spiral into insurmountable debts that would become nearly impossible to repay. Labourers, called peonies, were typically paid in vouchers or scrip that could only be redeemed at the estate store, where prices were exorbitantly inflated. Any attempt to leave or challenge the conditions was met with violent repercussions from estate managers, creating a cycle of economic entrapment that was essentially slavery by another name. Paraguay became a country of ever more wealthy and powerful landowners with a struggling rural working class. As the 20th century approached, the labour struggles and social divisions within Paraguayan society were glaring. Growing inequality, exploitive working conditions and the dislocation of indigenous communities created fertile ground for radical ideas among rural campesinos and urban workers. European immigrants fleeing political repression brought with them some rather radical ideas that began to resonate with Paraguayan workers who were desperate for a way out of their circumstances. For a people who had survived centuries of oppression and authoritarian rule, anarchism had a unique appeal. By the 1880s, workers in Paraguay had begun organising mutual aid societies. And one such society of typographers would organize themselves into a union, the first in the country's history by 1886. That same year saw the rise of construction workers, carpenters, tailors, postal workers and bakers unions. Those bakers would also conduct the country's first ever strike action. In October of 1886, the first distinctly anarchist publication I could find in Paraguay was Organised by a group called Los Hijos del Chaco, who published a libertarian manifesto in 1892. They call themselves anarchist communists and declare their intent to abolish private property, the clergy, the state and the armed forces. We seek the complete emancipation of the proletariat as we fight abolish the unjust exploitation of man by man. We dedicate all of our moral and physical strength to overturn all tyrannies, to establish genuine liberty, equality and fraternity in the human family. We seek to transform private property into a common good. We seek to do so because individual property is the basic cause of all the evils it afflicts us. It is on that basis that the dregs of humanity, government, clerics, lawyers, militaries, entrepreneurs, maintain themselves in power, live as parasites and the continued enjoyment of their plunder finances large armies with the products of our labour. End quote. Even prior to that manifesto, anarchists were making moves in the graphic railway and bakers unions as early as 1889, fighting for and winning the eight hour workday by 1901. Strike actions in this period were focused on that goal. Alongside wage increases and other improvements to working conditions. The anarchists also tried to establish a national trade union centre, but unfortunately did not succeed. In 1892, thanks in part to the growing Spanish and Argentine immigrant populations, there was a wave of libertarian union formation throughout Paraguay. Danicus was also quite successful among the peasantry as they helped organise armed resistance societies to aid in their struggles against the landowners. Anarchists also managed to establish Rafael Barrett Cultural Centre in the early 90s, hosting an impressive collection of books by fellow Paraguayan and foreign writers and emboldening the formation of even more trade unions. Rafael Barrett, by the way, is one of the most significant figures in Paraguayan anarchist history, according to every account I've read. Born in Todavega, Spain, in 1876, Barrett's early life was typical of a well to do intellectual. He studied languages, piano and eventually engineering. By his late 20s, he was drawn to Latin America partly by adventure and partly to make a difference. Driven by a growing commitment to justice and solidarity, he arrived in Buenos Aires in 1903 where he found work as a journalist, soon making waves with an article that condemned the stark inequality he observed in Argentina's capital. This critique cost him his job, yet it deepened his dedication to speak for those who were voiceless. Barat's experiences of seeing European immigrant workers toiling under brutal conditions fueled his indignation against unchecked wealth and poverty's vicious hold on the working class. In 1904. Barrett made his way to Paraguay. He was initially welcomed as a correspondent for El Tiempo and even held government positions, including as the director of the Department of Engineers and the Railroad agency. But his commitment to exposing the country's political and social rot soon put him at odds with Paraguay's new Liberal government. He saw that simply swapping out conservative leaders for liberals did little to improve conditions for ordinary Paraguayans, as demonstrated by the continuous labour struggles that arose in response to the industrialisation undertaken by the Liberal government. Workers were fighting to abolish child labour, improve their conditions, increase wages and so on. He couldn't stand by in silence, so he resigned from government service, now fully committed to social justice. Even as his growing radicalism began to alienate the political elite. Barrett's personal experiences sharpened his perspective, transforming him from a sympathetic observer to a dedicated anarchist. His writings in Criminal became essential reading for workers and peasants alike, urging them to see beyond superficial reforms and to challenge the entire structure of oppression. Barrett condemned the government's abuses and spoke out against exploitative systems that kept the majority of Paraguayans marginalised. He was a fiery advocate for social justice, and one right in particular. Augusto Roabastos, called him the discoverer of Paraguayan social reality. Because Barrett didn't just observe these injustices, he threw himself into exposing and condemning them with foofal. His impact was so significant that even when he was forced to Flee Paraguay in 1908, under government pressure, his ideas endured. His health was deteriorating from tuberculosis, but he continued to write, receiving support from intellectual comrades in Uruguay and Brazil. His final years were just a continuation of his relentless dedication, even as his health continued to decline. In 1910, he went to Paris to seek treatment, but his health failed and he passed away in December of that year. But just before Barrett's exile and passing in 1906, the anarchists would form the first, and for some time only, workers federation in the country. By joining together the illustrators, carpenters and drivers unions. Rafael Barat actually became something of a thought leader for this group. And this was the Federacion Operas Regional Paraguay, or fop, partially inspired by the Feracion Obrera Regional Argentina, or fora, where they borrowed many of their programmatic ideas. If you recall the episodes I did on Argentina, you'll know that the reasoning for the name was ideological. By adding the adjective regional, it made plain that the country in question, whether Paraguay or Argentina, must not have been considered a state or political unit, but a region of the world in which workers struggled for their liberation. Soon after its founding on 1 May 1906, the FORP held the country's first International Workers Day demonstration, despite police attempts to shut it down. FORP also launched their official publication, El Desperitar in the same year, and the paper carried articles about the anarchist movements in Europe and Latin America, printed works by authors such as Peter Kropotkin and Anselmo Renzo, published reports of the Forbes activities, named and shamed known strikebreakers, and encouraged its members to pay their union dues promptly. Subsequent years would introduce other libertarian newspapers such as La Rebellon, La Tribuna and Asiel Futuro. After the 1908 coup by Emiliano Goncalves Navarro destabilised the economy and restricted Asuncion's labour movement, anarchism still found strength among rural and tannin industry workers. Despite increasing hostility from figures like Presidents Kondra and Jarrah. Labour strikes continued, which were met by fierce repression, arrests and forced deportations. With the outbreak of the Paraguayan Civil War from 1911 to 1912, anarchists and other labour organisations faced a government crackdown. Groups like the FUP became inactive, temporarily at least, and by 1913, in the wake of the war, a schism was emerging as some unions moved toward reformist ideologies influenced in part by the populist Colorado Party. Meanwhile, THORP reaffirmed its anarchist and Nicholas roots, forming a federal council that included both workers and intellectuals, Aiming to rekindle its union activities amidst a wave of reorganisation Post World War I, a new surge in demand for Paraguayan exports revitalised labour activism. In 1916, the Corp. Or Centro Obrero Recuay took on the role of championing anarcho syndicalism and labour rights. This movement gained support from a wide network, launching influential publications like El Combate and Renovacion. Other groups like Mayday and the Revolutionary Nationalist alliance, which sought a federalist Union of the Peoples of Latin America, also took part in the resurgence of anarchist ideas. In 1922, the Paraguayan anarchists were able to finally establish links with the International Workers association. By the 1930s, Ciriaco Duarte emerged as a prominent voice advocating for workers rights despite you know everything. He was a protege of fellow anarchist and printmaker Felix Cantalisio Arakuyu, a Paraguayan mestizo of mixed indigenous and black ancestry. At one point, Arakuyu and his comrades had helped organise a tram workers strike in Asuncion, which compelled the government to round them up and dump them in the middle of the jungle in Mato Grosso, hoping that they would die and Yet Arakuyu and his friends made their way through over 1,300km of mountain jungle, surviving on roots, fruits and game to make their way back to their hometown of Incarnacion. And speaking of Incarnacion, both Tuarte and Arakuyu took part in the little known attempt at an anarchist uprising in Paraguay, which was actually centred in Incarnacion. On 20 February 1931, a group of 150 workers and students organized in a couple popular assemblies took control of the city of Encarnacion with the goal of establishing a libertarian commune, part of a plan to spark a wider anarchist syndicalist revolution in Paraguay. This was the culmination of a series of strikes and widespread leafletting by anarchists and students in support of revolution. It wasn't meant to be centred in incarnation, as there was a planned construction worker led general strike in and Suncion and similar action Villarika and Concepcion. But key organisers in those struggles in those cities were deported in the days leading up to the action. So those planned actions ended up failing after 16 hours. When their efforts were not reinforced by workers in the rest of the nation. The insurrectionists of Encarnacion took over two steamboats and made their way along the river to Brazil. But not before they attacked the Yerba mate companies and burned the records related to indentured labourers in two ports. Their solidarity never died. Even after they went through everything they went through, they didn't lose their sight on what really mattered. Sadly, the 17 students and workers who remained in Encarnacion were arrested. Duarte found himself jailed and interned on Margarita Island. After Liberal Party president Jose P. Gugiari outlawed trade unions. Other revolutionaries were dropped off in the jungle to die at random points along the Parana River. Seven of the captured 17 met this fate and the other 10 spent a few months in prison before being deported to Argentina. Movement then faced distinct challenges during the chaco War from 1932 to 1935 between Paraguay and Bolivia, which halted much of the anarchist activity activism. Many anarchists joined the war effort reluctantly, including Duarte, who performed duties in the rearguard while working as a typesetter for various presses, including anarchist presses. With the Paraguayan victory following the war, the return to domestic concerns saw a resurgence of anarchist and labour activities. The government's crackdown of leftist ideologies in the late 1930s and 1940s under President Horinico's rule led to severe repression of anarchist and syndicalist groups. Duarte had spent some time as a worker representative at the National Labour Department, or dnt, but was under considerable fire from the communists who had taken hold of the trade union movement after anarchism waned in popularity. He finally resigned from his post in 1941 after a workers Coordinating Committee of seamen, tram workers, bakers, print workers and other trades issued a protest note to President Mourinhigo threatening to withdraw from the workers delegate for the infringement of their rights of assembly to unionize and to strike. Of course, their protest note was completely ignored. The president's authoritarian tenure pushed several anarchist and socialist organisers into exile. Duarte himself ended up in exile in Argentina by 1942, but eventually was able to return and reclaim his appointment as a worker representative. Then, not long after, he became a victim of a police crackdown during the 1944 general strike after the labour movement was hijacked by the Republican workers Organisation. After 1947, Duterte dropped out of trade union activity entirely and refocused to publishing articles and trade union publications abroad and urging research into Paraguayan trade union history. He had faced repeated arrests and took part in strikes anyway, advocating for workers rights across various industries. He continued his activism against fascism and authoritarianism, operating from Argentina at times while still supporting strikes at anarchist literature in Paraguay. The 1954 ascension to power of General Alfredo Streusner marked a significant period of intensified authoritarianism. Streusner's regime violently suppressed opposition, including anarchists, for over three decades, even in his 70s. During the 1970s, Duarte was harassed by Stressner's secret police. Many other anarchists were imprisoned, exiled, or disappeared by Streusner, who imposed tight control over unions and labour organising. The 1954-1989 dictatorship of Streusner stifled anarchist activities severely and forced them underground, where they would have to preserve anarchist literature and ideas through secret print publications and solidarity movements. The result of this dictatorship was that anarchism in Paraguay experienced resurgence much later than other Latin American nations, with the spark rekindled only in the early 2000s. This rebirth of anarchist sentiment emerged largely within the punk counterculture and youth led social movements often interconnected with struggles for indigenous rights, economic justice and environmental causes. The establishment of spaces like La Terraza and Anarchist Squat provided platforms for activists and community engagement, while publications such as Autonomia, Zine and Gritofanzine disseminated anarchist ideals despite Paraguay's history of anarchist repression. These newer movements, however small, signifies some small hope for a renewed interest in libertarian ideas within Paraguay, one that can be seen even more vibrantly in other parts of Latin America. Paraguayan anarchists have shown us. The drive for freedom and equality is a daily commitment to defy tyranny and resist exploitation. Despite facing decades of silencing under the Streisand dictatorship, anarchism did not disappear. The seeds of resistance lay dormant, but they are ready to bloom again as new generations can take up the struggle. As we conclude, let us remember the words of Raphael Barret, who fought tirelessly for the people he came to call his own Justice. Justice above all things. Justice even if it costs blood. All power to all the people. Peace.
- [23:21]
Savannah Guthrie
Welcome to Decisions Decisions, the podcast where boundaries are pushed and conversations get candid. Join your favorite hosts, Me Wheezywtf and me, Mandy B. As we dive deep into the world of non traditional relationships and explore the often taboo topics surrounding dating sexual that's.
- [23:38]
Robert Evans
Right, every Monday and Wednesday we both.
- [23:40]
Savannah Guthrie
Invite you to unlearn the outdated narratives dictated by traditional patriarchal norms. With a blend of humor, vulnerability and authenticity, we share our personal journeys, navigating our 30s, tackling the complexities of modern relationships and engage in thought provoking discussions.
- [23:56]
Robert Evans
That challenge societal expectations.
- [23:58]
Savannah Guthrie
From groundbreaking interviews with diverse guests to relatable stories that'll resonate with your experiences, Decisions Decisions is going to be your go to source for the open dialogue about what it truly means to love and connect in today's world.
- [24:10]
Robert Evans
Get ready to reshape your understanding of relationships and embrace the freedom of authentic connections. Tune in and join the conversation.
- [24:18]
Savannah Guthrie
Listen to Decisions Decisions on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [24:27]
H
Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the Fire and dare Enter Tale from the Shadows presented by I Heart and Sonoro, an anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone chilling brushes with supernatural creatures.
- [24:57]
Hoda Kotb
Unless.
- [25:01]
Rachel Zo
Take a trip and experience the.
- [25:03]
H
Horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time.
- [25:10]
Rachel Zo
Listen to Nocturno Tales from the Shadows.
- [25:14]
H
As part of Michael Tura Podcast Network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast.
- [25:29]
Rachel Zo
Hi everyone and welcome to the podcast. It's me, James today and I'm joined by Danny. Danny's an engineer and photographer who lived in northeast Syria from 2018 until 2023 and a founding member of the RSC, which is the Rajava Information center. If you're not familiar and she worked for Self Administration Civil Engineering while she was there. Welcome to the show.
- [25:48]
Andrew Sage
Danny hi James. It's really good to be on.
- [25:50]
Rachel Zo
Yeah Cheers, thanks for coming. I know it's like a stressful time, so what I thought we would do is there's been a lot of reporting on Syria that people have probably seen. If they're living in the US or the uk. Nearly all of it has either excluded or like footnoted what's happening in north and east Syria and specifically in the areas that are under the self administration. So I was hoping today we could give people a little more introduction to what's happening there. There's been a lot of like jubilation about what's happening in Syria and things have been very far from universally positive. There's a massive displacement of civilians, ethnic cleansing of areas that have been captured by the Turkish backed Syrian national army and genuine peril for the self administration project, the like of which we haven't seen for a long time. So perhaps if listeners aren't familiar, would you like give them the real basics of the self administration of the AANES and what it means and what's going on there?
- [26:46]
Andrew Sage
Yeah, well that's a big question because it's like, it's a big project. It's been going on for quite some time. Yeah, yeah, it really has. It's kind of been lost in discussions and news about the Syrian civil war because it has been such a complex multipolar, multi axis, multi ethnic conflict. And it's been going on for what like 13, 14 years now. Yeah, coming up to 14 years. The Kurds in the northeast had been preparing for some time before the outbreak of civil war back in 2011 for something like this. Obviously they didn't know this was going to happen, but they had been working on revolutionary emancipation for decades and in particular since around 2000 they'd been working on this concept of democratic Confederalism which is moving away from a sort of what they call an old paradigm of Marxist Leninist thought to this system they've now quite effectively built up there where democracy is bottom up, it's structured around small communes and self organizing units, cooperatives. There's a market economy, but it's not a capitalist economy where there's sort of radical emancipation of oppressed peoples, particular women, who are really centered in the revolutionary process and organizing there. And I think because they maybe, maybe you can't call them conflict avoided, they haven't avoided conflict. They very famously defeated ISIS amongst other groups in the northeast. They fought against Al Nusra Front and various other jihadi groups. They also didn't enter into serious conflict with either the FSA as they were or the regime and the Assad regime. And so they kind of managed to carve out a sort of democratic semi enclave. I mean people would describe it as a state that they quite vehemently say it's not a state in the northeast of Syria, whilst the worst of the fighting was between the Assad regime and the FSA and groups that came out of the FSA in the west and south of the country.
- [28:59]
Rachel Zo
Yeah, I think that's a very good summary. I think it gets missed maybe because of how relatively successful it's been compared to other democratization projects within Syria. It gets missed that when people are talking about what will happen in Syria now, bizarrely. And I don't quite understand how we get here, but people seem to go to Libya. I understand how we get here. It's through a process of orientalism and, and ignorance. But we have a functioning democracy. An example of like it's not just Kurdish people. Right. It's lots of communities living together in north and east Syria and because of democratic confederateism, they're able to like coexist and still feel that they have enough sovereignty to be safe. Is that fair?
- [29:45]
Andrew Sage
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think something that is hard to convey or fully understand unless you spend a lot of time there or you're deeply involved with any of these communities is quite how hard that was to do.
- [29:59]
Rachel Zo
Yeah.
- [29:59]
Andrew Sage
A lot of different ethnic groups, political groups there, hate each other, you know. Yeah, the, the Kurds, they brought in lots of different policies like the right to be taught in your mother tongue. When they took power, 2012 onwards, they were very keen not to just sort of replace everything with Kurdish, make it a Kurdish state, you know, start being the oppressor instead of the oppressed. They made sure that they continue using Arabic as the majority language because it is the majority language there. The north and east of Syria is still an Arab majority area. And this is despite the fact that they've been pretty horrendously oppressed by the Arab population through the Ba'ath party and its oppressive systems for decades. So it has been a pretty hard ongoing process to negotiate and to put aside pretty serious conflicts between quite a few different groups that exist there.
- [30:52]
Rachel Zo
Yeah, it won't be any easier across the whole country than it was there, but like they have a system that works. And it's kind of frustrating to see these discussions of what happens next that just ignore the fact that there's a functioning multi ethnic democracy right there. If we just look at women's liberation, you know, I've reported from lots of places around the world, lots of places in that part of the world. And the difference is profound in everyday life. It's not just a kind of rhetorical commitment. Right. At least my impression as a man is that this is a revolution by women, not a revolution. And it's about women. It's not a revolution by men that seeks to liberate women, says it's going to liberate women. With the US invaded Afghanistan saying it's going to liberate women, and look what we got. And the difference in just the way people are able to. Every aspect of everyday life is completely different. But that's in danger right now. The narrative, I guess, that people will be familiar with from Syria is that the state has been defeated, the Assad regime has been defeated, and that therefore the revolution has succeeded. But the Assad regime is not the only state in play in Syria. Right. So can you explain the Turkish antipathy to the project in north and east Syria and how that's manifesting itself currently?
- [32:11]
Andrew Sage
Yeah, it's pretty hard to discuss any of this stuff without talking about Turkey and without understanding where they're coming from. And I think it's something that isn't said enough or understood enough that the modern state of Turkey is an ethno nationalist project. And I don't say that as a slur. That's a basic founding principle of the state. It's a state founded on genocide and the mass for demographic change across the whole country. And it's continued that way. And there have been reforms for sure, but that's still a founding principle. And even now, sort of speaking a non Turkish language in the Turkish Parliament is a pretty serious violation. And the size of Turkey, the size of its economy, the size of its military, their regional power status they have in the Middle east means that they have an enormous gravity. They have an enormous amount of power over Syria. A lot of the goods and services that Syria relies on come in through Turkey or rely on Turkish industry. And the Turkish military is a huge supporter of their groups in the northwest, like the Syrian National Army. And of course, the Kurdish question within Turkey is the main reason for their antipathy towards what's been built up in northeast Syria. As much as the self determination for oppressed people as minorities is something that's an issue. The fact that it's Kurdish led and in particular it's emancipatory for Kurdish people threatens this ethno nationalist aspect of their state. And they see it as something that needs to be nipped in the bud, right? And they've sort of done that with northern Iraq, the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, by essentially vassalizing the kdp, the main party there. And they know they can't do the same in northeast Syria. And the military option is their best chance, their best hope of nipping Kurdish emancipation and Kurdish self determination in the bards and preventing it from sort of snowballing across the region.
- [34:26]
Rachel Zo
Yeah, I think we should probably mention that like, I guess if we talk about like the electoral method or the electoral path, people in Turkish Kurdistan, in Northern Kurdistan, whatever you want to call it, in addition to the armed struggle which has been there since 1984, they have also like tried to vote and repeatedly seen their votes ignored or changed or their elected officials removed. Like this is within the last year, I'm not talking about back in the 80s and 90s. And Turkey has been aggressively attacking any attempts at self determination within the country and then as you say, militarily attacking the Kurdish freedom movement within north east Syria. Do you want to talk about the Syrian national army or the Turkish backed Free Syrian army, whatever you want to call them and explain? I think part of what we're dealing with is that Turkey has a very well established state media project and they seem to do very well on creating viral social media content. So people might not be fully familiar with who the SNA are and specifically Turkey's role in creating them. Do you want to explain that a bit to people?
- [35:34]
Andrew Sage
Yeah, I mean, this is one of the reasons why I think it's so hard for people to report on the Syrian civil war. It's very hard to convey like a simple, coherent narrative of one side versus the other. You know, like Ukraine versus Russia, the Russian world and Ukrainian world. Because there are so many different groups in the sna, it's an important one. And they are, they're grouped together with this like concept of the rebels that have liberated Syria.
- [36:01]
Rachel Zo
Yeah.
- [36:01]
Andrew Sage
Despite the fact that they're not actually part of Hayat through Al Hasham, the liberation movement, as it calls itself, that have taken over Syria. Yeah, the Syrian national army, it's kind of like a loose collection of various, some of them call themselves brigades or groups. It's essentially a military proxy force of Turkey. They don't have a coherent political framework. They're not revolutionary groups, they're not liberatory or mansion. They wouldn't describe themselves as that in the same way that maybe hts would. I mean, the Kurds in northeast Syria describe them as gangs, which kind of sounds like a propaganda term. But when you actually look at what they do. They really are like a sort of a criminal enterprise, a criminal gang that's used as a convenient proxy force by Turkey because ultimately Turkey has like a massive military.
- [36:56]
H
Yeah.
- [36:57]
Andrew Sage
Their navy is. Is quite underfunded and not particularly well staffed. The air force has suffered pretty seriously from the fallout of the coup in 2016. But the army is massive, it's relatively well funded, and their drone program is huge. The thing that they struggle with is the losses that are incurred against Kurdish groups, particularly the pkk, in the mountains between Iraq and Turkey. And they need to control that because they realize that they've been fighting militarily, the Kurds, as you say, since the early 1980s. And they can't have a Vietnam situation. Right. Of a mass movement against their military occupation and against their military efforts in Syria. They can't afford financially or politically, to get into a quagmire there. And so by funding this sort of collection of groups called the sna, that's their way of being able to incur pretty massive losses without having to report on it, without that creating unrest or opposition within the Turkish population of Turkey.
- [38:03]
Rachel Zo
Right. And I think, especially when, like, some of the things the SNA have done, which we can maybe get into in Mount beach, like, it gives them a deniability that wouldn't exist if that was regular soldiers doing that. Like some stuff which is war crimes is, I guess, a nice way of saying it, like a more sanitized way of saying it, but horrific stuff, really terrible stuff. This has been happening since at least 2018. But Turkey doesn't have to be held accountable for that because like you say, it's not Turkish, it's not the Turkish army. Do you want to explain how the situation in North Syria has changed since when was it, like two weeks ago? A week ago, I guess, that they moved south from Aleppo and start the hts, largely with some support from sna, moved towards Damascus, and then the SNA launched its own assault on the self administration. Can you explain a little bit of what's happened there in terms of displacement and in terms of the terrain that the SNA have captured?
- [38:59]
Andrew Sage
Yeah, it's been very fast moving, as you say. Like it's only been two weeks since the battle for Aleppo started, if you can call it a battle. So the sdf, so this is like the alliance of military groups that falls under the remit of the self administration in northeast Syria. So the YPG and the YPJ are like the most most famous and largest components of this force, but there are a whole bunch of Arab and Syrian and Armenian units within the sdf. They held this sort of salient pushing out into northwest Syria towards Afrin, which was captured by the SNA and Turkey in 2018. That was on one side surrounded by HTS and on the other by the SNA. When things really kicked off, the SNA started a pretty concerted campaign to. To capture this area known as Sheba. And because of its position and its relatively difficult terrain and difficult logistical position to resupply, they pulled back from that towards Aleppo and Manbij, which is the only major city that the SDS still held on the west of the Euphrates. And this is the area closest to Aleppo. They got hit pretty hard. If you follow live update map or any of these sort of update maps, it looked like that collapsed pretty quickly, actually. It ended up being a sort of large gray zone of guerrilla attacks and potentially still ongoing. It's been really murky and hard to tell what's going on there. But essentially there's a large area of uncontrolled but heavily contested territory between Aleppo and Euphrates river now which the SDF and the SNA have been fighting over. One of the curious things for me is that the Turkish Air force and military did not get involved for a while, but after about a week they did, and they started hitting Manbij very, very heavily. And at that point, when the center of Manbij started being contested and fought over, the US stepped in. We don't know the details of it, but there seems to have been some kind of negotiation whereby the suggestion is that if the SDF fighters pulled back a across the Euphrates, the SDF would assure their protection from any further assaults. We don't know how that. How true that is, and we know that today further negotiations on this failed. But it's really hard to tell right now as we speak, what's disinformation and what's truth. Because stuff's only coming out officially in dribs and traps.
- [41:25]
Rachel Zo
Yeah. And stuff's coming out unofficially often that is just not true. Every five minutes and getting blasted by maybe people who just don't understand or who do understand, but have a certain agenda to push on social media especially, but on telegram too. And it can be really confusing and it's really frustrating.
- [41:45]
Andrew Sage
Yeah. For instance, like just before we came on air, I saw a couple of videos being posted by pro Turkish accounts purportedly showing mass troop concentrations lined up against this border wall waiting to invade. And I realized that they were from 2019 when Sericani and Talabayed were invaded and they were just reposting material from then as disinformation on these movements and whether an attack is going to happen, what the negotiations between the US and Turkey turned out to be. And the truth is right now we don't know exactly what's going on.
- [42:22]
Rachel Zo
Yeah, and you probably won't and that's probably a good thing. One other thing is that the SDF tends to have much better operational security discipline than the SNA does. So you won't see as much of like media with an SDF spin or people directly streaming. I mean one thing the SDNA likes to do is a war crime and then post it on Telegram. And so it can be easy to only see that and be like, oh God, it's terrible and it is terrible. Those things are horrific. But because you're not seeing when the SDF is making movements or making advances until a bit later, until you get something from like an official press channel, it can give the impression that the SNA is just romping around, which is not the case.
- [43:05]
Andrew Sage
Yeah, we saw this a few times when Manbij was reported to have been captured by the SNA and they posted videos of themselves in the middle of the city and then an hour later the SDF posted a video from the centre of the city of 20 or 30 dead SNA letting about the streets and then flying their own flag. So yeah, it's really, it's really hard to tell. It's also really hard. It's like anyone who cares about the region has been there, has reported on it. Anyone interested in the kind of politics that the Kurds have built up in the region and others I should say is, you know, it's been a multi ethnic project, if you care about that. It's really hard not to be glued to social media to see what's going on, but it can be quite detrimental to Morrow. It can be quite an act of self harm to be like constantly checking on this because it's so murky.
- [43:54]
H
Yeah.
- [43:54]
Andrew Sage
And as you say like things can turn around within two hours of info or disinfect getting out there.
- [44:00]
Rachel Zo
Yeah. And I think it's a super important time to be looking at trusted sources and be considering if you need to be on Telegram that much. Something I have been considering this weekend. So let's talk about like right now. Certainly the focus is on Kobani. Right. But there's also, well, there's a lot of the self administration that could potentially be under threat if Turkey decides to go as hard as it as it can against the self administration, against the existence of, I guess, any form of democratic project in northeast Syria, if it attempts to kind of bring the whole thing under one government from Damascus. Can you explain what might happen, what people can do? And we should talk about what's at stake as well, especially with the prisoner Arhol, which maybe we can come to after those two things, because I think that's a lot to ask you in one question. But maybe people aren't familiar with Arhol, we'll leave that one. But can you explain at first what could potentially happen if Turkey decides to go as hard as it wants to here?
- [45:11]
Andrew Sage
I mean, I think the best way to answer that question is to look at what's already happened. So in 2018 and 19, they already captured three significant cities that were under control of the self administration. So the first and most famously was Afrin, which was in the far northwest of the country, like just north of Aleppo, sort of jutting out into Turkey. That was a majority Kurdish city. I don't know the exact details, but it was something like 80 or 90%, which I think is higher than any other city in northern Syria. And it was also like it had seen the least fighting of pretty much anywhere in Syria by that point. So the war had been going on for like what, seven years. And Afghan was pretty much untouched, so it was in a pretty good state. And Turkey and the SNA invaded just as the war against ISIS was winding down. And I mean, it's become hell on earth. It's been almost completely depopulated. I think it's less than 10% now, Kurdish. Ethnically, it has been ruled by a number of different groups. We can say the SNA, but you know, different groups within the SNA have fought over it. The HTs at times have had control over certain parts of the area. And there's been a lot of infighting, there's been horrendous war crimes committed. Yeah, rape, murder, thousands of disappeared people. And as you say, they, they really like to openly put videos out of them committing this stuff. I mean, they're pretty shameless about it. Yeah, there are some pretty disturbing videos of them mutilating the bodies of fallen YPJ soldiers, of committing summary executions, of wiping out whole towns. It's been awful. And yeah, the same thing happened again in 2019 around, in October when they, they captured Sarikani and Tala Bayad. And it's worth also pointing out that these were not Kurdish majority cities as far as I understand. So I think the Surikhani Maybe was about 50% and Tel avayed, which is kind of close to Kobani, I'm pretty sure wasn't Kurdish majority city. Bey was organized under the self administration and it was organized quite effectively and they committed the same horrific crimes there. They are an anti Kurdish force. If we can say that they are racist. They do have a stated goal of committing genocide against the Kurds. That's not an exaggeration. This is something they openly say, but they don't seem to care who they steal from or who they rape or who they extort. Wherever they go, it's death and destruction. And it still is now. And there's still something like a quarter of a million internally displaced people from these areas in northeast Syria hoping to go back and now having to see the situation get even worse and not knowing if they ever will be able to.
- [48:02]
Rachel Zo
Yeah, and I think like you were talking about, like we're seeing it right now in Man Beach. Right. Like the SNA seems to largely be in control of the city, albeit with YPG fighters kind of more, I guess, in a guerrilla role. So it would seem, still fighting there. But where? I believe we're on the second day of a general strike in Manbij after less than a week of the SNA holding it because of looting and executions and other war crimes.
- [48:32]
Andrew Sage
Yeah, I think this is actually a really good political education to see what's happening because what's been built up in the northeast has been built up over decades. Right. They like to use this analogy of the mycelium and the fruiting bodies of a mushroom. They appear to magically emerge from the earth in the autumn out of nowhere. But actually, you know, they've been brewing underground for years before. And they use this analogy because it took decades to put in place these structures. That's why they were ready. As soon as the regime, the Assad regime pulled out and collapsed in the face of isis in the early stages of the war, they were ready to build up these structures. They already had self organized militias, they had the economy planned out. They set to work immediately. And the SNA don't have any of that. They are a force of convenience. They're mostly sort of young men who were in groups before that were defeated in Syria, like isis, who are simply taking opportunity to enrich themselves. And that's also very convenient for Turkey because they do the dirty work against the population of northeast Syria. So I think it's worth saying that that aspect of it, that preparation, that resilience is something that also works in favor in the event of the worst case of full invasion of north Syria. I do think they are significantly better prepared than they were in 2018 and 19. Even if the worst happens, even if militarily it's defeated, that's not going to be the end of this project. Right. It's not going to be the end of this emancipation. There's now an entire generation of young people in northeast Syria who have grown up entirely living amongst a liberated and emancipated region. And people. That's not something you can militarily defeat. So I, you know, I'm not completely hopeless and obviously I'll be, like, devastated if the worst does happen there. But I don't think it means the end of this incredible political. And it feels wrong to call it a project because it's not. It really is a revolution in India and every possible meaning of the word and it's deeply embedded now.
- [50:51]
Rachel Zo
Yeah. And I think everyone I spoke to there, there's a deeply held conviction that they're not going back. Some people who have seen like, firsthand the fascist violence of isis. And fascist is the right word. It's something maybe worse than fascism. Like, certainly that. Like speaking to women in Roshava about how they. They're not going back to the gendered violence that they experienced for decades to include isis, but by no means, like, only from isis. And I guess that kind of brings us on to. I wanted to talk a little bit about the situation in the parts of Syria that are controlled by hcs, and in so much as they really are. Control is perhaps the wrong word. They haven't fully established their state project yet, but they're certainly moving towards that. They've sort of captured the institutions of the state rather than destroyed them. You'd spoken about. There's this very. I guess maybe I'll use an example. Sorry, I'm phrasing this question in a very meandering way. I saw this CNN clip where they're there, like, oh, we found a guy who's like, in this prison and he was stuck here. And the second part of this was not broadcast on cnn. This person turns out to be like an Air Force lieutenant who was in fact himself someone who tortured and killed civilians. And there's this very liberatory, very excited messaging coming from media in the West, I guess some of which is good, right? Like, it's good that the Assad regime is gone. Assad was fucking terrible and tortured and killed hundreds of thousands of his own people. But that doesn't mean that things are all perfect in Damascus. Do you want to talk a little bit about some of the worrying stuff we've seen in the last few days from those areas?
- [52:32]
Andrew Sage
Yeah, I mean, this is something that I worry isn't being spoken about enough. I don't, as a non Syrian, don't want to say to people, you shouldn't be celebrating your own liberation, because people absolutely should be and it's their right to be. And I'm like, yeah, extremely happy that this brutal dictator has gone. I mean, it's hard to summarize quite how awful he was. And it's deeply frustrating that he's probably not going to see justice. But it's also really hard to see stuff which is really reminiscent of like 1979, Tehran, 2003, Baghdad, of a sort of jubilation. Whilst at the same time there are videos of sort of pogroms being carried out against minorities, minorities like the Alawites, who were in control. And you don't know if the person being executed in the street was a torturer, an intelligence agent, you don't know who they were. But, like, this is happening. But you're also seeing, like, Salafist groups raising their flag, you know, like hardline Islamists raising their flag in places like Latakia and tattoos that have significant minority populations. I am very. I mean, concerned isn't the right word. Like, it's hard to feel that spirit of liberation when you see not only these things happening, but that the people who have captured these state institutions are admitted former members of Al Qaeda, they are jihadis. Hardline people have now got a very effectively made themselves out to be moderates. But my gut feeling is that we're going to see something like 1979, Tehran, of a lot of talk of reconciliation, a lot of talk of, you know, the concerns of the Kurds or working with the communists. But, you know, mass executions and oppression is not far around the corner. And I guess when the jubilation dies down, my question is, what's going to happen when minorities do demand their rights or women don't want to wear a hijab in, you know, inside the buildings of state institutions? And I'm finding it very hard to believe that these men who are professed Islamists are going to allow a moderate future to exist?
- [54:50]
Rachel Zo
Yeah, it's. I don't know, every day we get different information, right? But like, yeah, I don't know if concerned is the right word either. I don't quite know what the word is, but like, I'M worried. I guess I'm worried that I'm especially worried when like, rather than what we saw in the self administration was not like a continuation of institutions. Right. When the Assad regime left in 2011 and 2012 and areas that the regime or ISIS have left since then, it wasn't like, okay, we'll take over these institutions, administer them differently. It was we will build democracy from the bottom up. Not we'll just change the people in charge versus what it seems like we're now seeing for Damascus is like, hey, can the police from the Assad regime please stay at work? Which is concern. Talking of police, the last thing I wanted to address was the Al Holl camp. I've spoken about it before on this show and people can look back or other episodes, but if you've not heard about it, can you explain briefly what our hole is and then the massive risk that this Turkish backed invasion poses to Arhol and other camps? I guess our hole's not the only camp, just the biggest one.
- [56:07]
Andrew Sage
Yeah, our hole is a really important point to talk about. Ohol is a very large camp. It's hard to sum up what kind of camp it is because it's so vast and has different sections. It's near Al Hasakah, which is one of the largest cities in northeast Syria. It mostly contains families who were members or were resident in the Islamic State when it collapsed. So in the beginning of 2019, ISIS was sort of squeezed into this little corner in the eastern side of Syria between the Euphrates and the Iraqi border. And when the state collapsed or the caliphate collapsed, a lot of people had nowhere to go. A lot of them were foreigners who come in from abroad. When I say a lot, I mean like tens of thousands. Yeah, there were something like 20,000 families left within Susa and Bagos, like the last parts of the caliphate to hold out. And they didn't have anywhere to go. There were already camps set up for IDPs and for members of ISIS and families in north east Syria. But Al Hol was rapidly expanded to take these on. So it's a sort of semi prison, semi open camp that I think peaked at 75,000 people, which it sounds like a lot on its own, but when you consider that a large city in northeast Syria is about 150,000 people, it still is significant. You probably have more accurate recent figures than me, but I think the current population is about 40,000.
- [57:42]
Rachel Zo
Yeah, it's shrunk definitely. I'm not sure what it is exactly.
- [57:46]
Andrew Sage
The big problem that the self administration have had is multitude really. Many of the people there are foreigners. Many of them don't have papers. Many of them come from countries that either don't want them back or will almost certainly execute them if they're sent back. Like Iraq, which is against the policy of the abolition of death penalty in northern east Syria. There are some in Al Hor, but mostly in other camps in the north and east of Syria. Former ISIS members like Shimama Begum who come from countries like the UK who simply won't take them back. The UK is taking back some families that simply refuses to take back their citizens who joined isis. As you know, card carrying members.
- [58:27]
H
Yeah.
- [58:28]
Andrew Sage
So they've made a pretty massive effort to repatriate as many families as possible. They've made a big effort to rehabilitate and de radicalize as many people as possible. They have shrunk the camp massively, but there's still 40,000 or something left there. And these are like really a lot of them are really radical. Like I think, I don't know what an exact number is but something in the order of 10,000 of them are still like professed to be members of ISIS and that they have a lot of children. And this was something that shocked me when I was at the end of the caliphate in Baghdads and witnessed tens of thousands of people coming out and I could not have imagined how many children there were. And this was like what five years ago now coming up to six years ago. So some of them who were you know, seven, eight, nine years old are now like heading towards their mid teens. They've spent their entire lives being radicalized and like what do you do with them?
- [59:24]
Rachel Zo
Right.
- [59:24]
Andrew Sage
And it's no, I think it's no coincidence that in previous Turkish attacks because Turkey's been attacking the north and east of Syria for you know, the last five, six years now through the air, through nation warfare. And a lot of their attacks have focused on trying to break these people out. They have bombed the entrances to, to prisons multiple times. They provided funding and arms and ammunition to groups that are trying to break them out. And they provided safe passage back to Turkey for those who have managed to escape. So it's massively in their favor. But of course it's a Pandora's box because you know, if that does break open, if these people aren't repatriated or aren't de radicalized then that's a lot of people who have pretty much only known their whole lives a extremely radical. Yeah, fascist Islamist ideology. I don't think they're just going to give it up.
- [60:12]
Rachel Zo
Yeah, no.
- [60:13]
Andrew Sage
That they're not going to join this moderate future Syria.
- [60:15]
Rachel Zo
No. And like those people like have probably experienced like, probably have terrible experiences within that camp and that's not going to make that, does that don't tend to be moderating and sort of pacifying experiences. And I'm sure that they will, there'll be a lot of hate coming from there when those people come out. And I don't want to apportion blame too much, but we've had a long time to deal with this. The world's had a long time to deal with this.
- [60:39]
Andrew Sage
Oh, I mean I would happily apportion blame. This is entirely on the hands of the coalition. Northern East Syria is a very poor place. It's deeply impoverished. It's been kept impoverished by sanctions by Turkey. The oil refineries, the industry, the economy has been smashed to pieces. They've held on really well and that like all credit to them. They, they have maintained this camp. They have tried to, to give these people a life but it's, it's pretty awful conditions.
- [61:11]
Rachel Zo
Yeah.
- [61:12]
Andrew Sage
And this could have been sold if the international community of the coalition in particular United States had helped with these repatriations. They put political pressure on European countries in particular to take back their citizens and had just provided the funding for. They have provided funding. I'm not saying they haven't pretty much. But it's a drop in the ocean compared to the Department of Defense budget. We're talking a few tens of millions here and there as opposed to a concerted effort to de, radicalize and repatriate people that could pose a serious threat to Europe and the U.S. yeah.
- [61:49]
Rachel Zo
And you've got Britain doing the opposite of what's helpful, which is fucking removing people's passports. Right. Denationalizing them, leaving these people stateless and saying it's not our problem.
- [62:00]
Andrew Sage
Which is pathetic and incredibly short sighted.
- [62:04]
Hoda Kotb
Yeah.
- [62:04]
Andrew Sage
I don't like using the word terror or terrorism because I think they become meaningless terms. But ISIS did commit horrendous acts of terror in Europe and the United States. And these people, a lot of them I'm sure would happily do so given the opportunity. So I don't think that the threat is sufficiently understood in the West.
- [62:26]
Rachel Zo
Yeah, no. And like it's going to end up biting them in the ass because they've, you know, they put this off and put this off and wouldn't spend the money to like have justice. Right. Like to go through a system and to have a chance to plead their cases or have a tribunal, whatever it is. Instead these people have just been essentially abandoned by most of the world. The self administration has been forced to take care of the people who did horrific things right there. And yeah, at some point this population will continue to grow if we don't keep removing people from it. And that's going to be a problem for the whole world. Even if the whole world wants to pretend it's not happening right now. And it is just endlessly frustrating to see it not even be covered, let alone kind of addressed in the West.
- [63:15]
Andrew Sage
Yeah, I think that's a really important point. When similar atrocities have been carried out in, in Europe, we see international tribunals, we see the ICC and the ICJ step in, we see arrests, we see prosecutions, you know, like Milosevic, like the Nuremberg trials. And ISIS was a, was a massive state. It had something like 10 million inhabitants. It committed multiple genocides, you know, and this isn't just, you know, people in the region saying, oh, they're committing genocide. These are like Western, highly studied, highly understood, accepted by western states as genocide against like the Yazidis. Yeah, they committed horrendous atrocities. They are, they pose an international threat and a massive regional threat. And at the end of the caliphate as a territorial realm, as a serious military presence, it just, yeah, it just disappeared off the radar. I think this is like a, you know, a really, really shows their sort of racist and colonial mindset behind this rules based international order that the people who were their victims and who had left to pick up the pieces after it's got very little support or recognition and they've been calling for tribunals for years and it's just fallen on deaf ears.
- [64:26]
Rachel Zo
Yeah. And sadly I don't see that changing given the incoming administration in the United States. Like it's, it's deeply concerning, deeply concerned. The wrong word. It's just fucked. I want to ask like people, I think want to be in solidarity with the revolution. They want to help if they can. They want to support. I did a fundraiser last night. Thank you to everyone who gave their money and came. That was really nice. But what can people do to, you know, it's one thing to like be in solidarity or post or whatever, but like what concrete actions can they take to help?
- [65:00]
Andrew Sage
This is a question that gets asked a lot. Yeah, I think in doing anything is helpful. It's also a question that's really hard to answer given how things are just across the border in Palestine. I personally find it hard to engage and Ask for help and ask for solidarity when there's a genocide being committed next door. But we might be about to see the same thing happen in Syria, and I do think we should be taking it seriously. And anything from raising awareness to actually going there and lending support, anything on that spectrum, it's not just like. It's not just the material contribution that you can make. It's the people that do really feel left out. They feel betrayed, they feel let down by the international community, by the rest of the world. And any act of solidarity goes on incredibly well. Like, the first year I was there, I was basically useless because I didn't speak the language, I didn't know my way around. I was like a burden on society, more or less. And people were just, like, happy that you're there, you know, showing solidarity. And it's not about being useful, it's about that act. It's about more than that. That's what I'm trying to say. And. And if you can show solidarity in any way you can, like, this is, you know, incredibly, incredibly important time to do it.
- [66:21]
Rachel Zo
Yeah. I think, like, I don't know if I go back to when I moved to the US which was 2008, George W. Bush was president, and, like, I had my little Free Palestine badge when I got off the plane, and my little keffiyeh and, like, was immediately sent to secondary inspection by the customs people. Because, like, that was not really. Of course, there were Palestinian people and people in solidarity with the people of Palestine in the usn, and there were for a long time before. But, like, I would never have imagined that I would see thousands of people in the streets for the Palestinian cause. And the only thing that has materially held back the genocide of the Palestinian people has been the solidarity that they've experienced. And that shows the power that people have. Though obviously it's been able to do comparatively little, and Israel still seems to be killing little children every day. But it shows that we can build solidarity really quickly and really meaningfully. And you don't have to go, but you can go. You get. It's much harder to get to Palestine than it is to get to northern east Syria. I went last year, and I think people who are already organizing can bring that into their organizing too. These things don't have to compete. There's a lot of solidarity to go around. But I would say a lot of the news we see, unfortunately, from Turkey, and that will unfortunately give you information that's extremely biased when it comes to northeast Syria. So being conscious of your Media consumption is very important.
- [67:49]
Andrew Sage
Yeah, absolutely. I think I would just add to that to say that solidarity with any group is a long term project. Right. You're not going to jump in and be able to make a huge difference immediately. But also at the same time, if the worst happens, if Turkey invades full on and there's genocide in northeast Syria, that isn't the end of it. It's a massive international movement and there are practices from it that are being put in place in things that actually don't even have anything to do with the Kurds as a nation. And there are ways of organizing, there are methods that they use, there's personality analysis, there's criticism and self criticism. There's a lot of that that goes far beyond a single geographic region. And I think engaging with that can and I've seen with my own eye since I've been back, like there's a lot of groups around the UK that use techniques for self organization within land rights movement, within workers struggle, within anti cuts campaigning. And these got nothing to do with Rojava, but they have seen that through solidarity with Rojava and Kurdistan that there are ways they can improve their own practice and their own actions.
- [69:01]
Rachel Zo
Yeah, I think that's really important to. And those are things maybe we'll cover in the future. And there are plenty of good resources online. Are there any resources you'd like to plug or like personal social media, things you think people could follow to get good information on what's happening?
- [69:16]
Andrew Sage
Definitely the ric, that's the Rojava Information Center. They are probably the best source on the ground in Rojava and they are a collective of journalists, a mixture of local and internationalists who've been working there for six years now. So they're Rojava IC on various social media platforms. You can follow me as Lapinesque L A P I N E S Q U E. I'm also posting about it, although I'm not there anymore. I'm posting updates from friends, people I know there and my take on the situation based on my experiences being there for almost five years.
- [69:55]
Rachel Zo
Yeah, I think good to follow if you can. Thank you very much, Danny. What we're going to do now is I got some voice notes from some friends who are at the front with a takosinacist, which means anarchist struggle in Kurdish. They're a group within the SDF that is an anarchist group that's there fighting and in this case actually doing frontline medical support on behalf of the self administration, on behalf of the revolution. They sent me some notes this morning, Monday, today, from their positions on the front line. So obviously those notes will be a little bit they'll be 24 hours old by the time you hear them. But I still think it's very important to hear from people who are there when we can not from someone who's supposedly an expert but hasn't set foot in Syria in 15 years and hasn't really talked to anyone who's Syrian either. So we'll drop those in after a little advertising break here. And with that I will say thank you very much, Danny. Thanks for giving us your time and we really appreciate all your insight today.
- [70:51]
Andrew Sage
Thanks very much, James.
- [71:02]
H
Hello, I'm talking from the Provisional branch office of the Ocean Analysis and we wanted to share a bit about the situation ongoing here in northeastern Syria because as you probably know, the regime has fallen and Masara had left the country on 8 December after a big offensive that started from Idlib that took over quite soon, quite far to the city of Aleppo and continued moving on. We wanted to explain how is the situation right now on the ground and also give some insight on the situation of northern Syria and what the media is actually not covering of the different events and situation that are ongoing here. The main thing to remark that this can be a bit of a confusing, confusing interview for those that are maybe not familiar with the unknown situation. To give a short context, we can mention that there are right now two main conflicts, ongoing military conflicts. One is what we reported, the other not so much. We are talking about the war that HTS or the offensive that HTS launch against the Syrian Arab army and the other is the offensive that the SNA and Turkish PAXI forces that right under the name of Al Syrian national army, but that they are trained, paid and supported by the Turkish state. The offensive that they have been launching against northern Syria and the democratic administration of northern Syria, that is the area also known sometimes as Rajava, that is started as the Kurdish Liberation Movement, leading the world as Islamic State and establishing his autonomous administration. So let's go shortly to the first conflict, this offensive of HDR or the faith of Real Sham. It's Islamist group direct heritage of Alufra, that was the Syrian branch of Al Qaeda that has been governing, having some work government destruction in the region of Euclid in the northwest of Syria and was under heavy siege from the Norwegian forces, the Syrian Arab army on the 27th of November they launched this big offensive that led to the collapse of the regime. We could reflect deeply about the regions now on one side, the Syrian Arab army was exhausted after years of war here in Syria. But especially their main allies and supporters were also in a bad situation. We are talking mostly about Russia and Iran. As we probably know, Russia has been entrenched in a war in Ukraine for two years almost. Iran recently had been also engaging supporting their militias in the conflicts against Israel after the virtual occupation that Israel started on Naza a year ago. So these two conflicts create a situation that both partners like Russia and Iran were not able to support the Syrian Arab army as they did in the past. This led also to the collapse of the front lines of the Syrian Arabic army, allowing the offensive of HTS to overrun very fast the defenses in the city of Aleppo and also taking control of the city of Hama. This sparked also other groups that also opposed the region for a long time to start also taking action in southern Syria in the regions of there was also an autonomous military operation room that started coordinated insurgents against the regime. This sparked the collapse of the regime. A lot of soldiers were defecting their positions and finally the different military groups within the offensive took Damascus. This was offensive that was really not very bloody in the sense of like a lot of the Syrian army soldiers were just leaving their positions and running away and the offensive was able to advance very fast, very easily right now. This offensive led to the transition that we are seeing in the Match Force where the leader of HDS have been doing really public speeches and declaring the triumph of the revolution, trying to harvest the revolutionary spirit of 2011 for their own benefit and they imposed or proposed a transitional government that is formed exclusively by members connected or aligned to hts. Could be good to discuss more about hts, but maybe it's not the focus of our interview right now. Just mentioned that the authoritarian government in Egypt has been really criticized by the local population organizing protests against it right now, now running this interim government, they are already making proposals for like morality police, Islamic courts. So I don't know how much this comparison has been already shared, but clearly what we saw in Afghanistan with Taliban taking over the state structures is probably a good guide to understand what could be happening in Syria if HDS takes control of the state as it seems to be happening. So this is one of the conflicts I'm going that is widely reported. The only one maybe is not so much reported. We see how the Turkish has been for a long time, Turkish state has been for a long time attacking the region of Norway, Syria especially the.
- [77:46]
Hoda Kotb
And.
- [77:46]
H
This is connected to their war against the Kurtish Liberation Movement that Has been going for more than 40 years. And the last chapter of this started in coordination with this offensive of HDs where the proxy forces started to attack mainly the region of Tahrifat. That was an area where a lot of the refugees from Afrin, where living. Afrin was a region that was already occupied by Turkey in 2018. And a lot of the people from the city was displaced and living in refugee camps in the region of Shava and city of Califat. And these Turkish proxy forces attacked and conquered that region, forcing all these people that already had to leave their homes more than five years ago, 2018. Yeah. So forcing them to flee once again. A lot of these people was trapped in a caravan that suffered brutal raids, attacks, kidnapping, ransoms. Like it has been like a really terrible experience of people that was trying to flee. The offensive of these Turkish patriot forces and most of them are now arriving to Datka and to Raqqa, to the regions of the Soviet administration where they are founding and they can find shelter. And for those willing to help, we can mention that Khayvasser is the humanitarian organization, one of the biggest humanitarian organizations working in Northern Syria and has been providing cans and food and blankets and everything they can to support all these people that is arriving on these areas. So those willing to support economically in this humanitarian crisis that we are experiencing, they can easily find the website and the ban account of Khevashar to donate to them to support this and all these people that once again lost their in their homes. But the offensive didn't stop on Jaffa and the SNA continued their attacks and took over the city of Manbij already. Right now this was a really heavy crisis. Like it was a really serious military conflict that has been totally supported by Turkish artillery and air force. We are talking about drones sitting different positions and even airplanes that of course are like NATO air force have been bombing positions of the Syrian Democratic Forces, allowing these different Israelite groups that are part of this coalition of the SMA the establish proxy forces to control of the city. At the moment, there is already several days that man beach this city had been organizing protests and even a general strike that started yesterday against the occupation. Because these groups that occupied the city are looting and even killing local population in a really terrible situation that is experiencing the local people living in Malmich and they are willing to continue. They have been threatening the city of Kobani, the symbol of resistance of the royal revolution against the Islamic State. And these threats on the city are not just the bombings of the Turkish air force and artillery, but also a lot of military personnel of the Turkish proxy forces gathering on the bridge that connects the divisions of man beach and Kobani and all across the Euphrates River. So this war is not so reported, but it's been really brutal at times against the southern administration in Northeast Syria. We are trying to report an update about the situation. We also two statements to call out attention for comrades about what is ongoing here. Maybe I also talk a bit about the work that we have been doing on the ground. We need to remark that this offensive over Mambid and all these threats in Kohani have not been the only guards that the Turkish army and their proxies forces are doing all around the strip that they occupied in 2018 and 2019. The areas around the city of Sulpaniyeh and a next to the border with Turkey also host a lot of Islamist groups that are part of this Turkish proxy coalition. And they have been intensively bombing the areas and their surroundings. And there have been quiet widespread rumors of these Islamist groups gathering forces to continue their attacks on the self administration of Northern Syria and their war against the Syrian Democratic Forces. We from Tikosima Nazis, we have been working in medical capacity providing materials for the NATO planes in the front lines and being present in the frontlines together with the Syrian Democratic Forces in case that a new invasion is happening. Right now the bombings are hitting different areas and it has been really intense in the last days. The Syrian Democratic Forces are in maximum land. Especially there is a an important call in solidarity with the city of Kovane, a symbol of resistance that is now once again under threat. We have been seeing also demonstrations all around the world in solidarity with the revolution here. And this has been also bringing a lot of motivation to continue the resistance and underground. Right now these situations of Latin instability and political transition is still playing in ways that are difficult to predict. We can see how the Trump administration has been sending political relations to Damascus to negotiate with this new provisional government with the attempt to reach autonomy for the duration that connects with the ideas of democratic countries. The ideas of democratic countries don't expect to run a state institution because we don't want to live in a society that is ruled by a state. Are calling for autonomy in a local governance where the different communities can live together, coexist together, administrate their social affairs together and also their defense. We see how the Syrian Democratic Forces is like a military coalition of different local military forces that it's based on the principles of self defense. Maybe to give a bit of context also affect what we have been doing here for several years that our organization has been operating in northern Syria. As anarchists, we can share in solidarity, international solidarity with this revolution because their political values and their political project is really close to our ideas. We see big similarities with the ideas of libertarian socialism and social ecology like this. Thinkers like Murad Guchin have been a big inspiration for Andrea Jahan, leader of the courtesy movement that has been proposing this political frame called democratic conformalism, where especially with the principles of woman liberation, social equality and steady democracy has been the political compass of the revolution. Building autonomy in the different regions has been also a very important element to develop the project. And especially during the war against the Islamic State, as soon as the different territories were liberated, there was a big emphasis on creating local councils, civilian and military councils, both that can run their own affairs. This is very interesting from an anarchist perspective, not to see how one of the main political points is this promoting self defence and creating a military force that is not based on a centralized monopoly of violence, but on allowing every community to take care of their own defense and their own affairs. This is a really inspiring element that for us has been also a really extraordinary learning process, being part of a revolution, living day to day the developments that are happening here, seeing what does it mean to make a revolution. Because it's something that sometimes we anarchists look back, often in like the epic times of like Spain on 36 or Ukraine in the 20s, to see examples of like a mart. And this is something that today is happening here. Kurdistan has been for a long time leading a resistance against the logic of nation states, especially in Turkey. But we saw how it has been final in Syria where that this movement found the space to put in practice these ideas and to develop the revolutionary society that has been terrorized for a long time. So even if we cannot say that Rojava is an anarchist vision, but we can say how anarchist principles inspired the project and that it's been developed here and implemented. This is really an important school. It brings a lot of questions of the big challenges of reorganizing a society with principles of libertarian socialism. It is especially complicated here because of external reasons like the situation of the. The constant threat of the Turkish army. And this is something that for sure we can point out as like, well, it's very difficult to make a revolution with these factors. But this is also notion that making a revolution will always be difficult and will always have really big factors that make the situation very difficult. If making a revolution would be easy we would have already done it. So of course it's something that brings a lot of difficulties, a lot of contradictions, a lot of challenges. And being here day to day living what it means to build our vision in society, or to reflections that we also aim to translate and to reflect together with the anarchist movements from all around the world, to learn from this experience and to be able to analyze together and reflect and discuss together of what it means to build anarchism in the 21st century, what it means to build libertarian socialism nowadays in the current society, with all the different elements that we see, and of course the military conflict that it's ongoing, it can seem maybe sometimes far away. Not for comrades in Western countries, but I think it's important to remember that revolutionary war has been always two sides of the same coin. And it's in these moments of instability, of war, where the logic and the status quo of national states is more weak. Because we can also see it now in other times, in other moments, or even in other places nowadays. What is happening, for example, in Myanmar, what is happening in different areas where the logic of nation state is being questioned, creates instability, creates a situation where different actors will push, take control. And we know that often those actors will be met by a nationalist and fascist mentality with an authoritarian logic to just impose their ideas and their aims by force. And it's very important that we think and we reflect and we agree, organize force that is able to react to that situation. Because authoritarian and hierarchic military instructors are quite fast to react. We as anarchies, we need time to organize horizontally because our instructors function based also on trust, based also like knowing each other how even if I really believe that they are much more solid and much more reliable in the long term, in the short term we can face big, big challenge. So it's important to see fascism with assets advancing all around the world. And we can see how the tensions are growing. So maybe this isn't as so called to learn from the legends here, to learn from how the Kurdish movement had been working and preparing for decades and what happened in Syria made possible for the revolutionary movement to put their cards on the table, to organize together with the people and to defend their people and their communities, building this revolutionary process that nowadays so many people has been like taking inspiration from. So yeah, probably this is a bit confusing and maybe not so current. Sorry, we have been quiet some hours. We had several weeks that have been extremely challenging with like really few hours of sleep. But I hope this is more or less clear. Please if there is something that it's not so understandable. I'm always welcoming new questions and hoping we can answer, answer and share more perspective. We have been writing some statements and we are trying to answer all those people interested in learning more about the situation here and in ways the super just.
- [93:41]
Savannah Guthrie
Welcome to Decisions Decisions, the podcast where boundaries are pushed and conversations get candid. Join your favorite hosts, me Wheezywtf and me Mandy B. As we dive deep, deep into the world of non traditional relationships and explore the often taboo topics surrounding dating, sex and love.
- [93:57]
Robert Evans
That's right, every Monday and Wednesday we.
- [94:00]
Savannah Guthrie
Both invite you to unlearn the outdated narratives dictated by traditional patriarchal norms. With a blend of humor, vulnerability and authenticity. We share our personal journeys navigating our 30s, tackling the complexities of modern relationships.
- [94:14]
Robert Evans
And engage in thought provoking discussions that challenge society societal expectations.
- [94:18]
Savannah Guthrie
From groundbreaking interviews with diverse guests to relatable stories that'll resonate with your experiences, Decisions Decisions is going to be your go to source for the open dialogue about what it truly means to love and connect in today's world.
- [94:30]
Robert Evans
Get ready to reshape your understanding of relationships and embrace the freedom of authentic connections. Tune in and join the conversation.
- [94:38]
Savannah Guthrie
Listen to Decisions Decisions on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [94:47]
H
Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum Tales from the Shadows presented by iheart and Sonoro. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow as part of Michael Tuda Podcast Network. Available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast.
- [95:48]
Garrison Davis
Welcome to what Could Happen Here, a show about things falling apart. I'm Garrison Davis and this episode is going to be a special audio companion piece to an audience article published last night on Substack at Shatterzone. That's Robert's usual substack, though. Last night I published an article detailing the online history and transvestigation discourse regarding a school shooting in Madison, Wisconsin. The article has pictures and hyperlinks which might help explain some of the stuff I'm talking about, but I'll do my best to relay it here to you on the podcast feed. Another Monday in America and another school Shooting on the morning of December 16, a female student at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin shot and killed a teacher and fellow student and injured six others before killing herself. Initially, police falsely reported the shooter was 17 years old, but late Monday night they correctly identified the deceased shooter as 15 year old Natalie Rupnow, who went by Samantha or Sam. In the aftermath of this horrific event, right wing influencers and content creators wasted no time in blaming the shooting on trans people, labeling the suspect as another in a series of alleged transgender terrorists. But what really happened here had nothing to do with trans people and is sadly ordinary for the United States. In August of 2024, the father of the future school shooter took his daughter to a gun range to do trap shooting. Samantha wore a shirt bearing the logo of a band kmfdm. In another photo of the shooter, we can see the front of the shirt. The same design was famously worn by Columbine shooter Eric Harris, who was a fan of the band. The bulk of this new shooter's online footprint suggests a general obsession with school shooters and the tcc, or true crime community, a nickname used for the de facto international Columbine fandom. This sort of content dominates Samantha's Tumblr, which last posted in May of 2024. An alleged online friend of the shooter said that she, quote, posted about school shooters all the time and quote, had school shooter leanings. Samantha is hardly alone in this. There have been over 100 copycats inspired by the Columbine shooting since 1999. A Twitter account believed to have belonged to the shooter posted a series of videos that teased and glorified school shootings in the days leading up to her own shooting. The account was created in December of 2024 and the profile picture featured a young man in camo pants and a tactical backpack. The male profile picture was used as evidence by some conservative influencers that the shooter must have transitioned, though these same influencers could not agree on whether she was female to male or male to female. One user constructed an overlay trying to compare the photo of the shooter with her Twitter profile picture. This is a ridiculous diagram with about seven images overlaid at different opacities. Trying to layer the faces and body shapes of these two people on top of each other. This post is only proof that most of what gets passed off as quote unquote OSINT Online today's just completely incompetent rambling and propaganda. The main issue with this diagram is that the male profile picture is actually another Columbine copycat, a school shooter from Russia who, similar to Samantha, was only 15 years old when he carried out his shooting. Hours after the shooting in Madison, Wisconsin, while right wing accounts were still arguing about what sort of transgender the shooter had been, a neo Nazi Twitter account named Nitro claimed to be friends with the shooter on Discord and repeatedly denied accusations that the shooter was transgender, calling her a quote unquote biological woman. An early complicating factor in establishing the motive and identity of the shooter is that her alleged Twitter account posted a link to a Google Doc of her manifesto, but seemingly forgot to make the visibility setting public. So you couldn't access the Google Doc, you had to put in an email for approval and the person who was supposed to approve your email was was now dead. So there was no way to actually look at this person's manifesto. The shooter's alleged Discord friend Nitro claimed to find what he believed to be a snippet of a manifesto draft shared by the shooter in a Discord group chat. Nitro is based out of the UK and so if this is legitimate, and that is a big if, this message would have been sent about an hour and a half before the shooting per the Discord timestamp. I'm going to read a bit of this alleged writing from the shooter quote Women are the only hope for this wretched world. But even women have been brainwashed by Moids for too long. They've internalized the patriarchy and turned on each other, always begging for male approval and validation. It's disgusting. I realized the truth. Men are irredeemable. Radfem Hitler was is fucking vindicated now. They can't be reformed or redeemed. They are a fucking scourge upon the earth. The only solution is to total exterminate them and every foid who worships these fucking parasites. Every single male must be wiped out. From babies to the elderly. Only then can women be free to create a new world. I'll be the pioneer. I'll be the first one to take the first first step. I don't care if they're fathers, brothers, husbands, sons, teachers, police, and especially N words or politicians. I've been craving to kill them all. This is my mission. Only when their parasitic sludge has been expunged from the earth is when. Then the world will be clean and women can start over. It's the only way. In approximately 10 minutes I should be dead. It's strange, but it feels good. Hopefully to most people this should read like unintelligible gibberish. A reactionary feminist screed about initiating a wave of male targeted violence to cleanse the earth with pepperings of moids and foids, which is Internet incel slang for male and female respectively. Also included are racial slurs and something called quote unquote rad Fem Hitler. That last part is a reference to a Twitter influencer by the same name and the handle Hollow Earth turf, whose content is a mix of trad influenced right wing feminism with anti trans flourishes advocating for a mass purge of moids. This includes trans women. This account is derided by those both on the right and left, but has a small dedicated following of conservative rad fem and anti trans women with trad or often occult interests. The Discord Nazi Nitro claimed that the shooter was, quote unquote a fan of Radfem Hitler and talked about the account frequently on Discord, though Nitro previously believed her interest in the account was merely ironic. Now, obviously an anonymous Twitter Nazi is certainly not the most reliable source, but Nitro was the first person to correctly identify and post photos of the shooter, though they could be utilizing this newfound clout to troll a widely disliked Twitter user. But the fact that he's been right about all other details inclines me to not discount his claims just altogether, but instead just hold them with a billion pounds of salt. Allegations that the shooter was a Neo Nazi Radfem certainly sent Radfem Hitler into a panic, who quickly deleted her account. Meanwhile, some of her online associates worked damage control, claiming to have contacted the alleged boyfriend that the shooter had been quote unquote E dating with the apparent intention of disproving any ties the shooter had to the Twitter Rad Femme orbit Through this alleged online boyfriend, the right wing terf ecosystem claimed to have acquired a copy of the quote unquote full manifesto. This purported manifesto lacks the anti male, anti moid ramblings of the Discord screenshot, but unsurprisingly shares its use of racial slurs and glorification of violence at times evocative of Pekka Eric Avinen's manifesto a Finnish school shooter from 2007 who killed eight people, Ovidin considered himself a quote unquote natural selector who had evolved beyond the classmates he gunned down. In Samantha's purported manifesto, he is mentioned by name as a quote unquote true inspiration. Over the course of eight hours, a Radfem Twitter account released six pages of what they claimed to be Samantha's writing. It contains general misanthropic rambling about humanity and parents being quote unquote scum. The writing describes a difficult family life, suicidal thoughts, and admiration for school shooters and white supremacists, though it briefly references the accelerationist terror Graham Saints. The whole of this piece of writing is much more reminiscent of old school Columbiners than the modern white nationalist terror milieu. The alleged manifesto directly names the two Columbine shooters and includes a paragraph on Vladiskov Roslyakov, another Columbine copycat but from Crimea, who also cosplayed as one of the Columbine shooters during his own mass shooting. Though the discord Nazi and the reactionary radfems question the authenticity of the other's alleged manifesto, what both sides of the incel war do agree on is that Samantha was not transgender. We're gonna go in a quick ad break and come back to discuss transvestigation and the trans terror panic okay, we are back. It seems these days the fastest way to get transvestigated is to do a school shooting. Transvestigating is the practice of trying to determine if an individual is transgender. It's often leveled against celebrities, athletes and politicians, but in recent years there's been a new common subject of transvestigation mass shooters in particular school shooters. Myself, Robert Evans and James Stout previously reported on this Trend back in 2023, right as it grew in prominence after the Nashville Covenant School shooting, which police say was committed by a trans man, we theorized that the online right was testing out a new strategy to attack trans people by associating them with mass shootings via the use of selective bias reporting and plain disinformation. That fear has come to pass. The modicum of believability provided by the Nashville shooting, as it's the only legitimate trans related incident that meets criteria for mainstream mass shooting databases, was enough to fuel this ongoing strategy for the next two years. Since then, conservative influencers have attempted to link nearly every viral mass school shooting to trans people to create a false trend. The strategy operates as follows. During the first few chaotic hours after a shooting, a small group of right wing content creators weaponized the lack of verified information information to make posts framing an alleged shooter as being transgender. This can be done through the use of out of context social media posts, doctored photographs, photos of other people, or simply pictures of long or dyed hair. All they need is a collection of loose evidence to affirm on social media that a mass shooter is really transgender. For more context on this, you can listen to an episode of It Could Happen here. I wrote earlier this year covering the rise of fake trans terrorists. The goal is to get as many of their followers to see and spread these claims as fast as possible, even if it's widely debunked the next day. Many who heard the false claim won't be aware of the verified correction. All these anti trans influencers need is a brief window of time to plant the idea into people's minds and then that becomes remembered history. If this strategy is repeated every few months whenever there's a new mass shooting, then it's pretty easy to create the false perception of a growing trend. Now, in reality, trans people per capita are actually way less likely to commit a shooting compared to CIS people and are much more likely to be the victim of gun violence. But this past Monday, conservative and anti trans influencers tried once again to weaponize a tragedy for their own hateful agenda. Monday afternoon, Ian Miles Chung posted, trans terrorism must end. Hours later, Laura Loomer wrote, the trans movement is really turning out to be a terrorist movement. Just minutes after police responded to the shooting, the conservative influencer Matt Wallace posted that an unknown, quote unquote witness said that the shooter, quote, looked to be transgender, unquote. Wallace, who has over 2.2 million followers on Twitter, provided no source or citation and has since deleted this post. But others in the online Mega Orbit parroted this language before any identifying information was released, with the user Just Jeff from Cali writing, a trans person targeted and opened fire on students at Abundant Life Christian school in Wisconsin. 12 Hit unquote the right wing content creator Ryan Mata baselessly claimed that the shooter was on hormone replacement therapy, calling the shooter, quote, another mentally unstable psychopath who was prescribed puberty blocker and hormones. Mata hosts a show on the right wing YouTube alternative Rumble and has over 123,000 followers on Twitter. His tweet claiming the shooter was on hrt racked up 1.6 million quote unquote views and 17,000 likes in just 12 hours. Larger accounts like Chaya Ricek's libs of TikTok fueled undue speculation about the gender identity of the shooter, seeding confusion into the growing discourse and weaponizing a tragedy for political gain. Quoting the police chief saying, quote, I don't know if the shooter is male or female. A small group of conservative influencers have just so successfully created an alternate reality in which nearly every new mass shooter is transgender that they don't even have to outright say it anymore. Accounts like libsoftiktok and Malaysian blogger Ian Miles Chung can merely gesture to this reality tunnel they've intentionally created, and now thousands of people will affirm this fake reality as the obvious truth backed up by historical precedent of fabricated memory. Matt Wallace posted a photo of the shooter and the male profile picture saying, what do you notice about the shooter? Again, Ian Miles Chung posted quote, police are unable to identify if the school shooter in Madison, Wisconsin is male or female, but they do know who did it and identified them as a student. Is anyone else thinking what I'm thinking? This speculation fueled conspiracy theories which spread claiming that police were intentionally withholding information about the shooter's gender identity in service of some hidden agenda. And actually they were just waiting to like let the family know that their daughter was dead and making sure they had the correct identification. Very basic stuff. Police always do this. But no, it's all part of some secret agenda and some hidden narrative. As early as 1pm EST on Monday, which is just like an hour after the shooting would have taken place, the neo Nazi Twitter account Nitro correctly identified the shooter as his online friend Sam Samantha. As this name spread online, the multi gendered nature of the name added to the speculation that the shooter was trans. Scarlett Johnson, an activist with the ultra conservative parents rights group Moms for Liberty, shared self admitted unconfirmed reports that the shooter was, quote, unquote, a transgender teen who went by Sam or Samantha. As alleged pictures of the shooter started to spread online courtesy of Nitro, the transvestigation of the shooter only intensified. An unfortunate coincidence is that the shooter's given name matches the ancient Sam Hyde meme in which extremely online people try to trick journalists into believing the culprit of a new mass shooting was the American comedian Sam Hyde. In recent years, the meme has turned into the Samantha Hyde meme used to falsely label mass shooters as trans women. One Hyde post from an unassuming boomer named Ed Massey raked up over 600,000 views, 4.5 thousand likes, and one and a half thousand retweets. Massie posted quote, when you put disturbed children on hormone blockers and sexually mutilate them, you're not curing them. You're creating potential school shooters, Unquote. Now, it should go without saying, but the use of puberty suppressing medication has no link to increased violence. We're going to go on one last break and return to conclude our discussion of transvestigating school shooters. Okay, we are back. Time to talk about the potential double flipper. So as this transvestigation continued, the quote unquote, we can always tell crowd ended up transvestigating in both directions, seemingly unsure of what assigned gender at birth the shooter must have had. Some believe the shooter was trans femme while others concluded they were trans masc with one reply to an End Wokeness tweet reading quote those do not look like female hands and another transvestigation post said saying the shooter is a trans kid, a female pretending to be a male. Exactly why we keep our second amendment rights to protect our children from this mental health crisis. Zoom in close on her shirt and hand gesture unquote. A now deleted post from a TERF account also attempted to pass off the shooter as a trans girl saying quote the Wisconsin school shooter was a 17 year old trans identified male. It just keeps happening now. Quote unquote trans identified male was usually a transphobic dog whistle to refer to a trans woman as in a male who identifies as a trans woman. But sometimes transphobes get confused by words and use the phrase to refer to trans people who quote unquote identify as men. Like this other trans investigation post saying quote shooter was a 17 year old trans but identified male. Now one of the most widespread posts claiming the shooter was a trans guy came from an Anti Semitic Doctor in Denmark with 1.4 million followers. She falsely claimed with no evidence that the shooter was taking testosterone, writing quote the Wisconsin school shooter has been identified as a 17 year old trans identified male, another mentally ill girl on testosterone, unquote. As of Tuesday morning, this post has over 3 million views, 22,000 likes and 8.3 thousand retweets. In a following post, this doctor blamed quote unquote the Jews for inventing transgenderism. As a note, extremism researchers have argued that transphobia is structurally similar to anti Semitism. Now, a common piece of anti transmimetic propaganda deployed in the wake of mass shootings is the trans shooter collage. This format spread after the Nashville school shooting in 2023 and this week Matt Wallace provided us with a brand new version. This post is an ugly mishmash of 123-4567 people's faces with a variety of backgrounds, a purposeless red circle in the middle of the image and text that reads, quote, almost every child killed in a mass shooting in the last few years was killed by a transgender shooter. Now out of all those pictures in this collage, only one person in this collage is actually reported to be transgender. The Nashville shooter in the upper left. The rest of the people pictured are not trans and have never claimed to be trans. The person with long hair in the lower half of the image is Colt Gray, who is falsely labeled as trans by far right influencers like End Wokeness and Mike Cernovich Colt Gray's discord posts reveal he actually held transphobic beliefs. A more classic version of the trans shooter collage format is just five pictures with text next to each of them reading the X shooter identified as trans. The X shooter identified as trans Right. Just a big list of five of these names saying that they all identified as trans. The version I'm using here is courtesy of libsoftiktok Admin Chaya Raichek, who posted this earlier this year. But just as before, the majority of the subjects in this meme aren't actually trans and it's just full of disinformation. The Colorado Springs shooter who targeted a queer club is not actually non binary and simply tried to weaponize a false identity to get out of hate crime charges. The person labeled as the Denver shooter is not trans, has never claimed to be trans, he just has dyed hair. This individual pictured did plan the shooting with a transgender male who is not pictured now. Lastly though, the person pictured as the Uvalde shooter is trans. This is not the actual Uvalde shooter. It's a random trans girl who is one of two trans women whose photos were used to falsely label the shooter as transgender. The other two people in this image is the Nashville shooter who does appear to be trans, and the perpetrator of the Aberdeen workplace shooting. But back to Madison, Wisconsin. So after all of that transvestigating, what do we have? Just another columbiner with neo Nazi ties? The right has gotten so good at deploying the trans shooter as a smoke bomb, it obscures the reality of the over availability of firearms, the dynamics of online radicalization, and the social issues that fuel alienation and anger in youth. Instead of focusing on all that on the victims of this epidemic of white supremacist violence, we instead have to spend a whole day debunking the late shooters pronouns. And that's the point. That's what they want us talking about. Those who delete their quote unquote trans terrorist posts after being conclusively proven wrong will try the exact same shtick in a few months after the next mass shooting goes viral. Others won't even care that much. They'll just leave up their post, secure in the stability of the reality tunnel they helped to create. I'm going to close with a quote from Sartre. Never believe that fascists are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge, but they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly since he believes in words, this post has been deleted.
- [120:53]
Savannah Guthrie
Welcome to Decisions Decisions, the podcast where boundaries are pushed and conversations get candid. Join your favorite hosts, Me Wheezy wtf and me, Mandy B. As we dive deep into the world of non traditional relationships and explore the often taboo topics surrounding dating, sex and love.
- [121:09]
Robert Evans
That's right, every Monday and Wednesday we.
- [121:12]
Savannah Guthrie
Both invite you to unlearn the outdated narratives dictated by traditional patriarchal norms.
- [121:17]
Robert Evans
With a blend of humor, vulnerability and.
- [121:19]
Savannah Guthrie
Authenticity, we share our personal journeys, navigating our 30s, tackling the complexities of modern relationships and engage in thought provoking discussions.
- [121:28]
Robert Evans
That challenge societal expectations.
- [121:30]
Savannah Guthrie
From groundbreaking interviews with diverse guests to relatable stories that'll resonate with your experiences, Decisions Decisions is going to be your go to source for the open dialogue about what it truly means to love and connect in today's world.
- [121:42]
Robert Evans
Get ready to reshape your understanding of relationships and embrace the freedom of authentic connections. Tune in and join the conversation.
- [121:50]
Savannah Guthrie
Listen to Decisions Decisions on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [121:58]
H
Welcome. I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturno Tales from the Shadows presented by iheart and Sonoru. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone chilling brushes with supernatural creatures, Take a trip and experience the horrors that have.
- [122:36]
Rachel Zo
Haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows.
- [122:46]
H
As part of Michael Tura Podcast Network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast.
- [123:01]
Hoda Kotb
Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about the worst coups in all of history. I'm your host via Wong and we are returning to one of the worst coups I have ever seen. Because a whole bunch more stuff has happened in our most recent unbelievably dogshit coup in South Korea. The six hour coup in which President Yoon declared martial law and tried to shut down the national assembly. And then the national assembly got together and voted to end the martial law. And then it stopped. Extremely bizarre and baffling series of events. And you know, when we last left our intrepid heroes, the people of South Korea, they had just successfully overturned a coup. No one quite knew what was going to happen in the aftermath. We knew an impeachment vote was coming. A vote to impeach President Yoon. The reason we're coming back to this though is that the aftermath of all of this has been absolutely baffling. And I think this has all been lost in the news cycle because about a trillion things are happening right now. But the situation in South Korea has been unbelievably weird. And so we're now going to take a look at the actual impeachment of President Yoon and the unbelievably bizarre path that led to it. Because, oh my God, the more I talk to people, the more I realize that people don't know how unbelievably unhinged everything has been since. Since the military coup because everyone has moved on. So we're going back. So immediately after the coup, there is this whole wave of military guys going like, we didn't know we were taking part in the coup. We're totally innocent. Like, they just let us out of the trucks and suddenly we were at the National Assembly. We were like, oh, what are we doing? And there's also been this whole thing of all these special Forces guys going like, oh, yeah, no, no, you. Yeah, we. We totally could have taken the National assembly in 20 minutes if we'd wanted to. We just. We just, like, didn't want to take a National Assembly. Like, we didn't. We didn't really want to do it, man. Like, our heart wasn't in this coup. And like, really, I. I have seen the videos of that shit, man. Like, I didn't see you, like, going in there and kicking ass and taking names. I saw you getting your ass kicked by a guy just like, blowing your ass up with a fire extinguisher and like, not being able to break a bunch of very well constructed barricades set up by like fucking Senate aides. So that's been extremely funny. So you like, vanished for the entire time this coup was going on and like, nobody knew where he was and no one had seen him. And things were kind of fiasco.
- [125:32]
Savannah Guthrie
Y.
- [125:33]
Hoda Kotb
He was just gone. So he finally like, reappeared, right? And as he sort of reappears, he tries to like, do this explanation of why he did the coup. It goes about as badly as you would expect from someone who just failed the worst coup that we've ever seen. Here's from npr. In his speech on Thursday, Yoon, a former chief prosecutor, attempted to justify his actions and downplay its significance. He argued that the opposition's legislative dictatorship paralyzed state affairs and disturbed social order. Now this is going back to the thing he did at the time, right? He has this thing where he keeps calling the parliament, which is controlled by the Democratic Party, which is like the Liberal Opposition party. He kept calling the parliaments like opposition anti state forces. And like my brother in Christ, what the fuck is a legislative dictatorship? I mean, like, you know, you could be really strictly anarchist about it and be like, well, yeah, all legislators are dictatorships. But my dude, you are not living under a dictatorship because the parliament that your country elected hates you and refuses to pass your dogshit budget because no one likes you. That is simply not what the word dictatorship means. It reminds me of this thing where, like, you know, if you go back and you read like people in the 1800s talking about. Or like 1700s too, you'll read them talking about monarchies, right? And they'll be like, ah, if the king can like overrule the will of the nobles, we would be living in a pure dictatorship. It's like, what the fuck are you talking about? Like, sir, you live under a monarchy. Like, you are already in a dictatorship. You are also like part of the authoritarian apparatus of the dictatorship. And this is just like the inverse of that, where it's like, ah, the legislature won't let me do whatever the fuck I want. So this is now a dictatorship. And so, like, you know, that's simply not what the word dictatorship means. And you can't get away with that shit as much in a country where people like in living memory have lived through an actual military dictatorship and understand what that's like. The parliament refusing to pass your terrible budget. That's not an excuse to institute martial law and try to shut down the legislature. So this was not received well, as you would expect from whatever unhinged speech that was. He did apologize for imposing martial law, which is a very funny place to end up, is like you try to do a coup and then you have to go on TV and apologize for trying to do the coup and also try to argue you didn't just try to do a couple. And so this. This is received very poorly. As we sort of predicted. Immediately, the opposition Democratic Party immediately tries to impeach Yoon. And from the way the headlines kind of work in the west, and from the way this is being talked about, and even from the way this episode sort of opened, you'd think that this impeachment vote was how we got impeached. But no, no, the first impeachment vote is not how Yoon gets impeached. Everything is way, way weirder than that. Now, Yoon's party, the People's Power Party, which is henceforth going to be called the ppp because I am not going to say the words People Power Party over And over again. Good lord. The PPP get a lot of credit from people outside of South Korea for like, you know, some of their members legitimately did show up to parliament to vote against the martial law declaration. And at the time in the last episode, I said, that's bullshit. You don't get credit for voting against martial law. And also, like, most of them weren't there and I kind of got shit for this. And I have been absolutely 100% vindicated. Because the impeachment vote, the first one rolls around. The first one happens very quickly after the first coup, right? Well, the first coup, hopefully the only coup. Hopefully there's not a second coup, but this happens very quickly. And okay, so the vote rolls around and the entire ppp, the entire party, except maybe like two people just walk out of the chambers. And because they walk out of the chambers, the vote fails because they don't have. They don't have quorum. And if you don't have a quorum, is it like there's like a minimum number of members that has to be in attendance for. For whatever you're doing to be legal to stop like two people from showing up in the middle of the night and being like, aha, I am the parliament. We've just passed this like, order that makes me dictator or whatever. And again, the entire PPP just walks out and they leave and the vote fails because the PPP managed to whip basically its entire membership into. Into trying to keep Yun in power. And here begins the what the fuck is going on? Part of this episode. Because A, all reports we have suggest that Yoon was planning to have the leadership of the PVP arrested. And B, he just literally tried to do a coup and they're still backing him. And C, we stumble into a very, very thorny question that I saw from people in Korea, like the moment after all this stuff happens, but didn't really hit the Western press until later, if at all, and didn't really hit like the mainstream consciousness. And this question will become apparent in a second. So here's from the Guardian. Senior PPP politicians have claimed Yoon can continue as President while delegating his powers to the Prime Minister. An Arrangement park. That's Park Chan Dae, who's a very powerful Democratic Party politician. An Arrangement park described as, quote, a blatant constitutional violation with no legal basis. Now this is true. What park is saying is right.
- [131:01]
Garrison Davis
Right.
- [131:02]
Hoda Kotb
And the fact that the Guardian is saying, like, their way of framing this is, oh, the. The opposition party person says that this is a blatant Violation of constitutional law with no legal basis. That's not just a thing that he says. Like this is true. Like there is no legal mechanism for. Well, we don't want to impeach our Presidents. But also, he just tried to do a coup. So instead we're going to take his powers away and give it to the Prime Minister so he can still serve without us impeaching him. Like that's. That's not a thing. You can't do this. There's no mechanism for this. The Democratic Party people are just completely correct here. But because for some reason the Guardian feels it. I mean, it's the Guardian, right? Like, but they feel it necessary to sort of both sides. Again, a fucking coup. This is where we are. Here's more from the Guardian. The leader of the ppp, Hwan Dong Hoon, said at the weekend that Yoon would not be involved in foreign and other state affairs, with control of the administration shifting to the Prime Minister, Han Deok Su Han said Yoon's televised apology was effectively a promise to leave office now. No, it wasn't. It was not a promise to leave office. What the fuck are you talking about? Like, everyone could just go listen to his apology. He didn't say that. He did not say he was going to leave office, right? And no, Heli says it's effectively a promise to leave office, but it simply isn't right. Everyone could just like see this. And again, like, you know, okay, so like the thing that. The thing that the PPP is trying to do, right? The PPP is trying to have their Prime Minister like gain control of the administration. Now. There is a mechanism to do this. Under the constitution. It's called impeachment. The thing that happens when you get impeached is that you get kicked out of office. As we're going to get to this later, but you get kicked out of office and the Prime Minister gets put into power. And this happens until the Supreme Court decides whether. Whether. Whether your impeachment should go through or not, right? So like, there's a mechanism for this, but the PPP doesn't want to like impeach Yoon, but they also don't want him seemingly running the country because he appears to be like absolutely unhinged and just again declared martial law and tried to knock off the legislature. So you have this. You have this whole sort of steaming mess of a situation where the PPP is trying to like have it both ways of like not having union power, but also not impeaching him. But this also begs one very important question. Who the fuck was running the country between the first impeachment vote and the second one? No one knows. No one knows who was running this fucking country. This is a country with 51 million people and nobody knew who was fucking running the country. And this, this barely made the news. I'm going insane. How, how, why, why, why is this a thing that just like completely disappeared beneath the fucking like, chatter of the news waves? This just. This just vanish entirely. And speaking of vanishing entirely, we're going to vanish entirely to do these ads and we are back. So as you would imagine from a situation where again, you have a country of 51 million people where no one knows who is running the country, things have been extremely chaotic. So, you know, we covered in the last episode that like a bunch of ministers were resigning, right? Because you know, they had just taken part in a coup and they were like, well, shit, the ex Defense Minister, who's one of the people who's been sort of implicated as being like, saying that he's to a large extent behind the coup, like, is true. But I mean, this was a cooperative effort between Yoon, the Defense Minister and a bunch of the people in the army, and the Defense Minister who resigned in disgrace, like, got thrown in jail. So that's fucking wild. Like he just got like arrested by the police. A bunch of testimony also has come out from the national assembly investigation, which I'm not covering much of the testimony from, from the national assembly investigation because it's really unclear exactly how reputable all this stuff is because a lot of people are just saying shit, right? And some of it may be real, some of it may be stuff that people have, you know, obtained through their sources, but some of it's probably not. But like, to get a sense of like, the kind of stuff that is coming out in this investigation, one of the big claims was from. I think it's from like a TV host who claimed he got texted it by a guy in the army, but apparently he was saying that the plan, Bai Yoon and the army, the plan was to have the head of the PPP killed and then drop a North Korean uniform nearby to like do a false flag and implicate North Korean special forces. Now this is unbelievably unhinged, right? What the fuck? And it probably isn't true, but you know, the source isn't great, but like, who knows, right? Like, we don't. We don't actually know if they were playing to do this and fucked it up or if they weren't planning to do this or if this person, is this person just lying, this person did get this text, but the person was misinformed. We don't know if this is just like misinformation that's being spread around. This is a good demonstration of what the sort of chaos of this moment has been. And you know, and there's been a lot of other stuff that I think in any other time and place probably would have been like front page news. So one of, one of the things that happens in this whole process is that the South Korean police tried to raid the house of the President. And you know, like, as part of their investigation, there's a whole thing where Yoon's been ordered by like the investigatorial services to not leave the country because he's just actively under investigation for this military coup being illegal by just like the regular ass police. And so South Korean police like try to raid his house and they can't do it because the South Korean equivalent of the Secret Service stops them from doing the raid. And this in and of itself is something that like again would be a giant news headline at any other point in time. And it's just been completely lost. And it's like, it's not sort of clear right now how this is all sort of going to play out and whether the police are going to be able to do this. And you know, what's actually going to happen to Yoon after he presumably leaves office. I mean, I guess the Supreme Court could save him, but like, you know, there's a real chance that he, and we're going to get into this more in a second. There's a real chance that he just like fucking goes to prison. Right? And unlike the last president who was removed from office, like, I can't imagine him getting pardoned by the next administration because that was merely an unhinged corruption scandal involving the President of South Korea being under the influence of a shaman and doing a bunch of corruption that did a bunch of horrible shit. But this is, you know, this is like he tried to do a coup, right? So it's sort of unclear if he's going to get saved from that. It does seem very likely that he's going to face a bunch of charges for this because everyone is unbelievably pissed off. Here's from dw. On Monday, former head of Special Warfare Command Kwak Jung Gwyn and former head of the Capital Defense Command, Lee Jin Woo were arrested on charges of deploying military personnel to the Parliament. Former Chief of the Defense Counterintelligence Command, Yeo In Hong has been accused of orchestrating the implementation of martial law. And Army Chief Park An Soo has been suspended from his role. Yoon's former Defense Minister Kim Yong Hyun, who stepped down immediately following the aborted martial law declaration, and former Interior Minister Lee Seung Min also face investigations. So what we're seeing here effectively, right, is the house cleaning of the ranks of the Korean military who've been involved with this whole thing, right? And they're going through a lot of different people. Part of this is also clearing out some of like the cliques in the military who've been sort of backing Yoon and who people have suspected have been a bunch of the people behind a lot of this stuff. And this is a good and necessary process. The entire time this has been going on, everyone has been terrified of the possibility of a second coup. And the only way to avoid that in the short term is to remove the senior leadership of the military and get them away from their troops. They don't have the ability to sort of plan anything. And sometimes this can make people just go for it, right? Like that. That's what happens in Bolivia, it looks like, where the, the failed Bolivian coup was a product of, you know, people trying to do house cleaning and get rid of military guys before they did a coup. And so this makes them go off half cocked. And like, you know, that's, that's a bad situation for, I mean it's bad situation for everyone in the sense that there's a coup happening, but it's a bad situation, especially for the military because they don't have their coup preparations in place so it's easier to knock them off. But what's interesting about this too is that to a large extent we're seeing other parts of the Korean state like really go after the military, right? And this, I don't know, I mean, like, I'm hoping this kind of like has a precedent inside of the sort of Korean like liberal democratic societal norms that like, you can't let this just unhinged military do all of this stuff. The precedent of this sort of like military house cleaning I think is a good one, right? This is going to be a rare, a rare MIA agrees with the people who founded the US moment because oh my God, those people sucked shit like bunch of slave owning genocidal bastards. But you know, one of the things that they were right about is the political danger to any democratic system of having a standing army, right? And especially when you have a set, a standing army that's like permanently on a semi war footing. The way The South Korea's is there's always a real political risk that they attempt to seize power and you have to fucking stop them from doing that. And ideally you just fucking ax as much of it as you possibly can, right? I mean, I think you should act. You axe the entire political system to make sure this doesn't happen. But you know, this is hopefully a good first step. I also want to mention that the specific charge of insurrection is being thrown at a lot of these people and also at Yoon himself. And like, he absolutely did it, right? Like, there's not much of a dispute that he did in fact do an insurrection under. Under sort of Korean law. And this technically like carries the death penalty, but I don't think they're going to kill him. But you know, this is the sort of severity of this stuff under the Korean legal system. And okay, so like all of this fucking chaos is happening, right? And eventually there's a second impeachment vote. And this time the public pressure is enough that the PPP stays in the chamber to vote no. And only about a dozen, like per npr, only about a dozen PPP lawmakers actually vote to impeach the guy who, who just tried to have their fucking parliament disbanded. You know, and this is like one of the really depressing things about this, right? Even after everything, right? And this is something that we can trace back to sort of the roots of the conservatism of the ppp even after all of this shit, right? Like these people still backed him. And that's a really, really grim and depressing thing. And part of the reaction to this has been from the South Korean Trade Union movement, which has been calling for, just straight up, the disbanding of the PPP as a political party, right? And that's something that I think is extremely reasonable. Again, if your party's president tries to do a military coup, I think, I think you shouldn't be allowed to have a party anymore. This is the mea liberal opinions, right? Okay. So like eventually this vote does go through and the stage that we're at right now is that, okay, so once you get impeached by the national assembly, you're suspended from all your duties and the Prime Minister takes power. So what's happening right now is he doesn't have any power formally, but we're still in this sort of holding period. We're waiting for the Supreme Court to weigh in and either like approve the impeachment or not. And that's, that's kind of where things stand now after an unbelievably unhinged week and a half of just everything being extremely unblowed. Two weeks, I guess everything being just unbelievably, extremely weird. And yeah, but I think there is a mild hopeful note which is that like, if you fight back against these people, they can be defeated. It sucks, but you can eventually get them to crumble. And all I can really say for this is I hope the South Korean people prevail over the shitty military dictators. And I hope that we too are able to sort of prevail in the US against our sort of equivalents of these forces.
- [144:12]
Savannah Guthrie
Welcome to Decisions Decisions, the podcast where boundaries are pushed and conversations get candid. Join your favorite hosts, Me Wheezywtf and me, Mandy B. As we dive deep into the world of non traditional relationships and explore the often taboo topics surrounding dating, sex and love.
- [144:28]
Robert Evans
That's right, every Monday and Wednesday we.
- [144:31]
Savannah Guthrie
Both invite you to unlearn the outdated narratives dictated by traditional patriarchal norms. With a blend of humor, vulnerability and authenticity, we share our personal journeys navigating our 30s, tackling the complexities of modern relationships and engage in thought provoking discussions that challenge societal expectations. From groundbreaking interviews with diverse guests to relatable stories that'll resonate with your experiences, Decisions Decisions is gonna be your go to source for the open dialogue about what it truly means to love and connect in today's world.
- [145:01]
Robert Evans
Get ready to reshape your understanding of relationships and embrace the freedom of authentic connections. Tune in and join in the conversation.
- [145:09]
Savannah Guthrie
Listen to Decisions Decisions on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [145:17]
H
Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare Enter Nocturnum Tales from the Shadows presented by iheart and Sonoro. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone chilling brushes with supernatural creatures.
- [145:52]
Rachel Zo
Take a.
- [145:52]
H
Trip and experience the horrors that have.
- [145:55]
Rachel Zo
Haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow.
- [146:05]
H
As part of Michael Tuda Podcast Network. Available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast.
- [146:19]
Hoda Kotb
Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that I introduced the same way almost every time. I don't know you, you listen to the show, right? You. You're listening at like some point in the future. You, you, you probably know the things falling apart, putting back together again. Intro. I don't. I don't have to do it. We are doing Something that we have done before and I guess we'll continue to do, which is talking to other anarchist media projects about their work and how things are going and yeah, the general why, how, what of it all. And today we're talking with the collective of anarchist writers. And very specifically we're talking to Shuli Branson, who is a writer, translator and teacher currently living in so called New York. Carla Joy Bergman, who lives across the border in Canada and is a mom, writer, artist and loves crows. Very important. We'll be coming back to that in a second. And Vicky Osterweil, who is a worker, writer and agitator based in Philadelphia. And all three of you, welcome to the show.
- [147:13]
I
Hi, thanks for having us.
- [147:14]
Savannah Guthrie
Hi, thanks so much for having us.
- [147:16]
Robert Evans
Thanks for having us. Love your project. I also just wanted to give a shout out to our fourth member, Dani Burleson, who's not here today because she's working paid work, who just rounds us out so beautifully and just wanted to say her name.
- [147:31]
Hoda Kotb
Yeah, I'm excited to talk about this and partly I'm excited to talk about it because. So the acronym for this is caw and there's a whole crow theme going on and we love a crow here in Portland. It is maybe our big thing.
- [147:44]
Robert Evans
Yeah, I'm in Vancouver. Well, I was in Vancouver, just up from there, but Pacific Northwest and so it's Crow highway, you know, thousands and thousands of crows. Oh, yeah, I get it.
- [147:56]
I
I think the crow is like what ultimately sealed the project for us, honestly.
- [148:00]
Savannah Guthrie
Yeah, yeah.
- [148:01]
Hoda Kotb
Hell yeah.
- [148:02]
Savannah Guthrie
Yeah, it was, it really came together around, around the, the corvid theme, I think. Yeah, the combination of enjoying shiny things, extreme intelligence and never ending spite, I think are all sort of motivating factors for all of us. So.
- [148:14]
Hoda Kotb
Yep, yep.
- [148:15]
Robert Evans
And, and that they're a collective and have meetings often throughout the day.
- [148:21]
I
No collective call to murder, which is also pretty badass.
- [148:26]
Hoda Kotb
Yeah, there's a huge thing in Portland here where we have, we have the mega murder. So every, every like morning all the crows sort of fly off into their different like little murders and they go, they, you know, they go out and hang out in the city and then at around sunset every day all of the crows fly back into the city to have their like giant mega murder meeting. There's thousands of. And thousands of them. You know, you look up and you just see them like the herds, like the murders of crows flying past. And if you. There's specific spots in Portland where you can just go see all of the, all the crows hanging out and you know, do. Doing. Doing whatever the things crows do when literally an entire city swear the crows gather together every night.
- [149:05]
I
Oh, no, it's a spokes council. They're doing this.
- [149:08]
Hoda Kotb
Well, but I don't. It's not a spokes council, though, because all of them are there.
- [149:12]
I
All right, true.
- [149:13]
Hoda Kotb
I feel like that's an assembly.
- [149:14]
Robert Evans
It's more assembly. Yeah, yeah. In Vancouver it's called. It's called the Crow highway.
- [149:19]
Savannah Guthrie
Yeah.
- [149:20]
Hoda Kotb
Hell yeah.
- [149:21]
Robert Evans
Because it's so massive and goes forever and ever and ever to the roost. Brief story on crows and resistance. A really incredible story in Vancouver when a park was. A colonial person created a park in the downtown which was like displaced a lot of indigenous people in their homes and designed this park that was filled with crows as well. They also brought in animals from Europe as well to make it pretty. And the crows made it really hard for these animals. And so the city of Vancouver for 50 years from 1900 to 1950, gave free range to the Vancouver gun people to go into the park and shoot crows every day.
- [150:08]
Hoda Kotb
Oh, my God.
- [150:09]
Robert Evans
And when I see like the amount of crows that are still alive, it's just a metaphor for indigenous resilience, you know, like, it's just so powerful. So it's another reason why I'm like, interested in terms of where I was like, living.
- [150:25]
I
As I've been gathering images for our project, I've been specifically trying to find images of crows attacking people because I think that's, that's good. So it's like, you know, the follow up to what you were saying, Carla, is the. The crow's revenge.
- [150:40]
Savannah Guthrie
Yes.
- [150:42]
Hoda Kotb
Yeah. One of the things that, you know, you have, you kind of have to do here in Portland is you have to kind of like negotiate with the crows. You have to, like, you leave them like peace offerings. And you sort of, you know, you, when your friends come, you like, you introduce them to the crows so the crows know that you're okay. And it's, it's, it's very sweet, shiny things. Yeah, we love a crow based society. And speaking of a crow based society. Yeah. Do you want to, I guess, give a brief, brief sort of overview of what CAW is before we get sort of more into it?
- [151:10]
Savannah Guthrie
Yeah, I'm happy to take a spin at that. This is Vicky, by the way. Yeah, so CAW is sort of like. I mean, it's an anarchist journal of arts and culture that is a collective of anarchist writers. It's also a corvid appreciation working group. There's a lot of different acronyms for it. And what we are doing is we are bringing all four at first, just all four of our efforts together. So a lot of us work on separate podcasts, we have pedagogical tasks. We have many activist projects that center around culture. You know, I have a newsletter, Shule has a Patreon, Carla has a newsletter. Danny has, has also has like an email list. There's all these different projects and we realized that like for all of our talk about mutual aid and working collectively when it comes to writing and creativity, the market has been so fractured and so alienated and so sort of so turn into like everyone has an individual newsletter that they're competing with one another, you know, even though they don't want to be like they want to be. But that's sort of ultimately what's happening is that there's limited sort of customers and there's also this other trend going on right now of this really exciting trend of worker owned journals. A lot of them local, local journalisms. There's some in New York and Chicago and there's one in Asheville and all over the country as well as like on special topics. So like Aftermath, which like does. I think they video games and there's four media who does tech. There's just like all these different sort of sites doing this sort of thing. And I think in some ways all of us are sort of collectively reinventing the newspapers that have been sort of stolen and destroyed by capital, you know, in a big way.
- [152:37]
Hoda Kotb
Yeah.
- [152:37]
Savannah Guthrie
So there's sort of two goals that we have. And I think Carla speaks really eloquently just to some of this, but one of which is to make writing radical culture work. Beautiful, joyful, fun and also critical like movement work. Work to make it sustainable for us and for anyone else who wants to share in this project, who we can sort of expand towards. But also to make it easier for people who are reading to have access to these things like in one place instead of having to decide who they care for and who they like in order to sort of do that math of like, who can I afford to subscribe to? Like, I personally, I don't know if this is true for everyone else, but personally I usually have about two or three people I can afford to subscribe to a month and they switch it out just like on a very arbitrary basis or something like that. That was very technical and financially focused. But what we're really excited to do mostly is support each other's work because I think we all really love and admire each other's. Work and have for a long time. And this is just this really exciting opportunity. Instead of my writing just being for me, it's for Shuli and Carla and Dani now. And that just makes it feel more inspiring and exciting as well as a collective process. Yeah.
- [153:43]
I
I mean, connected to the financial aspect. But I think when we were initially discussing this, the experience of being a writer is trying to find outlets for your writing.
- [153:52]
Hoda Kotb
Yeah.
- [153:53]
I
And if you're trying to get paid for that, you have to sell it to people. Right. And so it's very hard to get paid at all for writing. And it's very hard to place your writing in venues that publish it. Especially if you're coming from an anarchist angle. Because people do not really want to. To publish things that come to anarchist conclusions. Like they want you to do all the analysis and whatever, but they don't want you to think about like what, what an action is.
- [154:17]
Garrison Davis
Like.
- [154:18]
I
So like, you know, you could write for some of the, the lefty, so called lefty socialist whatever rags, but they don't. Yeah, they won't feature anarchists. They basically even just act as if anarchism doesn't exist. Never exists. You know. Never existed. They erased the whole history of it. The only serious kind of political forces, some kind of democratic socialism. So to us, we wanted to create a place where we can do the writing we want to do without having to make compromises in what we want to say just to get published. Because that. Yeah, just that game of like, of shopping your stuff around is. It's demeaning. It's totally time consuming. It distracts you from actually doing the work. So we were like, let's band together instead of each of us going off wasting our time trying to write.
- [155:09]
Hoda Kotb
Yeah. And I think one of the other issues with this too also is the pay is just so bad. Even the almost especially the leftist groups page is so rancid and all of the combinations of those things make it really, really hard to just sort of be an independent writer. And also. Okay, jumping back a second to the erasing anarchism exists. This is why I, the one that makes me always lose my mind is like, I'm specifically going to name Jacobin here because I don't like them. But like one of the things that Jocman will do is they'll be covering a strike that is organized by the iww. It is an IWW union. They will have pictures of the strike where there are a bunch of people holding IWW banners and they will never mention that it was the IWW who organized the strike. So, like, yeah, there is this real sort of conspiracy of silence, I guess, about, about our politics and the stuff that we do in the world.
- [155:59]
I
It's so glaring. Jacobin is. Is definitely a big culprit. And then the. The podcast associated with the dig, like, they will specifically talking about history where anarchists have been very involved and they just will not mention them. I'm like, and sometimes there's really good history and analysis on that podcast. But, like, this is an omission that they clearly are choosing.
- [156:19]
Hoda Kotb
Yeah. And I think, you know, self organization is effectively the only way out of this because otherwise you just sort of, I don't know, have to deal with all of the sort of media gatekeepers, like, sitting there in front of you with a stick going, no anarchism, bonk.
- [156:34]
Savannah Guthrie
Yeah. And even the projects that have sustained, that have survived, which are all really awesome, you know, like, and exciting. Like, very few of them have offered real sustainability, like, on a professional level. And like, I've been publishing like, quote unquote, professionally for 15 years. And like, I'm the like, newest writer on the scene, like from our crew, basically. Like, we're incredibly experienced and all of us have books out, all of us have edited volumes, all of us have, like, podcasts. And like, are people who I like, really respect, whose names I think are big and important in. In the world of theory and activism and like, in the Anglophone world especially. And none of us can sustain ourselves as writers as such because of the way that just, you know, both politically, but also just like the way the market has come down.
- [157:18]
Danny Thrill
Yeah.
- [157:18]
Savannah Guthrie
And it just feels like something we could apply our politics to solving as a workplace issue, rather than just sort of as like, are you committed enough to sacrifice all your time issue? And so hopefully that will also function to make more work available to produce and to platform and to sort of work as an example simultaneously.
- [157:40]
Hoda Kotb
Unfortunately, speaking of sustaining work as a platform, unfortunately, the way we are sustained here is with these ads. So hold on. And we are back. And this, I guess, brings us to the. The kind of work that's happening here. And I, I was very excited because one of the things y'all have done is an interview with Raul Zabecki, who is the author of like, one of my favorite quotes of all time, I think I've said on this show, like, multiple times that I weirdly ran into in a sort of completely unrelated book called Rhythms of the Pachacuti, which is about the sort of the Water and gas wars in Bolivia. I talked about this book on the show, like, all the time. This quote goes roughly like, struggle illuminates the divisions of a society, like lightning illuminates the sky. And I love it. It's like, it's like. It's the best explanation of what happened during 2020 that I've ever seen. And this is sort of what's happening, like right now too, is like you have these sort of flashpoint moments where, you know, suddenly all of how society works very briefly becomes visible and you have this sort of moment when you're illuminated by it, to act. And so, I don't know, I'm really excited that y'all are talking to him. And yeah, you talk maybe a lot more about what's been going on and what's to come, I'm sure.
- [159:00]
Robert Evans
Thanks. That was a highlight, definitely this year was talking to Raoul, obviously. You know, at Podcast Go, we talked for quite a bit longer than what was on the show. And I think, like, reading his newest book that was translated and then doing that show with him, it was completely connected to me, like reaching out to Shuli about doing KA because there was a way that we. That he talked about this whole idea of disappearing symmetries that the Zapatistas are working on. Like this idea of really, truly looking at all the fault lines within horizontality or autonomy that we don't actually enact in our day to day lives. And so I really started to reflect on my own life that way and. And not so much Vicky at this point yet, but like Julie and Danny, both of them, like, we just were blurbing each other's books and like supporting each other, connecting to publishers or trying to connect each other to publishers. And this is like trying. Trying to disrupt a competitive nature that's running underneath, even when we're all really committed to not being competitive. But there's like, it is like, there's a. You know, so all of this to say that for me, like, collaboration is at the heart of what we're doing here in a deep, deep way. And for me, collaboration just means that when something is created that wouldn't be created otherwise without this collaboration. So I'm just really excited to see what sparks and comes up individually, but also like, with each other and even like through collaborations like the show with Raul and like, how that spreads seeds and ideas. Yeah. So, like, for myself, I'm going to definitely focus on collaboration in a deep way. I don't think I'll write very much solo stuff for the for Call, I think it will always be in conversation with others and just trying to double down on doing it together instead of individual pursuits.
- [160:58]
H
Yeah.
- [160:59]
Hoda Kotb
And that's something I think is useful for everyone listening to this is that, like, it's a lot easier to develop better ideas. And, you know, it makes your writing more clear. It makes the way that you, you know, just the way you act in the world a lot more clear when you're working with other people. And it's, you know, it's the process by which the best stuff gets created.
- [161:18]
Savannah Guthrie
Yeah, I mean, I think that's really like true. And I think like, I have for a long time now sort of accepted that writing is never going to support or sustain me. And all I needed was a push from a few other people to be like, wait, what if we like actually tried to do it collectively? To be like, oh yeah, like I could actually try that. Like, I don't have to just accept that, Like, I'll always have like a full time job plus whatever writing, like in whatever hours I can steal, you know, and like, you know, with great difficulty put out some writing sometimes and then always feel guilty when I'm not putting out enough to like sustain myself. Like that whole process. I think a lot of creatives right now know that struggle, you know, of having gigs and work and lots of other important things to do and, you know, sort of accepting that that's the conditions. And I think, like, what's so inspiring about, you know, because Carla, and as Carla was just mentioning, they sort of brought. I'm the last one on the, on the crew and I was sort of the closer, you know, or whatever, but I think like, I don't know what that means genuinely, but I was brought in and I think just having them propose it already, just as a project that we've been thinking of has changed the way I've been thinking about what is possible with the writing I'm already doing. And so I think just to underline that point and go on and on and on. Collaboration is really important and supporting one another is so powerful.
- [162:34]
I
Yeah. When Carla and I initially had the seed conversation of this, Carla said something about collectivizing as writers. Like we talk about it with all these other other workplaces and industries and whatever. And it was like, like when, when she said that, I was like, oh yeah, like that makes so much sense. Like we're off here doing our own thing. And as Vicky said, you do it sort of with the knowledge that it's not sustainable. You steal your time to do it right. Even the supposed jobs that are there to enable you to write actually make you do all this other work. So, like, the time for writing is always, like, endlessly deferred. And, you know, we have that image also, like, of the patron or something. Or like Virginia Woolf says, you need, like, money enough to have a room of one's own. But if we put ourselves together in this way, then we are trying to. Yeah, I don't know, create more time for ourselves to write. And then, like, going back to something Vicky said earlier about, like, reinventing the newspaper. There was a time in anarchism where, like, I think we talked about this amongst ourselves, like, where, like, every block had, like, a Yiddish anarchist newspaper. Right. It wasn't like you had one newspaper telling all the anarchists what to think. It was like it was hyperlocal in a way, and there was so many voices. And so I think that's another thing that we want to do is, like, help for that proliferation. Because in the sort of spirit of collaboration, like, the reason to write as an anarchist for me is to have conversations to produce the possibility for people to, like, receive it and then contact me and I get into conversations with people and learn things from them. Yeah.
- [164:10]
Hoda Kotb
And I think there's an angle there too, where, like, I think we're kind of. Okay, so I was a tiny baby when all this was happening, so I'm going to have to rely on y'all for this. But, like, you know, one of the things I get from sort of reading the record about, like, the older anarchist movement. I mean, when I say older, I mean like, like anti anti globalization era stuff was like, there. There seemed like there was a lot more of a kind of like, anarchist media sphere.
- [164:34]
Robert Evans
Are you talking about like the late 90s?
- [164:36]
Hoda Kotb
Yeah, like, like, like through the 2000s to some extent.
- [164:39]
Robert Evans
Like Battle Seattle.
- [164:40]
Hoda Kotb
Yeah, yeah.
- [164:41]
Robert Evans
I mean, that was like the, you know, the birth of anarchy again, Right? Yeah, I was definitely around. I'm in my late 50s, but the same struggle was there. Like that. Yeah, that we're swimming in liberalism. And like, that Socialist worker, like, capturing of the movement was just as powerful then. And it was. You saw it at all the rallies and stuff. And, you know, immediately anarchism was marginalized and pushed off as irrelevant and not practical for the revolution. And this is why it's splintered off in all these kind of sectarian movements in the. That's my take anyway. I think that.
- [165:20]
Hoda Kotb
No, it makes sense. It makes sense.
- [165:22]
Robert Evans
I mean, I've hashed this out with so many older anarchists. I was part of Institute for Anarchist Studies. Like we talked about this a lot phenomena with Scott Crow. And you could just see the direct line of where it went into sectarianism from this sort of rebirth. Sorry, I went off on a different thing instead of like journals and media.
- [165:40]
Hoda Kotb
But yes, no, no. Well, this is good too because like, I think that's the other thing I've been realizing is like people don't. I mean in my generation too, but like people younger than me don't really know the history of this stuff. Like all the time I have conversations with people where I start talking about the Oaxaca uprising and they have no idea what I'm talking about. And I'm like, oh no, we need to resuscitate the history of the 2000s, because stuff happened there.
- [166:04]
Savannah Guthrie
So I wasn't actually active at that point, but I was very adjacent to some of that stuff at the moment. And some of that was actually because a lot of what was going on in the alter globalization movement in that period was happening through culture. I think most famously, touring punk bands would also bring zine libraries with them so they would have someone distroing zines and playing the show. And I got radicalized through punk. I know a lot of people who did. When I finally did it was after that movement had largely crested. But I think there was a lot of focus on culture. And also a critique of culture was also pretty central to, to how people were thinking and moving. And I think the explosion of social media and like posting and like the sort of quote unquote democratization and leveling of communication capabilities, which in some ways was more real in the early 2010s than it is certainly than it is now. It wasn't totally like a made up narrative, but it was also over relied on. I think people sort of reached for a kind of like, well, we. Anyone who can use these tools to communicate, like, that's valuable. So critiquing sort of media in general or critiquing sort of capitalist media is sort of beside the point because we can go around it. We can sort of go. We can, you know, go on Twitter and subvert it and we can like do all these, you know, go sideways around it. So I was, you know, a participant in Occupy Wall street in 2011, which people also don't know anything about because that's just being older. But Occupy Wall street was started by a magazine called Adbusters, which came out of the WTO movement and, and sort of managed to stick around and by 2011, when they did that, we thought it was like a joke. It was like, oh, these culture jammers who, like, make fun of advertisements. Like, they started the movement. Like, that's ridiculous, right? Like, that's silly. And, like, this is not to defend ad busters. I think whatever. We.
- [167:50]
Hoda Kotb
Yeah, there's some issues with them, but they also did think, I don't know.
- [167:54]
Savannah Guthrie
Yeah, but also I think that reaction of, like, culture jamming is sort of stupid or like, you know, like talking about cult. Who wants to talk about culture at this point? I think that that made sense in the context in which we were moving and organizing. But, like, now, once again, it is clear that by abandoning the cultural sphere in many ways, we have in fact lost a tremendous amount of ground. So I think it's actually really important to have cultural organizations that aren't just theory, that aren't just news, but that are like, really talking about art and beauty and, like, excitement and joy and fiction and all these things that we find really important. Because I think a lot of people sort of think, well, it's a crisis moment. The world's ending. Why would you do that? But the world has been ending since 1492. The world worth defending has been ending since then, and it hasn't ended yet. And one of the ways it hasn't ended is by indigenous and black and other marginalized cultures and stories and narratives and works of art has been an important mode of history and resistance just as much as organizing and struggle. And, yeah, I think we can move some struggle onto that terrain right now. And I think there's a lot of craving for it now because I think also for a while, things felt really oversaturated. But the last five years, the Internet doesn't feel helpful anymore. No, everything feels like streaming is a mess. Everything's a mess. There's no access to culture that feels good. Everyone hates what they're doing. They know it's exploiting the artists. They know Spotify is giving people pennies and that HBO and all those, you know, all the. All the streaming services, you know, support Amazon, and they're. They're just miserable. Right. And I think there's. There's a real opening and a real desire for something else at this moment. At the same time that things are indeed quite on fire, literally, ecocidally, but also also sort of politically.
- [169:36]
Hoda Kotb
Yeah. Speaking of everything being on fire, we need to take an ad break and then we will come back. And I think the deliberate political intervention. Here we are. We are back from Capitol Hellscape to mildly less capital. Hellscape. Yeah. Julie, you were gonna say.
- [169:58]
I
Yeah, I wanted to just build on this culture thing because when, you know, when. After October 7th, when people are getting together to try to figure out how in the United States to do some kind of work and action and support and solidarity with Gaza and the Palestinian Liberation movement, people were just sort of like, what the hell can we even do? And one of the things that I would say to people is like, just putting up stickers and writing about Gaza on the walls, like, in graffiti, has a huge impact, and it's overlooked often, I think, as, like, something that's effective. But we can see that there has been a giant cultural shift after October 7th in terms of people's awareness of the Israeli genocide against the Palestinians and then support for the Palestinians. I think that has to do really, you know, post October 7th, with the fact that this was, like, kind of plastered everywhere. And so it's easy to kind of think that that isn't action. But to me, in a way, doing something like that is more effective than the kind of marching in circles that we can do that we call protest. And, you know, like, going back to punk. I think also punk has. Has. Gets a bad rap sometimes because, you know, in that line of like the kind of book Shining Lifestylism. But I don't think we should downplay, like, punk created its own culture of people doing everything themselves to make it happen. It's where I got radicalized too. And there were, like. It was anarchist, right? It was like, explicitly anarchist. And you were living in an anarchist way and, like, creating things in an anarchist way. And it was this whole other world. So, like, if we put our anarchist energy into culture, it's part of making a world that we want to live in, you know, over and against this world, this hell world that we're also trying to destroy at the same time. So I think we shouldn't kind of just like, dismiss this as. As less important than. Than the other kinds of actions that we can take care here.
- [171:56]
Danny Thrill
Yeah.
- [171:57]
Hoda Kotb
And that brings me to something I wanted to sort of ask about, like, more deliberately, which is like, what's the kind of specific political intervention that you're trying to make into this moment with. With this project? And both sort of, I guess, bit more generally, too big question.
- [172:13]
Robert Evans
I mean, I. My work has always been about intervening around any kind of dominant narratives that things are just now bad or that people don't know what anything or pedagogically they're lacking. Like, I've always tried to intervene around this. This idea that we've always been otherwise than we always are. And there's always cracks everywhere and eruptions of radical ways of being and knowing and doing. And so it's like a deepening of that. And I think probably on a systemic thinking systemically is really about disrupting individualism or liberalism or empire or whatever you want to colonialism to really like live it in the everyday. So that's partly that. And then on a just a super practical level, like, you know, all of us don't have wealth, don't have generational wealth, are working all the time to try to meet ends meet. And some of us are have housing insecurity and other real basic needs are insecure and health stuff. And so like actually showing up for the each of us is at the core of it. For me, like I. It feels so good in my body to know that I'm not just showing up to think about what to do for ka. For me, it's like it's in the act of collectivism for each other. And so I'm just open to what sparks and emerges with our work. I don't have an agenda except for to disrupt and intervene belief systems that are ideologically driven by empire. And I also came of age in the early 80s in the punk scene and had a venue space. And to me punk is and I would say hip hop as well. Hip underground hip hop stuff is like always the way to disrupt being captured by empire or from liberalism is to keep that punk ethos of doing it together and keeping it low to the ground.
- [174:08]
Savannah Guthrie
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just like to build on that. Carla, because I think that was really beautiful. I second everything that you said. Is it like many of us have a perspective, you know, that huge structural change is going to need to come and that often that will come through these big social movements, that these explosions of energy that you know, these lightning strikes. Right. But you can't force those. You can't make those happen. And in the meantime you can. I think I've spent a lot of my in the meantimes in trying to sort of organize stuff that's sort of oriented towards mass movement, you know. And it just feels often feels like wheel spinning, you know, like I'm build. I'm trying to build mass movement organizing like, you know, like whatever that means. And in the 2010s, one of the things that happened from like 2011, arguably 2009, but definitely 2011 to 2020, was that wherever you were, it was never more than probably 18 months before, there was, like, something else going off in the streets. And so although those could be very hard, those waves could be very difficult. You still had a lot of periods where, you know, you could just sort of be waiting and it would just sort of happen again. That was certainly what I was doing in that decade in a way that I don't think I appreciated until it was over, because the last four years has been very different. The rhythm has been very different since the pandemic started. And I can't just say panini on this podcast. Okay.
- [175:26]
Hoda Kotb
Everyone does it, right?
- [175:27]
Savannah Guthrie
Yeah. Since the pandemic started, those rhythms have been disrupted. And I think the Biden counter revolution against 2020, which. Which has also really disrupted those things. And in that space, it has felt very clear to me personally. And I'm older, whatever. I'm like a movement elder at this point, just because our movements are so youth focused, not because I'm actually old. The decade before 2011, from 2001, from 911 until Occupy, is how I periodize it a bit. There wasn't a ton of street movement. You had the Iraq war stuff that was really, really big. And there were important, important exceptions to that. In the US I'm doing a potted history here. Obviously, there's exceptions to this, but you definitely had all this time. And the stuff that was sustained and remembered were largely sort of cultural projects. And so I think now, as we're moving into this era here in North America on Turtle island, of extreme repressive danger. Right. Like, we shouldn't joke about it or downplay it. Like, we're facing a lot of extreme repression and fascists back in the streets in a big way. It doesn't feel like big political organizing of the kind that happened during the first Trump administration where people did a lot of marching in circles, but there were targets for the pressure. You know, like, they don't feel as relevant now. I'm really off now. I'm way off. No, no, but. No, I think so. I think, like. I think, like, we're in this moment where the fascists both are quite empowered and very unfocused. They're. They're confused. They don't really have us in their sights. Like, they think Liz Cheney is just as much. Much of revolutionaries, Assata Shakur or whatever. Right. And, like, that leaves us some space to move and to build things that can maintain a spirit of resistance, that can reproduce a culture of resistance that can also organize. And another. Another thing that has really been important for me recently with Ka Is that I've been doing an organizing project that I won't talk about the details of, but that the skills have largely come from punk music that I did in the 20s, in my 20s being in a touring punk band. And those skills have made this organizing really easy. And that's been a huge thing for me because I'm working with other people who are younger who don't have that experience, like, oh, how do you do this? And I'm like, oh no, no, it's so easy. You just do this. Here's these skills I learned just from doing music. And I don't think that's just accidental. As Shui was saying, the DIY nature of some of that work, the culture work, maybe the band wasn't revolutionary, the bands I was in certainly weren't the revolution solution or whatever, but they gave me all of these powerful skills and ideas and concepts for doing really important work. And I think that that's also a reason to pursue DIY culture in a way that's genuinely sustainable and world building.
- [178:00]
I
I think if I can build off this too, and I'm going to try to do some tying together of things. But one of the ways that I think about my contribution is to think about, let's not don't look there, let's look over here. And that can mean of multiple things, which is often when people think politically, they're looking at these big moments or big actions or like top down solutions. Which means that we take our attention away from these other places where we're doing all this stuff. Like Carla was saying, we're already doing a lot of important kind of life making work. And then also there's moments in our movements where we have to be like, you all look over here while we do stuff over here, right? Like you, you don't want to be seen all the time. So we have to be able to direct our attention to the things that we do and then also keep some of that stuff under wraps. And that means it's hard sometimes to see. And because it's so decentralized and anarchism really functions through decentralization, like we, we're not always aware of, of how much power we actually have and what's going on at any one moment. And going back to the kind of moments, even tracing back to the Battle of Seattle and I think it's ever more present today in all of the kinds of organizing for street actions that are being done, that a lot of the groundwork for any of these moments is done by anarchists. And then it's not either claimed by anarchists or stolen from anarchists. We make everything sort of run and anarchism makes everything run. And then it just gets ignored because it's not about taking credit. It's not about kind of imposing itself. And so I think like that kind of in between of saying what we're doing and sharing that knowledge and then keeping under wraps so that we can keep chugging along and then just also being aware of when our work is being stolen and then repurposed for something that goes against what we want. I think these are all ways for us to prepare for those moments of like, explosion or eruption where anarchy really manifests. And then we can kind of taste freedom for a moment.
- [180:04]
H
Love it.
- [180:05]
Hoda Kotb
Yeah. I think the way I've always thought about it was this kind of like. It's this like flame tending process where in. In these sort of low cycles, your job is to keep the flame alive. And eventually you know that you're going to see it. Like, you know you're going to see the explosion again.
- [180:22]
Rachel Zo
Right.
- [180:22]
Hoda Kotb
You're going to see the flame. But that doesn't happen unless the flame is still there and unless people have been tending it and people have been trying to make it grow. And you can't necessarily just add fuel to it and be like, ah, it's going to grow now. Right. You don't really have control of how it sort of moves and grows, it expands, but you have control over your ability to make sure that it keeps going.
- [180:46]
Robert Evans
Absolutely. All about the embers.
- [180:50]
Savannah Guthrie
Yeah.
- [180:50]
Hoda Kotb
And I think also, like, I think about the punk metaphor a lot. Like, one of the ways that I've been thinking a lot about, like, what we're doing here, and it could happen here is we kind of took the, like, we took the rage against the machine gambit, which is to say we were like, we're like, okay, we're going to go to try to go somewhat mainstream in order to, I mean, Bridge obviously, like, went way bigger than we did, but, like, we're gonna go try to some. We're gonna go like somewhat mainstream so we can like, spread this thing to a larger group of people. That's also very, very dangerous in the sense that it's very easy to sort of just lose yourself in the kind of mire of the field you've walked into. But on the other hand, the upside about it is that we're not the only people doing this. Right. And there's all of you out there who are doing this. Everyone on this call is Doing this is doing the DIY work that is going to be the core of what this whole thing becomes. And the more. The more of these media projects we get and the more that people are able to sustain themselves doing this, the more that we're sort of able to break, like, I don't know, just like the monomaniacal substack control of, like, taking your money and giving it the transphobes kind of thing, the better shape we're going to be in in the years to come.
- [182:01]
Savannah Guthrie
Exactly. And speaking of which, one thing anarchists are famously bad at doing is accepting that we do require money and asking for it. So I'm going to do that for the squad. We are currently fundraising because it's actually really hard to make something sustainable for four people.
- [182:15]
Hoda Kotb
Yep, yep.
- [182:16]
Savannah Guthrie
We have a fundraiser going on. If you like what we're talking about here, you can donate to our indiegogo. Literally anything helps. Once we fully launch in February, we're going to have a pay what you want subscription model, so everything will be subscribed, but we really want to have three months worth of living wage for all of us to do two days a week on it. Right. So we're not even, you know, we're not talking full salaries, and that's $45,000. Because four people for three months, it's not even a tremendous amount of money because we're including solidarity funds in that and paying any writers who contribute lots of other stuff. So, yeah, if you have a few bucks and maybe you're thinking about getting off of one of those substacks or something and you want to throw our way, we would be absolutely honored and very excited to accept anything in this launch. And if you don't have that money, which is, I know, true for a lot of us, which is why we feel bad asking for the money, because there are so many people who need it right now. You can subscribe online, you can find us on social media and keep in touch until we do launch, and then you can join and subscribe that way. That's also a really great way to support us. But if you have a few. Few bucks you want to throw. If you want to give someone a present of a year's membership, you can get that for $100 for the holidays. You know, radicalize your uncle. You know, just with. With our work, we'd really, really appreciate it.
- [183:27]
H
And.
- [183:27]
Robert Evans
And, yeah, thanks, Vicky.
- [183:29]
Hoda Kotb
Yeah. And I don't know, I'm excited for this. There's already been a bunch of great stuff that's up on the site. We will have links to everything in the description. Yeah. Thank you three for coming on the show and I'm really excited about this.
- [183:42]
Robert Evans
Well, thanks for having us.
- [183:43]
I
Yeah, thanks for the chance to share it. And like I always say, like, if anyone is interested and wants to get in touch, I'm happy to hear from you.
- [183:50]
Robert Evans
Yeah, yeah, same. And reach out to us too, if you have ideas on what cost stands for. We love hearing from people. My favorite is can anarchist write? That's what it stands for. I don't know who came up with that. I think that might have been Sheila or Vicki, but it's a good one.
- [184:05]
H
Tbd.
- [184:06]
I
Tbd.
- [184:08]
Robert Evans
So, yeah, send in what you think and we are going to have an advice column that's going to be launched soon. Yeah. So send us questions or individually or whatever, but you know, disrupt individualism. Reach out to us. Yeah, yeah.
- [184:21]
Savannah Guthrie
Thanks so much. And yeah, it's. As a longtime listener, first time caller, it's really exciting to be on here. So thank you, Mia, so much.
- [184:28]
Hoda Kotb
That's not true. Hold on.
- [184:29]
Savannah Guthrie
Second time. Dang it. All right, Sorry, I was on like.
- [184:32]
Garrison Davis
Hold on, hold on.
- [184:34]
Savannah Guthrie
I just go on so many podcasts, Mia. Like, can you blame me? No, I'm just kidding. Sorry. Yeah, well, anyway, it's really exciting to be here and talking to everyone and we hope to meet y'all in the future and pa, we'll have a. Well, we will have a Discord community. We'll be having like writing class. We're going to have a lot of like really exciting stuff. So even if you can't throw in money right now, please sign up to our website kashanythings.com stay in touch and find out all the really cool stuff we're doing.
- [184:59]
I
And just to reiterate, like all the stuff that we are already doing is now going to have a home in ca. So like my essays and podcasts, Vicki's review, reviews and essays, and Carla's many projects which include podcasts and writing and these interviews, Danny's writing and classes. Yeah, this is all moving there.
- [185:22]
Robert Evans
Plus new things, doing it together.
- [185:25]
Hoda Kotb
Yeah. In that spirit, you two, dear listener, can. Can do things together and go disrupt this world. So go do that now instead of listening to the whatever else tapping on the show. This ending's not going well, but go disrupt things.
- [185:42]
Robert Evans
Thanks so much.
- [185:44]
Hoda Kotb
Hey, we'll be back Monday with more.
- [185:46]
Garrison Davis
Episodes every week from now until the.
- [185:48]
Hoda Kotb
Heat death of the universe.
- [185:49]
Andrew Sage
It could happen.
- [185:50]
Garrison Davis
Here is a production of Cool Zone Media 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.
- [186:02]
Hoda Kotb
You can now find sources for it.
- [186:04]
Garrison Davis
Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions.
- [186:06]
Robert Evans
Thanks for listening.
- [186:08]
H
You wake up, put on your Ray Ban Meta glasses. You're living all in.
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Hoda Kotb
You realize you need coffee, so you say, hey Meta.
- [186:15]
Andrew Sage
How do I make a latte brew.
- [186:16]
Hoda Kotb
Two shots of espresso?
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Robert Evans
After Meta AI gets you caffeinated, you're.
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Rachel Zo
Ready for some beats.
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Andrew Sage
Hey Meta.
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Hoda Kotb
Play hip hop music.
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Robert Evans
You head to meet some friends but.
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Hoda Kotb
Can'T remember the place.
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Andrew Sage
Hey Meta.
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Hoda Kotb
Call Eva Ray Ban Meta Glasses, the.
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Danny Thrill
Next generation of AI glasses.
- [186:32]
H
Just say hey Meta.
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Danny Thrill
To harness the power of Meta AI.
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Robert Evans
Shop now at meta.com smartglasses we've all.
- [186:39]
Savannah Guthrie
Got a thing, an obsession. For some of us, it's vintage fashion, our cars, anything we can collect, they all live under one eBay. It's where closets get filled with statement pieces and vintage finds, where must have sneakers wait for you, and designer handbags are the real deal on ebay. Doors open to stacks of the rarest trading cards and a garage stocked with all the car parts you need for any DIY job. EBay's home to whatever thing you're into.
- [187:08]
Danny Thrill
That keeps you up at night.
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Savannah Guthrie
EBay Things people love Once upon a.
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Danny Thrill
Time, Amazon Music met audiobooks, and listeners everywhere rejoiced. Oh yeah, because now they could listen to one audiobook title a month from an enormous library of popular audiobook titles, including Romantasy, Autobiographies, True Crime, and more. Suddenly, listeners didn't mind sitting in traffic.
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Savannah Guthrie
Or even missing their flight.
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Danny Thrill
Amazon Music Unlimited now includes Audible Download.
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Savannah Guthrie
The Amazon Music app now to start listening terms apply.
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Hoda Kotb
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Savannah Guthrie
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Danny Thrill
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Savannah Guthrie
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Hoda Kotb
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Savannah Guthrie
Start your free 14 day trial@joinsignals.com One.
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Hoda Kotb
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Savannah Guthrie
Men experience domestic abuse in their lifetime.
- [188:18]
Hoda Kotb
And nearly half of survivors delay leaving because they can't bring their pets with them. Purina started the Purple Leash project to help eliminate one of the many barriers domestic abuse survivors face a lack of pet friendly domestic violence shelters. Through the Purple Leash Project, Purina is.
- [188:33]
Savannah Guthrie
Helping to create more pet friendly domestic.
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Robert Evans
Violence shelters across the country so abuse.
- [188:38]
Savannah Guthrie
Survivors and their pets can escape and heal together.
- [188:41]
Hoda Kotb
Visit purina.compurple to get involved.