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- [00:00]
Jon Stewart
Catch Jon Stewart back in action on the Daily show and in your ears with the Daily Show Ears Edition podcast. From his hilarious satirical takes on today's politics and entertainment to the unique voices of correspondents and contributors, it's your perfect companion to stay on top of what's happening now. Plus, you'll get special content just for podcast listeners, like in depth interviews and a roundup of the week's top headlines. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [00:37]
Robert Evans
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 gonna be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.
- [01:01]
James
Hi everyone, and welcome to the podcast. It's me, James Today, and I am very lucky to be joined by Azad, who is fighting in Myanmar in Chinland, specifically with the aif. Welcome to the show. Thanks for being here.
- [01:13]
Azad
Yeah, thanks for having me on.
- [01:14]
James
Of course. Yeah. This has been a project that, like, I've been following from afar for some time, maybe several months now, I think. But for listeners who have not been following, can you explain very briefly the role of the AIF in the struggle in Myanmar?
- [01:30]
Azad
Yeah, sure. Getting right into it. First, I like to give a little bit of a spiel about the context of the aif, maybe for people who aren't so familiar. In Burma already for decades, there have been some kind of established precedent of, we can say foreign volunteers of some kind or ex military personnel or somebody who is somehow drawn to the conflict. There has already been the precedent for some decades of people coming in a very limited capacity and helping with this group or that group. But it mostly has been participation of two big characteristics. The first characteristic is that of course it's been an individual basis. Like whoever individual had this idea, they organized it themselves, they handled it themselves, with the exception of like the Freebrand Rangers. But I wouldn't classify them as like, you know, foreign fighters or anything. They do very, very good work.
- [02:21]
James
But yeah, slightly different role.
- [02:22]
Azad
Yeah, yeah. The people who did this kind of stuff were mostly coming as individuals, you know, kind of on their own prerogative. And secondly, they were overwhelmingly, we can say non political or, you know, ex military guys from Western nations or, you know, from neighboring countries who were somehow drawn to the conflict and wanted to use their skills in that kind of light. The aif, on the other hand, is absolutely by no means like the foreign fighter organization in Myanmar or it's not like the foreign battalion or that's also not what the goal in the mission is. It specifically came about after 2023, 2024, there were slowly more internationals in the country. Internationalists, we can say.
- [03:06]
James
Yeah.
- [03:07]
Azad
Who were here on a much more. Yeah. Albeit at the beginning, individual. It was the same where people were organizing their own ways, organizing their own routes and connections, but with a much more different perspective of this kind of more intentional antifascist, internationalist perspective which bled over into the name. So kind of as. As a result of no discussions between me and some other people who were here and also some other people outside the country, the idea to set up a formation or an organization like this was floated. And of course, after talking with like local partners and local comrades who anyway were involved with on the ground, there was a lot of enthusiasm on both sides, both from people outside the country, both from people inside the country. So kind of within that context, the idea to take a step forward in a more organized, explicitly consistent. Yeah. To use a polite word, consistent perspective for internationalism in Myanmar, that was kind of the goal.
- [04:05]
James
Yeah. And if people aren't familiar, it's the anti fascist internationalist front. Right. The, the AIF has a really cool logo with the, the peacock tail and the three arrows and the like the white star in a red background that I thought it was. I really appreciate your logo.
- [04:22]
Azad
Yeah.
- [04:22]
James
So, yeah, I think people will like, when they talk about the conflict in Myanmar, they will be like, oh, why are there, why is there not more internationalism? Why is there not more international volunteers? Something that you and I have spoken about before is that like this has always been an international conflict. Right. And it's always been an anti fascist conflict as well. Do you want to explain that to people who. Because I think sometimes it's easy for people to fall into these orientalist or somewhat colonialist constructions of the conflict there. And I think you and I both agree that those are not the lens through which we should view it.
- [04:58]
Azad
Yeah, I mean, of course the history of, let's just use a big term, the history of conflict in Burma is of course very deep and very complex and has a thousand different ethnic and political, you know, branches that you can go down.
- [05:12]
James
Yeah.
- [05:13]
Azad
But if we're really focusing in on this post coup situation, which even though it has its roots and its context in of course the pre coup with, you know, the Existing ethnic resistance organizations and the democracy movement. If we're really looking at the conflict post 2021 coup, fundamentally it is not any one nation's struggle. It is not anyone's people's struggle. It is not even like a national struggle of Burgo. We can say it is fundamentally fight against fascism. It is an anti fascist people's revolution where after, of course, the coup and after these initial stages of protest and uprising, the people were faced by a choice of do we accept dictatorship, do we go back and do we live like normal, do we accept fascism, do we live under fascism or do we prepare to sacrifice everything to fight against fascism? And that was the fundamental calculation in that. So insofar as it's the fight against fascism, that that makes it an internationalist struggle in itself. I mean, without even, you know, going on too much about how anyways, the so called nation of Burma is dozens and dozens and dozens of different ethnicities and religions and cultures, which, I mean, if you aren't thinking in the traditional nation state sense of internationalism and more thinking in the kind of brotherhood of cultures and traditions, then yeah, of course, without the flashy, you know, foreigners coming, it's already an internationalist struggle against fascism. But I think, you know, on a more intentional level, the dictatorship represents fundamentally the same fascism that exists all over the world, fundamentally state oppression. So yeah, in that regard, it's very much an international struggle.
- [06:52]
James
Yeah. And something we've spoken about before is like the, the links of the inspiration, I guess, that comes from the internationalist struggle in north and East Syria and Rojava and how that's very much been like a source of inspiration for young people in Myanmar. I've spoken to tons of them even two years ago, especially young women there. Right. Looking at, looking at the women's revolution in Rojava and seeing like that this was a possibility, that this was something like on the horizon that they could strive for. Do you want to explain your own perceptions of that and experience of it?
- [07:28]
Azad
Yeah, sure. Well, first, you know, not to overstate things. While of course Rojava is a big inspiration, I think, not just for the here in Myanmar, but truly like a beacon of hope in general.
- [07:40]
Nevdon Jamgochian
Yeah.
- [07:40]
Azad
You know, you know, a little biased. Having spent time in Rojava as you also have, I think, how can we say, I'll give a bit of context in 2023. I think this message went out from the KNDF to the forces in Rojava. And I was there at the time.
- [07:57]
James
So was I really?
- [07:59]
Azad
What?
- [07:59]
James
Yeah, yeah, I was there to say we were there.
- [08:01]
Azad
We were both there.
- [08:02]
James
Yeah. At the same time, everyone started hitting me up for book recommendations. It's like, October.
- [08:07]
Azad
I didn't know that.
- [08:07]
James
Yeah.
- [08:08]
Azad
Okay.
- [08:08]
James
Right after October 7th, I think.
- [08:10]
Azad
Okay. Anyways, so, yeah, when this came out, like, some friends sent this to me and was like, hey, can you translate this? And I, like, not only me when I saw it, but also all the friends in the leadership, and, you know, all of the comrades there were, like, very. One surprised, but also very excited and very happy to kind of see a message like this. And I think also when the message was returned, you know, some of the friends from the leadership, you know, recorded this video message and sent it back. It was very much like a very pleasant, happy surprise for everyone involved. And it really showed the degree to which fundamentally, we are fighting the same struggles, even though, you know, maybe, you know, materially we're not talking about, like, guns going from one place to the other, fundamentally, we're comrades on the same very, very long front line. Now, I think what that looks like locally, especially, I'm happy that you mentioned, like, specifically the women's situation.
- [09:03]
James
Mm.
- [09:04]
Azad
You know, I myself sometimes when I'm giving training here, I like to show videos from certain parts of Kurdistan where they're very effective, we can say. And of course, that naturally includes, like, the very, very heavy participation of the women's guerrilla units as well as the men's guerrilla units. And specifically here in Myanmar, we see a very difficult situation in the revolution in regards to, like, the position of women.
- [09:27]
James
Yeah.
- [09:27]
Azad
Where because of. I mean, the. It's a very new revolution. Lots of these people are. You know, a couple years ago, they were just in, we can say, liberal society. They weren't in any kind of, you know, maybe at best, activist context, but it's not like these people had a strong revolutionary platform. And then they said, okay, let's launch a revolution against the dictatorship. It was a natural evolution from protest to resistance to revolution. No. So because of that, the same social structures that existed in liberal society were, in a large part, transplanted into resistance organizations, which means that, yeah, of course, thousands and thousands of women from all over the country have traveled to these camps, you know, have. Have prepared and have readied themselves to fight against the dictatorship, but in a lot of ways, they're still facing off against, you know, the patriarchy that. That is inherent in all of our modern society.
- [10:22]
James
Yeah.
- [10:23]
Azad
So I think Rojava, in so much as, like. I think anybody can take Rojava as an inspiration if there is anybody who, more so than anybody else, can take as inspiration. It is women and youth, as that is, of course, like, the revolutionary focus of the entire paradigm of the Rojava revolution. So I won't say that it's like, you know, like the leading inspiration for the people of Myanmar or something, but definitely the people who have interacted with it or interfaced with it in some capacity, be it official or unofficial, of course, have gotten a lot of inspiration from that. And us as internationalists, both me as well as some other people here, you know, having had that in person experience with their job. Revolution, of course, for us is eternal inspiration.
- [11:02]
James
Yeah. And it's a really beautiful thing to see, like you said, just to see people, like, when we think about alliances in conflict, Right. If we look at the extremely interactional way that the United States enters into those alliances, right. It's willing to allow the people of Rojava to die for it in the battle against ISIS or Daesh, but. But it's not willing to stand by them when they're being bombed by Turkey. Right. Something that you and I have both seen, but to see something that instead begins with genuine solidarity and admiration. One thing I really liked was when the KNDF replied to the video that came from Rojava. They said that they still had a lot to learn, especially with regards to gender. And, like, it's so rare to see revolutionary movements submitting their faults, especially during the struggle, right. During the moment of revolution. And that's something that I've been so impressed with in Myanmar for a long time, is their willingness to, like, look out at the world and see things that they think are better and adopt them or to at least consider them. It's a thing in Rojava, too. Some of the. One of the friends in Rojava said that they were excited to learn more about Myanmar because they hadn't worked everything out, and that they thought that there might be some solutions that they could learn from there. And so it's really special to see that solidarity that comes from a very genuine place and not just. It's not just rhetorical. There are people such as yourself who have made the journey to fight on behalf of the revolution in Myanmar. But it's really a special thing. It's really a wonderful thing to see, especially with the world seemingly getting more and more isolated and more and more nationalist as opposed to internationalist. It's a really big, beautiful time for it to happen, too.
- [12:50]
Azad
Yeah, absolutely. And I think. I mean, not to make the podcast, you know, a democratic Confederalism ideology lesson or something. But yeah, I think insofar as the revolution in Rojava considers itself a force on the side of democratic modernity, I think it's important to understand that they really mean it. Like, they really do see the conflicts that we're facing today against the capitalist system, against capitalist modernity. They really do see it in this all encompassing light that even though something is happening all the way over here in Myanmar and that maybe you could only tangentially connect to what's happening over there, they really do believe it when they say we are comrades in this same struggle. And that's why the solidarity is so beautiful to see, because it's that real solidarity. It's not just like, you know, pandering to some internationalist kind of sentiment.
- [13:40]
James
Yeah, no, it's very real and it has, yeah, very genuine basis in sharing more than common interests, I will say. So for people who are not as familiar with the struggle where you are, which is in Chinland, would you explain a little bit of. I mean, obviously we can and we will at some point explain a little bit more of the history of Chinland, because I think it's very important and it sometimes gets marginalized from even narrative of the revolution. But can you explain, like the groups and the struggle as it has been since 2021? In many ways, Chinland is where the revolution, the armed revolution began. Right. So can you explain how we get to a place today where in recent weeks we've seen massive victories in Chinland?
- [14:33]
Azad
Yeah. So as you know, the political situation, at least between the groups is somewhat complicated. So I'll try my best to like most fairly, but also somehow accurately describe. Yeah, I'll start from the history we can say, as you described in and around Mindat at the time of these protests, this was kind of like the catalyst and one of the first places that actual armed resistance to this dictatorship started. And that wasn't armed resistance like with guns or something, that was armed resistance like with the shotguns, like double barrel shotguns from India, muzzleloading, traditional hunting rifles and air guns and things like this. And with that kind of weaponry, they were going and attacking police stations and checkpoints. So it really was a sign for everyone, like not only the bravery of the people that are willing to do something like that, but the willingness and the risk that these people are able to take and the seriousness of their opposition to the dictatorship that, look, this isn't just a protest anymore. Even we have only sticks and stones. We will dismantle this dictatorship. Yeah, so yeah, that was a very inspiring early period. And I think even before the involvement of some of the bigger ethnic armed organizations, there were already local CDFs, which stands for Chinland Defense Force, which is kind of just like PDF. It's a moniker that a lot of groups share. There were a lot of different PDFs and CDF popping up just in the days following the coup in Chinland. So yeah, like from the very beginning there was the precedent in the history of revolution there. Now these towns that were the beginning of the revolution have now been seized. So Mindat as of last month was taken by the Chin Brotherhood alliance as well as, you know, cdf, Mindat and, and alliance partners. So the progress has definitely been made. The current landscape looks a little bit like this. In Chin State there's two big blocks. We can say one block is the Qin Brotherhood and one block is the Chinland Council. At first there was only one bloc called the icncc, which stands for Interim Qin National Coordinating Council or Committee. I always forget the last C. I.
- [16:41]
James
Remember at the same time as you were.
- [16:44]
Azad
And that was like the political big umbrella organization. And there was the cjdc, which is the military big umbrella organization that stands for Chinlin Joint Defense Council or Committee. Again, lessee, always ambiguous. So yeah, for a long time it was everyone, including one of the, you know, very old ethnic resistance organizations, the cna, cnf, the Chin National Army. Chin National Front was kind of involved in this one big umbrella organization. And everywhere there was resistance against the dictatorship and on some level, cooperation both with Qin groups as well as with the NUG. In 2023, political events occurred and as we can say politely, a disagreement in the political future of Qinland separated into two groups with CNACNF withdrawing from the CJDC and forming their Qinland Council. And the groups that kind of subscribed to that vision and subscribed to that path, they joined the new Chinland Council and all of the groups that remained in the CJDC and the ICNCC continued to hold on to the ICNCC as a kind of platform and umbrella organization for the people in Chin State that didn't want to subscribe to this new path. And then Qin Brotherhood was formed as the new practical military alliance of those people who remained, we can say. And since then, in only one year, I mean both sides have had, have had very incredible victories. No Chin then council has been able to in the north of Chin State, liberate Cheka and Tonzhong Town. And then of course in the south of Chin State, Chandler has been able to take Matupi and Khanpelet and Mindat. So definitely victories all around. But yeah, I'll stop myself before I comment too much more on that.
- [18:27]
James
Yeah, but victories, it would have been unimaginable three years. I mean we're almost exactly three years from the beginning of the revolution. Four years, 20, 25. God, yeah, yeah. Four years from the beginning of the revolution when as you say, like those videos. That was when I first became aware of the post coup resistance was seeing videos online of people with those traditional muzzleloading hunting rifles taking on police checkpoints or attempting to organize armed resistance and those little air guns made of the blue plumbing pipe. It was incredible. Just the bravery of the people and their commitment and their willingness to risk their lives and sometimes lose their lives because like as one revolutionary doctor told me a few years ago, he said, like my grandparents died for democracy and my parents generation died for it and we don't think another generation should have to die for it. So like we're all prepared to go down fighting for this, which I thought, you know, was, was really impactful. And then he was right that their willingness to risk their lives and, and to be so brave is unparalleled. And the revolution wouldn't have got to where it's got to. But it's such a beautiful thing that it has. I wonder, like it's a, it's a crucial time for the revolution now. Right. Like the, the revolution is as successful it's ever been. We're reaching the fifth year. Can you explain like the role of the AIF within the broader revolution? Because I think people get really confused by all the acronyms and it can be easy to think that these groups and it's an Alphabet secret. I'm writing a book about this and Spain and like I've spent most of the last week just trying to write the dictionary of acronyms that goes in the back of the book. But like, can you explain. These aren't groups that are necessarily. Sometimes they are opposed to each other. They have different visions for the future. But can you explain the role of the AIF within the broad anti junta movement?
- [20:28]
Azad
Sure. First I'll say I'm reading a book right now about like the history of the Communist Party of Burma. And that history goes from like, you know, the 30s all the way to the 90s.
- [20:36]
Mia Wong
Yeah.
- [20:37]
Azad
And every single page has at least 10 different acronyms and it's absolutely insane.
- [20:42]
James
Yeah, yeah.
- [20:43]
Azad
About the aif, the anti fascist internationalist front, which I'm hoping everyone just recognizes as AIF because it's kind of a mouthful. Our perspective so far has been that especially as foreigners, and especially as like foreign foreigners, you know, like Western foreigners. Yeah, we really want to avoid as much as possible the perception of we're coming here. You know, we've got military experience or we've got this knowledge or we've got that knowledge. And now it's time, now it's time for us to tell you what to do, or now it's time for us to train or something like that. Yeah, I would say our perspective is much more closer to the perspective of the, you know, the international structures in Rojava. Our goal is recognizing that this enemy, the SEC dictatorship, the SSC junta, is fundamentally a fascist, anti human enemy that makes it also our struggle. And so not in some kind of like presumptive way, or not in some kind of like imposing way, but in a very genuine and organic manner. We want to come here and implement ourselves into the revolution. Now we have some friends who are coming who maybe have previous experience with this or with that. And in their capacity, of course, they give training because the people here have, the comrades have been overwhelmingly receptive to training like this. You know, there's been no pride or no, like, oh, we don't need the help. Yeah, Quite contrarily, everyone at all stages, even the NUG is saying, I'm not talking about us, I'm just talking about publicly, you know, to everyone is saying, whatever help we can get, we appreciate it. Yeah, but, you know, we're not just bringing people who are, you know, Rojava veterans or veterans of some conflict where they can come and give training. Fundamentally, it's an anti fascist conflict, which means even people without experience are able to come and not only participate in the revolution, but in a less transactory way. Not to say like, oh, I have something and I will give it to the revolution in the most important way is to come and to learn from the revolution. Exactly as you said. Even a revolution like Rojava, which has decades and decades of history and tradition and culture and ideology and is steeped in this. Yeah, I would say, you know, one of the most powerful prominent revolutions of our time, is still able to say a revolution like this, of course we can learn from it. We need to learn from the struggles of our comrades there. We need to learn from the developments happening in this revolution. Our perspective in AIF is very much the same where, yeah, okay, maybe we have some limited material things we can contribute, but ultimately it's about organically participating in this revolution which is against fascism and in our own ways, to take the lessons of this revolution, to take the fundamental meaning of this revolution and be able to translate it for ourselves and for, of course, the future works which are ahead of us, shall we say.
- [23:26]
James
Yeah. I remember when I was much, much younger talking to a veteran of the international group. An anarchist veteran. No, it was from the International Brigade. So correct myself. And I asked him to explain anti fascism to me, and he said that for him, when somebody devalues humanity like the junta does in Burma, like the Francoist did in Spain. Right. Like Assad did in Syria, like, it debases his own humanity. And like anyone who attacks humanity in that way is attacking him and all humanity. And therefore, it's a responsibility of all humanity to. To defend humanity, to defend compassion and kindness.
- [24:04]
Azad
Absolutely.
- [24:05]
James
Yeah. I think what you're doing in Myanmar is part of that desire to defend humanity against inhumanity, against whatever we want to call it. What are the struggles that the revolution faces? Like, I know you guys have recently been doing a fundraising campaign, for example, and. And the revolution is almost unique in its complete lack of solidarity from the states of the world. Right. There is not a state that. That is backing this revolution. It is entirely the force of the people of Myanmar. So can you explain some of the struggles within the revolution, perhaps because of that?
- [24:43]
Azad
Yeah, I mean, as much as some people, you know, like to say CIA or something like this, they can fuck off. Of course, the reality is that, you know, I've heard the term crowdfunded revolution. I think it's incredibly accurate.
- [24:57]
James
Yeah.
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Azad
Because no, in the aif, we recently did a fundraiser for vehicles and equipment and things like this. But that's on our scale, on the scale of these organizations. I mean, they are fundraising from the diaspora, millions and millions of dollars to be able to wage this resistance. And of course, even, like, local people who themselves maybe don't have a lot, are giving everything they can or are anyway, acting any way they can or doing anything they can to help the revolution. So we can say overwhelmingly it is a popular resistance. Even I would go so far as to say it is fundamentally a people's resistance against the dictatorship that, of course, represents itself in a lot of different organizations. But these organizations Enjoy the, like, 95% support of the people against the junta, you know.
- [25:41]
James
Yeah.
- [25:41]
Azad
So, yeah, in that regard, the challenge, of course, is always resources and always the strength of the enemy. No, we're still going up against jet fighters, helicopters, mortars, artillery.
- [25:52]
James
Yeah.
- [25:52]
Azad
You know, they have a lot of ammo. Us, not so much. So there's like, lots of these practical problems. I think the, how can we say, cynical kind of, as you mentioned earlier, Western outlook has been to paint this struggle kind of in, oh, it's a tribal struggle. There's all these different groups. They're all fighting for their own area. What's going to happen after they win? Now, I disagree with that assessment, obviously. I think you know yourself, as you're familiar with the conflict, I think it's much deeper than that. And even across these many different identities and cultures, there's very deep, very real coordination and cooperation where I don't think it's just like chaotic. But on the other hand, that is a, you know, not to give the cynics credit, that is a question which going forward will politically very much be on the agenda. Because, I mean, now, as you're seeing, most of the country is no longer in the junta's control.
- [26:44]
Jon Stewart
Yeah.
- [26:44]
Azad
And the parts that are in the junta's control are contested. And then you have the tiny sliver of land which they can say they somehow without any kind of, you know, contestion control. So very soon the onus will be on revolutionary forces to answer that question. Okay, how are we going to consolidate? How are we going to transfer these winds on the battlefield into something that is more permanent and more lasting? And I think, you know, already, as you're seeing in Chin State, that I can speak of and that people are seeing in elsewhere, that I can't speak of because I don't know, there are definitely frictions. You know, I'm not going to say it's perfect. Everyone is smiling, everyone is working together, and there's frictions that will have to be worked through. But fundamentally, I think the trajectory as it currently is, is. Is positive for the resistance. We can say, yeah, definitely.
- [27:33]
James
I was talking to someone yesterday in another part of Myanmar and I was saying, you know, I'm going to come visit you hopefully soon. And he was saying, like, oh, you'll love it. Like, just to be in the liberated zone is so special. Talk to us about, like, liberated Chinland. Right. Mindat's just been liberated. Large areas have been under the control or semi control of a dictatorial regime that has been extremely oppressive to the Chin people for decades. Like, how are people receiving their liberty? How are they governing themselves or attempting to take care of one another in these liberated spaces?
- [28:10]
Azad
Sure. Well, I think the first thing I'll say is maybe to contrast to other parts of Myanmar, we've Been relatively lucky in Chin State in that even, you know, for some years already, the junta, due to the mountainous nature of Chin State, has anyway been reduced to the cities for years. Like all of their checkpoints, all of their like, external places, the last of those were cleared in 2023, and most of them anyway in 2022 were gone. So by landmass, even before these towns were seized, the junta controlled, if you were to add up all of the area that they actually physically control in Chin State, maybe a couple square kilometers, you know, just the area of like their bases and something like that.
- [28:49]
James
Yeah.
- [28:50]
Azad
So because of the nature of Chin State, they never had the, of course they, they did these atrocities and massacres and things like this, but on the kind of like, you know, fascist dictatorship level of oppression, since after the revolution, they had not really had the opportunity to impose themselves too much. They were the ones kind of cowering in their corner. But I think especially after these towns are being seized now, you know, take Rikodar, which is the border town on India, or take Mindar Murtupi, these towns that have just been recently seized, these are towns which people are wanting to live their lives. I mean, Shinsei has always been autonomous. Even in, in British rule, in colonial rule, it is, was just labeled as unadministered, you know, and there was a very rich democratic tradition, or how can we say, maybe not democratic in the traditional sense, but tradition of self rule and autonomy in Chin State. And the removal of the junta from these areas is allowing those relationships to much more naturally flourish. And I think the, the aspiration of a lot of people, both abroad as well as internally displaced from Chin State, is to return to those places where there's been fighting and to continue their lives as normal. Which I think finally now that not just in Chin State, but all over the country, we're slowly seeing these alternative systems of, you know, let's not call them like communist or revolutionary or anything, but fundamentally they are alternative to the state administration system.
- [30:12]
James
Yeah. And I think that narrative that you pushed back on already, that like, and we've seen it from so many, like every think tank, every analyst, every so called expert has said the Eros will only fight for their territory. When they've reached the limits of what they consider to be their like, ethnic homeland, they will stop. And that hasn't happened, Right. It's not happened anywhere. But the fact that even if it did, right, or even if some of these Eros have, have visions for the future, which is not as liberatory as maybe you and I would like the fact that there are parts of Myanmar that are free now and that where people can live their lives as they wish will never change. And that will mean that those places are always there for people to go to. And like, I'm sure lots of people you're fighting with and alongside have come to Chinland, Right. Like, not all of them will be. Will have spent their whole lives there. They'll have come there from Burma, majority cities, maybe. Is that correct?
- [31:11]
Azad
Look, like, not to give any specifics, so I'll just make a very broad term to exaggerate the fact. You can say that I have met somebody from almost every single group in Myanmar in Shin State.
- [31:24]
James
Yeah.
- [31:25]
Azad
Now that's just to say that's not to, like, you know, be shocking or something. That's just to highlight the level of interconnectedness logistically, materially, militarily. Yo, even if it's just someone sending someone to say hi from somewhere, you know?
- [31:38]
James
Yeah.
- [31:38]
Azad
It's not like, oh, everyone's in their corners fighting. I mean, I promise you there are soldiers here which are giving their lives for the towns in Chin State, which maybe they never even thought about Chin State before this revolution. You know, they're coming from opposite sides of the country. Yeah, absolutely. It's fundamentally a fight against the dictatorship. It's not the fight to liberate Chinland or to liberate Kareni or something like this.
- [31:58]
James
Yeah. I remember speaking to Mandalay PDF a while ago and they were saying to me, like, they were really scared when they first left the cities because they've been told that, like, wild people lived in the mountains. Now we're wild people. We like the wild people.
- [32:14]
Azad
Like.
- [32:15]
James
But yeah, this narrative, I mean, James C. Scott talks about this, right. In the art of not being governed. This idea that these mountains were never really places that were amenable to state control and that now they're places where people can go to avoid it. But it's also important that this revolution extends beyond the mountains and into the cities and that people living there don't have to live under the boot heel of a dictatorial state, which is what's happening, right?
- [32:37]
Azad
Yeah, absolutely.
- [32:48]
James
People will be listening to this, I'm sure, and like, thinking this is laudable. This is incredible. And A, they'll be shocked that they haven't heard about this, maybe, especially if they're newer listeners. And I do want to say that, like, you can go back and listen to our other coverage on Myanmar. There is a lot, but, like, in terms of conflicts Right. Conflict is always messy and war is never inherently a beautiful thing. Beautiful things can happen in wars, but we rarely see wars where there is so much good on one side and so much evil on the other. And why do you think that the, especially the western media has largely overlooked the conflict in Myanmar?
- [33:27]
Azad
That's a good question. Yeah. I will say just on a very base level, without getting into any kind of like, you know, pondering or something like that, I've spoken with a few journalists and you know, before anything, before we even talk about politics or something, there is just the material calculation that these outlets are making. From what I understand, from what I have heard, people don't care. Now that's really unfortunate. But like these, like big networks, you know, cnn, whatever.
- [33:52]
James
Yeah.
- [33:53]
Azad
I have to make the calculation of the people they send and the risks to send them and the actual exposure that these news articles will get. From what I understand from conversations that I've had with some people that are, you know, involved in these networks right now, there is not on like the executive board level. There's just not a lot of push to cover Myanmar. And that's, you know, that's really unfortunate. And I think one really bad side effect of that is whenever there's a tragedy, the media is there.
- [34:19]
James
Yeah.
- [34:19]
Azad
You know, like whenever there's some massacre or whenever there's some, you know, inter tribal conflict or whenever there's something bad to report about or maybe you know, on a good day, the really big like a win like in Lashio that we saw, you know. Yeah, okay. Yeah. For these big things that Western media will be there. But I think even from recording these very like clickbaity eye catching things, it seems like they're not getting the exposure that they want to get out of this content, which is putting them off of covering the, you know, in our opinion, much more meaningful wall to wall content that exists, I mean, every day in Myanmar.
- [34:53]
James
Yeah.
- [34:54]
Azad
It seems like this Western eye is only interested in the suffering, we can say, which is really unfortunate. But you know, even if the media is not paying attention, we can say for better or worse, the governments are paying attention. Absolutely. I mean, almost like hawks, you can say there are every single regional government as well as foreign governments, of course, keeping a very close eye on the situation, circling, looking at developments. I mean, China especially, no being, being very involved in the process.
- [35:21]
James
Yeah.
- [35:21]
Azad
So yeah, while unfortunately the, the kind of liberal media eye is not so much, you know, giving Myanmar the coverage that it deserves as a popular revolution, the powers at be are definitely watching Its progression, we can say.
- [35:34]
James
Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean, it offers an alternative for the world that, like, it's distinct even from Rojava. Like the. The building of a revolutionary movement. Like you said, the crowdfunded revolution. The revolution that, like, entirely. I mean, at points, armed itself using guns it downloaded off the Internet. You know, it offers. Sometimes I think when I'm thinking about, you know, my background in studying anarchists in Spain, and like, obviously I've looked a lot at the past, but it gives me a vision of the future. Like, and it's only in covering the small parts of the revolution that make it truly a revolution that we can see that, like, you have an Instagram and on there you're posting about training. Sometimes when you're doing the trainings and there are women who are coming to train, you know, with rifles to be. I was going to say marks. Marks people, I guess. Like, I know people. Marks women.
- [36:27]
Azad
Sniper.
- [36:28]
James
Yeah.
- [36:28]
Azad
Okay. Yeah, only US military guys are weird about calling things snipers. Yeah, they're snipers.
- [36:33]
James
Yeah. Okay. Yeah, let's do that. Okay. In the moment that. That they receive that training and become, like, efficient with their weapons, like a revolution happens for that woman, and it's only through, like, following those. Those little revolutions that happen every day that make up a big revolution that we truly understand it. And I'm sure that's something that you're seeing on a daily or weekly basis, People's worlds opening up and their horizons changing because of the revolution.
- [37:04]
Azad
Well, listen, absolutely. Now, of course, as leftists involved or interested in this revolution, studying it, whether you're socialist, whether you're anarchist, whether you're communist, whether you're opposite, however you like to describe yourself, whatever flavor you are, without pontificating too much, I think fundamentally this revolution is a symbol of hope that it can be done. No? Like, I'll give an example from the conversations that I've had with the comrades that have been involved in this revolution since it was just a protest movement in the streets. One thing that I've heard a lot is that at the beginning of the revolution, when it switched, you know, when the police were firing bullets into the crowds, and when people made this decision that, okay, now we. We have no choice but armed resistance, we have no choice but to fight the dictatorship. When that calculus was made, when that decision was made, it was not made based on the kind of analysis of the situation that they could even win. Yeah, it was not even that. Like, okay, we're going to do this, and we have this strategy of Guerrilla war, and then we'll do this, this, and this, and then we'll achieve the victory. The calculation that was made was a moral calculation. It was saying, we have the choice. We can go back to our life, we can accept this oppression, we can give up this struggle for democracy that we've been waging in one form or another, or we can make the decision to fight even if we won't win. It's the moral imperative to resist dictatorship. And I think what this revolution is showing, not just for the people who themselves were surprised at their capability and were themselves surprised at what they could accomplish when they actually stepped up and fought and sacrificed for revolution, fundamentally, it's a message to everyone. It says, look, these people at the beginning were going at checkpoints with, like, double barrels and air rifles, and at the end now they are, like, threatening to overthrow what was previously assumed to be one of the most powerful militaries in southeastern Asia. I mean, now, like, everyone jokes on the Tatmadaw because they're obviously garbage now, but, like, yeah, at the time, that wasn't the. That wasn't the analysis. You know, it would be the same as saying, like, oh, you know, we're going to overthrow the usa or something like that. It was fundamentally, people didn't even envision the victory, but on the moral principle to resist, they resisted. And from that moral position, they were able to materialize the victory that they had previously not even imagined. So, you know, for me, that's what I take away. There's no books, there's no ideological books here that you can study and understand the underpinnings of the revolution. You know, there's no classes that you can go to that the PDF teaches you about what their revolutionary paradigm is. Fundamentally, it's a fight of the people against oppression and against dictatorship. And while, of course, there's some strengths and some weaknesses that we face in the revolution, ultimately in the same way as Rojava, in the same place as other places in the world, it's a beacon of hope for democratic people who envision themselves fighting on the side of freedom and the symbol that actually, yeah, you can win.
- [39:58]
James
Yeah, it's given me so much hope, like, at a time the last few years when we've all desperately needed something good to happen. Like, something good is happening. Incredibly good through the. Yeah, like, it's breathtaking. Like, I went in 2022 during the first year of the revolution, and I was shopping around this story for months, right? I knew these guys who were doing the 3D printing and I went to every major outlet. I was like, this is the story that's going to make people care. And no one bought it until eventually Cool Zone did. And here I am. But like even 20, 21, 22, talking to those guys, I was like, they might all die. It's still been worth it for them, but they might all be gone in a year. I'm unfortunately familiar with that from my line of work. But like, to see it succeed, it's so, like, incredible. It's obviously war is terrible and terrible things have happened in the war, but like, it's such a beautiful thing to see. People refused to accept tyranny and just through the tenacity of their refusal to create liberated spaces and to now threaten to topple, like you say, one of what had previously been a feared army in the region. It continues to amaze me every day. Every time I see people dancing in front of a captured military headquarters or what have you, I don't know. It's just such a remarkable revolution. Asad, if people wish to be in solidarity, if they wish to follow the aif, if they want to learn more about the aif, where can they do that? Are there places online or are there ways that they can support you aside from obviously like being part of the struggle? Like, how can they help you?
- [41:37]
Azad
Yeah, me personally, my information platform is mostly on Instagram where I post updates about, you know, either insights about what's going on or news updates or something like that. And that's Azad AFA on Instagram.
- [41:49]
James
Spell out a side for the non Kurdish speakers.
- [41:52]
Azad
Yeah, A Z, a D. A Z, a D if you will.
- [41:56]
James
Y. Thank you.
- [41:57]
Azad
Underscore AFA on Instagram. The AIF also has an Instagram for like official posts. It's AIF Myanmar in general, about the aif, especially at this early stages. Right now we're involved in some front lines in western Myanmar. And so because of that, we don't really have a lot of information presence out right now. But in the coming weeks, in the coming months, definitely when things get published, when more things like that come out, they will come out from kind of the existing distribution circles that have been going around like Libcom, there has been like statements going out as well as Instagram pr, things like that.
- [42:31]
Jon Stewart
Yeah.
- [42:31]
Azad
And recently we just completed a fundraiser. Our goal was $10,000 for the vehicles and the equipment that we will needed to get started. For listeners who don't know, maybe, yeah, maybe they're not aware. This only started in October of last year. So we're still in the stages of consolidating and getting our equipment. We set the goal for $10,000 and we exceeded it. We raised over $13,000 for that.
- [42:56]
James
Nice.
- [42:56]
Azad
So, yeah, we're very happy to say that. But in the future, of course, there will always be more opportunities. As you know, revolution is very expensive.
- [43:03]
James
Yeah.
- [43:04]
Azad
So, yeah, on all fundraising platforms, we have PayPal, Cash App and Venmo, and all of those are AIF Myanmar. And yeah, in the future, hopefully we will have more news both about what's happening in Myanmar, both how we specifically are involved, as well as just very exciting footage we can say we hope to share soon.
- [43:24]
James
Yeah, that'll be great to see and I hope you'll come back and join us again and maybe we can delve into a little bit more of the history of the revolution and the revolution in Chin Lang, specifically, because I think these are things that we need to cover more and I'd love to. To give people a place to learn about them.
- [43:38]
Azad
Yeah, absolutely.
- [43:39]
James
Great. Thank you so much.
- [44:00]
Spencer Sunshine
Hello, and welcome back to It Could Happen. Here I am once again, your occasional host, Molly Conger, and I am joined today by Spencer Sunshine, the author of Neo Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism, the Origins and Afterlife of James Mason's Siege. It's available now in paperback. I have my paperback copy from Routledge Press. So, Spencer, I guess let's get right into it. What is Siege and why should we still be talking about it?
- [44:27]
Nevdon Jamgochian
Well, unfortunately, we should still be talking about it because it's still influential. It was a book Originally published in 1993, but that is an edited version of newsletters published in the 80s by a fellow named James Mason, who is a lifelong neo Nazi. He joined the American Nazi party at age 14 in 1966. He is still an active ideological believer in national Socialism. It's a book that in it, he makes the argument that any kind of normal, legal political activity was pointless for Neo Nazis to engage in. And like forming organizations, holding marches, making the traditional propaganda, trying to build up parties, even guerrilla warfare. At the end of it, he becomes very cynical about and he says through what are essentially dramatic random acts of violence, of terrorism or murder. He even goes into praising serial killers like Joseph Paul Franklin. We can destabilize the government and society. And after this, Neo Nazis can come to power. This has become a very influential idea. More recently, he was rediscovered. It was a pretty obscure. The newsletters were very unpopular. He made more than 100 copies. The original book had a print run of a thousand. So it was a sort of obscure text. It was known amongst neo Nazi circles for some unusual reasons. It became mixed up with some countercultural figures, and that was actually what made it more well known. But it was revived in 2015. It was found by these younger aspiring terrorists, let's say, at the time, around a message board called Iron March. It became the bible of the atom, often division, this neo Nazi group that its members and associates killed five people. And out of that, everyone in the atom, often division, had to read Siege, which became the hashtag. And out of that grew this whole sort of network, first of groups and now really of totally decentralized, like propaganda channels on Telegram, Dub Telegram, promoting these same ideas. And so it's become very influential today. It gets named in, like, terrorist manifestos. The school shooter, I think it was in Nashville, Tennessee, that just happened. He makes. He makes a reference to people who are into siege in his. In his writings. And more and more, I've documented before him at least 12 murders that were either by the Atomwaffen Division, by people inspired by siege culture, or by people directly linked to terror. Graham so if we want to look at the main text animating neo Nazi terrorism today, which is now spread around the globe, there's groups in Latin America, there's groups in Eastern and Western Europe. It's even influencing groups in the Middle east, or people in the Middle east, they're called accelerationists, they want to accelerate the collapse of things. And if there's a single ideological text today that's influential on this scene, it is by easily, James Mason, siege.
- [47:20]
Spencer Sunshine
And what I particularly am enjoying about the book, and I just told you before we started recording, I haven't finished it yet, what I'm enjoying about this book is so, you know, you were saying that James Mason started writing this in the 80s, right? But nobody was reading it. It was very sort of niche. It wasn't popular even within its own niche. He was not a popular man. He had his a lot of beefs with other leaders in the movement. It's rediscovered in the 2010s. It's big on Iron March. It's the animating force behind Atomwaffen. And so all of a sudden, in the last 10 years, people like us, you know, researchers of the far right, mainstream journalists, people are talking about siege, they're talking about Mason. But this, I think, correct me if I'm wrong, is the only book sort of tracing it back to its root. James Mason did not come into existence in 2015 on the pages of Iron March, right? They, they sort of dug back up this writing that was at that point 30 years old. But this book, I mean, it's an incredible work of research, but it's also sort of a picaresque, right. It follows James Mason through decades of Nazi history. Right. He wasn't just a guy who wrote a newsletter. He was a guy who was in a lot of rooms. He knew a lot of people. So through the lens of James Mason's life, you can follow the origins of the modern neo Nazi movement back to the sort of splinters and sects and rival personalities of the seventies.
- [48:41]
Kaveh
Right.
- [48:41]
Spencer Sunshine
That you can't understand modern neo Nazi organizing if you don't know the history that goes back to the 60s and 70s.
- [48:49]
Nevdon Jamgochian
Well, thank you for getting that. I had someone write a review and it was an interesting view from the viewpoint of literary criticism. And he's like, well, this is one of these books about a book.
- [48:57]
Spencer Sunshine
It's not.
- [48:58]
Nevdon Jamgochian
And I'm like, yeah, it kind of is, but it's really. And after I started writing this, which has an unusual origin, or just maybe it is a usual origin, like the first half is about Neo Nazism in the 1970s, which is incredibly undocumented. There's a huge problem with documentation about the far right in general before 2015. Probably more books have come out in the last 10 years about the far right in the US before 2015 than came out before. And certainly about Neo Nazis who are almost always, when they are written about American Neo Nazis, it's usually in the history of the white supremacist movement and there's no differentiation made between them. And I would say that National Socialists are quite different from other white supremacists for a variety of different reasons. So there is no book about Neo Nazism in the 1970s in the US at all. There are only two documents I can really name and they're both written by National Socialists, actually. One in Australia and one the head of the New Order, which used to be the American Nazi Party. Actually, not bad. It's an eight part series by Martin Kirk. So the first half is really reconstructing what happened in the 1970s, because this is what siege is coming out of. This siege is an answer to the questions that face Neo Nazis in the 1970s. And then the second half of the book is even, I would say, less about Mason. It's about these four countercultural figures who discovered Mason, helped published him, and eventually created, published and disseminated siege itself. And part of that is I was just around the scene. These people were part of in the 1990s. Like, I saw one of them, Boyd Rice, play. I had many mutual friends with another, the publisher, Adam Parfrey of Feral House. So, like, I was like, right around what these people were doing as part of the 90s counterculture. So I became very interested in that because these people always denied their background, you know, or left it off or something. And I found just so many smoking guns in this. And so I will say how this started is right after Charlottesville. They unite. The right rally in Charlottesville. You say these things and you give the name of the thing, and people are like, wait a minute. That's like, where I live. You know, we're more than that. You know, I was in Seattle. I was like, oh, I was at Seattle, referring to this 1999 demonstration. And I'm like, people are here. Weren't even necessarily born then. And just saying at Seattle doesn't mean anything. So after, you know, I had to write. There was a spike in popularity in siege and the hashtag readsiege because it looked like the rally followed what he said. And he said, no one in American society will allow neo Nazis to succeed. And a lot of people don't know this, but what happened at the initial rally is that it wasn't the street fighting people might be familiar with. Even that's fading from memory was before it was supposed to start and when it was supposed to start at noon, the police, who had been standing a block away and letting everything unfold, marched in and forced everyone out. Meaning the rally never happened.
- [51:48]
Spencer Sunshine
Nobody ever gave a speech.
- [51:50]
Nevdon Jamgochian
Nobody gave a speech. As. As we know, the car attack happened like an hour or two later. I got to look at a timeline that's all like, garbled now, right?
- [51:58]
Spencer Sunshine
1:30?
- [51:59]
Nevdon Jamgochian
Yeah, yeah, that sounds right. And the book is co. Dedicated to Heather Hare. I just want to point out. So it seemed to coincide with what Mason said. He's like, you can't do legal work. You have to do a terrorism. Right. And so there was a spike in interest in it. And Atomwaffen had been doing more and more. Adam Waffen People are doing. Committing murders, strange murders. They're all very strange murders. Which I think speaks to a lot of the personalities who are involved in this and other forms of violence, even in more structured political movements. I think it does attract. Tends to attract fringe people, except at certain times where people are intentionally using it as a strategy as part of a bigger mass movement. Anyway, these are questions for terrorism studies. And so there was a spike of interest in it. So I was going to write a short article for a think tank I used to be associated with, which I will not name because I had such a bad experience with them. And it was going to be an article. I couldn't get the facts to line up. As I said, there's terrible scholarship about this period. And so I used this very sophisticated research tool called Google. And through that I found that Mason's Papers. There was a huge collection of Mason's papers at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas. So I decided I'd go there. I thought I'd just straighten these things out. There were some documents I needed, some very obscure fanzines and stuff. It'd be the end of the day. I got there. Well, first I discovered it's not easy to get to Lawrence, Kansas. You have to fly into an airport. And then I think I took an Uber for like an hour. There was like one bus a day or something. Anyway, I got there and started poking at the papers. It was 60 boxes of his correspondence. He had letters, incoming and outgoing since the early 1960s. As you mentioned, he was an insider to the Neo Nazi movement. So it was with all these people. He had kept carbon copies of his outgoing letters. It was a unique slice of National Socialist life in the United States. Never seen an archive like it. People didn't keep their papers because they were doing illegal activities. The government sees them and has them in a warehouse somewhere or whatever this is, even in the pre Internet. I can only do this because it was pre Internet and there were paper copies of stuff. And I'm of the age where I grew up doing all research on paper and in archives. And I quickly found out what I had. And there were two things. One, as I said, was that there was this whole story of American Neo Nazism of when the American Nazi party splinters then called the National Socialist White People's party in the 1970s. And all these groups come out of it, many of which we know parts of, like William Pierce, who wrote the Turner Diaries, and the Skokie Incident, which is parodied in the Blues Brothers. Some people don't know this. Joseph Paul Franklin shooting and paralyzing Hustler publisher Larry Flint and some other things. And I was like, oh, these are all people who came out of one thing, a splintering of the party. And I realized that there basically was a terrorist wing that came out of the splintering. And people knew Mason and people knew Pierce, but there was like a couple other groups or people, but people didn't put it together that they were all like the most radical wing of these splinter groups. So there was that story. And then, as I mentioned, there was a second story about these countercultural people who had always denied that they were involved in national socialism or the level of it. It was just a joke. All these things that we hear today almost word for word. And so I found all their letters to James Mason, and they're adorned with swastikas and eight eights. And they're helping him. They. They reveal the extent that they helped him. And the funny thing is, a lot of this stuff was actually available and out in the open. It was in published books, but it was like little pieces of flakes of gold scattered around everything. And I started picking them up because I realized you could put them together. And so one article turned. It was supposed to be one article, and then it turns two articles. And I sat down to write it and turn into a book. And then five years later, I finally had the manuscript done. Then it took another year at the publishers, and then it came out last year. So it's been seven years of work. And I've been going around doing talks. I did 17 talks in support of the book and as many podcasts and stuff. So I'm still. The book is still part of my life, as much as I would like to sort of put it down. But thank you for having me on the podcast.
- [55:55]
Azad
This is not.
- [55:56]
Nevdon Jamgochian
This is great that you have me on the podcast. Not against. No dis. Against you, no shade. No shade.
- [56:01]
Spencer Sunshine
And I'm so. I'm so jealous of your trip to Kansas to see the archives. I only recently, a year or two, discovered that his papers existed in those archives. And so I wrote to the archivists and I said, like, you know, are any of these digitized? I would love to see them. And there's like, you know, we've only digitized like one box and they sent me a couple of. A couple of scans, but most of it has not been digitized. So you have to go to Kansas if you want to read this old pedophile Nazis letters to Charles Manson.
- [56:29]
Nevdon Jamgochian
Well, I do have thousands of pictures I took of this correspondence. So, yeah, if you request digital copies, they won't tell you what they've digitized. And so it's. It's like, you know, trying to like, randomly throw darts or something. If you get the right file, they have them.
- [56:43]
Kaveh
I know.
- [56:43]
Spencer Sunshine
I was like, I was begging and pleading. I was like, please, just like any letters you have with Bob Height. I just, I just want the Bob Hike letters.
- [56:50]
Nevdon Jamgochian
But I Can give you the Bob Hike letters.
- [56:53]
Spencer Sunshine
I would love those.
- [56:54]
Nevdon Jamgochian
I think they'll. They'll digitize stuff for. For a price, though.
- [56:57]
Spencer Sunshine
Oh, I'm. I'm sure. I'm sure if I pay for it, they would do me the favor. But that's the thing, is that there's so much interconnection here because these stories always get told episodically.
- [57:07]
Nevdon Jamgochian
Right?
- [57:08]
Spencer Sunshine
Like the story of James Mason and Adam Waffen, the story of William Luther Pierce, the story of the founding of the National Socialist movement. But nobody takes those pieces and slots them together because they interlock. They all interlock.
- [57:21]
Kaveh
Right.
- [57:21]
Spencer Sunshine
And so this. This idea of the lone wolf. I mean, I guess James Mason's life's work is to perpetuate and motivate the lone wolf. But is it really a lone wolf if he's training them?
- [57:32]
Nevdon Jamgochian
Well, the lone wolf question is. Is a long question. A lot of people know Metzger moved to the lone wolf strategy after war, was sued by the SPLC and collapsed. But Mason was advocating this beforehand and was very tight with Metzger. So there is actually a book describing what you've said, putting the pieces together, and it's called Neo Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism.
- [57:53]
Spencer Sunshine
Exactly.
- [57:54]
Mia Wong
It's the.
- [57:54]
Spencer Sunshine
I think it's.
- [57:55]
Nevdon Jamgochian
Which you can buy today.
- [57:56]
Spencer Sunshine
I mean, like I said, it's the only book that I know of that fits these pieces together.
- [58:01]
Nevdon Jamgochian
No, it is the only book, actually. I've been in contact with James Mason, and he said one radio interview, it's not the first of its kind, but it's the best of its kind.
- [58:10]
Spencer Sunshine
High praise from the. From the book's Nazi pedophile subject. Why did he donate his papers to the library? Because, like you said, most people are not. Not only not preserving these items, right? They're not preserving them at all because they know what they've done is illegal or embarrassing to everyone involved, and they're intentionally destroying the evidence of these kinds of communications. But he not only saved them, but he wanted to make sure we could read them. Did you talk to him at all about why he did that?
- [58:47]
Nevdon Jamgochian
Well, he sold them. He was a wheeler dealer in especially American Nazi party memorabilia. You know, he sold furniture on the side, like antiques. He'd go antiquing, and he. If you've seen pictures of his apartment, it's filled with Nazi knickknacks. Right. He's got a knife collection.
- [59:04]
Spencer Sunshine
I mean, it looks like. It looks like the Aryan nations booth at the Tulsa gun show.
- [59:09]
Nevdon Jamgochian
It looks like my apartment. But like in the. In the Inverse and fewer plants. So he was a collector. So he was already. I. My understanding is he was already selling George Lincoln Rockwell memorabilia or whatever papers and such to Kansas. They have this collection there called the Wilcox Collection of Anti extremist stuff. This guy, Laird Wilcox had been an early Students for Democratic Society before they took the like Marxist turn and then decided that the left and the right were the same, like in the 70s or something and started collecting all this material. So they were one of the. They were probably the biggest collection of far right material. And as I said at the time, libraries weren't collecting it and people weren't writing about it. They were like, oh, these are just a bunch of kooks and wingnuts. They're not important. And some of this is because, like as I say in the book, the first neo Nazi mass murder wasn't until the late 70s. Like it was what we know as neo Nazism today really only emerged in the 70s is one of my arguments in the book. So the papers were there because he sold them. The second thing is he is unique, I think not unique, but very uncommon because he is an unabashed neo Nazi. He does not try to hide it. He is not like the nsm, which is actually a party he co founded, shockingly, but left over that as they turned because originally it was to promote violence. And then as it turned to a more traditional Hollywood Nazi party, he left. But it's the same one that was at Charlottesville and Jeff Scoop was the head of. I actually taught Jeff Scoop about how the party was founded. That was very interesting. I interviewed him for the book.
- [60:42]
Spencer Sunshine
Another one of those dishonest actors.
- [60:43]
Nevdon Jamgochian
Well, the guy who had made him the head of the party, who was actually the second head. Harrington, Cliff Harrington, Clifford Harrington, did not give him the truthful account of the party's founding. Harrington claimed he was a co founder and he wasn't. He claimed a different date. This is one reason I spent so much time on stuff also that I found all these things had been printed that were wrong by scholars and others that were. And it wasn't their fault. They were taking. It was hard to get these, harder to get these documents, especially when a group is moving. And so Harrington claimed he had been a co founder in 1974 or whatever, but he was lying. Mason was one of the co founders and not him. He only became the head in the. In the 80s. So this is some of the stuff I found. Anyway, I was going to say the NSM at one point go, we're not neo Nazis, We're National Socialists. I was like, get the fuck out of here. Like really, like come all. Your flag is a swastika onic. Oh, I mean this is absurd. But people will do that, right? It's like the dead parrot skit in Monty Python if people know this. And so. But Mason stands out because he's always been very upfront about his views. He's very proud of them. He's not ashamed and if embarrassed other people, they didn't belong, as he told to me, they didn't believe in the one true religion. So I asked him about these counterculture figures who have denied they were ever involved in this stuff. At the time he was convinced they were National Socialists. And he was like, well, they believed in something else other than the one true faith. I think that's the word he used. So yeah, he has nothing to hide. He's very open about it, very open about promoting terrorism, as you know. And maybe some of the listeners do. Young neo Nazis go to his apartment and he tutors them. They take pictures with him. This included Sam Woodward, who murdered a young gay Jewish man. Blaze Bernstein, recently sentenced to life in prison. There's pictures of Woodward in Mason's apartment. So yeah, I mean he's proud of his lineage and he wants it documented. And I knew I did him a favor by writing a book about his movement. I mean they don't have the intellectuals and the resources to and the train people to write historical books. And I did a pretty straight up book. Even Mason was like, I kept waiting to read the smear. I kept waiting for the smear. There was no smear. I was like, yeah, I just wrote it as a history book. And so in a way I've given them insight into their history which wouldn't exist otherwise. So this stuff is always a double edged sword when you cover, as you know, when you cover fascist groups, they want the publicity by and large. I was told sometimes at the splc, like groups contact them and they're like, cover us, give us coverage.
- [63:15]
Spencer Sunshine
Sending them their press releases.
- [63:17]
Nevdon Jamgochian
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [63:18]
Spencer Sunshine
But I mean, I think someone like Mason, I guess he doesn't see this mirror because like you said, he's proud of himself. So this is, I think is an honest appraisal of his legacy. And most people would see that as a smear. But he's proud of it.
- [63:31]
Nevdon Jamgochian
Well, it's not a smear. I don't need to say anything bad about him. He's, he's there promoting Nazi terrorism. What's the point of like, you know, denouncing this or something.
- [63:41]
Spencer Sunshine
I mean, whereas I think someone like Pierce, I think sometimes when people write honestly about Pierre, I mean, obviously he's been dead for 25 years, but he resisted the characterization that he was inciting terrorism, even though he, like Mason very much was.
- [63:57]
Nevdon Jamgochian
Oh, well, Pierce is just a liar. I mean, all these guys are. Exactly.
- [64:00]
Spencer Sunshine
That's what I mean. But I think a book like this about Pierce, I think he would not have enjoyed. Whereas Mason is at least honest about his legacy.
- [64:08]
Nevdon Jamgochian
You know, there is a terrible book about Pierce by one of his sycophants who's a professor, actually.
- [64:13]
Spencer Sunshine
Robert S. Griffin.
- [64:14]
Nevdon Jamgochian
Yeah.
- [64:14]
Spencer Sunshine
And that again, that is one of those dishonest histories. I think we were talking before we started recording that the problem with archival research trying to write a history of these movements is they are dishonest actors. And so Robert S. Griffin, he wrote. What is it? The fame of a dead man's deeds.
- [64:31]
Nevdon Jamgochian
Yes.
- [64:31]
Spencer Sunshine
Is that what it's called? He went into it, you know, saying, like, I'm going to write this neutral appraisal of this figure of the movement about William Luther Pierce. And over the weeks that he spent on the compound to write it, he spent time with Pierce on the compound in Hillsborough, became radicalized, and is a Nazi now. He's still alive. I mean, he could take issue with that characterization if he wants. But yes, if I'm sure you've read the book, it's not neutral. It is a hagiography of Pierce.
- [64:59]
James
Yeah.
- [65:00]
Nevdon Jamgochian
There's actually a book by Pierce's son, too, which is interesting.
- [65:03]
Spencer Sunshine
I have read that. It's quite good.
- [65:04]
Nevdon Jamgochian
Well, unfortunately, a lot of it's copy pasted, but.
- [65:08]
Spencer Sunshine
Well, I think his insight into his relationship with his father is very unique. It is called the Sins of My Father by Kelvin Pierce. I mean, that's a window you don't often get. Although I guess now we do also have the Klansman's Son by Don Black's daughter.
- [65:23]
Nevdon Jamgochian
Black's daughter or son.
- [65:24]
Spencer Sunshine
She has transitioned.
- [65:25]
Nevdon Jamgochian
Oh, I did not know that. Well, mazel tov.
- [65:28]
Spencer Sunshine
Yeah.
- [65:28]
Nevdon Jamgochian
Yeah. I remember reading their work before Trump and they actually wrote one of the most moving resignations from the movement that I've read. Very much taking, you know, being accountable, even though they were raised in it, I feel like children raised in this are not, like, as accountable as adults are. Right. Especially like. Like they were in college at the time. But it was like a true. Interesting. Working through it and I felt like heartfelt apology for it. And. Yeah, actually, this is a fun Fact you may know a member of the Aryan Nationalist Action A n A this terrorist, this bank robbing group from the 80s, I think became the first person to transition gender from Donna Langan.
- [66:11]
Spencer Sunshine
Donna Langan was known as Pretty Boy Pedro when she was the head of the Aryan Republican army as a bank robber gang out of Elohim City. Yeah. She was the first person to win a battle with the federal government to.
- [66:23]
Nevdon Jamgochian
Transition in federal prison to get surgery.
- [66:25]
Spencer Sunshine
Yeah. And just recently actually there was a filing in her case. She's trying to get the. The way the case is titled in the court records is still Peter Langan, her dead name. And the judge denied her petition to retitle the case. But she has transitioned and is in a women's prison.
- [66:42]
Nevdon Jamgochian
Is she in Texas?
- [66:43]
Spencer Sunshine
Oh, gosh, I could look up in the BOP where she is.
- [66:46]
Nevdon Jamgochian
Texas bans prisoners from changing their names.
- [66:49]
Spencer Sunshine
She is in FMC Carswell.
- [66:52]
Nevdon Jamgochian
That is in Dallas.
- [66:54]
Spencer Sunshine
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [66:55]
Nevdon Jamgochian
That's why. Yeah, that's why.
- [66:57]
Spencer Sunshine
So she's still in the BOP system under her dead name, but she, she was allowed to. To physically transition. So that's again, just a strange twist of history, right, that. Yeah, the person who won that legal battle for us was a Nazi bank robber.
- [67:10]
Nevdon Jamgochian
Well, she has also long repudiated those politics. So I think she's been the only person to have surgery. Trans person to have surgery who was imprisoned at the time, because I think that was recently. And then everything, you know, everything they change. They. I know that they slowed down their trans policies waiting to see the results of the election. So for a strange reason, I know actually a bunch of the stuff about trans people in prison. So anyway.
- [67:37]
Spencer Sunshine
No, I mean, it's a remarkable, A remarkable history.
- [67:40]
Nevdon Jamgochian
Yeah, yeah.
- [67:41]
Spencer Sunshine
So you started writing this book after Unite the Right because there was this renewed interest in siege. I mean, I guess what has the experience been like, you know, over the course of spending the last six years of your life working on this, realizing that it is only becoming more relevant and not less?
- [67:58]
Nevdon Jamgochian
Well, the problem is, is like for people like us who watch the far right, like our work is only important or people are only interested in it when there is a big upswing in it. Like that's when people are interested and that's when it is more important. So on one hand it's good that I didn't spend five years and then no one remembered what siege was and it was just a blip. I mean, that's good for me. But I often say what's good for me is bad for Society. And so, I mean, I think it.
- [68:23]
Spencer Sunshine
Would have been an important work of history regardless. But I guess as you're working on it, realizing that the body count is only growing.
- [68:29]
Nevdon Jamgochian
Yeah, it's, it's. I don't know. I don't, I don't really, you know, what do you say about that? I, I call these people empty people, spreading emptiness. Like, it's hard for me even to get mad at the more aggressive neo Nazis and white supremacists. Like, often they're young and I just see like sad young people who can't deal with their problems, engaged in like hurting other people who are often not so different than them, you know, I mean, there's a trans man who was in Atom often, you know, like they're, they're.
- [69:03]
Spencer Sunshine
Tyler Parker Di Pepe.
- [69:04]
Nevdon Jamgochian
Yeah, Numerous stories of people being, you know, of not white descent. Either they're hiding that they're not, or they're a mixed race descent and they're sort of passing as white, of being Jewish, of being queer, all this stuff. The movement's filled with these people. Sometimes it's, the people are even like, how many straight white men are there in the movement? Like, and it's just sad. You're like, I see you're being attracted to this because you're so alienated or you're so, your identity is so shaky that you are attracted to this idea of a firm, strong identity. And I mean, sometimes people forget Fascist in Italy and Germany arose and basically the last two countries that arose and solidified in Europe, like those were countries that wasn't clear what Italy was going to be. There's such differences between the north and the south. There's no reason, like, it was unclear originally whether Germany was going to be Austria too, you know, and so they were. It's a way part of fascism, of shoring up that national identity, which was very fragmented. And it works the same, I think, with people's identities. And one of the, one of the things that attracts people to Neo Nazism, I think, is this strong affirmation, an identity. And people with mixed identities or conflicted about it or filled with self loathing are drawn to this for that reason. One of the many reasons people get.
- [70:20]
Spencer Sunshine
Drawn into these things and they recruit so young. I mean, I think in the book you're talking about, you know, all the way back to James Mason's origins, that he became interested in the Nazi party as a 14 year old.
- [70:32]
Nevdon Jamgochian
Joined it, joined it at 14.
- [70:34]
Spencer Sunshine
So he's, he's a child, right, getting into this movement and now that he is an old man he is in turn indoctrinating children.
- [70:43]
Kaveh
Right.
- [70:43]
Spencer Sunshine
That Atomwaffen members are very young I guess were Adam Waffen technically doesn't exist anymore. But most of the, most of the young men who spilled blood for Atomwaffen were 20 years old, 19 years old.
- [70:56]
Nevdon Jamgochian
And you know someone pointed out the founder of the Foyer Krieg Division when he founded it was 12. He was arrested when he was 13 or 14 but he founded it at.
- [71:07]
Spencer Sunshine
12 and which tragic. Obviously. Tragic. Heartbreaking. Disgusting. But imagine being one of the adults who is in that group and finding out that your Fuhrer was 12.
- [71:19]
Nevdon Jamgochian
I, I grew up in the south in an extremely Protestant area at the, at the height of that like 80s fundamentalist Christian, Christian right thing. And there were. I knew about. These are kind of an older thing. Child preachers. Have you ever heard of child preachers? This was a big thing during the.
- [71:36]
Spencer Sunshine
Yeah, they speak in tongues and they sort of parrot the, the cadence of the way adults speak. But if you listen carefully they're not saying anything.
- [71:44]
Nevdon Jamgochian
They've memorized the way that adults give these barn burning. You know adult Protestants, evangelicals give these barn burning sermons but they don't necessarily understand what they're saying. And so I mean I think it's pretty common people adults will do this. They don't say. Believe in what they're saying. Maybe they understand it a little better. I think there's a bunch of post structuralist academics who don't even understand what they're saying. But that can happen too. And so I think people like well I don't know. I was a pretty smart 12 year old. Maybe I would understand it better. But you just need somebody repeating it. The slogans and the narratives have already been formed by others. You're not necessarily innovating on it. As long as you can repeat the dogma. Does it really matter who's saying it? Does it matter if the person is gay or Jewish?
- [72:31]
Spencer Sunshine
And I mean the Estonian 12 year old was not a one off. You know like in the Ethan Meltzer case a year or two ago. Ethan Meltzer was a US army private who was trying to set up his unit in Turkey to be attacked by. By Middle Eastern terrorist groups. And the person he was communicating with online sort of goading him into these acts was a child. It was a child.
- [72:51]
Nevdon Jamgochian
He was the order of nine angles though. Right?
- [72:53]
Spencer Sunshine
He was Ono.
- [72:54]
Nevdon Jamgochian
He wasn't a neo Nazi. Right. I always try to distinguish there's some 09 as who are not.
- [72:59]
Spencer Sunshine
He was at the bleed point of an Atomwaffen splinter group. And Ona, he was involved with Rapewaffen.
- [73:05]
Nevdon Jamgochian
Oh, was he?
- [73:05]
Spencer Sunshine
Yeah. The lineage of these groups is so messy. I think some of them don't even understand the ideological lineage of the sect they've ended up in. But yeah, Melzer was at that sort of bleed point where Adam Waffen was becoming Ona.
- [73:20]
Nevdon Jamgochian
But I think what we're seeing now, and definitely in these last two school shootings in the last month is a syncretic murder cult. The guy who just did the Nashville one was black. But if you start looking at both of their manifestos, they're referring to all different kinds of things, Some of whom are white supremacists and neo Nazis, many of whom aren't just other school shooters. And they don't seem to have a real ideological necessarily connection to some of this. The political stuff. It's nihilism and onane. They are founded by a neo Nazi and many of them are neo Nazis. And so I was going to say they're not. They don't have to be. And all the people are in. And even if you were supposed to be, they aren't all. And so we're just getting through these various online forums on Telegram and elsewhere. Sometimes they just spread over all kinds of the different platforms. We're getting just this syncretic mix of these things. And this is one of the things that made 09A and siege culture parallel Mason's ideas. Because Mason's not a Satanist. And in fact, he's recently denounced Order of Nine Angles. And when he was around Satanists, they were atheist Satanists around the Church of Satan. That when you start saying, hey, we need to commit random murders in this goal of destroying the like supposed Jewish controlled society so there could be a white Aryan revolution. Like, it doesn't matter if you have a really political reason or if you're thinking that these heretical acts will destroy somehow the consensus reality. You're just trying to goad people into these violent, random acts of terrorism and more random murders.
- [74:54]
Kaveh
Right?
- [74:55]
Spencer Sunshine
And the end result is the same.
- [74:56]
Nevdon Jamgochian
Your thinking is the same. And the end result is the same. So they start cross pollinating. And then what's the difference between the school shooter cults, you know, and now we have groups like the Maniac Murder Cult who are ostensibly political, ostensibly neo Nazi and Order of Nine Angles, but in reality are just like, go attack old people from behind. I mean, it's just pathetic stuff. Go, you know, beat up homeless people and stab them. It's like at some point. I often say this in my speeches as become more and more real is like everything blends together in, in our society. I think you start with school shooters and it's hard to distinguish them from apolitical mass shooters and from political mass shooters. At one point it just becomes this one thing that's all mixed together because we're having, in the United States, we're having these constant attacks and often the body count is very high. What becomes the difference anymore? Does it really matter? Like the Allen in Texas guy who was a Latino Neo Nazi who killed a bunch of people in an outlet mall. This is really a Neo Nazi action. Like he was like, clearly, if we look, you look at his stuff or an article called Nazis of Color about this dynamic. But was his action, how was his action necessarily any different than like a school shooting or whatever? Or just like, you know, it's just like he's going somewhere and killing random people. Like what is this about? So I think we're seeing this syncretic murder cult is really, I know other people have different ways of posing this that is sprawling out on different online platforms and appealing to very young, alienated people probably whose whole lives are, you know, online. I think especially younger people who went through Covid Zoomers and I guess people younger than that would be Generation Alpha, spend more time online than any other generation. Obviously they must. And this becomes, especially when they're much younger, the horizon of their world. Right. And if they're incels and they're not really connected to other people and they're not connected to their family, like it just, it just drives these impulses more and more and they don't have the maturity to look outside of it or to think about the repercussions of it or think, have the empathy to think about how it's going to affect other people and their families.
- [77:18]
Spencer Sunshine
So when it comes to Siege, what would you say its current role in this sort of evolving syncretic murder culture that we have is, Is it. Is Siege's legacy now just that its ideological lineage lives on in sort of the terragram milieu or is it still itself influential?
- [77:39]
Nevdon Jamgochian
Well, some of this is a question of ideas. I think sometimes Siege acts as a symbol. People can gesture that if they're Neo Nazis, there's a serious Neo Nazi 450 page tome.
- [77:52]
Spencer Sunshine
They didn't read it. They didn't all read it.
- [77:55]
Nevdon Jamgochian
Yeah, I know read Siege is like how many of you have read Siege? And I found out doing the work that there's like an edited hundred page version and then there's like a little pocket version. And then someone even made the ten tenets of siege.
- [78:08]
Spencer Sunshine
There's this. The Spark Notes murder cult.
- [78:10]
Nevdon Jamgochian
Well, Atomwaffen Division apparently had a 10 test on Siege to get in. I'm like, I know these people didn't write. They're like a lot of very, you know, disturbed or, you know, people who aren't gonna like, it's a boring text. I mean, I read it twice and.
- [78:24]
Spencer Sunshine
Like, I've read portions, but I'm not gonna sit here and say I read the whole book. It's 450 pages, man.
- [78:29]
Nevdon Jamgochian
I read every newsletter and the book and it's yes, no. Oh, so it acts as the symbol to be like, look, we have a serious intellectual thing. How many Christians have read the Bible? Let's be really.
- [78:39]
Spencer Sunshine
I think, yeah, I think that's the right analogy. Right. That it is a, a foundational text, but they're not all sitting down and digesting or even understanding it.
- [78:48]
Nevdon Jamgochian
Yeah. I mean, how many communists have read Das Kavital? Even just volume one, which I have, I would like to say I have actually. Is it more or less boring than Siege? It's more intellectual. And so there's that. And there's also like the conclusions are there. Right. The whole argument is developed in siege, but you really just need to take the conclusions, which is you can't do any political work. It's hopeless. You need to go out and commit dramatic acts of violence to help inspire people. And then, you know, maybe afterwards there'll be some Aryan blah, blah, blah. Frankly, that's all you need to know about it because that's what it advocates. You just need the praxis that it concludes. And most activists aren't intellectuals, like I always say. Like a movement can have three slogans. And what you need to do on the left, you need to make sure those are the right slogans pointing in the right direction. Because somebody who flows into activism, who's young, it doesn't matter if they're young, doesn't have a background in politics, is going to take the things seriously that you say. And you can only say so many things to people. Political movements are stupid. I mean, this is why we are. The 99% was great. It was great. It wasn't true. I mean, half of Americans are like it, you know, support the Republicans, but like, it's like one thing and then the person can think about those things. They're not going to have complicated ideas. So what are the Slogans that come out of something. What are the basic. What does it boil down to, the things you're saying? And people have inherited that from Siege, or inherited it secondhand, you know, because Taragram is very well versed in what Siege is about. I mean, Adam often had to read it, so they were more, I think, into it as a text, and then as it's gone out, you know, Terragram people, the Terragram collective, certainly knew what was in it and stuff. And so people are being affected by it, even if they don't know, even if they haven't read it, or even if they don't know. That's the origin of those ideas.
- [80:40]
Spencer Sunshine
Right. So Terragram is directly downstream of Siege.
- [80:43]
I
Right.
- [80:43]
Spencer Sunshine
So Siege was a newsletter that became a book. People read the book, and the people who read that book turned it back into a zine. Right. So it's. It's sort of.
- [80:51]
Nevdon Jamgochian
Oh, to some level, right.
- [80:52]
Spencer Sunshine
It's. It's moving through its phases, and now it's regressing back into sort of memetic zine form.
- [80:59]
Nevdon Jamgochian
But people who join these movements who want something more intellectual, because everyone who joins a religious or political movement, some people want a more rigorous. They're like, well, what's the reason for this? Well, I have these questions. How do you answer them? Why are we doing this? Want more rigorous. Some people want a more rigorous background, can turn to siege, and as they get older, will turn to siege or move out of it. And they're like, what were the ideas behind this? Why did we have these ideas? And I think that's it's normal. I mean, there are all kinds of weird intellectual groundings for white supremacists. A lot of it is theology, which is sort of curious. And I kind of concluded at some point that you just needed something complicated because they couldn't use race science anymore. And there weren't people who developed social science other than someone like Alaina Benoist, who's saying something much more complicated than most white supremacists are. And so, like, theology just allowed something intellectual for people to chew on. You know what I mean? Like. Like people are real smart who are very analytical, want something to chew on with the ideas, whether it really changes their praxis or not. And I think there has to be something that serves that need.
- [82:03]
Spencer Sunshine
And so I guess, wrapping up, because this. We're supposed to keep these daily shows short. What is the takeaway that you want people to. To come away from this book with? I guess, especially in this political moment.
- [82:13]
Nevdon Jamgochian
I think there's there's two things. The book has two things. One, I just want to have people have a better understanding of neo Nazism in the US and how it developed. It's just one big. It's part of other things and I see it as a distinct strain. And I want people to have just a better understanding of that political movement's origins, which is maybe a more scholarly thing. And I am. My next book, I hope, if I can get a contract, is to write a history of National Socialism in America. Because again, there's not a single book that describes that which is very strange. Certainly not a history post war. And there may be a pre war one, but not one that puts it all together. So there's a lot of ignorance about this movement. And the second part about the cultural actors is about the danger of taking a radical cultural movement and to use impulses like transgression and turn them into the very toxic politics, into terrorist politics. At the end of the day, I had a discussion on Blue Sky. It was amazing. You could see it wasn't Twitter. I had a useful discussion on Blue sky and where I learned something. It was just fabulous. And it was. This woman posted that. She was like, essentially. And that's how I read it. In the 20th century, there was always, always this assumption that transgressive art, avant garde art, was implicitly progressive. Sometimes it was ideological, but even when it wasn't, even when it had some dodgy elements, the impulse of it led to progressive left leaning politics. And it's very. The transgression was progressive. And I mean these guys I'm looking at are working in the 80s. And you, you see it now. We've all seen it with 4chan. Like that was never. That isn't true. And that was never, never true.
- [83:50]
Spencer Sunshine
It's never true.
- [83:51]
Nevdon Jamgochian
Right? I mean, those of us in the punk scene in the 80s and 90s could see this, even if we certainly didn't put it that way with like skinheads in particular. It was contested terrain where people were trying to take this subculture and pull it to the left and right. Right. There were so many Nazis, but there were anti fascist skinheads too.
- [84:07]
Spencer Sunshine
Sharps.
- [84:08]
Nevdon Jamgochian
Sharps to some extent Sharps were. A lot of them are right wing nationalists. They just weren't Nazis. This is a common. There was groups like Rash Red and Anarchist skinheads who still exist, but there was a contested terrain where people trying to pull it in different directions. This is still the case in neo folk, in heathen religious circles. And that's sort of. There's an implication which I don't think. I can only, like, put it into words now that, like, the transgressive elements of these subcultures didn't necessarily go one way or the other and it was something you'd have to fight over. Like, they could go in any direction. And I think it was clear in 4chan early on. I once was mentioned very early on in 4chan and someone chimed in and they're like, leave him alone, he's my friend. And I'm like, which of my friends are on 4chan and defending me? But like, 4chan didn't have to end up the way it did. You know, the earlier Internet culture wasn't like this. It was progressive or libertarian or a more decent libertarian reading of libertarianism than we have now. So that's the second part. I mean, other than these guys, if you ever were in the industrial or neo folk scene and you heard the Butler's Nazis, I have all the receipts in detail in the book, if that's of interest to you.
- [85:18]
Spencer Sunshine
Yeah, Boyd Rice will tell you he never meant it. But I've read some of the primary documents that lead me to believe otherwise.
- [85:25]
James
Yeah.
- [85:25]
Nevdon Jamgochian
And I even made a video of him creatively entitled, Boyd Rice, Neo Nazi Collaborator. And I know you're like, spencer, what are you really getting at here? And I show the letters and stuff and just if you're not familiar with these figures, I know a lot of people, they were very obscure movements at the time and people are not familiar with them, but I think are familiar enough with this idea of a super radical cultural movement about step by step, I show how it can move into fully politicized. A transgressive movement can move into a fully politicized, super toxic neo Nazism that is espousing terrorism and that. That this is something that we always have to watch out for in our own religious movements and our own cultural movements in occult circles. I just did a podcast with some, you know, occult style, esoteric podcast, and I was talking about Satanists who become Nazis. Satanists are sort of of, I would say split these days. But there's definitely a Nazi, you know, piece in there, a very visible one. And so some of it's just about these things.
- [86:23]
Spencer Sunshine
That's an important takeaway too, that, you know, in any subculture, especially these sort of transgressive subcultures, like, you know, counterculture music and art and, you know, occult spaces, if you have a magical practice that you engage in, people who engage in, you know, practice pagan faiths in all these subcultures, you need to call out these bad actors early and often push back. Don't let them bully you and push them out of your spaces.
- [86:48]
Nevdon Jamgochian
Absolutely. And Nazis ruin everything. They intentionally go into all these spaces and sometimes don't intentionally. Actually, this was a comment on Stormfront. I learned from talking about Nazis and the animal rights movement. And they're like, spencer doesn't understand. We're not infiltrating these movements. We're just vegans. We're just also Nazis. But we're not vegans because we're Nazis. We're not coming here from some other reason. Reason.
- [87:15]
Spencer Sunshine
Well, you can't let them sit with you either way.
- [87:18]
Nevdon Jamgochian
Well, this is a funny story. I don't know if you have time, but I heard this story from a friend of mine that they were in a vegan group in Southern California, I think, and they had a unofficial party, like a barbecue. Was people from the group, you know, from the group doing it. People brought their partners. It wasn't an official group function, but this one member of the group brought her husband, who was Kevin McDonald. Oh. And they were vegetarians or vegans. And people were like, holy. And he was like, I mean, I feel a little sympathetic to him. He's like, hey, man, I don't know. I'm just. I'm a. I'm a vegetarian or whatever. I'm here with my wife. She's going to a party.
- [87:52]
Spencer Sunshine
Like, no, you're not allowed to have friends. You're not allowed to have friends. You're not allowed to have hobbies. You can't be here.
- [87:57]
Nevdon Jamgochian
Yeah, but he's like, I'm not here to recruit anyone. I'm here. You know what I mean?
- [88:03]
Spencer Sunshine
The barbecue is over when the race scientist shows up.
- [88:06]
Nevdon Jamgochian
Well, this became a big discussion in the group about whether to push him out or not. But you have to do these things. And if you. Even if you don't want to, they're my friend or everyone's welcome or whatever. What is going to end up happening if you don't push the Nazi out?
- [88:19]
Spencer Sunshine
Is that more Nazis show up.
- [88:21]
Nevdon Jamgochian
Well, if you do, if it's a single person, people are going to start leaving. People of color are going to leave. Jews are going to leave. LGBTQ plus people are going to leave, and you're going to end up defending this one person, losing many more. So even just on your own, you know, enlightened self interest, if you want to keep your group together. And I've seen this again and again and again. And then they're like, you're defending a Nazi, so you're one too. So yeah, you got to kick these people out. Even just for practical reasons. I have a very low bar for people these days and I try to, I try to appeal, I try to appeal to the baser reasons sometimes with people, you know.
- [88:54]
Spencer Sunshine
Well, if you would like to learn more about how a couple of guys in the counterculture movement in the 80s are responsible for for the publication of the book that serves as the bible for modern Nazi terrorism, you can pick up a copy of Neo Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural the Origins and Afterlife of James Mason's Siege by Spencer Sunshine from Rootledge Press. It's available, I think, wherever books are sold. I bought my copy directly from the publisher, Routledge Press. I think it was only $27, you know, a bargain and a steal. So pick up a copy of that. And where else can people find your workspace?
- [89:30]
Nevdon Jamgochian
Thank you for now that you mentioned that I am on all of the socials usually at transform 6789 have a webpage if you want, if you have an RSS feed. If someone said this recently, they're like, it's actually one of the better ways to keep track of people is like this is your follow a zillion people. Anyway, it's spencersunshine.com Also if you'd like to support anti fascist research and get a warm fuzzy feeling you should sign up for my Patreon for as little as $2 a month. You can help me out with the rent and get some exclusive content. So. Yep.
- [90:01]
Spencer Sunshine
Well, hell yeah. Thank you so much for joining us today.
- [90:03]
Nevdon Jamgochian
Yeah, thanks for having me on the show. It's been great.
- [90:21]
Mia Wong
Foreign here a podcast where the singular it is seemingly irrelevant now because everything is happening all of the time. I'm your host, Mia Wong and one of the many, many, many chaotic things that has been going on over the last two weeks since Trump took power has been a bunch of funding freezes to the the U.S. federal government grant system. And I think to a lot of people that doesn't sound like an enormously big deal, but that is unbelievably catastrophic for like I, I would go so far to say is like the survival of the human species for reasons that we'll get to in a second but unbelievably bad for the quality of life of everyone on earth. And to get to get a sense of exactly what this kind of stuff does, what these funding freezes do and what the sort of threat threat particularly to the Future of American science is I have brought in two people who are intimately familiar with this. Argy Von Sales, who's a surgeon and professor of medicine and friend of the show.
- [91:28]
J
Yeah, come on.
- [91:30]
Mia Wong
Yeah, definitely. I don't know why I had such a hesitant friend of the show, because it wasn't in my notes that was. I was ad libbing it. But yeah, friend of the show, Kamehoda, who is a gastroenterologist and the host of the podcast House of Pods. And both of you two, welcome to the show.
- [91:44]
J
Oh, thank you so much for having us.
- [91:45]
Kaveh
Yeah, thank you.
- [91:46]
J
I'm excited to be here for your most Persian episode ever.
- [91:53]
Mia Wong
Pretty sure we, we may have done episodes of like that were, like, about Iran. Yeah.
- [92:00]
J
This is as Persian as it gets. Two Persian doctors talking about Trump is about as Persian as it get. And you're not, you're not overselling it. This is a large scale attack on the hell health care infrastructure of the United States on a massive level. So you're not lying. It is a serious, serious issue, not just for us, but for the whole world.
- [92:21]
Mia Wong
Yeah. And one of, I mean, the place I want to start, I think, is with. Because it was happening, I think, in NSF NIH a bit before this happened. But the opm, the Office of Personnel Management, sent out this memo last week that was a. It was nominally a response to this very weird Trump executive order. That's him being like, every single program that has to do with civil rights, which is like. So my, my description is anything that has to do with civil rights at all, like, gone. His description of it is, like, DEI and woke. So, like, anything that has to do with queer people, anything that has to do with, like, racial inequality. And they were supposed to, like, go through and review every single, like, government grant program for anything.
- [93:03]
Kaveh
And, but don't forget, he also included the gender ideology, which is a meaningless phrase. And the Green New Deal is all part of it, too.
- [93:13]
Mia Wong
Yep, yep, yep. You know, and this is part of the raft of executive orders, particularly the anti trans executive orders. But OPM's response to this, again, awful. Personnel management's response was to just freeze literally every single grant program in the country. And this was everything from Pell grants and, like, work study for college students, to, like, food aid for single mothers to my personal favorite. And I don't know why this never made it into the press, because I'm apparently the one who went through and read the list. But one of the things that he froze funding for was security patrols for nuclear weapons manufacturing sites. So like we almost like, why.
- [93:49]
J
Yeah, why is that included?
- [93:51]
Mia Wong
It was because literally what happened was they found a list of every single grant that like anyone does or like, and any like program that gives out grants and they froze all of them. And so like another one of them that when I, when I said this is like, this is a threat to all life on Earth, I was not, I was not joking here. One of the other ones was defunding one of the very important, like international nuclear non proliferation organizations, like, specifically the one that's there to make sure that like random people don't get like enriched uranium or like obtain nuclear weapons. So like we, we, we dodged a like giant nuke sized bullet when, when like most of these programs got their money back after a judge was like, well, you obviously can't do this. This is so unbelievably illegal that it's astounding. Like, like the Constitution like very blatantly says that the power of the purse is Congress, not the President. Like, stop.
- [94:40]
Kaveh
Yeah, but I would just want to clarify for the people listening here that it wasn't just grants specifically. It was like all federal assistance. So one of the things that was very confusing and chaotic was this question of does this mean SNAP is gone? Does this mean WIC is gone? What about Head Start? What about Meals on Wheels? I mean, there are, are tons of federal assistance programs out there and they had only made an exception for Social Security and Medicare.
- [95:08]
Mia Wong
Yeah.
- [95:08]
Kaveh
In the memo. But not Medicaid. And what happened the next day. But the Medicaid portal went down. Right?
- [95:14]
Mia Wong
Yeah. And it's chaotic too because like all of the programs you just named were on the list of like, programs that they were putting a freeze on, but then it wasn't clear what was going to happen with them and.
- [95:24]
James
Right.
- [95:24]
J
And it's still not right.
- [95:26]
Kaveh
Right. Yeah, we just have a, we have, we found one judge with a backbone in the entire country so far. And, and he said, no, you cannot.
- [95:34]
J
Yeah, yeah. I am surprised actually that Trump hasn't gone out on the attack. Maybe I just missed it like attacking that judge, you know, but it is, I mean, what's so confusing to me is, you know, I get it. At least in some part of their weird, internal, terrible logic, transphobic logic. I get why they're doing some of the things they're doing, but then some of them don't even make sense within their own whack. Internal logic. Like when they scrub, for example, the CDC for all the terms that they didn't like gender terms, transgender terms, Things like that. They also scrub things like following maternal morbidity or opioid use, things that don't, at least on the surface, even fix with their attacks on WOKE ideology. So it seems like it's a complete mess to me. What's happening and what's terrifying about it is not just that it's a mess, but it is happening. I mean, they are doing it, they are pushing it, even though they clearly don't even seem to really know what they're doing or even have a great sense internally of what they're doing.
- [96:40]
Mia Wong
And I think that's the danger of this right now is that this is revenge. Right? They're lashing out in sort of in pure anger and pure hatred. And they have been given control of an apparatus that they don't understand at all. Right? Like, that's how you get defunding nuclear police. That's how you get them defunding. Like the Barry Goldwater Memorial grant thing that gives money to kids for writing essays about Barry Goldwater. They don't understand what the state is and what it does. And they're just trying to take the whole thing apart and they're just trying to sort of rampage their way through it. And it means that we're in this situation now where like, for a long time the line on like, trans rights was like, like, well, you should defend trans rights because they're going to come for you next. And that's no longer true. What is actually happening here is in order to kill us, they are. They are willing to kill every. They are willing to let all of you die in nuclear fire. Yeah, it's like specifically in order to hurt us. Right. That's the sort of line we're at where, you know, all of these, all of these sort of complicated systems and all of these sort of complicated funding mechanisms are just getting lit on fire by people who don't understand what they're doing and don't care.
- [97:44]
Jon Stewart
Right.
- [97:45]
J
Just out of spite or something.
- [97:47]
Kaveh
For sure. Out of sight and hate. But I wanted to take a step back and think about the fact that all of this is happening because of two versus three executive orders, depending how you think about it. But they're literally executive orders. They're not laws in the book. Congress has not passed anything. It's like this elderly man woke up and said, hey, let's get rid of DEI and deia, for example. Those are the terms they use exactly. Without saying what DEI is or what DEIA is. And then just. I feel that we need to pause for A moment on the A deia and they spell out, you know, A is for accessible. Wiping out everything related to accessibility is directly in violation of the ADA and makes no sense and is cool and all of that. But also just like legally, it makes no kind of sense unless they are going to go after the ada, which I'm guessing is part of their plan. To the extent that there is a plan. But the two key executive orders here are the sex and gender. One that's like defending, quote, unquote, defending women, that basically dictates that sex must be only male and female, thereby erasing intersex people completely. And that there's really. They're essentially saying there's no such thing as gender and that the only gender that they see are willing to recognize are male and female. They're by race. See, trans folks, intersex people, Non binary folks, etc. Gender queer, gender fluid, all of those people. So for them to go into, like, these CDC data sets, take them offline so that they can binarize whatever is there, eliminate. I'm assuming, I don't. I mean, I don't know that this was fine, but I'm assuming that that's what they're doing, taking any sex that's not male or female out of there and then removing gender as a variable because they've said that no grant funding should go to any assessment of gender, period.
- [99:32]
Mia Wong
Yeah.
- [99:33]
Kaveh
So that's when you're talking me about, like, how they're willing to throw everyone under, under the bus just to pursue this transphobic agenda. That's what you're talking about. They're willing to take huge swaths of information off of the Internet so people can no longer, researchers, physicians, anyone else can no longer access this information just to make sure that there is no hint or reference to anyone who is transgender. That seems to be, like, the key thing that they're trying to do with all of this. So they have thrown the entire government into chaos and the lives of millions of people into chaos, all to remove the teeth in lgbt.
- [100:10]
Mia Wong
Yeah. And the stuff that they're doing, like the destruction of this research data, the way that it's been just, like, taken down and destroyed, little parts of it have come back up after the sort of backlash. But, you know, what they're doing is staging a digital version of the Nazis burning all of the books at the Institute for Sexual Research. Like, that's. That's explicitly what they're doing. It's literally the same stuff. Like, it is research on queerness and trans People that they are lighting on fire.
- [100:36]
Kaveh
Yep, 100.
- [100:38]
Mia Wong
And you know, you know who else lights research on queer and trans people on fire? It's the sponsors of this show. It's the products and services.
- [100:46]
J
Yeah, that's the way you get those big bucks. That's how you do it. That's professional broadcasting.
- [101:02]
Mia Wong
And we are back. So I want to move from that to kind of the next phase after we got out of the sort of OPM like suspending everything phase, which has been this, kind of, this uncertainty around a whole bunch of the other funding agencies for science. The National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health. Can you talk a bit about what's been going on with grants there before we move into, like, how this whole process works?
- [101:30]
Kaveh
Yeah. So the first sign that something was materially going to change after these executive orders, as I recall, I'm living this along with everyone else and what is time? But the first thing that I recall is the study section being canceled. The study sections are meetings where scientists come together. They each will have read various grant proposals and scored them on a number of different dimensions. And then they come together and discuss. They don't discuss all of them, by the way. They only discuss the ones that have, that seem to have the most merit. And then out of those, they make recommendations for which ones they believe should get funded. So these are a critical part of the process by which the government gives out funds for research. If these meetings do not happen, people's grants are not getting evaluated, assessed and recommended for funding. That means they're not getting the funding. That means they're not hiring people or they're having to fire people they already had in or lay off people they already had in their lab. They're not able to continue the important work that they are doing. They may lose their job. Like really truly people can lose their job because they were not able to secure enough funding to support themselves and their labs. So these are really, really important meetings. And those have been canceled for both the NSF and the NIH for at least the last couple of weeks. And as of Yesterday, I saw Dr. Megan Rainey said that her or not, maybe not hers, but that study sections were canceled yesterday that were due to happen today. So there had been some communication around perhaps the free of those activities ending on February 1st today that we're recording is February 3rd. And those study sections for today were canceled. On the other hand, nsf, which is obviously a separate organization, has informally, I've heard, decided that they're going to resume some study sections. Although they haven't resumed just yet.
- [103:24]
J
And if I could add, just to be totally clear with your listeners, these are incredibly important organizations for discovery of new medical breakthroughs and for pushing science forward. The nih, for example. The NIH is a big part of the reason we have MRNA vaccines now. They were the ones helping to promote that research for decades before we were able to turn them into vaccines. And it's because of a lot of what they did that we're able to do that. When we're looking for new breakthroughs and we're looking for something where a patient comes to us and they're like, isn't there anything we've tried everything. Isn't there anything that we could at least try or some trial that we could be involved in, in? That's where we find these things. These are the things that we're talking about, these really important healthcare infrastructure that we're discussing.
- [104:14]
Mia Wong
Yeah, and between NIH and National Science foundation, and Department of Energy is having a similar thing to this because Department of Energy funds all high energy physics research. So all of your sort of particle accelerator stuff like that. It's not just the national labs, for example, that they get funding from these places, although national labs are like, you know, you get your funding from grants like everyone else. But, you know, I mean, this, this is, this is all the way down to the level of like undergrads in college chemistry labs, like, they're, they are getting paid out of these grants from National Science foundation, from the National Institutes for Health, like all of these, all of these institutions pay out everything. And it's like this is the basis of how all science, almost all science, like, there's some private sector stuff. But the thing is like the, the giant private, like Bell Labs, right? Like your, your old school, giant private sector. Here's our giant R D thing. Like, that's all kind of gone. So, you know, like, the only people who aren't getting funded by this are like, weird startup guys. And it's like, okay, look, look, look what they've invented in the last, like 15 years. It's like cryptocurrency NFTs, which is cryptocurrency again.
- [105:25]
J
Theranos, don't forget.
- [105:27]
Mia Wong
Yeah, Theranos, the Metaverse, Juicero. Like, they're doing great, they're doing great. And people will be like, oh, they invented AI. It's like, no. So national labs were using those AI algorithms like a decade and a half ago. It's like, yeah, the generative AI, blah, blah. Okay, we're not here to get into me complaining about generative AI. Go, go, go, go. Listen to Edgitron's entire show. Like, yeah.
- [105:50]
Kaveh
I mean, I think the bottom line of what you're trying to communicate here is that a lot of scientific and medical breakthroughs have come from labs and from researchers who have been funded by the NSF and the nih. And I will just say, as an academic, these are certainly the kind of premier funding opportunities that we have. Like, it also is really critical in the careers of researchers to be able to show that their work is worthy of this kind of funding. And that's part of why I was saying people's jobs, yes, the people we pay off of our grants, but also people like me. Our job can be really dependent on whether we get this funding or not.
- [106:29]
Mia Wong
And it's a generational thing too, because the students also need this funding. And so people, people who are undergrads, particularly people who like doctoral students, like their research. Right. Like the, the, the stuff that they're doing while they're in graduate school, like getting PhD so they can become scientists. That's all also like funded by these grants. And if that stuff goes away, like, it's not just that you're obliterating this generation of science, like you're kneecapping the next, like three generations of scientists.
- [106:54]
James
Right.
- [106:55]
Mia Wong
Because each one of them down the line suddenly doesn't have the research experience that they're supposed to have.
- [107:00]
J
Exactly. Yeah.
- [107:01]
Kaveh
Right. And also who would want to go into science if it's going to be like this?
- [107:04]
J
Right, right.
- [107:05]
Kaveh
If there's just going to be like some random person who goes into the White House and says, never mind, we're not doing that anymore. Who wants to be exposed to those kinds of wind?
- [107:14]
J
A lot of the smartest doctors and scientists I know, they tend to be risk averse people. I mean, there's a lot of people at the CDC that could try to maybe sue for, you know, for not being able to use the terms that they want to use and study the things they want to study. And they might even, I don't know, maybe they could win. I don't need to talk to a lawyer about that. Seems unlikely because they're not private sector. But to them they're not going to because they're living paycheck to paycheck to some of these people that are the lower levels, people that aren't making a ton of money and they have livelihoods that they're trying to maintain. They're not going to try and rock the boat when it comes to these things, it's putting them in a really tenuous position already. They're already worried about their next grant or their next, however they're going to fund their lab.
- [108:02]
Kaveh
Yeah. And I just want to highlight that postdocs, I think are particularly vulnerable because they are often like the NSF freeze actually demonstrated this very well. They aren't, as said, like they're definitely often living paycheck to paycheck. And what the NSF freeze did was that it made it so folks could not get their next paycheck because we were, this was happening at the end of the month. Right. So it was delaying people getting their next paycheck. And in particular, I'm talking about postdocs. Yes, it can affect graduate students as well. But a lot of postdoc funding, like one of the grants that I have, actually we work directly with postdoctoral and some pre doctoral, but many postdoctoral training programs that fund postdoc. And to the extent that any of those grants are put on hold, that is threatening the income of people who really don't have buffer, who cannot afford to not get paid.
- [108:52]
Mia Wong
And also, you know, and this is another aspect of this too. I really doubt, doubt they understand this. But you know, there's also a lot of postdocs who are not from the US Right there, who are either international student, international students who are just, who are, you know, coming in from other countries. And those people, if you suddenly don't have a grant, you don't have a job, and that is really, really bad for your immigration status like that, that is enough to get you kicked out of the US and this is the thing that's constantly leveraged in, in sort of labor organizing.
- [109:25]
Robert Evans
Right.
- [109:25]
Mia Wong
Or like one of the threats that universities will make us implicitly, sometimes they'll just go out and say it very legally will be like, okay, if, if you this postdoc or like you, this grad student like tries to like join this union, like your, your legal status in the US is going to be compromised. But that's, but that's another sort of risk from this is like those people's ability to stay in the US and not get deported, basically.
- [109:52]
J
Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And then we talk about bringing in, you know, I know there's a lot of internal debate right now between the Republican Party on bringing in people to work these jobs and bringing in these minds. But this is a clear example of where the United States has excelled in the past. We've been able to bring in great minds from all over the world to help US work on research and to help us come to work in these labs. You go to UCSF and Stanford and you see these people working these labs on important stuff. That's another, like that's something we're going to lose and I hope we don't lose it permanently. I hope it's not something like you say will last generations worth of damage, but it's hard to see how it won't at this point.
- [110:36]
Kaveh
Yeah, I was just looking up, I 100% agree. And to your point about how much of the science and even other amazing things that are done in this country are done by immigrants, I think it's over, just over a third of Nobel laureates from the United States have been immigrants to the United States.
- [110:54]
Mia Wong
You know, and it's sort of, sort of a nationalist thing. Right. But like for 99 of the time, for better like the US has been very, very good at absorbing other countries scientists. When you know this, like we, we got a, you know. Okay, so like it's hard to take too much credit for it because we also took a bunch of scientists from the Nazi, like from the actual Nazis. But we also like a bunch of very famous US Scientists like were in the US because they were fleeing the rise of the Nazis. And, and you know, like we, we are looking at a situation where we are going to be the opposite of this where like our scientists are going to be fleeing everywhere else because our government is being run by these people.
- [111:31]
Kaveh
Yeah. And I, I wanted to highlight, I think that were all really great points about the effect of not getting the funding and who it trickles down to. But I also wanted to highlight that there's two different kind of ways that the funding can be withheld. So one is, is just that review process and not actually reviewing grants. Right. So like I personally submitted a proposal in the fall. Who knows if, when that will get discussed. There are people in that kind of position where they maybe were dependent on or really hoping to get like funding this round and now they, they don't know if or when that proposal will get reviewed. Of course you never know if you're going to get funded. But to not even have a chance at review is an unanticipated barrier. Then on the other side there's people who have been funded and are in the position that I'm in, which is not knowing whether I'm going to receive the next payment because the nih, so I have a five year grant and we are currently in year three. Every year you have to submit a status update on your project. And then they determine, based on lots of different things, including what budget they are given from Congress, how much of the funds that they had originally projected they'll be able to give to you. And. And there are, as you can imagine, a lot of people who are doing work that's related to health disparities, health equity, women's health, LGBTQ health, et cetera, who now do not know if our work falls under, quote, unquote, DEI or DEIA or gender ideology or all these vague terms that the administration is using. And so we actually don't know whether, like, for me, I don't know if I'm going to get my next set of funds in July. So I was in the process of interviewing to hire someone to join my lab, and I genuinely don't know whether I should hire someone knowing that I may lose funds in five months or do I just try to make do without. And then that's a job that no one gets. And if you play that out over the 300,000 people who are funded in various ways by the NIH, you start to understand the scope of damage that's being done here.
- [113:36]
J
Can you tell people what your current grant is? Because I think that that is pertinent to this conversation.
- [113:45]
Kaveh
Yes, yes, yes, you're right. Okay. So my grant is called Ending Sexual Harassment. Teaching of Principal Investigators as a cute acronym, E. Stop. So our goal is to try to help people intervene when there is sexual harassment, with the ultimate goal of decreasing the amount of sexual harassment that. That's happening in biomedical research.
- [114:06]
Mia Wong
Oh, they. They don't. They don't want you doing that. Like, oh, no. Oh, no.
- [114:12]
Jon Stewart
Right.
- [114:12]
J
Because one of the great terrible ironies of this whole thing is that their argument is that they're doing a lot of this to protect women, the sanctity of women, or whatever this is. You know, I am hopeful that I'm wrong for you. I hope that this is not the case. But I could see them very easily saying that this somehow fits under WOKE ideology, even though it's something clearly that is designed to help not just women, but a lot of women could benefit from this, you know?
- [114:44]
Mia Wong
Yeah.
- [114:44]
Kaveh
Yeah. And. And to your point, like, everyone is at risk for experiencing sexual harassment. It's just that the majority of folks who experience it are women or sexual and gender minorities. And so, yeah, it's. I've really, obviously, as you can imagine, been thinking a lot about how. How they are interpreting these words that they're using and whether sexual harassment, which, by the way, is a form of discrimination like is that DEI is stopping discrimination.
- [115:10]
Mia Wong
Dei, probably. Who knows?
- [115:13]
J
Well, you know, quickly, if I may, I can go over this. There was this email that was dispersed from the CDC about terms that were no longer going to be used, that were going to be scrubbed from the CDC's databases. And they included words like gender, transgender, pregnant person, pregnant people, lgbt, transsexual, non binary, non binary. They use both just.
- [115:37]
Kaveh
Yeah, one with the hyphen and one without the hyphen.
- [115:39]
J
Assigned male at birth, assigned female at birth, biologically male or biologically female. So anything that terms like that, they're going to scrub.
- [115:47]
Kaveh
Wait, let me, can I just clarify that? Because actually it's even worse. Yeah, I think than what you just described because what they actually said in that email, as I understand it, is that they, there's all these researchers who work at the cdc. So they said if you have submitted a manuscript for publication to any scientific or medical journal that has any of these words in it, you must retract that manuscript. So it's even much, much broader than just what's on the CDC's website. It's any work that anyone employed by the CDC has done any research, I should say that they've done that they are in the process of publishing. They have been asked to rescind that work so that they can remove these God awful words. Right. That are actually words that are used routinely in science, but they can no longer have them in their manuscripts. And how nonsensical would their manuscripts be without these words? I mean it's, it's, it. Yeah, it's terrible.
- [116:42]
J
The other thing that blows my mind about this is how incredibly inefficient, maybe that's the point is how ridiculous it's going to be. Who's going to be doing this? Who's going to be looking over this? To my knowledge, there's only been one political appointee in regards to this and that's at the cdc. It's. Susan Monarz is the acting director there at the cdc. And it's all going to go through that one person. Every study is going to go through that one person. It makes no sense. I don't even understand how it's going to be enforced. It's a ridiculous thing. I'm sure they're going to try to make some examples out of people.
- [117:18]
Mia Wong
But.
- [117:19]
J
But how would they even enforce this? We're going to find out with your grant, I guess.
- [117:23]
Mia Wong
Yeah. I think the bleak thing about specifically the fact that it's these study retractions and it's just, you know, this attempt to ban anyone from doing any research. Right. Is that like the problem for them with medical research about trans people is that everyone who's doing this, who isn't a like unbelievably rabid anti trans person from the beginning, you know, looks at everything that they want to do to trans people and goes, this is going to kill unbelievable numbers of us. And I think part of what they're doing here is they're trying to, before any of this stuff would come out, they're trying to stop scientific apparatus from revealing the fact that they are trying to wipe us out. And that's an unbelievably bleak thing to live through, I guess.
- [118:12]
Nevdon Jamgochian
Yeah.
- [118:13]
J
I'm so sorry.
- [118:14]
Jon Stewart
We're sorry.
- [118:16]
J
Honestly, I wish I could say something more. War. It's really terrible.
- [118:19]
Mia Wong
I, I will say this like, genuinely, because it never happens. Obviously the best, the best thing you could do for trans people is like something that involves the follow the regime. Like the second best thing is like hire us because no one does it and we can't, no one can get jobs.
- [118:35]
J
Right.
- [118:35]
Mia Wong
And, and, but like, like the third minimum thing after like money or like housing is like, like check in on the trans people in your life because nobody actually ever does it and it means a lot and it's not going to like stop the wrath of the state. But like, I don't know, people feel less alone. This, this has been the via trans public service announcement is now over.
- [118:56]
J
I think that's great advice. In other friend of the show, Margaret Killjoy, and she also said, you know, when you hire people, you hire trans people, put them front of house, make it visible, and then when you go and you frequent these places is let them know that's part of why you do it. Like, I like that you guys are doing this. I'm here to support that. I mean, because we're talking about money, we're talking about people's livelihoods are at stake and we have to show that these are people that are not only employable, but could benefit your business.
- [119:29]
Kaveh
Yeah, Honestly, I don't know what to say about it either. Aside from everything that they're doing is atrocious. It is a scientific, it is inhumane, it will, it will harm people.
- [119:43]
Mia Wong
Yeah, people are gonna die. People probably have already died. If you're trans and you're listening to this, don't die, think about how good it's going to be to get a piss on these people's graves in like eight years. It's Gonna rule. But.
- [119:59]
J
It is. It is. I agree. It is. In dad, to Argo on's point, it is dumb on every metric. I. I can't think of a single metric. And that these actions are not hurtful and gonna harm us in the long run.
- [120:22]
Mia Wong
To close this out, this is something that I think is very important because no one in the US apparently seems to understand this at all. How does the grant process actually work and what is it? Because, you know, this process is the difference between you, like having clean water to drink and like that study that was going to determine if your water is clean or not. Not happening.
- [120:42]
Kaveh
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, you know, first thing I will say is that the word grant applies to lots and lots of different opportunities. And there are grants as small as like 1,000 or $5,000 and grants as large as multi million dollars. And the processes actually are. I mean, they're analogous, but they can be pretty different because as you can imagine, for a smaller grant, the amount of work that you have to do to earn that grant grant generally is a little bit less. But I can speak in the most detail to the NIH review process and specifically to these grants that they call R01. These are like kind of their fanciest grants that go to individual researchers with their team, but it's led by an individual researcher often. And the way this works is, first of all, I want folks to understand it takes a year from the time that you apply until the time that you get money can take up to a full calendar year. And so you put in an immense amount of effort. So I'll use myself as an example. I applied for a grant in October, huge amount of effort. I don't know how many hours leading up to that grant submission. And then I just sit and wait for months, months and months before there's even a study section, if study section happens. And then after that, it's still a couple more months before I might get information. It depends. Of course there's some variability there, but it's a long, long process is what I'm trying to. And the way the process starts is often you will send what's called a letter of interest to the agency that you're applying to. So as you said earlier, it's the National Institutes of Health. So every institute has its own Notice of funding opportunities or NOFOs that are like, here's what we're actually asking people to submit for at this point in time. And then people will send a letter of interest to the program officer. Each grant mechanism will have its own program officer. And you will send a letter of interest, maybe you get some feedback and then you move forward to the actual grant itself. And I just want to say that it is more work than probably anything else I've ever done, except maybe my dissertation.
- [122:42]
Mia Wong
Yeah.
- [122:43]
Kaveh
And so it's a huge amount of work. The R01 includes for example, a one page specific aims page, which is you have the entirety of the study somehow magically summarized in one page with your three aims. And if that doesn't get the reviewer's attention and if they don't think, think it's compelling and interesting and important, that may be the end. You may have done all the rest of the work and they may only read that.
- [123:06]
Nevdon Jamgochian
Yeah.
- [123:06]
Kaveh
And then you have a 12 page. These are single space pages. Single space pages, half inch margins, 12 page research strategy. I don't know how many thousand words, thousands of words on it. I'm just telling you 12 single space pages is a lot of text about your research. And, and, and it's like one of these puzzles where it like has to be exactly right and you have like these figures and you have to get them exactly the right size in the exact right place on the page with the legend and everything so that it all magically fits in these 12 pages. Because if you don't do it right, they will literally reject your grant for formatting problem. And so you, you may have spent months writing this grant and because you had the wrong font size or the wrong margin that, that they can literally choose not to even read it. And then your, your than having to wait till either six months later if there's another opportunity or sometimes a full year later before you can try again.
- [123:57]
Mia Wong
Also, it's worth noting, you also have to like do a bunch of science. Like if it was just you must do 12, you must write 12 pages of stuff and format it, it would probably be okay. But like, you also have to do science like both for it and also while you're doing it.
- [124:13]
J
It's, it's incredibly hard to get these. When someone gets a grant, we all celebrate it for them because we're all so excited because we know it's not easy. What's funny about that is the Republicans make it seem like all you have to do is put in a couple terms like, you know, non binary and you automatically get a grant. They like no idea how like challenging it is.
- [124:34]
Mia Wong
No, it's like the only thing that could even potentially work like that is to say, say whatever you're doing is cancer research. Like that's the actual thing, right? Like sometimes you could like defraud the DoD by telling them, like, whatever research you're doing is camouflage, but like, it's not. It's even that is like, it makes it like 1% more likely that you're endless hours of work.
- [124:56]
Kaveh
Yeah, I wish I could just write woke ideology on 12 pages and then like get a grant. But yes, to your point, you have to. Part of what's in those 12 pages is what is the work that you've done that builds up to the work that you're proposing to do. And that's a whole section called Preliminary Studies. And. And what's in there varies depending on like, what kind of research you're doing. If you're doing animal research, it might be various animal models that you've tested, different things on that demonstrate, for example, that you are able to work with the specific animal model that you're proposing to use in this study and that you have the specific methodological skills for whichever type of, say, cellular analysis or whatever it is that you're doing, that you have those skills, that you have the equipment that you're able to actually carry out that research. Because part of what they're evaluating is can the person who's proposing to do this work actually do the work? Last thing they want to do is give you millions of dollars and have you fall flat on your face because you don't have the skills that are needed. So you have these pages, part of those pages, like often a page, two, three pages about what you have done to prepare for the work that you're proposing. And a lot of times, to your point, that work may or may not be funded. You may have to. If you're like, at an academic institution, you might be using your startup funds, you might be trying to get smaller foundation grants or something to be able to do that work so that you can prove to the funding agency that you're able to do it. And then in addition to this full page thing, there are a bunch of additional documents that are required. Like there's currently. This will probably change, but currently there's like a diversity plan. There is a how are you going to treat participants who are women and minorities? There's like an age document, there's a page of about resources and facilities. There's all these additional documents which again, all have their own specific formatting requirements. There's a project narrative which is shorter, and then a project summary which is longer. I think I could have those backwards anyway, the way it's all these additional pages, it's not just the specific aims and just the research strategy. It's all of this plus the budget and the budget justification. And like, you could just go on. But I think you start to understand that there are many, many files that go into a single grant application and it represents often months of work for an individual and their collaborators. And if you have, for example, another institution you're collaborating with, they all have to do a bunch of this paperwork as well. And there's a contract between the two. And all this is done just to have a chance at getting funded.
- [127:15]
Mia Wong
Yeah. And you know, the, the disruptions to the funding system, the disruptions to the studies, the disruption to just the payout means that like all of this work that you're doing, you know, you have no idea whether, whether, like again, all of this, in some cases unpaid labor that you have been doing for months and months and months, like, could just not happen. Yeah. And also, like, it's worth noting too, like, you also have to, like when you're figuring out what, what you're going to be doing next, like working out whether or not your grant even has a chance of getting approved, like that it like, is something that is a, that is, that is a long term decision that determines like what, like, you know, what colleges you go to, like, what institutions you end up at, like all of that kind of stuff and like that thing being all this stuff being up in the air and for.
- [127:57]
Kaveh
People who run labs.
- [127:59]
Mia Wong
Yeah.
- [127:59]
Kaveh
Trying to figure out, like, can you. So I don't personally work with graduate students, but a lot of people do. So can you afford to bring in and sponsor another, support another graduate student? Can you afford to support another postdoc? These are all long term decisions. These aren't just like, okay, I'm going to hire someone for two months until I find out the next thing. It's like you want to commit to people, especially trainees. So it makes it very difficult for people who run labs to make those decisions to bring people in because we don't want to let people down. And so I think the kind of intuitive and natural consequences that people will bring in fewer people because that's less risky than bringing in more people and then having to either cut their funding or let them go or whatever later on when you don't get the resources that you need. And, and I want to just point out that institutions here have a major role to play and not all institutions, and by that I mean higher education institutions, and not all of them are equally resourced obviously. But we all know that there are quite a few in this country that have massive endowment. And so what is the plan there and what is the support for the folks at their institutions? And I'm not trying to be. I'm not trying to oversimplify what is, in fact, a very challenging issue, but it would be nice, it would be fantastic if some of these institutions came out and said, we understand that this is a very challenging time. We remain committed to supporting the work of our faculty, our graduate students, our postdocs, et cetera, and we will fund anyone whose funding is withdrawn or withheld.
- [129:34]
J
Let's just say it'd be nice if some of these very important, prestigious academic institutions showed maybe at least the same backbone as Costco.
- [129:43]
Nevdon Jamgochian
Costco, yeah.
- [129:45]
J
It's all I ask.
- [129:46]
Spencer Sunshine
Okay.
- [129:46]
Kaveh
Two, I want to highlight, too. It's very early yet in this game, but Brown did come out, I think it was yesterday or sometime over the weekend, stating clearly that they remain committed to their values of academic freedom. Right. So that's the way to say it, right? Like, we support our staff and employees and students, faculty doing whatever work. Work they think is important. I think that that was their roundabout way of saying we're not abandoning the principles of dei, but who knows? But that's what they said. But the Princeton. Princeton actually put out their annual report on DEI at Princeton. And I forget the exact wording, and I don't have it in front of me, but their president talked about how important it is to support people from different backgrounds, et cetera, et cetera. So those two that are trying to do something.
- [130:36]
J
Yeah, I remain hopeful. I remain hopeful.
- [130:38]
Nevdon Jamgochian
Yeah.
- [130:39]
Mia Wong
Also, I got to put in my word a Costco hate here, which is they're currently screwing over their unions. So I thought they resolved it.
- [130:46]
J
I thought they actually gave them the. No, they didn't. They gave them the pay increase.
- [130:50]
Mia Wong
Yeah, it's not resolved yet.
- [130:52]
J
I thought the hot dog was still 150, though, so that's important for me.
- [130:56]
Mia Wong
Read Jamie Loftus's book, Raw Dog.
- [130:59]
J
I'm a doctor. I can't do that by law.
- [131:01]
Kaveh
Yeah, but even the NFL came out today and said that they're not going to end their DEI programs. Anything. NFL known for being.
- [131:10]
J
I know.
- [131:10]
Jon Stewart
Right?
- [131:11]
Mia Wong
Well, I mean, that is the thing, though, right? If you want to understand why the NFL is doing that, like, look at who the current heads of the NFL Players association are and, like, who their past heads for the last, like, decade have been, and that will give you an indication of, like, why it's like that.
- [131:26]
J
So yeah, MIA follows football pretty closely, I can tell.
- [131:31]
Mia Wong
Unfortunately, it becomes football. Also. Also, I kind of owe the NFL Players association because, because they did put out a statement in support of our unionization drive. Yeah, it was very sweet.
- [131:44]
Kaveh
That's nice. Well, I do want to say one more thing about the grant process, which is that often people are submitting the same grant over and over and over because the funding rates are so low and so often they will submit it the first time, get feedback, make changes, resubmit later. And again, as I pointed out, it's not like this is a rolling submission process where any day of the week you can submit. I think for most mechanism again there's going to be some variability from institute to institute, but it's at most twice a year. So like if they're, if they reject it, hopefully they give you feedback. By the way, sometimes you don't even get feedback because if you weren't one of the top grant applications, you don't even get discussed. So you may not get get feedback, but let's say you get feedback, then you try again and then maybe you try again and then maybe you try again. So sometimes it can take many cycles of this entire terrible process before you get funded. 1. And so to Kaveh's point about efficiency earlier, like, I mean if, if you think about it that way, it's an extremely inefficient system. But the point I just wanted to make is that people work really, really hard.
- [132:50]
Mia Wong
Yeah.
- [132:51]
Kaveh
To get these grants. And for some of the folks right now who are, are kind of in limbo waiting for study section to resume, this might be their third or fourth submission of something. And they were really hoping this was going to be the chance because at some point you can't keep pursuing unless you have some other independent income. Like often at some point you cannot keep pursuing a specific line of research. So you have to think about what breakthrough is being put on hold or will never be identified because of all of this, because someone might have been waiting and maybe they can't wait for however long it takes to resolve this freeze and maybe they end up switching their career path into something completely different. And I'll just say, like even on a smaller scale, I had a grant that I, a colleague and I submitted several years back that got funded. That was a very competitive grant. It was not a federal grant, it was a foundation, very competitive and we were delighted. We were, I mean, just thrilled to get funded. And then we could not in the end take the grant we did not do the work of the grant because. Because he ended up not being able to find an appointment that was going to work for him in academia. And so he went to industry. And so that work never got done. To this day, that work has not been done. Yeah, I would love for it to be done, but those are the, those are the types of consequences that we're talking about. When we're looking at like, what's happening with these funds and the delay of distributing the funds and the chances that funds will be revoked from people, they really change the course of not just individual lives, but of. Fine.
- [134:16]
Mia Wong
Yeah. And I mean, like, the most visceral example I could think about this was I knew some people who wanted to work in a coronavirus lab in 2019 and couldn't do it because they didn't. Their PI didn't have funding for kind of coronavirus thing. It's like, oh, it would have been useful if they'd gotten that grant. So I think this is a decent enough place to wrap up. I do have one thing that I want to plug, which is something you were talking about earlier, which is these institutions, like coming out and backing their scientists. Right. And that's, that's a thing that you can do. You can put pressure on these institutions to do the right thing. And so I, it might be over by now, but like, literally as we were recording this, there was a protest going on at NYU's hospital.
- [135:00]
Kaveh
Yeah. Langone.
- [135:02]
Mia Wong
Because they've cut off care to trans youth.
- [135:05]
Kaveh
They cut off gender affirming care.
- [135:07]
Mia Wong
Yeah. And so, you know, you can do this. The people who actually run these systems and, you know, and the entire federal government. Right. The people running the federal government are relying on everyone just sort of sitting there, being shocked, not knowing what to do and doing nothing. And, you know, you can go show up to the administrators, the offices of the administrators of these places and you can confront them and you can be like, okay, you're, you are either right here, right now, you're going to be a coward and you're going to go along with this or you're going to go back your own people.
- [135:35]
J
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [135:36]
Mia Wong
And that, and that's something that you can do right now.
- [135:38]
Kaveh
And I just want to add, we didn't talk about this earlier, but when we talked about the CDC and everything that's been removed, one thing that's relevant to that is that there's an office for Research on Women's health. It's the only resource dedicated to women's health in the Entire National Institutes of Health. We do have the National Institute of Children's Health. We do not have a National Institute of Women's Health. We have an Office for Research on Women's Health.
- [135:59]
Mia Wong
We love the US Government.
- [136:00]
J
Gets worse.
- [136:01]
Mia Wong
Jesus Christ.
- [136:02]
Kaveh
Yeah, it gets worse. So the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, which is like, like I would say one of the most prestigious kind of academic organizations that existed, a review of funding for women's health research at the nih. And they put out a report in December. It's pretty scathing if you read it. And they shared that from 2013 to 2023, research for women's health was like 8.8% of the entire NIH budget. As a reminder, women are half of the population. And just as a reminder. And they called for almost $16 billion of funding to go to women's health research in the coming five years and the creation of an Institute for Women's Health. So what happened last week with almost everything on the website for the Office of Research for Women's Health was deleted.
- [136:49]
Mia Wong
Jesus Christ.
- [136:50]
Kaveh
It's gone. So their Funding and opportunities page is gone. Their bios about their staff are gone. Their updates on advances in medicine for women over the last 25 years, gone. Their pages on maternal morbidity and mortality, gone. The importance of including women and minorities in clinical trials, trial, gone. Their page on health equity, gone. You get the picture. So all of that, except for just a very bare minimum landing page and a link to the Office of. I forget the official name of the office, but an office that works on autoimmune diseases, like everything else is gone. And so I did create a script if anybody wants to call their member of Congress, I have a script for that. And the CDC pages that people can use in terms of actions. That's something I think that is about as real as it gets for us at this point. And I think that the more we are emphatic in our messaging that none of this is okay, that we demand to have these resources back online, that we demand to continue funding research on health disparities for all the different groups affected, I think the better the chance is that that actually happens. So that's out there if anybody wants that.
- [137:58]
Mia Wong
Yeah, well, we'll put links to that in the description. Also, I'm going to put in a personal plug to call your congressperson to yell at them about all of the anti trans stu because they're, they are legitimately in a flux point right now where the party is slipping back and forth between just being like yeah, whatever. We'll pass a defense bill that, like, ban trans people from the military, and we're gonna stop things from happening. And so this is a thing that can go either way. And getting yelled at by their constituents legitimately does help with this, so.
- [138:23]
Kaveh
Yep, absolutely.
- [138:24]
Mia Wong
Yeah, do that. Do that, too. When you're called, while you're calling what, the cdc? Multiple things, different calls even.
- [138:31]
Kaveh
Yeah, you might just want to put them on feed dial and make it, you know, on your drive. If you go into work, maybe every day on the Dr. Just call it. Hi, here's the issue of the day, because there is no shortage of issues that we need to be communicating.
- [138:43]
Mia Wong
Yep, yep, yep. So speaking of things in bios, where can people find you to for stuff that you want to promote, what you do, et cetera, et cetera?
- [138:51]
Kaveh
I mean, I'm on all the things, even the terrible things, which is. Most of them are terrible. But I. I'm on TikTok. If you just put my first name, usually I'll come up TikTok, Instagram, Twitter. I know, I know. And Blue Sky. And I'm not the only one I don't really do is Facebook.
- [139:10]
J
You're too cool for that.
- [139:12]
Kaveh
Oh, I have a substack. That's where the script is. By my substack. Now. I'm not too cool for Facebook. I'm just too lazy for Facebook.
- [139:19]
J
I mean, I mean, listen, if you're on these things, you're not too cool for anything. The really cool kids aren't on any of these things. You can find me on blueskyav. A K A V E H M D And more importantly, you can listen to my podcast, the House of Pod. It's a relatively fun, informal look at medicine. We tried to make healthcare more relatable. You know, sometimes we'll take an aim at medical quackery or Griffs and that sort of thing. I think your listeners will like it.
- [139:50]
Mia Wong
Yeah.
- [139:50]
J
Our guests range from doctors like Peter Hotez or Argovon here to musicians like Portugal the Man, or a lot of the Cool Zone family that you all know and love. Prop and Robert and hopefully Mia soon. So find it anywhere. You get your podcast, the House of Pod.
- [140:11]
Mia Wong
Yeah, and you can find all of the. We've talked about, like, a staggering number of the other shows that we do in. In this one, but yeah, you can. You can find our other shows where there are podcasts and. Yeah, think, God, I'm so bad at plugging these things. You think it's my living. But no, can't do it. 0 out of 10. Absolute failure. But yeah, thank you two both for coming on and I hope you get your grant Archipod, because that like, Jesus Christ.
- [140:44]
Kaveh
Thank you. Well, if I, if I don't get my funding renewed this summer, I will, I will let you know. Maybe we can talk about it.
- [140:51]
Mia Wong
Yeah, yeah, I'm down.
- [140:52]
Jon Stewart
Start a podcast.
- [140:56]
Mia Wong
Yeah, this, this could happen here. Go, go harass your legislatures, your local administrators for universities, your local police department. I make sure they do not bad stuff and do good things.
- [141:31]
James
Hi everyone, and welcome to It Could Happen Here today. It's me, James, and I'm joined by Nevdon Jamgochian. We're here to talk about Azerbaijan, Armenia and. And the increasingly genocidal rhetoric from Azerbaijan. But I want to start off Nevdam, we're talking about COP 2024, I guess. Can you explain. I think people will be sort of somewhat familiar with these series of climate conferences, but this one was held in Azerbaijan. Right. And can you explain a little bit about. You've specialized in like these greenwashing, sports, washing, various other sort of forms of laundering legitimacy.
- [142:09]
J
Right.
- [142:09]
James
I'd love for you to start off there and explain how this particular conference was used as a means of laundering legitimacy for what is a, like a genocidal project.
- [142:19]
Jon Stewart
COP 29, which was just concluded in Azerbaijan, is the deadly serious and vital conversation about climate in the United nations, which we absolutely need to have. But from the beginning, it was a clown show. And the way Azerbaijan, a Petra dictatorship, was able to procure this for themselves was at COP28, which was held in Dubai, another questionable location for the climate conference, where they had a pavilion, as reported by Politico eu, where they had a giant advertisement that said, said Karabakh is the first place to achieve net zero emissions in Azerbaijan. And that was one part of them getting the bid for COP 29. And the way Azerbaijan was able to achieve net zero emissions in this particular location was they committed a genocide against all the people. If there's no people, there's no climate emissions. And that's probably not even true that it's a net zero emissions because they've engaged in so much of the eradication of any trace of Armenians in this place that Armenians been living for, for at least 2, 500 years. Destruction of buildings, of course, is one of the huge source of pollution.
- [143:50]
James
Yeah.
- [143:51]
Jon Stewart
And, and they, they've raised something like four cemeteries, thousands of the monuments, four churches have been demolished, entire neighborhoods have been razed, historical neighborhoods. So it's probably not Even net zero. But that was their advertising claim to get the bid. Cop 29 was originally supposed to be in Europe, but Russia was vetoing every European bid. And Armenia, who Azerbaijan is currently occupying 215km of Armenian territory, was blocking Azerbaijan until Azerbaijan offered to give up 32 Armenian hostages. So, so we've got a claim of genocide and then we've got a gangster hostage situation, which they did. They gave up 32 members of the Armenian military and they made Armenia give up two Azerbaijanis that were held by Armenia because they had gone into Armenia and killed a local security guard trying to steal his car. They probably were lost. Lost. And they killed this guy and they were trying to escape. But then just one of them had been sent to life imprisonment. But that's what Armenia gave up in.
- [145:02]
James
Exchange to allow this climate conference to happen.
- [145:05]
Jon Stewart
That's correct.
- [145:06]
James
So let's zoom back from this climate conference. Right. Like in this, I think it's a really interesting place to start. This, like the site of our genocide is a net zero area and it's a very bleak vision of the sort of greenwashing future. Future. Let's explain a little bit of the history of the conflict between these two countries. And also, perhaps more broadly, I think people will probably be familiar with the Armenian genocide if they've listened to this show, but of Armenian people as a subject of discrimination and hatred for centuries. Right.
- [145:38]
Jon Stewart
Well, you know, I mean, Armenians are one of the ancient people of that area. Greeks, Jews, Persians. They're one of the people that have kind of stuck it out for a long time in that neighborhood. The Turkic people are more recent visitors to the neighborhood. And there's nothing wrong with migration of people, but there's something about populations that have been there for a long time that really strikes a nerve if we want to be very mild about it, with the Turkic people, Turkey and Azerbaijan, in the sense that they've been engaged in a policy of destroying any remnants of Armenian, including physical people, for at least in the 1880s. They've been making them second class citizens since they came in, in the Ottoman Empire. There's this myth of the, of a multicultural society, which is interesting. Azerbaijan is also trying to promote. But it really was a, a second class situation where the minorities in the Ottoman Empire had a lot of extra taxes and duties and persecution than other people in the area.
- [146:49]
James
Yeah. So let's talk about this, this area then. Specifically this, this area, which would be called, depending on who you ask, Artzac or Nagorno Karabakh. Right. I think probably It's, It's. I don't know if I haven't looked on Wikipedia, but like what the more commonly used term for people wanting to look it up. Right. In American English. But let's explain why there is a conflict in this area and then what has happened since. I guess we can go from like, the fall of the Soviet Union would be a place to start.
- [147:19]
Jon Stewart
Sure. I mean, we talked about earlier. That's the tough thing about talking to Armenians. Like, where I would start would be 6th century and the fall of the kingdom Eratu. Okay. But I guess we don't have that much time. So basically. And I do have to put this in there because there's this big Azerbaijani narrative that Armenians are a fiction. Effective people, their effective presence. And I'll deal with that in a little bit. Yeah, but you know, it's just been recorded by Greek. I. I mean, I don't know why I should have to prove our existence, but we do.
- [147:49]
James
Yeah.
- [147:49]
Jon Stewart
So anyway, it recorded history, that it's where the Armenian Alphabet was invented. These people have been indigenous to the region for thousands of years. They've got a deep connection with the land. Follow the Soviet Union fast forward there. It had been under the territory of the Azerbaijani ssr, as in a autonomous oblast, as they called it. It had been given to the Azerbaijani SSR because of Stalin, who was the commissioner of minorities. Stalin has this big project to divide the people, the minorities in the Soviet Union to fight each other, which is ramped up in 1960s when the Soviets start inventing fake history to pit people against each other, which is wild. But Soviet Union is crumbling. The people of Artsakh, which is the Armenian indigenous nation name Nagaro Karaba, is generally acceptable as well. That would be the colonial name or the name that the Azeris called the region. They are fed up with not being able to learn their language because of Azerbaijan. They're fed up with not being able to have any of the rights as Soviet citizens because the father of the current dictator of Azerbaijan was ruling Azerbaijan since 1969, and his policy was to try to get as many Armenians to move out of the region as possible. Possible. So they're fed up with this and they're like, okay, enough. They legally secede from the Soviet Union. It's allowed in the constitution, which of course infuriates the Azerbaijani ssr. You know, so there's a bunch of conflicts, there's some pogroms that happen against Armenians in the cities of Baku and Sumgate, and at which point they secede fully from the Soviet Union, they're one of the first areas to do so. So in 1991, they actually left the Soviet Union before Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan, with the Soviet Union's troops invade, there's this bloody mess, it's called Operation Ring, where they're killing Armenians in the area. There's a war that erupts when everybody secedes. Armenians in Artsakh get the upper hand due to. They really cared about it. And also probably because of racism within the Soviet Union, where they trained Armenians a little bit better than they did Azeris. It's a humiliating defeat for Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan is pushed back. Armenian seized about 9% of Azerbaijani territory beyond Artsakh. And that was a stasis until 2020.
- [150:19]
James
Yeah.
- [150:20]
Jon Stewart
Really?
- [150:20]
James
Yeah. Sort of 30 years of.
- [150:22]
Jon Stewart
Right.
- [150:23]
James
But it was always disputed. Right. This area was. Azerbaijan continued to lay claim to the Artsak region, as I.
- [150:29]
Jon Stewart
Correct.
- [150:29]
James
Correct.
- [150:30]
Jon Stewart
For some reason, it was never recognized by the UN as being a real country, similar to some other places. Why that is is confusing to me because they did leave earlier than anybody else. It is an ethnic minority that chose to leave the area, but it was. They weren't considered legitimate by the un, by Azerbaijan. And secondarily we have this brutal dictatorship that's held together by ethnic hatred.
- [151:00]
Azad
Really.
- [151:01]
Jon Stewart
I cannot overstate how terrible the Aliyaf regime is in Azerbaijan. But, you know, Armenian forces committed at least one war crime that I'm aware of during that time in a place called Khaljoli, where they killed 180 to 600 Azeri civilians. And they've used this event, and I think one other, to really hold their country together, other in this pit of frothing, broth of hatred. So not till 2020 does that really coalesce. Do they become strong as a petro state to take back large portions of the country?
- [151:38]
James
Yeah. Talking of taking back, I'm going to have to take back 30 seconds. Everyone's time for an advertising break here. So let's do that and we'll come right back. All right, we're back. One thing I think that might be illustrative to hear is that like in. In the first Artsak war, Turkish, I guess, irregulars or mercenaries or I don't know what you want to call them, people associated with the Gray Wolves fought on the side of Azerbaijan. Right. And keen history understanders will know that there is some history of anti Armenian sentiment among the Gray Wolves and indeed in Turkey as a country. So perhaps this is a good point to talk about the international involvement here, because I think it's very misleading to do this. As we're seeing in Syria right now, people want to divide the world into blocks. Right. With this sort of Cold War narrative that we have of Russian interests and U.S. interests. And I think this is an excellent example of why that is not necessarily a great way to perceive the world. So can you explain the international involvement in Artsakh and in this ongoing conflict, which we'll get to it beginning again in 2020, I think in a second.
- [152:57]
Jon Stewart
In addition to Turkish forces being used in that 2020 war, which I guess we'll have to get into a little bit, their Syrian mercenaries were used as well. They were cuted, they were put on the front lines as kind of candid fathers. They're given something like $100 bonus that they beheaded a civilian, a $200 bonus if they beheaded an Armenian soldier there. But of course, Israel is the primary supplier of Azeri weapons and weaponry, going so far to test some of their drones on manned Armenian outposts early on, before the war started. It's fair to say that Azerbaijan could not have been so successful without the aid of their out ally, Israel. Israel has been deeply involved in Azerbaijan for a long time. They use Azerbaijan as a listening post against Iran. Israel stages raids from Azerbaijan on Iran and has to do with the ethnic minority on Iran. There's a lot of Azeris down there. Israel gets something like 40% of its oil from Azerbaijan.
- [153:59]
James
Yeah.
- [154:00]
Jon Stewart
Right after the Palestinian genocide started, Israel awarded two new contracts to the the state oil company SOCAR in Azerbaijan that's right adjacent to the Palestinian gas field and the Lebanon oil field to SOCAR to explore. It cannot be overstated how complicit these two groups are with each other. They really, really need each other in the region. And the United States also likes Azerbaijan as well. They see it as a friendly Muslim country bulwark against Iran as well.
- [154:35]
James
Yeah. And I think they also have some Turkish drones. Is that right?
- [154:38]
Jon Stewart
The, the Bayakar drones. Absolutely.
- [154:41]
James
So let's talk about that 2020 war, because that was a war that relied heavily on these drones. Right. As a major means of destroying Armenian armor and pushing that offensive. So what happened in 2020 along this disputed border?
- [154:55]
Jon Stewart
Well, you know, it's called mountainous Karabakh. It's an area that's great defensively if you're fighting in a pre drone world.
- [155:04]
James
Yeah.
- [155:04]
Jon Stewart
But you know, as you've discovered with your Kurdish friends is this. The drones are amazingly destructive against people hiding in caves, which is what the, the Armenian response had been. Armenians have been a bit lazy. They've been relying on Russian tanks and weaponry, whereas Aerbaijan's is buying from Israel. They're buying, drawing from all, you know, many, many, just different sources. Which reflects the wealth of Azerbaijan of course. So in 2020 there's some indication that Alif, the dictator of Azerbaijan had been planning this for a while. He had this playbook called Operation Azeri Smile 2020, the troops move in, they encounter more resistance than they thought and they, they get most of the Armenian held territory of Nagorno Karabakh back. They're stopped at the last minute probably by Russian intervention at this time. The Armenia was a member of the Russian alliance at that time. Which they're leaving just because it's. The Russia has failed to live up to its treaty obligations anyway. And it left a kind of a skeletal state of Artak left which was only supplied by this one road called the Lachin Corridor, that was only one road from Armenia to supply the 120 some thousand Armenians who lived in Artsakh. Left, which brings us to 2024. 23.
- [156:35]
James
23, yeah. So you have this situation where we now have this massive area that's guess occupied and a lot of people, people began leaving at that time right through that Latin corridor. Like people didn't feel like they could safely remain there.
- [156:54]
Jon Stewart
I mean the indigenous people of Artsakh have this profound relationship with the land and the people. I am an icon painter and I was talking to my priest and he was comparing the people there to the elves and the Lord of the Ring. You know, they, they whistle to the birds. You know, they just been living with the land for a long time. So there was a drain, but it's not as big as you would have thought just because there's this intense millennia old connection with the places of Artsakh. So what Azerbaijan did, and this is, I think unprecedented is they had a fake ecological protest.
- [157:35]
James
Oh wow.
- [157:36]
Jon Stewart
That stopped the Lachen Corridor from supplying food and medicine, medicine to the people of Artsac. So they, they starved those people, they denied them medicine. People had miscarriages. The zeris were firing at farmers in the field that were trying to collect food. That went on for nine months. And what stopped it was Azerbaijan claimed it was a group of ecological protesters who were stopping trucks of food coming into Artsakh for any, any reason. Which, you know, is enough of a smokescreen screen for the Western world to really throw up its hands.
- [158:13]
James
Yeah, fascinating. So they literally had a blockade of these protesters.
- [158:17]
Jon Stewart
These protesters blocked it. The Russian troops that were the peacekeepers refused to disperse these protesters. They Were these old PR kind of looking people wearing fur coats. They were identified on social media as actually being members of the Azeri military. And they had these printed signs that said things, things like protect nature, stop pollution. It's like very generic, wildly generic things. Ostensibly they're against the gold mining operations in Artsakh, which is nuts because a protest is not allowed in Azerbaijan and B, there had been an actual protest against a real gold mine that was owned by the daughters of the dictator. And they were brutally shut down before. So anybody who was paying any kind of attention to this knew that it was fictive. But I think the EU in particular needed enough of a smokescreen not to support these people. Eu, of course, is getting its gas through Azerbaijan.
- [159:14]
James
Yeah.
- [159:15]
Jon Stewart
Because they've said they don't want it from Russia, but Russia's just feeding its gas to Azerbaijan and then Azerbaijan is selling its Azerbaijani gas to the eu. So they were just trying to do that.
- [159:26]
James
Yeah, we've just created a pass through and like someone who can live off that rentier income. So let's go to 2023. What do we see happening in 2023?
- [159:37]
Jon Stewart
So the Eco protestors, they kind of run their course and then there's a lightning operation. Art socks attacked, positions overrun. There's this massive exodus of people, people who have to leave their houses immediately. The road is blocked. People are dying on this road on the way out, fighting each other to, you know, just to leave their houses. In 2020. Azerbaijan has said, sure, you know, Armenians can come back, we're just taking back our territory. You live here, you can do that. But when Armenians did, there's this one case of a 69 year old farmer who went back to get his possessions. The dairy troops cut off his head.
- [160:20]
James
Jesus.
- [160:21]
Jon Stewart
They put it on a dead pig and they put all those images on social media.
- [160:26]
Mia Wong
Media.
- [160:27]
Jon Stewart
They raped and tortured anybody that they could find left behind and they turned it into memes on telegram stickers that were, you know, something like down like 20,000 times in the five days they were being monitored for this. So there was absolutely no question that people could stay behind. Yeah, zero. So there's no Armenians left. And so there's literally been daily ritual that's been going on for a thousand seven hundred years that doesn't go on anymore. And there's a tragedy in that.
- [161:00]
James
Yeah, yeah, it's been lost. It's hard to quantify the meaning of that loss, I think, especially for folks who aren't familiar with people in their culture and their connection to these things. Talking of Quantifying things. I need to look at the amount of time we got here and pivot again to advertisements. And we're back. So what we see in ARDSAC, especially in 2023, is a project of ethnic cleansing. Right? Genocidal violence, whatever, however you wish to phrase it. I mean, ethnic cleansing is not a term that has really like a definition in national law. Genocide does often very much like in this instance, I'm using them to mean one and the same thing. It's the removal of people either through killing them or forcing them to leave or starving them.
- [162:00]
Jon Stewart
The International association of Genocide Scholars, the Lemkin Institute. Luis Moreno Campo was the founding prosecutor of the icc. Yuan Uresto Mendez is special advisor to the Secretary of General General on genocide prevention. They all call it genocide. So we can call it that.
- [162:15]
James
Yeah, we can call it genocide.
- [162:16]
Jon Stewart
Be fairly safe.
- [162:17]
J
Yeah.
- [162:18]
James
There have been many genocidal projects in history. Like what is Azerbaijan's goal with this? Is it the removal of Armenian people? With the area such that Azeri people can occupy it? Is it access to the resources that are there? Is it settling a historical score?
- [162:35]
Jon Stewart
If you look at a map, there's this idea of Pan tyrannism. Is that something that you're familiar with?
- [162:43]
James
Yeah. Can you explain that to listeners who are not.
- [162:46]
Jon Stewart
Pan tyrannism is this Turkish idea of a ancient Turkish state that stretches from the Bosphorus all the way over to Mongolia. And there's one little country in the way that is blocking this, this empire that should exist according to the Pan tyrannis. And this is an old idea. It's a 19th century idea. It's lump it in with every Nazi and race junk scientist idea that you have. But that's the idea. And the secondary thing is, you know, again, Aliyev is raping his people. He's imprisoning every journalist he's any scientist. It's. It's really on a level with Turkmenistan or what was happening in Syria or North Korea. And he needs ethnic hate to keep his country together. He's made an ethnic hate theme park. It's not called that, but that's what it is against Armenians in a sense.
- [163:45]
James
So, yeah.
- [163:46]
Jon Stewart
So really I see it as a consolidation of power. He needs an enemy. He needs to move forward, which is why he's threatening to invade Armenia proper next.
- [163:56]
James
Yeah. And like, I think one of the things that like happened with the, with the conflict in Artsak, I'm just thinking about this Pan Turkic stuff because I see it every single day in the replies to My posts on social media, in my case it's with reference to my time in Kurdistan and in Rojava. Disinformation played a massive role in the 2023 conflict. In the 2020 conflict too. Right. And I think people who are hearing about this for the first time are at massive risk for finding out some of that different information. Right. They hear about this driving to work today on our podcast and they go to Google it. But there's a lot of crap out there. Right. So can we address that? The role that it's played and continues to play, the load of crap or.
- [164:40]
Jon Stewart
The pan tyrannism or both?
- [164:43]
James
Well, the pan tyrannism generates a lot of crap. Right. Like I'm convinced that some of the accounts in my replies are not real human beings.
- [164:51]
Jon Stewart
Oh, yeah, that's been a well established phenomenon, the number of bots that Azerbaijan and to a lesser extent Turkey, because I think Turkey's more secure in its genocide title aspect. Whereas other by shotgun is really, really going for it, you know, so not only the bots in the replies which just come up, no matter what you put in a keyword, there's going to be lots of mentions on your social media. Not to mention there's a pretty vicious campaign out there to dox anybody who talks about this. That's happened to me before and it's not pretty.
- [165:27]
James
Yeah.
- [165:27]
Jon Stewart
But also there's this thing called mirror propaganda. I don't know if you've heard of that, but the Azeris will take something that Armenians say, like, oh, our Armenians should go be able to have a right to return. So they throw up this huge cloud of. They'll take actual documents that have been produced by, I don't know, Freedom House. Right? Yeah. And then they'll copy the entire document and format things. Right. Of Azeris to return to Western Azerbaijan, which is their new concept. And Western Ivar is the country of Armenia. So they have these maps where they renamed all the towns of Armenia with Azeri names. They claim Armenians only came to the region in 1828 with the Russians, that they're a fake people. Another tragedy of Artsakh is they're taking these monasteries and places, not only destroying them, but chiseling off ancient inscriptions to prove that Armenians didn't exist there. They've already done this, this other place called Nakhevan, which is. They call it the largest cultural genocide of the 21st cent century, where they destroyed thousands of medieval monuments and stones with bulldozers and sledgehammers. So they're just wiping them out any record of Armenian anything. And they're claiming Armenia is really. Should be called Western Azerbaijan. And anytime Armenians talk about Artsak going back, they're like, well, they made cookbooks. They've got a television show about Western Azerbaijan. And it's just. It's what you're laughing and I laugh too, but it's. It's so ugly, so scary.
- [166:58]
Mia Wong
But.
- [166:58]
Jon Stewart
But it's funny too.
- [166:59]
James
Yeah, well, these things are. Until it's your grandma or what have you being beheaded. But yes, it does seem obscene. And it's so obscene that it's funny. Right. But this is a concerted state project that it's easy to get caught up in, and it's easy to get caught in this disinformation machine, not just from a bot in your replies, but from news, like you say news outlets or doctored reports or things that look very convincing.
- [167:30]
Jon Stewart
Search results that go to the top. I mean, you know, and this course started with the Marian genocide, which of course Turkey and Azerbaijan and Pakistan for some reason say it was fake. If you search for that, the top results are going to be, armenians are lying. They committed genocide with us. And then they'll throw these numbers like, oh, yeah, Armenians killed 3 million Turks. Like, what are you talking about? This is just like. Like words have meaning, you know, but.
- [167:55]
James
Increasingly less and less, less and less.
- [167:58]
Jon Stewart
You know, there's that great hind art line about constant lying is not aimed at making people believe a lie, but ensuring that no one believes anything anymore. And that's what they want. We're an obscure part of the world. This will say a bunch of shit and people throw up their hands and walk away.
- [168:13]
James
Yeah, it's too complicated. And so they sort of.
- [168:16]
Jon Stewart
Too complicated.
- [168:16]
J
Right?
- [168:17]
James
Yeah.
- [168:17]
Jon Stewart
Or, you know, they say, oh, it's ancient hatreds. And like, that's. It's not ancient hatreds. It's a very modern thing. These are real people who have real understandable issues. You know, like in Gaza, it's like, it's very clear what's going on.
- [168:32]
James
Yeah, yeah. And the difference there is that it has received a lot more coverage, a lot more attention. So where does this leave us now? Right. Azerbaijan has just hosted this conference. And like, it's important to recognize that this conference is. It's a project of kind of global liberalism. Right. Like the COP conference. And like, it conveys legitimacy. And in this case, it's a means of kind of laundering legitimacy. Embassy for this Karabakh project, in their case, through the lens of protecting the planet. Where do they go from there?
- [169:10]
Jon Stewart
Well, so what makes the dictatorship of Azerbaijan a little bit different from these other dictatorships I mentioned is I think they care about what people think a little bit. They bring in F1 racing, they had Eurovision. They really do these projects because they want to be seen as a legitimate state. Whereas I think those other than like North Korea, they don't do that. Like, no one's gonna like us no matter what we do.
- [169:36]
James
Yeah, yeah. They've given up.
- [169:37]
Jon Stewart
They want to play on the international stage. So that's one aspect. Another aspect, it legitimizes themselves to their internal critics. People as their bajana smart. They know what's going on, but they say, oh, the world is coming to us. Us. The world accepts us. They must, you know, accept the brutal dictatorship that's cracking down anybody's gay, lesbian, anything. You know, torture is a feature of this regime. So it legitimize themselves internally.
- [170:08]
James
Yeah.
- [170:08]
Jon Stewart
And what they fear, I guess, is people would getting angry that they invade Armenia. So it's just. I think it's that sheen. Now, we could argue whether that that was. Was effective because COP 29 was an absolute train wreck for them, but I'm not sure that matters to them.
- [170:25]
James
Right.
- [170:26]
Jon Stewart
Matters for the environment.
- [170:27]
James
Yeah. I think probably these COP conferences are not going to be the way we solve our. Our issues with climate change. But that's another. Another conversation going forward. Like, what is the status of aza? What can those people, those people who were able to leave, like, what. What does the future hold for them? Are they sort of refugees in. In Armenia now?
- [170:49]
Kaveh
They're.
- [170:50]
Jon Stewart
They're refugees in Armenia. Armenia is a poor state, doesn't have the oil reserves.
- [170:55]
Nevdon Jamgochian
The.
- [170:56]
Jon Stewart
Azerbaijan just announced that they increased their military budget by 20%.
- [171:00]
Nevdon Jamgochian
Jeez.
- [171:01]
Jon Stewart
It was already incredibly high last time I got statistics. The flights from ovda, which is the Israeli military insulation for flying equipment to Azerbaijan has ramped up. It's higher than it was in 2020 before their invasion. Sit on par for 2023. So that's a pretty clear sign that they're getting all their equipment from Israel. They stopped before cop, and so I haven't been able to get data on that since then. Azerbaijan just issued a declaration that parents cannot visit their children in the military. Military.
- [171:39]
James
Oh, wow.
- [171:40]
Jon Stewart
And that's a bad, bad sign.
- [171:43]
James
Yeah.
- [171:44]
Jon Stewart
So the question is not if it's win. It is winter. Armenia has a lot of mountains. Those are pretty good defend people are figured out. I'm sure you've talked to your friends about Java. They figured out drones a little bit yeah. How to deal with them better. Armenia has reached out to France who's been helping them a little bit. Azerbaijan says there's some conditions for P that are insane. You know, like change your constitution is one.
- [172:11]
James
Wow.
- [172:11]
Jon Stewart
Get rid of all EU observers is another. Don't get any new weapons. And then give us the what's called this Zangar corridor which is like this road that goes to their exclave Nakchivan to the, to the west there. And it's just like you can't stay. No country's going to do that. Oh, and they've got another claim which is they say allow the UNESCO to visit Armenia to check out erased Azerbaijani seitz which is just a mere propaganda insanity because UNESCO's already in Armenia and Armenia asked that of UNESCO for Azerbaijan. But of course they just copy that.
- [172:48]
James
Right. And say well why don't you do it? Yeah, right.
- [172:51]
Jon Stewart
Which you know, it's not a real thing but anyway, so those are the conditions of peace. So it seems probable that Azerbaijan will invade possibly in spring because the snow will melt it away. Possibly. Now Cazalia seems, seems like he's very angry that the world kind of paid attention to COP 29 is figuring out that he's a dick and he's ramped up in arrests in his own country. He just arrest an entire television station of people that were, you know, again it's, it's one of the least press free countries on earth but I guess people were doing something before that and they'll either take the southern half of Armenia. Armenia or they'll take all of it because they say Yerevan, the capital of Armenia is historically part of Azerbaijan. So that's the state where we're at there. And I really think any other perspectives are wishful thinking and I'm sorry he's so grim about that. But I think it's a very real possibility that this Armenian genocide, that it's killed literally really countable millions of armenians since the 1890s and ramped up through 1915 through 1923 and then subsided a little bit is ongoing and their project will be completed in the next year.
- [174:12]
James
Yeah, that's pretty bleak. How can people, they want to be in solidarity, they want to support. This is something that doesn't get reported on Right. In the US Even if they just want to learn more, how can they do that? Where can they go?
- [174:25]
Jon Stewart
There's a good site that says learn for Artsoc. That's a good site. There's a bunch of Armenian websites that people can go to. May I Post some links on the show notes. Would that be good?
- [174:41]
James
Yeah, we'll absolutely put those in the show notes.
- [174:43]
Jon Stewart
Yeah, yeah, I would be very happy to do that if you want to donate things. But it's a similar to Gaza or other places. Like what, what does awareness do? I guess it could slow things down. Yeah, but really we just need state actors to respond to this. Armenians get very cynically used in France and in the United States by right wing politicians who claim that they're protecting Christians. But I don't think that's something that will actually happen.
- [175:15]
James
Yeah, I mean, people did the same thing for Assad. Right. That he protected Christians in Syria while he. Yeah. Murdered. Gassed his own people.
- [175:22]
Mia Wong
Exactly.
- [175:23]
James
That's, that's a best, a cynical thing and a worst justification.
- [175:26]
Jon Stewart
I mean, what have you seen that's effective in terms of world action for these things with Kurds or other people?
- [175:33]
James
I mean, look, when we talk about how the Kurds have defended themselves from. Yeah. A state project to eliminate them. Right. In some areas they haven't been able to. Right. And when they have, it's through their own armed initiative for the most part. Right. They were very fortunate to have the support of the United States, but that was only ever in the battle against isis. It wasn't when genocidal violence, this genocidal project in Afrin, we're seeing it right now in Tal Rafat. The US didn't stand beside them there and it's not in its nature. And I think this is a really difficult situation that we find ourselves in all around the world right now. We've seen this in Africa too. Right. It's not really in the nature of the United States done in this century to intervene simply for human rights reasons, simply because genocide is wrong.
- [176:28]
Jon Stewart
We had a person, Samantha Power, who wrote a book on how genocide is wrong and we should intervene. And then what happens when she's in power with Obama and Biden?
- [176:37]
James
We draw red lines and then let sad walk over them like it happens all over the world. And I think, yeah, yeah, we're probably in a post hegemonic era, but that doesn't mean that people deserve to die because we're in a post hegemonic era. I know when, look, if I look at the other genocide, which I've spent more time with than most genocides, which is a weird thing to say, it's the genocide in Myanmar of the Rohingya people. They are still facing facing genocidal violence now, even from anti hunter groups. But I also see Muslim People in the Korean National Liberation Army. I see them fighting with the kndf and the way that those people liberated themselves was like, from the bottom up. And I think that I find some hope in what's happening in Kurdistan and what's happening in Myanmar. And I don't see very much from the community of states and much of the thing that even fucking exists. I don't really believe that states have a conscience. And I don't think it's in their nature to care about people because people are inherently valuable. But I do think people do, and I do think it is in the nature of people to care. So I guess we have to continue to hope.
- [177:47]
Jon Stewart
And there has been some positive statements by your Java regarding Armenians, and there's been a lot of solidarity there, which is great. Kurt's helped commit the first Armenian genocide and they've apologized and. And so I'm seeing a little glimmers of hope in terms of the solidarity of people who see what's right and wrong who aren't state actors. That's absolutely right.
- [178:09]
James
Yeah. One of the things. There's another thing that will be deployed very often, that Kurds are responsible for the Armenian genocide. Kurdish people were part of the Armenian genocide, and they will acknowledge that and they've tried to make amends for it.
- [178:20]
Jon Stewart
Yes, exactly right. And that's all anybody can.
- [178:24]
James
We're here now. We're not prisoners of our history, but we have to admit, acknowledge it so that we can move from it. Thank you for sharing all that.
- [178:31]
Jon Stewart
Yeah, thank you.
- [178:32]
James
Is there anything else that we've failed to address? You want to get in quickly before we. I mean, yes, there's thousands of years.
- [178:38]
Jon Stewart
Of stuff, but, you know, visit Armenia. It's still called one of the safest places on earth. It's been rated safer than Japan.
- [178:47]
James
Oh, wow.
- [178:47]
Jon Stewart
It's a beautiful place. It's a struggling democracy, but it's the only democracy in the area. Area. Try to pay attention to the news. You know, is hacky as it seems. Right. Your senator. You know, like, I. I just feel wrong saying that, but. But what else can we do, Right. If you're in Britain, the UK is an incredibly egregious supporter of Azerbaijan through British Petroleum. Really, you people probably can have the biggest effect because the. The UK is the biggest in the enabler of those dirt bags. And thank you for the time. I really appreciate it. And I don't feel like I've done justice to 2,500 years of history, but thank you so much.
- [179:36]
James
No, I think that's Great. Is there anywhere people can follow you online if they'd like to?
- [179:40]
Jon Stewart
Oh, absolutely not. I'm tired of getting doxed.
- [179:43]
James
Excellent. Yeah, that's probably for the best, you.
- [179:46]
Jon Stewart
Know, and that's why I, I paint icons. This is because it's, it's anonymous, you know. Yeah.
- [179:52]
James
Very offline, but.
- [179:54]
Jon Stewart
Yeah, but thank you so much.
- [179:56]
James
Great. Thank you.
- [180:24]
I
This is. It could happen here. Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling of our world and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today I'm joined by Mia Wong, James Stout and Robert Evans. This week, we are covering the week of January 29th to February 5th. And oh boy, has this week felt like a month. I am absolutely exhausted. And let's start, I guess by talking about what Trump did. Tuesday night he had a press conference with both himself and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to announce that the United States would, quote, unquote, take over the Gaza Strip, resulting in, quote, unquote, long term ownership. Previously, on that day, Trump also signed an order pulling out of the United Nations Human Rights Council and cutting off aid to unwra. Let's start with this topic. Hopefully we will have a later episode, maybe next week covering what's happening in Palestine. But you know, this is, as of right now, the current most development.
- [181:29]
James
This is one of the more like crazy things that he's like. Like you could see Netanyahu even like in the room clearly finding out about this for the first time.
- [181:39]
Robert Evans
Yeah, there was a real. Oh shit, really vibe.
- [181:42]
I
I'm not sure how long Trump and Netanyahu have actually had this like entire thing planned. That, that is a distinct possibility that like this has been Netanyahu's goal for a while and this was like impacted his negotiations with Biden, like knowing that he wanted this to be like the outcome where the US Basically just takes and holds the territory of Gaza as a US Territory, like indefinitely.
- [182:02]
James
I think Bibi knew that Trump would give him a positive outcome in any number of ways. Right. Like to include just saying, like, bomb it off the map. Like, I think it's reasonable to assume that.
- [182:12]
Robert Evans
Well, and I mean something like this was, I think, the obvious outcome as soon as Trump, I mean, from before Trump won. Right?
- [182:18]
James
Yeah.
- [182:18]
Robert Evans
Netanyahu never had any intention of letting things go back to the way they were before October 7th. And Trump has a vested interest in giving Netanyahu whatever he wants the most. Like, it's, I don't know, I'm not surprised by it, I guess. I'm a little bit like, okay, at least now we know what, what they're going to do next.
- [182:41]
I
It's in line with the manifest destiny territorial expansion that Trump has been talking about the past few weeks. Yeah, I mean, Joe Biden laid the groundwork for this by giving, like, Israel the actual, like, bombs and materials to, to, like, do the demolition side of this project. And now Trump continues to discuss relocating Palestinians to Egypt and Jordan while promising to turn Gaza into, quote, unquote, the Riviera of the Middle East. Level it out, create an economic development, unquote.
- [183:09]
James
He has also said that he's going to, again, said he's going to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria, which would leave 2,000 people in CENTCOM to deploy to Gaza. I guess, if that's what they want to do.
- [183:19]
Mia Wong
Yeah, I mean, I feel like there's no possible way this can go, quote, unquote, well, this is going to be a fucking catastrophe. Feet. The basic plan here is to do a genocide, and then, well, this.
- [183:29]
I
This is part of a genocidal operation.
- [183:31]
James
Yeah.
- [183:32]
Mia Wong
It's like this is like, well, we're doing. We're doing a second, larger genocide.
- [183:35]
I
This is like the finishing touch.
- [183:36]
Mia Wong
Yeah, but, but, but, you know, like, on a sort of practical level, it's like, okay, the US Couldn't hold Afghanistan, right? Like, and, like, obviously, like, this is. This isn't like a, quote, unquote, easier occupation, but it's like, this is going to be a fucking, like, a nightmare. Like, and it. I don't know. I mean, my, My assumption is that this is going to be just like, if he. If he actually, like, you know, does a deployment of US Troops, this is going to be hideously unpopular. People are going to be coming back in body bags, and it's gonna. I don't know, it's going to be a nightmare for everyone involved. And, yeah, it's. It's a absolutely terrible idea.
- [184:11]
I
I'm more scared that they're going to get away with it. I think it's. I. I'm more scared that things will go fine for them, Them. And this just becomes like, an actually stable US Territory in the Middle East.
- [184:21]
James
There will be significant. Pushback's not the word. Right. Like, there will be guerrilla warfare. Right. Like, it's very hard to take and hold significantly large urban areas, as the US has found out for 20 years. Whether or not people will accept that, I think. I think they might, like. I think Trump kind of needs an enemy, you know, like, and a war and like a quote, unquote, you know, he can. He can paint almost anything as a win. And I think people might be more willing than we'd like to think to accept people coming home in body bags from that.
- [184:51]
Robert Evans
I'm not really sure. I think we're actually going to see the kind of troop deployment that people think based on what Trump has said, as opposed to expanded support for what the Israelis have already been doing, which has. Which has, like, done a significant job to depopulate the area as it stands, like. Yeah, I think we have to be hesitant to draw too strong a line between the rhetoric and what Trump is actually going to do. Which doesn't mean, I don't think that it's not very likely that you're going to continue to see mass depopulation in Gaza. I think it's just that, like, I don't know that. I think the only way that happens is something that looks like most of the occupations of the last century have looked like from a US Point of. Of you.
- [185:38]
James
Yeah. And the new model is this Syria model. Right. Like the relatively small footprint and then local partner force at the IDF pulling security for US contracts and in US money. Like that.
- [185:49]
Robert Evans
Right, the IDF and a lot of.
- [185:51]
James
Third party corporate PMCs.
- [185:54]
Robert Evans
Yeah, PMCs. You know, like, we've got guys champing at the bit to do that. And like, that looks a lot likelier to me than the 10th Mountain Division, you know, occupying large chunks of Gaza.
- [186:08]
James
Agreed. Yeah. Erik Prince is ready to. Ready to get in there, sadly.
- [186:12]
I
All right, let's transition to our new segment titled Stinky Musk, which I came up with last night. Delirious. And yes, it's bad. No, I'm not gonna fix it. South African gang does a hostile takeover of the United States.
- [186:25]
James
Yeah, you're hidden. You're hidden.
- [186:27]
I
Today, Garrison Elon Musk and a gang of overly online Gen Z interns are doing an oligarchic cybercrime of the federal government, starting with the Office of Management and Budget and moving on to usaid, a General Services Administration, the Treasury, and as of recording, noaa, as well as many other agencies, smaller agencies, bigger agencies that they are infiltrating both physically and digitally.
- [186:51]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [186:52]
I
Employees of these agencies have been locked out both physically and digitally as the DOGE team ransacks various departments and accesses sensitive data with no oversight site. And that's like government data about you, possibly in the hands of a literal Nick Fuentes pilled griper intern. Security officials who tried to resist Musk's seizure of classified materials have been fired and DOGE personnel threatened to call the U.S. marshals to be let into buildings. I have some more info on this, as we will. As we will go on, but I guess this is, this is an okay time just to discuss.
- [187:25]
Robert Evans
Yeah, I think the response to this is one of the more hopeful things going on right now and kind. What led me to think that is looking at 2020, looking at the fallout from 2020 and what worked and what didn't, largely what didn't work and thinking like, okay, well, if we're going to actually get any kind of functional resistance to what's happening, what does that look like? And it doesn't look like the same crews of people doing the same thing that they did four or five years ago, which is why I've got some hope in the fact that you've got a different crowd of people who are radicalizing and taking to the. And, you know, we.
- [188:04]
I
Federal employees.
- [188:05]
Robert Evans
Federal employees. Right. And you've got a lot of like.
- [188:08]
I
Or former.
- [188:08]
Robert Evans
Yeah, most of them are still current, but, you know, it's a mix of former and current federal employees. And these are, these are the people who do a lot of the nuts and bolts stuff at the Office of Personnel Management, Office Management Budget. Like, these are the people who like, make sure keep things functioning at like a ground level. And a lot of them are pissed off in a way that I don't think we have really seen before before. And I think there's a potential. And who's to say, like right now we just had a big protest in front of treasury about a full city block or so of people, many if not the vast majority of whom were federal employees, rallying alongside a lot of Democratic members of Congress. And you know, that's not. That doesn't accomplish anything on its own, but it's a potential start to accomplishing something. You know, if you get those people out in the street, it provides, among other things, a lot of COVID for everyone else. And it also is the start of, you know, what you might call a reverse January 6th. If January 6th was a bunch of random people taking and occupying government buildings without any knowledge of like, what they are or how things actually function inside of them. The kind of thing that we might be looking at in the near future. Future is the opposite of that. We're a bunch of people who absolutely do know how those organizations and buildings function, trying to take and occupy them. And that's the feeling I got because I talked to some folks who were at the treasury protest. One person that I talked to most extensively is A federal contractor who was present in 2017 at the travel ban protests, if you remember those, which is back when Trump announced his first Muslim ban, and a bunch of people started occupying, like, airports and stuff. Like, I was at the. @ lax for that. This person was at some of those protests, and it was out in front of Treasury. And the quote that I've got from them there was. I was expecting it, it being this protest, the treasury protest, to feel like the travel ban protests. It didn't. It was a lot angrier than the travel ban protests. The travel ban protests were kind of an in defense of another person sort of anger. And this was narrowly focused anger at a very specific group of people. There were a lot of people yelling and screaming outside of their congressmen's offices and the like. And, like, there hasn't been that much disrupt compared to what we're going to see. Right. Social Security payments haven't stopped going out in mosque. So if we're seeing something like this at this early stage, I think there's a lot of potential there. And the thing this person brought up repeatedly is, like, when we start seeing congressmen kicking indoors is when things are going to get interesting. If that happens. Like, that's kind of the stage at which there's a lot of potential for this to turn into something that could actually, like, cause change. Like, if you actually start getting government employees, employees who are willing to do more than stand outside of their offices, like, who are. Who are willing to take direct action to occupy those buildings or stop other people from. And you've seen little bits of that. Right. One of the things we did see is, as these Doge kids came along, federal employees refusing them entry, keeping doors locked. Now, that was not illegal because these were literally, as it's been described to me by multiple people, just kids showing up, demanding entry without any kind of a badge or. Or evidence of who they are. Right, right. When you. When you get people who are willing to escalate from that and refuse entry, that's when we might actually see some things start to seriously shift here.
- [191:36]
I
I mean, based on how much of what Musk is doing is just, like, bypassing Congress and doing like. Like a very kind of, like, typical, like, like, oligarchic coup. Like, he's doing all those steps. And if you look at, like, what happened in South Korea a few months ago, we are not at the point where congressmen are literally, like, like, like, you know, climbing over, like, fences, barricading doors.
- [191:55]
Robert Evans
We're not in South Korea territory yet.
- [191:57]
I
But, yeah, but like they're lawmakers, like were willing to do that and there is like, I think waiting from people to like, wait and see if our lawmakers are going to be willing to do the same to like protect the actual like, functional aspects of our government. And like things are already happening. Like we are in some ways kind of already at this point.
- [192:15]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [192:15]
I
The usain website is now like completely removed. Removed. Leaving only a note that claims that all personnel have been put on administrative leave, including overseas personnel. But this essentially leaves a whole agency shut down, but all done with like without an act of Congress or even like an overstepping executive order from Trump. It was just, it was just the unelected Elon Musk who decided to and carried out the closure of a government agency which like, should be like, like should actually be like a criminal. Like there is like statutes that are designed, designed to stop this from happening. Just no one's enforcing them because they control almost every aspect of government. Musk has also closed the IRS direct file tax system, which has, which has now forced taxpayers to use third party paid services. So like he's doing this like one by one.
- [192:59]
Mia Wong
I think the weakness that they have right now is that because they're causing so much chaos because they're, you're talking about the FBI purge. They're trying to do like, you know, the thing that they're relying on is everyone is just going to let them in and just let them get walked over. But it's like, okay, the thing about acting this much outside the law is what guys with guns do you have who you can use to enforce this? That's the thing where it's, it's legitimately like if there's serious resistance to them, they might start to crumple because the, the, the, the reason you work inside of the legal order or you have your own paramilitaries is so that you can have like the guy with the gun to make you open the door.
- [193:37]
James
Yeah.
- [193:38]
Mia Wong
And the more people who are willing to just be like, no, fuck you, like, and like force them to actually like find guys with guns who are willing to do this, the odds are.
- [193:46]
Robert Evans
Lower that you get a positive shift because people engage directly and aggressively with the cops than you have when some sort of like mid level military functionary is asked to drive a tank over a schoolteacher. Right. Like historically, historically, if you look at when regimes fall, that happens more often than the waving a flag on top of like a pile of corpses. Right. Like demands are ordered. Illegal, illegal orders are given to people with Guns. And they're like, no, I'm not going to shoot at a bunch of teachers today. That's not the only way this kind of thing happens. But at least, like, for my money, that's the likeliest positive outcome right now.
- [194:25]
J
Yeah.
- [194:25]
Mia Wong
And if you look at the last world historical empire run by an incredibly unpopular genotocracy, it was the Soviets, and look at how they fell apart.
- [194:32]
Robert Evans
That's. That's more or less what happened. Yeah.
- [194:34]
James
Yeah. And, like, it's interesting that if we use a Bavarian definition of the state, like, that has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Right. That they've dismantled their apparatus for state violence as well. And this could just be like, the blunt instrument of apparently offering every federal employee. I know. I've heard that they've tried to un. Retire Wildland firefighters who accepted their offer of retirement, which is extremely funny. But, like, it's. It's very, very. Yeah. You're going to, what, you're going to retire a bunch of FBI agents or fire them? Because, like Mia said, they are going to need hitters. They're going to need to use coercive force at some point, possibly very soon.
- [195:13]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [195:13]
James
To get what they want to do done.
- [195:15]
Robert Evans
And I think when it comes to that, the question is, like, which hitters?
- [195:18]
James
Yeah.
- [195:19]
Robert Evans
Because the FBI and the CIA, I mean, are getting gutted at the moment right now. Like, so you're looking at, like, and the nsa. And the nsa, you're looking at local police, police, Federal Protective Services, Department of Homeland Security, you know, and the marshals. Right. Like. Like, these are kind of like the shooters Trump has to play with. And the military will remain an open question until the critical moment. Right.
- [195:46]
James
Yeah. I mean, FPS is infinitely expandable and is mostly contract. Robert. And I've spoken about it before, but, like, that's the one that has a lot of potential to grow. And I think within local, especially sheriff's departments.
- [195:58]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [195:58]
James
You got some people who won't bat an eyelid in some of those.
- [196:01]
Robert Evans
Oh, no, no, no. Absolutely not. And I do think that, like, sheriff's departments are kind of what haunt me the most. But that's also. It's not purely a matter of, like, which agencies and organizations are going to back Trump in this. It's also a matter of, like, geographic location and DC In DC at least, he can count on a lot less of those guys because, like, the Capitol Police aren't thrilled right now. You.
- [196:28]
I
You know, essentially what Elon is doing right now is exactly what he did to Twitter, except to the entire United States of America.
- [196:35]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [196:35]
I
And like by the end of this process it still might function on some level. Right. Like Twitter still kind of functions, but it's just worse in every way. It's worse. It doesn't have the quote unquote good features it used to. It's, it's buggy, it's full of Nazis. It's just, it's, it sucks more like the previous version was, was already bad and harmful. Harmful. But the new one is just worse without the aspects that made it semi worthwhile. And like I'm going to do an episode like next week like kind of about, about this like specifically and how Musk is Twitterifying the entire government using like all of the same tactics like refusing to pay leases on buildings, installing beds in agency headquarters to make employees sleep there overnight, having teenagers review code of like long standing employees. It's the exact same problem process. And if you didn't like what happened to Twitter, that process is now happening to the government itself.
- [197:30]
James
I can't wait for the IRS to send me a letter saying my pussy in bio like that. That will be.
- [197:36]
Robert Evans
Hey now, now, now, now you've, now you've got me back on the Trump train. You know what, I'm, I'm, I'm peaceing out for the day. I'm, I'm on board.
- [197:45]
I
Now before we close this segment and pivot to ads, I do want to shout out the work that Wired is doing right now. And yeah, Wired magazine is doing some fantastic reporting on this. The, the D.C. attorney is currently promising to go after individuals who post about Doge employees. They might end up going after some of these Wired journalists who identified this Gen Z Doge team that is wreaking havoc throughout the government with no oversight. Wired provided what should be, you know, legally required necessary identification of public workers.
- [198:16]
James
Yeah.
- [198:16]
I
Who Musk is trying to keep secret. The D.C. attorney and like Trump's DOJ is very mad about that. They might, they might end up like going after these people. But fantastic work coming out of Wired right now.
- [198:27]
James
Yeah.
- [198:27]
I
If you want to keep up to date on Musk's takeover, I strongly recommend checking out their work. I'll post some of those in the sources below. Let's go on a quick ad break and then come back to talk about the continuing kind of fake trade, war and immigration.
- [198:43]
James
Sick.
- [198:56]
I
All right, we are back. I'm going to pivot towards James and Mia to discuss tariffs and immigration. Take it away.
- [199:02]
Mia Wong
Yeah. So on Monday, Trump sort of averted the market collapse that he had set off with his declaration that there are going to be 25% tariffs on all goods from Canada and Mexico and also 10% tariff on China. So let's, let's go into like what actually happened. So the tariffs on Mexico and Canada are on hold for a month. However, the 10% tariff on all Chinese goods did go into effect and we'll get to more about what that's going to do in a second. But much more important, Trump eliminated the de minimis exception which allowed like people and companies to ship goods from China that were worth under $800 and not have to go through the formal customs process and you know, pay tariffs on it and also have to spend all of that time, paperwork and shit. And before we get into the sort of devastating effect this is going to have on businesses, I want to make it clear that like regular people in China use this to send things to people in the U.S. u.S. Like that's a, that's a very normal thing. Yeah, that is now really, really difficult.
- [200:07]
Robert Evans
And about a third of YouTube ads are supported by people who run companies that make use of this loophole.
- [200:13]
Mia Wong
Yeah, yeah. Okay. So on the business side, this is actually really interesting because I think it's one of the, I mean, not the first, but I think it's going to be a very, very early example of Trump completely fucking a base that's been very, very supportive of him. Because this is going, going to liquidate huge portions of the drop shipping economy. Right. Like all of, all of the stupid YouTube shirts, like all of that stuff is just going to be annihilated.
- [200:36]
James
Can you explain drop shipping if people aren't familiar mir just like 10 second version.
- [200:41]
Mia Wong
Yeah. So drop shipping is a thing where you do an order and instead of having like an inventory, normally you'd have a warehouse that has shirts in it. Drop shipping, you don't do that. You are now the intermediary and you have these manufacturers like print to consumption based basically. And you can, you can do this very cheaply and then you can run the entire markup. But it works because of how cheap it is to get these like sort of small scale Chinese firms to like make stuff for you. Those people are screwed. Companies like TEMU and Shein are either going to have to just completely eat shit or they're going to have to figure out a way to move their entire supply line through countries like Vietnam, which is going to be very difficult. I mean, because TEMU even getting stuff to the US has been kind of hard for them because of how the logistics network Works.
- [201:28]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [201:29]
Mia Wong
And so obviously, like, I don't, I don't think most people who listen to the show are that sad about she and Intemu eating shit.
- [201:34]
Robert Evans
But no, it is like a mixed bag because a whole lot of the, the MLM industry is going to take a header as a result of this.
- [201:43]
James
Yep.
- [201:44]
Mia Wong
Yeah, there's some stuff to, like, fuck them. But on the other hand, there are a lot of people who are going to eat shit who are not those people. And this is. There is a huge, huge, like, range of industries that are run by very, very small businesses. Like, it was even just like an individual person who, like, makes crafts and sells it. And those people are also screwed because they, they rely on getting the resources in from China. And there's a lot of sort of, you know, things like, like people who build, like, hand, like retro handheld consoles.
- [202:12]
James
Oh, yeah.
- [202:13]
Mia Wong
And like, I don't know, like, custom Airsoft rifles. I know, Jay, you talk about, like, there's a whole bunch of industries like that that are these, like, small scale production things, things that are just screwed, that rely on this stuff. And so the ripples of this specific part of it are going to keep playing out basically, no matter what else happens in this trade war.
- [202:31]
James
Yeah.
- [202:32]
Mia Wong
It's also worth noting that Trump's tariffs on Mexico and Canada aren't gone. They've just been postponed for a month. So there is a real chance that we end up in exactly the same place that we were going into the weekend, where no one knows where these tariffs are going to take effect and basically blow a smoking crater in the world economy. And we get another round of the negotiations that James is going to talk about. It's already setting off a really sort of staggering right wing. I mean, not even necessarily right wing, just like a nationalist backlash in Canada that's kind of been like, tearing up this sort of international right wing alliance and nationalists, because suddenly Trump's coming after them and now they're. They're really mad about it.
- [203:09]
I
Well, and, and because Trudeau announced that, that he would be targeting, you know, like retaliatory tariffs specifically at Red States, we now have people calling him Dark Woke or Dark Trudeau, you know, for very different reasons than they used to call him.
- [203:23]
Robert Evans
Yes, yes.
- [203:25]
James
Oh, that's magnificent.
- [203:27]
Robert Evans
All right, all right. You're gonna get canceled if you're not careful.
- [203:33]
James
No, outstanding.
- [203:35]
Mia Wong
Speaking of getting canceled, what hasn't gotten Canceled is the 10% tariff on all Chinese goods, which is just now in effect. It's just happening. That's bad. It's going to increase inflation. It's also, it's, you know, it's, it's sort of the opening round of this escalation to a trade war. China has retaliated with tariffs that are not a very big deal on US Goods and some product control stuff, on export control stuff, on some rare earth minerals. Actually, I'm the rare minerals, but, like, minerals you need for production stuff that isn't a big deal yet, but could be.
- [204:08]
I
I mean, and we were all expecting Chinese tariffs. Having 25 tariffs to Canada was not something I thought was like a looming.
- [204:14]
Robert Evans
No.
- [204:15]
James
Yeah.
- [204:15]
Mia Wong
I mean, I thought they'd do Mexico. I didn't know about it.
- [204:18]
James
I'm very worried about the offshoring of Chinese labor and the impact that we're having. Places like Myanmar, where China has these special economic zones. And it's something we will cover. We obviously have a lot of sources.
- [204:29]
Mia Wong
Yeah, we have Monday. Yeah, on Monday, we're covering this more. So I think something that's important to understand about these tariffs is that these tariffs are not economic policy. This is, this is the mistake that all of the capitalists who back Trump made is that they assumed that just like every other president who's made promises like this, like Obama's promise to renegotiate nafta, they all assumed that because of economic policy, they'd be able to just like, get Trump to be pro business and he wouldn't do it. The miscalculation they made is that these are not economic tariffs. These are directly foreign policy geopolitical tariffs.
- [204:59]
James
Right.
- [204:59]
Mia Wong
They're. They're international relations, art of the deal bullshit. And the goal of it. And he's been deploying against, like, I mean, Colombia, Denmark. He's threatening the eu now he's going to keep doing this with China. The, the goal of this is to directly use American consumer power as, as a, as a weapon of imperialism to make these countries fall into line. Yeah. And now, now I will pass it to James to talk about what he was specifically trying to get out of Mexico and Canada in this round.
- [205:25]
James
Yeah. So, like, we spoke about falling into line there. I think it's probably a good place to start. Like, this kind of Trump brinksmanship is very typical of his stuff style.
- [205:32]
J
Right.
- [205:32]
James
Nearly every media outlet, I think, fell for it this time, just like it did in his first term. Like, we got this, like, this is going to cause a crisis. Trump was very nebulous in his goals for these tariffs. And as almost always, like, he talked a lot about, like, America being treated unfairly Right. He talked about the border and he talked specifically about fentanyl. So I want to begin by talking about fentanyl. Just to be clear, it is true that some fentanyl comes into the USA from Mexico and to a lesser degree or so from Canada. The vast majority of the fentanyl that enters the USA from Mexico, about 80% of the convictions made as a result of that fentanyl entering the USA are made on US citizens. Right. And 90% of the fentanyl that is seized is seized at ports of entry. So this idea that there are like Mexican nationals backpacking fentanyl through the desert, that exists, but it is not what is bringing the bulk of the fentanyl that is killing the people in this country into this country. There are multiple cases of CBP agents taking bribes to allow the drug into the country. I will link to two of them in the show notes, but know that there are more of them and given the relatively high bar for CBP age and anyone in DHS to be investigated. Right. We can assume that this is something that happens on at least a semi regular basis. So what did Trump do to stop this fentanyl coming into the country? What did he get? He got this promise that Mexico would deploy 10,000 troops to its border. In reality, this isn't much of a concession at all. The Mexican National Guard has been deployed to the border for years. Specifically, it's been deployed at gaps in the US Border wall for more than a year. So people will remember our coverage of the open air detention sites in Jacumba and East County, San Diego. All of those open air detention sites correspond to gaps in the border wall where migrants would enter, surrender to border patrol and then be detained in and open air. Each of those gaps now has a Mexican National Guard checkpoint in front of it, and they're there in conjunction with the inm, the National Institute of Migration. In English, the INM has camps for the migrants who do come there. Right. This is something that Biden obtained in I think late 23, early 24. And that's why we aren't seeing open air detention. One of the reasons, the other reason being Biden's asylum ban, we aren't seeing as many people crossing the border. Right. Mexican border towns also tend to be areas where the Mexican military deploys its troops because often they are places where organized crime occurs due to their proximity to the border and the market for drugs and the fact that weapons from the US tend to flow into Mexico and that that's where large numbers of weapons for organized crime come from. Right. For more than a year, I've received press releases from Tijuana constantly talking about new unit arrives, special forces arrives, army arrive, and then they'll have pictures of a parade. Right now, they never tell us when those units are leaving. They just keep telling us they're coming. So it's very hard to get a sense of actually how many troops are there.
- [208:22]
Mia Wong
Sure.
- [208:23]
James
But the idea that Mexico is suddenly militarizing its border is kind of farcical.
- [208:28]
Mia Wong
Yeah. And I want to. There's been a lot of sort of cheerleading of shine bomb, sort of like standing up to the US And I don't think people in the US really understand the securitization on the Mexican border. And so something that I'm realizing that I don't think, I just assume people knew about this, but I don't think I ever made it into the Western press much. Is that. So like a few months ago in October, the Mexican army just like opened fire on a convoy of like on a convoy of immigrants. And this was, this was on the border of Guatemala and just like killed six of them, shot 12 other people. So like, and like there are massacres like that, like not infrequently. Right. Like, this is not a, this is not a. Mexico is pro immigrant. Like the US Is anti immigrant thing. Like part of the, part of the reason why Trump can like, you know, sort of declare victory without getting any concessions or whatever is because of how murderous the Mexican army's like, border policy is already.
- [209:22]
James
Yeah. And the Mexican leaders have successfully been able to paint themselves as leftists exclusively being 2 inches to the left of a further and further right regime in Washington D.C. people can listen to the last episode of my Daddy and Gap series, an idea of how Mexico is constantly deporting migrants to its own southern states. I want to talk a little bit about the Canadian concessions very briefly again. 10,000 agents and a border spending that really doesn't change much in terms of what was already becoming a more militarized border. There has actually been a significant flow of migrants from the U.S. to Canada in the last couple of years. Specifically a Francophone African people who would take that route. I'm aware of several TikTok influencers. There's one guy I follow in Chad, who, he's in Canada now, but he's from Chad and he makes these videos explaining to Chadian people how to like go from Mexico into the US and then move up to Canada, obviously where they can speak French. And that, that's makes Their lives much easier. Right. Makes it much easier for not to not have to learn a language. Trudeau did agree to list cartels as terrorist organizations.
- [210:24]
Robert Evans
Yeah, that, that, that seems to be, from what I can tell, the big move that he made.
- [210:29]
James
Made, yeah, yeah. So it, it does allow for some economic sanctions. Right. If they attempt to use that Canadian border and sort of get around the United States, it's much less significant than a US Listing, which we believe is coming. Like Canada's not going to use it to do covert operations inside Mexico. I don't think Canada's not going to be drone striking anyone. Like when Trump listed the, the Kurds force, he then strucks its leader. Right. With a drone. I don't think Trudeau is going to be, I don't think Canada is going to be doing that. But nonetheless, that is a concession and perhaps there is some plan for that. Right. It certainly allows for, and I've said this before, the economic sanctioning of people who provide material benefit to those organizations, or potentially the arrest of people who provide material benefit to those organizations, which is a large number of businesses in Mexico which end up being extorted or paying protection money. Right. So we don't know what is going to happen with that. But it's one of the tools that Trump now has to use as another cudgel against, against Mexico.
- [211:30]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [211:31]
James
The last and perhaps most sinister of all development is this deal that Marco Rubio struck with Bukele in El Salvador. Right. El Salvador has said it will host US citizen criminals and deportees from any nation in its jail system. So I'll just read Bukele's tweet. It's very short. We are willing to take in only convicted criminals, parentheses including convicted U.S. citizens, citizens, into our mega prison secot in exchange for a fee. The fee would be relatively low for the US but significant for us making our entire prison system sustainable. If you're not familiar, it means counterterrorism confinement center in Spanish. For people who haven't heard about this, it's the largest prison in the world that Bukele opened in 2023. And it's a terrible place. There are cells of a hundred people in that cell. There are 80 bunks, two toilets and two bases license. They are extremely confined. I think they get 6.5ft of space per person. They get 30 minutes outside a day. They're forced to shave their heads. Their ankles and wrists are chained. People are arbitrarily detained there sometimes for things like looking like they might be in a Gang. Multiple human rights organizations, including. Well, the State Department is not a human rights organization. Sometimes it's the opposite of that. The State Department itself has raised concerns about human rights abuse due to the, quote, unquote, state of exception which exists in El Salvador, which allows the government to do these things without really any human rights oversight. The US has already seemingly moved some migrants to Guantanamo Bay, to the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center. And satellite imagery has shown tents going up there. Very few at the current time, and they seem to come from Fort Lewis McCord, which I couldn't work out. But there are tents, I guess. I think it was Washington Post, had these satellite images of tents being constructed there. I'm trying to keep an eye on that satellite imagery. Of course, Biden opened the door to outdoor detention. It's not impossible that we will see that again. But this Bukele plan, this, this plan to send people to EL Salvador, especially U.S. citizens, evidently this is unconstitutional. The courts get to decide how much that matters, right? We don't. But this is deeply concerning.
- [213:44]
I
We're all, we're all waiting on the courts and we're all deeply concerned.
- [213:48]
James
Yeah.
- [213:49]
Robert Evans
Well, there you go. You go.
- [213:50]
I
One final break and then we'll come back to end and discuss Trump's targeting of teachers in relation to gender ideology. Welcome back. So last week Trump signed an executive order titled Ending Radical Indoctrination in K through 12 schooling. And part of its focus was to prevent teachers from calling trans students by their names and preferred pronouns, even promising to inflict legal punishment for doing so. Basically like mandating dead naming, misgendering, and forcibly detransitioning students. This order specifically took aim at, quote, unquote, social transition. Right. This is like the non medical social aspects of transitioning, like changing gender, names, pronouns, you know, what facilities you use, socialization. And like, this stuff has historically been, you know, the most common form of transition for minors. It's the, it's, it's the easiest to do. You don't even, like, need your, like, your parents help. But this order blames schools for indoctrinating children in, quote, radical anti American ideologies, unquote, which they include. Gender ideology as a part of the order tries to mandate a national school bathroom ban, restrict participation in school sports, and states that within 90 days, the Secretary of Education, the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Health and Human Services and the Attorney General General shall provide Trump with a, quote, unquote, ending indoctrination strategy to protect parental rights and eliminate all federal funding that directly or indirectly supports gender ideology indoctrination in K through 12 schools, including curriculums, teacher education, certification, licensing, employment and training. To quote from the order, quote the Attorney General shall coordinate with State Attorneys General and local district attorneys in their efforts to enforce the law and file appropriate actions against K through 12 teachers who violate the law by 1 sexually exploiting minors 2 unlawfully practicing medicine by offering diagnoses and treatment without the requisite license and three otherwise unlawfully facilitating in the social transition of a minor, unquote. So basically the goal is to try to make calling a student by their name and pronouns illegal and wrapping this in either with with some form of like sexual exploitation, practicing medicine without a license and using those as justifications for making this practice illegal. Now, in response, school districts in Columbus, Ohio, Harrisburg, Virginia and Montgomery County, Maryland announced that they would not comply with the order and continue to defend their trans students, according to journalist Aaron Reed. Seattle Public Schools published a statement reaffirming their commitment to protecting LGBTQ students and staff. And later the California Department of Education pushed back on the legality of Trump Trump's order Other blue cities and states have stayed quiet in the weeks since the order, with teachers and parents calling on places like the New York City public school system to take a stance on if they will stand up for their trans students. So this is, this is one side of of the of the coin right now. The other side is health care, which we will close on now in relation to Trump's executive order from his first week entitled Defending Women from Gender Ideology, Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government. Now some hospitals have begun complying in advance by canceling patient appointments for gender affirming care. Denver Health and University of Colorado Health sacrificed the care of their patients for Trump's promise of continued funding by announcing that they would no longer be offering care, including blockers and hormone replacement therapy for patients 18 and under. The Virginia Commonwealth University and Children's Hospital of Richmond have also ceased providing gender affirming care to those under 19. This past Monday, thousands of people gathered outside at the NYU Langan Hospital in protest of the hospital's choice to proactively comply with Trump's order to restrict health care after the cancellation of two appointments for trans patients under the age of 19. Now after these protests, which saw thousands of people protesting out in the streets after this, the New York Attorney General sent a letter to the state health care systems saying that the state law requires that hospitals provide gender affirming care and claimed that the federal funding would not be impacted by an executive order. And like, this really hammers down the point that like, none of these executive orders are self enforcing. These all require proactive implementation by local actors. Dr. Jeremy Birnbaum was quoted in the New York Times. He's a pediatrician at the state run University Hospital of Brooklyn. And he was quoted as saying, quote, I am willing to go to jail to continue to provide your care, unquote, out. And you really can like protest hospitals that, that comply in advance. Same thing with schools. Yeah, these are, these are targets that can provide actual pressure and there's probably people on staff who are very sympathetic and they just might be too scared to take a stance right now. And we have some breaking news as of this morning. State Attorney general from California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Nevada, Vermont and with Wisconsin released a statement saying that Trump's executive order banning trans healthcare is unlawful and the hospitals have a duty to provide care. So this is like the, the most optimistic thing that we've seen so far. Now, obviously these, these, these are blue states. This is not going to impact red states who already have these types of bans, either in process or, you know, are going to have them down the line. Georgia just, just put out a, a trans health care ban this morning for, you know, a bill that'll reach our Senate in the next few weeks. But this is, this is the current situation. Protests seem to have applied a degree of pressure that has gotten states attorney general to actually make a statement on this issue.
- [219:38]
James
Yeah, I will say, like, so I still teach, right? I teach at a community college and sometimes through that, we also teach high school students. If you are an educator or someone in healthcare, now is the time to be talking to your union about, like, how you meet this, because, like, the stronger we are, the better we can confront this. And the only way to confront this is we all need to do it together. These are conversations that we need to be having right now. We do not have time and our unions are a very valuable tool for preserving our rights.
- [220:10]
Mia Wong
Yeah, that's actually part of what I was going to say. I've talked to a few union teachers who are like, yeah, we're going to go do this, we're going to go fight. So I assume, I expect in the next couple of weeks we're going to see more movement from the teachers unions. And I think there's an under, I mean, on the one hand, there is the threat that these people do want to privatize the education system. Right. So there is a chance that this is trying to draw a backlash out of. This is something that they're going to try to use to just completely eliminate national federal education. But also this is something I want to close this episode on that we've been talking about this whole time, right? Is that this, this whole coup is being carried out by a bunch of people with laptops and pieces of paper walking up to bureaucrats and the bureaucrats doing what they're being told. Right? This is, this is not a coup that's working with like an army that is showing up on your street and you can go like, find the local bureaucrats who are the people who are supposed to enforce this stuff and you can protest them and you can put some steel in their spine and make them, make the administration actually, actually try to do this. It's not that hard. And they'll fucking cave.
- [221:18]
Robert Evans
Yes, yes, that's, that's entirely what I was trying to get at earlier. And you know, it ties into what James was saying is, like, this is the time to be making connections across as wide a swath of the country as you can, including like everyone you can get in touch with who is not someone you would normally organize with. Like, this is a moment of potential and it's during moments of potential that you should be widening the swath of people that you connect to because otherwise there's just no getting through this sort of shit.
- [221:52]
I
Yeah, we will be covering all these topics more in depth in our regular, like daily episodes. I have a mind boggling, very frustrating episode on Musk and the, the Trump campaign's promises of abolishing different departments of government, as well as a deep dive on like, affirmative action and DEI wokeness in the coming, coming weeks. And I'm sure we will, we will all be focusing on different parts of this in our continuing episodes. But that does it for us today. See you on the other side.
- [222:20]
James
We reported the news.
- [222:24]
Robert Evans
Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.
- [222:29]
Kaveh
It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website coolzone media.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts you can now find sources for. It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.
- [222:48]
Jon Stewart
Jon Stewart is back at the Daily show and he's bringing his signature wit and insight straight to your ears with the Daily Show Ears Edition podcast. Dive into John's unique take on the biggest topics in politics, entertainment, sports and more. Joined by the sharp voices of the show's correspondence and contributors, and with extended interviews and exclusive weekly headline roundups, this podcast gives you content you won't find anywhere else. Ready to laugh and stay informed? Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.