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- [00:00]
Jenny Keasden
This is an iHeart podcast.
- [00:05]
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Jenny Keasden
Yeah, that's cool. But how about the soft purr of.
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Garrison Davis
An upgraded exhaust when it fits just right?
- [00:18]
Mia Wong
For me, it's the little things. Like these new windshield wipers from ebay I installed.
- [00:22]
Ebay Advertiser
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- [02:05]
Jenny Keasden
High Key Listen.
- [02:06]
Mia Wong
To High Key, a new weekly podcast.
- [02:09]
Robert Evans
You better listen.
- [02:10]
Garrison Davis
Speaking of tanning, I was sunning my nether regions cause I read that you're.
- [02:14]
Andrew Sage
Supposed to like get sun not only.
- [02:16]
Garrison Davis
In your mouth, but also in your other orifices.
- [02:19]
James Stout
Wait, are you talking about you put your hole into the sun?
- [02:21]
Andrew Sage
I did. That's crazy. Downward dog mooning the sun. I was gonna say. Is it cheeks open?
- [02:27]
Mia Wong
It's cheeks open all the way wide.
- [02:29]
Jenny Keasden
Is it cheeks open?
- [02:30]
James Stout
Uh huh. Who's hold them? Enough of that nonsense. Now listen to High key on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
- [02:43]
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 going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.
- [03:07]
James Stout
Hi everyone and welcome to the podcast. It's James today and I'm joined by Jenny Keasden, who's a writer, activist and someone who's been in and out of northeast Syria for a long time working with the women's movement. And today we're going to be talking about a situation in north and east Syria since the fall of the Assad regime, some of the conflict that has been happening and the resistance of the sdf. Welcome to the show, Jenny.
- [03:30]
Jenny Keasden
Hi there. Yeah, first of all, thanks so much for having me. I'm really happy to be here.
- [03:33]
James Stout
Yeah, you're welcome, of course. So I think if we start off, people have been messaging me a lot of various platforms about the, the letter that Abdulloh or Jalan wrote and I don't want to address that in its entirety today because we've got something coming up on that we're going to talk to some people from the Freedom for Abdullah campaign. But I do want to use it as a jumping off point because I think it A, has reminded people as we spoke about before the show, that north and east Syria exists and the SDF exists, which has been largely missing in the legacy media reporting on Syria. But B, there's been atrocious reporting on what it means for the sdf, even though there's a very clear answer to that. So for people who have been reading papers which either just ignore the existence of the FDF entirely or speculate as to what they're going to do when they've given a very clear answer. Could you explain to people, people like where, where this leaves the sdf?
- [04:31]
Jenny Keasden
Yeah, sure. No, so thanks for that. And yeah, I've also been getting a lot of questions about Otan's letter and I'm really glad to hear that you guys are going to do a program on it because Western media wants to report it in this way that's very snazzy and this like bolts of the blue and something crazy's happening. Really. It's unfortunately it has to actually be spoken about in a kind of more long term and intelligent way that sets the context and like, yeah, puts that makes things a bit more clear because it is something with a background, and it's connected to a lot of things. And of course, that whole political process that Ajan's recent statement is a part of is going to affect the situation here in north and East Syria. Because the situation here a lot of the time depends on the actions of the Turkish state and on expansionism and aggression from there. And so as the political situation changes, it will affect that. What it is not is like a call or a statement that means that the SDF has to lay down their arms and start with this thing. This is for several reasons. Absolutely not what it is. The main one of those being that the SDF is not and never has been the pak. And that's something that they've tried many times over the years to make very clear, but unfortunately has not always been heard and acknowledged. And so whatever this statement means, and you guys will go into that in your program, whatever it means for the pkk, for the situation in North Kurdistan, it's a different situation here. And so the SDF is in a moment of, like, a big question and a big change, but it's much more to do with what's been happening in Syria politically and to do with the government and the interim government. Interim government have installed themselves here and the regime change and, of course, the ongoing war and situation of invasion that they're facing. So there's a lot of big questions for the sdf, but I think it's important right now that we don't kind of confuse and misunderstand with this sort of parallel process that's going on.
- [06:28]
James Stout
Yeah, definitely. And I think if people are hearing this and you're new to the show, this is your first time hearing the sea of acronyms that is the Kurdish Freedom Movement. I could direct you to the Women's War, which is a series that Robert made. I have a book, but you can't read it yet. Still editing it. Or you could listen to one of our numerous other. If you search for Rojava or Northeast Syria or Syria in our feed, I'm sure you'll find a lot to explain those acronyms to you. But, yeah, we. We've had this situation, right, where since December, the situation in Syria has drastically changed and we now have two state actors. Well, we have lots of state actors. We always had lots of state actors intervening in Syria, but we have this new state actor in the Syrian state. Right. And I think people, if they're, you know, if. If they're like reading the New York Times or, God forbid, seeing Charles Lister, then that they'll have a certain vision of this that sort of exempts the sdf. It sort of just ignores this whole area of Syria and says like, oh, well, the Syrian revolution has succeeded. I think we should address like what has happened to the SDF to north and east Syria since the collapse of the Assad regime in December.
- [07:42]
Jenny Keasden
Yeah. So obviously what's happened to northeast Syria in northeast Syria and TSDF is very connected to the whole overall Syria process. And you're right. When you hear the reporting on it, I think lots of parts of it can get erased and kind of depending who's talking and what their angle is or whatever, there are a lot of things left out. Not just the Kurds in north of east Syria, but other minority ethnic groups or like women organizing across Syria, like all of these things. It's a very complex situation which I won't pretend I can completely lay out and summarized for everyone in five minutes. But yeah, what you did have was the culmination, the end of a period and a massive change when, as you say, there was a regime change, there was a change of government. And that happened with this like, offensive sweeping down from Idlib to Damascus, succeeding in taking over the government in Damascus from the Assad family, which was the end of a 61 year reign which caused absolute jubilation, it's safe to say, all across Syria, and that includes where I am in north east Syria. Because anyway, just, yeah, people were very happy and celebrating, but also there were cities here. When you look at the map and you see this like semi autonomous region, what you had to understand was that there were actually within the cities, there were neighborhoods and sections that were still under the Assad government. It wasn't as simple as like the whole city is in the autonomous administration. So here as well, even there were still statues of Assad and people took the streets and tore them down. And really close to actually where I'm recording this today, there's a roundabout where they took down the statue of Assad and it's been replaced by pictures of the martyrs of people who have fallen fighting for the autonomy of the region here and fighting for their political system. So, you know, it's very, very beautiful. Yeah, people celebrated and were happy with a qualifier, with a very big qualifier. You know, you saw the jails opened as well and the flags went off. And yeah, it was a real moment of jubilation, celebration. But unfortunately, the force which eventually succeeded in toppling Assad and installing itself as the now, as they're saying, the interim or transitional government of Syria. You know, we can say it was not one of the many, like, progressive democratic alternative forces that originally in the uprisings weakened the Assad government.
- [10:03]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [10:03]
Jenny Keasden
Back in 2011. Since then, things have changed. And this isn't a podcast directly about that. I'm sure you guys speak about it as well at other times. But. Yeah, instead what you have is HTs, who are a kind of conglomerate of militia, of these different militia groups. Another acronym for you there as well, James. Yes.
- [10:21]
James Stout
Yeah, three languages, acronyms. Yeah.
- [10:24]
Jenny Keasden
Pointing people to resources is, is always very useful. And they're, they're a kind of mixed up amalgamation of different militias who were operating in Syria. And what's crucial to say about them is that they're, you know, their political background and perspective of a lot of people in these organizations are like, really, really similar, unfortunately, and all too familiar to the people here who fought against isis, the Islamic State, because they're coming from similar backgrounds and also to Al Qaeda and the organizations who were kind of the Syrian branches of Al Qaeda, like, played a really direct role in founding HTs. And they want to now sort of put on a new face, put on a suit, go out and shake the world's hand and become world statesmen and become the government, which unfortunately, it looks like all of our governments are all too willing to very quickly accept. And we'll get in a minute. We can talk a bit specifically about the role that I know most of your listeners are in the states and that the American government has been playing here. But yeah, so there's a big qualifier on how much people are celebrated because of the very dodgy history and the real, like, threat that HCS's politics holds, unfortunately, particularly for ethnic minorities and women.
- [11:39]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [11:39]
Jenny Keasden
And they're establishing their power. And it's by no means a kind of nonviolent or peaceful process. And there's a lot of, like, tensions flaring up and a lot of problems. However, yes, it is the case that in a lot of Syria, the majority of Syria, outright, like warfare on the ground has pronounced because this one group had taken power. And so we're in a different moment. We're in a different kind of process. So what's different up here? What's different up in the north and east and what's not being discussed as much. And the point that I'm often trying to make when I'm trying to write articles and doing interviews at the moment is that like, actually the war in the whole of Syria has not completely stopped.
- [12:16]
James Stout
Yeah, very much so.
- [12:18]
Jenny Keasden
Mostly, yes. We can Say in most regions. But significantly here in northern east Syria, it's not just that there is still classes or flare ups between different groups like there might be in other regions. There is like a full scale invasion, a ground invasion with air support that has also been going on.
- [12:36]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [12:36]
Jenny Keasden
And that was timed. Where has that come from? Like what is that? What does that look like? This is another group, another three letter acronym for you. But the important thing to understand is that this offensive was tied to coincide with the HCS takeover. HCS also has a lot of links with the Turkish state. And I wouldn't, I personally would not go so far as to say that that government is a Turkish puppet government or that the relationship is that direct. But there is a relationship there. And what you saw when they kind of successfully went on the offensive was that at the same time other armed groups which operate are kind of loosely affiliated and mostly operating on a mercenary stockade basis rather than being kind of ideologically driven or whatever.
- [13:20]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [13:20]
Jenny Keasden
But are affiliated under the name the sna, the Syrian national army. Which is even more confusing because they're not and were never the national army of Syria.
- [13:29]
James Stout
Yeah, yeah.
- [13:30]
Jenny Keasden
What they are is yet these paid militias which, yeah, we can describe, he might describe as jihadist gangs, mercenaries, etc. Etc. And it kind of depends. It is like a mix of different forces.
- [13:43]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [13:43]
Jenny Keasden
What's very important there is the very close relationship that they have with the Turkish state. Essentially the Turkish government has made the choice that it wants to continue its aggression and its expansionism on northern easy Syria. And rather than immediately sending their own army, they instead pay and fund and direct and support these militias who are also operating for their own benefit. Yes. But the relationship between them, their actions right now and the Turkish state is much more direct. So at the same time as you had this sweep to the south that caused the regime change in Syria heading to the east. So to originally the region of Shepa followed by City of Mindage in the region around there you have this onslaught from the sa and that is what the SDS you originally mentioned are currently up against. And that's the situation that we're in. And it's, it's still ongoing, it's very much not stopped. It's still much, very much like hot engagement and hot fighting that is happening.
- [14:36]
James Stout
Yeah. And it like sometimes to introduce another acronym we use like TFSA to refer to some of those groups like the Turkish Free Syrian army and that they're essentially an operation by the Turkish state to co opt what was initially a Democratic grassroots revolution more than a decade ago.
- [14:52]
Jenny Keasden
Yeah.
- [14:53]
James Stout
And like, if you haven't been following, I suppose it would be easy to be confused by this. But the SNA have not been backwards in documenting their war crimes in, in the advance toward, I guess their advance westwards towards the Euphrates and even over the Euphrates. And there have been some really horrible things. Some of them like I've, I've shared online if people want to. They're not hard to find if you want to find them, but I'm not going to put them right in front of you because they're horrible. And as the SNA have advanced, they've reached a couple of locations that are very crucial. Right. And that's where they've been kind of stopped by the sdf.
- [15:29]
Jenny Keasden
Yeah.
- [15:30]
James Stout
Because the SDF haven't been in like such a large scale conflict for the last couple of years. They've of course been fighting against like Islamic State splinter cells and, and to a degree the sna. But like the SDF has modernized a lot more than the SNA have, I guess in, in the past few years. Right. They've embraced the use of first person view drones. They've even shot down several Turkish Bayraktar drones which they previously, if they had the ability to do it, then they weren't able to use that ability until very recently. So like they, in a sense their resistance has been very impressive. Right. Because we have on the one hand the second largest army in NATO giving its full support to the sna. And on the other hand we have the fdf which is in theory a US partner force. Right. There are US bases still in Syria. There are US troops still in Syria. Well, yeah, so now, but like, I mean, I remember when I was in Rojava In October of 2023, the US shot down a biraktar drone over a US base. And then it did not shoot down the dozens of other Biraktar drones that were bombing the cities that, you know, the city that you're in right now, city that I was in other cities, you know, I met a mother who had lost her 14 year old son to one of these drone bombings. Really like horrific and just cruel bombing of what very clearly civilian targets. So like the US is there, but they're not doing anything to help. Supposedly their friends, supposedly their partners. And like every interview I conducted began with like five minutes of me being asked why the Americans weren't being friends when the SDF had been friends to them in a battle against isis. And like that's not Something I have a good explanation for other than, like, I think most Kurdish people can understand the difference between people and government and people and state. And like, I might have a belief, but it is not the same as the, the government of the U.S. so can you explain the role of the U.S. here? Because people will be very confused. Right. And I think it's easy to, to sort of simplify this as like, America is in Syria for oil, but there's a little bit more to it than that. Right?
- [17:41]
Jenny Keasden
Yeah, absolutely. And again, it's such a big question, and it's a question of how far back do you go? How far do you zoom out? Because in both senses, as you keep moving back from today, the plot kind of thickens. And as you, you know, if you imagine if you're looking at the Google maps of Syria and then you click the button that takes you out and out and the map gets wider and wider.
- [18:04]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [18:05]
Jenny Keasden
The story kind of fills itself in as well, like that things make more sense when they are put in that context.
- [18:12]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [18:13]
Jenny Keasden
And I think a good place to start maybe is. Yeah. This consistent for a long time, like, American attitude to this whole region, not just Syria, which is to play. Yeah. To play very carefully to your advantage and make alliances where it suits you and continue them where it suits you and not stick to them where it doesn't. And that is. Yeah. That one aspect of that is the resources, which is. Goes further than just oil, is also gas and is also the resource of the space to create a trade route. Right. Like, that's a really important question.
- [18:51]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [18:52]
Jenny Keasden
In the Middle east at the moment. And it's one of the reasons that Kurdistan is such an important place politically. A lot of these, like, lines of potential trade routes and these kind of lines of power and money, they intersect and they cross over here.
- [19:07]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [19:07]
Jenny Keasden
So there are all these different, like, resources at play. And I think another thing that's important to look at is that, yeah, the, the U.S. as the U.S. government, as you put it, as, as distinct from the citizens in any way, doesn't just go into this blind and kind of react day by day. It's not like a reactive force in the world. The US Government is, and would, you know, proudly announce, I think as well on this one point that they are, no matter who the administration is and where it's politically leading at the time, a very proactive force. They have a plan where. And they try and put it into practice. And famously, historically and very intensely, a lot of that has played out in the Middle east because of the Middle East's position in the world, resources and the role that it's played in kind of who gets to be the big dog in the world over the years and throughout history, it's become, for those various reasons, very important. And so yeah, again, without its many podcasts of its own and I'm sure you are making them, so I won't try and like summarize it, but I think you can't talk about America's role in Syria and the Middle east in general without mentioning like Israel and the role the Israeli state plays for, for and with America and things like, you know, we're also following and for you guys following more closely because we're all following the current American administration and leadership and what's been coming out of there. And sometimes you think like, God, is it just nuts? And when you look at something like, you know, the video for like the new Gaza that we're going to make, for example. Yeah. And Trump's, Trump's Gaza, whatever that was.
- [20:52]
James Stout
Gaza by the sea.
- [20:53]
Jenny Keasden
Yeah. So I mean it makes it sick. And then you're also not sure if it's, if it's serious or if it's mad. But I think unfortunately it's actually. Yeah. It's quite an intelligent play and what it speaks to that is relevant to what I'm saying here is this kind of long term plan. Right. That to annihilate a region to the best of your ability so that you can move in and develop.
- [21:15]
Mia Wong
Yeah.
- [21:16]
Jenny Keasden
Is a tried and tested method of many, many governments and America's not the only one.
- [21:21]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [21:22]
Jenny Keasden
But at the moment we're at a kind of crucial moment in the Middle east when one sort of wall of forces are trying to greatly reduce the role and power of some others so that they can put their plan into place and so that they can. Yeah, so they can, so they can make money. You know, it's always worth following money and where development can be made and where trade routes can be made. And so what, what happened? The timing of the regime change that we've just discussed, the timing of HDS being able to move into Damascus and take it over. It's no coincidence that it came after like a shift in the Israeli like genocidal war on Gaza and after what the then military action they were taking against Hezbollah in Lebanon.
- [22:05]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [22:06]
Jenny Keasden
Which they felt then had up to a point achieved what they wanted to achieve and then things kind of moved to Syria. Right.
- [22:12]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [22:13]
Jenny Keasden
So I'm not saying that the new government has kind of come from, has been sponsored by that at all. I think there's a huge amount of tension there, but the withdrawal of, like, the weakening and. Or withdrawal of forces like Iran and Hezbollah here played a role with them being able to establish themselves as a government. So that is also something, you know, that's not directly, necessarily every step sort of kind of puppeteered by the US at all. But it is a part of politics that the US has had a long historical influence on and that it backs and that it's in conversation with in the whole of the Middle East. It's this kind of greater Middle east plan, this vision for it, if you will. And the other aspect that I think is important to talk about is the US's relationship with north and East Syria specifically. You mentioned there, like, you know, this, like, supposed friendship with, we can say the, like, friendship with the Kurds, as people will refer to it, or the alliance and coalition between the SSDF and the US, which was sort of most most famous and most well known during the fight against isis, when the international coalition used, obviously spearheaded by America.
- [23:21]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [23:22]
Jenny Keasden
Was bombing and providing air support for the SDF as the. As they called it, the boots on the ground. The actual ground force that could go and take territory back from isis, which, yes, did look like a kind of. Did look like a friendship, but I think from both sides, everyone always knew that that was a tactical alliance, perhaps, perhaps a strategic alliance. At best we can say. Yeah, but I think that the US has not got a history of operating on a bas. This of, like, friendship or of that kind of commitment to the forces it works with. And a lot of history and modern, recent history can attest to that. And from the side of people here, I think it's really important to say that, yeah, people were angry and that, you know, what you heard there, you were talking about interviewing people and then kind of being like, what are they doing? Like, we. We fought a war with them partly on their behalf, like. And then they deserve. Yes, people are angry, but the more kind of politically engaged someone is sort of moving up that scale, I think the less faith they ever had in the us.
- [24:23]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [24:24]
Jenny Keasden
So. And now you've got the US kind of muttering about withdrawing their troops from Syria. Right.
- [24:30]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [24:31]
Jenny Keasden
And is deja vu, because they said this before. I was actually here when they said this before, back in 2019. I also happened to be in northeast Syria. And it was, if I'm not wrong, it was Trump again, the first turnaround.
- [24:46]
James Stout
Yeah, it was. Yeah.
- [24:47]
Jenny Keasden
And said, we're withdrawing our forces from Syria. Did they actually, actually withdraw? Not exactly, no. You still saw them driving around in big cars, mostly right next to the oil fields. It was a bit. It was almost comical, sort of like when. In part. Yeah, in part next to the oil fields. But that withdrawal was symbolic. That withdrawal was. They withdrew from bases right on the border with Kirkey.
- [25:08]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [25:09]
Jenny Keasden
Which lies just to the north of Syria and as such just next to north of east Syria for anyone without the. About the map immediately in their head. And they announced it very, very clearly and very publicly. And so it was a kind of. It was a green flag to say to Turkey, yeah, come and you come. Yeah, we're not going to stop you. We're not going to. Because what you don't want to do is hit an American by accident, as you gave the example. You know, they brought down a drone because it was over an American base, not because it was bombing civilians nearby, which dozens of other were. And so that you had that kind of symbolic withdrawal which led to. In 2019. It's one of the times. So that Turkey has like, annexed section. Essentially annexed a section of Syria, north and east Syria, under the remit of the autonomous administration, but nonetheless still technically Syrian territory. And in that time it was Syania and gpi, which people may have heard of. And so that, yeah, that was the, like green flag to Turkey to take that step. And at that time I, yeah, I'll maybe share. It's a lot of. A lot of political stuff, a lot of acronyms, a lot of all this. And maybe I'll just share a wee anecdote. Yeah, at that time, when they made the announcement they were going to leave, people organized a. A march to an American base. And I was here at the time and I joined it with some of the women's organizations. It was the most amazing day. Like, I sort of went home and wrote this massive journal entity because I'd already been here for a very long time, but my mind was still a bit blown by it. For one thing, it was such an example of like, how the social movement here works and what society is like and all the complexities. Because, yeah, a lot of people here are very wedded to the liberatory, progressive, grassroots, democratic, women's freedom, ecological movement that I'm sure you've spoken about in your programs on Rojava, and thousands and thousands of people completely take ownership of that and see themselves in that and are the driving force of that. Obviously that doesn't mean every single person here is 100% sold on movement at all.
- [27:05]
James Stout
Yeah, Some of them are trying to get on with life.
- [27:07]
Jenny Keasden
Some of them are just trying to get on with life. Some of them are, you know, I mean, if you talk about women's freedom, there's always going to be a few men who are a bit like, what does this mean for me? What do I have to give up? So it would be silly.
- [27:18]
James Stout
I've encountered that.
- [27:19]
Jenny Keasden
It would be silly and new topic to say that everyone's totally sold. However, nobody wants to get invited by one of the largest armies in NATO.
- [27:26]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [27:27]
Jenny Keasden
So you had this sort of. Actually even broader than usual kind of coming together like groups from the sort of like tribal clan structures here that are still like in really important political force and that don't, you know, have a kind of uneasy truth and sort of slowly learning each other relationship with the movement, you can say. But they really came out in. In force as well, as well as like the Kurdish movement, as well as like lots of different ethnic groups. And we marched and to be honest, I didn't know we were going through an American base. A lot of people didn't. It was quite a confusing day because I think they didn't want to announce things too widely until they got there. Yeah. And we went and did this kind of the. Yeah, they like read out a letter symbolically, I think in some of the Arabic community leaders went up to the base. We, the majority of people. There's hundreds, hundreds of people in this crowd. And they stayed back at a distance. And I found out later that that is because the American soldiers said if too big a group of people come close, we will like, we will open fire like that. That information was given.
- [28:27]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [28:28]
Jenny Keasden
I don't know what they were scared of. You know, it's like, like any march here. The people in the front row are always running.
- [28:33]
James Stout
Yeah. Yeah. It's old ladies.
- [28:36]
Jenny Keasden
No different on that day. I mean, they're a bit scary, to be fair, but I don't. I think that it's a bit embarrassing if the American thoughts, please give them. But no, that's not for me to judge. But while we were there, by like pure chance, a fleet of not tanks, but big armored cars rolled in. And there was just this moment that I really clearly remember, this kind of pause and they rolled through the crowd and the crowd parted and turned and looked and nobody teared or clapped, obviously. There was no sense of, oh, it's the Americans, right?
- [29:10]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [29:10]
Jenny Keasden
But nobody sort of threw, you know, threw anything or threw insults or chanted anything negative either. There was just this stillness and this really palpable energy of this kind of sense of people looking at. You know, obviously they're just these soldiers that happen to be driving these trucks, but they really symbolize something more than that. And people were kind of looking, sort of insisting that you look them in the eye, saying, like, hey, if anyone owes anyone, you owe us. After everything we fought for and everything we've done.
- [29:40]
James Stout
Yeah. 13,000 martyrs, as they would call them.
- [29:43]
Jenny Keasden
Exactly, exactly. Yeah. So many people lost in the fight against isis and so much like blood and sweat and tears given and there was just, yeah, this palpable sense of, like, at least have the decency to kind of look at us and admit what you're doing because you know what you're doing.
- [29:58]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [29:58]
Jenny Keasden
And it really. Yeah, it really felt. It was very kind of moving at the time. And it. I feel like it's very symbolic into politics here of how, you know, someone asked me the other day what was it like for people to rely on America knowing that they betrayed them. And I said, well, they didn't. They never relied on them.
- [30:16]
James Stout
Yeah, no one was relying on America. Yeah.
- [30:18]
Jenny Keasden
But, you know, there's that kind of the. The expectation of at least some sense of dignity. That is a very important concept for people here. Dignity. And. Yeah, so, yeah, that. That is. I always remember that. That. Yeah. Say again. I know it's confusing. That was five. Five and a half years ago now.
- [30:37]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [30:37]
Jenny Keasden
And now you've got this sort of. Is history repeating itself. They're talking about pulling the troops up, but I think it's important to understand what that means. What that means is they're talking about potentially giving a green apply for more military aggression. And I think they kind of haven't decided yet if they're really going to do it. And there's a lot of things in. In the balance. And in terms of. I'll just say one more. One more thing. Edit this out if it gets a bit long. In terms of, like, the plan for Syria and America's role. Like, this is my opinion. I can't say for sure that this is the. The definite reality, but my understanding in the situation is that once again, people here, in this. In this movement are kind of caught between a rock and a hard place. And the rock and the hard place now looks like you've got the new government that set itself up in Damascus, hds. And their goal, if they can wangle it and get the outside and international support, is to build your sort of socially, at least if not politically, the model is going to look A bit like Afghanistan and the Taliban. Right. Like from the signs of changes they've made to the constitution, incidents of like violence, sectarianism and feminist side have been rising. Attacks they've already made on women's rights like very rapidly and things that have been put in like the president legally has to be a Muslim. All of this stuff. Right, yeah, that's sort of their plan. But on the other hand, I think if you kind of let the American government lose on Syria to build up its plan at the moment, I think they are seeing an opportunity to use this kind of formula from Iraq in two desperate.
- [32:11]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [32:11]
Jenny Keasden
And I think they want to create this sort of very open to capitalist markets, to trade kind of space in which the north and east area with majority, though not entirely Kurdish can sort of play this role that the Kurdistan region of Iraq has played.
- [32:28]
James Stout
Yeah, Like I don't know what you call it, like a safe conduit to capital. Like it's a very stark difference. If people haven't traveled in that part of the world to be in howler a bill and then to cross into Rojava, you can see the impact that a decade of that being the safe place to have your oil company headquarters has had on the Kurdstar regional government.
- [32:50]
Jenny Keasden
Yeah.
- [33:00]
James Stout
I'm going to move on. Before we finish up, I want to talk about the current manifestation of resistance. Right. And specifically at Tishrin Dam because that's something that A has been reported on and B, like it mirrors what you saw in, in 2019 and that like it's not just a military resistance. Right. But also like a civil society resistance. Can you explain? Maybe if people have seen anything, they've seen that horrible video of people dancing and then SNA drones dropping a mortar bomb right in the middle of them. But can you explain how we got there?
- [33:35]
Jenny Keasden
Yeah, of course. Yeah. Great. I'm glad you asked about that because in some senses, you know, there is some horrible stuff in there. But this is the, this is the beautiful bit, this is the great bit, the bit that we should be talking about at the moment. So yeah, the Tischin Dam is a big hydroelectric facility that is on the Euphrates River. If you look at a map of Syria, Euphrates is kind of in the middle up the top and that is the region roughly where this offensive that we spoke out of the Turkish funded militias which has come from, from the west across to the east, at times closer and further away from the river and currently like a few kilometers away. That's where that offensive has been stopped. By the FDA and cannot progress any further.
- [34:19]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [34:19]
Jenny Keasden
Despite intensive air support from Turkey and they're sort of increasingly putting pressure on that. But it hasn't got anywhere. But it's close. Right. You know, it's not too far away and people are following the news. And what's right on the other side, if you get across the river there, there's the dam and then there's a bridge further to the north, the Kerakozak bridge, that's similarly kind of crucial. And if you get across the river, you're not far away. It's all from the city of Kobani, which I'm sure most of your listeners will have heard of, is this massively important symbol of anti fascist resistance. It was one of the ignition points of the revolution for the social movement here and it was really important to fight against isis. And I think it's safe to say that Turkey, via the sna had its eye on the Bani again and that this is in fact an attack on Kobani which has been kind of held back. And so the Dan is important symbolically as this like, strategic river crossing. It's this kind of no pass around, like they, they will not pass moment. It's also important logistically, like for the society here because it's a hydroelectric facility, it supplies electricity, it helps with the supply of water for various reasons for thousands and thousands of people. It's now out of action. Yeah, it might go without saying, but when you're in the middle of an active war zone, you can't keep running a place like that.
- [35:34]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [35:35]
Jenny Keasden
So that is directly attacking and impacting the society and normal communities here. And so, yeah, it's no wonder that those normal communities and that society always feel very, very implicated and are kind of ready to, to stand up and defend themselves. It's not as yet the, the military assault is not kept separate from the society here. The society is also under attack, indirectly attacks on infrastructure such as that, and directly by like drone strikes on many, many civilian targets. Unfortunately, in recent times that has increased, particularly in villages surrounding Bani. And we seem like kids also hospitalized and killed as a part of that. So on the 8th of January, what began was that what they call a convoy, like a big, big trek of different vehicles got together and arranged and organized from different towns in across not Syria to go to Kishin Dam as this very like this big symbol, this very clear like important physical location and also very symbolic thing where war has also been fought before. There's also in previous campaigns against ISIS for Example, there was fighting in the region. So people feel like, you know, their sons and daughters have fought for TIS 3 river crossing before. It's still, you know, it's there in the historical memory as well.
- [36:51]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [36:51]
Jenny Keasden
And people went. And since then, which is almost exactly two months as we're recording this, we're right around the two months anniversary mark, there's been a constant presence there, protest on the dam. And that's got several different kind of aspects to it. It is mostly to raise the voices and raise awareness and make visible what's happening. And yeah, if it's hard to understand why like hundreds of people would go from their homes to somewhere that is closer to the act of fighting to somewhere that's in a very unstable region, like. Yeah, first of all, you have to understand that nowhere in northeast Syria is actually safe. Like in commerce of the city where I am, there's been residential buildings, bombs dropped on them from drones, like within the last couple of months as well. It's not like.
- [37:35]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [37:36]
Jenny Keasden
And there's this sense of safety wherever you are. The difference is a sense of doing something about it and of standing together and coming together in these like, amazingly brave and amazingly creative ways that only the communities of northeast Syria can manage. So, yes, unfortunately, during these two months, there have consistently been airstrikes on the dam. And I don't have the exact statistics, and you wouldn't necessarily get an honest answer about how many of them have come directly from Turkey and how many have come from SNA drones.
- [38:05]
James Stout
Right.
- [38:05]
Jenny Keasden
But the SNA drones are paid for by the Turkish state anyway. So at the end of the day, yeah, morally, how much difference does it make?
- [38:12]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [38:14]
Jenny Keasden
They have attacked the, the civil protests there, and up until Now, I believe 25 civilians have been killed and many more than that hospitalized. But despite this, and in the shadow of this, with the most beautiful defiance like that, protest has continued. And what the videos that maybe don't get shared as much or shared enough that people might not have seen are also these images, you know, which are very, I can attest, are very real because I went there myself a few weeks ago, which is everybody getting out and dancing at the slightest opportunity or slightest excuse or lack of an excuse. And the most amazing art that's been made, like paintings of the people who've been killed or as they would say here, fallen martyr. In, in these two months, there's been theater, like theater performed using the bits of the bombed out cars that were bombed just a few days before as props to kind of like, yeah, tell the story of what's been happening, like, the most, like, creative things, also statements for the press and all your different organizations show up. So, like, the organized youth show up as the youth and obviously the women's organizations as women, saying, like, you know, this is our revolution, this is our community, and we know what it looks like when it gets occupied. We're not just going to stand by and see it happen again. It's our land, it's our water, and it's our kids, is the refrain that kind of gets repeated over and over again. And of course, they're there in solidarity as well with the, with the SDF themselves, with the military force. It would be. It would be crazy if they weren't, because, yeah, they are also embedded in their communities. No, they're not extracted from the society the way that most kind of state armies are. So, yeah, the situation at Tisrin is. Is still ongoing. When I was there, it was. It really was the most amazing experience. There were bombings while I was there. And tragically, one of the people I got to know there, he was a journalist. His name was E. Just less than two weeks after I got back, I found out that he'd also been killed in another drone strike. So it was. Yeah, it's. Yeah, it's very, very. Just kind of. It doesn't. It doesn't stop. The aggression doesn't stop. But nonetheless, people kind of coming together to resist. It doesn't stop either. And once I'd been there, it seemed a lot less crazy or hard to imagine that people would come together around it because you see, like, the immense power that it has, and you see that how everyone here has lost someone, though, like, the vast majority of people here have lost members of their family. You said yourself 13,000 fallen in the fight against ISIS alone.
- [40:46]
James Stout
Right.
- [40:46]
Jenny Keasden
And since then, like war, one way or another, has been going on. So people know what loss means already. They've already lost, but they're not going to let that make them step back. They're going to do their fallen loved ones justice and continue to stand up in their name. And, yeah, it's. It's a very sort of big thing, but it's really powerful when you see it in. In person and in all its kind of humanity and, and humor and joy, despite the situation.
- [41:12]
James Stout
Yeah, no, that is a very unique thing to Kurdistan and like the Kurdish Freedom Movement, it's this sort of joy. I mean, I think it's very similar in Burma actually, where they also do. They love to dance in a war. And, like, it is one of the things that I think the joy is hard to explain. I know we're sort of running low on time here, but I just like when people hear Syria and to extent, when they hear Myanmar, they'll think of wars. But you should also think about all the people who exist outside of the conflict or who don't exist outside of it. That's the wrong word. But who are not fighting at the front line. The experience of revolution is very joyful one, even amidst very difficult times. And it's difficult to explain it if you haven't experienced it because it sounds so juxtaposed. Yeah, but it isn't necessarily. Like, I have actually really fond memories of meeting Kurdish people coming into the United States in the mountains at the time when the United States was detaining people outdoors in very difficult conditions and like dancing with them. There's at a time when it was miserable, the ability to salvage joy. It gives you a sense of sovereignty, I suppose. And I can understand why that's such an important part of the Kurdish freedom movement when every expression of Kurdish identity has been suppressed for so long. The ability to seize your moments. What James C. Scott would call little small acts of resistance. It's important. It's more important, I think people understand. And if you're understanding it from a Western military doctrine, it doesn't fit. Yeah, but that's because you're using the wrong framework.
- [42:49]
Jenny Keasden
Yeah, exactly.
- [42:51]
James Stout
Jenny, if people are interested in following your work about this, or perhaps they're interested in doing what they can to support the revolution in what is like a challenging time, a very, very changing time, how can they do both of those things?
- [43:05]
Jenny Keasden
Yes, so. Well, if they are interested in following the sort of updates and so on that I've been doing, I've got Instagram and TikTok channels, which are both at J. Keesten. I'm assuming you can stick that written form somewhere.
- [43:21]
James Stout
Yeah, we'll put it in the Show.
- [43:22]
Jenny Keasden
Notes and Telegram channel as well. If people find it easier to sort of get. Yeah, that's just the most condensed way to kind of download information, videos or whatever, which you can find under the same name. And there's also links to it on the. On Instagram, TikTok and on there we've got a we link tree that has some suggestions for if people want to support, like ways to donate, say to the Kurdish red present and stuff like that. And then specifically. Yeah, I mean, there is a lot that people can do. And whatever it is, it all starts with getting more. I wouldn't say informed. I would say getting more connected. Right. So getting informed is a part of that, but not just in the sense of information learning. Like, it's also connecting with, like, the feeling of things here and why it's become so important to so many people across the world, not just people from here.
- [44:11]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [44:12]
Jenny Keasden
And the more we learn about that, the more we'll start to see, like, how we can be a friend to the movement here and where how our role can fit. And I know that there are specifically in America, a couple of organizations. Is it that Debbie Booktin has been really prominent in organizing one of them?
- [44:28]
James Stout
Yeah. Emergency Committee for Rojava.
- [44:30]
Jenny Keasden
Emergency Committee for a Java. That's the one. Yeah. And you add emergency in there somewhere. That's definitely worth looking up and following a lot of the work that they do. And you've also got, like, think tanks, like the Kurdish Peace Institute, that do kind of lobbying. And so, yeah, there are some. There is some stuff from coming from the United States as well. But I think, yeah, the more people get a chance to kind of learn about stuff here and see the connection and be able to see and find themselves in it. And I think that's got a lot to do with what you were just speaking about airing. You put it so well. I wouldn't send it much more. But, yeah, like, people here, it's really. There's always war happening and always war kind of piling on top of you, but that's never what it's about. The question is always, what are you fighting for and what are you fighting to defend?
- [45:16]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [45:16]
Jenny Keasden
And what would you be doing if there was no war? Everyone here always say if there was no war, we'd still have enough work to do with all the really, like. What's that word? Ambitious, like social transformation that people here are really committed to.
- [45:29]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [45:29]
Jenny Keasden
There's enough going on and it's very big and as you put it, it's very beautiful and very joyful. And so that's. Yeah, that's the bit that I encourage people to try and learn more about, because that's the bit that makes you stay. It makes people like me stick around for years, finding out more and more and making friends, getting closer and closer to the communities here.
- [45:46]
James Stout
Yeah, I think that's a very good way to put it. So, yeah, I encourage people to do all that. Thank you so much for your time, Jenny. I know it's late there, but we really appreciate you joining us today, and.
- [45:54]
Jenny Keasden
Thank you so much.
- [45:55]
Andrew Sage
Cheers.
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- [49:22]
Andrew Sage
Hello and welcome to It Could Happen Here. It's time to finally continue our journey through Latin American anarchism. Now, so far we've covered almost every country in Latin America at this point, including Peru, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Central America, the countries of the former Gran Colombia, like Venezuela, Ecuador, Colombia, and also Cuba and a few other islands in the Caribbean. And now, before we get to the really big history that I've kind of been saving as the finale that is Anarchism in Mexico, we're going to be talking about the anarchist movement in Uruguay. So my name is Andrew Sage. You can find me on YouTube as Andrewism. And you can also find the bulk of the research for today's episode in Angel Cappelletti's aptly titled Anarchism in Latin America. I'm joined today by James.
- [50:21]
James Stout
It's me again.
- [50:23]
Andrew Sage
And it's been a while.
- [50:24]
James Stout
Yeah, it has been a while. Nice to be back.
- [50:26]
Andrew Sage
Great to be back in conversation.
- [50:29]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [50:30]
Andrew Sage
So before we could really get into the history of anarchism on Uruguay, I probably should give some context as to how Uruguay became Uruguay. And, well, my source for this history is primarily the Encyclopedia Britannica. So before the whole scourge of European colonialism, what is now known as Uruguay supported a population of about 5,000 to 10,000 people, which were organized in semi nomadic groups. You had the Taroa, the Chana and the Kwarani Indians, primarily. So the first European visits took place first in 1516, and they weren't particularly successful or of interest. Spain was looking for gold and looking for silver. That was their incentive for colonies at the time, and they didn't see any of that. So they didn't have much motivation to stick around. It wasn't until the 1620s, over a century later, that Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries set up religious settlements. But unfortunately, by then, Uruguay's native population had already begun to collapse. Thousands of people were succumbing to European diseases that they had no immunity to. A couple centuries later, in 1800, Uruguay continued along with a very small population. At this point, it was about 30,000 people in total, and a third of their population lived in the capital city of Montevideo. Another third of their population were African slaves who worked on ranches, in meat processing plants and as domestic servants. Meanwhile, the elite, whether they be wealthy traders, bankers or landowners, mostly trace their roots to Catalonia, the Basque country, the Canary Islands and other parts of Spain. We get into 1810, when a lot of the Latin American countries had been fighting for their independence. Buenos Aires, Argentina was among them. But while Argentina was fighting for its independence, Montevideo was a royalist stronghold, backed by the Spanish military and naval forces. On the countryside it was a different story, though. Uruguay's greatest independence hero kind of came out of that space. His name was Jose Gervasio Artigaz, and he originally led a Spanish cavalry unit, but eventually turned against the crown in 1811 and rallied an army of rural fighters, freed African slaves and anti royalist leaders from Montevideo. So with the backing from Buenos Aires, his forces were able to score key victories and eventually oust the Spanish. But Artigas had much bigger ambitions. He wanted a confederation of provinces that resisted the dominance of Buenos Aires. In fact, he wanted Montevideo to become the centre of a rival confederation, as prior to Argentina becoming Argentina, it was sort of a loose confederation centered in Buenos Aires. Artigas ideas also included things like redistributing the land to freed slaves and poor Uruguayans, which made him obviously very popular among the poor and very much a threat to the elite. Eventually he was forced into exile because he made some enemies that basically sat on their hands as the Portuguese Brazilian forces invaded and took over the region. Despite his exile, though, the fight really wasn't over. You know, after the occupation, which was often called Brazilianisation, it was resisted very heavily by locals and exiles. And of course Argentina, which had become somewhat of a rival power to Brazil in the region, it saw Brazil's influence in Uruguay as a threat. So eventually one of Ortegas exiled officers, a guy named Juan Antonio Lavalla, would lead a force that would cross the river and reclaim Uruguay. The fight would end in a stalemate and then British diplomats would step in, because of course, the British had their own interests in the region. But eventually, in 1828, a treaty was signed, officially creating Uruguay as an independent nation, a buffer state between Argentina and Brazil. In 1830, Uruguay's first constitution was ratified. And at the time the country had a population of just 74,000 people. All that war kind of left the country in ruins. A lot of the once wealthy colonial families were devastated, the cattle numbers had plummeted and the threat of Both Argentina and Brazil still persisted. Despite the treaty at being signed. So then the nation ended up being split into two rival factions. You had the faction that was led by Uruguay's first president. And then you had the faction that was led by Uruguay's second president. And they became fierce rivals. That ignited a civil war known as the Gera Grande, or Great War. And to make a long story short, the first president's supporters became known as the Colorado Party. And they controlled Montevideo. And the second president's supporters became known as the White Party or the Blanco Party. And they dominated the countryside. And so they would fight from time to time. Each side being backed by different parties. The Blancos were backed by Argentina. The Colorados were backed by France and England. And then eventually Brazil. And after about a decade of war, there was still no clear victory as to who came out of it as a successing state. The interior of the country was devastated. Government was bankrupt. Its very existence as an independent nation came into doubt. And the divisions between the people who backed either party became more stark than ever. Eventually, the Colorados were able to force Blancos out of power. Thanks to their backing by Brazil. And that move ended up alarming Paraguay. Who was also afraid of Brazil's influence. So Paraguay ended up launching what became known as the War of the Triple Alliance. Which is something I covered in the episode of Paraguayan anarchism. Eventually, after getting out of the civil wars. And all these disputes and foreign powers meddling into affairs. We have the situation Uruguay found itself in the 19th century. A situation that waves of immigrants and also anarchism would find themselves in. So Cappelletti identifies a few of the ugly forces that shaped Uruguayan at radicalism. Before. Before anarchism and syndicalism. The first factor shaping the radical landscape in Uruguay's 18th century. Was utopian socialism. It came to Uruguay with Eugenio Tandenet in 1844. And he was a French utopian socialist and follower of Charles Fourier. Who was one of the founders of utopian socialism. That whole milieu advocated for a reconstruction of society. Based on communal associations of producers known as phalanges. And then with their influence afterwards, came the next force of influence. The Italian migrants who had fought in the civil war. These were republicans who eventually became socialists. And in the next influence was the mutualist movement. That was inspired by Proudhon in the 1870s. First arising in Uruguay among artisans and workers. And establishing mutual aid societies to meet people's needs. A friend of Pier Joseph Proudhon himself, a guy named Jose Ernesto Gilbert. Had Actually moved to Montevideo for a bit after being exiled from France. And while I don't think he did anything too actively political, he did pursue botanic studies in Uruguay, and I believe there was some kind of creature named after him.
- [58:48]
Garrison Davis
So that's cool.
- [58:49]
Andrew Sage
You know, it's a little fun. Fact. Finally, as we kind of exit the 19th century, you had, of course, the rise of unions and internationalist organizations in the 1870s and 1880s. You had fights for workers rights, you had the struggle for an international socialism, and you have what Capelletti identifies as a Uruguayan section of the Associacion International de Trabajadores, which was established in 1872 and engaged in a public action in 1875 that had some 2,000 attendees. They established something of a manifesto where one line had asked, who better and of greater faith than ourselves can destroy the criminal exploitation to which we are condemned as a whole? The manifesto basically asked workers to unite. And this was in a time where anarchism was finally starting to pick up in the region. Another group formed in 1876. This was the Federacion Regional de la Republica Oriental de Uruguay, later called the Ferracion Operadorienal Uruguaya, or foru. And they published papers like La Revolution Social, La Lucha Operera, La Federacion de Trabadores, Lay Manspacion and Soledadidad. And it was a very small but burgeoning movement, but they didn't take very long to start making some moves. As Cappelletti noted, they celebrated the anniversary of the Paris commune on March 18 and collected 40 pesos on behalf of libertarian prisoners in Lyon. They also collected money to support their papers and to support papers and efforts elsewhere, like in France. What's interesting about the Uruguayan anarchists is that they were among the most internationalists that I have found so far. You know, like other parts of Latin America, they did have a large immigrant population.
- [60:47]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [60:48]
Andrew Sage
But because I suppose the size of Uruguay, compared to other countries, the immigrant population was probably larger, proportional to their neighbors. So they ended up having a much greater connection to movements and, you know, things that happen in other parts of the world, including their home countries.
- [61:06]
James Stout
Yeah, that makes sense. Was there. I'm trying to remember exactly when this began, but, like, there was a movement among anarchists, I guess, in the early. More in the early 20th century, to learn Esperanto as part of their internationalism.
- [61:19]
Andrew Sage
Yes, that's actually a history that I would love to cover in an episode.
- [61:23]
James Stout
I will connect you to somebody who wrote books about it. With pleasure.
- [61:27]
Andrew Sage
Really?
- [61:27]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [61:28]
Andrew Sage
Yeah, that'd be fantastic.
- [61:29]
James Stout
My first book was about the anti fascist Olympics. And the last surviving popular Olympian, Eduardo vivancos, died in 2022 in Canada in an old people's home. I've been trying to visit him, but because of the COVID restrictions in the old people's home, I wasn't able to. But he had served as a Esperanto translator at the popular Olympics and lived out his whole life with this dream of if we can break down the linguistic barriers between workers and we can get together and change things.
- [62:04]
Andrew Sage
Wow, that is fascinating. You know what's interesting about the whole Esperanto connection to anarchism is that long before I really got into anarchism or even learned about anarchism, I actually tried to learn Esperanto.
- [62:19]
James Stout
There you go. It worked. They see that this is what they wanted. You saw the barriers fall down once you, once you began speaking Esperanto.
- [62:27]
Andrew Sage
I didn't get very far. I think it was around the time when like, Duolingo at first introduced it into their, like, courses.
- [62:35]
James Stout
Okay.
- [62:36]
Andrew Sage
And so I saw it and I, like did like a brief reading on it and I was like, oh, this stuff looks interesting. And so I tried to pick it up and I studied it for a little while, but I didn't get particularly far. But now looking in the connection between Esperanto and anarchism, it's like, wow, you know, the seeds were already there in a sense.
- [62:53]
James Stout
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you are ready for it. That was a dream of the, of the 1920s and 30s. I'm glad that you're living it for sure.
- [63:01]
Andrew Sage
And actually we're about to enter, well, at least the 20th century in our little historical review here, anarchism was really starting to finally pick up steam by this point becoming very commonly known across Iroquois. In fact, by 1911, according to Cappelletti's research of the official stats, there were 117,000 industrial workers in Uruguay. And of those, 90,000 were affiliated with the FORU. So what? 76% of those industrial workers were affiliated with an explicitly anarchist organisation that included port workers, construction workers, metal workers, horse drivers, railway workers, and a lot more. And to be honest with you, I'm not entirely sure what kept them from taking bolder action compared to some of their neighbors, considering their proportion, the numbers they had. But unfortunately, it didn't take very long for the movement to be divided, particularly after the Russian Revolution. There was, of course, the influence of Bolshevik ideas that had split the movement somewhat, bringing workers onto the Bolshevik cause. And then of course, you had Bolshevik sponsorship. It was within the USSR's interest to support USSR aligned movements worldwide. And so a lot of libertarian groups around the world went into decline in that time, including in Uruguay. Some of the unions ended up faltering under the pressure of both the state and of course, the new draw that was the Marxist Leninist groups. But of course, the libertarians never really gave up, as they don't tend to, historically speaking. So the unions and groups continued acting, continued producing papers. In fact, there was a major surge in unionization in the 1940s, according to Poor Sharkeys, the Federacion Anarquista Uruguaya, especially among the textile workers, railwaymen, dockers, construction workers and meatpackers. And then outside of the union and paper pushing scene, Yosta Uruguayan writers that continue to shape the cultural scene with anarchist ideas. Lorencio Sanchez, for example, was a playwright in the Rio de la Plata region whose experience in nationalist militias led him to align himself with anarchist circles. He worked as a journalist while actively participating in anarchist organizations and publications, including La Protista in Buenos Aires. His plays tackled social issues such as class struggle, intergenerational conflicts and the hardships of the working class. Then he also had other Uruguayan literary figures influenced by anarchism and contributing to the libertarian literary movement, including poet Julio Herrera, ircegation novelist Horacio Quiroga, and bohemian writer Roberto de las Carreras. And interestingly, there was another notable figure in anarchism connected to perhaps the most, or one of the most notable figures in anarchism, and that was the friend and biographer of Erico Malatesta himself, Luigi Fabri. Fabri founded the journal Studi Sociali, which was one of the strongest libertarian publications in Uruguay and Latin America. And after he died, his daughter Lucie Fabbri, continued his work and edited the journal until 1946. Lucie Fabbri was also one of the founders of the fau and she also published quite a few books in her time, many of which have yet to be translated into English. I wish I could, you know, check them out.
- [66:45]
James Stout
Yeah, Paul Sharkey, you just mentioned, he's the guy, he's translated like a library of anarchist text.
- [66:52]
Andrew Sage
Yeah, yeah. I think translators, they don't get as much praise as they should. You know, they're really an underrated contribution to the movement and to the propagation of the movement in new spaces.
- [67:04]
James Stout
Yeah, absolutely. I translated some texts for a zine last year and it is a lot of work.
- [67:10]
Andrew Sage
Yep.
- [67:10]
James Stout
But yeah, massive respect to people who do that.
- [67:13]
Andrew Sage
Unfortunately, translation is not as simple as just going word for Word, you know, you really do have to get the spirit of the text out of it somehow, sometimes with different phrasing and that kind of thing.
- [67:25]
James Stout
Yeah, exactly.
- [67:26]
Andrew Sage
It's difficult.
- [67:27]
James Stout
Google can't do that for you.
- [67:28]
Andrew Sage
Yep. I mean, I appreciate having the ability to like go on a website and like have Google Translate, translate the webpage quickly for me. But that has very clear and obvious weaknesses, you know, when you go through it in terms of actually translating the information.
- [67:46]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [67:46]
Andrew Sage
It's good for like getting like a. A vague gist.
- [67:49]
James Stout
Right.
- [67:50]
Andrew Sage
But professional translators aren't going away anytime soon.
- [67:54]
James Stout
No, no. It's a great thing to do if you, if you have a couple of languages, like, to make the world visible from someone else's perspective is such a, such a wonderful thing to like be able to try and share. That is really special.
- [68:06]
Andrew Sage
Yeah. Particularly for the less, Less well known or less popular languages.
- [68:10]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [68:11]
Andrew Sage
You know, although you'll be surprised, some of the most popular languages, most widely spoken languages in the world, are still lacking some key translations of some very key literature. You know, you'd be surprised like the kinds of texts that we take for granted. The theory and stuff we take for granted, that's just not available and vice versa. You know, there's probably a lot of gems out there that have yet to hit the English language.
- [68:39]
James Stout
Definitely. Yeah. Yeah. Just because especially if it's a big language, like a language is something like Arabic or Spanish, Mandarin, where so many people speak it already, there's less need to translate it because it's getting out there. I suppose. So there isn't quite the same urgency to translate it. The ideas get out through sort of paraphrase, I suppose, because enough people can read it in the original language and then paraphrase it in other languages. Yeah.
- [69:07]
Andrew Sage
As long as the idea gets there, you know, the exact words may not necessarily be important.
- [69:12]
James Stout
Yeah. There is some beauty in like, the piece I translated was pretty short, but the Belgian anarchist who fought in the Spanish Civil War and then went into exile in South America. But the way he writes about the revolutionary moment is one of the most perfect and beautiful encapsulations I've ever read. So, like, it was nice to be able to share that.
- [69:30]
Andrew Sage
You should send that to me. What is it called?
- [69:32]
James Stout
It's called Rejecting or Refuting the legend by a guy called Louis Mercia. Vega was the name he went by sometimes. He also called himself Charles Riddle. Neither of those were his real names, but those were names he lived most of his life under. I've been reading a lot of Translations of Durutti column memoirs. Another wonderful one is called Sons of the Night, which is by an Italian anarchist who fought in Spain and then lived the rest of his life in France. And then it's a beautiful book because he was a groundskeeper at the Libertarian Club in Marseille, and the young people of the Libertarian Club were so influenced by his life and his experiences and the way he talked about the world that after his passing, they translated his diary and then wrote this huge historical sort of the footnotes are four times long as the book, because the footnotes explain the things that he's talking about and who the characters are. And it's a really kind of beautiful text, and it has. The authors call themselves the Humanologues, like the followers of Antoine Jimenez. So it's kind of anonymously authored, and I think it's a really special literary project.
- [70:35]
Andrew Sage
Wow, that is something that always moves me, you know, when somebody is able to have such an impact on the lives of others that even in their absence, people, you know, continue their life's work.
- [70:48]
James Stout
Yeah, yeah. It's a really special thing. I'll send you a link to it when we're done, but I've diverted us a long way from Uruguay, I'm sorry.
- [70:55]
Andrew Sage
Oh, that's fine. That's fine. I think for this episode, there's just one other interesting moment in Uruguay's, Annika's history that I want to cover, and I'll leave it at that before the next episode. But going down this rabbit hole was actually really interesting for me. So there was an experiment in the 50s in Uruguay called the Comunidad del Sur, which was an anarchist intentional community experiment. And Cappelletti talks about it briefly as an effort by folks to live and work and eat and rear children together away from the injustices of capitalism and the state. Now, anarchism is not about establishing intentional communities, but many anarchists have found great reprieve and great joy in establishing those communities, in finding love and care and connection in those spaces. So these people spent about 20 years living together, making decisions together, sharing finances and sharing education. But the Uruguayan military dictatorship stepped in and put an end to the project in 1976. They spent that time afterwards living in exile. First they settled in Peru, and then they ended up in Spain. And then after that, they found themselves in Sweden, of all places, where they continued their communal life and engaged in international political education. So that's all I ended up learning about them at first, but I wanted to dig a little deeper and find out what happened to them. After that. And I wasn't finding that information in English language sources, so I ended up unfortunately having to lean upon Google Translate for the Swedish and Spanish Wikipedias. Yeah, but those pages went into a little bit more depth. And so I was able to find out that this group ended up taking part in the occupation of the Moulvaden neighborhood in the late 70s, and they also translated Latin American anarchist texts into Swedish and vice versa.
- [73:11]
James Stout
Cool. Nice.
- [73:11]
Andrew Sage
And then when the dictatorship in Uruguay ended, they returned to Uruguay with the money they raised with the help of their Swedish comrades. And initially a few stayed in Stockholm. So there was a split effort between Uruguay and Sweden for a bit, but the ones in Sweden were able to send money and equipment home. And so eventually they were all able to focus in Uruguay and set up a printery and established a farm in the countryside outside Montevideo, on land purchased with money collected in Sweden, where they focused on collective farming and organic agriculture. I mean, apparently they're still active today. I found what seems to be their website, but it's not accessible. It's down. I tried to dig for it on web archive, but I wasn't getting much information out of that. But I also found a Swedish website that was talking about the activity and I'll drop that in the show notes as well.
- [74:01]
James Stout
Yeah, that would be cool.
- [74:03]
Andrew Sage
So that particular website they said, and this is the Google translation of what they said, but it was, quote, in parallel with the other activities. The organization runs a farm where it produces sweets from figs, guava, blackberries and citrus fruit. It also preserves vegetables such as peppers and eggplant and produces its own tomato sauce. This small scale industry that the organisation has built up is mainly run by a women's group. Comunidad del Sur also participates in the collective La Pitanga that works for equality between women and men and against violence against women, end quote. So they're doing some really important work in Uruguay after all these years. I can't find their exact location, but it seems they're based somewhere in La Paz. If anybody wants to reach out for further details, what they're up to these days. Their story is really fascinating to me, so I'd love to find out just that whole idea of this group facing this dictatorial repression, resettling somewhere else, catching their breath, engaging in actions elsewhere, and then Mia being able to return home and continue the work. I find that very inspiring.
- [75:08]
James Stout
Yeah, that's really cool. That's what we hope for when people are forced into exile, to be able to return eventually and to be accepted into the community where they find themselves and able to, like you say, catch your breath and build their strengths and return. That's really cool.
- [75:24]
Andrew Sage
Yeah. I mean, shout out to the Swedish anarchists who would have moved in solidarity with them and helped them set up and that kind of thing if they did.
- [75:33]
James Stout
Yeah. Swedish have been really good at accepting migrants and refugees. Unfortunately, a number of people who had received asylum in Sweden were killed this week. So it fucking sucks, Rob. To them.
- [75:46]
Andrew Sage
Yes. I think all just the mood is shifting as of late.
- [75:51]
James Stout
Yeah. All around the world thanks to the wonder of social media, I think.
- [75:55]
Andrew Sage
Yeah. But you see the digression we had about translation that ended up connecting.
- [76:00]
James Stout
Yeah. Beautiful. Yeah. Everyone listening. Start learning Esperanto.
- [76:08]
Andrew Sage
I think it's a great hobby, although I do question. I think it was a really cool project in its time, though I don't know how well it can pick up today.
- [76:19]
James Stout
Esperanto in the age of AI is an interesting. I'd love to hear from Esperantis, honestly, if we have Esperantis who listen, I still have a great deal of admiration for the project and for the people who participate in it and I've had a lot of communications with them because of their relations to Spanish anarchism and they've always been the nicest, most interesting, welcoming people. So like, yeah, if you want to be our Esperanto guest, please hit me up.
- [76:45]
Jenny Keasden
Yeah.
- [76:45]
Andrew Sage
Yeah. Maybe eventually I will get back into Esperanto and pick it up again. I'm still working on my Spanish as listeners can probably tell, but we'll get there.
- [76:58]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [76:59]
Andrew Sage
So we'll leave it here for today, but next time we're going to venture into how anarchists stayed active throughout the 20th century and also contributed to the development of anarchist strategy internationally. Until then I've been Andrew Sage. I've been here with James Stout and you can find me on YouTube.com andrewism on patreon.com saintrew this, this is it. Could happen here. Peace be with you.
- [77:43]
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- [80:54]
Mia Wong
Welcome To Kadapt here, a podcast increasingly ruled by an absolutely unhinged and unrestrained ban of Nazis and apparently their democratic collaborators. I am your host, Mia Wong. With me is James Stout.
- [81:05]
James Stout
Yeah, I'm Mia's collaborator today.
- [81:08]
Mia Wong
Yay. This is collaborator Good. We are talking today about collaborator Bad. So on Friday, Senator Chuck Schumer and his allies, in an act of democratic collaboration with the regime that looks even more hideous now than it did then in the wake of a series of absolutely horrific deportations in the last few days, voted for basically a continuing funding resolution. So this is. This is a little bit complicated, but I believe in us, we can get through a little tiny bit of Senate bullshit. So basically what's happening is that they need a resolution to keep funding the government for a little bit until more negotiations can happen to fund a budget. There hasn't been a budget. Basically, like we keep seeing this over and over again. They're keeping continuing funding resolutions there, keep almost being government shutdowns, because if there's not a continuing funding resolution and there's no budget, the government doesn't have any money. What happened here was that. So in the Senate, you can filibuster this and a whole bunch of Senators Schumer and others who we will be reading out later after we talk about what this resolution actually did, because it's unhinged. So you've probably been hearing, if you've been hearing about this, you've been hearing it called a cloture vote. So what that is is basically the absolute shortest version of it, is it's a vote to kill a filibuster on the bill. You filibuster by continuing debate, cloture ends debate, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So this resolution is staggeringly unhinged. It is not a very long funding continuation. It includes $13 billion in cuts to non military spending and also $6 billion in military spending cuts. There are a lot of things that have been sort of defunded by this, including like a lot of, like, Housing and Urban Development stuff. So research ship, you know, and that's obviously really bad because normally with these resolutions you're just sort of like continuing the funding. Right? But this is not a normal continuing resolution. This is. It is over. It is very, very over dramatic to do the thing that a lot of people have been doing, which is comparing it to the enabling acts that the Nazis passed.
- [83:14]
James Stout
Yeah, it's not.
- [83:15]
Mia Wong
But, but comma, this is a completely unhinged continuing resolution. There has never been a continuing resolution. Like this ever. And it is genuinely. It is another step down the path of effectively having Trump running the government as a dictator by sort of pure fiat. And, okay, you're hearing me say this, and you think this is an exaggeration, but what this continuing resolution actually does is normally in one of these resolutions, Congress tells the executive how parts of the budget are supposed to be sent. Right. It does allocations. It'll be like, okay, so there's this money for this thing, and it goes to this purpose, and you have to spend it here. This continuing resolution just, like, doesn't do that.
- [84:02]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [84:03]
Mia Wong
And the goal of it is just to let Trump do whatever the fuck he wants with the money by not actually giving out congressional things to specifically allocate it. So this is more of a thing we've been seeing more and more, which is Congress specifically, like, delegating and abandoning its constitutional power to be the people who set the budget and just handing it over to the executive. So there can be a single unitary executive that runs the entire government.
- [84:27]
James Stout
Yeah. I mean, when you combine it with the open defiance of the courts that we saw this weekend with. With deportation.
- [84:35]
Robert Evans
Right.
- [84:36]
James Stout
Like, it's not a good. Not a good outlook, actually. Like, it is. Yeah, yeah. In terms of the old separation of powers, which is, you know, supposed to be a thing.
- [84:44]
Mia Wong
Yeah. You know, you. You could argue about whether the American Revolution was about the king being able to set taxes, because that was technically a thing controlled by the British Parliament. But, like, is, for example, the issue that, like, The Revolution of 1789 was fought over. Right. Like. Like that. That there shouldn't be a single unitary executive who gets to fucking set the budget.
- [85:05]
James Stout
It's fundamentally, I don't want to say unconstitutional, because I guess I don't get to decide what is unconstitutional. And to the extent that it matters.
- [85:14]
Mia Wong
Fuck him. Fuck him. We get to. Well, I mean, it doesn't matter. Yeah. But it is, like, obviously hideously unconstitutional.
- [85:20]
James Stout
It's entirely against the basic principles of the Constitution. Right. Like, the sine qua non of the U.S. constitution, to use a fancy word, is separation of powers. Is it not? Like, the kind of. The point of the thing is to not just have one older dude in charge like that. That is the English way.
- [85:37]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [85:38]
Mia Wong
And this is. This is the fundamental, like, principles upon which the liberal notion of democracy is based. And I use liberal in, like, the 1700s, early 1800s sense of the word liberal. Right. Which is that, like, you believe in democracy. This bill effectively just allows Trump to fund a defund programs at will. I mean, there's, you know, there, there are specific things like boundaries in which he can and can't do this. But I'm going to read some stuff from Senator Patty Murray, who is the vice chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, which is the committee that handles, like, where money goes in the budget, right? As budget appropriations, et cetera, et cetera. So she, you know, is one of the senators who sort of understands this intimately. She wrote a fact sheet about this, which is fucking terrifying. I'm just going to quote from that because. Good God. Quote. Under this continuing resolution, the Trump administration could, for example, decide not to suspend funding previously allocated for combating fentanyl, the Support act, and other substance abuse and mental health care programs, or specific NIH priorities like Alzheimer's disease and vaccine research, and instead steer funding to other priorities of its choosing. It could also pick and choose which military construction, Army Corps or transit improvement and expansion projects to withdraw funding without direction from Congress, leaving Democratic states and priorities in the lurch.
- [86:59]
James Stout
Yeah, that's, that is like, that's not great.
- [87:02]
Jenny Keasden
Like.
- [87:05]
James Stout
I don't think people realize how much damage this could do in, like. Yeah, they have a year of just randomly slashing fit. Not only is it the programs who are affected, right, Things that are cut, the certainty that contractors will get paid, the certainty that if you have a contract with the government, it is a reliable thing like, that will have devastating economic consequences if they just start randomly yoinking contracts and not paying people, as they did with the USAID suppliers. Right?
- [87:35]
Mia Wong
Yeah. So, like, there is also a bunch of funding cuts for things like the Army Corps of Engineers. And like, there are a lot of valid criticisms you can have about the Army Corps of Engineers. And for example, the way it, like, has structurally fucked the entire city of New Orleans. But the thing is, not giving them money to do hurricane prevention is not going to help that. And the thing about this, right, because this, this resolution has 13 billion in direct budget cuts, and then it also allows Trump to do more cuts on top of it by doing, by doing these funding allocation things. Right? So it's, it's like a, it's a fucking, like double. Yeah, it's a sort of double set of cuts here. And this includes, you know, he can, he can reallocate money away from the faa. One of the most absolutely terrifying ones is that this continuing resolution allows RFK Jr. To, to eliminate funding for the universal flu vaccine.
- [88:20]
James Stout
Yeah, I was talking to someone in the medical profession about this. Like, there's a serious chance that there just won't be one developed in the US for next year and that we'll just use the European one. Great stuff.
- [88:31]
Mia Wong
You know, this is really the substantive problem with this entire thing and why it is genuinely an act of like an act, an act of collaboration worthy of Vichy France. To fucking pass this, to pass this fucking bill.
- [88:45]
Jenny Keasden
Yeah.
- [88:45]
Mia Wong
Is that again you are handing control of like the budgets, right? You are handing direct control of just like how budget allocation stuff gets, gets fucking dealt with to like Elon Musk, Trump and RFK Jr. And they can just fucking do this shit with it.
- [89:02]
James Stout
Yeah, we've already seen some of this like manipulation of federal government funding like with the, with Columbia University.
- [89:10]
Mia Wong
Oh, we're going to get to that.
- [89:11]
James Stout
Yeah. Okay, good. Exciting.
- [89:13]
Mia Wong
Yeah. So other things, it defunds FEMA's disaster relief fund, which is bad because a bunch of FEMA's disaster relief fund has been get this exhausted because there were a bunch of fucking disasters. Guess what? There's going to be more of disasters. Guess what? There's not going to be money in the FEMA disaster relief fund.
- [89:31]
James Stout
Yeah, that's bad. Yeah.
- [89:33]
Mia Wong
And here's the thing. We have not fucking hit the worst part of this continuing resolution yet. Like all of that, right? Like the monopolization of power in the hands of the executive, you know, like the potential defunding of the flu vaccine. We have not hit rock bottom yet. Rock bottom is this Getting resolution quote slashes $185 million 7% of the total program from defense nuclear non proliferation programs, including the programs that prevent terrorists from acquiring nuclear and radioactive material, remove radioactive materials at misused or causing a catastrophic accident and deter and monitor foreign nuclear fuel cycle and weapons developments, nuclear materials movement or diversions and nuclear explosions.
- [90:19]
Robert Evans
Cool.
- [90:20]
Mia Wong
So we are defunding the nuke police again for a third time and this one looks like it's actually going to fucking stick. Because I don't think any of these fucking people actually understand what the defense nuclear non proliferation programs do.
- [90:33]
James Stout
Yeah, I mean, I don't know because they were on one about Iran and enriching uranium for years. Have they just. Have they just give. Have they moved on?
- [90:42]
Mia Wong
Well, like this as we're going to see in a second, this budget is being written by just fucking clowns, like just absolute dipshits. I don't know who the fuck is doing this.
- [90:53]
James Stout
That's what I sometimes wonder is like who comes up with these numbers? Like is there like a staffers.
- [90:59]
Mia Wong
It's literally an army of staffers. The senators who are voting for these Bills most often have no idea what the fuck is in them. Uh, it's. It's all run by an army of staffers. And. And the thing about it all being run by an army of staffers and the fact that Republican staffers are increasingly drawn from a class of, like, genuinely the most unhinged people who have ever lived. This. This class of fucking Internet gripers and fucking white nationalist bullshit means that one of the parts of this I think people have heard about is the $1 billion in spending that was cut just from, like, the city budget of Washington, D.C. now, looking at what's happened next, I genuinely think they did this by accident. That's been the explanation that's been given is that they literally did it by accident. And the reason I think it might actually be true. It's either actually true or they saw the pushback. But immediately after this bill got passed, there was like a separate bill that was drafted to restore the funding, and that was approved unanimously by the second. So it might legitimately have been a mistake. So it was either legitimately a mistake, or all of these people realized that the entire population of DC Was about to, like, fucking march on the Capitol of pitchforks. So I don't know one of those two things. So we're not talking much about the DC Stuff, because it seems like that funding is going to come back, though. If it doesn't, we'll cover the catastrophic impacts of that. And there's one more thing, James, which I couldn't find details of, but one of the things it's supposed to do is eliminate protections for people in immigration courts.
- [92:21]
James Stout
Fantastic. Great.
- [92:22]
Mia Wong
Allow the Attorney General more power.
- [92:24]
James Stout
Yeah, I was just looking this up, actually. Like, let me. There was an office founded under Biden that was the Office of the Office of Immigration Detention Ombudsman, which was, like, supposedly to exist to, like, examine people's conditions in immigration detention. Right. And I'm wondering to what extent it still exists. Yeah, like, I. I don't know. I was just trying to find that out. I would have to go through the resolution, and maybe I will at some point, but, yeah, there is stuff that the federal government does right now that provides people with some protections in immigration courts. Right. And, yeah, I can see. I mean, look, to the extent that that matters, because they're just deporting people in open violation of court orders right now. We don't know. But it's still bad either way. Right. Taking away the very few protections that might have. Yeah, it's bad.
- [93:17]
Mia Wong
Yeah. So, speaking of bad things, we're going to go to ads, and then we're going to come back. We are back. So having said all of this about this bill, fully 10 Democratic senators voted to avoid shutting down the government and fucking pass this unbelievably hideous resolution, which again, like, defunds the nuke police. Again. They are risking, like, global annihilation by doing this. And I'm just going to read out the names of everyone who did this because there's been a lot of focus on Chuck Schumer, and Chuck Schumer is the, like, probably the primary person responsible for this, but fuck every single one of these people individually.
- [94:06]
James Stout
At least a quisling in this scenario. Like the Capital Q. Quizly.
- [94:10]
Mia Wong
Yes. Yes. Okay, so Chuck Schumer, Kathryn Cortez Mostow, Dick Durbin, which is actually a surprising one because Durbin. So Durbin's about to retire.
- [94:19]
Jenny Keasden
He.
- [94:19]
Mia Wong
He was my old senator in Illinois, actually. No, he wasn't. Well, complicated. I actually fucking don't remember which one of the. Which one of them I had. But Durbin is, you know, he's like senior party leadership guy. He's usually been in, like, the kind of left left, I guess, of the, like, old Democratic, like, leadership, which is not very far left, but he fucking voted for this. John Fetterman, to the surprise of absolutely no one. Tristan Gillibrand, to the surprise of absolutely no one.
- [94:48]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [94:48]
Mia Wong
Maggie Hassan, Agnes King, Gary Peters, Brian Schatz, and Janine Shaheen, now notably missing from that list. Tim fucking Kane voted against this. Do you know how bad a Republican budget thing has to be for Tim fucking Cain to vote against it and be like, hey, guys, what the fuck are you doing?
- [95:09]
James Stout
Yeah, the thing is, like, as a Democrat, the move just, if you want to get reelected is to vote against it and then blame them for everything bad that happens this year because of the budget thing.
- [95:21]
Robert Evans
Right.
- [95:22]
James Stout
If you have no moral backbone whatsoever. And I'm sure, like, there are things in this continuing resolution which will really screw over rural areas. Right. Like some of the funding that was allocated.
- [95:32]
Mia Wong
Oh, yeah.
- [95:33]
James Stout
And like, Kane is at least, I guess, astute enough to see that when things get harder for his constituents, he can go, yes, they did this and I voted against it. And you need to return me to office so I can continue opposing this shit. Which is very cynical approach.
- [95:48]
Mia Wong
Yeah.
- [95:49]
James Stout
But then, yeah, we've just got Chuck. Chuck Schumer, who just kind of bowed down and kissed the ring.
- [95:55]
Mia Wong
Yeah. And. And, you know, the response to this is staggering. I. I genuinely. I have never seen anything like the the kind of anger I'm seeing, I've seen that were for the past few days, this has happened Friday, like, indivisible, which is like a pretty. So indivisible is like a sort of ngo e thing that. That's like. Like tries to. It's like a sort of vaguely progressive thing. It tries to get people to vote for the Democrats.
- [96:17]
James Stout
Yeah. And, like, register voters and stuff.
- [96:19]
Mia Wong
Yeah. They've been getting into fights with the Democratic leadership because they keep telling people to call their senators to tell them to oppose bills and the nominations. The Democrats are like, we don't want.
- [96:27]
James Stout
To oppose bills in 2020. In mobilizing the vote in Ton odham territory, for instance, like, an indivisible tohono played a really important role. So, like, they're not negligible in their power.
- [96:39]
Mia Wong
No. Yeah. And like, they are calling for primaring. Chuck Schumer. R Neoliberal, is calling for aoc the primary Chuck Schumer. Do you know how fucked things have to be for R Neoliberal to be backing AOC against Chuck Schumer?
- [96:59]
Garrison Davis
Like, fucking.
- [97:00]
Mia Wong
Neera Tanden is agreeing with Bernie Sanders, criticizing Schumer for voting for this bill. Like, this is like, I. I don't know. I think that maybe there probably are people in the audience here who either, like, weren't paying attention enough or, like, don't remember or, like, weren't old enough to be around for, like, like, the Bernie wars. But this is like, every faction on every side of, like, the whole series of fights from, like, 2015 and, like, Bernie's first thing through 2020, even, like, the mid late 2000 and 20s, like, all of these people were on exactly polar opposite sides. They fucking hated each other. And they're all, like, coming together specifically to agree on a fuck Chuck Schumer campaign to the point where, like, again, like, R Neoliberal and like, neurotan, who are, like, have been just absolute stalwarts the party. Right. For ages are, like, are backing AOC primaring Chuck Schumer.
- [97:56]
James Stout
Yeah. It's a total cultural victory for the Bernie Bros. Is what's happening inside the Democratic Party.
- [98:01]
Mia Wong
Well, again, Chuck Schumer is the head of the Democratic caucus in the Senate.
- [98:04]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [98:05]
James Stout
Minority leader of the United States Senate.
- [98:06]
Mia Wong
Yeah. He is. You know, he is unbelievably powerful. And I mean, like, the people criticizing him. He got criticized. There was a joint statement on the funding bill in the Senate from the Democratic minority leader in the fucking House, Hakeem Jeffries, and the Democratic whip, Kathleen Clark. And the caucus chair, Peter Aguilar. And like Hakeem Jeffries is as ferociously anti socialist of a politician as there exists in all of Congress. He is like implacably hostile to even like the most like, barest progressive things whatsoever. He is just staggeringly opposed to it. And they released a joint statement against this. Right. What is sort of happening here? And it's happening fucking too late to stop anything. But what's happening here is like, we are genuinely starting to get a kind of. And I'm seeing this sort of online, we've been. I think we've been seeing the sort of echoes of it. It's like there's a kind of realignment happening among. You know, obviously this has been being opposed by people outside the Democratic Party and by a lot of the Democratic Party's base for ages. Right. And the Democratic Party's base. And also just like people who don't want to get. Be ruled by fascists forever have had incredibly staunch opposition to all of the collaborationism that's been happening. But what's happening right now is that like the actual, like inside of the Democratic Party there was a fucking rupture happening. And inside of the people who are like, you know, like inside of the politicos, there was a rupture happening between people who are collaborationist and people who like, want to be less collaborationist. And this is to the point where like, Nancy Pelosi came out against this.
- [99:41]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [99:42]
Mia Wong
And the reason they're doing this is because a lot of these people are fucking terrified because they are looking at a couple things. One, they're looking at what the Trump administration is doing and they're going, holy shit. Like, Neera Tanden is looking at them fucking just black bagging. Just like, just fucking black bagging Mahmoud Khalil and is going like, holy shit. We are maybe about. I mean, it's maybe eight steps away from that happening to me. But that's eight steps that you can fucking, like, that's a path you can walk down. And it's these also these people that are realizing just the unbelievable anger among just like regular, what you would call sort of like regular liberals who aren't like, like, who vote for the Democrats but who aren't like, yeah, they're not.
- [100:24]
James Stout
Like on Twitter with a blue wave emoji.
- [100:25]
Mia Wong
Yeah. But the thing is, even, even the people on Twitter with a blue wave emoji. And again, like the r. Neoliberal people are like the most ideologically committed of all of these people. Right. Like, like, even the most unhinged nerds who are, like, obsessed with, like, individual House races and, like, very, very specific, weird, technical policy stuff that allows them to justify supporting all these unhinged policies. Even those people are turning on them. And the reason this is all happening, and I think this is a very, very important thing to understand about the entire political landscape going forward, is that one of the core and extremely important bases of Donald Trump's support is in the leadership of the Democratic Party, particularly the Democratic Party in New York. Right. This is Schumer. This is Eric Adams. This is also increasingly becoming true of people like Gavin Newsom and a lot of the sort of Democrats out of the bay to some extent. And, you know, and you. You can, you can see this in sort of various border states, too, where, you know, these, these people fundamentally are doing this because they fucking agree with him. That's why. That's why. That's why they're fucking collaborating.
- [101:29]
James Stout
Yeah. Or at the very least, like, and perhaps it's in a sense worse that they don't agree with him, but they don't care enough to not like they're doing it because they think they can personally benefit.
- [101:43]
Mia Wong
No, I don't think that's true. And my evidence for why I don't think this true is I'm going to read some stuff from a New York Times interview they did with Chuck Schumer right after he did this. Okay? So in this interview with the New York Times, he gets asked about Trump cutting $400 million of funding for Columbia University for, I guess not like, publicly executing the Palestine protesters. And again, Columbia University, that is an institution that he represents in the Senate, right?
- [102:20]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [102:20]
Garrison Davis
Like, that's like his.
- [102:21]
Mia Wong
That's like his fucking thing. And his response was, well, obviously they didn't crush the campus protest hard enough, but. But cutting $400 million of spending might hurt students who didn't protest, like, maybe. And he's not even clear about that. Right. So if you read between the lines of what he's saying, his argument is that it's actually fine for Trump to do all of these fucking budget cuts of all of these people from these universities, as long as it's specifically targeting pro Palestinian protesters, which is anyone who's vaguely pro Palestine. And he also gets, you know, he gets asked about the Trump administration just straight up black bagging Mahmoud Khalil. And he says, quote, I don't know all the details yet. They're trying to come out, and there'll be a court case which will determine it if he broke the law, he should be deported. If he didn't break the law and was and just peacefully protested, he should not be deported. It's plain and simple.
- [103:11]
James Stout
I mean, how is it hard to not make an equivocating statement on that?
- [103:15]
Mia Wong
No, this is the thing. Because he agrees with it. He thinks it's fine. He thinks it's fine. The Trump administration fucking black bagged this guy. Like, again, who is. Who is a permanent U.S. resident. He thinks that it is okay, that. Here's the thing. He's not even disagreeing with the actual literal black bagging. And I want to point this out. Like, even if Mahmoud Khalil, like, legally committed a crime, like, that's not a fucking deportation thing.
- [103:38]
James Stout
Yeah. The section of the United States law that they're using to justify deporting him is not one that has been used before. This is not. He did not do a felony, and they're not suggesting that he did do a felony. And, like, if Schumer can't find it in himself to condemn that, like, yeah, like, folks need to move on.
- [103:56]
Mia Wong
Because he agrees with it. Like, that's the thing. Like, what he is saying here is that he agrees that if a permanent legal US Resident commits any crime or.
- [104:06]
James Stout
Doesn'T, though he's not accused. He's not accused of a crime. Like, he's. He.
- [104:09]
Mia Wong
No, no, that's not.
- [104:11]
Garrison Davis
But this is.
- [104:11]
Mia Wong
This is specifically what Schumer said. Schumer said, quote, if he broke the law, he should be deported. What his stance is is that if someone who is a permanent US Resident breaks the law while at a Palestine protest, even if it is a misdemeanor, even if it is fucking jaywalking, that they should be deported. That is the Trump administration line. Like, that is. It is slightly less the Trump administration line, but that is a genuinely fascist political line. He just straight up agrees with the administration. He is a slight matter of degree, like, off from them, but, like, like, he's. He just, like, he's collaborating because he fucking agrees with them. And he agrees with them both on. On the fact that the state should be used to, like, destroy anyone who supports Palestine. And he agrees with them on the fucking deportation shit. Because he, you know, this is. This is one of the other things that Democrats have fundamentally aligned with Trump on since 2020 is that fundamentally, like, they agree that we need more immigration controls and we need to do more border violence. You can see the evidence of this from when they fucking passed that just unhinged, fascist bill to do allow border state of Emergencies.
- [105:15]
James Stout
Yeah. And the stuff that they proposed and didn't pass because the Republicans wanted to kill it. And then Biden executive order banning asylum. I think what it comes down to is that for the Democrats, the existence of people who oppose a genocide in Palestine and the existence of migrants is seen as inconvenient. And they're prepared to do away with any rights those people might have and even do away with those people rather than engage with them in any way. Right. They, I'm sure people like Schumer continue to blame people from both of those movements for their ass whooping that they took at the polls in 2024 because they decided that it was more important to do genocide than it was to listen to voters in this country. And rather than listening, now they're blaming them. And the only logical way for them to go is.
- [106:06]
Mia Wong
Right.
- [106:06]
James Stout
And the only logical place for them to take it is more state violence. Right?
- [106:11]
Mia Wong
Yeah. But there's another aspect of this too, which the thing I want to close on, which is, okay, so why did the. Why have the Democrats been shifting so far to the right since 2020? Right. And specifically since after 2022 when they needed to sort of win a contestant after election. And the answer is that after 2020, all of their politics became about opposing the uprising because they, you know, there was a period during the uprising where they were scared enough that like you get like the kente cloth shit and they're like, you know, and they're, they're talking about like. And Biden like runs on a significantly more left wing platform than like Kamala Harris did. Right?
- [106:43]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [106:44]
Mia Wong
Like, because of the, specifically because of the pressure of those protests. Now obviously, like presidential platforms are just lies. Right, but.
- [106:49]
James Stout
Right, yeah, it's just lies you need to tell to get the votes.
- [106:52]
Mia Wong
Yeah, yeah. But on the other hand, the fundamental politics of the Democratic Party in the last half a decade has been opposing the uprising. It's the thing that's, you know, behind all of their turn to tough on crime politics. It's the thing behind their sort of anti immigrant politics, the thing behind the turns they've been taking on trans politics. And the problem with this, particularly like the anti black, anti crime shit and the anti immigrant stuff. You know who else. His entire politics, like, came into the fucking political sphere as the right wing reaction to the uprising. Oh, wait, Donald Trump. Donald Trump walked down the fucking escalator in 2015, immediately in the wake of the giant uprisings in Baltimore in 2015, which I think people have sort of memory hold, like Ferguson In Baltimore. It's like right after Baltimore that Trump fucking comes down the escalator and people forget how fundamentally the right wing reaction to those protests deranged people who even the Tea Party hadn't pushed far enough to vote for Donald Trump. It was a reaction to this.
- [107:51]
James Stout
Yeah. That's when we saw the Oath Keepers for the first time as well. Like this kind of militant right really grew dramatically in response to it.
- [108:00]
Garrison Davis
Yeah.
- [108:01]
Mia Wong
And this is the sort of fundamental thing that's going on is that there's now an entire class of people who are running the Democratic Party. Right. This is like fucking Chuck Schumer. He is like, I mean, quite possibly the most powerful Democrat in the country and he is just straight up a collaborationist.
- [108:16]
James Stout
Yeah. It might legit become that like AOC is, is more powerful than Chuck Schumer in the next few weeks. You know, he is. The reaction against Chuck Schumer from establishment Democrats is stronger than anything I've ever seen from them.
- [108:30]
Mia Wong
He lost Seth Moulton, which I didn't even think was possible.
- [108:33]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [108:33]
Mia Wong
But I think there's one more important note to sort of say here, which is that like, you know, the response to this that I've largely been seeing is everyone going, okay, we need a primary. These people. Okay. Are you looking at the rate at which stuff is happening in this country, like, do you think that we are going to be able to wait until the fucking primaries?
- [108:51]
James Stout
Yeah. Six years, the same cases, right?
- [108:53]
Mia Wong
Yeah. Until we can like attempt to fucking do shit here? Like. Absolutely not. No, there literally is. Regardless of what you think about electoralism as a strategy, there is literally not time to wait until the next election cycle. Like again, they have defunded the nuke police for the third time. So the opposition to this isn't going to come from inside of the electoral system because again, the Democrats are being run by collaborators and there's not enough time to fucking oust them. So if you, if you want this to not continue, you were going to. You're going to have to find ways to do organizing outside of that system. We have approximately 1 million episodes about this. You can also go back to my you already know how to organize episode.
- [109:32]
James Stout
Yeah, but yeah, look, call your senator if you want to, but if that's the net total of your political activity, then like right now it's probably not going to make a difference in time. And really consider if it's the most useful use of your time. Yeah. And maybe make some beans or sew something nice for someone instead. Or as well you could listen to it while you sew something nice. You could call them while you're cooking your beans.
- [109:57]
Mia Wong
Hell yeah. Well this is. But it could happen here. Yeah. Down with the collaborationists. Yeah, them.
- [110:04]
James Stout
Yeah, absolutely em. Chuck Schumer in particular.
- [110:26]
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- [113:37]
Garrison Davis
This is it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis Tesla Derangement system syndrome is sweeping the nation. Last week on March 11, President Donald Trump starred in a 35 minute Tesla commercial broadcast live from the White House driveway to news stations across the country. This presidential ad campaign started with Trump announcing that he himself would buy a Tesla in support of his unique advisor, Elon Musk, whose business ventures have taken a sour turn as of late. To assist Trump with his purchase, the South Lawn was temporarily turned into a Tesla showroom with five different models parked in a row to choose which shiny new car to buy. A significant portion of this Tesla sales event was spent by Trump praising Elon Musk's work at Doge as well as Elon's business ventures, and complaining about people treating Elon Musk unfairly, saying that he, quote, shouldn't be penalized because he's a patriot.
- [114:44]
Mia Wong
I'm just telling people this man is a great patriot and you should cherish him.
- [114:49]
James Stout
You should cherish him.
- [114:50]
Mia Wong
You know, I have a little statement. We have to take care of our high IQ people because we don't have too many of them.
- [114:56]
Garrison Davis
We got to take care of them. As for the cars, Trump mentioned that he actually already bought a cyber truck for his granddaughter Kai, which Trump called the coolest design, but this time he chose a red Tesla Model S. Upon climbing in the car that Secret Service does not allow him to operate, Trump remarked, wow, everything's computer. At the end of the live streamed Tesla commercial, Trump said that he would pay with a check. Though for the duration of the event, Trump served as both buyer and salesman as he read off from a sheet of notes on pricing and features for various Tesla models, like how, quote, Teslas can be purchased for as low as 299Amonth.
- [115:42]
Mia Wong
I have a lot of information, including the price.
- [115:44]
Andrew Sage
Yes, I want to make a good deal here.
- [115:47]
Mia Wong
You know, I do notice this. They have one which is $35,000 which is pretty low. What is that all about?
- [115:55]
Garrison Davis
This whole charade was an explicit attempt to rescue Tesla's plummeting stock price and help foster a new demographic of electric car buyers. Anti woke conservatives looking to show support of Elon Musk, Doge and the new Trump administration through consumer purchases. Trump himself said that he hoped doing ads for Tesla on the White House driveway would help Tesla's stock value and encouraged others to buy Elon's cars. The next day. Tesla shares did rise 4%, but are now trending back down amid a global wave of protests against Tesla for Musk's involvement with Doge and the Trump administration, as well as Elon's Nazi curious behavior. Trump has tried to face this wave of hate against his new best friend head on, truthing on his platform of choice Truth Social last week, quote, elon Musk is putting it on the line in order to help our nation and he is doing a fantastic job. But the radical left lunatics, as they often do, are trying to illegally and collusively boycott Tesla, one of the world's greatest automakers and Elon's quote, unquote baby in order to attack and do harm to Elon and everything he stands for. They tried to do it to me at the 2024 presidential ballot box, but how did that work out? Unquote. There's a lot to unpack there. From Trump calling Tesla Elon's baby despite Elon carrying around his baby at the White House near 24 7, to bizarrely declaring protest boycotts as illegal. Not only has Trump called the Tesla boycott illegal, but during the White House car commercial he announced that vandalism of Tesla's will be labeled as domestic terrorism, promising that perpetrators will, quote, unquote go through hell. White House spokesperson Harrison Fields said, quote, ongoing and heinous acts of violence against Tesla by radical leftist activist activists are nothing short of domestic terror. There certainly has been a surge of violence targeted at Tesla vehicles and dealerships, which I will discuss in detail later this episode. But for the past month there's also been a wave of non violent protests and mass mobilization against Musk and Tesla at dealerships all around the country and even overseas, which the aforementioned boycott is a part of. The quote unquote Tesla takedown protests call to quote, sell your Tesla's, dump your stock, join the picket lines. We're tanking Tesla's stock price to stop Musk, unquote. Their website has a map of Tesla dealerships around the world and a list of upcoming protests at various locations which can be searched through via zip code. There have been reoccurring weekly protests at dealerships every Saturday in cities across the country, with demonstrations at more than 50 Tesla showrooms attracting crowds of between dozens to a thousand, like in Tucson, Arizona. Tucson, Arizona the boycotts and public demonstrations certainly aren't helping Tesla's stock price and international reputation. But they are not the only display of displeasure directed at Elon and Tesla, as others are employing more direct methods to damage the company. Beyond peaceful protests, picketings, short lived dealership occupations, and waving anti Elon Musk signs outside Tesla stores, Tesla vehicles themselves have become the nation's hottest graffiti mural service. Actually, around the world, people have been using Teslas to scribble epithets against Elon Musk and Donald Trump. Even some eco conscious owners of Tesla vehicles have defaced their own cars with stickers that read I bought this before he was a Nazi, which hey, you can also put on your old Kanye west records. Speaking of Kanye west, some individuals have taken to marking Teslas with a swastika, which at first raised eyebrows and confused some investigators, as typically when there's swastika graffiti it's supposed to be anti Semitic in nature, whereas in this case based on external factors, this is most likely a public attempt to link Elon Musk and Tesla with Nazism. Following Musk's own anti Semitic posts, far right politics and the whole salute thing, stickers and flyers have spread from the UK to San Francisco reading Don't buy a swastikar. But it's not all stickers and graffiti. We'll talk about the other Tesla attacks after this ad break.
- [120:48]
Jenny Keasden
Foreign.
- [120:54]
Garrison Davis
Okay, we're back. One of the most bizarre instances of Tesla vandalism was when 44 wheels were stolen off 12 unsold Teslas in a Texas parking lot on Valentine's Day. Investigators say they don't currently have any leads since the nearby security cameras weren't recording and the Tesla cameras were not active. These Teslas were actually being stored in an Amazon parking lot six miles away from their home dealership. Allegedly, Tesla is contracting with other businesses to store their cars amid a wave of vandalism at Tesla dealerships. On March 11, wheels were damaged on multiple vehicles at a Tesla dealership in Dedham, Massachusetts. In Myers, California, Tesla superchargers keep being sabotaged with epoxy found in the charging cable and anti Elon musk graffiti with chargers marked with swastikas. Seven Tesla charging stations at a shopping center were arsoned outside of Boston, Massachusetts on March 3 and on March 7 Molotov cocktails were thrown at a Tesla charging station in South Carolina with Long live Ukraine on the ground in red paint. A 24 year old man was taken into custody on March 13th. But it's not just wheel thefts and supercharger sabotage. Tesla dealerships have been a target for anti musk graffiti, vandalism and armed attacks. Some commentators have been conflating the picketing, protests and graffiti with actual instances of arson and property destruction. People like Libs of TikTok labeling simple spray paint as quote unquote trans violence or trans terrorism. Which is not to say some people aren't taking a more destructive approach towards their Elon Musk grievances. Whether that qualifies as terrorism is another issue though. On January 20, a man wearing black pulling a wheelie cart approached a Tesla dealership in Salem, Oregon and threw a Molotov cocktail at a cyber truck. Surveillance footage shows the man pull out ignite and throw three more Molotov cocktails from his rolling cart before realizing an eyewitness is charging their Tesla nearby. The man in black pulls out a suppressor mounted AR style rifle and points it at the witness as they drive away before continuing to throw more Molotov cocktails at parked vehicles. A rock was used to break the glass of the dealership showroom and another Molotov cocktail was thrown inside the building. A criminal complaint claims that this incident caused around $500,000 in damage to the dealership, including damaging seven Tesla vehicles. A month later, on February 19, the same dealership was hit again, this time with gunshots breaking through windows and hitting vehicles. In early March, a 41 year old man was arrested in connection to both incidents, with court documents claiming fingerprints were identified on recovered glass bottles used for explosive devices and the suspect's car was identified in footage captured by a police car parked near the Tesla dealership a bit north of Salem. In Tigard, Oregon, there have been two incidents of gunshots being fired at a Tesla dealership. Just this month, a Tigard police press release reads, quote, for the second time in a week, Tigard police are investigating shots fired at a Tesla dealership early this morning, March 13, 2025. Around 4:15am, more than a dozen shots were fired at the dealership, causing extensive damage to cars and showroom windows, unquote. There's also been a series of incidents at a Tesla dealership in northern Colorado. A spree of anti musk graffiti and vandalism started in January with Molotov cocktail style incendiary devices found on the scene. On February 7, police responded to a call about graffiti and possible arson at the dealership. A few days later, a security guard confronted an individual spray painting the front windows of the dealership. And on February 24, a suspect was arrested at the dealership, allegedly in possession of bottles and gasoline. She was charged. In late February, another person was arrested, allegedly in connection to a similar yet unrelated incident at the very same dealership in Loveland, Colorado, after a Molotov cocktail style device was found burning between two Tesla vehicles on March 7. The rocks were also used to damage both the building and multiple cars. At around 11pm on Sunday, March 9, four cybertrucks erupted into flames at a Tesla parking lot in Seattle, Washington. On Monday, March 17, two cybertrucks were set on fire at a dealership in Kansas City. Here's how local TV news reported the incident.
- [125:48]
Annabe Sofa Advertiser
Around 11pm, officers were called to a fire at a car lot.
- [125:52]
Jenny Keasden
Car fired at that Tesla dealership.
- [125:54]
Annabe Sofa Advertiser
In the parking lot, a KCPD officer was close by when he noticed smoke coming from a Tesla cybertruck. The officer used his fire extinguisher to try to put out the flames, but the fire continued to spread. KCFD was called in to help.
- [126:07]
Mia Wong
Our crews got on scene and the fire was in two cybertrucks. It had spread from one to the other. We were able to get water on them, copious amounts of water.
- [126:17]
James Stout
Water.
- [126:17]
Andrew Sage
Get the fire out.
- [126:18]
Annabe Sofa Advertiser
Now. Federal agencies are getting involved. We saw an ATF officer with a bag of evidence. They say this incident follows similar reports from across the country of violence at Tesla dealerships.
- [126:31]
Mia Wong
I mean, you're eventually going to get caught, right?
- [126:33]
Annabe Sofa Advertiser
Reaction to this incident has been mixed with some condemning the crime and others who see it as a form of protest towards the automaker.
- [126:41]
Garrison Davis
And just a few days ago, on March 18, an individual dressed in all black fired gunshots and threw Molotov cocktails, damaging five cars at a Tesla service center in Las Vegas. The Las Vegas Review Journal writes that the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force is investigating the matter. Quote, agents arrived at the scene early Tuesday, according to FBI Special Agent in Charge Spencer Evans. Evans said that while it was too early to call the attack attack in active terrorism, it had, quote, unquote, some of the hallmarks and a potential political agenda, unquote. Now, this particular incident in Las Vegas really got to Elon Musk, who spent the rest of the day complaining on Twitter that Tesla has, quote, done nothing to deserve these evil attacks, unquote. Attacks on Tesla have not been contained to the United states. In early March, 12 Teslas parked outside of a dealership in southern France were set ablaze. And outside Berlin, unknown persons set fire to a high voltage transmission line on a power pylon, cutting power to a massive Tesla manufacturing plant in Germany for multiple days. This follows a series of direct actions and a forest encampment where the Tesla gigafactory seeks to expand by leveling 250 acres of forest. The German forest encampment lasted nine months before being successfully raided by police this last November, with police destroying tree houses and trashing tents. After the whole my heart goes out to you salute and subsequent endorsement of afd, Musk's reputation in Germany specifically is suffering steep decline. To quote the Washington Post quote, Tesla stock has fallen BY More than 35% since Trump's inauguration. And last year the company suffered its first annual sales drop in more than a decade. In Germany, Tesla car sales plummeted by 76% in February compared with a year earlier, according to figures released Wednesday. And some owners have expressed buyers remorse over owning a car some now see as a symbol of far right politics a stark departure from the environmental consciousness it once epitomized. And we'll talk more about how these protests are affecting Tesla's international reputation after this ad break. Okay, we're back. Right after the November election, Tesla stock surged to a never before seen high of $1.54 trillion. But as Musk's direct involvement in the government was ramped up, Tesla has fallen to about 777 billion. The massively inflated value of Tesla stock is directly related to the public perception of Elon Musk. And Tesla stock greatly determines Musk's own net worth, which is down more than 140 billion from this past December peak. When Elon's reputation gets damaged, so does Tesla's and vice versa. Tesla stock has been declining for nine consecutive weeks. JP Morgan analysts recently said that Tesla has lost so much value so quick that there really isn't any comparison. Quote, we struggle to think of anything analogous in the history of the automotive industry in which a brand has lost so much value so quickly, unquote. And Forbes writes, quote, Last week, JP Morgan analysts described the recent melting of Tesla's perception, especially in pockets of the world in which Musk inserted himself into right wing politics such as Germany. About 53% of respondents to a CNN poll published last week said that they hold a negative opinion of Musk, compared to roughly 35% with a positive view and 11% with no take, unquote. Overseas, Tesla sales in general are way down even as electric vehicle purchasing is going up. New data from the European Automotive Manufacturers association show that Tesla registrations in the European Union, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, Switzerland and the UK have dropped by 45%. When you compare January 2024 to January 2025, and this decline from Tesla comes as overall electric vehicle sales have increased 37% in the same January 24 to 25 head to head comparison, China's own EVs are surpassing Tesla in global production and sales in China, which is a huge EV market. And Chinese manufacturer BYD is on track to overtake Tesla in global sales this year. And so if you consider the Tesla protests as a sort of public display of unhappiness with Tesla and Elon Musk combined with all these other economic factors impacting the automaker, if these trends continue, Musk and Tesla could be in real trouble. After the Las Vegas attack this Tuesday, Musk went on to Fox News to explain the situation as he sees it.
- [131:59]
James Stout
Yeah, it turns out when you take away people' syou know, the money they're receiving fraudulently, they get very upset and.
- [132:10]
Mia Wong
They basically want to kill me because.
- [132:12]
James Stout
I'm stopping their fraud. And they want to hurt Tesla because we're stopping this terrible waste and corruption in the government. And, well, I guess there's bad people.
- [132:26]
Mia Wong
Bad people will do bad things.
- [132:29]
Garrison Davis
Essentially, Tesla is seen as an extension of Elon, and right now, Elon is seen as an extension of the Trump government. And even if people feel powerless to stop the government hurting, Tesla is seen as a much more achievable goal, with ripple effects that reach Elon Doge and the Trump administration. And compared to protesting the government, Tesla is a soft target with cars and dealerships all across the country, not just in state capitals or in Washington, D.C. whereas government facilities are typically hard targets by both being less accessible and more protected. JP Morgan analysts wrote, quote, Mr. Musk's work with the Department of Government Efficiency has proven controversial domestically. And while as many members of the political right may be pleased as those on the left are displeased, the effect on Tesla sales seems nevertheless negative, unquote. Musk is certainly trying to make the best of it by tapping into the previously untapped EV market of mega conservatives. And though the Tesla brand is gaining popularity amongst conservatives, that demographic is just far less likely than liberals to actually switch from a gas to electric car. Still, the President and conservative media have been doing a lot of free Tesla commercials. Last week, Sean Hannity announced on air that he would be buying a Tesla.
- [133:57]
Robert Evans
I don't Believe in cancellation. I don't believe in cancel culture, you know, and I know maybe it's not going to make up a difference, but you know what?
- [134:05]
Mia Wong
After I drove my friend's Tesla, I.
- [134:08]
Robert Evans
Went and I already picked out the one I want. It's called the. What is it called? The S. Plaid. And you realize this thing, an electric vehicle, has 1006 horsepower and goes from 0 to 62 in 2.0 seconds. And this thing rips and you can go about 400 miles without a charge. And I don't drive enough to go further than 400 miles, so I'm good. And maybe it's just a gesture on my part and I like that. I, I like new technology, but it's just a way of saying, you know, look what they're doing to this guy.
- [134:44]
Garrison Davis
On Friday, March 14, Attorney General Pam Bondi said that she is opening an investigation into the attacks against Tesla. Quote, if you're going to touch a Tesla, go to a dealership, do anything, you better watch out because we're coming after you, unquote. She released a statement on Tuesday after the Las Vegas arson, writing, quote, the swarm of violent attacks on Tesla property is nothing short of domestic terrorism, unquote. Musk just can't seem to understand that tons of regular people really hate him now and instead has to invent some grand conspiracy against him. Here's how he explained it on Fox News.
- [135:29]
Mia Wong
Yeah, I mean, it's really come as.
- [135:31]
James Stout
Quite a shock to me that there is this level of, of really hatred and violence from the left. I always thought the left, you know, Democrats were supposed to be the party of empathy, the party of caring. And yet they're burning down cars, they're firebombing dealerships, they're firing bullets into dealerships, they're just, you know, smashing up Teslas. Tesla is a peaceful company.
- [135:58]
Mia Wong
We've never done anything.
- [136:00]
James Stout
I've never done anything harmful.
- [136:01]
Mia Wong
I've only done productive things. So I think we just have a deranged. There's some kind of mental illness thing.
- [136:11]
James Stout
Going on here because this doesn't make any sense. Yeah, I think there are larger forces.
- [136:16]
Mia Wong
At work as well. I mean, I don't know who's funding.
- [136:18]
James Stout
It and who's coordinating it, because this is crazy. I've never seen anything like this on X.
- [136:24]
Garrison Davis
The everything applied. Musk is much more open about who he suspects are these larger forces. Musk has spread claims that, quote, unquote, multiple Democrat NGOs are coordinating, quote, attacks on Tesla dealerships, staff and vehicles. Last night, a Number of cybertrucks were torched in Seattle Democrats are becoming increasingly more desperate and violent, unquote. People in Musk's replies posted about how protesters are being paid by quote, Democrat fundraising platform ActBlue, which is funded by Soros, unquote. ActBlue seems to be the right's new favorite conspiracy topic, from claiming that USADE was illegally laundering money to Democrats through ActBlue and now that ActBlue itself has the ability to funnel money to activist groups like Act Blue doesn't give away money or directly fund anything, it's a donation based platform for registered organizations. This is like saying go fund me paid for your top surgery. No people donated on a fundraising platform. But nevertheless this claim is going gangbusters on X, the Everything app and being boosted by Musk and his associates. A popular right wing politics account on X called Insurrection Barbie posted that quote, attacks on the Tesla dealerships which have been linked to the Indivisible Project, a left of Stalin NGO that organizes street protests for the Democratic Party with shady prepaid debit cards that they run through Act Blue are committing economic terrorism meant to tank Tesla's stock and drive a wedge between Musk and Trump. Trump, unquote. Elon himself has claimed that a mysterious investigation, quote unquote has found, quote, five Act Blue funded groups responsible for the Tesla protests, Troublemakers, Disruption Project, Rise and Resist, Indivisible Project and Democratic Socialists of America. Act Blue funders include George Soros, Reid Hoffman, Herbert Sandler, Patricia Bauman and Leah Hunt Hendricks. If you know anything about this, please post in the replies. Thanks Elon. Now the main organizations behind the Tesla takedown protests, two activist groups called the Troublemakers and the Disruption Project don't even fundraise on ActBlue. They have no affiliation. But that hasn't stopped Elon from targeting specific activists and accusing them of committing crimes simply for organizing pickets outside stores, meanwhile invoking the old anti Semitic George Soros conspiracy as Elon himself has funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to right wing politicians this past year and has threatened to primary any Republican congressman who doesn't cave on Trump's agenda. So anyway, that is what's happening with Tesla Derangement Syndrome all across the country and even the world. Every day it feels like we are getting closer and closer to the cool zone. See you on the other side.
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- [143:13]
James Stout
Oh, Lord. The coming has begun.
- [143:16]
Garrison Davis
The coming has begun. This is it could happen here. Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. I'm joined by Mia Wong, James Stout, and Robert Evans.
- [143:30]
Robert Evans
Yes, and as James Stout just noted, the coming has begun. So we're going to also begin this episode.
- [143:38]
Garrison Davis
We are covering the week of March 12 to March 19. Obviously, the most important piece of news right now is that Minnesota Republican State Senator Justin Eichlord, who just last week sponsored or co sponsored a bill that, that legally recognizes Trump derangement syndrome as a mental illness which disqualifies you from possessing firearms, was literally that same day arrested in a sting operation for trying to be the up with and have sex with a minor.
- [144:08]
Robert Evans
Like, like, literally. He was like, had to have been texting this. He thought what he thought was a kid, but what was really a federal agent while he was finalizing the language.
- [144:19]
Garrison Davis
It's, it's, it's truly phenomenal. Pedocon theory never fails. Anyway, let's move on to the actual important news, which is mostly bad. This has been a pretty rough week.
- [144:31]
James Stout
Yeah, it's been a pretty rough week.
- [144:32]
Robert Evans
It's. Yes.
- [144:34]
Garrison Davis
So I guess I'll turn to James Stout.
- [144:36]
James Stout
Me. Hi, everyone. Hi, James. Well, the day you're listening, it's, it's new, Roz. So Nuroz, Peroz Bay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Kurdish listeners. So I want to talk today about rendition. This has been reported as deportation. Like, I guess it technically falls within deportation. But what's happening here is that the Trump administration has begun renditioning people who it accuses of being members of Trend Aragua, which is a Venezuelan gang, and La Mara Salvatore, the Ms. 13, as they're known here. Right. It has done this based on something called the Alien Enemies Act. The way it's able to use the Alien Enemies act is that it has designated these gangs as foreign terrorist organizations rather than as, like, international crime organizations, and it's used the Alien Enemies act to expedite their removal. We spoke about the Alien Enemies act in a podcast that I made last November with Robin Sophie about parts of the law that Trump administration might use for its mass deportation. Agenda. They're now using this one very briefly. It's a 226 year old piece of legislation that hasn't been used since World War II when it was used to justify internment camps which were a bad thing. These people aren't being deported back to Venezuela. Right. The US doesn't have relations with the Maduro regime, although it has deported people back to Venezuela on an airline that was previously sanctioned, which can now land in the US for the express purpose of deportations, which is great. Instead they're being sent to El Salvador. They're being sent there with no trial or hearing or seemingly ripe to appeal. When they get to El Salvador, they've been paraded in front of video cameras. Very degrading treatment. Right. Their hair is being shaved, sort of being walked with their heads forced down. They're being filmed on their knees while all their hair and facial hair is removed. And then they're being sent to secot. If you're not familiar with this, it was the subject of State, State Department human rights reports very recently. We are sending people there. It's a mega prison in El Salvador. It roughly translates terrorism confinement or terrorism detention center. I guess it's been very recently built by Bukele, who's the president of El Salvador and is part of his supermano Turo. Like Iron Fist. Super Iron fist would be the way you would translate it, I guess. It is routinely criticized by human rights organizations for the disgusting conditions that people are kept in. Right. The United States government intended to send 300 people there and in return it paid $6 million to El Salvador for the cost of their detention. At the time that I wrote this, 238 people who were accused of being part of trend were sent there and then 23 who accused of being part of Ms. 13 they were removed on flights. The Trump administration is claiming they were removed before a district court judge in D.C. blocked the removal. But there are a series of timelines that you can see online, some of which will be linked in the sources episode. We suggest that they were in the air when he blocked their removals. Nonetheless, the judge very explicitly said, and I'm quoting here, any plane containing these folks that is going to take off or is in the air needs to be returned to the United States. This is something that you need to make sure is complied with immediately. This did not happen. The planes continued traveling to El Salvador, it stopped in Honduras and then these people were paraded before the cameras. Right. And they're now presumably being detained in this prison, which doesn't meet basic standards of human rights. The government has given various reasons for ignoring this ruling from the judge. Press secretary Caroline Leavitt claimed that there was, quote, no lawful basis for it. Obviously, the process here is if you don't believe the judicial ruling is correct, you stop doing the thing and appeal it. You don't just keep doing the thing and say, like, oh, well, I don't believe you. It's not true. Obviously, this only matters insofar as a judge can enforce his decision. They also claimed in court that a verbal order that the judge gave is not the same as a written one. And they claimed that because the flights were over international waters, this was a foreign policy matter and that the judge couldn't intervene in a foreign policy matter. That's a power that's reserved to the executive.
- [148:45]
Garrison Davis
I mean, like, all of these justifications are really, like, freaky in terms of constitutional power and stuff.
- [148:50]
James Stout
Yeah. This is. There are fringes on the flag, so Admiralty Court applies kind of stuff.
- [148:54]
Garrison Davis
Yeah. But specifically that last one being, like, it doesn't count because we're over international waters is like.
- [149:01]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [149:02]
Garrison Davis
Super frightening in terms of, like, human rights abuses.
- [149:05]
Robert Evans
That's not the way anything works. Especially since it was, like, a US Airline.
- [149:09]
James Stout
Yeah, yeah, yeah. In terms of. Yeah. You basically don't have human rights because really, look, it's. They're forcing a loophole that doesn't exist in the same way that George W. Bush did. Did in the. In the early 2000s with Guantanamo Bay. He was never stopped from doing it.
- [149:25]
Mia Wong
Yeah, yeah. Well, and I. I honestly, I think. I think the thing that this is closer to is the other things. So I think Guantanamo Bay is the one that gets remembered. But the other part of the CIA torture program was the US Would just ship people off to places like Syria.
- [149:40]
Robert Evans
Yeah, to Syria.
- [149:42]
Mia Wong
Yeah, yeah, Syria. Egypt.
- [149:43]
Robert Evans
Yeah, Syria and Egypt.
- [149:46]
James Stout
Biggest Tunisia, maybe.
- [149:48]
Mia Wong
Yeah, yeah, we did Tunisia, too.
- [149:50]
Robert Evans
Syria's torture program had largely been cobbled together by a former SS guy. It's all. It's very good history.
- [149:56]
Mia Wong
Yeah, yeah. I also want to read a line from the legal argument that Trump's lawyers made before this judge because it is fucking horrifying. Quote, enemy aliens are not entitled to seek any relief or protection in the country that has designated them enemies, absent dispensation by the president. C. Citizens Protection League. And then in parentheses, noting common law ruling that alien enemies have no rights, no privileges, unless by the king's special favor. So every single part of that is horrifying. Also horrifying is the fact that if you actually look up the Commonwealth citation. The next words after King's special favor is in a time of war.
- [150:31]
James Stout
Yeah, yeah. That's the idea here, right. That we're at war with these foreign terrorist organizations, and these people are essentially like spies or.
- [150:40]
Mia Wong
Yeah. And this is this thing where like. Well, no, obviously we're not. Like, we don't have. There's no state of war. Like, no state of war has ever been declared. But because of the way the war on terror sort of functioned, they're trying to claim these things. And then again, the fact that they're saying that anyone they declare an alien has literally no protections at all in the country, no rights at all. Anything can be done to them unless specifically the president decides that they have rights is unbelievably hideous. It is pure, pure state of exception. Total fascism shit. It's fucking horrifying.
- [151:14]
James Stout
Yeah. And it's entirely unconstitutional. Right. Like, you have to be a radically left person to believe that humans have rights. Yeah. I want to really briefly, like, one of the criteria that was used here, so ICE criteria. So they have to have two identifying signs to be classified as a gang member. One of them that has been used very heavily here is tattoos. We know from court filings at one man, he has a football tattoo, right? Like a tattoo of a football with a crown on it and it says Dios, like God underneath. It was supposed to be, I guess, similar, like a play on the logo of Real Madrid. But they've used this to claim that it's evidence he's a member of a gang. Gangs like 20th Aragua don't have, like, gang sign tattoos, right? Yeah, they're smarter than that. Like, they've seen what's happened to gangs like MS.13 because they who do, like, mar us Central American gangs have had these things, like, as part of their tradition for a while, and they've been used heavily by law enforcement. I remember Christmas Eve 2023. I was in the desert with my friends and a large number of migrants across that day. I remember meeting a Venezuelan man who was, like, covered in tattoos, like head to toe, very heavily tattooed. That dude spent the entire day building a shelter for someone else's sick kid and then slept by himself in the freezing cold outside. Like, I know I've been thinking about that guy a lot because, like, under this ruling, right, like, just his appearance of having tattoos would have him classified as a terrorist. And, like, when thousands of Americans living within an hour of that place did nothing and that little girl who was sick had nowhere to Sleep like this guy took it upon himself to help even when he himself was in a difficult place. And it just really makes me kind of sick to think that this is where we're at now. Yeah.
- [152:58]
Robert Evans
No, I mean, it's a damning indictment of the character of people who are the voter base in this country. And it's a damning indictment of what, particularly liberals in the left failed to stop, because this was a train that we could see coming for a while. Like the propaganda campaign against these folks.
- [153:20]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [153:21]
Robert Evans
And a necessary ingredient and the Republicans getting their way on this was Democratic politicians. And, you know, to be entirely fair, quite a few prominent thought leaders on the left absolutely folding. And not just. Not just failing to, like, counterpoint this stuff, but, like, diving in on it because they. They either had prejudice of their own or they saw it as, like, an opportunity. But, like, you know, the whole nativist deal is. Is just disgusting.
- [153:51]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [153:52]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [153:52]
Jenny Keasden
I don't know.
- [153:53]
Robert Evans
I don't know what else to say. I can't just, like, keep yelling about it.
- [153:55]
James Stout
Yeah. It's not all a slippery slope. And I'm not saying that they're both as bad as each other, because what's happening now is much worse than anything that happened previously. But, like, yes, when we could detain people, including little children outside, and we could leave them there in the snow, and, like, little babies could be shivering and I could be giving away my own coat almost every day, I was out there because I was worried someone's baby was going to die of hypothermia. We kind of conceded that these people didn't have rights.
- [154:21]
Mia Wong
Right.
- [154:22]
James Stout
And the Democratic Party let that happen, and people on the left let that happen. And that is a stepping stone on the pathway to where we're at now.
- [154:30]
Robert Evans
Yep. Just as like, with all the shit that's. That's happening right now, like, in terms of, like, the disappearing of political opponents and whatnot. Like, you can draw a line from that, from, like, the Patriot act, you know, from Obama targeting a US Citizen in, I think, Afghanistan. Like, there's. All of these are, like, obviously things were not nearly as bad as they are right now in those administrations, but, like, they're not unrelated. You know, this kind of unitary executive theory is a through line through the last several administrations.
- [155:05]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [155:05]
Robert Evans
And if anyone had pushed back prior to this point, Trump wouldn't be able to do a lot of what he's doing.
- [155:10]
Jenny Keasden
Yep.
- [155:12]
James Stout
What we are doing is pivoting to ad. Yeah. Right now.
- [155:28]
Robert Evans
We'Re back and we're talking Crane, Ukraine, I'm sorry that I shouldn't have framed Ukraine.
- [155:35]
James Stout
If you want to.
- [155:36]
Robert Evans
Yeah. I don't know why I did. Anyway, so if you've been kind of paying attention over the last month or so, we've had a little odyssey in terms of U.S. russia, Ukraine relations. And the gist of it is that everybody claims to want an end to the fighting. You know, at least off and on. Putin has kind of like, made some motions to that, has absolutely not acted as if this is something he particularly cares about. Trump clearly does want a ceasefire because he wants to be able to take credit for it. And Zelensky also clearly wants a ceasefire. But there's been some kind of, some. Some pretty significant, like, hold ups. One of them has been around Ukrainian minerals. And, you know, in February, you had the administration talking a lot about how the US Was going to gain control of Ukraine's minerals in order to pay us back for our support of their war effort. And Zelensky drew a very firm line, as he often does, saying, like, no, I'm not gonna. You're not just going to get all of. Of this, all of our country's minerals. And I should note here that, like, this is a fairly significant issue in global terms. It's estimated that Ukraine has about 5% of the planet's critical raw materials, including massive reserves of graphite. They're somewhere in, like, the top five countries in terms of proven graphite reserves, which, among other things, is a critical ingredient for batteries in electric vehicles. They supply about 7% of Europe's titanium. They're a home to a third of European lithium deposits. This is not an exhaustive list. That's just kind of, you know, to start things off. And initially when there was this kind of pushback from Zelensky saying, like, no, you're not just going to get all that. Putin came in and was like, well, hey, you know, we've occupied a bunch of Ukrainian land that has raw minerals on it. We'll give those to you. Right? And so this went back and forth, and eventually Zelensky and, and Trump's people put together, like, a deal that they were supposed to sign earlier this month that was like an actual, like, bilateral agreement on the use of Ukrainian minerals. And essentially what it would have done is the deal did call for Ukraine to use its mineral resources to repay the United States to the tune of about half a trillion dollars, but not in a manner like where they were just handing us their minerals. Essentially, Ukraine would contribute 50% of revenues earned from the future monetization of government owned mineral resources and other natural resources. But these were critically revenues earned from those resources, like future monetization. Right. So new mines, new oil and gas plants, not included in this were like current reserves, like actively being exploited for profit. So, so kind of the key to this is that, like, mining is not something that you can turn around on a dime. Generally, once you have actually proven, you know, that you have sort of the reserves in an area, it takes about 20 years to actually get like mines up and running. And, you know, this is an extremely expensive process. So one of the reasons why Ukraine considered this a good deal for them is that we're essentially putting a lot of those revenues in the hands of the US but it was revenues from minerals that Ukraine was not currently exploiting and that the US Would help and provide funding to exploit. So it was not just paying back the U.S. it was something that would allow the rebuilding of the Ukrainian economy post war. There were some issues with this, including the fact that mining is an extremely energy intensive task and Ukraine is in the middle of an energy crisis at the minute. But among other things, it would have been brought the US in and given them a financial stake and continued peace in the region, which was seen as positive. That all blew up at a White House meeting a couple of weeks ago where, if you remember, J.D. vance and Trump basically had a little like WWE Smackdown with Zelensky. It was a pretty ugly meeting. And after that kind of talk of the bilateral mineral deal faded significantly. Now what's interesting is that just today it's come out that Zelensky and Trump have had further conversations and there's a new deal apparently on the table, or at least the White House claimed that there was a new deal on the table. Both the White House and Zelensky's office said that it was a very positive, productive meeting. There's some evidence that Zelinsky, after that big blow up, has been kind of of doing the thing you've got to do with Trump, which is like massage him and say nice things to him so that he'll like you more. And that Trump has gotten kind of frustrated with the fact that Russia clearly has not been overly motivated to move towards a ceasefire. But then in the middle of this meeting that everyone seems to agree went really well, the White House comes out and says, and we're working on an agreement where the US Will control all of Ukraine's nuclear reactors. And Ukraine came out and said, no, we're not. Absolutely. We did, we did not say that that was a deal. So I don't know what's actually going to happen here. Ukraine is a massive, like, nuclear energy state. In fact, the only European country that competes with them or that is, like, on the same level as they are in Europe in terms of nuclear industry is France. They've got four nuclear power plants with 15 reactors in total. Now, obviously, like, the Zaporizhzhia plant is still under Russian control, which is a significant chunk. It's like six of the 15 reactors in the country. And Ukraine is in the process of, like, building more. They've actively added capacity since the end of the Soviet Union. And so one of, like, the promises for sort of future Ukrainian economic stability is that they will be able to export nuclear energy to the rest of Europe, which is also going through an energy crisis. So it's unclear what's going to happen. There's definitely evidence, again, that Zelensky has kind of figured out how to massage Trump a little bit. There's a quote from an article in the Conversation that I found very interesting here. While Trump still leans towards Putin, his relationship with Zelensky seems to have improved. The Ukrainian president appears to have learned that Trump doesn't have a long memory and that flattery goes a long way with the US President. Trump, meanwhile, is no longer calling Zelensky a dictator. And yet there is no mention of halting US Military aid or intelligence to Ukraine. There's the opposite. In fact, as the US has said, it will assist in finding more Patriot missile defense systems after Zelensky mentioned they were sorely needed. By giving Trump credit for the ceasefire initiative, Zelensky is putting the ball in Russia's court. And his apparent receptiveness to Trump's idea about the US Taking over Ukraine's nuclear power plants will appeal to Trump's transactional instincts in addition to offering Trump business deals. And I. I don't fully know what the conversation is saying here, because Ukraine, our Zelensky's office has stated like, we're not considering handing the U.S. control. I think this may be something like what happened with the energy deal, where essentially what they talked about was the US Having a financial interest in the rebuilding and expansion of the Ukrainian nuclear power grid, which would be an extension of existing programs because Ukraine's nuclear power grid is already very reliant on a US Nuclear energy company, Westinghouse, that provides both. Both the raw fuel for nuclear reactors to Ukraine and also provides a lot of, like, actual technology for different kind of systems in the reactors. So I kind of think that what's happening here Is that basically, it was floated like, well, we can extend and expand this deal so the US Will have a financial interest in this potentially very large Ukrainian industry. And then Trump and his people kind of took that and said to everyone else, yeah, the US Is going to be in charge of Ukraine nuclear power. That's my best guess for what happened here.
- [163:37]
Mia Wong
It really seems like we're relearning one of the last lessons from the administration, which is if you can be the last person in the room with Trump, you can.
- [163:44]
Robert Evans
Yes.
- [163:44]
Mia Wong
What he does.
- [163:45]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [163:48]
Garrison Davis
Mia, do you want to do a tariff talk?
- [163:50]
Robert Evans
Wait, wait, did you say tariffs, Garrison? Or did you say, ah, God, feels good every time. Okay, Mia, sorry. You can talk about the actual news now.
- [164:15]
Mia Wong
Let's do this. So the news we have today is that effectively every single thing I have talked about on tariff talk before, this is just the fucking prelude, you know, and those have been very, very extreme tariffs. But these are. Are effectively going to be looked back on as the opening series of skirmishes and sort of probing defenses. On April 2, Trump is going to crash the entire world economy. He is calling this Liberation Day. On April 2, he is planning to impose reciprocal tariffs on every single country on Earth.
- [164:48]
Robert Evans
Finally, you know what? I'm completely on board. As long as we're finally sticking it to those snotty fucks in Oman, you know, then, then, then everything's good. It's about goddamn time.
- [165:01]
Mia Wong
Now, I'm gonna take a fucking victory lap here because I have been talking about this for a very, very long time. I talked about this last year. I talked about this the beginning of last year. I talked about this the end of last year. The entire media seems to have sort of forgotten about this until they all suddenly remembered this week that Trump had promised to do reciprocal tariffs. So what reciprocal tariffs are, in theory, is if there's a tariff on something from another country, the US Matches it. So the way the Trump administration thinks about tariffs is deeply weird. So they're including on goods in countries.
- [165:28]
James Stout
Wow. Which is like a sales tax in the U.S. yeah, yeah.
- [165:31]
Mia Wong
And.
- [165:32]
Jenny Keasden
But.
- [165:32]
Mia Wong
And. But also, like, subsidies. And also. And this is the part that has gotten less things, but quote, unquote, currency manipulation. Now, how the fuck do you do you calculate that for literally every single country on Earth? Who knows? Business Insider has some reporting on this where they talk to some insiders and. Okay, so literally there are not enough people working on tariffs to, like, calculate out individual tariff rates for every single country on Earth. It looks like the plan right now, and this is all subject to change. Because, again, this is Trump administration, and who the fuck knows what they're going to be saying or doing in two weeks? But what we know right now is it looks like they're going to separate every country on earth into three tiers of tariffs. So there's going to be, like a low tier, a mid tier, and a high tier. And it's unclear exactly what levels they're going to be. These are going to be on top of all of the, like, additional tariffs that they've already imposed. So say, for example, China gets put into high tier one, they put, like, a 50% tariff on it. That means the tariff rate is going to be 70%, because there's already 20% tariffs on there. Business Insider seem to think 20% is, like, the low one. I don't know about that. I think they're going to be pretty high. We have no idea. And again, so what's happening here is Trump is declaring this Liberation Day because he has convinced himself. I think I finally understand what's going on in his brain, which is that he's convinced himself that, like, if you have a trade deficit with a country, that means the country's robbing you. Right?
- [166:53]
James Stout
Yes. Yes.
- [166:54]
Robert Evans
Again, Trump's firm, lifelong belief is that if you are selling something, you've won, and if you are buying something, you have lost.
- [167:03]
Mia Wong
Yeah. Now, this is not how international trade works at all for the U.S. like, the entire U.S. empire.
- [167:09]
Robert Evans
Absolutely not.
- [167:10]
Mia Wong
The entire U.S. empire is based on outsourcing a bunch of political violence to other countries so you. So you can buy goods at cheap rates. Right. Like, that's, that's, that's, that's what the empire is.
- [167:19]
Robert Evans
Yeah. We love buying things. It's the entire basis of our civilization.
- [167:24]
James Stout
Yeah. The reason Jeffrey Bezos was at the inauguration is because we like to be buying.
- [167:29]
Robert Evans
Yes.
- [167:29]
Mia Wong
Yeah. And so something I mentioned, you know, back, back when I was talking about this in the tariff episode right after the election, is that the thing about reciprocal tariffs. Right. Is that it means that if anyone attempts to fight a trade war with the U.S. so another country imposes 20% tariffs, the U.S. will also impose 20% tariffs. And this just spirals out of control into a version of a trade war. So unhinged, like, none of us have ever seen anything like it in our lifetimes.
- [167:51]
Robert Evans
Hell, yeah, brother.
- [167:53]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [167:53]
Mia Wong
So that's coming. We have. We now have April 2nd as the day everything explodes. I also want to put, like, another note here. The hope has always been from a lot of countries and a lot of the financial markets and a bunch of companies that these tariffs are going to have more exemptions because there were some exemptions on stuff in the initial tariffs on Mexico and Canada.
- [168:13]
Robert Evans
Well, and he kept going back and forth, right?
- [168:15]
Mia Wong
Yeah. But now we're getting into tariffs which have no exceptions. The steel and aluminum tariffs have had no exemptions at all, what we've been hearing. So one of the things I've been noting is that Canada and the EU have been basically mobilizing in the trade war and imposing reciprocal tariffs on the U.S. china has two, Mexico has not. Apparently, Mexico still thinks that they can negotiate to be in, like, the lowest tier of tariffs. This won't completely destroy their economy. Fuck if I know why they think that, but who knows? Yeah, but that. That's. That's a fact. That's effectively the tariff news we have right now. We have, again, April 2, quote, unquote, liberation Day, the day that this all goes into effect. I bet they wanted to do April 1st and realized that they couldn't.
- [168:56]
Robert Evans
No.
- [168:57]
James Stout
Yeah, I didn't think that.
- [168:58]
Garrison Davis
So Trump. Trump announced this during his joint congressional address, and he openly said that he originally wanted to do it on April 1st at the start of the month, but decided not to because he is too superstitious as a person. So, yes, originally they were going to be on April 1, and then they pushed it back to April 2 because they didn't want it to be on April Fool's Day.
- [169:21]
James Stout
That's good. That's a good way to run things. I'm glad we're.
- [169:23]
Garrison Davis
So. That's a great, great extra insight into the. Into the mind of the US God King.
- [169:30]
James Stout
Cool.
- [169:31]
Garrison Davis
Anyway, let's go on ad break and then come back to discuss all of the other bad things that are happening in the country. Okay, we're back. The first thing I want to kind of open to a group discussion on is that on Tuesday, March 18, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction blocking Trump's ban on trans people serving in the military, ruling that the blanket ban likely violates constitutional rights. Stephen Miller responded to the ruling by writing, district court judges have now decided that they are in command of the armed forces. Is there no end to this madness?
- [170:16]
Robert Evans
God.
- [170:17]
James Stout
Fuck.
- [170:18]
Garrison Davis
So I know this is a topic that, like, we have. We've discussed a lot. As you know, know, we're not all big US US Military defenders.
- [170:26]
Robert Evans
No. But it's mostly done bad stuff in my lifetime.
- [170:31]
Garrison Davis
But we still take, like, almost like an ontological issue with this ban because it essentially creates just a secondary class of citizen with, with fundamentally different rights from the rest of everyone else. And that is never a good thing.
- [170:46]
Robert Evans
It's like, so right now, one of the the semi positive news stories is that Trump's ATF is going to be for the first time restoring people's Second amendment rights who had them taken away because they were involuntarily institutionalized. And I've seen a lot of liberals being like, oh, they're just gonna let more crazy people have guns? This is bad. And like, I have to disagree whether or not you like it, the Second amendment is a fundamental right under the Constitution. And it's bad to say that this class of people forever lose a fundamental right because they're involuntarily institutionalized. That's bad. And likewise, even if you hate the US Military's role in US imperialism, which, fine enough, the right to serve in an integrated military has been a major underpinning of most of the civil rights movements, like a foundational underpinning of most civil rights movements in this country's history, including going back to the Civil War, you know, black civil rights rights, including LGBTQ rights, and including women's rights. Right. It's like, it is significant. And so the fact that the GOP is attempting to peel this back and essentially reverse integration of the military is bad for two reasons. One, it represents, as you've said, creating separate classes of people and peeling fundamental what. What are considered under the law in this country. Fundamental rights away from groups of people. And it's also just dangerous for them to remake the military into an all white organization. Right. Like all white male organization. There's a reason why that's also dangerous to you. So, yeah, I think people should care about this, even if they're, you know, leftists.
- [172:29]
James Stout
Yeah. And like, especially in this country, the military represents one of the few social mobility tools that exist. Right. People don't just join the military because they, contrary to what you might have seen on twitter.com they want to go to Middle east and kill people. Sometimes they do it because they want to get a chance to go to education. Sometimes they want to do it so they get a chance to have health care.
- [172:48]
Robert Evans
Yep.
- [172:48]
James Stout
And like, trans people serve at a higher rate than CIS people. That may not be the case for very much longer, but, like, that has been the case. And they have rights to use however they want. They don't just have rights to use how you or I or anyone else would like them to use them.
- [173:02]
Robert Evans
Well, and that's also a broad truth for the US Military. Members of marginalized groups have always served at a higher rate than basically anyone else. This includes, like, Native Americans serve as, at a higher proportion of, like, their, their population within the country than most other groups, in part because traditionally serving in the military was a way in which to gain, like, acceptance and entrance into American society.
- [173:29]
Garrison Davis
It's also just like another world. Like, you can feel in some ways, like, insulated from, like, yes. The hoarders you might experience in, like, regular suburban life. Oddly enough.
- [173:39]
James Stout
Yeah. It's a way out of the, I don't know, isolation that so many people experience in the world.
- [173:43]
Mia Wong
And, like, is it extremely bad that the way that you integrate into American society is by being a part of the Imperial War machine? Yes, yes. But also, the war machine is going to be there whether you are in it or not.
- [173:57]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [173:57]
Mia Wong
And the actual fundamental, important thing here is, again, what we've been saying is that, like, the fundamental basis of liberal democracy, going back to the American Revolution, going back to the French Revolution, going back to, like, the original liberal revolutions, the fundamental principle of it is that everyone is equal before the law. And the moment that ceases to be true, and it has not been true in this country ever. But, you know, we're seeing increasing numbers of people who are not considered equal before the law. We just spent this entire fucking, like, first part of this episode talking about what happens when people are considered to have no protections under the law, which is that the state can just fucking black bag you and send you to a gulag. Yeah, like that. That is bad. Not. That's what's fundamentally at stake here. Not like, whether you think the army is good.
- [174:40]
James Stout
Yeah. And imagine for those people, like, when they. People could have served 19 years. Right. They could have been just about to get their 20 years and get their retirement and will now not get that. Like, they, they signed up expecting a thing. Right. Like, like there was a quid pro quo there that they would give 20 years of their life and possibly a lot of their health to the United States government, and in return, they will get health care and, and a pension for the rest of their lives. And people are now going to lose that.
- [175:04]
Garrison Davis
Yeah. In some related news, the VA just announced that, quote, effective immediately, the VA will not offer cross sex hormone therapy to veterans who have a current diagnosis or history of, or exhibit symptoms consistent with gender dysphoria, unless such veterans are already receiving such care from the VA or such veterans were receiving such care from the military as a part of and upon the separation from. From the military service. Service and are eligible for VA health care. So basically, they will not be admitting, like, new patients to receive gender affirming healthcare.
- [175:39]
James Stout
Well, unless they're cisgender, it seems like.
- [175:41]
Garrison Davis
Oh, yes. Correct. Yes.
- [175:43]
James Stout
If it's just to be clear, CIS men can still receive gender affirming hormones.
- [175:46]
Garrison Davis
Sure. I mean, like, I kind of get annoyed when people do that, like, comparison, because, like, that's never, like, we're falling into, like, this Archer trap of, like, we're. We're actually using words to mean what they mean. And, like, they're not using words like that. You know, like, whenever people, like, laugh about haha. They banned pronouns at school now. Now you can't say the word I and you're like, no, like, come on.
- [176:07]
Jenny Keasden
Like what?
- [176:08]
Garrison Davis
Like, that's not what they mean. Like, you have to understand, like, the dog whistles that they're using.
- [176:12]
James Stout
Yeah, it's. I found it interesting, though, that they seemingly, like, you try to even get around, like, that, like, linguistic thing in their statement.
- [176:20]
Jenny Keasden
Sure.
- [176:20]
Garrison Davis
I mean, like, it depends what you mean by gender dysphoria. Right. Like, you could, theoretically, you could have gender dysphoria because. Because you're a CIS male and you want to become more masculine. Right. Like, like all, all of these diagnoses have, like, a very fuzzy ontological underpinning. Right. These are just categories that we're projecting.
- [176:36]
Robert Evans
Yes.
- [176:37]
Garrison Davis
But this is, you know, probably not great. It's probably isn't a good thing. Like, for instance, if you already have VA healthcare, you're not in the military. Military anymore, and now you decide that you would like to receive gender affirming healthcare. Now you can't. At least through the va. Yep. So as a. As a related thing, let's see. I think we should kind of close with or like, bookend our discussion on, like, like, the immigration stuff and the black baggings and deportations which have been happening. A German immigrant named Fabian Schmidt, who's lived in the States with the green card.
- [177:09]
Robert Evans
Such a German name, beautiful.
- [177:11]
Garrison Davis
Since 2008. So, like, he's lived here quite a while. He immigrated with his mom. He was detained and tortured at the Boston Logan Airport upon returning from a visit to Europe.
- [177:20]
James Stout
Europe.
- [177:20]
Garrison Davis
The man's mother says that he was, quote, unquote, violently interrogated at the Logan airport for hours and was stripped naked, put in a cold shower by two officials, and pushed back into an interrogation chair. I'm going to quote from wgbh. Quote, she said Schmidt told her immigration agents pressured him to give up his green card. She said he was Placed on a mat in a bright room with other people at the airport with little food or water, suffered sleep deprivation, and was denied access to his medication for anxiety and depression. He hardly got anything to drink, and then he wasn't feeling very well and he collapsed, said a senior, which is his mom. He was transported by ambulance to Mass General Hospital. He didn't know it at the time, but he also had the flu, unquote. Now, Schmidt has since been transferred to multiple ICE facilities. He had a misdemeanor charge for marijuana possession in California back in 2015, but that charge was dismissed the following year due to changes in state law. But I think this incident may have flagged Schmidt on the customs and border protections like database. And Hillary Beckham, CBP's assistant commissioner for Public affairs, gave a short statement reading, quote, when an individual is found with drug related charges and tries to re enter the country, officers will take proper action, unquote. But essentially they like tortured, black bagged this person who's had a green card for like almost two decades for a dismissed marijuana charge like 10 years ago. This is like, you know, like a very white man, like Fabian Schmidt. This is super freaky stuff.
- [178:57]
James Stout
Yeah, we should say that a lot of that stuff is not particularly unusual in ICE detention lights, being on time, not being given bedding, but like being shoved into a cold shower is.
- [179:06]
Garrison Davis
That was at the airport. They said, like, like being. Being interrogated like at, at the airport.
- [179:11]
James Stout
That's, that's, this is a new one.
- [179:13]
Garrison Davis
And like being forced to like, forcibly, like, give up your green card during this, like, yeah, interrogation session at that very same airport, like, I think just maybe like a day or so later. A Lebanese doctor and professor at Brown University, Rasha Awiya, was deported this weekend after traveling to Beirut to visit family and attend the public funeral of Hassan Nasrallah. Upon return to the United States, she was detained at the Boston airport, had her H1B visa revoked, and was deported on a plane to France on Friday, March 14, before she could attend her in person hearing that following Monday. According to court documents, her deportation was prompted by deleted pictures on her phone of like Shia Muslim figures like Nasrallah and the Ayatollah. Another very, very frightening incident in those documents. It's unclear how Customs and Border Protection was viewing deleted photos on her phone or like, like, like, like open up her phone, right? Because like, if you recently deleted a photo, it is still contained in your recently deleted folder, assuming you have like an iPhone or equivalent. But it's unknown how they like got into her phone, if she like let them look through it or if they used one of like a many like.
- [180:28]
James Stout
Phone break or whatever. Yeah.
- [180:30]
Garrison Davis
But I think it is interesting that this is at the same airport to, you know, slightly related incidents.
- [180:37]
James Stout
But yeah, we've seen that a lot with like in the similar cases, people crossing the land borders, San Isidro. But I think a Canadian and German citizen were both detained, which is in San Diego County Fair. It's not familiar. Like, it seems like there's some kind of policy at certain border crossings or maybe like the person in charge there is saying, do this, you know, detain people at the as anything on their record at all.
- [181:01]
Mia Wong
Well, so. And there's another case of this that's similar where a French researcher, who to the best of my knowledge is unnamed so far, was randomly pulled aside for a stop at George Bush International Airport in Houston, which is sort of fitting for all of this. George Bush has gotta be fucking creaming his pants thinking about all this black bagging shit. But yeah, was randomly pulled over and they found anti Trump texts on his phone and immediately deported him. This is a guy who was visiting the US like I think to go to a conference. And the Border patrol is arguing that anti Trump texts are considered terrorism, which is great. Or the texts that they found are like, could be like the anti Trumpness of it can be considered terroristic. So that's bad. There was yet another case which is a slightly different one, which is Badr Khan Suri, who is a postdoc at Georgetown who was detained and sent to an immigration facility, who's here teaching. He's a postdoc at Georgetown on a student visa who has been sent to an immigration facility based on basically a right wing panic about his wife, his wife's father being Hamas. And because of this, he's been black bagged in a way very similar to Mahmoud Khalil. Yeah. Now Georgetown is backing him on this, but this is, you know, this is another one of these fucking black baggings that they're just doing now with someone who is here on a student visa who has committed no crime, who Georgetown was like, has committed no crime. And again, also, even if he committed a crime, this is fucking horseshit. But yeah, all of these things are just continuing to ramp up and they're getting bolder and bolder.
- [182:34]
Garrison Davis
Robert, do you want to, do you want to read a select paragraph or two from, from Khalil's first like public statement?
- [182:42]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [182:43]
Robert Evans
So he, he put out a letter a couple of days before we recorded this and you should really read the whole thing if you just Google Mahmoud Khalil letter. I mean, I think the exact title is my name is Mahmoud Khalil and I am a political prisoner. Which is the first sentence of the the letter. But I want to read this little bit of him talking about his arrest. On March 8, I was taken by DHS agents who refused to provide a warrant and accosted my wife and me as we returned from den dinner. By now the footage of that night has been made public. Before I knew what was happening, agents handcuffed and forced me into an unmarked car. At that moment, my only concern was for Noor's safety. I had no idea if she would be taken too, since the agents had threatened to arrest her for not leaving my side. DHS would not tell me anything. For hours, I did not know the cause of my arrest or if I was facing immediate deportation. At 26 Federal Plaza, I slept on the cold floor. In the early morning hours, agents transported me to another facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey. There I slept on the ground and was refused a blanket despite my request. My arrest was a direct consequence of exercising my right to free speech as I advocated for a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza, which resumed in full force Monday night. With January ceasefire now broken, parents in Gaza are once again cradling two small shrouds and families are forced to waste starvation and displacement against bombs. It is our moral imperative to persist in the struggle for their complaints, complete freedom. And again, I really recommend reading the whole thing.
- [184:13]
Jenny Keasden
It's.
- [184:14]
Robert Evans
It's very good.
- [184:16]
Garrison Davis
But yeah, I get so particularly upset that Trump's admin uses like this, like vague anti Semitism justification for, for, for some of these actions, at least, because the head of Trump's anti Semitism task force just last week retweeted Patrick Casey, who is from the American Identity Movement, a leading alt right figure who was at Charlottesville, to quote Shane Burley, this tweet that was reposted by the head of this anti Semitism task force claimed that, quote, trump has the ability to revoke someone's Jew card.
- [184:53]
Mia Wong
Yeah, it's absolutely fucking horrifying.
- [184:55]
Robert Evans
Are we, Are you, are we serious here?
- [184:56]
Garrison Davis
It's like unbelievable, unbelievable amounts of anti Semitism spread by the person who leads the federal task force to combat anti Semitism.
- [185:07]
Robert Evans
Great.
- [185:07]
Mia Wong
Yeah. And going back to Colombia for a second, one of the other things that's been happening is that Trump threatened Colombia with the loss of $400 million of government contracts unless they give in to A bunch of Trump's demands. So Trump wants them to ban masks on campuses, allow campus cops to do more violence against student protesters and expel, like, protesters who occupy buildings. The president is supposed to get control of all discipline and can expel and suspend students. And they want to crack down student groups. They want. And this is also a tie into the other thing they want the IHRA definition of anti Semitism. And like, specifically, the Trump's like, letter to them specifically says, like, classifying anti Zionism as anti Semitism. And they want to put the Middle East, South Asian and African studies departments in academic receivership, which means stripping away power from the faculty and giving it to someone outside.
- [185:54]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [185:54]
Mia Wong
Columbia is about to give in to these demands. It seems like they want to try to find another word other than academic, academic receivership, but they're just going to fucking do it. So, and Trump, does Trump have legal authority to do this? No, obviously not. But, you know, does he have the moral authority to do this? No, obviously not. Like, this guy is.
- [186:08]
Robert Evans
No, but none of those are important. He has guys with guns. That's what it always comes down to. And then anyone who forgets that is, is only hurting themselves.
- [186:17]
Mia Wong
Like. Yeah. And so he's also doing this thing of like, attempting basically to dismantle a bunch of the higher education institutions in this country unless they become just pure right wing sort of laboratories. And another example of this is as the news stories about Columbia were coming out, like Columbia trying to take the deal were coming out. The University of Pennsylvania is about to lose $175 million of funding for allowing Lia Thomas, a trans swimmer, to swim for their college. So this is just going to be a giant sort of battering ram that Trump is going to use to just basically obliterate the education system and impose whatever unhinged right wing thing that he wants to impose.
- [186:55]
Garrison Davis
And we will talk more about his efforts to destroy the education system next week on our next episode of ed. As. As he is continuing to prep an executive order to abolish the Department of Education. And there's plenty of plenty other news, including the, the federal judge confrontations that we will also report on next week. But before we leave today, Mia has a, a brief note on the bird fluid flu, which I'm sure will be fine, frankly, I'm still eating it eggs. But Mia.
- [187:26]
Mia Wong
Yeah, so as, as people did with the Boyd flu. So, so the, the thing, the thing about chickens is that they're dying from bird flu right now. This has killed an enormous number of chickens. This is part of why egg prices are so high. Now, this is a problem that a lot of countries have dealt with. China has dealt with this by just fucking vaccinating their chickens. The Biden administration refused to vaccinate chickens because it would cost money and because it might make it harder for us to export their chickens. So that was bad. RFK Jr literally just wants to let the bird flu rip and kill all the birds and thinks that the healthy birds will survive and those healthy birds.
- [187:58]
Robert Evans
Herd immunity.
- [187:59]
Mia Wong
Yeah, yeah, he thinks herd immunity.
- [188:02]
James Stout
Flock immunity.
- [188:03]
Mia Wong
He is a herd immunity guy for Covid because he's a human eugenesis. He's also a chicken eugenicist. Now, I'm specifically doing this because I read multiple virologists reading about this, writing about this. I talked to virologists and the virologist all basically said if you were trying to design a way to make. To make the bird flu like move, like mutate in such a way that it moves from birds to humans, this is what you would do.
- [188:26]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [188:27]
Robert Evans
Great. And again, the death rate of this thing is staggering in a completely different category from fucking Covid. It makes Covid look like having a mild case of allergies, like staggeringly lethal. And it cannot overstate how disastrous this would be.
- [188:48]
James Stout
Yeah. And Covid killed more than a million Americans. Like, just in case people have memory hold that. Yeah.
- [188:53]
Robert Evans
Right now, current rates when it has reached humans is about a 50% fatality rate. They thought initially that they were missing a lot of cases and that it was much lower. But like the current research points to suggests that that is not the case. That it is actually somewhere in that range of lethality.
- [189:12]
Mia Wong
Yeah.
- [189:12]
Garrison Davis
So I'm still eating my chicken tartar. I don't know why everyone's so worried about it.
- [189:18]
Robert Evans
Yeah. And again, we don't know that like the version that actually is able to jump from human to human after jumping from bird to human would be that lethal. Because that doesn't exist quite yet.
- [189:30]
Mia Wong
Probably. Yeah.
- [189:32]
Garrison Davis
But this is how we find out.
- [189:34]
Robert Evans
We really don't want to find out.
- [189:37]
Mia Wong
Yeah, look, if you don't want to find out, we have to find. Find a way to get RFK Jr. Out of that fucking office.
- [189:42]
Robert Evans
Like, again, I think if we. We really need to have a lot of different farmers set up photo ops with him where he is just covered in birds. We need to have that man in constant physical contact with chickens. He would do it and the problem will eventually solve itself.
- [189:57]
Mia Wong
We could convince him to eat raw chicken. We could definitely do it.
- [190:00]
Garrison Davis
Sure.
- [190:01]
Robert Evans
Yes, absolutely raw. Eat them, cuddle them, sleep with them at night. Just kind of stand on a pile of their corpses.
- [190:09]
Garrison Davis
All right, all right.
- [190:10]
James Stout
If you are a chicken or you know, a chicken or you have anything else that you would like to share with us, you can do so. Well, not anything else. It should be related to the news and things that we can report on. You can send it to coolzonetipson Me.
- [190:26]
Garrison Davis
And it's only encrypted if you also use encryption to send the message. It's end to end.
- [190:31]
James Stout
Yeah, it's a Proton manager. That means yeah, you have to send from encrypted to encrypted. It still doesn't mean it's not. It's perfectly safe. That just means it's encrypted. So send what you think you can send over an email that is that.
- [190:45]
Garrison Davis
Way we reported the news.
- [190:47]
James Stout
We reported the news.
- [190:53]
Robert Evans
Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the Internet universe.
- [190:59]
Mia Wong
It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media.
- [191:04]
Jenny Keasden
Visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It.
- [191:13]
Mia Wong
Could Happen here, listed directly in Episode Descriptions.
- [191:16]
Jenny Keasden
Thanks for listening.
- [191:20]
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Mia Wong
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- [194:11]
Jenny Keasden
This is an I Heart podcast.