It Could Happen Here Weekly 134
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Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.

Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast being recorded something like 19 hours into bargaining with management, thus at the peak of maximal derangement. And also about an hour after former President Donald John Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records for his election time payoff of Stormy Daniels. We can only hope that this will bring voting rights to the long-suffering felons of Florida. And realizing that that kind of sounds like a joke, it's actually not. It is in fact

really messed up that you can just disenfranchise an entire class of people and maybe the law hurting someone famous will do something good. Now, that's all the time we have to talk about Trump right now. If you want to hear more about that, you can go to literally everyone who's ever done any media-related thing ever. However, comma, we now have to talk about the other candidate in the 2024 election, Joe Biden, which means this is all the fun you're getting for this episode. It is now time for you to suffer and...

with me to talk about suffering and specifically the suffering of my well I was gonna say my people like it's like one of my people's question work I don't know identity is complicated sometimes you're more than one thing at a time is Corinne Green who's part of a Southern Transfem collective launching a very long list of projects that you will be hearing about very shortly she also used to be work on policy for the Equality Federation and for the Transgender Law Center yeah Corinne welcome to the show.

Thank you so much. Happy to be here. And yeah, I'm excited to get the opportunity to kind of talk about maybe what is behind some of the press releases and the HRC list of accomplishments that gets posted at me all the time when I complain about lack of action on trans policy.

You know, I really should have looked this up beforehand, but I once one of my friends dragged me in college to a queer movie screening that I went to because I hadn't eaten all day and they had food. They ended up being this this really great little kind of I think it's like an indie movie thing that's about this group of queers robbing, stealing a blood diamond from the from the HRC. Great movie. Ten out of ten. I wish I remember what it was called.

In the movement at the time, we all joked that HRC stood for Hillary Rodham Clinton rather than the White's campaign because of how in the tank they were. So as the listener may have guessed, we need to talk about Joe Biden's, quite frankly, really terrible record on trans rights. And to do that, we need to talk a little bit about where the power of the president comes from because –

You know, the sort of traditional liberal wonk theories of the president tend to either focus on the discursive effects of what the president says or the president's ability to negotiate with Congress to get bills passed. But this largely is not where the president's power comes from. The president's power comes from, I guess, three things, two of which are very similar. One is just literally the command of the military, right? The president sends...

Since Barack Obama, although Bush was doing similar things, has claimed the legal authority to kill any man, woman, or child the moment they leave U.S. or regardless of their citizenship status. This is the legal foundation of the drone program, and it is still in place to this day. The second one – I'm talking a lot about Obama here because Obama weirdly established a lot of these kind of legal frameworks – but the second one has to do with their ability to control the nation's intelligence services.

One of the things that Obama did was personally coordinate the multi-agency crackdown on Occupy. And then the third thing, and this is where really most of the power is, is through the unbelievably massive federal bureaucracy. So I do kind of get a sense of this. And anytime you hear the words, the department of, that is the thing the president has the ability to do shit with. That is a very simplified version of it, but-

Yeah, you know, when you're dealing with an office whose power is largely bureaucratic, it means that if you want to figure out what they're actually doing, you have to dig really deep into the depths of the American bureaucracy. So, okay, let's do that. And yeah, first I want to ask you about PPACA 1557.

which is a part of the Affordable Care Act. Otherwise, is it still better known as Obamacare? Do the kids remember Obamacare? Yeah, they reclaimed it, I think. The Libs took it back. I've been having this realization that people don't remember Obama-era stuff, which is why I'm saying, like, I said, I started saying Ferguson to people, and they had no idea what I was talking about, and I was like, oh, no, we've entered the disaster era. So, yeah, can you talk about what that is and what it sort of...

says about what the Biden administration isn't doing. Yeah, absolutely. So as you mentioned, it's part of the Affordable Care Act. And so Section 1557 is the regulatory implementation of the non-discrimination parts of the Affordable Care Act.

Back in the day, when we were fighting to prevent Trump from rolling back some 1557 protections, we actually, our comms people came up with a much sexier name than Section 1557, but it never took off with any of the policy people. And so I don't even remember what I'm supposed to be calling it right now. So yeah, you ever hear people say Section 1557, what they're referencing is basically the non-discrimination part of

And so the Affordable Care Act, as people have probably noticed by now, touches practically all of the U.S. health care system and has extended, especially through Medicaid expansion, federal dollars into health care even more than they had been previously with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Supplements for insurance, through Medicaid expansion and those kinds of things. And so there's actually a lot of control that the Department of Health or Health and Human Services and associated other parts of bureaucracy like Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services, those kinds of things.

have over implementation. And so one of the ways that this works is when legislators write a law, they don't go into all the details. They just pass a law, right? And so most times, especially at the federal level, after a law is passed, the relevant agencies that are going to be dealing with that part of the law

work on and issue rules or regulations. You might hear them called either thing, but they mean the same thing, right? So it's basically the additional agency policies and procedures that they issue through the formal process governed by the Administrative Procedures Act. Very exciting. I know this is going to be like just bombshell episode.

Terrible stuff is coming. Don't worry. You got to hold on. It's going to get really bad. I'm giving you the foundation to make sure you can get maximally angry along with me. And so they create the rest of the implementation of the laws that Congress passes. Right. And so in this particular case for Section 1557, it deals specifically with non-discrimination. So it deals with

race, sex, gender, sexual orientation, any inequality you can typically find in federal non-discrimination laws actually in 1557. And so it's obviously been kind of going back and forth as a political football between the Obama administration and then the Trump administration. And then I don't even know if I'm going to give Biden credit for treating it as a football.

And so there's this regulatory process that has been going forward and been rolled back and going forward and been rolled back. And then simultaneously, there are several, I don't know the current number, but several court cases over 1557 from various eras. I think there's still...

At least one case ongoing from the Obama era, 1557 reg, there's some ongoing from the Trump reg, and then obviously folks might have seen in the news that states like mine, Louisiana, that have a governor and attorney general super focused on raising their own profile, have already filed suit against the recently issued Biden era Section 1557 regulation.

And so there is a lot of fighting around trans people, specifically, go figure. It has been, we've been hot right now for the last four years or so. It's not been a super exciting time. And it has actually impacted, if you know how to read the policy tea leaves, it has actually impacted what we have gotten out of the Biden administration in terms of actual trans policy.

And I've been doing trans policy for a very long time, started at the state level in Louisiana. You can't get paid to do queer policy in Louisiana. So I moved out to Oakland to work for Transgender Law Center for a while. And that was actually where I created the joint Protect Trans Health campaign. It was actually the first ever coordinated collaboration between the National Center for Transgender Equality and Transgender Law Center. They had never formally worked together on something before.

But for trans policy folks, Section 50 and most of the country, frankly, obviously, health care is like the thing. Right. It's always been really terrible in this country, no matter kind of what. And so taking care of people's what should be a right to access health care has been really, really important. I kind of considered it since 2017 the most important thing.

trans policy issue to work on. And so this is definitely kind of to the sense that you are a nerd like me and you have, you know, headline regulatory actions that you're looking out for and hoping to influence and doing things around. This is kind of the premier regulatory action, in my opinion, in the trans policy space. I'm trying to what it what it should ideally do is safeguard and guarantee trans people's access to health care, including gender affirming care.

It does not if you actually read the 558 page final rule. But if you just read like the press releases and the quotes that the head of human rights campaign give, you might have a different understanding currently. And that's what I'm hoping we can kind of get into today.

Yeah, and unfortunately, before we get into that, we have to do one of the other things that is required of trans people, which is promoting capitalism if you want to have a job. So here are some ads. Oh god, we're going to end up with like some campaign ad from a Louisiana rep or something. Oh my, they don't even, they have a super jarry that they've been flexing muscle on. They don't need to, they're fine. Yeah.

And we are back with some tea. So, yeah, let's talk about what what has been happening and what was actually in the rules that no one who's not a bureaucrat or a policy activist has actually read.

Yeah, so I think a little more background will help you get just as angry as I need you to be, which is, you know, so the administration is large. There are a lot of people that work in the executive branch and a lot of them have, especially with this administration, where a lot of folks actually did come kind of directly from the Obama administration, they have relationships with issue advocacy organizations. So most of the nationals, the queer national organizations, advocacy nonprofits,

have relationships with executive branch folks. And so when an executive branch agency like HHS is working on a regulation that involves queer and trans people, the way it worked in the Obama administration, there was actually very close collaboration between, for example, the National Center for Transgender Equality and the administration in the writing issuance of the first Obama era 1557 protective regulation.

And so before the election and then during transition, the Biden administration was obviously in contact back and forth with all kinds of issue advocacy groups, not just the queer movement, but everybody. And they made commitments to the queer movement that would be a fairly smooth transition to working with them like we had worked with the Obama administration.

If you think back a little while, that was before the kind of current fascist dehumanization campaign had really kicked off. And so these commitments were made kind of in the Overton window from before the last four years of hell or three years of hell, however you want to time it, when they decided to come after trans people so hard.

This was back in the kind of halcyon days. I don't even know if people remember this right now, but like it used to be a thing where Democratic like presidential candidates would attack each other for not have for not being radical enough on trans health care. That was a thing that happened on the debate stage in like 2019. It feels like seven lifetimes ago now.

Yeah. And keep in mind that Biden, you know, every six months he tweets that he has our back or whatever. And then he's also called us the civil rights issue of our time. So, you know, there are some opportunities to question that and see if he stacks up. And my personal and professional opinion, this is what I do, is that he absolutely doesn't. Right.

And so one of the things that you would really, really want out of a Section 1557 regulation in a context where states have been passing trans health care bans is

is that you would want a Section 1557 regulation that deals with preventing trans discrimination in healthcare. You would want that to strongly and efficiently preempt state bans against trans care as violating a federal rule against non-discrimination.

And because these things are, you have to follow the Administrative Procedures Act when you're issuing regulations as a federal agency. And most states actually have the same, a similar kind of process. And so you kind of have to, the agencies have to show how they got to the final rule. So they issue a draft rule, invite comment. There's a comment period that you might have seen organizations asking you to submit comments for before.

And then they're actually required to read and respond to all those comments. And so if you actually pull up the 1557 final rule,

It sounds even wonkier than, for example, looking at a bill. But because of the Administrative Procedures Act and the way they have to respond to comments, there's actually a lot more kind of conversational prose, or not conversational, but regular-ass prose and not terrifying legal language in this stuff that is them directly addressing comments people, organizations have made and explaining their reasoning. And so one of the things that I think is most kind of emblematic of

How we've been failed and thrown under the bus is because of this process where they have to kind of show you how the sausage is made. You can you can look up in this regulation and see that for some additional conduct, we were promised this would come out year one. And then we were promised it would come out year two and then year three. And then I have actually heard that they were trying to push it past the election. And we kind of forced their hand on it.

So you can tell that they initially wrote the first draft of this regulation to kill health care bans, to federally preempt health care bans. There's actually, I did a Twitter thread on this about how one sentence that existed in the draft version of the 1557 rule, that one sentence alone could take down, I think the one I used for an example was Arkansas's trans health care ban.

or Missouri's actually, potentially. Because what that sentence did is it laid out very, very clearly that a determination that trans healthcare is never helpful or useful and can never be provided does not meet the bar for considered medical reasoning, right? And so states just can't do it.

And that's fantastic because that is functionally what these health care bans do. And many of them, I think the one I used as an example, even actually have include in the non-effective text, kind of the whereas preamble section of their bans. They can't help themselves. They go into all this flowery language about how trans care is never good and it's always harmful and all this stuff and garbage.

And this sentence spoke directly to those trans health care bans. And it made a firm commitment to address them as a whole, as they were happening, right, at the federal government to state level. And if you read the final rule, you will get to see them strike that sentence out and read their reasoning for striking that out.

And so you actually had this language that was very clear and very strong written relatively early on in his term, when at the time there were only a handful of trans healthcare bans that had passed. And so it didn't

So now I'm just offering conjecture, informed conjecture, conjecture informed by reading policy tea leaves. But it is my suspicion that at that time, because there weren't that many trans health care bans to preempt, they were more than willing to maintain, you know, to fulfill their commitment to us and to issue the kind of regulation that we had talked about.

But as time went on and the fascist dehumanization campaign started and ramped up and health care bans rapidly spread throughout the country, I've been doing this for a decade and I've never seen anything like this in any area of policy before.

All of a sudden, if you're holding a card that nukes state healthcare bans, when you wrote it, that card was only going to nuke a few, two or three trans healthcare bans, right? And if you're the federal government, you can expect two steamrolls in just a handful of states like that. But then later on, at this point, I forget the exact number, but it's something like 20, 20, 23 states have healthcare bans implemented. And

Now, if you're holding a card that nukes healthcare bans, you don't really get to pick and choose which healthcare bans you're going to nuke. You have to commit to nuke all of them if you play that card. And that just was not something that they seemed willing to do when it was going to make the waves that it would make with 20 to 23 or whatever states being preempted and required to make sure that trans people have healthcare access.

And keep in mind that during this period, not just did more states pass these health care bans, but the kind of national discussion and focus on trans people deteriorated horrifically. Right. And so not only were the stakes higher in terms of the kind of policy confidence and in projecting your politics, but also there was just less

I assume those lanyards run horrible polls all the time, right? And saw that we were losing points in terms of how the public views trans people because there's a lot of money being poured into this and just made the horrible, unethical, immoral calculations that Democrats make and decided that trans people weren't worth it.

And so you can see them cross that, strike that part out of the final 1557 rule. And it no longer contains any language even approaching that that is written to address states as a whole. And it is mostly what is in there at this point is the same thing that they've been telling us to do for the last over a decade, which is individual trans people who just happen to encounter discrimination in health care.

You need to submit an OCR complaint, an HHS OCR complaint. OCR stands for Office of Civil Rights. So you would think an Office of Civil Rights could maybe be proactive and notice that a state that has banned trans health care and in some places even criminalized it might be.

be ready for some enforcement, some broad enforcement. And yet they have maintained in this final rule that they expect individual trans people to file individual OCR complaints every time and that they will address each one on a case-by-case basis. They reiterate this at least a dozen times. It is one of the most offensive parts of all this, right? Because that's the only thing that HHS has ever told us about this.

Yeah, which is just nuts. Like, that's not an actual systemic way of addressing this. Can you imagine if they had done this with, like, literally any other kind of civil rights issue? Like, you know, okay, we get a state ban on gay marriage, and the department is like, yeah, you have to submit a complaint to us individually. Like, that's absolutely nuts.

Or even if states were banned insulin or something, like any other facet of healthcare. Nobody would take that. Everyone would expect, yes, the federal government will come in to make sure that people in Louisiana can still access insulin. Yeah, and instead you have this just, I mean, a complete abrogation of any, like,

Not just any responsibility, but I mean, any attempt to actually like not even like any attempt to do anything to stop any of these bands that are going to kill a like not insignificant number of people like me. Yeah. And one of the things I'd like to point out is one of the benefits of the federal government having to follow the Administrative Procedures Act is they have to talk about the previous rules in this space. And so you also get really.

I was going to say funny, but they're not funny. They're deeply depressing paragraphs about how their final rule is worse than Obama's final rule, right? And they have to explain it. One of the things I'll reference here is that Obama's final rule

I believe involved directing the Office of Civil Rights to conduct a disparate impact analysis on marginalized populations to determine if there were discriminatory outcomes in health care access, kind of even as a closed system. So they can look in from the outside and be like, oh, OK, all the trans people in the state can't access this.

X, Y, Z. So whether there is a discriminatory law or not, there is a disparate impact on this population. And that means we need to take enforcement action. And you get to read the Biden HHS right about how they're not going to do that, actually. No, no, don't. Please do not do any analysis to see if trans people are being oppressed. This would look really bad for us. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaking of looking bad for us, you know what won't look bad? It's if you buy these products and services from this ad that hopefully isn't... I don't know. I feel like we're kind of running... We've run through the cycle of the terrible ads, so I feel like we're on the precipice of there being another bunch of ads they put on the show without telling us that we can complain about. But for now, these ones. And we are back.

Yeah, and I think this is something that – I don't know. I think most people do not know this. I think most people do not understand that not only is the Biden administration not being proactive, it's like they're actively rolling back protections and they're actively rolling back things that the agency used to do under Obama, which was – in most other respects, I don't know. Again, I don't really – can I expect the people who listen to this show to remember the Obama administration now? I don't know.

I mean, I was one of the people who came, aged off my parents' health care plan, kind of

exactly right before kind of the primary PPACA protections kicked in, right? And so I had a several month period where they could still deny you health insurance using your being trans as a preexisting condition as a justification. - Oh God. - And so that actually did happen to me. I applied for health insurance and they sent me a letter that said, "You're trans, that's a preexisting condition. We're not gonna sell you health insurance." - Jesus Christ.

And so I actually did several months later, you know, those protections kicked in and the Obama administration actually did do some kind of proactive work to make sure that those were spread around the country. Like it's not nowhere, never has been as good and thorough as it should be. But it worked for me here because then when I applied again, I was not denied for being trans. Yeah. And I mean, I think that's the kind of general thing I want to say about that too, is like, you know, there were things where like,

on these kinds of issues where the Obama administration was a lot better broadly if you look at the rest of their policy it was like significantly further right in the Biden administration like Obama Obama tried to tried to like put up grand bargain together to destroy Medicaid Medicare Social Security like he he tried to do that and he was stopped by the Republicans right and

I was like, I need to give people a sense of like how far right Obama was even compared to Biden. And yet the regs are getting worse, which is not issues. He was, he was fairly, fairly good. Right. Yeah. And one, one thing that I think contributes to people, not, you know, I can't blame folks for not understanding this is happening because of the queer advocacy orgs are not talking about things this way. Right. Yeah.

And I think possibly one of the most illustrative things I can point out is when the first Title IX NPRM drops. So NPRM stands for Notice of Proposed Rulemaking. So if I drop that again, it's a screw up on my part. I don't mean to use the jargon. But so that's when they issue their first draft of a regulation and invite comment and a comment period follows, right?

So the Title IX in PRM that they released around trans students' access to sports programs and education

If you read it, the language of the actual draft policy, not the press releases people put out about it, it's functionally states' rights for athlete fans, right? It gives the states rights to come up with a justification that involves fairness and safety, and then they will have deference to pursue or whatever, which is not dissimilar to some of the ways they've done 50-57 as well.

Yeah, and to make it explicitly clear, what they're saying is that if you as a state can come up with a good enough reason, you are allowed to discriminate against trans people and prevent them doing sports. Which is, like, again, it is overt discrimination based on gender, which you should not be able to do legally. However, comma, the absolute cowardly shits at the Biden administration were like, no, you can actually do this. Go ahead, have fun.

Fascist dehumanization works. And so if you remember back to that time, all of the national queer organizations put out these glowing press releases. So I'm on the policy side, right? I'm not on the comp side. I read and analyze the policy. I tell them what it means.

And then it's unfortunately out of my hands at that point, right? And the national queer organizations have been messaging basically all of these things as great wins, moving things forward. Biden, truly the first trans president. We love him. Stuff like that, right? And so they did that for that Title IX NPRM. And then several days later, Representative Zoe Zephyr, a trans woman state representative from Montana, said,

organized the out trans state, trans and non-binary state legislators from around the country to release an open letter, which, you know, condemned the, the title nine NPRM for being dog shit. Yeah. And so that's, that's, I think maybe the, the one and only kind of a crack in the, in the facade that has gotten through over the past couple of years is when, you know, this thing came out after the policy people said, this is,

how did this happen? What the hell? And then the comms came out and they were great, glowing. You know, he loves trans people. And then, you know, the state trans electives actually said, no, this fucking sucks actually, right? Yeah. But that has not really happened for anything else because they're, you know, most of the people who do what I do, they're, you know, specialized in each and there aren't many jobs for it. And

You I could speak at length about how you don't get to speak your mind if you want to continue to stay with kind of movement employment in this sector. And so in terms of publicly being able to speak about how we're being thrown under the bus currently, there are not many folks with the expertise who are free to do that.

Yeah, I mean, I remember, like, I'm not a policy person, right? Like, I have, you know, part of this is an analytical thing, right? Like, I bailed out of going to law school because I had to read the Clean Air Act. And I was like, I will literally die if I have to do this for a living. But, you know, I remember when the sort of Title IX stuff came out and when...

And I remember trying to talk about it. I remember the pushback that I got for being like, wait, this sucks. It was enormous. It was this incredible sort of broad-front PR campaign from just so many different... And not even just... It had filtered down to the point where it wasn't just these orgs. It was just like the random people on Twitter who are supposed to follow policy stuff were falling in line. It was like everyone was coming in and it was just this absolutely terrifying...

Because most people don't actually read policy. That's the thing. Policy reporters don't, right? Yeah. Many such cases. So most people who report on policy or kind of follow policy do tend to kind of stick in the realm of those press releases and initial articles based on press releases. And so...

If there is not kind of sincerity and truthfulness on the part of the orgs that are the trusted speakers in this space, then this stuff gets successfully laundered. And I think it's intentional. I think that it, on one hand, is an intentional move to

prevent and stymie actual grassroots organizing around sincere and real and pressing trans needs. Because if you're trying to get a lot of people fired up about trans healthcare is like on fire and half the, like half the trans kids in the country don't have, we have to like, this is act up shit time. Right. But if everybody that, you know, is on your email list, if most of them have seen

HRC and NCT and all these places put out these glowing press releases, people are like, "You're crazy. Things are fine. Joe's moving things forward. We're good." And then also, I think they have kind of backed themselves into a corner in terms of how a lot of libs have backed themselves into a corner at this point, right? They know that Trump is worse on policy, even if Biden has done barely anything. Trump is obviously worse for trans people.

And so they're allowing electoral weirdness to control actual kind of policy comms in a way that I find really, really frustrating. And I think is not doing trans people, especially in the South, it's not treating them with the respect that they deserve from the organizations that claim to represent them. Yeah. And this is a thing that...

Okay, this is going to sound like a weird sidebar, but I promise if you follow this train of logic all the way, this is something you actually – this is a debate you get a lot more clearly in Latin American social movements. Because their social movements are significantly stronger than the social movements in the US, they are their own sort of coherent political basis. You get this question – And there's even like a labor movement.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, this is the thing about the labor movement. If you look at, for example, Bolivia, which has very, very strong social movements or has traditionally had very strong social movements in the last 20, 30 years. I mean, their labor movement throws dynamite at bosses, right? So they have a very strong movement. But one of the questions of these movements, and this is something that has just torn apart the MAS, their supposedly movement political party, is this question of to what extent

Should you integrate your social movement with the state? And this is a long-running debate in a bunch of social movements. Various movements have picked different directions. Some of them have become very enfolded in the state. Some of them have resisted it. And there are benefits and problems with both. But one of the big issues with trying to sort of incorporate yourself into the state is that

The state isn't just a kind of neutral body. It will, you know, it's not just that you're working with the state. The state is also working with you and it will attempt to, and its political parties will attempt to seize control of your organization and turn your organization into just a sort of, into, you know, into basically a PR outlet for whatever thing it's doing. And this becomes a real problem when your, you know, your, your party is trying to screw you.

Yeah, I mean, this came to a head in 2012, where there was a huge fight in Bolivia over a plan by the MAS to build a highway through a bunch of indigenous land. And this basically split the base of the party, right? Because the MAS had been sort of an indigenous socialist movement, and it got split between the people who supported building this road and the people who didn't.

And so, like, Eva Morales has riot police stormed the offices of one of the indigenous federations and, like, replaces them, like, replaces their leadership with guys who are loyal to him who will push this thing through, right? And, you know, I mean, the reason I'm talking about, like, this is the kind of social movement stuff I studied in college, right? And it's like, and now in the US, we are, like, kind of starting to get to the point where we have real social movements, right? And we've seen sort of, like, BLM, right?

And, you know, we sort of have something that is a queer movement and we're running into exactly the same thing where, yeah, like if you, you know, this is something you can talk about more specifically in the US, but it's like, yeah, like these orgs are on, are in the middle of this sort of state capture process. Right. And this has having really, really dog shit effects on queer people because when these organizations are, you know, become sort of media arms or become sort of political arms, right?

of these party apparatuses, they're not representing you. They're representing the party. Right.

And I think that one of the easiest places to kind of see the dynamic that you and I are talking about in current U.S. politics is in the discourse around Palestinian liberation, right? Yeah. If you try to talk with anybody about Palestinian liberation, you get beset upon on all sides by people saying, well, do you want Trump to win? You think Trump's going to be better? This like electoral project takes precedence over U.S.

you know politics guided by core values so quickly and so overwhelmingly yeah and i mean and and it's it's accelerated to a point i mean this is something i remember in during the trump years we would we would joke about this about sort of the spinelessness of liberalism like it used to be a joke that like if the democratic president did a genocide people would go oh well you still have to support him because the other guy's trump and now it's literally happening

Yeah. You know, I mean, well, so I actually started working at nationals. I took the job at Transgender Law Center right after Trump took office. And so my, you know, it was very easy for me to, especially as someone who, you know, had never worked at large advocacy nonprofits before, because go figure there's no money in doing trans work in the South. It was scrappy and under-resourced as fuck.

I got to delude myself, I think, because Trump is such a uniquely dangerous force that

a lot of people alongside me in the movement were, had the same, shared the values with me because I could see them being equally strident and vocal on kind of all the bad things that were happening. And then, you know, it's almost, it's a tired joke at this point, but, you know, Biden took over and the kids were still in cages and everybody else shut up. And I looked around and I'm like, wait, I'm still, I still care. What the hell? Where'd y'all go? Like, I want to yell about that for a second because like, so I kind of like,

This was like my sort of, well, I mean, I guess my technical origin story, there's a slight longer thing than this, but like my me being a person that anyone listened to was a product of being involved in Occupy Ice and like, you know, going out and finding like, you know, I mean, the sort of horror of that, like you can fucking hear people yelling from the inside of these buildings that they're being fucking held in.

And now, you know, Biden, like, well, we'll do a longer thing about this at some point. But like Biden is, you know, that that fucking bill that they were trying to pass, like absolutely unbelievably fascist one saying the president has the right to close the border. She's trying to just fucking do it anyways. Yeah. And they're still doing comms hits about it, making them think it makes them look good.

No, it's like, it's like they're, they're, they're doing just pure evil. Like, again, like literally without like James and his friends, there would be pile, like there still are corpses floating up in the fucking rivers on the border, but there would be fucking like, there would be stacked like mounds of corpses of people who fucking starved or died.

Like if literally James and his friends weren't down there on the border right now that, and, and, you know, and yeah, like it's, it's the thing you're talking about. It's like you, like, I remember all these people in the streets for this. I was like, I was there. I was fucking helping to organize this stuff. And then like you watch them walk away. Yeah. It's terrible. Yeah.

And I want to make clear that you're talking about kind of the pressure that a party in power can apply and the way in which these organizations can be captured, especially just due to how nonprofit funding is a whole clusterfuck and how it works here in the U.S.,

But I so so I actually a white house staffer called my executive director within an hour of my boss forwarding the White House, an analysis of mine that I'd written for a state and.

without reading it herself at all. And in this analysis, I included a dismal assessment of the likelihood that the federal government would use its power to prevent implementation of assault. This was a healthcare ban, a novel healthcare ban that the state wanted a quick turnaround on. And so my boss, direct boss, forwarded it to the White House who had asked for analysis on it without reading it at all. And within an hour of my boss forwarding it to the White House,

The White House had called our executive director to complain about me and I got written up for it. That is the fastest turnaround on anything trans that anybody has gotten out of this White House. And it was getting me disciplined for an analysis that was not for them, not being super impressed with their trans policy. And I have heard, I have a lot of colleagues in the movement who

Folks I trust completely on trans policy. And I know for a fact that I am not the only person that has had a situation like that occur. And so they are applying pressure and even in the most direct ways to the advocacy organizations. So it is happening.

Yeah. And I think the thing I wanted to close on was talking about a bit about like the consequences of this, because what happens when any of this, this is, you know, this is part of going back to me talking about Bolivia. Like this is part of how even more allies got overthrown in the coup was that because the social movements, like most of these, like a lot of these social movements have been sort of weakened to the point where they know they no longer had, you know, that they'd become policy organs of the state and not actual like fighting movements that could like effectively resist, you know,

That could do with – for example, if you look at the original coup against Hugo Chavez, the social movements were so strong that even though the army literally did a coup, they got fucking ran out by several million Venezuelans taking to the streets and just overturning the coup. And that –

I mean, that happens later. Like, there was a second round of barricades that went up that got basically no press attention in 2020. You know, there's a whole... I'll talk about that one day and how...

Hilariously, after getting bailed out, even Morales pulled his people off the barricades because they didn't actually want to overthrow the government. They just wanted an election. So he pulled people off to keep the government intact long enough. He's done this in many... This is the second time he's done this, by the way. This happened in the water wars in 2006. But, you know, but like...

In the initial period of the coup, part of the reason this was able to happen again was because the capacity of these groups to overturn something like this had been so neutered that they were able to be defeated in the streets. And we are watching our own version of this where –

Yeah, like I wanted to sort of talk to you about what's been happening, the fucking hellscape that's been happening in Louisiana as in, you know, partially because of the sort of Republicans fascist turn, but also because the resistance to them has been neutered by the fact that they're, you know, they have to like defend this Biden policy shit.

Right. And yeah, so one important point to make about the federal, the need for federal protections is that, you know, I live in Louisiana. Federal protections are all I'm ever going to have. Yeah. Right. And so if the federal protections aren't there and if there's not a federal government willing to enforce them, I'm in big trouble. Like I would bet every single dollar I have, which is not many, that my Medicaid will not cover my hormones by the end of the year. Right. Right.

And so what I think, and I've highlighted kind of before when it was very clear that Jeff Landry was going to become governor after John Bell, and actually did drug policy for John Bell for a while. And a lot of trans people were kind of quietly in his administration. I think that my friend Tucker, aside from Rachel Levine, was probably the highest ranked state executive branch trans person ever.

In history as deputy press secretary for a while. Yeah, I'm not sure. But yeah, trans people busted ass to get John Bell elected. And so we had held off a lot of this stuff for a long time, not just through having a nominally Democratic governor, but through the organizing in the South that happens on Tuesdays.

no resources whatsoever is some of the most broad-based and inspiring kind of coalitional organizing that I've ever seen. And I've done work all around the country. And the way that people are able to organize kind of cross-issue here is phenomenal.

But we are all gerrymandered to shit. We get no money, attention, resources from national groups, often the media. And especially here in Louisiana and in much of the South, like we are not an attractive place for impact litigation because we're in the Fifth Circuit and all our state courts are shit.

And so we really kind of are on our own here in a all of a sudden Republican supermajority legislature with an activist fascist governor and AG. So Jeff, Jeff Landry is very much in the model of a DeSantis or an Abbott in terms of what he is hoping to do in Louisiana and what he's hoping to get out of it in terms of his own personal profile and ambitions.

And there's so much we could talk about in terms of what's going on here, but I want to highlight specifically SB 276, which is the bill you may have seen headlines about. It's the bill that adds Mifepristone and Misopristol to the state schedule for controlled substances act. Can you explain what that actually means for people who don't? Yeah. So Mif and Miso are used for a lot of healthcare in terms of, for example,

miscarriage management, inducing labor in a hospital, but they can also be used for self-managed medication abortion. And so this has not been done anywhere else in the country where leading the charge here, no other state has ever added drugs like this to their controlled substances law. And

And so what that means is that those drugs are now going to be going through the prescription monitoring program, the PMP, which has a lot more controls and surveillance than non-controlled substances, right? So the Board of Medicine, the Board of Pharmacy, and I'm trying to do a survey now to figure out which state agencies specifically have automatic inherent access to that PMP database. But it makes it a lot more...

traceable and trackable, which is really scary for anybody trying to access reproductive and abortion healthcare in a place like Louisiana. And then the other thing it does is it raises the stakes phenomenally for the people doing the kind of, and I'm going to try to speak very carefully here, the people doing the kind of direct practical support work to work with underserved populations to make sure that they can access healthcare services that they need, right?

And it is just a it is a fact of life that, you know, just like in the harm reduction movement, there are a lot of people on the ground busting ass to get people what they need. And, you know, for a lot of times for abortion funds, it's organizing money and transportation and hotels to get people out of state. Right. Since the Florida abortion ban, we can't send people there anymore. We have to send people to Illinois, which is more expensive and further away.

And it's those people who are at risk, the people doing the work, like the backbone of the on-the-ground, grassroots, practical support, mutual aid work that are risking, I think it's, you know, five to ten years per pill if they are, you know, providing that to someone else. It's terrifying. And there's no...

We don't know what we're going to do about it yet. I just had a call last night, kind of like, what are we going to do about this? We don't know.

because it's scary. And then jumping back to kind of the problem with how nonprofit and advocacy funding works in this country, there are a lot of restrictions that come that are, you know, that organizations who are funded that way have to live with. Like, especially I'll speak to the harm reduction world, for example, you'll get a grant at your syringe exchange and they're like, here's $10,000, but you can't spend any of it on needles. And you're like,

That's my biggest expense. That's what I was going to, you know, and so it's the same kind of thing. The more that this kind of work gets criminalized and pushed to the edge, the fewer resourced organizations are able to work on it, have the money to work on it, but be just they're

legal teams, the chilling effects of this stuff are massive. And so it just falls more and more on the backs of kind of the grassroots folks who have always been making this happen for a community to the extent that they can under the harshest of circumstances. And it's people like that who are going to have to make some really tough decisions going forward. Yeah. And it's never...

There's never been a good or safe time to do stuff like this, but as it gets increasingly dangerous and as you get the downstream effects of both the legal danger and the constricting of movement space by the co-option of these NGOs, things just get...

more and more dangerous in a time where the people who need to be dangerous is us because otherwise we are going to die yeah scary time but yeah you know we we keep us fucking safe and yeah always have and always will and it's going to be rough what we're heading into but you know i again the organizing in the south is i've never seen

anything that's made me so proud to be an organizer and an activist as the work that I see in the South. And so if there's anybody who can lead the way on how to respond to these things and how to take care of each other, you know, it's our people, it's these people who've been doing it forever. So, yeah. And I think on that note, if people want to find you and the people you've been working with and the orgs that you're sort of

working with now where where can they find that on the internet or i guess other places too are there other things that are not the internet i at this point i'm who knows i really don't know

Yeah, so you can find me on Twitter. I'm Gay Narcan on Twitter. That's me. And then if you are interested in supporting kind of the work that my collective is doing, the probably best place to go for that right now is our first launched project called Trans Income Project. It's transincomeproject.org. And what that is, is an organization that is solely dedicated to doing direct cash transfers to trans sex workers in Louisiana.

We just had some of our first listening sessions with folks and

Yeah, this is going to be so kick-ass. So yeah, go there for that direct project. And then I would also encourage folks to take a look at Louisiana Trans Advocates. I used to be president there. It's a state trans advocacy organization. We're actually the state in the South that has had the longest consistent trans presence at the Capitol through Louisiana Trans Advocates. And we have no fucking money. So feel free to maybe toss something over there too if you get inspired. Yeah.

Yeah, and I will say this, given how fucking zero dollars every trans person has, like, this is one of the places where your individual dollar will go the furthest because you're like, you're $10 is like a 300% increase. I like the total funding of these arcs. All right. Well, thank you so much for coming on and talking about this. And thanks so much for having me.

Yeah, and I guess my final message to listeners, go fuck them up. You can do it too. Yeah, I agree completely. Coastline.

Hi everyone, it's me James, and I just wanted to read you this today. We're going to put it in our episode this week because it's a cause that's important to us, and so we thought it would be something that might be important to you too as well. On the 10th of June 2024, Leonard Peltier, an enrolled member of the Turtle Band of Chippewa of Lakota and Ojibwe ancestry, and the longest serving political prisoner in the United States, will be appearing before the U.S. Parole Commission for the first time since 2009.

He faces staunch opposition from the FBI and other law enforcement agencies due to having allegedly killed two FBI agents in a firefight on the 26th of June 1975 after the agents appeared on reservation land to execute a pretextual warrant.

The initial firefight occurred during the, quote, reign of terror on Pine Ridge in the wake of the occupation of Wounded Knee, a time of extreme violence when federal law enforcement installed a puppet tribal chair and was arming vigilantes who targeted indigenous traditionalists. Everything leading up to these events, as well as subsequent investigation and Mr. Pelchier's extradition, trial, conviction and sentencing were characterized by gross misconduct on the part of law enforcement, the prosecution and the courts.

Mr. Peltier's co-defendants were separately tried and acquitted on grounds of self-defense. Mr. Peltier was railroaded and his case is tainted by discrimination at every level, ranging from the withholding of exculpatory evidence to the torture and coercion of extradition and trial witnesses, and from the refusal of the judge to dismiss an avowedly racist juror to the apologetic gymnastics of the courts affirming his convictions in the face of meritorious legal challenges and admitted evidence of outrageous government misdeeds.

Mr. Peltier has been in prison for more than 48 years, and he's almost 80 years old. He suffers from chronic and potentially lethal conditions, for which he receives insufficient and substandard medical care.

If you want to take action to hashtag free Leonard Peltier, you can call the U.S. Parole Commission at 202-346-7000. And if you'd like to find more information on how to support, you can go to this URL. It's http://www.parolecommission.org.

Or you can follow NDN Collective on social media for more ways to support him. For more information on Leonard Peltier, listen to Margaret's podcast on the Lakota Nation, A Read in the Spirit of the Crazy Horse by Peter Mathewson.

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Hello everyone, welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and people putting them back together. Today we're talking about a little of both of those things. I'm joined by Rose, who's a migration activist in the Netherlands, and Mick, who has studied migration. We're going to talk about the EU's border today, and we're going to talk about, I think a lot of people, especially the bulk of our listeners in the United States, won't be aware, perhaps, of how

incredibly cruel and fatal the EU's border is, what it does to people, how it does it, where it does it. So we're going to talk about that today. It's very exciting. There's even more war than we have in the United States. So I'm looking forward to that. So hi, welcome to the show, both of you. Hi, thanks for having us. Hi, thanks for having us. Yeah, thanks for being here. The way we wanted to structure this was Mick has like an excellent presentation on the

for, we're going to structure this over two episodes. First, we want to talk about the state of things and then we want to talk about activism and ways that people can meaningfully make a difference in this situation. So Mick, yeah, if you'd like to take it away with your script here, Rose and I will interject whenever we feel like it.

Okay, fair enough. Let's go. So the EU border crisis is largely a crisis of the Mediterranean, the sea that separates Europe from Africa. And it is arguably one of the most deadly borders in the world, if not the most deadly border. According to several activist organizations, such as the United Against Refugee Deaths and Abolish Frontex,

which is the EU border agency in charge of protecting the border. Over 52,000 people have died at this border as of June 2023. This number is almost certainly higher due to a number of factors, one of which is that a significant amount of bodies are never recovered, which makes it very hard to verify whether or not someone has died or is dead.

lost somewhere in the migration routes. Migration patterns are very hard to keep track of. People travel hundreds of kilometers to simply get to a point where they can get access to boats or other means of being transported across the sea. Yeah.

I have a picture here that I would like to share with you. Listeners can find it in the notes and sources. Maybe we'll try and describe it just so, you know, if someone's driving or something, they can, I guess. Yeah, go ahead. Give me a give me a best shot.

Okay, it's a map of continental Europe with adjacent to it Africa and Eurasia. And it's a bunch of arrows coalescing onto certain points that grow bigger and bigger. And these represent the migration routes and the number of people that take a particular path.

As you can see, the thicker the line, the more people it represents. The thinner lines come from the Middle East and further to the East. In terms of obstacles and danger, I think it's safe to say that crossing Iraq or Syria is not without risk. Yeah, yeah, I've done that. It's...

Yeah, and I've done it in cars and with permission, and it's already pretty high risk. It's interesting. This map is a 2017 map. Am I saying that right? Yes, it's from the Frontex Quarterly Reports 2, which covers April till June 2017. Yeah, so maybe this is...

after the peak of people leaving that Iraq and Syria area, the so-called Islamic State. Yeah, the after 2015 mayhem. Yes, yeah, exactly. Not that there are not still significant numbers. I mean, I speak to people in Syria now

most weeks who are trying to leave Syria. It's become harder and harder due in part to the EU making its borders harder and harder and more and more deadly to cross and due to a number of other reasons. But yeah, I think those lines would have been fatter if we'd gone back like three or four years.

Yeah, I mean, people in Europe will probably have been familiar with this. I mean, of course, there's the... When was the photo taken of the young child who passed away? That was... Alan Kurdi. I think that was in the summer of 2015 or in the autumn. Yeah. Alan Kurdi.

Yeah. Boy's name was Alan Curdy. I think a brother of his drowned as well. Yeah. People can look that up if they want to, but I'll try not to include it. It's quite a horrible thing to have to witness.

No, it's not a nice photo to see. Ironically, it was one of the few moments where European people could muster some sympathy for refugees. But that waned at some point. Yeah, it's always the case. Like, I don't know. I am...

I've spoken about this before, I'll speak about it again, but the other day I was out dropping water and we came across a little three-year-old girl and her mother from Guinea. And the young girl was very hypothermic. At first we didn't notice because we were like, oh, this girl is very quiet. And then we're like, oh, okay, this girl is very, very quiet. And perhaps we should be concerned. And like...

I don't know how, and no one in their right mind would be like, yeah, this is normal and good. And I'm really glad that this child is in a place where, you know, if left for several more hours, she might die. And everyone in that situation to include people who were just driving by were like,

oh, fuck, we need to help. But sadly, when we abstract it to numbers, which is the way it's always reported on, right? It's not stories. It's not people. It's not little children. It's 50-something thousand people. It's hard to imagine 50-something thousand people dying. It's easier to feel something for one little boy. Yeah, and it's easier to feel something for a child than for a man. It's easier to feel something for...

a woman than a man and also even the death of al-qurdi despite all the yeah outrage it provoked it was also used as a to make the turkey deal which was intended to stop people crossing by boats from turkey to greece even though that was actually one of the safest migration routes we had at the time and it closed up and people started to move to libya

Instead of 3 km of sea, that meant people had to cross 100 or more km of sea, which was obviously way more deadly. Yeah, and just the journey to Libya and their time in Libya, as we'll find out later, is far from risk-free. Yeah, Libya is a very different place than Turkey. Significantly worse to be than Libya.

Turkey. So to get back on track, as you can also see from the picture, a vast majority of those migration routes cross the Sahara Desert. People who die in the desert or through other dangers on their journey do not make it to the Mediterranean and therefore tend to not end up in the statistics of people dying there. But I would still argue that it is undeniable that those people in fact died due to the migration policies

that the EU puts in place and enforces. Definitely, yeah. It's just outside of our purview. The United list of refugee deaths is taking into account anyone whose death can be attributed to the border. So they do also include people dying in the desert, but there is much less news about it. So the figures of Frontex and of IOM usually do not include those, but the number you just mentioned, the 52,000,

It also includes people who committed suicide in detention centers or who died of medical neglect in camps, but it also includes people who died further from the European border, but still on borders that are controlled or influenced by European policies. Yeah. In the US, to give a comparison example, the statistics we have that come from Border Patrol, those are the remains that are found

which is a subset of the remains that exist. And it doesn't take into account people who died crossing Mexico, Creepio who died as far south as the Darien Gap, right? Which is very dangerous and it's becoming more so as more traffic goes across it. People who died taking boats around the Darien Gap, right? Or for whatever reason didn't make it. So we too have this kind of attempt to...

I guess when we get government statistics, we have to remember that they come from a government perspective and they will try and minimize the obvious cruelty that's happening. I think that's a characteristic of almost every government that keep the numbers low and don't really engage with politics.

the actual problems that are at hand. So before we go into more specific territories, there are a few things that should be made clear. The EU does not follow their own rules about migration. Hopefully at the end of this, the listeners will also accept that the humanitarian and migration crisis is much more a product of border policies rather than the policies being a consequence of migration.

To first illustrate this, here is a quote from government.nl, the English version of the Dutch government website: "Asylum or return? All refugees entering the EU may apply for asylum. They must do this in the country where they enter the EU. Asylum seekers who do not require protection must return to their country of origin or to a safe third country. The EU respects the human rights of refugees.

both when dealing with their applications and with regard to return. So I want you all to keep this in mind when we continue because this phrasing ignores other policies that make it much harder for migrants and refugees to even enter the EU or to be able to apply for asylum.

So, and before we dive deeper into the atrocities that the EU enables, I think it's important to first briefly explain how the border system works and the history behind it.

Europe is no stranger to migration and migrants, and it is something that has been happening in waves over the past three to four decades. In the early 90s, there were multiple waves of migrants from Albania to other European countries. The main cause of this was the isolationist policies that were enforced by the communist regime that was in charge there.

the unrest that followed at the end of the regime and the crisis of Kosovo. For those unaware, Kosovo had a war with Serbia for independence and Kosovari people are largely ethnic Albanians with the same language.

And because of this, it was easier for Albanians to merge with the Kosovari refugees and use that to migrate further and easier into Europe. Other waves are caused by other geopolitical events, such as the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia, which I think Mia and Robert covered in their episode on self-immolation. Yeah.

Okay. And much more known to everyone, the wars in Syria and Libya. My interest in the border has always run parallel to my interest in conflict and reporting on conflict. And it's just become such a recurrent experience to either learn about conflicts at the border here because someone is telling me about them,

or learn about often like repression of ethnic or national or religious minorities because someone here tells me about them or to go somewhere. You know, I was in Syria in October, I was in Iraq and,

And then return and see people from there at our border. And as people will be aware, the asylum system, and we'll cover it later, the asylum system allows people who are in danger of persecution for various categories to apply for asylum.

It's not functioning. It's not functioning in the EU. It's not functioning in the US. I've seen that persecution with my own eyes and the consequences of it. And I've seen people try and get away from it. Every single time I'm in somewhere like that, people will ask me for help. And it is fucking heartbreaking to be like, yeah, the country that you see flying the F-16s or F-35s over your head, the planes that cost millions,

more than this entire town makes in a year. No, we can't have a functioning fucking immigration system. Like in the case of the US, it's this app which doesn't work and you can only use it north of Mexico City. And it's this broken system leads to people. They're not like getting in a boat across the Mediterranean, crossing the Darien Gap, walking across the mountains of northern Mexico because they want to have like a better iPhone. They're doing it because whatever the alternative is seems worse.

And it's worth, people are fully aware that they're risking their lives on these journeys. It's not like they live without access to news and the internet. They know about the deaths in the Mediterranean. They know about the Darien Gap. When I talk to migrants who haven't crossed the Gap,

I was talking to a group of Colombian migrants two or three days ago. They were coming in to the US through an area east of Jocumba, which is very rugged and very mountainous. They were coming into an open-air detention site where Border Patrol holds them. I was talking to them. I said, "How many of you walked? How many of you flew?" Most of them flew and then were able to walk forward. The ones who walked, everyone was like, "Oh, shit. That's horrible.

you must have seen terrible things. They're very aware of how dangerous these journeys are. The reason that they're taking them is because it seems like staying at home would be more dangerous. Yeah, although I would like to add that it's not every migrant is a real refugee and not every migrant has to be a real refugee. Yes. At least as the definition was established in the 50s by a bunch of pretentious guys who kind of decided this is a good reason to migrate and all other reasons are not.

At first, yeah, at first I worked in Greece and that was mainly with people of like what are considered like objectively real or good refugees, like people from Afghanistan and Iraq and Syria. Whereas when I was working in Bosnia, it was mainly people from Morocco, Algeria, Pakistan. And a lack of opportunity can be a very good reason to move. I think most white people who moved to America did so because of that. Yeah.

Not because they were imminently bombed in their home countries, but because they wanted to make something out of their lives and they didn't have opportunities at home. And I think this whole concept of refugee is meant to distinguish between good and bad reasons to move and good and bad reasons

people, migrants in the end. People can do really dangerous things for giving their children a better life, even if their children are not in immediate danger. And the other thing I would like to stress is that I think the migration regime that we see today is very tightly connected to

colonization and decolonization. For example, specifically in the Netherlands, Suriname was a Dutch colony. And one of the reasons why the Dutch government agreed with decolonization was because the Dutch society started to get worried about all the black people showing up.

So, and the same, something similar happened with the independence war that Algeria fought against France. France preferred to give them independence rather than give them equal rights and access to the French territory. So,

lifting, like creating those barriers and keeping people in the global South after these countries became independent is very tightly connected with decolonization. But of course, especially with like new colonization and new ways of controlling people in the global South and exploiting them. Yeah. If we look at like the US context,

The United States government has managed to engineer this sort of compromise where capital travels freely across the Americas and people don't. So it's possible for them to exploit lower wage labor, for U.S. companies to exploit lower wage labor in Mexico and other countries to the south, but not for those people to come and seek a better wage, a better way of living in the country that is consuming the products of their labor.

And so this is obviously not new to people. This is a thing that Zapatista has highlighted in 1994, and it's been the case for 30 years. But yeah, we have in the US, because the United States did colonialism in a somewhat less overt way, although often in a pretty overt way, it's facilitated colonialism.

undemocratic regimes and a low quality of life for people all across specifically the Americas, but also the rest of the world. And it's now seeking to prevent those people from coming here after it destabilized their countries, right? Or in the case of climate change, again, like the consumption habits of certain countries have had an impact on people all around the world to include people

in more dire economic circumstances. And it shouldn't be any less, we shouldn't like have any less empathy or solidarity with those people because no one's bombing them. And they just want a chance for their kids to do the same shit. Like I moved to America when I was 21 because they weren't many jobs for me at home. Like,

There's something very arrogant about thinking that you can decide whether someone else has a right to exist somewhere. Totally. And I think that's kind of what migration policies are. Yeah, and as you pointed out, they were established after the Second World War,

a very narrow set of categories. They not only do not include climate change, but also generalized violence. Actually, fleeing from a war is not making you a real refugee according to international law. Yeah. Which is something people don't know. So an average Syrian refugee is actually legally not a refugee. They are fleeing indiscriminate violence, but they don't have political

They don't have a right to political asylum. Yeah. People in Ecuador will talk to people from Ecuador a lot. And they'll be like, well, you've seen men. They took over the TV station. Some gangs took over a TV station there recently. And it's kind of an armed takeover. And then as you can see, would you want your child growing up there if you had children? And of course, it's a very compelling argument. And if I was in that position with young children...

one guy I met the other day, his son needed medical care that he couldn't obtain in his country. That's a perfectly valid reason for coming here, but none of those things count for asylum. So those people are either lumped into quote unquote economic migrants, which is still, people have a right to a living wage and to be able to pay for their family to have the things that they need to survive and thrive. But you're right, the asylum system is very narrow.

Yeah. And we should also not forget that even if we're excluding war, you can't really separate migration from the things the West has done in those other countries to maintain that neocolonial relationship. And, you know,

keep those people dependent on whatever whims there are in the West. And whether that's for resources, whether that's for, because there were like communist regimes there that we weren't happy with, like you can't separate that. You can't separate the conditions that are happening there right now to things that have been decided in the West years prior. Yeah, very true.

All right, we're back. I hope you enjoyed those adverts for products and services following our discussion on how capitalism has made life unlivable in certain parts of the world. So, Mick, let's pick up with you explaining this EU border to us. Well, I found a very nice scholarly article that breaks down how the EU borders work and makes a very clear distinction between the different layers that protect fortress Europe.

These layers will be called the paper border, which largely consists of visa policies and similar bureaucracy that regulates movement to the EU and within it. Then we have the iron border, which is exactly what you imagine it to be. It's the physical structures and forms of control that regulate

We put up to keep people out. And then we have the post border. And that's about the reception of migrants, migrant shelters and similar constructions that keep migrants and refugees ostracized and isolated, even after being allowed access into the EU and having started a asylum process.

For those stories, we should turn to Rose when we get there, because she has much more on the ground experience than I have with this. We'll start with the paper border. During the mid 80s, the EU started to propose and enact a series of treaties and policies that in effect strengthened the external borders and loosened the borders within Europe.

I think no one is particularly interested in this series of treaties, so I will name the only one is the Schengen Treaty. This treaty essentially unites the external borders under EU command rather than as a task for individual states.

In practice, this also means that EU citizens who have proper documentation can move freely between countries who have signed the Schengen Treaty for holidays or work. Rose, you and I, we could move to Germany tomorrow if we wanted to and have little to no obstacles in terms of

Only if we're economically independent though. That is very crucial about EU. EU freedom of movement is conditional on you making money. Yeah, having enough money to support yourself. But you can move like... This is very funny because it pissed off British people who were living in Spain when Britain Brexited because they hadn't realized that it would impact them. They were like,

Yeah, they thought it was only the Polish that we, yeah, like the undesirable migrants, but they assumed themselves to be desirable. Yeah. Well, yeah. I don't think we use the word expat, right? Like Brits would use the word expat to describe a migrant from Britain to Spain. And like, it's, yeah, it's ridiculous. I mean, I've lived in France, I've lived in Spain, I've lived in Belgium.

And I was, I guess, somewhat economically independent, made 12,000 euros a year as a bike racer. But that was, you know, I could do that. It was very easy for me. But it is, I do think it's important because I think it's one of those post-border things that what we see, for example, in the Netherlands is that most homeless people here are not the undocumented migrants. They are not the refugees or Dutch people, but they're EU migrants. Right.

So people have low paying jobs, break their legs, get kicked out of their houses, lose their jobs and are not welcome in the homeless shelters because the Netherlands says, well, you are not economically independent anymore. Yeah. So this is also part of the migration regime. And this is also part of keeping migrants exploitable, even if EU citizens have the right to work.

they don't they're only allowed to work they we only want them if they bring in economic profits right we don't want them when they're sick or in need or whatever yeah

And then mostly we want them for jobs that we feel too good to actually do. When I was younger, I used to work in a greenhouse and there's an immense amount of people from like Poland or other Eastern European countries coming there because Dutch people tend not to want to work in a greenhouse.

It's one of those things. It's an extension of that colonial perspective, right? These are not jobs for us. Exactly, because you get your hands dirty and we can't have that here.

To put the whole thing about the paper border into a less academic term, the EU started to act like a nation-state and started to make sharp distinctions between native and non-native European citizens. I think it's worth pointing out that what counts as EU is also a supposed European identity. It's very closely tied to geographical location and therefore also implicitly linked to Christianity.

Countries that are largely non-Christian but connected to Europe tend to be excluded. Turkey is partially in Europe but not part of the EU. And Bosnia-Herzegovina, which is a majority Muslim country, is also excluded from that. But much like Turkey is being tempted with the whole, maybe you can join if you do this and that, but...

We're not really committing to that. That, however, is a story for another time, maybe. The point that I want to make here is that the visa program for Europe is based on geographical discrimination. Countries outside the geography of Europe are blacklisted and cannot gain access to the papers that they need to legally enter the EU. This bureaucracy prohibits people from entering the EU before fences or border guards have even entered the equation.

Hence, the paper border since entering or crossing without a paper visa is nigh impossible.

Yeah, I would like to add, of course, it is geographical discrimination, but of course, indirectly, it is discrimination based on class and race. So it is people of color, but not the super rich people of color. And it is, yeah, it is formerly colonized countries that are largely, that even have an obligation to get a visa. So people from the US can travel visa-free.

Same for people from Australia. So it is very ironic, I find, that in Europe it's considered legal to discriminate based on nationality, even though it is very clearly a very smart way to discriminate actually people based on the color of their skin and their economic status. Exactly what you said, Rose. All the countries that are blacklisted are from the...

the global south, so to speak, almost all of them. But I talked about this with a professor of mine a while back. And I think if you can put down like 30,000 euros, then you can get a visa, even if you're from those countries. Exactly. So the super rich, actually the super rich have freedom of movement. Yeah. But the...

It is always the poor migrants whose movement is problematic and whose movement is horrible. Yeah. In Britain and in the US, there's a lot of discourse about open borders, I've noticed. Like, oh, the border's open, right? The border has always been open to people like me. I live in the United States, right? I am a US citizen now. I'm also a British citizen.

I've lived and worked in Spain, I've lived and worked in France, I've lived and worked in Belgium. I can go and I can get a visa to Iraq, I can get a visa to anywhere I want. The borders have always been open to white people who have financial means. What they're saying when they're saying open borders is implicitly borders open to people who are not white, not wealthy, perhaps not Christian. And the

what one can infer from that is a great deal of bigotry and a great deal of like unease about living you know alongside people who you feel like are not like the same quote unquote as you which is particularly ironic in the United States right in a country which is itself a settler colony yeah it's all very very uplifting stuff I do want to end this particular bit with the quote from that article because I think it

It says it much more fancy than I ever could. Rather than guards with guns, this first border of the EU is watched over by bureaucrats, armed with paper and entrenched in faraway embassies. Through this political technology, all citizens of a large group of nations, barred a few, are blacklisted. This means in practice that most of the citizens of these blacklisted countries cannot acquire the visas they require to legally travel to the EU.

The implication is that the paper border of the EU remotely and invisibly cages people in the inequitable lottery of birth." I think it's very much worth highlighting that if you're, as we've established, unless you're like wealthy or white, you cannot legally enter the EU. And even though our politicians keep saying, no, we're just against the illegals.

Now, there is, for a lot of people, there simply is no way to enter legally. It's impossible and it's a large part of the conversation that we conveniently ignore because it doesn't fit the political narratives that people want to spread. Yeah. And of course, most refugee conventions allow for people to enter between ports of entry in whichever way they can to claim asylum. One does not have to

enter in a certain way to claim asylum despite what the discourse might suggest yeah and i think this border is like probably the most overlooked because it doesn't create any dramatic pictures right it is indeed it's just people sitting in an office and looking at papers and deciding no but these are like in dutch yeah these are people working at the immigration office and these are the people who then decide that's the only option for

people is to go on a boat. So these visa policies and the people who are executing them are super crucial in enforcing people onto dangerous routes. Exactly, because there is no way to do it legally, therefore I have to just set foot on that soil and then apply for asylum. Because the other route is like, before I even tried, already closed off.

Yeah, and I really like that term, the inequitable lottery of birth. We call it like mass border partites. Yeah, but it's one of the most insane or like most fundamentally unjust things that we see that we are living with.

And that we don't see or like that many people don't see. So just because we were born, like I was born in one of the richest countries in the world. My parents had a Dutch passport. That's how I got a Dutch passport. I did literally nothing to get that. It is impossible for me to lose my Dutch passport. I commit, I can commit like the worst crimes and they will not, you know, they will not lead me to lose my passport.

Whereas other people who are born in countries where life expectancy is crazy low or where there's no health care or no proper education or jobs, they too did absolutely nothing to be born there or to be assigned to that nationality. And so somehow this border and this passport is legitimizing the fact that some people just die and we're fine with that and other people die.

have insane privileges and opportunities. And the nationality is kind of a justification. Because if you really think about it, there is no reason why the minimum wage in Ethiopia should be lower than in the Netherlands. Like, there really isn't. The only reason is that they have a different nationality and somehow that makes it normal. And it's just...

It's just these injustice, unjust structures that are so invisible and that are not questioned or talked about enough. So I'm glad we're talking about it today. It's such a stark reality when you live on the border, like I live on the US-Mexico border.

at like what on earth like you know the justification for being like oh yeah this person should earn less money and they can't come here but you can go down there and buy stuff at the same price they can that's fine like it's totally fine yeah this is and oh we're going to build a giant fuck off wall and uh it's just so when i spend a lot of time in the more remote parts of the u.s border and for most of the time that border contrary to what you might have seen on the news is a

one meter high cattle fence with a single strand of barbed wire.

And it's so obviously just a line, like very often cattle will cross the border and like that will have to be herded back, right? Like it's just a notional line in the sand. When they built the border wall, it really fucked up the migration habits of jaguars, bears, deer. I've seen animals unable to comprehend like, but now that's where I go and get my water, right? Like it's such an arbitrary distinction that results in so much cruelty.

But we do build walls better than you. Yeah, that's a good segue to the European iron board. The one thing we are more cruel at than the Americans. Yeah, it's finally something we can beat the Americans at. We're working on it, believe me. Okay, well, not too hard. We want to keep this trophy for a while. You know what else is competing to be the most cruel, Mick?

No. It's potentially the products and services that support this show. All right, we're back. We hope you enjoyed those products and services. Hopefully it wasn't for like a border surveillance technology or, you know, something similar. Walls. Okay, so the next part is the iron border. This is very similar to what people already think of.

But somehow worse. The Iron Border is a collection of fences, walls barbed and razor wire, or even fortified enclaves such as Suta and Melilla in Spain.

Sorry for butchering those names. It is both a deterrent and a performance. It's meant to project security for people within the walls. It shows that the EU uses an iron fist to protect Europeans from irregular or illegal migration.

What is more important to highlight, it also makes for very good outrage media for right-wing and fascist platforms. Refugees will continue to breach those fences and the photographs and videos

make very good propaganda about how borders need to be strengthened. The fenced borders of Europe have increased from 300 kilometers in 2014 to a shocking 2,048 kilometers in 2022. That's substantially more than the US. Of course, it's America, so it's miles. But the most generous estimate based on

Pre-existing war repairs, Trump war building is 748 miles. That was actually, I would say about 750 because I've seen construction happening since then. So that's what, like 1,100 kilometers? We're just over half of what the EU has.

And I think for me, like when I was at the physical borders, like the border walls, I mean, it feels like a military zone. Like I was on the Hungarian border. There's drones. There is super heavily weaponed soldiers walking around, like helicopters flying around. It's like it's a very intimidating feeling. But if you talk to the people crossing the fence, the fence is kind of a joke.

Like you can just bring, yeah, you can just go to a gardening shop and buy a stairs or like a ladder and just put it over the fence. You can buy a super simple scissor that you would use in the garden to cut your vegetables and you can cut the fence open with it. People were building tunnels, like,

Of course, it takes time to cross it. So in that sense, it's a hindrance. But the entire promise that a wall will stop people is indeed just a political game. And the politicians know that it's not true. It's just a way to show how tough they are and how rough they are. And at the same time, I think this is a good moment to...

in states on Palestine to the discussion. So most of the European borders are equipped with razor wire and that is literally like knives wire, you know, like it is like it's razors. It's a little half razor blades. Yeah. And this is designed by the Israeli army and weapons industry. And the aim of these, this razor wire is to gut as deeply as possible into people's skin.

without causing pain so people don't realize how heavily wounded they are in order to make them bleed as much as possible. This has been tested in Gaza and

The Israeli army liked it and now it's sold in Europe to sometimes stop the same people leaving, fleeing Gaza, trying to reach Europe. So the border in one hand is kind of useless, but at the same time it is really built to be as cruel and as harmful as possible. And I know a lot of people with a lot of scars on their bodies just from those razor wires.

Yeah, I think if we want to draw that connection further, like Elbit Technologies has massive multi tens of million dollar contracts for border surveillance where I live, right? The same things happen.

that are surveilling people in Gaza are surveilling you. If you go for a hike in East County, San Diego, they're also surveilling migrants. The razorware that you mentioned is everywhere out here. It doesn't work. It gets cut eventually. It gets blankets thrown over it. But in the meantime, it hurts people. The wall itself, there's also walls between Israel and Palestine, between Kurdistan and Turkey.

What at least these larger ones do is they force people. The US wall is also one that's entirely breachable. I've seen people climbing it. I've seen people climb and get this week. I've seen people go under it. I've seen people go through it. I've seen people go around it. But what it does tend to do is force people into the more remote areas where they didn't build wall.

And those areas are where you're more likely to die. And every year that we've built more wall, we've seen more deaths. And as someone who engages in mutual aid, every year that they build more wall, we have to think about where will people go? How will they get there? What state will they be in? How can we make this journey less deadly? And that becomes harder and harder for us. We did a water drop on Sunday. It took us five hours to

to hike a very small section of this trail that people hike in order to surrender themselves, just as they would if they could come through a port of entry. But it's a lot more deadly now. I think that kind of sums up most migration policies or obstacles to migration in Europe as well. They don't actually stop migrants, but they do hurt them and they do push them into danger or actual deadly routes. Yeah. Because you're never going to stop it, but...

you can use like quote unquote deterrence in the hopes that it'll slow down but you're just going to get people hurt and killed yeah yeah that is like how incredibly cynical the border is i think that the main deterrence is the people dying and that this this is part of the political game to disencourage migrants

And then you can use other policies that we'll get to, to present yourself as the good guy for wanting to make sure that people don't cross those walls or cross the Mediterranean. And you can present yourself as the good guy trying to prevent those deaths that your policies cause.

are, you know, causing. I think that's where we're going to end it for today. We'd planned for this to be a one-part episode, but we really enjoyed talking and we had a lot in common. So this is going to be a two-parter. Tomorrow, we will be back to discuss the EU's external border and how it has non-EU countries enforcing its border in ways that are very detrimental, damaging and deadly to migrants. So I hope you look forward to that and we'll see you again tomorrow.

Hi everyone, it's me James, and I just wanted to read you this today. We're going to put it in our episode this week because it's a cause that's important to us, and so we thought it would be something that might be important to you too as well. On the 10th of June 2024, Leonard Peltier, an enrolled member of the Turtle Band of Chippewa of Lakota and Ojibwe ancestry, and the longest serving political prisoner in the United States, will be appearing before the U.S. Parole Commission for the first time since 2009.

He faces staunch opposition from the FBI and other law enforcement agencies due to having allegedly killed two FBI agents in a firefight on the 26th of June 1975 after the agents appeared on reservation land to execute a pretextual warrant.

The initial firefight occurred during the, quote, reign of terror on Pine Ridge in the wake of the occupation of Wounded Knee, a time of extreme violence when federal law enforcement installed a puppet tribal chair and was arming vigilantes who targeted indigenous traditionalists. Everything leading up to these events, as well as the subsequent investigation and Mr. Peltier's extradition, trial, conviction and sentencing were characterized by gross misconduct on the part of law enforcement, the prosecution and the courts.

Mr. Peltier's co-defendants were separately tried and acquitted on grounds of self-defense. Mr. Peltier was railroaded and his case is tainted by discrimination at every level, ranging from the withholding of exculpatory evidence to the torture and coercion of extradition and trial witnesses, and from the refusal of the judge to dismiss an avowedly racist juror to the apologetic gymnastics of the courts affirming his convictions in the face of meritorious legal challenges and admitted evidence of outrageous government misdeeds.

Mr. Peltier has been in prison for more than 48 years, and he's almost 80 years old. He suffers from chronic and potentially lethal conditions, for which he receives insufficient and substandard medical care.

If you want to take action to hashtag free Leonard Peltier, you can call the U.S. Parole Commission at 202-346-7000. And if you'd like to find more information on how to support, you can go to this URL. It's http://www.parolecommission.org.

Or you can follow NDN Collective on social media for more ways to support him. For more information on Leonard Peltier, listen to Margaret's podcast on the Lakota Nation, A Read in the Spirit of the Crazy Horse by Peter Mathewson.

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Hi, we're back. And just to remind people, if you haven't listened to the episode yesterday, you probably won't pick up what's going on today. So I suggest starting there as we commence on our second part of the discussion about the EU's border. Today, we're going to discuss the EU's external border and what that means for migrants. We'll pick up with Mick and Rose, and we'll start off more or less where we left off yesterday.

Like you can map, and I'm not the first one to have made these maps, but you can look at humane borders in Arizona, and then you can look at EFF's map of fixed and mobile towers, and you can see people...

And again, this is something I'm more familiar with and I'd like to be. People dying in the shade of the surveillance towers without help, without water, without the very minor things that it would take for them not to have died. And so, yeah, this provides justification. It provides a massive outlet for the post-war on terror military industrial complex to continue to make its money and to continue to make its money through innocent people dying.

Yeah, I think it was either a bullish Frontex or the Transnational Institute. I got some hands on some literature they were spreading. And there is a direct, you can draw a direct line between like,

the end of the Cold War in the 90s with military industrial complex having to find new ways to sell their products to states and that's also why the border keeps getting more and more militarized because this is the one point where they can still sell a lot of things without there having to be a war. Yeah, there's like a very serious lobby of companies who just want to make money out of making our borders deadly and they're

really successful actually. Yeah, I think they just want to make money and they don't care if they make our borders deadly. The end goal is always profit for them and everything else is

to that. Think of the stockholders. They have to live as well. What I personally find most troubling is this extension of the iron border into non-European countries. So the EU is making deals with countries in which for

in exchange for large sums of money, that those countries are now containing or stopping migrants and refugees from ever leaving the Middle East or Africa. Like Rose said earlier, the Turkey deal is essentially a political deal between the EU and Turkey for Turkey to hold a portion of Syrian refugees over within their border area.

to stop them from coming into Europe. And I think we paid a few billion, more than a few billion probably for Turkey to do that. So the most prominent of these deals are, as I said, Turkey, but also Tunisia and Libya. We're essentially outsourcing the abuse and human rights violations to countries that are outside the scope of our media.

who have regimes that we would declare dictatorships and autocracies. In the case of Libya, it's even like rebels and warlords being funded with EU taxpayer money. Today, the EU pact with Libya has given rise to a full-fledged slave market run by cold-blooded human traffickers who, incentivized by the EU's crackdown on irregular migration and the resulting business downturn of would-be profitable passengers, are now auctioning economic migrants and refugees as slaves.

Yeah, we're just doing slavery with extra steps now. So to make it inescapably clear how bad the situation is, I'm now going to quote from an Amnesty International article from 2021. Tripoli's Jara al-Zawiyah Center is a facility which was previously run by a non-affiliated militia group

and was recently integrated under the DCIM and designated for people in vulnerable situations. A DCIM is an acronym for Libya's Directorate for Combating Illegal Migration. It's essentially a department of their interior ministry.

Former detainees from that facility said that guards raped women and some were coerced into sex in exchange for their release or for essentials such as clean water. Grace, a pseudonym, said she was heavily beaten for refusing to comply with such a demand. "I told the guard no. He used a gun to knock me back. He used a leather soldier's shoe to kick me from my waist." Two young women at the facility attempted to commit suicide as a result of such abuse.

Three women also said that two babies detained with their mothers after an attempted sea crossing had died in early 2021, after guards refused to transfer them to a hospital for a critical medical treatment. Amnesty International's report documents similar patterns of human rights violations, including severe beatings, sexual violence, extortion, forced labor, and inhuman conditions across seven DCIM centers in Libya.

In Abu Issa Center in the city of Al-Zawiyah, detainees reported being deprived of nutritious food to the point of starvation. End quote. Yeah, Libya is just on a completely different level. Like we have systematic torture on almost all border crossings by European border guards. But Libya just manages to

do worse than that and just systematically enslave, rape, murder, torture. And I think it's important to stress that there's this Libyan Coast Guard, they're funded by the European Union. So the European Union will go out with drones, spot a boat of migrants. Previously, the European Union actually had rescue ships, but the European Union

if a boat is near another boat in distress, there is an obligation to rescue. And after the rescue, you have to bring the people to a safe port. So having a boat at sea meant that the European Border Agency Frontex was obliged to rescue people at sea. And so they just thought, let's just do away with the boats and let's just have helicopters and drones. So we can still spot boats that are sinking, but we cannot help them.

They are not obligated to help anymore. Yeah, exactly. They managed to escape that responsibility under maritime law. And then they paid the Libyan Coast Guard to rescue people. Libya is so bad that

Reportedly, migrants just jump in the water if they see a Libyan Coast Guard because people prefer to drown than to be taken back to Libya. The Libyan Coast Guard takes the people on the boat, brings them back to Libyan mainland and actually sells them to the militias running the detention centers. So the Libyan Coast Guard gets paid twice for stopping migrants, first by the European Union and secondly by the militias that will later sell them as slaves or prisoners.

use them for slavery and this is what we have been funding for years and there have been extensive documentation about these human rights violations and the very direct link of the EU funding and it just keeps going I think it was a year or so back where I saw a video of like

someone a woman on a dinghy who was just incredibly emotional and she was just exclaiming all the time like I'd rather die than go back to Libya which yeah it's yeah just literally what it is yeah

yeah i would encourage the the listeners to just google something like libya migrant detentions or or something and look at the pictures because it's it's you you might get like traumatized but you will be more aware of the horrors in the world yeah yeah they're not great pictures to look at but don't go before you go to sleep like uh yeah

I think it's important to see those things because that is the reality that we in Europe often do not get to see. And it is the reality that has been created by our overlords. So, yeah.

What the EU is doing is, to be very blunt, extending its own borders into sovereign territory of states outside of Europe to stop migrants from even entering the EU. Proponents of these policies will undoubtedly argue that this saves lives by preventing people from crossing the Mediterranean in overcrowded boats and dinghies.

Personally, I would argue that people will continue to make that crossing if only to escape the EU-funded hell holes that these regimes create in order to get that sweet, sweet EU funding. What is definitely very concerning is that despite criticisms from NGOs such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, Europe will likely continue these practices.

Only last year did it sign a deal with Tunisia with the intention of using that as a third country, as they call it, to prevent sea crossings. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen stated that this could be a blueprint for cooperation with other countries. To the surprise of no one, this will very likely increase the human rights violations and abuses that happen there.

And after this, I have two examples of stories that happened at the EU borders that are, I think, particularly heartbreaking. And this was also the hardest part for me to write because there are so many stories out there that I think deserve to be heard and deserve to have some light shone on there just to...

to show people the reality but that would be that would turn into a very very long episode yeah can i can i quickly just i would like to say something about the these deals and i think there is something very ironic about the european union pretending to value democracy and human rights and blah blah well i mean what what you've just said makes it abundantly clear that

human rights in Europe are just for Europeans and not for humans. But I would also just like to stress that it's very strange and I think not maybe often enough addressed that

What Europe is doing is it's just bribing countries. It is bribing countries to stop migrants. It is bribing countries to take unwanted migrants back through deportation. It is often also forced to take on its own citizens. So it's not only people from sub-Saharan Africa traveling through Libya, but it's also Libyan people themselves. So they have elected a government. They have an interest themselves as well, maybe, in having the ability to move away from Libya.

And the EU needs to come up with enormous sums of money to force these governments to... Yeah, why do they need that money? Because that is not in the interest of the country or its citizens to do this. And...

especially in the Netherlands, there is this enormous, yeah, there's just this expectation that if we don't like something, other countries should do something about it. Yeah. So in the Netherlands, Moroccan migrants specifically are vilified a lot and, uh, and Algerian migrants. And, uh, they, both countries have not been very collaborative with deportations, but like, why the hell should they support the forced, uh,

return of their own citizens who don't want to go back to their countries. There's no reason for them to do that, except if Europe is just abusing its power and forcing these countries to do things that are not in their interest. I mean, a lot of these border guards, I think Libya is an exception because they actually make money out of the migrants in so many different ways.

But if you look at Serbia or Bosnia, they are forced to control their borders, which is super expensive. And these are countries who have other issues to fix. Maybe they want to focus on building up their country and improving living conditions. But instead, the EU is just giving them money to protect borders of people who are mainly just walking through their countries. That's not really a big problem for them.

And yeah, it's very ironic because Europe is like justifying its migration policies with this idea that every country has sovereignty over who it allows access. That's like legally, that's like the fundament of migration deterrence.

But it only claims that right for itself. So if other countries say, well, I don't care if there's Syrians walking through my country, like maybe they'll spend some money and they'll just leave anyway. Yeah. Other countries don't have the right. I think Belarus is an interesting example as well, because Belarus welcomed migrants and then brought them to the EU border with Poland and Lithuania mainly. And Belarus has every right to give visa to people, you know, like,

It's actually like, just like the Netherlands has the rights to give visa to people, Belarus has that right too. And then of course, people can also go to the border and cross the border if they want and ask for asylum. So yeah, I just wanted to highlight the irony of how incredibly one-sided Europe is in how we can claim that we want to keep people out, but other countries are not allowed to have sovereign migration policies.

Yeah, we see exactly the same in the US, right? We're trying to outsource processing of migrants to Guatemala and Honduras.

We are trying to, I mean, we pay Mexico massive sums of money to enforce our border, right? Like we saw, it's funny, there are three gaps outside of Cumbia that people who have listened to this podcast will be very familiar with my reporting on. And we saw those gaps close down, not when people started coming so much, but once legacy media outlets showed up.

Then by December, the US had a bilateral meeting with Mexico. And very soon thereafter, we saw Mexican National Guard sitting at those gaps in the border wall. The US's border, like if people are leaving Mexico, it's not Mexico's problem. But we saw them with technicals and machine guns policing those gaps in the border. And the US gives a ton of money to countries to enforce its border, right? To prevent migration and...

get extremely the u.s has even taken actions to um prosecute airlines that fly people north so that they can yeah we do that too yeah yeah yeah it's uh yeah the sanctions are in like insane like half a million or something for like bringing one migrant without a visa yeah yeah yeah that too is externalization just as like bribing libya to protect the border it's also like

actually forcing carriers, like forcing transport companies to be the border guard. Yeah, to ascertain whether you have a visa or not. Decide if you have the right to travel. Let's pick up with those examples you mentioned because I think it is important for people to kind of have a...

a human face or a human story? Well, to preface this, under EU law, migrants are supposed to apply for asylum in the first EU country that they enter. This policy is likely the result of fear from more affluent European countries that the majority of refugees will travel to those countries.

This means that the countries geographically closest to Africa and the Middle East are the ones supposed to take in most refugees. Think of Spain, Greece, Italy, Bulgaria. They, however, are not too enthusiastic at the prospect of taking in huge amounts of migrants. Who are the migrants themselves, by the way? I can imagine that they're also not too keen to live in Bulgaria, especially after what follows next, because...

This story happened at the Turkish-Bulgarian border. But I also personally, it's just incredibly cruel that the Netherlands and Germany and the Scandinavian countries are like, oh no, you should take all those refugees. We don't want them here. I would say that's where the outsourcing starts. That's EU law. We have Schengen, so we have free travel within the EU. But that comes with

extremely violently guarding the outside of the EU. So if you are a border country, you are only welcome if you can prove to us that you are cruel enough to discourage people from crossing this border. Because again, Bulgaria doesn't really have that much interest in guarding the borders if people can just, if they anyway want to go to Western European countries.

So it's a way to, again, I would say the border externalization already starts from the main countries of destination, which is like France and Germany and even Bulgaria would not have much interest in stopping migrants if there were not all of these rules to make them responsible. Exactly. But again, which is why I said the more affluent countries within the EU don't want that for migration.

reasons that I think anyone can think of. At this point of the story is where pushbacks come into play. This is a tactic used by the countries I just mentioned. It's a set of measures that force people back over the border they crossed, often immediately after it.

This practice is often enforced with violence and does not take into account the circumstances of migrants and denies them the opportunity to apply for asylum. This means that the EU does push back people that have very legitimate reasons to apply for asylum under the EU's own rules. I'm going to quote...

Pushbacks violate the prohibition of collective expulsion of asylum seekers in Protocol 4 of the European Convention on Human Rights and often violate the international law prohibiting on non-refoulement. Non-refoulement. Oh, it's French. Yeah. Ah, okay. I was never good at French.

All right. It's a fundamental principle of international law that forbids a country receiving asylum seekers from returning them to a country in which there would be improbable danger of persecution based on race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion. That being said, I'm aware even like the Dutch government has sent like

LGBTQI people back to countries where they could be like persecuted for that. So again, those rules seem to be very optional. So what follows now is two examples of border practices that I think are particularly egregious. So on October 3rd, 2022, Abdullah Mohammed, age 19, a Syrian refugee, attempted to cross the Bulgarian-Turkish border.

After being pushed back by border guards, they threw stones at the border. I want to emphasize here at the border itself, not at the guards. After this, a shot rang and Abdullah fell to the ground with a bullet lodged one centimeter away from his heart. He survived and was interviewed by Lighthouse Reports. He states that there was an intent to kill when he was shot. That's his belief.

The bullet also pierced his hand which is now partially paralyzed. There seems to be no justification or reason whatsoever for border guards to have shot or to have shot with live ammunition. This was the first time that such an incident was caught on video. If you want you can find it linked on lighthouse reports attached to the article about this incident.

The video is not as bad as you might think, but watch at your own risk. As far as I'm aware, there have been similar rumors before, but this was the first instance that has entered the public record, or the first time it was actually documented.

Needless to say, no one should be shot for attempting to cross a border. I don't care about anyone's opinion or bad faith nuances. People have a right to apply for asylum. And as far as I'm concerned, this was a deliberate and calculated attempted murder. Yeah, I do think there have been quite a lot of videos of people being shot and definitely people making statements about it and just having the actual...

bullet in their body to prove that it happened yeah it happened in croatia it happened in greece greece has a habit of shooting at boats as well and in that way making people drown yeah and of course apart from the shootings which i would say on the european borders that they are still kind of rare the yeah the pushbacks and the violence and the torture is yeah the evidence of that is like

an enormous pile. When I was working in Bosnia, I think that was in 2018-19, there was no video footage of a pushback and there was a journalist who volunteered with us for a while and they were the first one to film it. But in the past years there have been like many many horrible videos of people being beaten up and actual torture.

Yeah, of course in the US under the pretense of protecting us all from the coronavirus which still killed millions of people in this country we have something called Title 42 which allowed Border Patrol to

quote unquote, repatriate people to Mexico, even if they weren't Mexican, and just drop them back in Mexico to include laterally transferring them, which is a pseudonym for kind of trafficking them halfway across the country and then dumping them in a place where they have no connections, no money, and no

way of establishing themselves, right? And this led to massively increased fatalities at the border because people were trying to avoid border patrol rather than coming in and surrendering themselves for asylum, as we see now. And massively increased encounters at the border. Encounters don't necessarily represent unique individuals, right? This is my... I will beat this fucking drum until I die. But apparently...

Our colleagues at the New York Times haven't worked it out yet. Wall Street Journal, almost every NPR, every big outlet in the United States that likes to commission border reporters who don't live on the border will tell you that the number of migrants went up. An encounter is an encounter. If someone crosses and then gets bounced into Mexico and then crosses again and does that five times, that's five encounters. It's the same person.

BP doesn't keep records of unique individuals under Title 42 or didn't keep under Title 42. We don't know how many people, but we know that more people tried to cross. And we also know that every time you try to cross, you risk your life.

And so we certainly know that more lives were put in danger because of this policy. Because again, like turning someone back is not going to stop them, especially when you're dropping them in a country where they don't want to be and where they're not from. Like the people aren't just going to be like, okay, cool. I'll stay in Mexico. That has not historically been the case.

Yeah, we had exactly the same kind of juggling with numbers. I remember people in Bosnia, some of them would get pushed back like 40 or 50 times. Damn. And so they would be counted as individual stops. Yes. Indeed. So it would sound as if there was like, I don't know, tens of thousands. And I was like,

it's really not that many though. Yeah, yeah, we were saying the same thing. So they would just literally count the same person again and again and again. Yeah, and also I would like to say that, like, yes, it is the border, like the EU border countries, but it is also much deeper into the territory. So we externalize the border towards, like,

Libya, Niger and way further even but we also internalized the border so we would have people who had made it to Austria or Italy they would get caught in Austria or Italy be pushed back to Slovenia taken over by Slovenian police brought to the Croatian border taken over by Croatian police often in Croatia get tortured and then be dumped on the Bosnian border which would be the EU border as well so that's what they call chain pushbacks

And yeah, I yeah, so I worked in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which is non-EU. So we would get the people after they had been pushed back. Yeah, the things that people have done, like border guards have done to migrants are...

yeah I don't know if you actually want to use this footage but it's like it's really really gruesome like in Bosnia they would there would be like snow for like they have very long and very cold winters

they would take away people's shoes and socks and like make them walk for five hours on bare feet so one of the main tasks of our volunteers our medical volunteers was amputating toes yeah people would come back with broken bones broken skulls people would be sent back with just their underwear at minus 20 degrees celsius i don't know how much that is in the us neither do i it's a

I think they come together around minus 20. It's extremely fucking cold. The colder it gets, the more accurate. Yeah. So like at some point we started to call this cold torture as a kind of specific tactic that mainly the Croatian border guards were using. Yeah. And also, yeah. And I also want to stress again that

Yes, it is the European border countries in the east and in the south. But when I was working in Bosnia, Croatia was not yet part of the Schengen zone. And politicians were pretty explicit about Croatia can only enter if they have solved their border problem, even though there was constantly proof of torture coming out. The same happened with Bulgaria.

and Romania. So these countries were very, very much pressured by countries like the Netherlands and Germany who like, you know, pretend not to have anything to do with these atrocities, but who were very, very explicitly saying, if you are not, if you don't get your borders in control, you cannot join the economic, yeah, you cannot have the open borders within the EU.

Yeah, we it's so sad to see all these serenities. This is very depressing. My friends and I were helping someone who had it like the early onset of like like trench foot. Yeah. A couple of weeks ago. Yeah. Yeah. We don't do it like I guess as a policy as much as just by default. But in the mountains and then desert here in California when it rains, yeah.

areas that are dry for the rest of the year turn into rivers and migrants have to cross them. We've also seen a large number of migrants drown this year in San Diego. And more would have drowned if very brave people hadn't risked their own lives rescuing them, not people who were working for the government, just individuals who cared. We've also seen a young man from Jamaica recently passed away. This was in early, probably early February and March, in February and March.

He was on a migrant trail. I know exactly where, about a few hundred yards, actually, from where my friends have left warm clothes, hand warmers, jackets, food, water. But he wasn't able to make it that far. And for whatever reason, you know, like...

one death at a tragedy and a million statistics or whatever but that really impacted me he was actually on the other side of the border when he died but like he could have thrown a stone into the US and it's not a fence to border there but yet we have chosen a policy which made that young man die of hypothermia by himself on the side of a mountain because some for some reason that's the what the

we've decided or our government has decided is better than having him come here and be able to make his case and live with us and get a job or what have you. And yeah, that was just a particularly heartbreaking one for me because I knew that if he was five minutes walk away, 10 minutes walk away from potentially being okay. And that's why my friends and I like to go out and leave stuff for people. But

It shouldn't be a group of anarchists and migrant activists and people of faith hiking into the desert every weekend with backpacks full of water and food and warm clothes. That shouldn't be what prevents people from dying coming here. Yeah, there's a kind of cruelty in that even. Yeah.

It is amazing to help people, to be part of a group of people who commits themselves to resist these incredibly violent borders and to support people who decide to cross them. But at the same time, it is just so problematic that someone's life, like access to food or healthcare, depends on whether or not there are some crazy volunteers willing to do that.

So, like, it shouldn't be like our, you know, like, yeah, like, I don't want to have that power over someone's life. And I think no one should have that power over someone's life. But this system where basically migrants lives are disposable also mean that it's like optional to offer super basic things that can save these lives. Yeah, yeah, very much so.

Are we ready for the second depressing story? Yeah, let's get the second depressing story. Let's hit rock bottom. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'm sure you've heard this story before, but still, I think it's very much worth repeating. So on June 14th, 2023, the Adriana, a ship on its way to Greece, capsized and subsequently sank.

The boat allegedly had the capacity for about 400 people, but carried around 750. Of all those lives, 104 were saved, 82 were confirmed dead, and up to 500 are missing and presumed dead, the majority of which are women and children. I'll refer back to Lighthouse Reports, who did a reconstruction of the incident, which

makes this even worse than it already is. Transcriptions and witness statements obtained by Lighthouse reports Der Spiegel, Monitor, S.I.R.A.J., L.Pias, Reporters United and The Times strongly suggest that the Greek Coast Guard attempted to conceal their own involvement in this tragedy. Nine survivors were asked to make statements, none of which appeared to blame the Coast Guard.

Different suggestions were given for the capsizing, blaming it on the age of the ship or the lack of life jackets. Four of these statements contained near identical phrasing. It was later discovered that one of the translators was a coast guard himself. There were other translators, all of which were sworn in on that very day.

Later in Greek courts, six of those nine stated that the Coast Guard did in fact tow the boat before it went down. Two survivors told Lighthouse reports that certain parts of their testimony was omitted in the transcription. To clarify that a bit, because of what I said earlier, that migrants have or are obligated to apply for asylum in the country in which they arrive, it's become clear

a habit of like coast guard and frontex to drag them to certain areas of water that are part of for example Italy or Greece. This particular one boat may have been an attempt to drag the boat to Italian waters so the Greeks didn't have to take them in. So to quote the report from Lighthouse

16 out of the 17 survivors we spoke to said the coast guard attached a rope to the vessel and tried to tow it shortly before it capsized. Four also claimed that the coast guard was attempting to tow the boat to Italian waters, while four reported that the coast guard caused more deaths by circling around the boat after it capsized, making waves that caused the boat's carcass to sink.

End quote. Not great bedtime stories, if you ask me. Yeah, I think that's fucking horrible. There's just no words. Yeah, I got nothing to say. I don't think anyone should be okay with that. Perhaps, I think we're going to talk again about how people can oppose this and how people can try...

their best to, A, change the system and B, do what they can while we're stuck in this terrible place to make things more survivable and less cruel. So perhaps we can finish up here with you guys plugging anything you want to. If there are orgs or social media where people can follow both of your work, then I'd love to hear about them. Yeah, you can follow us on migrate.en, I think, just like for English.

And migrate is M-I-G-R-E-A-Z. Yeah. The system is super fucked. It is super, super, super fucked. It is. Yeah. It's really treating human beings as disposable and human. A migrant life has absolutely no value. But I also just wanted to say that I think a lot of migrants who cross borders, they are aware of the risks.

But I think it's also important to say that it is a kind of resistance. It is a kind of, we started that episode with talking about passport privilege and the lottery of birth. And I think we should not only look at like the bad border guards and the good people helping or something, but I think we should also acknowledge that the people crossing the borders are people.

like taking unbelievable risk often also to help their families or their friends. And I think crossing a border without permission is a kind of resistance. And I think we as people who do direct support or direct aid, we are...

I mean, for me, that's also part of the resistance is like helping people cross the border. I don't mind if, yeah, people get one accuse me of being a smuggler or something or like aiding illegal border crossings. Like the whole point is that people should be able to cross that border. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a really good. Someone recently accused us of in Oktober that said that people people come to Oktober because we feed them and like,

A it's fucking ludicrous. Like you didn't fucking come from a Guinea because I'm going to give you a peanut butter sandwich on some bread I got for free. Yeah, it's not as if we have the best food. Yeah, it is not the best. It's the best we can do for like, you know, less than a dollar a person or what have you. But like,

No, but I guess, but I am doing it because I believe that person should be able to, and not just because they're in those dire circumstances, but because I fundamentally support their right. Like I want them to be my neighbor. I'm okay with that. And that's why I'm doing it. Yeah, absolutely. I think, I think we should all keep in mind how many of our friends and family or other loved ones have moved to

at some point in their lives for a job or opportunities or love or whatever. The essence of like human movement is the same right there. Yeah. Yeah. And it is our politicians who choose that this movement is a problem, that the movement of these people specifically is a threat or a danger.

Whereas I think like, yeah, if you talk about like racism or systemic racism, the question is always like, yeah, but what is the system then? This is the system. The visa policies, the actual border. This is what is keeping people like it's trying to keep people in exploitable conditions in the global south is doing incredible like cruelties to them just for political gain is

is exploiting people who do make it but who are undocumented or on fragile resident status and are still exploited and deprived of basic rights even if they do arrive to their country of destination. Like this system is designed to create an underclass of people that is easily exploitable. There are companies who are profiting from this. There is absolutely no intention to stop migration but there is definitely an intention to marginalize and segregate migrants.

And yeah, and just profit of it. Yeah. And meanwhile, we do the absolute bare minimum to provide aid to those countries to make the living conditions there better. Yeah. These borders are playing a role in keeping people exploitable there and making it possible to make them work for incredibly low wages and horrible labor conditions. Like, yeah, these borders are forcing them into those into those conditions.

I think the mandatory international development aid that countries should pay is like 0.007% or something of the GDP and the majority of like western countries are not doing that, even that. So it's very much like the problem is that they're coming here not that the conditions there are shit and we're keeping them shit. Yeah.

What a great system. I'm a bit bummed now. Sorry we've left you all sad. We will come back with Rose again and Mick to talk about ways to make it better. Is there anything you wanted to plug, Mick? Anything you want people to give the time, money to follow on the internet?

I just want to give a shout out to organizations such as Migrate, but also the Abolish Frontex campaign and United Against Refugee Deaths. And I would urge anyone who feels compassionate to help out. There are so many ways you can help out, even if you don't know it yet. It is sorely needed. Wherever you are, whoever you are, you can help out.

Hi everyone, it's me James, and I just wanted to read you this today. We're going to put it in our episode this week because it's a cause that's important to us, and so we thought it would be something that might be important to you too as well. On the 10th of June 2024, Leonard Peltier, an enrolled member of the Turtle Band of Chippewa of Lakota and Ojibwe ancestry, and the longest serving political prisoner in the United States, will be appearing before the U.S. Parole Commission for the first time since 2009.

He faces staunch opposition from the FBI and other law enforcement agencies due to having allegedly killed two FBI agents in a firefight on the 26th of June 1975 after the agents appeared on reservation land to execute a pretextual warrant.

The initial firefight occurred during the "reign of terror" on Pine Ridge in the wake of the occupation of Wounded Knee, a time of extreme violence when federal law enforcement installed a puppet tribal chair and was arming vigilantes who targeted indigenous traditionalists. Everything leading up to these events, as well as the subsequent investigation and Mr. Peltier's extradition, trial, conviction and sentencing were characterized by gross misconduct on the part of law enforcement, the prosecution and the courts.

Mr. Peltier's co-defendants were separately tried and acquitted on grounds of self-defense. Mr. Peltier was railroaded and his case is tainted by discrimination at every level, ranging from the withholding of exculpatory evidence to the torture and coercion of extradition and trial witnesses, and from the refusal of the judge to dismiss an avowedly racist juror to the apologetic gymnastics of the courts affirming his convictions in the face of meritorious legal challenges and admitted evidence of outrageous government misdeeds.

Mr. Peltier has been in prison for more than 48 years, and he's almost 80 years old. He suffers from chronic and potentially lethal conditions, for which he receives insufficient and substandard medical care.

If you want to take action to hashtag free Leonard Peltier, you can call the U.S. Parole Commission at 202-346-7000. And if you'd like to find more information on how to support, you can go to this URL. It's http://www.parolecommission.org.

Or you can follow NDN Collective on social media for more ways to support him. For more information on Leonard Peltier, listen to Margaret's podcast on the Lakota Nation, A Read in the Spirit of the Crazy Horse by Peter Mathewson.

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Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart. And today, the thing that's fallen apart is our shared concept of reality, our ability to exist as a population within the same world, or at least versions of the same world that even slightly interact with each other. And my guest for this episode about the breaking of reality, Garrison Davis. Garrison, what do you know about the USS Eisenhower?

Is that from Star Trek? Yes. Yeah. That's the ship that they all fly around in Star Trek. The mini voyages of the starship Eisenhower. It's continuing missions. That would be such a different show. Every episode, they're just fucking with Guatemala. Like every single episode, Picard's just finding another way to overthrow the government of Guatemala. Yeah.

Yeah, no, that's like alternate universe evil Gene Roddenberry. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, if Gene Roddenberry had been like a hardcore conservative. Yeah.

Speaking of hardcore conservatives, we are talking again about alternate realities and the USS Eisenhower is relevant to that because it's kind of been the subject of a reality fracture recently. Just talking in terms of like things that are actually true, the USS Eisenhower is a very big aircraft carrier. It's got something like 5,000 people on its crew.

It's nuclear powered. It can stay, I think, up to like 25 years. Potentially, it could stay in the field without needing to like refuel or anything like that.

That's wild. Yeah, yeah. Aircraft carriers are insane things. And it is the center of an Air Force carrier group, which is a group of, I think there's something like 10 or 11 other ships in it, a combination of like, you've got like destroyers, these little like missile ships. I think there's some submarines, probably an ice cream ship in there somewhere. That's kind of like a key thing the US military does. Anyway, the Eisenhower is the ship that's out in the Gulf of Aden right now, throwing down with the Houthis. And on...

The 31st of last month, there was a series of attacks launched by the Eisenhower, along with some of our British allies, striking 13 Houthi targets at various locations in Yemen. This is in response to a number of attacks that the Houthis had launched recently on shipping in Yemen.

including I think they hit a Greek ship a couple of times. The strikes came also a day after the Houthis shot down an MQ-9 Reaper drone, which was the third downing of a Reaper drone in May. So the Houthis have been dropping Reapers pretty regularly. So anyway, all of this led to a massive series of strikes that were kind of launched from

Eisenhower on Houthi targets. Houthi rebels said that the airstrikes killed at least 16 people and wounded 35 others. I think that death toll has risen since the article, the Washington Post article I'm looking at now. And that, you know, we're going to be talking about things that are credible and not credible, the Houthis say. Given the attacks launched, that death toll seems pretty credible to me, just based on other strikes that I've read about. The Houthis launched a retaliatory strike.

on the Enterprise, or at least they claim that they did. Wait, on the Enterprise? Sorry, on the Eisenhower. We did used to have an aircraft carrier named the Enterprise. I think we've decommissioned it since. I'm blaming that fuck up on you. Kirk would handle that real fast. He would not. Oh, he would be fucking his way through the Houthis already. Kirk would have... That's... Oh, God. Star Trek is so much more fun to talk about than actual geopolitics, which...

Which are mostly depressing with the genocide and all. Anyway, the Houthis claim that they launched an attack on the Eisenhower. The U.S., the DOD says that they did not. The Houthi press person stated that they hit the Eisenhower. The hit was accurate and direct.

Again, there's no evidence of this whatsoever that's been posted. The story seems to have started percolating out into kind of lefty media when Houthi press people made this announcement. I think the first direct statement I found about it outside of like Houthi press resources was a Twitter account called for an online news magazine calling West Asian geopolitics called The Cradle.

I'm not wildly familiar with the cradle. They've got something like 109,000 followers on Twitter, and they seem to mostly be, you could say, like a broadly sort of anti-imperialist left. Most of their content lately is very pro-Gaza. You know, there's stuff like

articles about Israeli organ trafficking networks in Turkey. You know, they've got like video clips of like pro-Palestinian protesters getting dunks in on pro-Israel protesters at like protests and stuff like that. Very standard stuff. And on the 31st, they posted a, they made a post. Yeah. Basically,

basically restating what the Houthis had said. Although they, instead of saying the Houthis made a claim that they had struck the Eisenhower, they claimed it was Yemeni armed forces. It's an easy way to tell that someone is not accurately reporting on what's happening in Yemen because the Houthis are actively at war with Yemeni armed forces. Like that is the actual reality of the situation on the ground over there.

So this got picked up by chunks of lefty media and particularly like American lefty media. I think one of the first big accounts to take this story was a guy named Ashton Forbes. You know, Ashton? I don't think I've heard of Ashton Forbes. This is this whole like left media. Yeah. Anti-imperialism bubble has just gotten so big the past six months. Yes.

These are mostly accounts, and I believe this is true for Ashton too, who like,

They blew up in the wake of October 7th, particularly once the Israelis started launching massive strikes on Gaza. And they primarily exist within the profit ecosystem that Elon established in Twitter, right? Where if you have a verified account and you get a lot of engagements from other verified accounts, you get a chunk of money from Twitter, right? And so all these people figured out that like,

there's a huge appetite for reposted videos from Gaza or videos that you just claim are reposted videos from Gaza. A huge number of them are from Syria. And if they make people really angry or horrified, they'll get shared and get a ton of engagement and you will get a check, right? Like that's where Ashton comes out of. That's where all these guys come out of. So Ashton sees...

I don't know if he picked it up directly from the Houthi press people. I don't know if he picked it up from that thing on the cradle, but he posts the next day breaking and he's got... Of course, of course. I'll show you. I'll share screen, Garrison, as you can see. He's got the two little like... Does he have little sirens? Yeah, he's got the two little sirens on either side. I fucking knew it. Oh, yeah. No, of course. There's a million of this guy. This guy is all over the internet. A source has informed me that the USS Eisenhower has been sunk, all caps,

Mainstream media reports from yesterday claim the ship was not hit by Houthi missiles. Social media shows conflicting reports of damage. I'm seeking corroboration on this potentially huge story.

So first we see the the escalation of the Houthis say we shot at the Eisenhower and we hit it right they didn't claim they'd sunk it I think because the Houthis are like they're not dumb and like that's an easy claim to disprove whereas yeah you can kind of like there's not as much live footage of this you could kind of get away for a while with making people think maybe you damaged it a little bit or at least you got close you know.

But a source. A source. Yes, a source from citizen journalist Ashton Forbes. Speaking truth to power. Yeah.

The evidence that Forbes posts, because he says like social media shows conflicting reports of damage, is a screen grab of what looks like an aircraft carrier that's on fire. You can see a watermark behind it. Very blurry picture as well. Yeah. And there's a watermark. I don't know if you can see it clearly on this, Gare, but like that says Arabic Journal. So he clearly took it from another website, right? Yeah.

Now, I would describe the image quality of this as cell phone camera circa 2007. That's accurate. Yeah, it works roughly at like 3DS camera quality. Yeah, it looks it's not even super clear to me that that's an aircraft carrier.

Forbes's post obviously does not occur in a vacuum here. And it would be deeply fucked up for me to say citizen journalists shouldn't exist. If someone identifies themselves as that, it's a sign that they're full of shit, right? Because recent history is filled with people who call themselves citizen journalists putting out bullshit. But it's also filled with instances of citizens doing crucial journalism in the absence of credentialed professionals.

Especially in Gaza right now. Oh, yeah. I mean, that's basically everything, right? In part because most of the journalists who have tried to report on it have been fucking murdered. But even in the U.S., we have the recent case of Darnella Frazier, who was the 18-year-old woman who filmed the murder of George Floyd on May 25th, 2020. She received a Pulitzer Prize the next year for her video. However...

journalism, while again, there's a lot of value in citizen journalism, journalism is also a technical trade. And there are, in fact, some things that random derps on the internet should not report on. And an attack on the Eisenhower is maybe one of them. To

To make a long story short, the USS Eisenhower was not sunk. It is virtually impossible for non-state forces like the Houthis with the weaponry that they currently enjoy to sink a vessel like the Eisenhower. And for a little bit of context on why that is the case, I'm going to talk about another aircraft carrier called the USS Independence. The Independence was one of many, many aircraft carriers produced by the United States to curb stomp the empire of Japan during World War II.

After that war, we found ourselves with way more aircraft carriers than we needed or could afford to operate indefinitely at peacetime. So we decided to do the smartest thing we could with all these extra aircraft carriers and nuke them. That was... Wait. Yes. Yes. Well... It's classic 1946 America logic. That is true. That is true. That is...

So the independents didn't brave nuclear hellfire alone. As part of operations crossroads, we detonated two nuclear bombs within 1,700 feet of a fleet of ships. That's pretty close to point blank range in nuclear weapons terms. 14 ships were sunk outright by these nukes and the remainder were badly damaged. The independents was one of the boats that remained floating though. And it actually was towed back to San Francisco after being nuked twice.

Two nukes could not sink a 1946 aircraft carrier. What are they building these things out of? They're very big, and they are, if you are attacking them above the waterline, it's really hard to sink one of these boats, right? Like, that's kind of the thing. You can lob huge missiles and hit them with huge missiles on the top of the thing, and that can stop them from being able to launch aircraft. It can kill crew.

But unless you're actually blowing a big hole in it below the waterline, you're not going to send one of these fuckers to the bottom of the ocean, right? That's just kind of physics, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so we towed the independents back to San Francisco. They actually built a radiation lab in the boat itself for a while. And then again-

Because the United States be how the United States do. We filled this massive boat with concrete drums full of radioactive waste and sunk it 30 miles off the coast of California with two torpedoes. That's fucking hilarious. That rules. Hell yeah, brother. This country, man.

So again, once we started lobbing torpedoes at this fucker underneath the boat, it was not wildly hard to sink the son of a bitch, right? And that's the reality of the situation. If the Houthis were able to get some subs that were capable of actually getting through the dragnet of boats that are defending the Enterprise, and they could get any kind of decent-sized torpedo underneath it, they might have a chance of sinking it. Photon torpedoes. Photon torpedoes.

For the Enterprise, yeah. Yes, yes, yes. Or a quantum torpedo if we've moved on to DS9, Garrison. Oh, I've not started DS9 yet. Oh, oh, it's great. It's the horniest Star Trek, Garrison, which I appreciate. Which is shocking to hear. It is shockingly horny.

So I want to note, while I'm talking about the impossibility of the Houthis using their current methods, which are basically when it comes to how they've been attacking the Eisenhower, they've been either flying drones at it, trying to ram it with an explosive drone or launching cruise missiles at it.

Right. And all of these are basically aiming for the top of this boat because that's kind of the option that they have. I was not aware that they had like advanced submarine capabilities. They sure don't. As far as I'm aware, they don't. Yeah. Now it is. It's worth noting. Potentially, it could be surprisingly easy.

easy sometimes to sink an air, a modern aircraft carrier. If you have a decent submarine and there's, there's evidence of this that came from a, a joint Franco us Naval exercise off the coast of Florida in March of 2015, where basically we're doing this exercise with the French. At one point, this French submarine is part of the op for, which is like opposition forces during a war game. And it sinks the Roosevelt and most of its escorts in like a, a, a simulated, uh,

battle. And this is, you know, it's very funny because like the French military posted about this and then had to delete it because it was really embarrassing for the Navy. And it's seen as evidence by people who actually know their shit about naval power and naval warfare is like, oh, US anti-sub interdiction tactics and technology really took a hit in the post-Cold War period. We stopped putting money into it because like we thought, well, who's going to send subs after us if the Russians are gone?

Right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't mean to say that like these boats are invulnerable. Nothing can stop the U.S. Navy. In fact, the evidence suggests that like a modestly powerful naval power could do some serious damage to a carrier group in the right circumstances. It's just the way the Houthis with the claims people are making about how the Houthis sunk the Eisenhower is not a way in which the Eisenhower could realistically be sunk.

Right. Some bootleg Iranian missiles are not going to sink the most advanced carrier in the world today. Two nukes couldn't do a comparatively shitty carrier in 1946. Now, this is all pretty obvious to anyone who knows the first thing about modern naval warfare, but it was not obvious to our citizen journalist friend Ashton Forbes.

When numerous people pointed out to him that his claims were absurd, he replied, Yeah, I wanted to hold back on this story in case it's not true, but I trust my source and the media reports stink to me. If this ends up being wrong, I'll retract, but the implications are too huge not to report. Sure, sure, sure, buddy. Why not? We're going to dig into that and the ethics of the journalism that he claims to be practicing. But first, the ethics of my journalism are...

that you should buy whatever these advertisers are selling. And we're back.

So, I really hate the too-huge-not-to-report justification. That's, like, that's incredibly unethical journalism. Because, like, if a story is that huge... Actually, Robert, no, no, no. I just got an update from a source that 9-11-2 just happened. Oh, wow. I have a very blurry picture. I'm going to post it up on Twitter right now. I can't verify, but this is, if true...

This is groundbreaking, literally in case of, you know, the ground. Yeah. And I know listeners, you're like, there's no way 9-11-2 happened several days ago by the time you listen to this episode. And I haven't heard about it. I want to remind you about the film Mad Max Fury Road. You know, when that came out, none of us were expecting another Mad Max movie. And we got a great one. And I think 9-11-2 could be the Fury Road of terrorism attacks. Yeah.

Real promise. Real promise. They also could be censoring the story. They may not want you to know in case you haven't heard. The news doesn't want you to know that 9-11-2 already happened because it's going to destroy the market for 9-11-1 memorabilia. You know, that's everybody needs to read Manufacturing Consent by Chomsky. He lays it all out. Uh,

As you were saying. So obviously, if a story is as big as this and the sinking of the Eisenhower would be like the most significant military reversal in the 21st century, maybe, you know, I guess you could argue like the U.S.,

Leaving Afghanistan, maybe, but honest, from a technological standpoint, at least, the Houthis managing to drop an aircraft carrier would be massive. And if a story is that big, you have a responsibility not to report on it until you have any reason at all to believe that it's true. So when somebody says the implications are too huge not to report on, what they mean is I wanted the clout and traffic from getting this out first, and I don't really care if it's true.

Now, it happens to be quite easy to prove that the USS Eisenhower is still among the living because the captain of that boat is a poster. His name is God. Oh, he this man posts like you wouldn't believe Garrison. I've never seen a commanding officer in the US military who posts like this. Do you think Riker would be a poster?

I don't know. Riker would be he would do a lot of DMing. He would be sliding into DMs an awful lot. Yes, yes, yes, absolutely. He would constantly be trying to fuck. But I think the only reason he would actually post is when like something broke and he couldn't figure out how to fix it. He would he would be like adding Geordi constantly. Like, yes, I can't get my computer working.

That makes sense. So the captain of the Enterprise is Christopher F. Hill. And again, he's a poster for reasons that I have not bothered to look into and don't care to learn. He goes by Chowda on Twitter, like with a D-A-H. I don't know why. And within minutes of the Forbes post about or of Forbes's post, he himself posted videos of the bakery on board the Eisenhower, which showed no signs of being underwater.

I think that was kind of his subtle way of being like, we are still making like cinnamon rolls, like everything is fine on board this ship. In short order, internet sleuths discovered that the video clip posted by Forbes that claimed to show the Eisenhower in flames was, Garrison, do you want to guess where this, what this was a screenshot from?

Is this a video game? It is a video game. It's the video game Arma 3. It's from Arma 3. Every fucking time. Every time. Whenever this happens in the war in Ukraine, too, constantly, they'll be like, we've shot down, you know, a bunch of these MiG-21s or, you know, shot down this this massive Russian jet that's never been shot down before. Every time it's Arma 3. Like every single time. Unbelievable.

Yeah, like 80% of the time, fake videos of military vehicles being destroyed. It's just clips from Arma 3. Now, a brief glance into the backstory of Ashton Forbes would have made it clear that his claims were nonsense, as this write-up by George Allison in the UK Defense Journal notes. Ashton Forbes,

Ashton Forbes, despite his self-identified role as a citizen journalist, has, I'm told, a history of posting sensational and often unverified claims, particularly about Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. Oh my God! MH370 was a commercial flight that disappeared in 2014, well en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, leading to numerous conspiracy theories. Now, we don't actually know why MH370 went down. I think probably the leading theory was that the pilot committed suicide, but even that, I don't think that there's like

I don't think it's, it's very unclear. Could have just been a fuck up something like it's, we really don't know, which is why there's so much conspiracy. It could have gone into wormhole. So it could have gone into the wormhole. Right now, Forbes is belief. According to, I found a post by Swift on security. Who's a popular security expert who states that Forbes believes that MH three 70 had secret free energy tech on it. That was raptured into a wormhole by reptilians. Are you? No, no,

Yeah, you actually got it right. I was doing a bit. You got it right, Garrison. Oh my God. Swift provides an example of another one of the citizen journalists' big scoops. Free energy announcement. Free energy, otherwise known as over unity, is 100% real. The devices exist already. I have been told exactly how an operational device works. I signed an NDA, so won't be able to disclose specifics.

100% real. That's great. I love that the people who figure out free energy would let you post about it as long as you don't explain how it works. I like that you signed an NDA so you can't talk about it, except for this post in which you do talk about it. In which you absolutely talk about it. Classic move.

Now, once Forbes' post started to gain traction, the entire ecosystem of info grifters who cropped up like mushrooms to profit off the massacre in Gaza swung into gear. Thanks to Elon's new ownership of Twitter, being able to draw viral crowds to your content by latching onto the most discussed topics of the day is very profitable, as we discussed.

And into this mix, you do have some state-funded actors. You've got people working for Iran, for Israel, for Russia, for the United States, all trying to push their own sundry lines of propaganda using the engines of algorithmic virality. And then, of course, there are the legitimately hopeful but ill-informed. And these are the people that I have sympathy with and who I'm kind of like- Totally. Focusing on. These are people who are

understandably numb from constant exposure to a barrage of photos and videos of war crimes. And they are desperately ready to believe in some kind of miraculous underdog victory, right? Hollywood fiction has trained us all to see that as possible. This is being thought of by a lot of people who are just numb and broken from videos of horror as like,

Well, I don't know. Maybe we could have our Star Wars moment, right? Maybe we've got a Luke Skywalker downing the Death Star. Now, the Houthis aren't Luke Skywalker and the Eisenhower isn't entirely the Death Star. It's like, it's got shades of Death Star. It's got some Death Star DNA. It's like a mini Death Star. It's got some Death Star DNA in it, sure. Yeah.

I mean, it's closer to a Star Destroyer, right? Closer to a Star Destroyer. Right, right, right. One of the posts I came across researching this was Alden Markey, who describes himself as a counter-propagandist and researcher with a focus on Yemen. He posted a Photoshop of the Eisenhower from above with a dagger in the water beneath it. This was accompanied by the text, USS Eisenhower was just struck for the second time in 24 hours, and it had something like 2,000 likes, 250,000 views, when I came across it.

Another account quote tweeted this and got nearly 5,000 likes saying it won't happen, but it would be so fucking funny if Yemen sinks an aircraft carrier. Like, can you imagine?

And I think that guy represents the more common attitude, which is this mix of ennui and desperation, right? Nothing is going to stop this massacre. It seems like that. It really feels like that, right? But wouldn't it be rad if something did? And to be realistic, I don't know that I think there's a real odds that dropping the Eisenhower somehow would stop Netanyahu from what he's doing. I mean, maybe it would. Like, it would certainly reduce the ability of the United States to interdict Iranian missiles coming in.

into Israel. But I don't know that I think that it's realistic that that's going to stop Netanyahu from doing the shit that Netanyahu is doing. You can feel however you want about that. It's not irrational to be like, boy, I don't think this is real, but like, I wish it was right. So you can feel however you want about this guy wanting, you know, thousands of US soldiers to get murdered. I get both like,

I don't think that realistically anything the Houthis are doing is going to stop what Israel's doing at this point. But I also understand just desperately wanting some violence to come down on the other side of this thing after months of watching videos of the slaughter in Gaza. You know, especially as you have, you have like Nikki Haley signing bombs that then Biden is sending over. Like, come on. Like, yeah, no, I could understand the emotional, like,

Yeah, it doesn't speak to the best angels of our nature, right? Because you're hoping for huge amounts of human death either way. But like, I get it. And it's not irrational, right? Saying there's no way this is real, but I wish it was is not an irrational feeling, right? You can contrast that to the posts of independent journalist and news grifter Richard Medhurst with 418,000 followers who posted this on June 2nd.

Yemen struck the best ship in the U.S. Navy with ballistic and cruise missiles. The ship is fleeing, and the captain of the USS Eisenhower tried to do damage control by posting a video of the deck on Twitter, but it's an old Instagram reel from 13 weeks ago. Left. Yemen never lie. And this is just an alternate reality that they've entered into now. Yes. Yes. You have departed...

reality and in favor of one that you are crafting because it's more comforting than the one in which nothing seems to be able to actually alter the course of violence in Gaza, right? So you're just deciding to believe in something else. Now, community notes flagged this post, but it still has something like 350,000 views and more than 400,000 likes. 400,000? Or 4,000 likes, sorry. Okay.

418,000 followers, 4,000 likes on the post. I see. 4,000 likes is still a mess. It's sizable. Super large number. Yeah. Medhurst has leaned hard into repeating claims that the Houthis have sunk or damaged the Eisenhower. In another post with 6,000 likes and 821,000 views, he describes the Ike as being hit with ballistic and cruise missiles and add, Yemen never lie in their press briefings, so I'm inclined to believe them. In one post he... Jesus Christ. I know. It's...

In one post, he notes that the Houthis recently shot down an MQ-9 Reaper drone, which did happen and claims the US won't admit to that either. And like, I haven't run into the US denying that this happened. There's three clear cases of MQ-9s being shot down last month alone, right? Like, we actually know a lot about this, which is part of why I don't believe the Eisenhower shot down is they, the Houthis were able to prove quite frankly,

readily that they had shot down the MQ-9s, I have seen no proof that the Eisenhower's been hit, right? And this isn't just a case where like the Houthis should be able to provide some actual proof if they'd done this. The Eisenhower is a floating city with a population of thousands. There's like seven or 8,000 people, I think at least in the whole strike group. I will concede that the military could probably keep a lid on an attack against the Eisenhower and might even temporarily be able to hide the fact that it had suffered minor damage from

But you're not keeping anything significant secret for the long haul, right? Like you just, you can't keep secrets like that. There's too many people. They're going to talk to their families. If the boat goes down with thousands of people on board, family members are going to be like, boy, none of us have heard from our loved ones in a while, right? And also like the government would say something and like start like a massive batch of retaliation. Like it's not like America would be like, oh, shh, quiet.

We just have to pretend this didn't happen. Yeah. No, they're going to be talking about it nonstop for the past like

Three months. We sent the Eisenhower and its crew to an ice farm upstate. Exactly. So why would the Houthis, this is a question to ask then, why would the Houthis make fake claims that are obviously fake claims about striking the Eisenhower, right? And I think it's because at this point, for a sizable chunk of people, fake Houthi attacks on U.S. assets are just as good as real ones. And I think there are people within the leadership cadres of the Houthis who know that perfectly well.

It is entirely possible that the Houthis find themselves low on munitions after months of conflict with the U.S. And somebody smart realized, like, what if we just say we shot at them, right? It'll have the same propaganda impact and we won't have to waste a missile, right? No, you'll still be able to talk about it on your –

Los Angeles Twitch stream to your hundreds of thousands of followers. Right. The ongoing genocide, if that's what actually is happening here, right? I can see that as a reasonably cunning move. The ongoing genocide in Gaza, the other inability of protest or armed resistance to

change it in any way, leads some people to a kind of mad desperation. In this desperation, the Houthis have become a symbol of hope to many people for the simple reason that they seem to be capable of taking action against the forces protecting Israel as Israel commits war crimes.

Now, the reality of the situation is that the Houthis themselves have committed their share of war crimes, some of which are reminiscent of the very crimes committed by Israel. In December of 2014, the Houthis laid siege to Yemen's second city, Taiz, leading to a humanitarian catastrophe, as this article from The Guardian lays out. Quote,

Since early April, when the Resistance, an alliance of local forces dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, fought off the Houthis' attempt to control the city, the militia retaliated by cutting off roads, preventing food and medical aid from getting in. Access is only allowed through a single checkpoint, dubbed the Rafah Crossing by the residents after its more famous namesake on the Egypt Canal.

Gaza border. Every morning, long queues form outside the crossing by those wanting to enter the city. Houthi militias search and confiscate medicine, cooking gas, cigarettes, bottled water, or anything more than a small shopping bag of food. In order to survive, the city has for months been relying on groups of young boys and long trains of donkeys to bring in supplies via a long and arduous journey through the mountains.

but donkeys alone can hardly fulfill the needs of the city. Medicine and food have all but disappeared from the market, and the prices of what are left have jumped in the last few months, pushing most of the population below the poverty line.

Now, the comparison between Thais and Gaza are striking, right? Like the crossing was called Rafa, you know? Yeah, no, they literally named it after the crossing. Yeah. And, you know, you hear a lot of the same stories like the hospitals basically were out of, you know, anything to actually treat the injured. One doctor at one of the two functioning hospitals in the city told the Guardian, we can't do operations. We can't put people in intensive care. We can only patch wounds and tell the patient you are welcome to die here.

Now, I want to be clear here. The other side in this conflict was inarguably even worse. The Saudi led coalition using U.S. weaponry put the whole country in a state of siege that like led to catastrophic famines and situations very similar and in some cases worse than what the Houthi did to Thais. Right. Like this is the this. I mean, it's war. Right. This is like unspeakable suffering compounding on unspeakable suffering. Right. Right.

You've probably heard that old saying, when you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back. And there's a corollary to that statement that I think is relevant to some of the fantasies that some people on the left have about the Houthis. When you start giving yourself up to false realities, eventually you can lose yourself entirely. And we're going to talk a little bit about that. But first, lose yourself to these products.

We're back. So people like Medhurst, you know, hosts like by these guys, they aren't meant to inform people about the real world. Medhurst's fans, the people who take him seriously, have departed reality in favor of a fantasy because that fantasy world is the only place in which victory feels possible. There's a term that you and I talk about a lot, Garrison, coined by the author Robert Anton Wilson, that I think is useful in dealing with situations like this. And that term is reality tunnel.

The concept is complex and explanations of it tend towards long, but the basic idea is that we in the modern world are all constantly flooded by information, from our senses and from the different information delivery devices that we filled our world with. In order to function, we have to triage that information, to pare it away until we get to a reality that we can live inside.

The fact that human beings can and perhaps inherently do this is not necessarily bad. And in fact, I might argue that without the ability to choose and flip between different realities, to change the channel, as Wilson put it, positive progress is impossible. I found this explained well in an essay on Wilson's work by Mykola Bilukonsky.

Quote, Now,

Those other reality tunnels like that you can key yourself in on are always there. They always exist, right? You just had to actually unlearn the filters that you existed within in order to access them, you know? Whether or not you're tuned in doesn't mean like

they just don't exist. They're still there. Yeah, yeah. So again, the fact that people can pick and choose which reality channel can change the channel, so to speak, isn't necessarily bad and in fact is part of necessary positive progress. But some people don't want to hop between tunnels and explore the dazzling variety of realities that exist. They want to pick a tunnel in which they feel comfortable and then burrow so deep into it that no other realities can find them.

I want you to think of one of my favorite recent Trump world grifts, right? Is these kind of this company that started putting out these like ads with an obvious AI Donald Trump or Elon Musk voice where they're like, Trump is going to change the monetary system. And if you buy these like Trump bucks,

debit card things or fake checks. He's going to like, when he changes it, there'll be worth a thousand, 10,000 times what you put in. So if you put in two or $3,000 worth of this, you'll be rich. He's doing this to reward his loyal fans. He's going to like, he's going to fix everything and you'll finally be rich. Right. You know, you deserve to be rich. Right. And a bunch of people bought these like fake promissory notes and then like went to bank of America to cash them in. And the bank was like, well, no,

That's not this. This isn't real money. This is this is nothing at all. Right. And, you know, these people got fleeced. And one way to look at the people who got fleeced is like, well, they're dumb. Right. These people are stupid. You know, they did a stupid thing. They believed something that was obviously fake. And you can you can take that out of their story if you want. I don't think that's helpful, though.

The reality is that these people represent a cautionary tale. They didn't start out believing that the guy from The Apprentice was their messiah. Their break from consensus reality began years or decades earlier, and it's going to be different for every individual person. When I think about my own family members who came to believe pretty unhinged things that, you know,

figures within the Republican Party or Trump himself told them, I tend to trace their break from reality back to, well, back to the day when the calming, charismatic voice of Ronald Reagan said this about the Iran-Contra scandal, a deal in which his administration gave Iran weapons in exchange for hostages. And this is Reagan.

A few months ago, I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions tell me that's true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not. Jesus. And I think that line...

Yeah.

And in that moment, I think that's where a lot of Americans who are now in an even more unhinged place started burrowing down and started tunneling away from their friends and family and towards the heart of something dark.

As the years went on, the consequences of many Reagan-era economic and social policies became impossible to ignore. No wealth trickled down. Mourning did not return to America. The promise of the internet boom yielded to the dot-com bubble bursting. September 11th sobered us up from the hallucination of permanent victory after the end of the Cold War. The housing market crashed.

The hideous reality of climate change became unavoidable. The promise of a bright future faded and people buried themselves deeper in fantasies to avoid a bleak and empty horizon.

And all throughout this, the left prided itself on a sort of logical sobriety, a willingness to stare into the abyss, to accept the reality of our dire moment, and to propose radical solutions. Yet one by one, the different protest movements put out by the left flopped and fizzled, promising organizers and ideological leaders were revealed as frauds or became corrupted by the system. Capitalism failed to fall or reform.

And rather than confront the dire, complex reality that leaves us in, increasing numbers of leftists found alternative realities, served eagerly by an alliance of conmen and paid propagandists. Now,

Leftists have always been just as vulnerable to vicious fantasy as conservatives. This has proven well in the last century. There's a case of a Marxist academic named Malcolm Caldwell, which I think is valuable. Depending on who you talk to about Caldwell, he's this Scottish academic. He was a college professor, apparently a pretty good economist, and he also had this weird thing for a

communist movements, which he thought were, he believed that there was this like massive global famine coming. And he believed that these like back to the land Marxist movements sweeping Southeast Asia were the only way forward for a lot of humanity. He was this like third worldist.

A lot of his belief was kind of centering that, you know, the United States was the source of all evil in the world effectively. But this kind of led him to, he became a stan of every communist state, even the ones that were in conflict with each other. He traveled to like North Korea and came back like,

talking about all of the wonderful accomplishments of Juche ideology. You know, he was in love with Vietnam. He was also in love with Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. And that's kind of part of the evidence that like he had entered a reality tunnel that had taken him away from any kind of logical reality because like Cambodia and Vietnam went to war, right? Vietnam invaded Cambodia. Like these two were not like communist fellow travelers on the same side of a conflict. But

Whenever this would get brought up to Caldwell, when he'd argue about Vietnam and the conflict that Vietnam was having with Cambodia or people would try to argue with him about the realities of the Khmer Rouge system, he would just kind of shut down. Like he was – yeah, he couldn't talk about it, right?

Now, eventually, Caldwell, because he's an academic, he travels to a lot of these countries. And it's fine. He travels to the USSR. He gets a tour there. He travels to North Korea. He gets a tour there. He gets a tour at Vietnam. That's all fine. All of those states are sane states, right? Which is not to say that they don't do bad things, but they're run by people who like, there's no benefit in us to anything bad happening to this guy who's out there in the West writing nice things about our regimes, right?

Pol Pot was not sane. The Khmer Rouge was not sane.

So he goes to Cambodia with two American journalists, one of whom had been in Cambodia in the years prior to the Khmer Rouge overthrow of the U.S.-backed government of La Nol and knew the country well. And when she got there, they had all these arguments where he was like, I think the revolution is working. You know, it's not perfect, but it needs its time. Look at all the wonderful accomplishments already. And she would point out, I have been to these cities before.

years ago and there's no people anymore. All of the people are gone. Something is terribly wrong. And he just couldn't listen to her. So they're there a couple of weeks and he gets invited to have a meeting with Pol Pot and

And, you know, he has a meeting with him right after these journalists do. And he comes back from it really excited, being like, we had a great talk. He's such a smart man. You know, we talked about economics. I feel really he's invited me back next year, you know. And by the way, within like weeks of this, Vietnam invades and forces Pol Pot out of the capital. Right. Like the the the the state of of the Khmer Rouge was deeply precarious at this point. But he comes out super optimistic and.

And then later that night, a gunman shoots him to death and then shoots himself to death. It is really unclear to this day. It's a bit of a mystery what happened. The most likely explanation is that the Khmer Rouge wanted to pin the murder of a leftist Western academic on Vietnam to try and generate international outrage against Vietnam, who was about to invade. It's...

possible Vietnam killed him for, but I don't really see a benefit to Vietnam in doing that. Again, they invade right after this. It seems like in one of the journalists who was there basically was like a Pol Pot was out of his fucking mind. Of course he would do this. There's no like, there's no trying to lay out like the rationality behind this man's actions. I think what's more interesting is Caldwell's

had been presented with plenty of evidence that the Khmer Rouge regime was deeply evil and violent. And in fact, he had published right before he went over there, he published an article about like the successes of their agrarian reforms and the Khmer Rouge government official that he cited in that paper. That's like the basis of most of his claims about how well the reforms had worked with it. Like a couple of weeks before he arrived in Cambodia was tortured to death in the S-21 prison. Yeah.

Well, that's not a great sign. Not a great sign. Anyway, I bring this guy up because I think he's maybe the best example of like,

the damage that you do to yourself when you let yourself fall into these tunnels. Because Caldwell, he's not one of these gray zone guys. He didn't make a bunch of money being a stand for dictatorships. He seems to... Everyone who talked, even the people who thought he was out of his mind on his opinions on the Khmer Rouge agree, he was a really nice man. He was a family man. He was a good teacher. He just...

completely left reality in this one thing and it led him to oblivion you know I've been thinking about a lot of similar stuff in terms of like what Israel's currently doing and like there's so many people who are just vocally supportive every single action that's being done and there's even been attacks where I've seen people like

like, defend what happened. It's like, no, this was, like, a necessary strike. It did for all these reasons, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Even if someone like Netanyahu then, like, comes out and says, like, actually, no, this was a quote-unquote, like, terrible accident or whatever, there will still be people defending it. And, like, I don't know if all of these people are literally, like, bloodthirsty. Like, I don't know if they actually really want to see, like,

everyone in Gaza killed. I'm sure there's maybe some people who are like just bad, but I think the reality tunnel version, I think is a lot more useful for understanding how there's so many otherwise very like normal people who feel totally fine about cheering on the actions of the state of Israel right now as their, you know, as the death toll just gets higher and higher and higher every single day. No, it's certainly been something I've thought about

Very often these past few months, as I'm sure many other people are, you know, both staring into the abyss on Twitter.com where everyone has a take. But then also, you know, if you're ever going out to any, like, if you're ever going out to any of these protests, there will probably be like a group of Zionist counter protesters yelling something. And it's a really tricky thing to navigate. Yeah, it is. Because like, and I guess what the scary question to me is like,

How do you communicate with someone who is not living in the same reality? And like, totally, I don't think you really can. I think sometimes I know sometimes because I've seen it happen. Sometimes people just get out of that alternate reality on their own. Right. That does happen. Thank God. But it's not like reliable that it happens. And I, I have, you know, as someone who has been in this space of researching cults of researching disinformation for years now, I,

I'm not aware of any reliable ways to break people out of these tunnels when they get themselves in. And that's the scariest thing to me, right? There's a number of people, I don't think it's huge in an electoral sense, but it's probably thousands or tens of thousands of people who now believe that the Eisenhower is either badly damaged or at the bottom of the sea, and they will keep believing that the same way that like

A chunk of people believe that when they look up and see clouds, every cloud they see is like poison. The US government shot out into the sky using our secret planes to murder people with fucking whatever. I don't know. It's anyway, or

Or the belief that literally every university in Gaza has been secretly turned into a military base. Right. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's like underground tunnels. It's like, you know, it's all of all of all of these things that it's not just like a I don't know if the switch happens immediately. I don't think it does. There may be like a tipping point. It is often a very gradual shift into different reality tunnels. And then you don't realize how far you are in one.

until you're fully in it. And then in that case, you probably don't even realize yourself. People on the outside will point out, oh, wow, this is some interesting beliefs you have suddenly fallen into. But it doesn't happen overnight. It is a slow shift in a lot of cases. And yeah, laying out, quote unquote, facts and logic often cases does not help at all and will actually hurt. It will produce a backfire effect. Yeah.

That's not the case for everybody, but that is the case for a lot of people. And it's easy to discount people yelling horrible things at you at a protest. It's easy to discount people saying horrible things on Twitter. But it's more frustrating when it's your aunt, who you previously had a good relationship with. This kind of reminds me of...

attempts at QAnon deprogramming back in 2019, where we had this influx of older people and boomers, and sometimes just not super old people either, also just moms in their 30s who started believing all this stuff. And

cutting them off from contact with you or other people doesn't help, obviously. But it can also be really hard to maintain a good relationship. And it's a weird balance of being able to provide a little bit of compassion to someone and not completely cut them off while also maintaining your own personal boundaries. It's a really tricky thing. But in a lot of the cases of the QAnon stuff, all the most successful things that I've heard about people getting out of it, it did require...

a line. There had to be some connecting thread to the person. And over time, that thread could be pulled upon, and maybe the person would use that thread as a crutch when the reality slowly started to crumble around them. And it's really tricky, and I don't have any good solutions for this. Nobody does. Anyone who does say they do is also a grifter who's lying and trying to make money.

Yeah, I will. I will agree with you. The closest we come to there being a solution is don't cut off ties with the person. I mean, unless you have obviously there are some things that people can come to believe and advocate for that you have to like I'm not saying that that that line doesn't exist. Like I had someone reach out about a family member who had started to believe that.

some conspiracy stuff regarding extraterrestrials that was like obviously untrue and it worried them. And I was like, well, look, you know, you don't have to tell them that you believe them. You can say like, I don't, you know, really feel the same way you do about this, but I'm always down to talk about it. Right. Or like, you know, I'm always, you know, here to, to, to listen if you want to talk about this and let them know that like they have a connection still, if you make sure that there's like still a way they can get out of that tunnel and back up to something that resembles reality, maybe they will, you know?

Yeah. I really wish Robert Anton Wilson could have seen the 2020 era internet. I'm sure he would have had some thoughts. He would have had some fascinating things to write about it. Yeah. Well, this has been an exciting tale. Yes, indeed. So, I don't know. Aircraft carrier down. We did it, Joe. Yeah, we did it, Joe. Go destroy the USS Eisenhower in your own life. Just like the fake Kuthys pretend to did.

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This is It Could Happen Here, a daily podcast, and this might be our annual Oh My God episode. And we have Robert and Gare, and I am also here, Sophie. Hi, Gare. We've been chasing the high of the come episode for more than a year, so let's try this. Yeah, so, you know, last week we all got some really exciting news. The rule of law has found Donald Trump guilty on 34 counts.

So that's exciting. You can, of course, Google Trump Rule 34 to learn more, which was, you know, a joke I saw a lot online. And then I wanted to actually see what would happen if I did that. And then that turned into like... That's evidence of mental illness. Nobody does that. And then it turned into like five days of work. That's further evidence. So that is what we're doing today.

Hey, this is Gare from the future. Just cutting in to clarify one little aspect. When doing the legal review for this episode, we noticed that we never actually defined what Rule 34 is. Now, I assume if you're listening to this podcast, you know what Rule 34 is. But just in case you do not, Rule 34 is part of the memefied rules of the Internet. It originally comes from a 2003 webcomic.

But Rule 34 states that if it exists, there is porn of it, meaning that you can find porn of anything on the Internet, whether that be cooking or bowling or in this case, Donald J. Trump. And, you know, as someone who is

just reviewed basically all of the Donald J. Trump pornography that I could find on the internet these past five days. I did try to keep this episode roughly PG-13. We kind of crossed that boundary a little bit. So I do think it's, you know, probably wise to give some sort of general sexualized content warning here. But again, I tried to keep things as tame as I can, you know, all things considered. Anyway, back to the episode. ♪

I started my journey by doing the most obvious thing I could think of, which is opening a virtual PC and using Google through the Tor browser to search Trump Rule 34. No, this is already sounding like a great life choice when you have to make all of those steps to search something. Well, because I don't want all of my entire computer and search results just to get completely fucked over for the next week or two.

Absolutely. They might just already because this is all in a Google Doc now. So it's already being mined, you know. Yeah. So I'm already fucked. Very similar to the way that we'll be discussing today. So. Wow. The first result when you Google Trump Rule 34 is the website rule34.xxx. So here we go. Just straight to the source. I clicked on the link and as the page loaded, I was shocked by what I saw or more accurately what I didn't see. Yeah.

There was far less Trump porn than what I was expecting. Not even like a single full page of results. See, this is what Joe Biden's taken from us. Only 31 pieces of artwork came up in the search results, seven of which didn't even feature Donald Trump and only used his name. Wow, that's three less than the number of felonies he has. That's right. But many of them just didn't even have Trump and only used his name as like a joke tag for...

Typically some sort of like furry pornography, which is going to be a very common trend for the rest of this episode. Great. So what would you expect the first results to contain on the website rule34.xxx? God, Garrison, I don't even know. I'm imagining a lot of like, you know how there's those like political cartoons? Like, I forget the guy's name, Ben Garrison, I think it is, who like always draws Trump as like shredded.

I guess that's kind of what I expect. There are certainly some of those, but the very first piece features a glossy rendering of Vladimir Putin's head.

With a quote, this is me just quoting myself. I don't know why I said quote, but it's what I described as a penal like object looming in front. And I believe this is alluded to be Donald Trump. I feel like the listener needs to know that Garrison, for reasons that surpass all understanding, is wearing a fitted shirt and tie as they explain this to us. This is serious. Which is some ambiance you are not getting as a listener. This is a serious topic for me. I can see that.

See, I was like, I was thinking like Trump fucking a flag, but... We'll get some flag action later. Don't worry. I'm so glad. Flag action. Yeah. So there we go. The next image is actually going to be a little bit more useful in kind of forecasting some trends that we're going to be going over. The next image is Donald Trump in makeup and lingerie engaged in some sort of what I would describe as an interracial cuckold scenario in the White House.

Not the best. This is where we're going to start seeing some worrying trends. And part of the difficulty in this episode was like, I can't just show everyone all this pornography. That would be like an HR violation. And I'm not going to have the editor, you know,

cut together weird porn audio. So it's all, I often describe this with word, but I did find one. Hence the tie. Hence the tie. But I did find one workaround. Is I collected all of the pictures of just Trump's face. Divorced from any other context of the image. I will actually share the picture of his face across some of these, some of these artworks. Okay. So here is, here is image number one. Oh, honey. Not great. Okay.

Is that not like a, so this is not, I need to qualify here. This is not like a political cartoon. This is somebody trying to get off. Okay. Correct. Almost none of these are going to be political cartoons. Great. The very last one is, but all of these are just, just regular artwork. I feel like I have to comment on this with a reference that Garrison might be several decades past your time, but he looks like Mrs. Doubtfire. He looks like Robin Williams and drag.

A little bit. I would say Williams pulls it off a little bit better. Absolutely. I mean, Robin Williams could pull off anything. I just don't think that lipstick works for Trump's complexion. No, and I think that's probably fair. His eye shadow is a little heavy. There's definitely some troubling... Hair's looking good. Hair's looking great. Side note, is the image framed behind him...

Also Trump? Yes, that's him. That's Trump as some sort of Mussolini type figure. He's got like the Roman laurel wreath in his hair. He does. Which I believe that Trump has a photo like that in his house. That actually, that could be real.

Next one. Yeah, we have to get through a few of these. So there is multiple tentacle pieces, which I'm sure we could all guess, right? That seems pretty obvious. There is a drawing of Putin and Trump engaged in what I would describe as old man yaoi, which is...

I'm going to need to see that. Two parts. And one of these images is actually animated into a gif. So that's exciting. That's pretty competent, though. You know, I actually kind of like those as caricatures of both men. You really get a lot of personality. And I do feel like that's how Vladimir Putin looks when he's coming. It's not bad. I don't think about that.

Jesus Christ. Two fun comments underneath this one is this is actually so hot. Hashtag mega. And this is why he isn't our president anymore. Perhaps. Oh, OK. We also we also have Trump in a in like a dungeon orgy comprised of horror movie characters and female pop stars. Great. An image posted the day after the election in 2016.

There's Trump in his suit having sex with an anime girl wearing a Confederate battle flag bikini and cowboy hat. This is backdroped by a big American flag, and the Confederate girl has a Make America Great Again butt tattoo. So getting some kind of conflicting messages there. But this Trump face is really not great. I really don't like it. See, yeah.

His eyes are really squished together. In a lot of these, he's giving a thumbs up. I would say in about half the images, he's giving a thumbs up. You know where that thumb's about to be, right? That's part of what makes this unsettling to me. I really appreciate in this one that for his fingerprint, it's just like a spiral swirl. Yeah. That's not the best one. Read us some comments. The comments for this one are quite good.

Quote, I want to see more thick or flat blonde waifus wearing a cowboy hat. I want to help make America to be great. This turned me on bigly and frankly. Okay, now Garrison, you've buried the lead, which is that I want to help America to be great was posted by hexmaniac underscore pokewhore. I'm guessing this is some sort of Pokemon obsessed meme.

slut witch that's that's kind of many such cases taking this many such cases quite frankly made my peepee huge and if people say this is not pretty they are wrong they are working for the socialist globalist democrats and chinese government anyway it's impossible to know if that's a joke

We have a really interesting one by an artist named LGL I'm as how I'm going to say it. Sorry. There's also the last post on that is why it's the cock discolor. Yes. The last comment for the Confederate girl one is why is the cock discolored, which is quite funny, but we have the next one is actually a three panel spread. First is a Democrat donkey for Sona. Okay.

The second part is a floating Donald Trump elephant head with like a propeller extending out at the top and a robot hand coming out of the trunk reaching for the donkey's ass. Lastly, the Trump elephant now has an extendable boxing glove trunk and is flying victoriously over the donkey Democrat with a black eye. See, I like this more before we got into like domestic abuse territory.

No, this is... We're going to get into a lot of problematic aspects. I will just say now, if you don't want to listen to some kind of deeply troubling psychosexual themes develop over the course, especially once we get to the AO3 section. Okay. You know? Okay. I'm sorry. We need to talk about this post by user Trashfucker. Yeah. I don't... Wow. Okay. So this... Wow. The comment for the Donkey First Sono one says, quote,

I love you and your art, though this really represents how that orange treated women and how he assaulted them by grabbing their genit-tess. Genitess? Beautiful art, beautiful styles. Thank you!

If you can't spell genitals, you're not allowed to grab them. That is the law of the world. Reading that post, I want more than anything to have Trump comment on some of these. Oh, absolutely. Get him up on the podium talking about this beautiful art, beautiful styles. They're saying it's the most beautiful donkey pornography anybody's ever made on the dark web.

A really bad one is a cartoon of Milo Yiannopoulos having sex with a hashtag never Trump Orthodox Jew who might be Ben Shapiro. I can't tell. Please, please scroll. Please scroll. Until he supports building the wall as then. So as this is happening on the background, a Yassified Trump is sitting on the wall giving a thumbs up. This is by a Nazi cartoonist named Emily Yousis. Here is Yassified Trump giving a thumbs up. He sure is, man.

Those cheeks are appled. It's the only way I know how to describe him. Where is Milo Yiannopoulos? Sophie, I don't think I can show you that image because it'll be in HR. I can't show you that part because there's too much stuff going on. Okay, send it to me on Signalator. I need to get it. Sophie, Sophie. That's an HR violation. You're not allowed to ask Garrison that, I don't think. I know, but...

I barely look. I don't have a great recall of the HR course we have to take every year about sexual harassment. But I'm sure that you are both in violation of company policy. Robert, that is because you're like two years behind on all of your mandated work trainings. I get a notification in my email twice a day that Robert hasn't done some like...

legally required training. So maybe I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure you are both in violation of our company's HR policies. Probably, but these Trump drawings just keep getting more bizarre. There's a really good one of an octopus Donald Trump getting intimate with a furry fox and cat. Well, I do want to see that. With the comment posted under, from what I've known, Trump doesn't support these kind of things. That's probably true.

I don't think he'd be thrilled about that. So there's a few other furry ones, notably one with Trump grabbing the buttocks of a wild cat with very small hands and one of a sexy Trump plowing down Fluttershy in front of an American flag. Oh, God.

Sorry. That makes sense. Yeah, it's bad. Quote, guess I'm not the only mega brony out there. Also, quote, I want to end my life. Sorry. Also, quote, I want my life to end. Right? Fucking...

Me too, honey. Me too. Same, bro. That's like a lot of Trump back. I did not need to see that much of his back. Sophie, there's so much more Trump back. Okay. Anyway, so results for Donald J. Trump specifically produced a handful of new images of

One really bad one of Trump groping a Family Guy character. Which Family Guy? But which Family Guy character, Garrison? I've never seen Family Guy. It's some woman. Come on. There's also a cartoon. Okay, great. I'm sorry. Is that his face as a ball sack? No, that's just his face, Sophie. Yeah, that feels like, that does feel like some kind of like,

lib political cartoon Trump drawing. It does. He's covered in bronzer, his hair is a bit... I love the eyebrows. It's trying to be the family guy style. There's also a cartoon of a naked, very, very buff, well-endowed Donald Trump flexing while holding a cigar sitting in his armchair, which has the really good comment of...

His thumb is on the wrong side, which it is. That's true. I just want everyone to know that Garrison has PG'd these for us. They're like PG-13, so we're not seeing anything super inappropriate. No, this is all above board. One of the worst ones, in my opinion, is a very, very steamy rendering of a blushing Trump looking behind toward the viewer with his butt pushed into the foreground. Mega is written across the cheeks.

In the upper left corner is a close-up of a smooth scrotum and a stretched out hole. See, Garrison, when it comes to HR violations, I feel like you can't say stretched out hole. I think that's forbidden on a company call. I don't think you're allowed to say stretched out hole. I tried to really turn the script into the most...

academic wording I can. There are text bubbles of Trump conversing with the viewer. Trump says, you will vote for me after this, right? With the viewer responding, yeah, sure. They can't even hit the board. They can't even get someone excited about this election.

Extra text with an arrow pointing to Trump reads, ineligible to run again. This piece has by far the highest number of horny comments underneath the image. Now, I think the actual worst one I discovered is a happy International Men's Day cartoon of Trump wearing an American flag thong standing on top of a box of Nobel Peace Prizes.

Thank you for censoring that. Jesus. With the Steven Universe character Pearl in a bikini holding on to Trump, rubbing her leg against his thigh. See, and I don't feel like Pearl would do this. No, no. So Pearl has a text bubble saying, forget women. I only make love to real men now. Now, I wanted to learn more about why this image exists.

The artist behind this creation is named Luke Webber, and he actually used to work on the show Steven Universe as a storyboard artist. Oh, God. So this is canon. Luke, no. Luke had a really unhealthy obsession with the lesbian character Pearl.

and would often waste time at work by drawing really horny art of himself and Pearl in a relationship. Some of his art of him and Pearl would include other co-workers like Ian Jones-Quartey and show creator Rebecca Sugar. He allegedly gave Rebecca Sugar a drawing of him having sex with Pearl, which allegedly got him fired from the show among many other reasons. And he's been blacklisted from large parts of the animation industry for sexual harassment and violence.

Oh, well, that was much worse than I thought it was going to be. I was like, this is bad. Novus is really fucked up. Ew, what a piece of shit. So there's a bad stuff. Now, I saved the best for last. There's a small collection of pieces riffing on that picture of Trump playing tennis where he looks all, quote unquote, caked up.

One with Trump in his tennis outfit is bending over, pants down, crack out, with a variation featuring two large, what I'm going to call dark-skinned penises. I think Trump interracial bottoming is a trend that we'll see reoccurring here. Of course. Now, however, I believe the superior tennis piece is from an artist named Shadbase, who might be a Nazi or just pretends to be one online. Correct.

Cutting in here to do a quick correction. So originally in this episode, I identified Shadbase as a trans woman, which is not the case. The reason why I thought this is because the most recent picture appearing to be Shadbase on his Twitter account from like a year ago is him as a trans woman talking about getting on estrogen. Now, this was actually part of an ongoing joke that I just didn't have the context for as he's like a really scummy and deeply problematic artist who I did not feel like doing a whole deep dive on. So apologies for that. And back to the episode.

But she has drawn Trump in the same pose as the famous photo, but as an anime girl wearing a transparent tennis skirt with the comments underneath saying, I'd vote for her and I don't have enough weed for this shit. Nobody does. That's what I was about to say about this recording. Yeah. But you know what we do have, Sophie? An ad break? An ad break. Yeah. We can all consume substances to get through the rest of this.

Okay, we are back. Now, the most interesting thing I found on Rule 34 is a political comic by a guy named Larry Welts, who makes this thing called Cherry Comics. He's like an old hippie cartoonist. This is a long running series. But these collection of panels are about a group of women using quote unquote weaponized sex to bring down Donald Trump.

One page depicts the main character, Cherry, breaking into the White House like a quote-unquote sex ninja to quote, fuck them to death, unquote. One plotline has Cherry using her love powers to make all of the riot police at a 2020 protest take off their riot gear and start having gay sex with each other through the power of love. Now, in the main panel, Cherry seduces a very unflattering Trump from the bushes of a golf course. Quote, grab some...

this P word, pretend I'm your daughter, unquote. She gets Trump to chase her naked through a golf course. And when he's about to grab her, she disappears with the accompanying onomatopoeia twink, which I think is completely unintentional. Trump falls naked into a face full of mud.

I think this comic is actually good natured, but it's still kind of really problematic and very boomer. Pretend I'm your daughter. So they're like rooting for Trump to incest. Sophie, there is a lot. We will get to this. There is a lot of Ivanka Trump weird incest shit. It is deeply upsetting. Like I said, I put the content warning further up because there's going to be some really bad psychosexual shit that I tried to really like clean up here.

But yeah, this like boomer hippie cherry comic thing is really weird because it's very like nominally liberal, but it also has like really like classically racist cartoon depictions of black people. Oh, great. It's just, it's just a lot. Anyway, so...

But again, I was kind of surprised that tags for Trump only returned like a few Trump images. When I searched just quote unquote Trump on Rule 34, most of the results were for a furry Japanese webcomic that's over 120 pages because I think the artist just goes by the name Trump. He's

completely unrelated. And I was really just expecting more stuff. I checked DeviantArt and it was largely barren of Trump-themed not-safe-for-work images. Now, just as I was about to give up and I thought, maybe that's not enough for an episode, my primal Zoomer brain activated. It's like something deep in my core knew what had to be done. My primal

That's when I logged into the website Archive of Our Own. Oh, no. The most popular fan fiction website on the internet. There are over 1,700 works tagged with Donald Trump. That sounds like the right number. Now, not all that's porn or erotica, right? So I had to really whittle down the results based on my own judgment and to my own tastes.

Now, I had a very specific focus on the genre of old man yaoi, which conveniently was also what the majority of the Trump-centric works that were rated M and explicit could be categorized as. Of course they were.

Let's start our journey by going over the most popular Donald Trump relationship pairings. Any guesses for what the first one is? Like Donald Trump X, like who? You know what? I'm going to swing for the fences here and say Condoleezza Rice. Sorry, wrong. Yeah, that was always a long odds. Sophie, coming to the steel?

I mean, unfortunately, I kind of think it's probably Ivanka. It is not. It's not Ivanka? Ivanka and Hillary had very few, so few that they're not even notable and not even in my list. The number one pairing for Donald Trump is Joe Biden with 192 works. You know, that's what we deserve as a country. The number two is Vladimir Putin with 104. Wait, number

Number three. Okay. Number three is Shrek with 34 works. Sorry. That's all right. That is number four. Number four is Shrek. Number three is Barack Obama with 37 works. Well, that's less Obama than I expected. I'm going to be honest. Yeah, that was my point. Number five is Kim Jong-un with 24. That's the exact number of Kim Jong-un ones I expect. We have 12 works that are titled Donald Trump X Reader.

Seven of them are Trump and Jesus Christ. Six are Donald Trump, Kanye West. Five are Adolf Hitler, Donald Trump. And two are Teletubbies and Donald Trump. 41 works are titled as or tagged as bottom Donald Trump. Wow. Wow. Far outnumbering the numbers where he tops. I'm actually really surprised by only seven for Jesus because I'm kind of curious about the Jesus ones. Robert, I have great news for you.

Oh, good. Oh, good. Now, we don't have the time, nor do I have the willpower to go through each and every one of these. So instead, I'd like to highlight some of the plot summaries, tags, and select paragraphs that caught my eye to give you a taste of the horror that I've gazed upon. I'll start with one of the newest entries in the canon titled Donald Trump Prison Era.

I'm going to start with a time skip. Quote, it's been four years since Trump was re-jailed. Him and his friends were locked in the safest, most desolate place in the prison. They may not have freedom, but at least they have each other. During those four years, Ben Shapiro was thrown in prison too. He was very silent about what he had done and therefore distanced himself from everybody. I don't know what he did, but he must have done something to ruin him as a person, Warren Buffett said. Warren Buffett! Warren Buffett!

in there is he one of trump's friends we have each other at least we'll be fine in this jail elongated muskrat said trump was cuddling with andrew tate in the corner unquote why this is the closest i've come for feeling bad for andrew tate i i for the record i still don't feel bad for andrew tate

Another one, which is Trump X Reader. The summary is, quote, it began four years ago when you saw him on TV. During the presidential inauguration, you were laying on your bed listening to country music on you American bed sheet. Suddenly, you saw his big, handsome orange face and you knew he had to be yours.

So in this one, the reader gets to marry or get with Trump in some way, and then you kind of like plan the January 6th insurrection together. Oh, Garrison.

So that's a fun one. Great. There's a really good one titled Trump-Polly relationship with the tags Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Obama-Donald Trump, Joe Biden-Donald Trump, Sonic the Hedgehog, enemies to lovers. See, I feel like only Sonic the Hedgehog of that group has the communication skills necessary for a successful polyamorous relationship. There's another one that's tagged as Donald Trump-Kangae West-BoJack Horseman. Of course.

I feel, you know, BoJack would. You get him drunk enough, he'd get on with that. And there's really, like, there's two big genres here. There's the genre that's just, like, regular smut, where you feel like someone's just, like, controlled F to all of the names and, like, just, like, switched it around. Versus...

The fanfics that are entrenched in world building, that integrates erotic literature with the world of Donald Trump. And those are the ones I like to focus on more because you know it's not... The Trump-centered erotic universe. Exactly. You know it's not just someone control-effing just like a regular sex scene. I want it to actually like... I want it to have lore. I want world building. I need to be connected to an extended universe. Is this leading us to what the story titled Donald Trump's Monstrous Dick is?

that you've put in this document? No, I'm going to skip over that one, actually. We don't have enough time. Oh, great. Oh, okay. This is just a woman talking about how she finds his orange shiny body attractive, which there's a lot of that kind of stuff, right? I'm going to instead go to Where the Wind Blows by JustAndam3. Summary, Joe Biden is a 17-year-old senior who happens to be top of his class.

Known as the perfect straight-A capable student to friends and family. But what happens when a new student who got kicked out of his old school for fights gets partnered up with him for tutoring? Oh my gosh. I'm actually going to skip to chapter two, titled What the Sigma? Oh no. Oh no!

Oh my God. Quote, after about two hours, they finished their study session. Joe went out to a cafe with his childhood friends, Barack and Barry the Bee Benson. Just imagine Barry the Bee to be six feet tall. The three of them talk at a booth inside when the topic of Donald is brought up.

What the f- So he's a literal B! What?

Wait, so no, no, no, no, no. Barry B. Benson is the Jerry Seinfeld B-movie B, correct? Wait, no, really? I'm not joking, Robert. Yes, yes. We got back to the fucking B-movie somehow. What is Jerry's? I can't escape Jerry Seinfeld. No matter where I go, he's always there. Even in Trump pornography, Jerry follows me.

Barry, you're overreacting, Brock said as he rubbed the inner of his eyes with his pointer fingers. I'm sure Joe can handle himself. He's almost 18. Besides, can we talk about something else? Like how Drake and Kendrick got caught making out under the bleachers? I'm pretty sure they hated each other just three weeks ago. Or at least Kendrick hated Drake after he dated the freshman. Unquote.

There's one called Election Day where Shrek tries to prevent you from voting and Trump shows up as like a superhero. There's some like ISIS jokes, refugee jokes. Why? There's some funny lines in here to be sure. It is Donald Trump who is your hero. His intense alpha stare disintegrates the rest of Shrek's body, leaving you covered in dot, dot, dot. Donald pulls his pants back on. Yeah. Great. So...

So, you know, yeah. Anyway, there's a really troubling one titled Under the Crooked Lamp, which is tagged with American history fandom, World War II fandom, Nazi Germany fandom. The summary is, quote, short smut about Adolf Hitler and Donald Trump with cameos from Barack Obama and Kanye West. So there you go. Now, one of the most popular...

Donald Trump fan fix is titled a Donald Trump story. Quote, I walked past the door to the Oval Office. No, my office, my house. Finally, the White House, the only race that should be here, unquote. So not off to a great start. Throughout this fic, Trump falls in love with a Mexican architect that he hired to build the wall. Oh, good. That's the whole bit. Now, great. Robert, I know you said you were interested in Jesus Christ.

Of course. Yeah, who is it? Yeah, he is kind of popular. He's our lord and savior, yeah. The most popular Jesus Christ one I could find is called Jesus X Trumpussy. Sure. The summary is Trump kicks the bucket and has a very interesting surprise waiting for him. Chapter one, Trumpy Dumpty meets Sky Daddy. Oh, boy. Oh, boy.

I'm so worried about our society. So Trump gets assassinated and to his surprise gets sent to heaven. He thought he was going to be going to hell with gay people and Hillary Clinton. But instead, Jesus is waiting for him. And Jesus says, be prepared for the ride of your life or death.

You are a bad little slut on earth and it's time for you to pay for your sins, my little Trump pussy. I hope you're ready. Anyway. I kind of hate that they stole my catchphrase. Now, by chapter seven, Donald Trump is pregnant. There's eight chapters in this. By chapter seven, Donald Trump is pregnant. I'm sorry. That's...

That's all you need to present to get someone 5150. Like that's an involuntary mental health hold right there. Speaking of pregnancy, there's a very popular or the most popular. I thought you were going to go to an ad break. Speaking of pregnancy.

Speaking of pregnancy porn. The most popular Donald Trump ex-Adolf Hitler one is titled Warped Tour, a great place for homophobes to meet hot guys. It's set at this music festival. That is true about Warped Tour. It's not wrong. Where Adolf Hitler and Donald Trump are both there to like disrupt like a gay concert. And they have like a little meet cute scene.

Trump invites, invites Hitler back to the, back to his hotel room to come up with new plans for how to try to harass gay people. And it ends with Adolf Hitler being impregnated, but Trump is not a supportive parent. So Joseph Goebbels has to help deliver the child with Hitler instead of Trump. Well, you know, I, I gotta say at least they get the personalities right because Joseph, Joseph is the kind of guy who would, who would come in at the clutch like that to, to help Hitler deliver his lust baby. Yeah.

There's two decently popular Trump x Biden ones that are set during presidential debates, one of which they fuck backstage. And I don't think... 5,000 hits. Okay, no one gets pregnant in this one. But...

But there are certainly others. So there's one where they have sex backstage. And then there's another one where they have sex on stage. And Chris Wallace is moderating. Someone should let him know. Oh, and then in chapter two, Donald Trump gives birth because he got impregnated on stage. Yeah, I think Garrison, you need to do your job as a journalist. And we need to reach out to Chris Wallace and ask theoretically.

Would he narrate Donald Trump's sex with Joe Biden if they were to do that on stage? How does he feel about that? I will go to the very last one with 65,000 hits. By far the most popular Donald Trump kind of erotica smut on the whole website. It's called Go Fuck Yourself, Donald Trump by Orphan underscore account, who's actually written a few of the ones that we've talked about here today. 65,000 views. Yeah. Yeah.

published in 2017, just before Inauguration Day. Quote, "Another person told me to go fuck myself today," Donald Trump told his strong Russian lover Vladimir Putin. "I want to, but it's impossible. There's only one of me."

So the first paragraph is about how Putin forces Trump to eat three tubs of Crisco a day. It's basically just body shaming for the majority of this piece. Sounds like feeder porn too. Yes, totally. And then Putin presents a clone of Donald Trump. Quote,

That was the true perfection of this creature. He's gorgeous, Trump said, tears sliding down his face. He felt as if he was looking into the mirror, but when he reached to touch his reflection, his...

His hands met soft, clammy skin. Thank you, Daddy. Trump eagerly began kissing his clone, pushing his tongue past slack lips until it learned to respond to him. Each hungrily tried to devour the other, their bodies writhing against each other, tears rolling down their faces in unison as they realized that neither one could ever fill the empty void that they felt inside.

So, that is my extremely abridged version of my AO3 adventure. And, unfortunately, I do have one more section, but it's a bit shorter, that we will get to after the break for some of the more, kind of, I would say, mainstream Trump pornography that can be found on the internet. Finally. Alright, we are so back. We have never been more back. So,

I've been to, you know, the regular Zoomer places, right? We have like, you know, DeviantArt type stuff. We have AO3. And then I realized that boomers also watch porn. So I went to the two most popular porn websites, something I've never done before. Brave. And I...

There's only around 30 Trump-centric videos across both sites. Now, there is a decent number of repeat uploads, right? And there's some videos that are just cut into shorter clips from longer scenes. But there's only about 30 source videos that I could find across the two top porn sites. Question, is it because they're being censored or is he friends with somebody else?

No, it's just not the most popular thing. Interesting. Now, I would argue Trump is probably one of the more sexualized presidents we've had in recent years because of his, you know. Which makes, because of who he is, not because of his sex appeal. Not because of how he looks, but because of, like, his personal background. Because, ugh.

and all of his, you know, very obvious sex crimes, right? Like, we can go with, like, Bill Clinton, but, like, Trump is so much more sexualized than, like, Bush or Obama. It's kind of interesting. And yet, very few materials on these sites. Now,

So weird. There's a few different types here. We have animated ones, which is what I first went through. Some of these are just voiceover clips of someone playing a porn game and doing voiceover for dialogue. Now, all of these are narrated in one take, and it's very clear the voiceover person has not reviewed the material at all prior to the recording because they will often end sentences at the wrong spot, breaking the flow of the dialogue. So that is one genre. There is a really upsetting one.

titled Stormy Daniels X Trump Cartoon Hentai Cosplay MILF with 11,000 views which has the worst most creepy looking PlayStation 2 level Jesus fuck what is happening holy oh god he looks like a corpse but

But also is little like Clinton like these. These 3D models are fucking in what looks like a college dorm room. Trump is wearing his suit jacket and red tie with leather shoes, but nothing else.

And something I can't show you, but I found really upsetting, is that his legs are about as twice as big as his body, but with tiny feet. Like, his legs are so much wider than the rest of him, they're huge. It's really concerning, and I don't think it's on purpose, it's just like a really bad 3D model.

So weird. Yeah, that's upsetting. In one of the video game type ones, when Trump is orgasming, he says, ah, bing, bing, bong, bong, bing, bing, bing. I just thought I should include that. You and me both, buddy. Big, big, bong, bong indeed.

And now, so on to live action. The first live action one is a bit of an outlier. It is titled Donald Trump parody clip smoking and drinking in the Oval Office LOL with about 2,600 views. It's a woman cosplaying a gender bent Trump and just like casually monologuing at the camera for like 18 minutes.

At one point, she takes off her suit jacket and unbuttons her shirt, but not in like a striptease way. At 11 minutes in, she quote unquote, rubs one out, her words, while continuing the half in character ranting. It's kind of a weird outlier, but I thought to mention it. Now, onto the two major genres of Trump porn. The first one being the debate orgy.

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton fucking Bernie Sanders and Megyn Kelly. Parody. This one has a combined total of over, of almost 8 million views. Leave Bernie alone. Jesus Christ. This is the most popular Donald Trump pornographic work on the internet. Oh, no, the Bernie they got's kind of hot.

I think we're good. This one oddly enough focuses on Bernie more than Trump. I think because the Bernie actor. That's because he's more fuckable. Because the Bernie actor did a really good job. Okay. And also this was, this was like a live stream that's been edited together into a video. So the audience like on the chat was responding to Bernie more. So he got way more of the attention. Yeah.

Yeah, he just oozes charisma. The sound quality is terrible. Don't use oozes right now, Robert. Jesus. The sound quality is terrible. Everyone's slowly reading off scripts and not even trying to hide it at all. Trump says he's going to build a wall around Mexico and install one big glory hole, which isn't how a glory hole works. No. I mean, it could be.

Hillary gets asked if she thinks she might fall to the same infidelities as her husband. And Hillary explains that the Clinton family has a rule that whatever happens in the Oval Office doesn't count, unquote. That actually might be a Clinton family rule. All of the actors, except for Bernie, look really uncomfortable.

The entire time. At one point, they switched to like an unscripted Q&A section using like the live stream. And it all reads like high school improv, but obviously like not with high schoolers, not for high schoolers. But just like, it is so awkward. About halfway through the 20 minute video, Megyn Kelly asks Trump if he would like to improve his personal rating among married women.

As they start having sex. And then Hillary says, quote, I'd rather fuck the party than the enemy and calls on Bernie. There is a lot of feel the burn jokes in here. So many. There's a couple of good bits there. We should figure out that Bernie actor, though. Get him on the pod.

Honestly, I would love to interview this guy. Bring him on staff. The second most popular one is titled Erection 2016. Donald Drumpf fucks Hillary Clinton during a debate. It has over 5 million views. Once again, we start with a build a wall bit, but this time it's Hillary who makes a move on Trump. The third most popular one is called a cream pie debate. This is the grossest one in the entire collection. It has three and a half million views. Yeah.

Of course it does. Much more accurate ages, but the impressions are really bizarre. Like they all have like weird accents. I can't quite tell where they're from, but they all sound odd. They're almost certainly somewhere in Eastern Europe. No, they're American.

Now, let's see. Why is that more upsetting to me? Trump waves around a gun on the debate stage talking about how Hillary wants to take away the Second Amendment. He points the gun at her, threatens to blow the wench away because she's trying to rig the election. The wench? The wench. That's a quote. Wench. Okay. And calls her crooked Hillary with quote unquote crooked genitals. Okay.

You know, actual Trump might say that at some point. But you can kind of see how the video will develop from here, right? Right. Now, I was not prepared for how racist it would get. Trump gets like this, this like dark dildo and starts screaming and growling in like a really upsetting fashion. There's a whole bunch of really racist comments. Hillary implies that she took part in all of Bill's sexual...

growling. It's the best word I could find to describe this. I think I get what Garrison's getting at. I was going to say, noted, don't expand. Yeah. Hillary talks about how she took part in all of Bill Clinton's sexual escapades and then uses a strap-on on Donald Trump, but it's simulated. They don't actually do it in the clip, so minus points for that. The

The actor for Trump makes some really interesting faces. And at the end of the video, Hillary shoots out Trump's votes from her ballot box, which covers Trump's face in the rejected votes, which he wipes off with an American flag, something that multiple commenters took great offense to. Not the rest of the video, but the fact that he wipes it off with an American flag seemed to really upset some people.

Now, the guy that made this created four other Trump-themed porn videos. Deep Throat Diplomacy, where Trump bribes the president of Mexico to pay for the wall by offering a, quote, beautiful white woman who happens to be Trump's daughter, Ivanka. He makes another Ivanka one called Bobblehead Butt Plug, which I think is pretty self-explanatory. The third one is Trump and Obama's Daughter, which I skipped through mostly because it was really gross. And the last one's called Cuckold Trump with, again, three and a half million views.

And this one has President Obama and the Secret Service breaking into Trump Tower where Trump and Melania are sleeping in bed. And then a cuck scene unfolds. Once again, very racist. We're nearing the end. I can see the tunnel at the end. We're now going to get to the last debate one.

Donald Trump in the White House. This is going to be huge with only a quarter of a million views, pretty low, but 70% upvoted. So there you go. Now in this one, Trump is doing a solo debate by himself, kind of predicting how he would handle the Republican primary in 2024. Ahead of its time. But in the context of the video, it's basically just a journalist that's interviewing him.

So after some very typical ha-ha, Trump is racist type jokes, the skit turns oddly poignant where Trump kind of starts whispering and says, quote,

I'm using my ranting billionaire charm to win you over. First, I'm going to tell you that America is really lost and I'm the one to find it. And then you will be drawn to all of my ideas like a very special episode of Shark Tank. And then I will tell you how all the other candidates are stupid, idiotic morons. And you'll be left wondering, is he trying to get his subreddit banned or is everything he's saying really what he means? Now let's have sex as I whisper racist comments into your ear. Unquote. This Trump actor...

The hair is too orange. The hair is too orange. Everything's too orange. He's really orange. They're really into making him orange, but the hair is just way too red. So that is the, that's the, that's the like the main category, which is like these like debate ones. But there's a second category, which is almost equal in numbers. And this is, this is the last genre of work we'll be talking about. And it's the one I find the most telling. It's, it's, they're all a very distinct type of like amateur video and,

of a man in a low-quality Trump mask getting beaten up, domed, pegged, interrogated, or otherwise humiliated by women.

Now, these have anywhere from like 400 views to 25,000 views. So they're watched less, but the people that are making them seem really passionate. We have titles like Trump Gets Donkey Punched by Two Sexy Women, 100% Real, 60 FPS, 1080p. 100% Real. Or Make America Beg Again, Kick My Ass, President Trump. And I think most evidently,

Two beautiful femdoms humiliate, feminize, and peg sissy in Donald Trump mask. So...

Okay. Do you want to see the collection of masks before or after I talk about this genre? I'm going to save it for after. Never mind. I'm going to save it for after. So I've gone through these three different kind of mediums here in this episode, right? We have the drawn art. We have AO3 fanfic. And we have this more classic pornography live action stuff. And each...

Each of these has different aspects that I believe are clearly tied to the medium, right? Like furry stuff for drawn art, the largely homosexual pairings of AO3, and the normie hetero misogyny of classic pornography. But I'm more interested in when some of these kind of medium-specific aspects intersect, right?

and how that might tell us something about what's really going on here. So based on all the evidence I've reviewed the past five days, I'm going to split the Donald Trump pornographic catalog into two main kind of thematic sections. The two genders, if you will.

First, we have Trump the strongman, right? This is either propagated by people on the right who genuinely admire Trump as a dominant dictator, and thus displaying sexual submission to him is a righteous duty or a sign of respect or a quest for validation. Alternatively...

This strongman framing can also be used, and I would argue more perversely, by liberals in some form of like a post-irony desire for subjugation stemming from like a neoliberal disenfranchisement or like neoliberal nihilism. Having a Freudian father figure you deeply despise strengthens the taboo aspect of repressed desire for the inherent domination of authoritarianism. I think the...

Master-slave kink is very common in the Trump AO3 fix, presumably mostly written by people on the left. And this type of thing I think can be vulgarly tied to the Lord Bondsman dialectic at play in this sort of politic, which is defined by and desiring what you cannot be.

So, we have that, plus all the fucked up, yet very common incest framing, strengthens these psychoanalytic links. But enough of that babble. To contrast Trump the Strongman, the other major category is Trump the Defiled, which is exceedingly popular on Rule 34, AO3, and this kind of later category of femdom porn videos.

This is like a revenge fantasy. It's uncaring in its embrace of problematic tropes so long as Trump is symbolically stripped of what signals his status of power. This often includes a misogynistic embrace of social norms that reflect authoritarian patriarchy. Trump is feminized, mostly through actions, to signal that he is lesser, right? He's emasculated, penetrated, dominated, assaulted, and very often impregnated.

Even death is no escape, for in the afterlife, Jesus Christ continues the holy work of Trump's psychosexual humiliation. The hope is that the catharsis will be found in putting the image of Trump through the types of things that the actual Trump has done to others, perhaps with some kind of perverse pleasure in this role reversal of now being the one to subject Trump to such experiences, even through fiction. Now, I'm not necessarily saying all this stuff is bad, but there are plenty of materials that I've reviewed that I do object to.

But this mostly does fall under the guise of play and kink, which can be valid and often useful ways of sorting through psychosexual or psychological affairs. And obviously, throughout a lot, if not most of these works, there is a large comedic element. But I think such comedy is still underpinned by some of these maybe deeper motivations. And to detox from that rant, here's a collection of really uncomfortable Trump mask pictures, which, oh my...

I have so many. I have so many of these. I have a whole collage, a whole collage of this. It's really upsetting. I've got HR on the other line here. So we're going to actually swing over to a separate Zoom call to talk through some of this. These look so bad.

Bad! It's the I Heart Daddy shirt with the horrible Trump mask. It's so bad! No, it's like, it's weirdly trans-misogynistic. For all of these ones in the mask, it's just, there's a deep uncanny. He looks like Melting Dave and Bowie. He does. The bottom ones. He looks like the thin white duke if the thin white duke like...

Oh, God. Got coke bloated or something? Terrifying stuff. I will post some of these mask images onto Twitter, so you can check that on at Hungry Bowtie. I will reply once this episode drops with these awful collages I've created. Anyway, Robert, what do you think about all this Trump porn? Again, I think we're all going to get fired for doing this episode. I think this has crossed every professional line that exists.

But good work other than that. I was going to say, I think yours deserves a really big raise. I was really proud I was able to sneak in a little bit of Hegel there at the end. I was really proud of that one. I can say one thing for sure. We can do a follow-up that's all of the Hegel porn. Really curious as to how much of that you can find. What's exciting about this entire thing is Trump would fucking hate it just like he hates all of his followers.

in his core. Many such cases. Well, thank you for joining us on this deeply disturbing journey. I love to see it. Don't, don't do this. Thankfully, you only have to listen to it. You only have to listen to me explain it now. So now you don't have to fulfill this curiosity that I know has been bubbling in a lot of you. So there you go. And check back in next week. We'll be covering all of the best Hegelian pornography that the internet can provide. Take a long weekend.

Hi everyone, it's me James, and I just wanted to read you this today. I'm going to put it in our episode this week because it's a cause that's important to us, and so we thought it would be something that might be important to you too as well. On the 10th of June 2024, Leonard Peltier, an enrolled member of the Turtle Band of Chippewa of Lakota and Ojibwe ancestry, and the longest serving political prisoner in the United States, will be appearing before the U.S. Parole Commission for the first time since 2009.

He faces staunch opposition from the FBI and other law enforcement agencies due to having allegedly killed two FBI agents in a firefight on the 26th of June 1975 after the agents appeared on reservation land to execute a pretextual warrant.

The initial firefight occurred during the "reign of terror" on Pine Ridge in the wake of the occupation of Wounded Knee, a time of extreme violence when federal law enforcement installed a puppet tribal chair and was arming vigilantes who targeted indigenous traditionalists. Everything leading up to these events, as well as the subsequent investigation and Mr. Pelchier's extradition, trial, conviction and sentencing were characterized by gross misconduct on the part of law enforcement, the prosecution and the courts.

Mr. Peltier's co-defendants were separately tried and acquitted on grounds of self-defense. Mr. Peltier was railroaded and his case is tainted by discrimination at every level, ranging from the withholding of exculpatory evidence to the torture and coercion of extradition and trial witnesses, and from the refusal of the judge to dismiss an avowedly racist juror to the apologetic gymnastics of the courts affirming his convictions in the face of meritorious legal challenges and admitted evidence of outrageous government misdeeds.

Mr. Peltier has been in prison for more than 48 years, and he's almost 80 years old. He suffers from chronic and potentially lethal conditions, for which he receives insufficient and substandard medical care.

If you want to take action to hashtag free Leonard Peltier, you can call the U.S. Parole Commission at 202-346-7000. And if you'd like to find more information on how to support, you can go to this URL. It's http://www.parolecommission.org.

Or you can follow NDN Collective on social media for more ways to support him. For more information on Leonard Peltier, listen to Margaret's podcast on Lakota Nation, A Read in the Spirit of the Crazy Horse by Peter Mathieson.

Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. This is Malcolm Gladwell from Revisionist History.

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