It Could Happen Here Weekly 143
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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 back to It Could Happen Here, your daily dose of something a little unsettling.

I'm Molly Conger, your occasional host here on this feed and the host of a new weekly show from Cool Zone Media called Weird Little Guys that I think you'll probably like. Today, I'm a little shamelessly promoting my own show by giving you a little taste of the kinds of stories I like to dig into over on the Weird Little Guys feed. So remember last month when Donald Trump got shot?

I kind of don't. It feels like it was years ago. I barely remember who I was during those tense few days where it seemed possible Trump would ride that momentum to victory. Imagining posters of that photo of Trump with blood dripping down his face, fist raised, and then kind of didn't matter at all anymore. The shooter wasn't a Biden sleeper agent sent to take down the opposition. He was just some kid with a rifle and the kind of uniquely American desire to cause chaos with it.

And that was really hard for a lot of people to swallow. What do you mean it doesn't seem like he was politically motivated? He shot the former president. He shot him while he was on stage at a rally for his campaign to retake the presidency. Everything about the situation is political. How could the shooter have had any other motivation? Thomas Crooks wouldn't be the first guy to take a shot at a president or a presidential candidate for no reason at all. Far from it.

While I was doing research for the first episode of my show, which theoretically you could pick up your phone and subscribe to right now while you're listening if you wanted to, I got lost on a few side quests. That's always happening to me. But as I breezed past a quick mention of George Wallace, the four-term governor of Alabama, best remembered for his rallying cry of segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever. I'm not going to do it in his accent. I'll spare you that. I remembered that he got shot while running for president too.

During the primary in 1972, he was paralyzed after surviving an attempted assassination on the campaign trail. Surely, whoever shot a man like George Wallace did it out of a deep ideological commitment to something, right? Maybe a civil rights activist opposed to Wallace's views on race or a McGovern voter concerned that Wallace's cynical attempt to gain the Democratic Party nomination after winning five states as a third party candidate in 68 was

might actually work. Or maybe it was a diehard Nixon supporter who saw Wallace as a spoiler, siphoning conservative votes away from Nixon. But that's not what happened. When Arthur Bremmer shot George Wallace four times in the chest and stomach on May 15th, 1972, it had nothing at all to do with Wallace's policy positions, or Nixon's, or McGovern's. It didn't even have really anything at all to do with George Wallace's.

Bremer had been planning for months to assassinate Richard Nixon, but it turned out that was too hard. He just wanted to shoot somebody important. I hesitate to draw too many comparisons to the Trump shooter because there's a lot we still don't know and may never know, but it did come out early on that Crooks was equally interested in shooting Joe Biden. Trump just happened to have a campaign rally close to where he lived in Pennsylvania, and that rally happened to have weak perimeter security.

Crooks had also looked into how to get close to FBI Director Christopher Wray, Attorney General Merrick Garland, and inexplicably, Kate Middleton. Yes, that Kate Middleton, the Princess of Wales. If Biden had been campaigning in Western Pennsylvania, or if Richard Nixon's security hadn't been so tight, Crooks may have shot Biden and Bremer may have killed Nixon. It doesn't seem like it really mattered to either of them who they shot, as long as they shot someone important.

One of the funny things about history is realizing that we've always been the way that we are now. There truly is nothing new under the sun.

Because within hours of the attempt on George Wallace's life, before any information was clear at all, Nixon was demanding his aides put in a call to the White House deputy director of communications, Kenneth Clausen, to put out a statement that the shooter was a supporter of George McGovern. That was the front-runner in the Democratic primary who Nixon would go on to trounce terribly at the election at the end of that year. So, you know, Nixon saying, just say we've got evidence, we've got unmistakable evidence.

Of course, they didn't have evidence of any kind, unmistakable or not. And when the evidence did emerge, it certainly didn't show the shooter working on the McGovern campaign, which is the rumor Nixon was hoping to spread in those early hours. ... ... ... ... ... ...

They pin this on the right wing.

Now, we don't have thousands of hours of secret recordings from inside the offices of today's Republicans, but we did see something really similar in the immediate aftermath of the Trump shooting. He's a Biden voter. He's a Democrat. He's a radical leftist. He's Antifa. We can already tell. We just know. It's obvious. We have proof. The fact that there was no proof of anything on day one doesn't matter. It matters even less that no proof ever materialized.

You just have to get the rumor out first. You have to make an impression while the cement is wet, and sometimes that's permanent. One thing that is not on the Nixon tapes, though, is a conversation that allegedly occurred that afternoon in May 1972 that was reported by Seymour Hersh 20 years later in 1992. Despite a Supreme Court ruling in the 70s that the tapes belonged to the National Archives, the full volume of the Nixon tapes were not made available to the public until 2007. Now,

Seymour Hersh is not a making stuff up kind of guy. I don't think he was fabricating any part of this story. He's still alive and has a substack at 87 years old, so I don't want any beef with Seymour. That's not what I'm saying. He has a decades-long career as an investigative journalist and has a Pulitzer for exposing the cover-up of the My Lai Massacre. I don't think he's padding the truth here. But in his 1992 New Yorker piece called Nixon's Last Cover-Up, The Tapes He Wants the Archives to Suppress,

Hirsch wrote that the unreleased tapes from the afternoon of the Wallace shooting contained recordings of Nixon directing E. Howard Hunt, the retired CIA officer who headed his White House plumbers, to break into Bremer's apartment before the FBI could search it and to plant McGovern campaign literature.

Hunt's own autobiography admits only that, at Nixon's direction, Nixon advisor Charles Coulson did ask Hunt to take a look around Bremer's apartment. Given that this is all taking place just a month before Hunt did, in fact, play a key role in the Watergate break-in, this isn't exactly unbelievable. I can absolutely believe that Richard Nixon would ask E. Howard Hunt to break into a building for some nefarious purpose because we know he did that at least once.

And one thing the varying accounts seem to agree on is that Hunt was unable to complete the assignment because the FBI had already sealed off Bremer's apartment in Milwaukee before he got there. Hersh's piece claimed the tapes contained recordings of Coulson breaking this news to Nixon that Hunt arrived too late and the apartment was already under police guard and further claims that on the recordings, Nixon can be heard berating Coulson for not doing more to slow down the FBI. Again, all completely believable if you have even a passing knowledge of Richard Nixon.

And Coulson himself related this account to Hirsch in 1992. The problem is, we have the tapes now. Fifteen years after Hirsch's article was published, researchers scoured the newly released recordings for proof of this version of events, and it isn't there. It's entirely possible that Coulson is recalling conversations that occurred outside the presence of the tape machine, or is misremembering how much of this was actually spoken aloud and what was simply understood.

It's not out of the realm of possibility that Coulson is recalling something Nixon definitely desired. It's just not on the tapes. Absence of proof isn't proof of absence, of course, but we do have a pretty complete record of Nixon's conversations on the afternoon of May 15th, 1972. Those missing 18 minutes are from a different frantic afternoon that summer. But before we get to the rest of Richard Nixon's no good, very bad day, here are some products and services.

So on May 15th, Nixon got out of a budget meeting around 4 p.m., which was shortly after the shooting. And that's when he first got the news. And we know from the tapes that his first phone call was to his own wife, Pat. And then he called George Wallace's wife, Cornelia.

He then asked Secretary of the Treasury John Connolly to call Ted Kennedy to offer him full Secret Service protection, which is not allowable under the structure of how that works, but he wanted it done. Presumably out of some combination of the idea that Kennedy would be McGovern's vice presidential pick and maybe just the general idea that if people are getting assassinated, you need to account for all your Kennedys. It's actually kind of wild to dig into the tapes and see where everyone's heads were at that afternoon in the Oval Office.

A recording from around 7 p.m. captures speculation that the shooting may have been a false flag by Wallace's own people. But the idea is quickly dismissed. He wouldn't have his own people shoot him in the stomach. I could kill you. They would have gone for something less dangerous, like shooting him in the foot. Which is a conversation we all had after the Trump shooting, isn't it? Oh, maybe this is a stunt. Wait, why would he have them fire at his head? That's so crazy, right? I mean, it's the same conversation with different names and body parts subbed in.

And this recording, too, captures Nixon's top aides hoping that whoever did it was a left-wing nut. Oh, I think it likely is. Could be one of his own people, too. They wouldn't shoot that many of them. No, and they would have shot him in the foot or something. I think that was enough. It wouldn't be if not one of his own people shoot him in the stomach. It's too easy to kill him. Oh, I think the guy has to be a nut of some kind. I just hope he's a left-wing nut, not a right-wing nut. Yeah, I don't like that. Silly thing that didn't come out.

So Nixon tried to put a thumb on the scale after the fact. But the exact nature of his meddling will forever be up for debate, I guess. And the Nixon tapes aren't the only unique primary source for what went down that day. In the early months of 1972, as Arthur Bremmer prepared to shoot Nixon, gave up on shooting Nixon, and ultimately shot George Wallace...

He was keeping a diary. And in 1973, Harper's Magazine Press published that diary. I couldn't find a physical copy of the original bound book published by Harper's for less than a small fortune, but I did find an archival scan of the diary that was produced as evidence. And the diary is a strange and fascinating document. Only the latter half was published. He'd thrown away the first 148 pages of fact-tune notes on the first page of the version that we have.

In 1980, a construction worker named Sherman Griffin found those first 148 pages. So this is, again, eight years after the shooting. He found them wrapped in plastic inside of a backpack underneath the 27th Street Viaduct in Milwaukee. From prison, Arthur Bremmer tried to sue Griffin for ownership of the document, saying it would only be used to embarrass him and it was his, he owned it, I need it back.

But in 1981, a court ruled that Griffin could keep it. I'm sure it was more complicated in the end, all the back and forth in court, but ultimately, finders keepers. The portion we do have is a lot of things. It's full of typos and disorganized thinking and sexual fantasy and the mundane rambling stream of consciousness of a guy going about his day-to-day life as he tries to figure out how to shoot the president.

A few months after it was published, the New York Review published an essay by Gore Vidal speculating that Bremer hadn't written the diary at all. As a literary critic, it was his professional opinion that Bremer could not have written such a document.

Though it was riddled with typos, Vidal believes they come and go and are not believable in their structure and format, as though the writer is remembering as he writes that he's supposed to be a 21-year-old busboy of mediocre intelligence. He also doubts that Bremer was well-read enough to make reference to Solzhenitsyn's Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich or quip as he crossed the Great Lakes, Call me Ishmael. Both Denisovich and Ishmael are misspelled, but that could be intentional, he says.

No, Gore Vidal believes, or perhaps would only like you to think he believes, it's hard to say, that the diary was falsified in its entirety by E. Howard Hunt, Nixon's spook.

And Hunt was a prolific writer, giving Vidal a large volume of material for comparison. And he claims there are similarities in the writing styles and also notes that both Bremer and Hunt use the phrase hairy hippies. They have a distaste for hairy hippies. I don't know. I wasn't alive in 1972. Maybe a lot of people hated hairy hippies then.

But again, just as Hirsch's claims about the secret tapes in 1992 were called into question when we got the tapes in 2007, Biddle's essay was published in 1973, seven years before the first half of the diary was found. So even if you're inclined to believe Hunt was crafty enough to construct this elaborate plot with a fake diary and a patsy shooter,

It's a real stretch to think he would even bother writing 148 pages, wrapping them in plastic, hiding them inside of a backpack, and tucking that backpack into a little nook under a bridge in Milwaukee to be found by a construction worker a decade later. That part just doesn't make a lot of sense. But maybe Gore Vidal was just doing an elaborate bit that I don't understand.

The legacy of that diary lives on in some surprising ways. In those early days after the Trump shooting, before we all forgot it ever happened, I did see a lot of people point out that the last time a president took a bullet, it wasn't over politics. John Hinckley Jr. shot Reagan to impress Jodie Foster, remember? Okay, here's where I admit something kind of embarrassing. I've always just accepted that statement at face value. It makes no sense, but he wasn't acting rationally, so it's not something I felt like I needed to make sense of.

He shot Reagan to impress Jodie Foster. I guess he thought she'd find that impressive. No need to interrogate that further. I mean, a lot of women might find it impressive if you shot Ronald Reagan, so there's not a lot of follow-up to do on that. The thing is, I'd never seen the movie Taxi Driver. I never pieced together that he thought shooting the president would impress Jodie Foster because she starred as the child sex worker in the movie Taxi Driver, in which the protagonist, Travis Bickle, plans to shoot a presidential candidate named Charles Palentine.

Hinckley shot Reagan to impress Jodie Foster makes, I guess, like a little more sense if you have that cultural context. And I fear I may have been the very last person in America to find that out. So maybe everybody else already knew this next part, too. I don't know. But Taxi Driver owes a lot to Arthur Bremmer, the guy who shot George Wallace.

Screenwriter Paul Schrader has always denied that he based any part of the movie on Bremer's diary. In a 1976 interview, Schrader says he was inspired by the shooting itself in 1972, but that the script was actually finished before the diary was published in 73. And he registered the script with the WGA, so that is provably true, right? But he told Film Comments Richard Thompson in 76, I want to emphasize that the script was written before any of the diary was published.

After I read the diary, I was very tempted to take some of the good stuff from it and add it to Taxi Driver, but I decided not to because of legal ramifications. Rubber's sitting there in jail with nothing better to do than sue us, which is why I made certain the script was registered before the diary came out, and that nothing was changed after the diary's publication.

That's actually kind of prescient of him, come to think of it. He's saying this in 76, that Bremer could file some kind of nuisance lawsuit from prison. And that's years before Bremer tried to get half a million dollars and his diary back from that construction worker. And I'm obviously not a film buff, right? We all just found out that I've never seen a movie. So I won't say Schrader's not telling the truth here. And maybe somebody who knows more about film would say, well, there's a difference between a script and a screenplay, right? Those are different things. The script was done

but he still could have changed the look and feel of how it was shot. Because there are some scenes in Taxi Driver that unless Scorsese and Schrader had some kind of deep psychic connection to whatever forces in the universe motivated Arthur Bremmer, they absolutely came from the diary.

I read the diary before sitting down to see what the movie was all about. So when Travis Bickle, the titular taxi driver, pulls up outside of a building with his fare, Martin Scorsese himself, in the back seat, I was doing the Leonardo DiCaprio pointing meme at my TV because the camera pans to a woman in a window smoking a cigarette partially obscured by a gauzy curtain. And just a few pages into Bremer's diary, he describes a really similar scene.

Before he flew back to Milwaukee to try to cross the border into Canada to shoot Richard Nixon in Ottawa, he wrote this in his diary. My last night at the Howard Johnson's in the Jamaica area in New York City. I didn't sleep much. A beautiful naked lady across a parking lot on the next motel out by her window, floor to ceiling, smoking cigarettes, and I had to watch her. Her table room light was on and a thin veil of curtain allowed me to watch her as she passionately kissed a man who wore clothes. I never saw them in each other's arms for more than a minute at a time.

They must have been fighting. Through binoculars, I saw them gesture like Italians and open their mouths very wide, very often. So maybe he finished the script before he read the diary, but the diary absolutely influenced the way the film was shot. According to Andrew Rauch's book on the films of Martin Scorsese, De Niro prepared for the role by getting a New York taxi license and driving around the city listening to a cassette tape of someone reading the diary aloud. The diary is genuinely odd.

Normally, I'm firmly in the camp of please do not read or recommend that others read the manifestos left behind by shooters. There's not much to gain from it. It's what they want, this, that, and the other. There's plenty of writing on the topic. But I don't really think anyone will read Arthur Bremmer's diary entry about leaving a nude massage parlor frustrated that he's still a virgin and feel inspired to follow in his footsteps.

But I do think it's a fascinating document. I learned more about what's inside the mind of a nihilist aspiring shooter from Bremer's diary than I've learned from any self-indulgent little manifesto left behind by a mass shooter. After failing to get his shot at Nixon at the appearance in Ottawa in April, he wrote, I just need a little opening and a second of time. Nothing has happened for so long. Three months. The last person I held a conversation with in three months was a near-naked girl rubbing my erect penis and she wouldn't let me put it through her.

failures. A few pages later, he writes that he thought about getting really drunk, but, quote, decided against it. Just wanted to pick a fight with a bartender somewhere or someone, get arrested, and then where am I? I got something to do, something big before I ever get arrested again. He writes that he's getting tired of writing. He wants to be a madman who kills, and then abruptly transitions to saying he goes crazy when he hears Johnny Cash's new single, quoting the lyrics, I shot you with my .38, and now I'm doing time.

before noting that a baseball game had been canceled that day due to rain. Honestly, the document it reminds me the most of is the diary kept by Franklin Seacrest, the young man who set a synagogue on fire in Austin in 2021. Large portions of his diary were produced as evidence in his trial.

And his diary is sort of similar in that it's a strange stream of consciousness accounting his frustrations with women, his daily activities, going to class, arguments with his mother, interspersed with these strange outbursts of violent desire. And they're just sort of mixed in without any recognition that these things are incongruous. After taking two weeks away from his diary to deal with the tragedy of failing to kill Richard Nixon, Rummer went to see Clockwork Orange. As he watched the movie, he decided he would kill George Wallace instead.

though he lamented that this was a second-rate target, writing, I won't even rate a TV interruption in Russia or Europe when the news breaks. They never heard of Wallace. If something big and nom flares up, I'll be at the bottom of the first page in America. The editors will say, Wallace dead? Who cares? He won't get more than three minutes on network TV news. I don't expect anybody to get a big throbbing erection from the news.

You know, a storm in some country we never heard of kills 10,000 people. Big deal. Pass the beer. What's on TV tonight? I hope my death makes more sense than my life. And just days before he finally took his shot, he wrote, Yesterday I even considered McGovern as a target.

If I go to prison as an assassin, solitary forever, guards in my cell, etc., or get killed or suicided, what difference to me? Ask me why I did it and I'd say, I don't know, or nothing else to do, or why not, or I have to kill somebody. It bothers me that there are about 30 guys in prison now who threaten the pres and we never heard a thing about them, except that they're in prison.

Maybe what they need is organization. Make the First Lady a widow incorporated. Chicken in every pot and a bullet in every head committee incorporated. They'll hold a national convention every year to pick the executioner. A winner will be chosen from the best entry in 40,000 words or less, preferably less, on the theme, how to do a bang-up job getting people to notice you. Or get it off your chest. Make your problems everybody's. On May 13th, two days before the shooting, Bremer attended a Wallace rally in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

There are photographs of Bremmer at the rally that day, and he even spoke to a police officer who responded to a call about a suspicious vehicle parked near the venue. Bremmer told the officer he just wanted to be early to get a good spot at the rally and complied when asked to move his car. His loaded .38 was in his jacket pocket.

He writes in his diary that he could have taken his shot that day, but at the last minute, two teenage girls got between him and his target, and he thought they'd be disfigured or blinded if he fired through the glass they were pressed up against. Writing, I let Wallace go only to spare these two stupid, innocent, delighted kids. His final entry, made the night before the shooting, ends with, got a sign from campaign headquarters here to shield the gun. Is there anything else to say? My cry upon firing will be a penny for your thoughts.

Around 4 p.m. on the 15th, after Wallace finished addressing a crowd in Laurel, Maryland, Bremer pushed his way through the people hoping to shake Wallace's hand and unloaded his .38. He struck Wallace four times and wounded four others, a state trooper, a campaign volunteer, Wallace's personal bodyguard, and a Secret Service agent.

He was convicted and sentenced to 63 years, later reduced to 53 years on appeal. He was denied parole in 1996 after arguing at his hearing that shooting segregationist dinosaurs wasn't as bad as harming mainstream politicians. But he was released in 2007. George Wallace wrote to Bremer in prison in 1995, telling him that he forgave him for the shooting and hoped to correspond a bit to get to know one another. Bremer never responded, and George Wallace died in 1998. So we shot George Wallace for no reason.

And Robert De Niro's study of the diary he left behind inspired the performance that made Hinckley shoot Reagan. There's really nothing hard to believe at all in the idea that Thomas Crookes wanted to shoot a president just to be remembered as anyone at all.

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Hi, and welcome to the podcast. It's me, James, and today I am joined by Mick. Mick's been doing some reporting on a forest occupation in Hent, which is a place I used to live, actually. Mick, would you like to introduce yourself and sort of explain a little bit about what you've been doing? Of course. Hi, I'm Mick. I am incidentally reporting on stuff, and I thought this was a pretty neat thing to report on that I think people should know more about, and it's also kind of a fun thing, so...

Yeah, it's very accessible for people. Like if you want to do like little forest occupying over the summer, this is one that you can do pretty easily. Yeah, yeah. You can skip your like European festival season and just go help at a forest occupation, which is cheaper and much more memorable. Yeah, you can. God, they used to have one of those near the little town I lived in when I was racing in Belgium. And it was it was a scene.

Yeah, just lovely times. Yeah, great times. We should maybe explain like a little bit about Hent as a city, because I think if people have seen it or they've maybe visited, like they've been to the middle of town, right? And they've seen the castle and the waterhouse bar or whatever, and they've eaten one of those sugar noses. But like they may not have seen the whole city. So can you sort of characterize the city?

Of course. It's very diverse in the sense that the scenery changes a lot. You've got some of these like really old buildings that are just like speaking to your imagination, but then there's also almost like concrete deserts. Yeah.

I would almost call them where like the view on the street is just an incredible amount of gray in varying colors. Yeah. It was a beautiful city. I don't mean to trash talk Shantier at all, but at times it's just really gray.

Yeah, I have lots of memories of springtime in Flanders and like grey sky and grey buildings and grey roads. But also some very beautiful areas. So why don't you go ahead and explain to us a little bit about this forest occupation. Okay, it's an occupation that's happening to a little north of the city centre. In terms of forest occupations, it's remarkably accessible.

So it's called the Wondelhemse Meersen or Ponds for you English speakers out there. And it's part of an industrial area called the Wiedaukai, which is located just west of the canal, the Lieve, which connects the port of Gent, the third largest port in Belgium. The area itself is about 14 to 15 hectares.

I'm not sure how to translate that to US numbers. I'm sorry. Yeah, neither am I. I'm terrible at American. Doesn't matter. There's internet. Yeah. And the area has largely been left to its own for a pretty significant amount of time, past 20 years. Now, there's two areas within the ponds, as I'm going to call them.

a northern part and a southern part. And later down the line, I'll explain why that is important. Before I continue further on to highlight, I went there mainly as a form of solidarity and support. I had asked if people would be willing to talk to me about in a journalistic or reporting capacity, and they agreed to that. But I'm not a local and I also don't want to pretend I am. Although any listener will hear my accent and...

know that. So yeah, we'll be mainly talking about the southern area and there's destination plans for this area. There's essentially two parties that are working together to turn these green areas into the grey concrete deserts that we just talked about. These parties are the municipality of Gent and De Lange, a government organization that handles public transport in Flanders. So

Over the years, there have been several plans to build or develop the ponds, but up until last week, we're recording this in the week of August 8th, but up until last week, no permits were issued to actually finalize or realize these plans. The northern part was supposed to be turned into a sort of training area for bus drivers, while the southern part is intended to be a parking lot for public transport buses.

The activists currently residing in the forests are by no means against the idea of public transport, but do think that the destruction of this piece of nature is counterproductive for both the locals and for climate change reasons. There is enough concrete in the city already, and they argue that alternative solutions have not been given the attention they deserve.

Yeah, it seems like it wouldn't be hard to find, I think, did they call it a brownfield site, like a former industrial site in that area of Flanders, to redevelop an old factory or a warehouse complex or something to do this rather than taking one of the green spaces and destroying it and paving it over, you know? I don't know what the municipality was thinking, but I'm sure there is barren areas elsewhere that can just as easily be repurposed as

in a way that doesn't like destroy nature. So the part that was most surprising to me, and at the same time, not at all is how this is being played out politically, uh,

To give everyone a quick timeline, about 20 years ago, the municipality designated these two zones that I talked about as to be used for common use. Algemene net for those speaking Dutch or Flemish. Well, at the same time, the ground was being bought by the public transport company, De Lijn. Plans for development started. There is even like an unused tram bridge just outside the green zone and the occupation.

But for one reason or another, the permit to build on the ground itself had expired, during which time nature took it upon herself to reclaim the area. Now, what I mentioned earlier is this difference between the north and the south part. These are separated by train tracks, making a very clear distinction between the two areas. The line originally wanted to use the north part to make a sort of training area,

As I just said, but these plans never materialized. At the same time, about three years ago, another action group prevented the destruction of the northern part. Now, this is where I find it really interesting. The terrain is still owned by the Leyen and the municipality, but they intend to give custody to a local environmental group called Natuurpunt.

but only if the plans for the southern part, where there is an occupation right now, are completed. Oh. Yes, yes. Interesting.

Yeah, while I was talking to my source, I was reading between the lines there as a sort of an attempt to play these multiple environmental organizations against each other, a sort of divide and conquer. Yeah, very nefarious. When I asked my source about that, they said that it was up to me whether or not I would call it that, but that the existence of these plants is just a reality. Now, I will not claim...

probably for legal reasons, that there is definitely some attempt to set these parties up against each other. But from the information that I have, like if I were a betting man, I'd know where I'd put my money. Yeah, that's really interesting. So like...

So Naturpunt is not present in the forest occupation on the southern side, is that right? Not that I'm aware of. And so they'd stand to, like, they'd gain custody of the northern side if the people on the southern side failed. Exactly. Yeah, and how nefarious. Exactly, and if the southern side now succeeds in preventing, like, the tearing down of the trees, then...

the northern side could become, you know, threatened again. And then this whole circus starts all over again. Right, yeah. So both of them have like a vested interest in one of these, well...

In theory, the municipality maybe would like them to think that both of them have an interest in the paving over of one of these areas. Exactly. Someone has to lose in this equation. And I find it interesting that it's happening like this, especially because Gent kind of promotes itself on these green zones that are mixed throughout the city and that are then again accessible for people by bike or for running or walking. And then...

In that same breath, there's also still the, oh yeah, one of these pieces of nature we need to tear down because we need more concrete. Yeah. Those two views just don't align. Right. And like we said, there's no shortage of concrete. Like this is a very sort of post-industrial area. It's not like this is like a public facing thing that needs to be in one area to be accessible to people, right? Like they could store their buses, train their bus drivers, right?

somewhere else in Flanders. It's not like it needs to be right in town. No, I'm certain there are other areas where you could just as easily make a parking lot for buses. Yeah. As for like a training grounds, I'm not sure how that would work, but...

But then again, I think there's roads enough in the city for people to practice. Like even like industrial areas tend not to have very much traffic. So that could still work without having to like, again, get rid of a piece of forest just so people can drive around in buses. Yeah. But again, this is not an argument against public transport more in the like...

hypocrisy and and senselessness of the plants that are on the table right now yeah and kind of trying to make people choose between two things when they should be perfectly possible to have both right exactly i'm guessing it would also be more cost effective if you take some other parts

Because I'll dive into that later, but there's also pollution in these areas that needs to be taken care of. So just from a cost-effective standpoint, I think there should be alternative options that will keep everyone happier. Yeah. So describe to me your visit there. Describe how it was and what you witnessed there. Okay. Well, I went there at the end of July. I stayed a few days there.

And it was really weird because you're coming from, again, a tram stop. Then you have to walk for a bit. And all of a sudden, it's like you're in a forest. It was really surreal almost to know that you're in the middle of a big city, but also have that kind of like isolation from the sounds of traffic. Yeah. I mean, that's lovely, right? It's nice that that's available, at least for now.

Oh yeah, I understand 100% why people want to keep that green space close to their homes. Yeah. So the ponds are a mix of terrain. There is water-hungry, swampy areas when the rain has been falling. There's lush grass fields with little, curvy, impromptu paths to take. And there's some parts where the trees have been growing for long enough that people can now build tree houses in them.

Which to me is quite a good indicator that not much development or care has been done in this terrain. There's an absolutely insane amount of blackberry bushes, much to my delight. And yeah, it's just for an area that is relatively small, but in the bigger picture, it just surprised me how many different faces it has. It was a delight to be there.

Locals from Kent tend to use the area for walks or picnics or to take their dogs out. I've seen multiple people stopping by just to pick the blackberries. The city itself calls this entire area a green zone and a climate access zone.

there words. What Kent has done is trying to create like a network of zones and roads that are accessible by car, but not so much that there is a lot of traffic on these roads, which makes them ideal for cycling, running, recreation, or even transport, if you would so choose. The website of Kent itself promotes these areas, is good for the flora and fauna, for the environment, and subsequently for residents. Then you need to be thinking of

Absorption of rainwater or keeping local populations of animals and plants healthy or just the cooling effect that nature has. Yeah, compared to blacktop. Exactly. Like fully concrete cities tend to like not really release their warmth as quickly as nature does it. And it was surprising because it was really hot when I was there. But in the shade of the trees, it was perfectly doable up until the point where you actually...

exercised and then suddenly it's what was less cool but different story again the website from the municipality itself acknowledges the importance of the area for an endangered species of lizard and the efforts that the city took to make sure that it can still thrive there

More concretely, one person I spoke to said that there are 39 protected species of plants and animals living there, protected under both Flemish and European law. So I'm not really sure why that's discarded. Yeah.

Into the calculation. Yeah. I'm not a municipality person. I don't know. Also, I believe there have been sightings of foxes there, mainly because we were told by the activists not to eat the blackberries that are too close to the ground due to the parasites that foxes may carry and can subsequently like infect people with. Oh, wow. Yeah. Interesting. You know what else carries parasites, James?

Is it the goods and services that we rely on to pay for this podcast? Exactly. There's a 50% chance that these products and services will give you one or another incurable parasite. Wonderful. And we're back. And, Vic, you mentioned that there was a problem with pollution in the wilderness space. Can you explain, like, what...

What kind of pollution that entails? Of course. In the past, there has been like a pollution of both the groundwater and the soil. In and of itself, that's not that remarkable. I've been told by someone that Flanders has multiple spots where you can come into contact with

different forms of pollution. In the ponds, there is both pollution in the soil and in the groundwater. The soil itself contains asbestos, although it should be noted that that is within the acceptable regulatory norms.

As a refresher for listeners, asbestos danger lies mainly in the breaking or fracturing of the material and the fibers that release through that process is what makes asbestos so hazardous. An effective way to mitigate this is to make sure that these fibers do not get into the air, for which water tends to work wonders. So at least in terms of asbestos,

It seems very simple and cost-effective to just leave it undisturbed because it's already an area that likes to swallow up water, which then will isolate the asbestos from the air and thus, you know, make it less harmful. Yeah. The water is contaminated with VOCIs. That's an acronym for a variety of volatile organic compounds with some chlorine attached to it.

I don't know. I'm not a chemist. These chemicals have several uses and applications in a variety of industry. One of my sources told me that the specific chemical is 1.4 dioxane, which is used as a solvent.

It's not the type of stuff you want to drink or inhale, but serious exposure from contaminated soil or water is pretty rare from what I've read. As my source pointed out, the contaminants in the water will over time degrade organically. A process called phytoremediation, where the presence of plants and microorganisms and fungi will degrade the material and reduce the toxicity. While reading into this, I found that the same is true

to an extent for asbestos, which can be a source of inorganic nutrients for these microorganisms. So while you could point out that phytoremediation is a longer process than sanitation,

I personally think that it's just common sense that letting nature do its work under stirrup might be significantly cheaper and more sustainable compared to putting additional chemicals and substances in the ground to neutralize these VOCIs. Also just a fun little side quest here, but in order to monitor the area, the line employed a concierge to walk the terrain on a daily basis.

I'm unsure if you can spot upcoming or emerging contamination with the naked eye, but not my money that they used to pay the guy. So this guy, just his job was to walk around the pond. Yeah, pretty much. I'm told he had like a little hut or a little shack from which he worked. The guy was still working there at the time the activists moved in, but the shack is gone and so is the concierge.

I'm not sure about the details of what happened there. Yeah. But, uh, what I do find extremely funny is that now officials and spokespersons from, uh, the development side are claiming that the area is dangerous and that it is for their own wellbeing that the activists leave as soon as possible, uh,

which doesn't really make sense to me. Like either this argument is like incredibly disingenuous or they fucked over someone by paying them to take this incredibly risky job of walking over contaminated terrain. Yeah. And not to mention like all the people who they're allowed to walk their dogs and blackberries there and things. Exactly. If it was that dangerous that people should not be there, then,

I'm fairly certain they could muster better fences than they did at the moment. Like, I'm not sure on the fence economy in the broader sense, but there should at least have been signs on the fences. Yeah. And there were none. So, yeah, we're getting to the activist groups. The group that is currently occupying the trees is an assembly of people who care deeply about the area itself. I spoke on the record with one of them, and I would like to play this clip to let them introduce themselves.

I'm Arvid, I'm one of the activists of the Wondermeers occupation which we occupied since the 20th of June and we occupied this because it's endangered since the LEIN which is the public transport company in Flanders wants to destroy this 15 hectares of nature for building a bus depot so like a parking for buses okay

Do you want to tell us about what you and the group of activists have done here? Yeah, so we live in the trees as much as possible and we sleep there to make an eviction harder and to have more power in our action. It's way more difficult for them to get us out if we are on height and use other tactics to...

to block them and they also cannot start cutting trees when we are in the trees. How is that for you? It's intense, always, in occupation of course, but also places where we experiment with living together and where everyone is welcome. There are no doorbells, no walls.

Forests are very open place where everyone can just come in and feel like they are welcome and it's not owned by someone. It's not... Yeah, it doesn't feel like it's belonging to someone which you can easily have with the house, I think. But here there is all the space to make stuff, to live, to take time for yourself. Which makes it very...

healthy I think to live here by being in nature people are just more happy I think in general than in the city and in the house and yeah we are mainly building tree houses as you can hear maybe probably so as you've heard that was Arvid one of the activists that I spoke to um

As you've also probably heard, that is that there is construction going on in the trees. There's multiple tree houses there at the moment, and that's where they sleep. When I spoke further to Arvid, he made clear the demands that the activists have, which is mainly that they don't want the needless destruction of this area.

Their intention is to remain in the trees and make it hard, if not impossible, for the trees to be felt. There are multiple tree houses with enough stability and space for multiple people. On top of that, they are preparing for a possible eviction, all while also living happily and communally. Like, every night they cook together, they're having dinner together. I found it incredibly healing and wholesome to just have a meal around a small fire with, like, a group of like-minded people, and...

not hearing traffic or other urban noises. A bright spot was one evening where someone played a Dutch protest song just on the guitar, satirizing an unnamed US president for his role in the Vietnam War, which can't escape US politics, even in the middle of a forest. So then I would like to play a second clip.

And do you want to talk about how your relationship is with the neighbors around here? Yeah, the neighbors, they started their own action committee for more than three years ago, I think. And they have already saved one piece of the Wollongonghamse Mies, which is on the north part of the train rail. So this one is now safe. It's only three hectares.

But it was also the land that wanted to destroy it for making a place to practice to drive with the bus. Oh, like a training ground for bus drivers. Exactly. So just put concrete on this swampy area to then once in a while drive with the bus there as if there is no other concrete in the city to practice driving with the bus. But this is now saved and now the neighbors are

Also for this big piece of the Rondelmse Mieres, they are now going to start a court case against the decision because the ministry of Zouad de Mieres, the ministry of environment, they approved the permit for the stoutplats for the bus depot. Okay, that was yesterday that that was announced? Yeah.

How are you feeling right now? Do you have any plans on how to continue the fight against the bulldozing of this place? Yeah, we are not surprised that she approved it. We saw it coming a bit. But it's just very ridiculous and we will keep fighting of course because she's very hypocritical in saying that we have to save nature but in the meantime she...

That's really interesting.

That diversity of tact-to-tact cooperation, I think, is really valuable in these kind of struggles. Can you explain a little bit more about that, like how that works? Well, I think it was just the stars that aligned for this particular goal. There is a neighborhood committee that's also heavily opposed to the destruction of this area, but it's mainly a neighborhood committee. These are people who will stand up to the municipality, but

entirely through the legal system or the judicial system. And I think this committee was like at least a year or two, maybe even more old before the occupation happened. And the occupation also happens separately from the committee. So you kind of have this, this,

you know alliance now between like a group of people who will take more direct action against the plans to destroy the place and this group who is going to do that by filing court cases

against the plans that the land and the municipality are trying to realize right now. It's really funny almost because one of my sources said the people who are occupying the forest came down like angels. The activists really don't like to be called that, but it's sort of, yeah, just they have a common goal. And for that, they're working together. And from what I've seen, there is very warm and friendly contact between the groups.

I've seen multiple neighbors come by with like food or building materials, like think of screws or nails or like wooden beams for construction. I think there was one person who like every Sunday brings pancakes.

I'm not sure if they still do that, but... That's pretty cool. Yeah, exactly. I've seen people come by and drop off bags of dried beans and lentils. I think it's really fascinating how organically these two groups sort of come together in their common goal, but also that the two different strategies kind of strengthen each other.

Right. Yeah. Like it's obviously you've got people who wouldn't think of occupying forests, but then they find themselves in solidarity with the people who do. And I think that's really cool that like,

You said there was no prior communication, right? These folks just arrived, began the occupation and the locals were like, yes, this is exactly what we needed. Thank you. Insofar as I understood it, that's how it happened. As I said earlier, like the combination of tactics just make their path towards their goals so much more tangible because by occupying the forest, they can't start like early construction in the area or,

I know some municipalities or cities kind of begin with the destruction prior to having permission, but then it's like, oh yeah, we've already started, so it's of no use anymore. Which, I'm not sure how common it is in other countries, but I've heard of that within activist circles in the Netherlands. And...

All the while this committee is like doing the court cases and filing legal motions. And yeah, I think it's a really warm and friendly contact. Yeah, that's what it's kind of nice to see. Exactly. Okay, I have one other clip.

How does it make you feel that the neighbors are so supportive as you said that they're bringing food on a regular basis? I've seen I think a few who brought materials even like screws or nails. Yeah. What does that do with your morale or your motivation? Yeah, I think we wouldn't really be here if they would be pro the bus depot but

Of course they are not, because it's just a very stupid idea to destroy this valuable nature for it. But yeah, we help each other a lot and we keep each other strong by supporting each other. And they were very moved by us being here and even called us their angels, which we don't like to be called, but anyway. Yeah.

Is there anything else you would like to share or to have on the record? Yeah, we would like to invite everyone to come here. There's more info on wandermeersen.noblogs.org and yeah, there will still be the whole court case, so there is a chance we stay longer, but they also have the legal...

Right to evict us which we also be paying for but yeah Obviously people who listen to the show will be familiar with like forest occupations in Atlanta, right? What's the state response to to this look like? For a long time there has been very little state response while I was there the permit to develop the area was granted and

But for the most part, there's occasional a car that drives by. I did receive word that a few days ago, a few cops came in onto the terrain and

uh took pictures of everything and the next morning there was a drone flying over the camp yeah yes um so things are like tensing up a bit and we'll have to see how we'll have to see how it goes obviously like the case is still like in the judicial so we'll have to see what comes from that but

Up until now, things have been quiet and peaceful. Okay. Yeah. Cause like, I think people sometimes obviously make the U S really strives to lead the world in, in police violence. But, uh,

I think sometimes people underestimate the capacity of European states for state violence. That's definitely true. Our lack of guns makes it that not many people are getting shot by police, but against activists or protests, police can be pretty violent. I don't have much experience with Belgian police myself. I've heard conflicting stories about them.

I was at the May 1st celebration in Brussels and we were, we came incredibly prepared and then it was all okay. Literally nothing noteworthy to mention. But then when I speak to other people, I hear like, oh, you know, Belgian police worse than the Dutch, but then that very also varies from city to city. And that's a whole nother rabbit hole to go down into. Yeah. Yeah.

So for now, not much police action against the activists. Not sure if or when that will change. Right. So if people wanted to, they said everyone was welcome. Yes. And I presume they can drop in for the day or they can go and stay for a period or they can commit staying until the forest is safe. Right.

Is it easy to access? Can you walk there? Could you like, I didn't take it, I guess, ironically, maybe could you take a bus? There is a tram that stops pretty close by. They have an Instagram account that I don't know from the top of my head because I don't use Instagram. We'll link it in the notes. I think if you just search for like a Wandel Meersen or Wandel Gemsen Meersen, you'll find something.

You can contact them there and they can give you more details on how exactly to get there.

Yeah, you can come by for a day. You can come by for two weeks. That's up to you. You're welcome there. What I would like to urge everyone is if you plan on going there, contact them about the supplies they need. When I arrived there, I got some small kitchen knives and literally for cutting veggies and some canned foods and some first aid supplies because it is largely donation-based what they're doing there. So...

Yeah, anything that you can spare or can purchase for them would be greatly appreciated. Check the website, check their Instagram.

There might be a Facebook page. I think there is a Facebook page for those still using Facebook. So, yeah, I would recommend it. Like, go over there, help out. They're very friendly people. If you're interested in doing something like this, this is like a very entry level thing. Yeah. Like you said, it's not just like a good thing to do. It's also a nice, fun thing to do. Like, it's...

these spaces could be really healing. Like just being among like minded people, like you said, and in nature. Exactly. And like when I was there, they gave like a climbing workshop and,

So they taught me how I should climb a tree with like gear around my waist and everything. That's cool. Yeah. And follow the agreements that people make between each other. Besides that, there's not really any rules. You're free to come for a day. You're free to stay for two weeks. That's entirely up to you. Just it's nice to help out. And even if it's just help with cutting vegetables for dinner. Yeah.

Yeah, that's already incredibly appreciated. And in the meantime, people can do other stuff that needs to happen around the camp. And yeah, in terms of activism, this is a small step to do, but it can also just be a really good experience for you. And yeah,

all the while helping the locals and helping the activists, which is the sort of mutual aid that I would prefer to see a lot more. Yeah, yeah. I think it's great that it's integrated with the community. And I think it's great that it's accessible for people. And hopefully folks will go bring something that they need. It's cool that they can share skills. I've learned a lot in different activist spaces. I think that's really cool.

Mick, is there anywhere that people can follow you if they'd like to? Yes, I have a Twitter account now because I don't see enough horrible shit. It's at Two Sober Possums or under the name Mick Smith, M-I-C-K-S-M-I-T. I don't think I've posted anything yet, so I'll think of something funny.

but feel free to reach out there if for reasons yeah i'm cool with that great well thank you very much that was i think that's really interesting i hope people will go if you go you know send us a little message let us know how your experience was in the forest i'd love that it would make me happy likewise

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Ooh, but not so much of that. Sign up at Work Money. Get money-saving tips. Skip the rent. Get more rich. Sign up at workmoney.org slash morerichcontest for your chance to win $50,000. What's JD? My Vances. This is It Could Happen Here, a podcast that's not behind the bastards. But today we're doing a little mini episode on our future possible vice president,

J.D. Vance. Garrison, how are you? How are you feeling today? Welcome back to the program. Thank you. I'm feeling pretty good. Yeah. Yeah. I got a great five hours of sleep. I'm good to go. Oh, I slept 11. Good for you. No, I've also been in the researching bad people hole, which keeps me up late at night. Yeah. I have to do the walls episodes tonight so we can go back to back on the VPs. But I decided to start with J.D. Vance.

And, you know, I had debated with myself, is this guy worth a full BTB episode? And I decided ultimately, like, no. You know, I just don't think there's enough to him yet that he deserves that. Perhaps that will change in the future. But what I wanted to do was give the listener, who I'm guessing has mostly just heard a few disjointed things about JD. A few things. What are two things? Maybe one specific thing. One specific. They're probably

aware of hillbilly elegy. That was like a pretty, pretty big book in the day. And the movie was panned. And that was kind of news. They've probably heard the couch fucking stuff. And then they've heard allegations that he's like a straight up fascist. And, you know, he thinks that single women should be dragged out into the street and shot or something like that. If you have a cat and you're a single woman, you are ontologically evil. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A sociopath.

And so I wanted to provide some context for how he went from, if you can remember back to 2016, he was a liberal darling for having written Hillbilly Elegy, right? He was this guy, this like never Trump conservative who was explaining to everyone how the evil of Trumpism had infested and, you know, latched onto the minds of small town Americans, right? That's kind of how he was framed to today, where he's like this hard right MAGA guy, literally Trump's, you know, future right-hand man with, you

what sounds like explicitly dictatorial ambitions. And the mystery of this story, all of it comes down to Peter Thiel, right? Many such cases. Yeah, as is often the case. He's a major part of why things wind up where they are.

The bones of J.D.'s background story are kind of important, so I'm just going to give them rapidly. He was born in August 1984 in Middletown, Ohio, born under the name James Donald Bowman. But his parents divorced when he was a toddler. His dad, his bio dad, is pretty much out of the picture right away. He is eventually adopted by his mother's third husband, whose last name is Hamill, and that's the name he's going to serve in the Marines under.

His mother was not very together. There's a lot of neglect and poverty and some drug abuse in his early life before his grandparents move him from Kentucky to Ohio. Now, a lot of ink has been spilled on the subject of Vance's supposedly autobiographical book, Hillbilly Elegy, which paints him as a member of the aggrieved and abused white underclass, the forgotten men of American politics.

I'm not interested in relitigating this stupid book except to say that I had a kind of similar background. My dad was in the picture, but socioeconomically, it was kind of similar. We grew up in a very poor and troubled small town. Eventually, my caretakers got me out of there into a more functional part of the country. And I can see, I see J.D.'s book as kind of cynically positioned

to take advantage of the liberal outpouring of sympathy for rural whites that followed Trump's 2016 victory and attempt to position himself as someone who can explain why this part of the country swept Trump into power. Now, the reality is that this part of the country did not sweep Trump into power.

the core of Trump's support in 2016, were aggrieved but financially comfortable suburban white people. Vance did not write about poor folks addicted to Oxy and the Hollers with any real empathy. He painted them as helpless fools and mental children and himself as better for getting out. And that's really all I have to say on the matter.

To me, his early life suggests a young man who wanted to set himself up for a career in public life and took the most expedient actions to do so. And that is the context under which I see his service in the U.S. Marine Corps. He joined the Marines and got himself the job that would get him as close to action as possible without requiring that he actually, like, do anything. His specific gig was public affairs for a Marine aircraft wing. So he is writing about the shit that this aircraft wing is doing,

which is about the least job that you can actually have in the military. He wrote that he was, quote, lucky to escape any real fighting.

After finishing his term, he got a B.A. in poli sci. And I'm not saying that you have to fight for, you know, most of what the military does is not literally fighting. I'm just saying I see his specific positioning himself with this job as him wanting to have Marine on his CV when he goes into politics. Right. That's yeah, that's my allegation. Right. Not that there's anything wrong with not fighting. Sure. I mean, and it's also just.

Good to point out considering most of the rights attacks against walls right now are also about him not actually like seeing combat and Vance has gone after him for that specifically. Yeah. Trying to like allude to like Vance having more combat experience. Yeah. Yeah.

Both men did not like fire bullets at enemy combatants. No. And most people don't. But what I see with Vance's service is I did this because it was a line in my resume. Whereas you don't do you don't do 24 years in in the National Guard, like just to set up your political career. No, you do that because you want to be in the National Guard. Yes. Walt was definitely more like a career man in that sense. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

After finishing his term, he got a B.A. in poli sci and philosophy from Ohio State. And during his first year in college, he worked for a Republican state senator. He's going to work for a couple of Republicans in his college and grad school, you know, law school years. Then he attended Yale Law School, where he made friends with Jamil Javani, who would go on to be a conservative parliamentarian in Canada.

He was mentored by Professor Amy Chua, who wrote a book about being a tiger mom that made a lot of people angry and was beloved by the chunk of the country who thinks that children have it too easy. Chua helped to convince him to write Hillbilly Elegy, which might be her worst sin. Almost definitely is her worst sin. I can forgive some terrible acts towards children if you don't write the book Hillbilly Elegy. It was when Vance graduated from Yale that he first made contact with the man who would come to define his adult political

journey, Peter Thiel. The PayPal co-founder and serial entrepreneur investor had taken a rapid turn from his earlier libertarian politics, thanks to a growing interest in a line of political philosophy known mostly as neo-reactionary or NRX thought.

Although today you'll more often hear it described as the new right. I'm not in love with either of those terms for this particular chunk of the right, but I think neo-reactionary is better than new right. Not as bad as dark enlightenment. It's not as bad as dark, and we'll talk about that. The worst of these three terms. By far the worst of the three terms. So I tend to stick with neo-reactionary, although if you hear new right being used, that's also what this refers to.

That's a term I've used sometimes. Yeah, yeah. What time period is this? Is this like 2017? Like, where are we at here? 2011 is when he sees Peter Thiel speak at Yale, which he describes as like the moment around which his life pivots. So this is pre the publishing of his book.

Yes, yes, yes. He publishes Hillbilly Elegy in 2016. Okay, so he kind of got in on like the ground floor of some of this kind of stuff. Yes, he is very early in teal world. He is one of the first, he's going to be one of, we're getting to that, but I want to talk about what neoreactionaries are because the rest of this isn't going to make sense unless we go into that. So Vanity Fair writer James Pogue rather ably described the new right as a worldview in direct competition.

to the liberal idea that economic growth and technological innovation would lead us to a better future. Instead, the growth of big tech surveillance, nanny state governance, and social justice culture war dominance has created a system of oppression that will destroy everything good in the world if not stopped.

The primary high priest of this school of thought is Curtis Yarvin, who in the early aughts from about 2007 to 2014 blogged prolifically as Mincius Moldbug. Now, Yarvin is a computer programmer. He is this guy who has had for most of his career this desire to create a new computer operating system that would like

the way in which knowledge is disseminated in a way that sounds kind of magical to me. He never quite gets it working, and he blogs about political philosophy the same way he talks about programming, which he has this dream for a way to reorient society after a soft kind of peaceful coup. He always emphasizes how peaceful it needs to be. That will be, you know, again, it's his way if he wants to program society to make it work perfectly, you know, based on his sort of sensibility

set of values. And he writes a series of essays about how he wants to reorient society. And these essays become kind of the central underpinning ethos of the messy assortment of philosophies that we call neo-reactionaries or the new right now.

The basic idea is that this liberal nightmare hellscape can only be stopped and turned back by replacing democracy with an essentially monarchic system. Pogue describes Yarvin as arguing for, quote, a Caesar-like figure to take power back from this devolved oligarchy and replace it with a monarchical regime run like a startup.

As early as 2012, he proposed the acronym RAGE, Retire All Government Employees, as a shorthand for a first step in the overthrow of the American regime. What we needed, Yarvin thought, was a national CEO or what's called a dictator.

Now, a lot of guys in the aughts become enraptured by Yarvin's ideas because the way Yarvin writes, he spends most of his free time because he gets bought out of a company he's in and he doesn't wind up like super rich, but he winds up comfortable enough that he's for a while just spending like 500 bucks a month on books and reading like old reactionary tracts, like books from the 1800s of like monarchists arguing against, you know, the Enlightenment and socialism and the like.

And so he peppers his essays with a lot of different kind of archaic flourishes, a lot of Latin, a lot of like references to Greek and Roman philosophical figures. And that is fucking catnip for a certain kind of guy. No, it makes it, it makes it seem like esoteric. It's like, there's some kind of like hidden, hidden knowledge. It's being like rediscovered that like holds the key to fix all of our problems. Yes. He is. If you've read Ender's game, he,

He's doing what Ender's brother does in Ender's Game, where he's writing his little essays for the internet, trying to overthrow the government using them. And there's a certain kind of guy who is just deeply attracted to that idea. One of those kinds of guys is a philosopher called Nick Land. Land is an interesting character. We talk about him a little during our AI cult episodes. He's a dude who comes out of academia and kind of has now moved around to essentially like

fascist political philosophy would be kind of the quickest way to describe Land today, although he's a complicated fellow. But he is the guy who comes up with the term dark enlightenment for Curtis's writing. And this is the way in which a lot of these guys, a lot of the guys especially who are going to come into Yarvin's work around the mid-aughts, are going to think about it, right? Where it's this

He has pulled the wool from my eyes, right? He has made it clear how doomed democracy is, that it's fundamentally evil. And now that I've had this dark revelation, I can never look at the world the same way again, right? And like Land was trying to do the same thing for like the previous like 15 years. Yes. He attracted a small...

batch of like kind of like academic followers a whole bunch of his colleagues kind of got more popular than him because they were slightly more reasonable in many ways because land's writing is never going to be like the most viral thing on earth right like yeah and mold bugs is a little better written for that although both of them are are too

The guys who are going to like, like Vance is going to be the guys who are going to take his theories into like mainstream politics are going to need to trim the fat off, you know?

It's also worth noting, Yarvin is the guy who introduces the term the red pill to right wing politics, right? Oh, I didn't know that. Yes. As far as I've ever seen, Yarvin is the guy who like starts using the red pill in like a really concerted way to describe like coming to these understandings about, you know, race science has a decent amount to do with it earlier in Yarvin's writing career. But like all of these ideas that we now call neoreactionary, like that's that's a Yarvin thing.

original. He thinks the Matrix is a work of genius. Of course. Which it is, but maybe not in the way that he thinks. Slightly different reasons. Yeah. So...

Anyway, Peter Thiel falls in love because Thiel is by 2009, Thiel's writing stuff about how he thinks democracy is incompatible with liberty. Right. And when Peter Thiel refers to liberty, he's not talking about like your freedom to like to love the people that you want to love or do with your body what you want to do with your body. He's talking about his freedom as a guy with a lot of money to not have to pay taxes. Right. That's primarily what what all of these guys mean by freedom. Right.

So Thiel, by 2009, is already enraptured with these anti-democratic ideas, and he finds Yarvin. It's kind of unclear to me, does Yarvin actually start him on that road? I think it's more that he has started down that road, and he thinks Yarvin is doing a really good job of –

setting up what he's been thinking. So he starts pumping money into Yarvin. He funds some of his software ambitions. He's just kind of generally supporting him. And he begins pumping money increasingly over the early to mid-aughts into an array of influencers and thinkers who are in alignment with what we might call moldbuggy and thought.

Right. And he he's doing that up to this present day. Pogue writes, Teal has also funded things like the edgelordy and post left infected New People Cinema Film Festival, which ended its weeklong run of parties and screenings in Manhattan just a few days before NatCon began. He's long been a big donor to Republican political candidates. But in recent years, Teal has grown increasingly involved in the politics of this younger and weirder world, becoming something like an efarious godfather or genial rich uncle, depending on your perspective.

Podcasters and art world figures now joke about their hope to get so-called teal bucks. And if you're familiar with like the Red Scare podcast and those ladies, if you're familiar with like the dime square set, a lot of them are into neo-reactionary thought and are the people that that paragraph is referring to, right? Yeah. Now, while podcasters and cultural influencers have long been useful to teal, he's also tried to collect up-and-coming politicians with uneven success.

In 2011, he gave a talk at Yale while Vance was still a student and discussed the stagnation of technological progress in the United States. Vance wrote that Thiel was then, quote, possibly the smartest person I'd ever met. And this moment is the moment that his whole life pivots around, meeting Peter Thiel at Yale in 2011. And we're going to talk about what comes after, but Garrison...

You know what isn't receiving any money from Peter Thiel? We also cannot say that. There's no way to know what he's doing with this investment. It's entirely possible. It's entirely possible that we are funded 100% by Peter Thiel. And if so, thank you. Gotta get those Thiel bucks.

And we're back. I've just uncovered that Peter Thiel is the mind behind Chumba Casino. Garrison, this goes so much deeper than I thought. What if Peter Thiel instead just got really into sports betting? You know, instead of dealing with all this weird, like, esoteric, traditionalist, like, like,

like 1880s racism philosophy. What if instead he just got really into, I don't know, the Bucs? That's probably a sports team, right? He put $8 billion on the Raiders. That's right. He took a bath. He's fucked. He got addicted to it, too. God, we could save so many lives. Sports betting really could save lives. I've always said that.

Vance decided to abandon his planned career in law, although I'm not sure I believe that was ever his intended path. Absolutely not. No, he does a couple of years in law, and he claims that Thiel also is who made him decide to convert to Christianity by defying the social template I had constructed that Christians were dumb and atheists were smart. I don't know how much to believe that he's actually a Catholic. Maybe. I don't know, but like.

There's this whole new batch of people who are philosophically Catholic, or they're Catholic in a quote-unquote Hegelian sense, when they construct these larger models of human evolution, and they view Christianity as this thing that will drive the human species towards its perfected form. And definitely the Dark Enlightenment people are...

are a significant chunk of kind of what caused that to develop. And we're seeing that now with like these fake movements, like the Hegelian e-girls, which are kind of like the like weird stepchild of some of these like dimes square, like influencer philosophy stuff. Yeah. And I would say he's definitely, yeah,

Not a Catholic in the sense that your aunt is right. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. He is a Catholic in the sense that like he believes there are things about social order and the roles that people should have in society that Catholicism gets right. And that's that's the sense in which he's a Catholic. Right.

So in 2016, the same year that Vance publishes Hillbilly Elegy and becomes a liberal darling, he joins Mithril Capital, a venture capital firm founded by Thiel. Peter Thiel and Vance, all of these guys, pretty much every time they create a company, it's named after something in the Lord of the Rings. Fucking a J.R.R. Tolkien bullshit. He would be so unhappy with this. Because Tolkien was also a Catholic monarchist, but in a very different way. In a super different way, yes. Yeah.

So the two young men that Thiel adopts that he makes what are called generational bets in is Blake Masters and J.D. Vance. And his bet is that if I really bankroll and back these guys, they are going to be major figures in U.S. politics, right, for decades to come.

And his first step is he makes them rich. He helps them get jobs and stuff that they get wealthy in. You know, Masters is recruited in the same way as Vance. He's given a cushy job in venture capital. He's handed a shitload of teal bucks to see what he can make of them. And Vance is, you know, both of them are decent enough at this. Vance is OK at it. And within two years, he gets hired for $150 million fund out of Washington that focuses on finding young companies in overlooked U.S. cities, places that weren't seen as traditionally tech hubs.

Soon after this, he goes into business on his own. If we can call it on your own when Peter Thiel is the guy who backs your new company entirely. Right? Sure. I do love that Peter Thiel somehow picked the two most uncharismatic up-and-coming dudes. I mean, look at Peter. What does he know about charisma? Yeah. But, like, it is fun that he made these two bets.

and Mark Kelly just destroyed one of them. Yeah. Oh, criticize the man for what you will. But what are these weirdos go up against an astronaut on a public debate?

Jesus Christ. You know, say what you will about electoralism. I'm excited to see the Waltz-Vance debate because I think it'll be funny. Yeah, well, because Vance has big daddy issues and Waltz has strong daddy energy. So we could be in for a very interesting night. So Vance forms his own venture capital form, Narya Capital. This is another Lord of the Rings reference. Narya is one of the rings of power, which...

The rings of power are bad. Very famously. They're part of a con. An evil monster creates them to enslave you. If you are wearing one of the rings of power, you have been enslaved by Sauron. That's the point.

They're very famously bad. Yeah. Yeah. And of course, one of the major investments Narya Capital makes is into Palantir, which is also named after the Lord of the Rings. Also famously used by the evil wizard. Yes, famously used by the evil wizard.

Now, in 2016, Vance portrayed himself as a never-Trumper, calling the future president a wannabe dictator. Wow. You know, how many people in America didn't he rape is one of the things Vance says about Trump. So he is, like, not holding his punches against the man. Broken clock. But behind the scenes, he is in the process of being anointed by the Teal Crown.

who again see him as a bet in the future of American politics. Now, this is not something I can claim to know with confidence, but it seems to me from the extant information that Vance's anti-Trumpism was performative, calculated to sell books when he thought he might have a future with a new, more conservative Democratic Party, triangulating to battle populist Trumpism. The fact that he remained close to Thiel during this whole period and that Thiel spoke at the 2016 RNC strikes me as evidence of a lack of any core political beliefs beyond a personal desire for power.

Now, it is worth noting that as a younger man, he displayed none of the signs of social conservatism. He is always an economic conservative. He's willing to work with Republicans, right? He's one of these guys who you could definitely see economically being in line with the Republicans. But he does not evince any kind of bigotry in his early life, particularly towards LGBT people.

One of his best friends from law school is a transgender woman, Sophia Nelson. He describes her in Hillbilly Elegy as an extremely progressive lesbian and wrote in an email to her, I recognize now that this may not accurately reflect how you think of yourself, and for that I am really sorry. I hope you're not offended, but if you are, I'm sorry. Love you, JD. Sophia responded the next day saying, if you had written genderqueer radical pragmatist, nobody would know what you mean. Ha!

Many such cases. Right. The text of their emails has been shared with The New York Times by Nelson after Vance took a hard turn to lean into the right's anti-trans bigotry. This was a move that pleased Thiel himself, who has a very long he has been he has been anti-trans and pushing anti-trans rhetoric for years before this was a mainstream thing on the right. You know, before the Matt Walsh types really started pivoting Republican messaging around it. Right. Yeah. And I'm going to quote from The Times here.

Nelson, now a public defender in Detroit, said they visited each other's homes, talked on Zoom during the pandemic, and exchanged long emails discussing a range of subjects, from minutiae of daily life to weighty discussions of current events and public policy issues. Nelson attended Mr. Vance's wedding in Kentucky in 2014. They pondered doing a podcast together. He suggested they call it the Lunatic Fringe.

But Nelson and Mr. Vance had a falling out in 2021 when Vance said he publicly supported an Arkansas ban on gender-affirming care for minors, leading to a bitter exchange that deeply hurt Nelson. He achieved great success and became very rich by being a never-Trumper who explained the white working class to the liberal elite, Nelson said. Now he's amassing even more power by expressing the exact opposite. And I think that's interesting. It does kind of point to the whole, there's no core to this guy. There's nothing that he has ever really...

like, cared about other than positioning himself most advantageously. And I really do think that that gets at what actually is inside J.D. Vance. I mean, I mean, a proximity to political power is the driving force for a lot of a lot of people who get into politics. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, that's that's it. Now, it's relevant that 2021 was the year Vance chose to pivot away from never Trump rhetoric and lean into the right wing culture war bullshit.

Narya had been founded in 2019 and had been backed by $100 million from Peter Thiel, as well as funding by Eric Schmidt and Mark Andreessen. Their investments included Strive Asset Management, an investment fund started by Vivek Ramashwamy, who was Thiel's classmate at Yale.

Oh, I did not know they were classmates. Uh-huh. Oh, yeah. It's the class the shit fell on. For two years, he'd been allowed to keep up the fiction of a principled economic conservative who was horrified by the bigotry and corruption of Trump world. But by 2021, with Trump out of office and Biden's presidency underway, Thiel made it clear that he needed something else from Vance.

We get our best texture of what Vance believed by late 2021 from Pogue's Vanity Fair piece, which was written about a neo-reactionary summit in October of 2021. Quote,

Vance believes that a well-educated and culturally liberal American elite has greatly benefited from globalization, the financialization of our economy, and the growing power of big tech. This has led an Ivy League intellectual and management class, a quasi-aristocracy he calls the regime, to adopt a set of economic and cultural interests that directly oppose those of people in places like Middletown, Ohio, where he grew up. In the Vancean view, this class has no stake in what people on the new right call the real economy—

the farm and factory jobs that once disdained middle-class life in middle America. This is a fundamental difference between new right figures like Vance and the Reaganite right-wingers of their parents' generation. To Vance, and he said this, culture war is class warfare. Vance,

Vance recently told an interviewer, I got to be honest with you. I don't really care about what happens to Ukraine. A flick at the fact that he thinks the American-led global order is as much about enriching defense contractors and think tank types as it is about defending America's interest. I do care about the fact that in my community right now, the leading cause of death among 18 to 45-year-olds is Mexican fentanyl. His criticisms of big tech as enemies of Western civilization often get lost in the run of Republican outrage over Trump being kicked off Twitter and Facebook, although they go much deeper than this.

Now,

He is backed entirely by social media money. Teal is one of the major backers of Facebook, right? Of course. He is supported entirely by the money of the people he claims to hate, who he claims are destroying America. I do find this to be really interesting because it's like a more conservative right reaction to like right wing neoliberalism, right? Yes. This is so different. Even though all these guys like kind of talk about how they're like they're like Reaganites, right? They're really not.

No, they're going back to a much more 19, like 20s style of conservatism almost. Yes. Before like the Southern split before like like New Deal. And we solidified more of like the Democrats being this liberal party, this more fiscally conservative party on the right. And then that kind of gave way to like Thatcherite England and Democrats.

the neoliberal takeover of the entire world. It's like they're looking at how like neoliberalism has been totally subsumed even by like the Democrats and like, you know, centrist left liberals. And they're reacting to it with this much more socially conservative backlash. Yes.

And that is really the entirety of what's happened to the Republican Party the last four years. And Trump's only a small part of that because even Trump doesn't really care about some of these types of like culture war issues. No. That these guys care about. Like these guys are even like further to the right of Trump on like most things in this kind of social vein. And like where you're viewing, like you said, like culture war is class war in terms of like this culture war is like beating down like the poor white working class. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

These small town farms aren't the real economy. They simply aren't. The real economy is California and Texas. These beliefs, there's an element to which they sound compelling because parts of this are the stuff that everyone on the left has complained about neoliberalism. But like his solutions are fantasies. Like for one thing, the people who are backing him are the same kinds of people and often the same people who were very much gung ho behind getting rid of American factory jobs in order to maximize their profits.

and the consolidation of farmland into these giant agricultural conglomerates, right? He abandoned this part of the country because he knows it sucks. It's not a pleasant place to live a decent life. It's very hard. It's very difficult. Yeah, and it's in part because these kind of people who came out of the Reagan era have no use for factory workers or farmers in the United States.

All of that can be consolidated into these vast enterprises that when there are human workers necessary, we can just grab undocumented people from across the border. Right. Anyway, speaking of grabbing people, these ads will grab you. We're back.

So by late 2021, Curtis Yarvin is still a major figure in the neo-reactionary movement. Vance has started quoting him kind of obliquely. And in fact, during this 2021 National Conservative Conference that POG pivots on, Vance is

makes direct reference to something that Yarvin has written his ideas about, like, we need this red Caesar. When he says during an interview, we are in a late Republican period. If we're going to push back against it, we're going to have to get pretty wild and pretty far out there and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with. And, you know, what that means is this late Republican, he's talking about Republican Rome before Caesar, you know, makes his play for power. Like that's explicitly what he is comparing it to.

And it's because Yarvin's big thing is we don't want a left or a right wing dictator. We want a king for the whole country. Right. That's going to represent everybody, which is just not what kings do. It's not what dictators do. This is so clearly just also just like a fascist line of argument, like an actual, like actual, like, like ideologically fascist. I know people call like, you know, Reagan, a fascist, but like, he's not, he's, he's a neoliberal, neoliberals suck. Yes. These guys are going back like actual, like fascist political theory that

That's what Moldvog is reading. That's what he's writing about. And in 2021, Vance is saying this. I think Trump is going to run again in 2024. I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice, fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people. And when the courts stop you, stand before the country and say, the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it. Which he's quoting Andrew Jackson there. But he's describing like the end of democracy. A dictatorial takeover. Right. Right.

And laying out with a plan that is very similar to Project 2025, which I know Vance does have some personal connections to because a lot of his friends were involved in the planning of that. But you can see Project 2025 and what Vance is saying here, these are all downstream of what Yarvin's saying in 2012 of this RAGE acronym, Replace All Government Employees, right? Or Retire All Government Employees, you know? Yep. By the way, you will be glad to know that by 2021, Yarvin has stopped openly using the term dictator. So that's good.

He just he just he just calls it a monarchy a lot now. Oh, OK, that's good. Yeah, that's good. Now, J.D.'s pivot, which he often credits with his conversion to Catholicism, although you can see he's been on this road for much longer than that, was perfectly timed for his Senate run in 2022. Peter Thiel was his biggest donor, providing 15 million to the super PAC that backed

him, which at the time, at least, was the largest amount ever given to boost a Senate candidate. Yeah, $15 million for a Senate run is crazy. It's nuts. J.D. had been a long-shot candidate at first because he's very unlikable, but the teal money allowed for major ad blitz and the kind of media prep work that only a well-funded PAC can provide.

His PAC published the data on an open medium page with a username at ProtectOhioValuesForms, which allowed the PAC to send info and advice to Vance without violating federal campaign finance laws. Vance had been hit early for comments made a few years back negative to Trump, but he clawed his way back into the MAGA good graces by appearing on Breitbart News, Tucker Carlson's Fox show, Steve Bannon's War Room podcast, and most of all, by positioning himself as a violent opponent of immigration from a write-up in Politico.

In February, Thompson, who's the guy running the PAC, posted a memo to the Medium site arguing that Vance had an opening to zero in on immigration and border security, noting that he had a personal connection to the issue, given his mother's struggles with drug addiction. The issue was near and dear to the primary voters, the memo argued, and crucially could help in nabbing Trump's support. To win a Trump endorsement, a candidate has to show a growing ballot share. To get that, a candidate has to own a critical issue, the memo read. J.D. can do that.

And that's exactly what J.D. does. When he takes the stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Florida later that month, he focuses his speech entirely on immigration. And when his campaign goes up with its first TV ad, it shows a direct-to-camera Vance telling viewers that he nearly lost his mother to poison coming across our border.

Now, by mid-April, Trump has become convinced that Vance's past mean remarks were water under the bridge, and he calls an associate of Peter Thiel to say, hey, I'm moving closer to endorsing Vance. Thiel, by this point, has also introduced Vance to David Sachs, who adds another million dollars to his super PAC's war chest. On April 15th, convinced by Vance's rising poll numbers and impressive fundraising, Trump makes an official endorsement. This helps pull Vance over the top, and he ekes out a narrow win in the election that followed.

The next year, Vance repaid the favor, writing a January Wall Street Journal op-ed where he endorses Trump as a candidate in 2024. This was back in the start of 2023. The Republican primary is just gearing up and the end of it is in enough doubt. You can remember back then. It sounds silly now that people really thought DeSantis had a shot. Right.

And so he is Vance's kind of in before any of the other major Republican figures and backing Trump for his his redux round. Right. Yeah. He's like one of the first to fall in line here. Yeah. And there's a few people like Sarah Huckabee Sanders had been seen as a potential Trump VP pick, but she waits months to actually like endorse Trump officially. So Vance gets in on the ground floor and this impresses Trump that he is someone who he can count on to be loyal.

Vance wins more praise the next month when a train carrying hazardous materials derails in East Palestine, Ohio. Trump makes a visit to the town as one of the first stops on his campaign, and Vance organizes the visit. And he does apparently a good job of this. Trump says to his entourage, this guy is turning out to be fucking incredible. Now, by this point, Vance has befriended Trump's oldest son, Donald Trump Jr., and set himself to the task of well and truly kissing ass to get on that 2024 ticket.

By late January of this year, Vance and his team had received enough friendly feedback from Trump World that they decided to invest in a full court press. Vance began showing up on TV networks that Trump considered enemies, doing a reverse Buttigieg and throwing himself into the enemy camp to take shots on behalf of the boss. He also devoted himself to raising money for Trump from the Silicon Valley VC set. Most of these guys were Thiel's friends, dudes like David Sachs.

What finally put him over the top, though, was an article Donald Trump Jr. gave his dad from Breitbart News about the man then seen as Trump's most likely VP pick, Doug Burgum, governor of North Dakota. The article's title was, Carl Rove Endorses Doug Burgum for Vice President. And, uh,

I do love that Karl Rove's endorsement is the fucking kiss of death right now for a fucking VP candidate. Very funny place for his story to have wound up. Not a bad call by Trump, though, I got to say. Actually, it is a bad call for Trump, but also I get it.

I read one Politico article that argues this was the final straw for Trump. It was this Karl Rove article. I can't actually speak to that. It is worth noting that in the months leading up to the RNC, Trump is also being subjected to a charm campaign by all of Peter Thiel's friends, this huge pile of wealthy Silicon Valley investors. From the Washington Post, quote, In the weeks before former President Donald Trump announced his vice presidential presidency,

pick, some of tech's biggest names launched a quiet campaign to push for one of their own, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance. The former president fielded repeated calls from tech entrepreneur David Sachs, Palantir advisor Jacob Helberg, and billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel, Vance's former employer and mentor, imploring him to add the one-time Silicon Valley investor to the ticket, according to three people familiar with the entreaties. All caps, we have a former tech VC in the White House, greatest country on earth, baby! Delian Ashparov of

A partner at Thiel's Founders Fund wrote on X after the announcement of Vance's nomination. Delian Asparov? Something like that. Jesus Christ. I know. It's fucking exhausting. But that is, you know, the J.D. Vance story, more or less. That's where he comes from. That's who wants him to be the VP. It's all of these fucking ghouls who want to own the world and become...

It's these people who have achieved the highest level of financial success you can achieve in any society on the earth right now. And they found that it's kind of empty and it's kind of empty in part because people can still be mean to you and they don't have to care what you believe just because you have a lot of money.

They don't like neoliberal capitalism because it fundamentally still has a shred of like a democratic value. Yeah. And that makes them too mad. Yeah. So instead they are they are going back to like a much a much more like archaic system where they can still maintain their personal wealth while being like very influential through like a dictatorial means.

they're still like fundamentally capitalists, but almost in like a more like fascistic feudal sense. Yes. We're like, they want to be Lord. Well, that's exactly it. That's what, that's what they really want. They are terrified of death and what they're terrified of more than anything. What scares them mostly about death is the idea that like all the success they've seen, uh,

It's meaningless. It doesn't matter. Fundamentally, all of this passes. No one is on top forever. Nobody matters. No one's going to care about PayPal in 20 years. That's the price of time, right? And they want to stop the clock. That's fundamentally what near reactionaries are. They are people who think, I am special. I am super special. The world should be oriented around recognizing how special I am forever. And in

Anything I can do to turn back the clock is necessary, justified. Like that's that's what these people are. That's what they believe fundamentally. Like imagine being so mad that no one will remember PayPal in 200 years that you try to install a fascist takeover. Yes, yes. Of the United States of America. So that PayPal always matters. It's these fucking guys. Anyway, Garrison, that's the James Donald Vance story. Not his name. Is that his name? No, of course not.

Maybe. I forget. I forget. I always forget what J.D. stands for. Who cares? Who gives a shit? Hopefully he's not going to matter much longer. This is this is this is my biggest thing going going into November is that, you know, if the Democrats win on on on like on their ticket, that still means plenty of bad things around the world. Yeah. But I also really don't want these freaks in there. Like, I really don't want them.

They're they're like they're like spooky. They're trying to do like this, like like esoteric LARP in like the White House. Come on. And most of the things that need to happen for the world to get better can't happen while these people are in power. Right. Like or close to power. Like there needs to be damage done to them. And.

I'm hopeful about that, if nothing else, in this election. And like electoral damage is only like one type. They have to be like culturally humiliated. Like they have to be like culturally like rejected, being like, no, like you, you are not actually the wizards of culture that you kind of want to be. Like no one likes what you do. No one likes what you believe. Like it has to be like this, this larger, this larger like cultural battle. That's why they have like the culture wars. This is like,

super important thing. That's why they're so scared of queer and trans people, especially queer and trans people that are influential, whether they be teachers, whether they be working in media, making movies, television, writing books. That's why they're so freaked out about that kind of stuff. That's why they're trying to get out of schools. That's why they're trying to stop woke Disney. It's because they know that

no one's going to want to listen to these freaks when like gay people can make a good art or like give a good history lesson. Yeah. That's like, there's, that's like the strongest like anecdote to these, like just really, really,

Really bizarre, like esoteric ramblings about wanting to go back to like 1910, like racist science and just weird, weird shit. Yeah. You know, I think that these guys delved too deep and too greedily if we're going to continue the Lord of the Rings references, which by God, they're not going to let us stop doing so.

And I think that there was this thing we used to I used to talk about a lot when I tried to explain like far right terminology to people back in 2019, 2018, five decades ago, a thousand years ago. That's my Elrond moment. I was there, Garrison, a thousand years ago.

We talked about like the term hide your power level, right? Which these Nazis used to use. And they've just completely given up on that. No. And the thing that they are seeing, there was like all this. I was reading that 2022 article by Poe, which I think is a really important snapshot because it's these people about to head into 2024. And they they know before the dims do how badly down Biden is. Right. The Democrats have not really taking seriously what a dangerous position Joe Biden was going to be in for reelection yet. Right.

But they also think that like, wow, all these young people are showing up at our lame parties. That means there's a broader sweep. All young people are becoming like closer to reactionaries. They're becoming like all weird tread caps. Yeah, we're capturing the culture. And that's just absolutely not what was happening. And it would have been obvious if like they had been capable of actually like listening to people. But

what we're seeing now is they did the most dangerous thing you could do is they predicted and understood one thing about the future, but nothing else. Right. And so they they understood the weakness that Joe Biden represented and kind of the weakness of his control over the Democratic Party. But they did not understand that, like,

Other things are possible, right? And including the fact that like Joe Biden and largely the other people who were running the Democratic Party might come to understand that weakness too. And after a disastrous debate and a shooting go, you know what? Let's change course.

And I really think that that, above all else, might be what fucks them, is they completely came out of the woodwork. They were tired of having to pretend they didn't want a king. They thought their time had come, and perhaps it has not. We'll still, we'll all see. We'll all see. Well, I'm super excited to hear what kind of just unhinged and bizarre things Tim Walls has done in the past.

In the next tale. Yeah, I'm just going to accuse him of having been the Zodiac Killer. You know, that's worked on a couple of guys. It seems to work, actually. Yeah, so we're just going to do that. Call it a night. Anyway, this has been J.D. Vance. We've been It Could Happen Here. Go to hell. I love you. Clean your couch. Clean your couch. Shit, I need to do that.

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Ooh, but not so much of that. Sign up at WorkMoney. Get money-saving tips. Skip the rent. Get more rich. Sign up at WorkMoney.org slash MoreRichContest for your chance to win $50,000. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about Tim Walls. And in this episode, Garrison and I are going balls to the walls. Are you happy with that, Garrison? What's skivvitying your Biden?

What does that even mean? All right, let's get going. Some fucking Gen Z bullshit garrison because I won't take part in it. Yeah, I'm excited to hear about how Walls is either great or terrible or probably a mix of both. Yeah, I mean, he's a politician and a pretty successful one. So it's definitely got to be a mix of both. For J.D. Vance, I figured the most relevant thing to do was to talk about, like, what does he actually believe and where does he come from in the right direction?

because people had gotten pieces of that, but I feel like unless you put it all together, it's not as useful. So I hope we did that. With Walls, he's not a guy where there's anything sinister for you to know. So I think the useful thing is kind of going through his whole political biography and just kind of talk about, like, what has this guy done in his public life, right? That's kind of what I wanted to do here so that people actually know, you know, whether or not

You are making your mind up about whether or not to vote. You're voting for harm reduction. You're anti-electoral. Here's this guy who may or may not wind up being the vice president. And here's what he's actually done in the past when he's had any kind of power. It's worth noting that kind of at this point here, Walls is maybe the most popular politician at his level in the country. This has happened very suddenly, but he's got something like a plus 16 net favorability among moderates.

which is insane yeah that's a lot yeah it's it's wild as someone who's looked at a lot of the favorability ratings the past six months yeah that is astonishingly high especially compared to where we were like two months ago with skibbity biden which was yeah very low quite

Quite dire. He's incredibly popular with the normies because basically everyone in the country has positive memories of a guy like Tim Walls. Like whether it was like your favorite social studies teacher or your dad, there is like a kind of rotund, balding, very mechanically capable man probably somewhere in your life that you have fond memories of. And Walls dredges those up. We are a very Freudian country. Yes, yes.

For an idea of how, like, rapidly people have gone from not really knowing who this guy is to loving him, on August 8th, a YouGov survey showed him with a net favorability rating of plus 11, which was up from plus 1 in a survey conducted in late July. Amazing. In the same time frame, JD Vance has seen his approval rating steadily drop. Yeah, isn't he, like, at, like, negative points? Oh, yes, yes, yes. By any stretch of the imagination, at negative points.

And if you're just kind of looking at Tim's life, which we're not really getting into because we have limited time here and it's not the most important thing I thought we could be talking about, but he has a long history of doing decent things in his personal life. Kind of most notably in the early 90s, like 93, 94, he sponsored the Gay and Lesbian Alliance at his high school. And his reasoning was that, you know, he was a soldier in the National Guard and the football coach at that point. And he decided, you know,

you know, him sponsoring the club in particular would have the biggest impact. And I honestly, I think that's the kind of thing that might have saved lives. Yep. Good thing to have done. Anyway, this isn't an episode about his life and background. We're not going to litigate. We're not going to waste any time litigating the attacks on his military career.

which seemed to confusingly say that after extending his time in the Guard by four years to participate in Operation During Freedom, he owed his soldiers staying on even longer to fight in Iraq. I could make the point that no grunt in any U.S. war ever found themselves in the shit and said, boy, I wish the command sergeant major was here.

But given that J.D. Vance was played onto stage at the RNC to a song with the refrain, we got to get out of Iraq and take our country back. I just don't think these attacks are worth acknowledging at all. Right. Yeah. The right has already acknowledged that was a stupid war to fight in. Walls decided not to fight in it. Good.

Good for him. Now, when it comes to the current war that is on everyone's minds or one of the wars that's on everyone's minds, Walls is fine on Ukraine. But when it comes to the war that he's not fine on, the genocide in Gaza, Walls is in no way that I can find really better than Kamala Harris. But he did take a stand against the Iraq war back when that mattered, which is, I guess, a little bit of a point. But again, doesn't really matter today. And in any case, we're far afield from the subject, which is what has Tim done in politics?

So Tim's political career, he came late in life to that. He was a social studies teacher for a couple of decades. He was a coach. He lived in Nebraska, then moved to Minnesota. And in 2006, after retiring from the Guard, he was elected to Minnesota's 1st Congressional District.

Now, this was a tough campaign. His opponent in this race was a six term Republican incumbent, Gil Gutnacht. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Gutnacht? Gutnacht. I'm guessing his family were knights and it used to be like good night or something like that, like G-U-T-K-N-E-C-H-T. But I don't know enough about ancient German to tell you if that's really where his last name came from. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

But Walls came in. He kind of goes against this guy who had promised not to run for another term and then decided, actually, I don't want to give up power. Not a thing that's ever happened again. And Walls kind of came in both when this guy had violated his promise to not run again and near the peak of disillusionment and exhaustion with neocons. Right. This is kind of the twilight of the Bush years. Even conservative Americans are pretty fucking tired of the Republican Party right this second.

And Walls exhibited a notable ability to connect with rural Americans who mostly voted red. He did so with basically no funding or larger national operation behind him. From a write-up in the New York Times, he had no money, no nothing, said Representative Betty McCollum of Minnesota, who that cycle worked on House Democrats' recruitment team under their campaign chief Rahm Emanuel.

He had a grassroots campaign that he had put together that I just knew was going to be dynamite. So I went back and I told Rahm Emanuel, this guy's going to win. He's great. And Rahm looked at me like I was crazy. Walls was a dark horse candidate and would claim around that time that his whole inspiration for getting into politics was when he tried to take two students to a rally for President George Bush, and they were kicked out because one student had a John Kerry button.

Now, I found a blog by the Republican staffer who kicked them out where he admits he made a dumb call. He was kind of trying to be a dick. He had seen Walls out protesting against Bush like the day before, and he knew he was going to kick them out of the rally. But he made them stand in line for a long time before he kicked them out. And he was like, I shouldn't have done that. But his angle was that Walls wanted to get denied and kicked out so that he could make a big deal about it and use it as a line on the campaign trail.

That's probably what happened. Regardless, this is a very funny little domino leading to big domino. Yeah.

Everyone likes Walls, who tends to meet him. Joe Biden, for the last year or two, his team's been trying to get him to do more events with Walls just because he put Biden in a good mood. I think that's a big reason why Kamala picked him. He just seems to be a very likable guy. But he's very okay with lying to get what he needs. I mean, he's a politician. He's a politician. Another good example of this would be his DUI, right? When he was 31, he got a DUI.

And he has at times claimed basically that's why I decided to like I stopped drinking. I changed my life. I moved. You know, I got my shit together. But his campaign manager made a statement recently. Oh, he wasn't drunk. He just couldn't hear the cop. I don't know who to trust, politician or cop in this case. But the cop's attitude is like, well, I would be fine if he had just like fixed his shit up. But he definitely was drunk. And I don't have any trouble believing that a man in rural Nebraska, a football coach in rural Nebraska drove drunk once. Right. Right.

No, that is not the most surprising thing in the world. So I think he's a guy who's certainly, he's not naive political actor, right? He's not one of these guys who's so good and pure that he's not willing to like fudge in order to make shit work for him. And that's probably what he did at this Bush event, right? Now that said, it would be hard to overstate what a difficult task he picked for himself in trying to unseat Gutteneck.

At the time that Walls ran, Minnesota's first district had been held by one other Democrat in the last hundred years. So he was the second Democrat in a century to win in that district. And as soon as he left, by the way, a Republican took back over.

During his six terms in Congress, he was one of the more interesting legislators in the country. Walz was a risk taker, supporting liberal votes on major issues even when he was politically vulnerable. He opposed Republican legislation to make doctors vulnerable to criminal penalties for performing abortions. He supported a climate cap and trade bill on greenhouse gas emissions that failed. And this really pissed some folks off. He supported the Affordable Care Act.

And kind of one of the more notable things about him is there's stories of when he was running for reelection, he would do town halls in southern Minnesota and he would get attacked by these red voters who had supported him early on for backing the Affordable Care Act.

And rather than like backing off, he would lean into it and argue with them and try to like convince them. And, you know, his numbers with conservative rural Republicans got worse and worse every cycle, basically. So you could argue how good he was, but it is worth something to me that he didn't back off. He didn't do the well, this might, you know, fuck up my chances of reelection. Like he's never really been that kind of guy. Yeah, there's things that he believes and he will just kind of like jam his flag into the mud over them.

That said, Tim was a pragmatist. He voted for a resolution calling for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq within 90 days. But when that failed, he voted in favor of continuing funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Tim also received an A from the NRA during much of his time in office, voting against gun control based on what seemed to be a natural inclination to firearms and hunting. Walls may have been the best shot in the Minnesota National Guard during the time when he was there. He's apparently a very good shot. He is an avid and skilled turkey hunter. And if you talk to people who want game in the U.S., turkey is one of the more difficult game to hunt.

He developed a reputation as a guy who wouldn't apologize for voting with liberals, but who would go across the aisle when it mattered. During his time on the Veterans Affairs Committee, which he ultimately chaired, he voted with Republicans to make it easier for the VA to fire employees, even with union opposition. And he also pushed through changes to improve GI Bill college access for veterans post-9-11.

One of the things I find interesting about his record is that in 2018, he voted against most of his party, opposing an overhaul of the VA's health care system. He agreed, everyone agrees, that the system needed to be overhauled, but he argued the proposal in place would force the VA to cannibalize itself, basically starving the organization to try and fix it. And his attitude was, well, it needs to get fixed. I'm not going to vote for a change that might be worse than what we currently have.

While chairing this committee, Walls made strong connections to Nancy Pelosi, who, like basically everyone, really came to like Walls. And she's going to be one of the people who's one of the strongest voices for picking him as VP. And we will be back to talk about more of that. But first, Garrison, you know who else loves Nancy Pelosi? Probably these products and services if they come from San Francisco. They're based in the Bay Area. She will break their kneecaps if they don't like her enough. Ah, and we're back.

So one of the big shifts for Tim during his time in Congress was away from the NRA. This started after in 2017, after the Las Vegas mass shooting and then after the Parkland mass shooting. And then in February of 2018, he writes an op ed supporting what he calls common sense gun reform and donates the NRA contributions to his campaign that cycle to some sort of, I think, gun control cause. Why?

Walls' common sense gun regulations include an assault weapons ban, and he is currently in line with the Democratic Party on that, if you were curious. That same year, 2018, he launched his campaign for governor of Minnesota. By this point, Walls had bled much of his ability to win rural red votes. It is accurate to say he was only really good at this during his early years in Congress. His margins grew a lot narrower over time, and once he hit the governor's office, his support was largely in the cities. Now, it's one of those things where...

I think there's been debate, like some people have argued, well, he's maybe not the best VP pick because he actually isn't all that good at getting these red rural votes. But I just don't see that as where the election's coming down to. Walls has great favorables with, like, suburban white people. And...

particularly suburban-like moderates. And that is like one of the most important demographics to win. So I don't believe the fact that he's kind of bled his support with rural conservatives is really necessarily a mark against him in an electoral sense. One thing I do appreciate about Walls is how direct he is to people I dislike.

He decides in 2018 to run for governor, and during that run, he has a meeting with a bunch of business leaders at a luxury hotel. The president of a machining company asks if Walls felt corporate taxes hurt workers, and Walls replied, we're not taxing people, we're taxing corporations. And I want to quote from a CNBC write-up.

For Jeff Baker, it was a bit of a no shit moment. That's not what I wanted to hear, said Baker, president of McFarland Truck Lines. There's a lot of stories like that. He's been very willing to tax the wealthy and to tax corporations to pay for things like children's lunches. This is a consistent Walls move, and it's something that he absolutely is unapologetic about. And I think that's fine.

Minnesota currently taxes corporate income at 9.8%, the highest rate in the nation. Walls did not back down on this during his time in office. In fact, that CNBC report found that, quote, Walls' policy battles have a common theme. Walls supported either higher taxes on the rich or businesses and corporate leaders fought back.

One of their fights was over a 1% surtax on passive investment income over $1 million. Another was a tax on the wealthy wall signed into law that limits standard and itemized deductions for households with gross incomes over $220,000.

Due to Republican control of the legislature, Walz's first term was not hugely eventful up until the COVID-19 pandemic. This is because Republicans retained control of the state legislature and were able to stop much of his planned reform. We did get to see more of the politician Tim Walz during COVID when he stood up against Republican resistance for common sense pandemic safety regulations.

He earned a lot of hate from the right for some of the more extreme COVID restrictions in the country, which were put in place in Minnesota. In particular, Walls threatened citizens with up to 90 days in jail during the shelter-in-place period and threatened $25,000 fines for meeting in public. Minnesota instituted a COVID hotline where people could inform on their neighbors if they saw rules being broken. And...

I get why the right is uncomfortable with this. I'm not fully comfortable with this kind of stuff either. But given what was going on at the time, I'm not going to slam the man for trying to save lives in a very uncertain and desperate situation. You know, it beats the nothing that a lot of state governors did. So I guess that's kind of where I stand on that shit.

Not long after the pandemic lockdown started, George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis. Walls mobilized the National Guard after three days of riots, earning praise from President Trump on June 1st, who said, "...what they did in Minneapolis was incredible. They went in and dominated, and it happened quickly."

And this is, you know, the National Guard do a lot of very violent shit coming in to crack down on these protests. I know a lot of people who were the ones cracked down upon. It's one of those things where, yeah, he's a governor. You know, I think pretty much any governor in this situation would have sent in the National Guard in that sort of situation. Especially after the burning of the third precinct. Especially after the precinct got burnt.

Which doesn't excuse it. It's just like, well, yeah, he's not he's not an anarchist, right? Like he's not he's not your communist like revolutionary hero. He is the governor of Minnesota. I'm just really not surprised that this happened. It's, you know, a pretty normal thing for a guy in his position to have done. Yeah.

Now, like every other dim in creation during the height of the uprising, Walls voiced support for a wide host of police accountability reforms. He even voiced some degree of support for ending qualified immunity. But this did not last long, and as the backlash against police reform swelled up after the election, Walls joined many dims in pulling back and even quashing moves for greater police accountability. When he ran for re-election, he did so as a tough-on-crime, law-enforcement-friendly Democrat. Right? Many such cases. Now,

He did push through some accountability measures. He used $15 million in COVID funds to pay for grants for community violence prevention. He pushed through some requirements to increase data sharing from the police licensing board. He pushed through a demand for state law enforcement to share footage of police killings with the family of the victim within five days.

These are, I think we can all say, minor accountability moves. Very, very, very minor. Very minor. He said of these moves, they build trust in police. They build trust in the systems. They build trust among communities and they provide the community with some basic closure and understanding for families. Nothing builds trust like a video of your cousin getting shot in the back.

Yeah, the biggest accountability thing is that you get first look at the murder video. I don't know, man. Like, okay. Like, yes, I do think you probably have to legislate that, because otherwise police just won't give it up at all. But, like, I wouldn't hang my hat on that. It is...

Ignoring the main issue at play here, which is the fact that we have murder videos. It's like, come on. Now, there were some bigger reforms, including limitations on no-knock warrants. Although, again, not like a ban or anything. But it lacked a lot of the stuff that activists in the state had pushed for, including limits on police stops of motorists. And Walz had agreed...

that there needs to be more movement in this direction, particularly after the murder of Philando Castile. It also left out an asked-for end to the statute of limitations for wrongful death cases against officers. Walls had personally voiced support for a ban on officers with white supremacist gang affiliations, but this was also left out, ultimately. State Rep. John Thompson said to Walls at the time,

And all I've been getting from your office is lip service. And I mean that we don't need a news conference from you, governor. We need a leader. So you're not going to get a lot of police reform under Tim Walls. That's just a pretty consistent reality of the guy. That said, he can be forced to do some things if you scare him enough. So, you know, keep that in mind, I guess. First, keep in mind these ads. And then we'll talk about the environment and stuff, which is a happier story for Walls. We're back.

So Walls ran for re-election under the slogan One Minnesota, and he managed another solid victory. Up to this point, you would say he'd been a pretty standard dim governor in a swing state. But something happened in the 2022 midterms that changed the course of Walls' career in maybe the nation. The Democrats won a slim majority in the state legislature.

As David Schultz, a political science professor at Hamlin University, told CNN, Walz's message immediately jerked away from one Minnesota to damn the torpedoes and fuck the Republicans.

Quote,

And that is a real solid spate of shit for a governor to get done. And all of this is about in a year, right? Like most of the shit that Walz has gotten done as governor has been very recently because the Dems had just taken back control, right?

And it's very narrow control. Amy Koch, a Republican and former Minnesota Senate majority leader, said Walls definitely had not governed like a moderate and unlike other governors with trifecta control, had not emphasized making deals with Republicans. Everything that went forward was signed, she said. I'm not sure what that says about him, but it definitely puts a dent in his argument that he's just this moderate Democrat fascist.

from the Midwest. And this is why progressives, many of them, are excited about Walls, is that when he actually had the opportunity, he was willing to say, fuck the Republicans, let's get some shit done. I don't care that we only have one vote, right? Yeah. Now, Walls has stated that in his opinion, political capital exists to be spent improving people's lives. And this is an area where you can say that he's put his money where his mouth is, right? This is how he actually governed.

Now, it's worth noting, obviously, he also promised to burn political capital on major police reform, and he gave that up. So, you know, the fact that he says he's going to do something like any politician, not a guarantee it's going to happen.

Well, and some of the more kind of upsetting things, but not surprising things is now that Kamala has basically secured the nomination. She has rolled back many of the progressive policies that she ran on in 2020 when those seem to be more popular. Right. You know, that's not necessarily walls. That is that. Yeah, that's Kamala. But they're running on the same ticket. And again, like, it's not surprising that she's not advocating for Medicare for all now that she is the actual nominee. Right. But it still is, you know, disappointing for people who are like, hey, we're

her actual policies four years ago were actually relatively progressive. And now they are slightly more kind of in line with like the mainstream Democratic Party views on, you know, most of these issues. Right. And again, one of the reasons maybe for a little bit of hope is that Walls has not really been that guy during his time with executive power. Right. And kind of the area where he's been best maybe actually is climate change. Right. This is the thing Dems seem to like to compromise on the most, right?

And Tim's history here is interesting to me particularly because he doesn't have a perfect record, but it's genuinely pretty positive.

His major achievement was a policy passed in 2023 that required Minnesota to have a carbon-free electric grid by 2040. Now, this is the kind of legislation that could just be virtue signaling, but Walls didn't just say, yep, we'll get it done by 2040 when I won't be the fucking governor anymore. He backed it up by approving a historic amount of state spending on energy. The legislation included rebates on climate-friendly technology like air source heat pumps and electric

vehicles, as well as spending to improve home insulation and $100 million for city extreme weather preparedness. Walls also signed a bill to cut red tape for wind and solar farms and transmission lines, and to speed up permitting for infrastructure needed to replace coal and gas plants. So it was not just a, yeah, we'll definitely do this. It was a, well, there's certain things that need to happen for this to be possible, but

And I am going to work to make it easier to do those things. I'm going to make sure that we're passing legislation that makes it easier to do those things. And that that shows me someone who sees this as important as not just a thing that's virtue signaling, but as we need to figure out what the actual concrete steps are to make this doable. And that's something that gives me a little bit of hope.

The more questionable side of his environmental history is the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline, which he and state regulators approved in 2020. This angered a lot of local environmental groups and several indigenous tribes in the area. The pipeline was argued to be necessary because the old one was corroding and a spill risk. And of course, when the new pipeline was constructed, workers punctured multiple aquifers. This seems to have been a case of Walls being the politician that he is. Trade unions supported the project because jobs.

And it's also worth noting this is 2020, so the dims do not have a majority in the legislature, and there's just a lot less of a stick available to Walz at this point. So, you know, maybe he would have ruled differently, or maybe he would have acted differently, you know, had he been in a more friendly situation. Yeah, I reported on this back in 2021. Yeah. We did a two-part series on Stop Line 3, where I traveled to the pipeline, and

Yeah, it's not surprising, especially with pressure from trade unions to approve this pipeline. From what I've seen, he did not have much to do with the police crackdown on protesters. I've seen that alleged, and I'm not finding much to back that up.

There's a lot of like county sheriffs and other task forces working directly with the pipeline company. Like, you know, Walls never used National Guard against these people. I don't see much from him being personally involved in suppressing these protests beyond the fact that he's the governor. Like he is he he's he's the top guy in charge. He could shut that all down if but he also doesn't need to be like actively involved for that to happen.

Right. Police will do it themselves. Right. And that seems to be mostly what took place. Yeah, that seems fair to say. And most of the extreme charges that Stop Line 3 protesters were getting, like felony theft for locking down onto construction equipment, mostly have since all been dismissed immediately.

in the courts or at least taken down to a lower, more appropriate charge. Yeah. So again, like with everything about this guy, he's not perfect. He's not without some fucked up things in his background. He's a politician. Um,

But on balance, a better history on environmental stuff than most governors in the country. I should also note here, under walls, Minnesota passed the nation's most comprehensive ban on PFAS chemicals, a category of industrial compounds that do not break down and run off and have been associated with a bunch of cancers and other health risks.

It is a ban that rolls out over an eight-year time frame. So, you know, maybe it's not like who knows how well it will actually get executed, but literally no other state has passed a ban this strong. So I'm putting it in the ups for walls category.

Now, that is kind of what I had to say. I did want to end talking a little bit more about Palestine because, again, Walls has a very mixed record here at best. While he was in the House, he received AIPAC's endorsement and spoke at the group's 2010 conference where he said this, Israel is our truest and closest ally in the region with a commitment to values of personal freedoms and liberties surrounded by a pretty tough neighborhood.

You know, I might quibble with most of that. Well, except for with our closest ally in the region. That's kind of hard to argue with. After October 7th, he ordered state flags flown at half staff and condemned the Hamas attacks. In early March, he began endorsing calls for a permanent working ceasefire. A few days after Harris called for a six week ceasefire.

He's made statements about how the uncommitted protesters should be listened to. Same thing about college protesters. But he is not he's not backing an embargo. Right. He's not, you know, pushing any kind of like stick to actually force Netanyahu's hand in any way. You would not say he's the worst Democrat on Gaza, but he's not, you know.

particularly good either. He didn't lie about volunteering with the IDF as a teenager. He did not lie about volunteering with the IDF as a teenager. That's one thing we can say.

But unfortunately, the bar is quite low these days. Yeah. So, you know, that's Tim Walls, a political biography. I hope you now can walk away being like, OK, that's that's more or less who Tim Walls is. I do. I do feel it's important to end with one more kind of anecdote about Tim Walls that I learned this morning. OK, yeah.

is that on, I believe, his first date with his with his soon to be wife when he was teaching geography, he took her to see the movie Falling Down, the 1993 Michael Douglas masterpiece. Incredibly based. Which I feel like every single politician should be forced to watch. I would make it a mandatory part of graduation. You know, that was that was an important movie for me.

It is a pretty funny first date movie. It's not the worst. It's not like American Psycho, which is also a great movie. But it is a curious first pick. But I think it is important that whoever is sitting in the White House is familiar with Falling Down as it kind of displays...

american male violence it predicted a kind of guy who was just starting to like yeah creep up into public consciousness when the movie came out and who now commits a mass shooting every four weeks yeah yeah so i think that is a very funny anecdote watch falling down folks it's a great date movie you know maybe double parrot with event horizon and really really get some action christ

All right, Gary, that's the end of the episode. How are you feeling? Pretty good. Pretty good. Honestly, well, you know, not great. You know, actually, the whole situation politically in the country is kind of a nightmare. It's fine. It's fine. Somehow I feel slightly better than I did two months ago. I'm going to tell you this is the best it's been in a while. And maybe the best it'll ever be again. Which also just points to how low the bar is at the moment. Yeah. Yeah. It's fine. Look, best case scenario,

Matt Walsh is... Is mad. Is a little further than mad. We'll see. We'll see if we can get like a welfare check over at his house. Anyway, that's the end of the episode. Good night and good luck. Carl Walsh.

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Ooh, but not so much of that. Sign up at WorkMoney. Get money-saving tips. Skip the rent. Get more rich. Sign up at WorkMoney.org slash MoreRichContest for your chance to win $50,000. In the last few weeks, indeed the last few months, the eyes of the world have been on the atrocities afflicted on the people of Palestine on a daily basis.

For the first time in most of our lifetimes, tens of thousands of people have taken to the streets to lift their voices for the stateless nation of Palestine and against Israel's unchecked mass murder of civilians. It's something I never thought I would see in the US. On one of my first visits here, I was staying at a bed and breakfast in the Bronx in late December. It was cold and I was wearing a kefir to stay warm, as I still often do. I remember wearing it while I was talking to small guys while I was waiting for the train and we talked about Palestine for a long time.

I ended up giving one of them my kefir and he gave me some cool badges I still have on a jacket somewhere. I was hopeful after that, but since then I've lived here for more than a decade. It was really not for about 15 years that I saw someone else in the US without a direct connection to Palestine who wanted to show up for the Palestinians. It's an important cause and it's one that we've been supporting here on our podcast with our coverage and speaking for myself also with my presence when I can. But as the world looked at Gaza, bombs also fell on Kurdistan.

It's equally hard, if not harder, to find solidarity for the Kurdish freedom movement in the United States. I have a Kurdish kefir as well. A Kurdish migrant that I met in the mountains gave it to me on one cold night last year after I said good evening to him in Comanche. It stinks of campfires and cigarettes and I wear it all the time. I don't think anyone has ever recognised it, let alone said anything positive about it. But someone did once ask me if it was a Rasta thing.

So while our eyes have been on Gaza, those of Turkish drones and warplanes have been on the mountains of southern Kurdistan. Bombs have been going off in Kurdistan for a very long time. Indeed, before Guernica, Britain was dropping bombs on people in the Middle East without paintings to commemorate it. State boundaries and alliances have changed a lot since those first bombs, as has technology. But the fact that death from above has remained a consistent tool of the colonial state hasn't changed.

When I was in Kurdistan in October of 2023, it was amidst almost constant drone strikes. I had to conduct my interviews in a climate of secrecy and concern, somewhat for my own safety, but also for the safety of my interviewees, who took great and serious personal risks to come and meet me. One of the people I met was Zagros Hiva, a spokesman for the Kurdistan Communities Union, or in Kurdish, Korma Sivakin Kurdistani.

It's generally known as the KCK by its courteous initials. Recently I connected with Zagros again and I asked him to explain this latest round of aggression. Hello dear James, I hope you are doing well. As far as your first question is concerned, I can say that this operation has started from 16th of April

six days before Erdogan's visit to Baghdad. And in the last weeks, the Turkish army has extended these operations and this invading army has moved further deep into the Iraqi territory and the Kurdistan region. Now they have set up checkpoints. They stop civilians. They interrogate them.

According to CPT report, CPT stands for Community Peacemaking Teams. It is a civil society organization active in Iraq and Kurdistan region of Iraq. According to CPT report, in the last months there has been 238 bombardments in those areas.

and 2000 hectares of agricultural land have been burned to ashes. And now 602 villages are under the threat of displacement and 162 of them have already been displaced. They have been razed to earth. From the start of this year, according to CPT data, 1700 attacks have been done.

And this comes against the backdrop of attacks in 2023 where 1,548 bombardments have taken place. If you're not familiar with the KCK on whose behalf Zagros is speaking, you can think of it as the umbrella group that unites the various Kurdish freedom movements in Bakur, North,

Bashur or south, Rojava or west and Rodjilat or east. To use the Kurdish terms, these parts of the Kurdish homeland are found in different states. Respectively they are in Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran. In each of these states, Kurdish people represent a minority. Under the Assad regime in Syria, Syrian Kurds were stripped of their citizenship and forced out of their homes in what is known as the Arab Belt Programme.

In Turkey, they had been bombed, banned from speaking their language, and even had their very existence denied by the state. In Iran, tens of thousands of Kurds were killed when they rose up for autonomy in 1979, and they still cannot teach their children in their own language. In Iraq, they were subjected to genocidal violence, chemical weapons, and the murder and forced Arabization of tens of thousands of Kurds during what is known as the Anfal. If you ever find yourself in Sulaymaniyah, or Sulaimani as it's known in Kurdish,

You can visit the incredible museum there which documents the tortured history of the Kurdish people at the hands of the Iraqi state. It's a very moving place. On entering the museum, you'll walk through a hallway that's covered from floor to ceiling with broken pieces of mirrors. Each represents a life cut short during the Anfal. After this entrance, the first exhibit you'll see has a large sign that says "In those days we had no friends but the mountains."

It's an old and sometimes overused aphorism about the Kurds, but it's not untrue. In the mountains of southern Kurdistan, the Kurdistan Freedom Movement aims to liberate the Kurdish people from all four states, and indeed from the state altogether. And it's in these mountains it's found a place where it could avoid state violence. The mountains of Kurdistan have long provided a safe place, and especially in recent years, the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan, controlled by Bafed Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan,

which shares power in the Kurdistan Autonomous Region of Iraq with the Kurdistan Democratic Party, headed by Masoud Barzani. The Kurdish Freedom Movement, that is the KCK, has been able to exist largely without the state. This, of course, has always been unpopular in Ankara and indeed in Baghdad. A recent offensive by Turkey seek not only to displace the PKK, that's the Kurdistan Workers' Party, which is part of the KCK, and its allies from the mountains, but also to extend their state control there.

Now, I could go on for a diversion about James C. Scott here, but that's another episode that I'm working on, so I'll spare you. Instead, I asked Mohamed Havasila, a Kurdish historian, to explain the impact of this latest round of aggression and how local people felt about it. People here in Soleimani are in the PUK-controlled area.

Or even in Kuduson, our sympathy with PKK, our sympathy with Rojava, with Yabaka, our sympathy. So they see that they're really struggling against an enemy went to invade.

the whole Kyrgyzstan, went to move the whole Kyrgyzstan, want to build the whole Kyrgyzstan. In my point of view, it's not that the case of PKK of Rojava. And they have the same issue and the same stand with Rojava, with YPK, with the Syrian part of Kyrgyzstan. So...

People here, especially in Germiano, not the PQ control, I think that all folks are proud with the struggle of Rojava, the struggle of Jepeke, and they did very hard issue for their people, and they have actually

Turkey, however, seeing the existence of the movement as a threat to its national security, has begun a campaign to eliminate the movement wherever it finds it.

As Mahabat mentioned, the history of the Kurdish people in Turkey is one that's riddled with state violence, and it's that which I want to discuss today. Turkey has long vacillated between a genocidal denial of the existence of Kurdish people, recognising that they exist only insofar as it allows them to be targets for bombing. We could really start this history almost anywhere in the 20th century.

Indeed, following a series of suppressed rebellions, the entirety of northern Kurdistan was closed military area in which Turkey did not allow foreigners from 1925 to 1965. But I want to start it just after a coup in 1980 when Abdullah Öcalan had recently founded the PKK or Kurdistan Workers Party and was beginning to view a vision of Kurdish liberation that was rooted in a Marxist-Leninist and socialist analysis and ideas of national liberation. Soon after the 1980 coup,

Turkey began to refer to the Kurds as mountain Turks. And although it doesn't do this as much anymore, it did recently release school books in Diyarbakir, a majority Kurdish region, that made no reference to the Kurds or their language and asserted that people there spoke a dialect of Turkish. They don't, they speak Kurdish. It's this denial of their very existence, Zagros told me, that made the Kurdish freedom guerrillas take up arms in 1984, which is actually 40 years ago yesterday, if you're listening to this on the day it comes out.

But after the military coup of 1980 and the inhumane tortures in the notorious prison of Diyarbakir, Ahmed City, the movement embarked on a strategy of legitimate self-defense and waged military struggle against the Turkish state, starting from

15 of August 1984. Since then, there have been periods of ceasefire and periods of conflict, with tens of thousands of lives lost. Both sides have killed civilians as part of their attacks on the other. The most recent ceasefire was signed in 2013, and as a result, the PKK began slowly withdrawing to the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan. In 2015, when the Syrian Kurdish YPG and YPJ fighters were leading the battle against ISIS,

Turkey broke the ceasefire between the PKK and itself, began attacking the Kurdish fighters, forcing them into a war on two fronts. As far as Turkey is concerned, the YPG, YPJ, KCK, YBS in Yazidi areas and all other elements of the Kurdistan Freedom Movement are just different names for the PKK, which it considers to be a terrorist organization. Everyday life for Kurdish people in Turkey can be hard. I've spoken to hundreds if not thousands of them in the last year.

often sitting around fires in the mountains, working together to build wooden shelters for their children, or sharing the bowls of beans that my friends cooked because the state refused to feed the people it was detaining in the open air for days. These aren't conversations I recorded because that wouldn't be safe. There's a very real danger of these folks not getting asylum and being sent back to a country where they've seen their friends murdered, their election results denied, their job applications thrown away and their language suppressed.

Having them on the record would be a huge risk to their safety. And not every interaction I have with people, even people I'm writing about, has to be turned into content to go between the adverts. So sometimes I just do things because I like to do them. If you'd like to know more about these stories, you can find a link to a piece I wrote for the Kurdish Peace Institute in the show notes. Anyway, here's an ad break. The situation in Iraq is different. The Kurdistan Autonomous Region enjoys a great degree of autonomy from Baghdad.

It is chiefly run by two parties: the KDP and the PUK. The KDP enjoys influence in Erbil, or Howler in Kurdish. In Slemani, the PUK is in control. In these areas, especially those of the KDP, a more neoliberal vision of Kurdish identity is pursued. In Howler, I saw skyscrapers lit up all night, huge mansions, but also whole areas of the city struggling to get by, or sometimes not even having access to year-round water.

The vision of Kurdish identity here is not as threatening to Turkey, and the KDP seems to take the line that the PKK ought to keep its struggle within the Turkish borders. The PUK has been more sympathetic to the KCK and the PKK, and it's often in the mountains near Slimani and Duhok that Turkey targets Kurdish guerrillas and their infrastructure. For the last 40 years, Turkey has remained extremely hostile to the vision of Kurdish liberation with the democratic and federal system that Ocalan and the movement that follows him have adopted.

I asked Zagros to explain the connection between the Kurdish struggle in north and east Syria, which many listeners will probably be familiar with, and the element of the Kurdish freedom movement in other parts of Kurdistan which they might not be familiar with. And I'll ask interview. I spoke to Zagros about history in Spain. Now it was his turn to give me a history lesson. By the way, he calls the Ozilan Lida Apo here, Rehber Apo in Kurdish,

It's a common contraction that's used all over Kurdistan and Apo is also the vocative form of the Kumanshi word for a paternal uncle. Leader Apo migrated to the Middle East. He migrated to Syria and Lebanon, I mean, months before the military coup in Turkey, the military coup of 1980. He went there on his own. There was only one comrade with him. First, he entered the city of Kobani.

And from there he found his way to Lebanon, to Beirut. In Lebanon he made relations with the Palestinian groups. He even took part in the resistance of the Palestinian groups against the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. For nearly 20 years he waged the freedom struggle from Lebanon and Syria.

In doing so, he educated, he trained and organized the Kurdish people in Rojava, Kurdistan. In this sense, his struggle is twofold. Firstly, he developed self-awareness in the people of Rojava with regard to their national and cultural identity and brought the Rojava people together who had been divided by the many Arab belts and demographic differences

I'll just interject here to explain these terms.

Baathist Syria under Hafez al-Assad and his son Bashir al-Assad attempted to divide and deny the existence of the Kurdish people in many ways. Some of these included omitting them from censuses, denying them citizenship, prohibiting the public use of their language and demographic transfers and installed belts of Arab people in areas that were majority Kurdish. Nonetheless, Assad also saw benefit allowing the PKK to exist within his borders, especially in the parts of Lebanon that Syria occupied.

in order to use them as a tool against other states. Secondly, he got this nationally and culturally aware people of Rojava to support the struggle in North Kurdistan. Therefore, thousands of Rojava youth were first organized and educated in villages, in cities, and then they joined the guerrilla struggle and fought in North Kurdistan, in Bakur, Kurdistan.

This struggle served to unite Rojava and North Kurdistan, Bakur Kurdistan, and develop shared national political awareness and attitudes. Thousands of Rojava youth, boys and girls, fell martyr in the ranks of the guerrilla struggle.

Lider Apo tried to reach out to all cities, to all villages, to all families, and even to all individuals in Rojava, Kyrgyzstan. This has created a strong national, social, cultural, and let's say philosophical bond between Lider Apo and the Rojava people, because a neglected and divided people had united around him. This isn't an episode about the entire history of the PKK, and I wouldn't be the person to write that.

But I will attempt to speedrun it here anyway. Appa was arrested in Nairobi in 1999. Ever since then, he's been held in prison, often without access to visitors or his lawyers, and at some points on an island where he was a solitary prisoner, surrounded by hundreds if not thousands of guards.

His human rights are almost universally acknowledged to have been violated by this arrangement, and despite a quarter century of detention and Turkish moves towards Europe, there seems to be no willingness on the part of the Turkish state to release him. In his time in jail, he began to read more and correspond with many thinkers, including Murray Bookchin. Bookchin influenced his thinking a great deal.

And gradually, through this and other influences, Oslo moved away from a Marxist-Leninist analysis and national liberation goals, and instead began to conceive of a feminist and ecological revolution that decentralized power, ensured all authority positions were shared by a man and a woman, and valued the environment as much or more than the economy. This libertarian left ideology came to be known as democratic confederalism, and it is a guiding ethos for Rojava, and indeed the KCK as a whole.

The civil war in Syria provided an opening that the Kurdistan Freedom Movement took advantage of, as Assad's forces withdrew from their regions to fight elsewhere. They didn't spring from the ground in 2011, but instead they'd spent decades building a movement that they felt could replace the state. Today, millions of people live, work and play under a democratic confederate ideology in the autonomous area of north and east Syria, where I was last year.

It's not paradise, but it's a special place. And by any metric, life there is better than in the rest of Syria right now. For over a decade, they've navigated a complex system of adversaries, including the Syrian state, the Islamic state, and the Turkish state. Just this week, all three of them have tried to attack Rojava. More than 15,000 people, men and women, have died in the decade-long war against the Islamic state, which, contrary to much reporting, remains ongoing.

ISIS actually car bombed a place not far from where I stayed last October, after I'd come home. At times, the USA has supported the people of Rojava in their battle against the Islamic State, but it's also stood by as Turkish bombs fell on them. Although Rojava is by far the biggest territorial area in which democratic confederalism is in practice, much of the movement remains in the mountains of southern Kurdistan, in what is technically Iraqi territory.

There are many more Kurdish people in Turkey, and as the recent election results show, revolution by the ballot box is not really an option for them. Rojava enjoys autonomy, but is still very much ideologically twinned with the part of the movement that remains in the mountains and dedicated to its struggle against the Turkish state. Turkey, in return, has crossed the border with Iraq to attack the KCK and anyone else who gets caught in the crossfire.

As Zagros explained, this is not new, but the recent change has been notable. During the 80s, 90s, and even after 2000, the Turkish army used to do military operations to the other side of the border, into the Iraqi border, for several months, to withdraw back to the other side of the border, to its own border, afterwards, after several months.

And in that period, it only had limited number of barracks and bases on the Iraqi territory. The change now is that Tehki has built new military roads from scratch to the Kurdistan region, to northern Iraq.

Today, Turkish troops can be found deep inside Iraq.

According to the community peacemaker teams, since December of 2017, Turkish forces have built over 40 bases anywhere from 9 to 25 kilometers into Iraqi Kurdistan's territory south of its border. End quote. They have dispatched hundreds of troops and military vehicles into another state, set up checkpoints, and even killed civilians, a member of the KIG's military, the Peshmerga.

Fighting has caused massive wildfires. For example, in Sagale village, about 55% of the agricultural land has been burned by Turkish attacks. Incidentally, Turkish shelling in the autonomous area of north and east Syria has also caused similar fires and destruction of crops in agricultural areas. The Kurdish freedom movement is very well established in the mountains of southern Kurdistan, where they live in tunnels and caves. These are not caves or tunnels like you played in as a little child. We're talking about villages underground.

This makes tracking them very hard. As we heard in another episode, many of the fighters sent to Kurdistan are Syrian Arabs, repurposed by Turkey and ginned up on anti-Kurdish sentiment. But this is perhaps the least concerning of the ways that the tunnels are being attacked. Zagros explained some of the other things that they've seen. The idea is that they use dogs. They tie explosives to the dogs and send the dogs into the tunnels and they explode themselves.

the dogs via remote control. In addition to the dogs, he says that the Turkish state uses chemical weapons inside the tunnels. There are also reports of suicide bombers detonating themselves.

The KCK also claims that Turkey uses thermobaric bombs, sometimes called bunker busters, which create a huge pressure wave and subsequent vacuum. Also, they are using thermobaric bombs. We have documented the use of these thermobaric bombs. There are remnants of these bombs. They are using thermobaric or vacuum bombs against the tunnels.

And they are using some form of explosives which are more powerful than thermobaric bombs. Kurdistan Freedom Guerrillas have developed a literature for it because they do not know what kind of explosive it is, but it has the effect of a nuclear bomb. Kurdistan Freedom Guerrillas call it a nuclear bomb.

They call it so because the effects are higher than the thermobaric bombs. I asked Mohamed to explain how people are reacting to the current situation. You know, Turkey now invaded some parts of Pakistan and actually the

the areas under the control or under the influence of KRG state, of KDP. And, you know, the people here have dislikes, this issue, dislikes the invasion of Turkey to this area. It's not just invasion, it's killing people, besides the PKK elements, and killing people and burning the homes.

whole agricultural area and you know so on so on so it's kind of an invasion and right here some people on forces in in the southern part of Kurdistan or southern Kurdistan you know Iraqi Kurdistan like their sympathy with with the PKK as they see that they're alive so they

their struggle against Turkey because if there is no PKK, even if there is no PKK, the Turkish forces will not withdraw from Komsomol. When it controls any area of Iraqi Komsomol, let's say, or southern Komsomol, it will not withdraw. And its excuse is PKK. But

things on earth is telling something else. Despite what both my guests have seen as alienation of the local population, Turkey's continuing with its attacks. I asked Zagros what he thought the goals of this Turkish invasion of Iraq were. The invasion and annexation of these lands is the prime goal of Turkey. This goal is a long-term goal of the Turkish state since

It has been created after the Lausanne Agreement. It has two aspects.

Turkey lays claim to what was once part of the Ottoman Empire 100 years ago. It lays claims to the cities like Mosul and Kirkuk and claims that these are lands of Turkey. So the invasion operation in the area of Bahdinan, in Zab, in Matinan, in Abashin, in the areas around the cities of Ahmediyah, Dera, Lukşehir, Ladizah and Duhuk,

They are attempts to take control of these mountainous areas and to materialize those long-range goals. Turkey already has a big military base near Mosul, I think 15 to 20 kilometers north of Mosul. It is called the Başikabase.

So if Turkey manages to invade all these areas in Bahadirna, I mean in cities of the Huk, mountainous areas of the Huk, Turkey will be able to create a land bridge between these areas and its base in Mosul and it will be far easier for Turkey to, let's say, annex the city of Mosul and Kirkuk to its lands. Secondly,

Turkey has a long-term goal of demographic change in Kurdistan. As you know, Kurdistan is a land, the ancestral land of the Kurds, being divided between four countries: Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria, being divided by borders. People from one side of the border are Kurdish, people on the other side of the border are Kurdish. In many cases,

The borderline go through the cities, they divide the cities, they have divided the villages, they have divided the tribes, they have divided large populations, they have even divided families. This is one of the characteristics of the border in Kurdistan. In fact, Turkey has begun something of an Arab Belt program of its own in Syria, seeking to resettle Syrian refugees and Turkish-backed Syrian anti-government rebels in the areas that it took from Mujavah in military operations over the last eight years.

This is part of Turkey's plan to return as many as a million Syrian migrants to a country still in the grips of a brutal civil war, and push the autonomous administration of north and east Syria back from Turkish borders, or crush it altogether. For Turkey, there's no distinction between Rojava and the PKK, and thus Turkey claims the entirety of Rojava is a haven for terrorism.

Many Kurdish fighters and international volunteers who fought ISIS for years died fighting the Turkish army in Afrin and the many other territories that Turkey has expanded into since 2017. The fighting there was fierce and saw the YPG and the YPJ, the men's and women's armed forces of Rojava, battling a NATO army with modern armor and modern air power. After taking significant losses, they retreated.

And I asked Zagros what this means for people living in Afrin, who had just managed to return to some semblance of normalcy after Assad's forces left and attacks from the al-Nusra Front became less frequent. This is genocide. I mean, forcing people to leave their lands and replacing those people with people which are not from that land. Forcing people to leave their ancestral land, lands which they have lived on for thousands of years, for more than 10,000 years.

and getting Arab jihadists, Chechen jihadists to live in those areas, it is a genocide. Along with the ecocide which is now taking place, thousands of hectares of forests of agricultural land are now burning. So what Turkey does is femicide, is ecocide, is genocide in Kurdistan. And these

Let's say what now happens to the Kurds is the same thing that happened to the Armenians 1,000 years ago. The genocide of the Armenians was done by the people who had the same mentality and the same mindset of Erdogan, I can say. So these areas are very strategic for the Kurds. They bind the four parts of Kurdistan together demographically, and now Erdogan wants to draw...

a jihadist buffer zone between these areas. If a Kurd from Syria wants to go to the Kurdistan under the invasion of Turkey, we call it North Kurdistan, he will have to go through cities and areas populated by Arab jihadists, by Chechen jihadists, by Turkmen jihadists.

by jihadists which have been collected from around the world. So this buffer zone, which is more than 1,000 kilometers long, according to Erdogan's plan, and 30 to 40 kilometers wide, is expected to be inhabited, to be settled by the jihadists which Erdogan has gathered from ex-Daesh members, ex-Nusra members, ex-Al Qaeda,

At present, this Turkish occupation is a situation in parts of Syria. But it's also increasingly becoming likely that it will be the situation in parts of Iraq.

As is often the case, states are trying to use divisions in Kurdistan to their advantage, and Turkey in particular is relying on the well-worn excuse of counter-terrorism to mount its incursions deep into Iraq. Here's Mohamed explaining that. PKK is thinking like in such a way to support Rojava, to support maybe PKK. They don't say orally that thing. And KDP says that PKK...

follow the instruction of Turkey and actually here the force and influence of Turkey and even Iran in the beauty controlled area is very strong and people here as people of the nation

I'm not feeling comfort with such invasion, such issues. So we are not like the owner of our right decision in the area. So we are divided between Iran and Turkey and so on and so on. And we are not depending on our people. You know, thousands of people killed for the

nationalist, you know, hopes. And now people are...

with such issues, with such situation. Mohammed also said that it was really frustrating for him to see Kurdish politicians so influenced by the states that they've been trying to escape for a century. So we are here in a situation from the North Turkey, from the East Iran, from the South Iraq, and all are like working. But

the people who pay thousands of you know martyrs, thousands of you know laws of the people, why you are not depending on your will or with the force of your people? Why you are became like

like a feather, a feather to the winds of so forth, which are not

Indeed,

The invasion of southern Kurdistan would not be possible without the consent of both the Iraqi and Kurdistan regional authorities. As Zagros mentioned, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan visited Baghdad on April 22. This was his first visit to Iraq since 2011. During the visit, Iraq and Turkey signed a joint security agreement, allowing Turkey to conduct military operations deep within Iraqi territory.

In return, Iraq will receive desperately needed water from Turkey. Now in those areas, tens of thousands of Turkish troops, hundreds of tanks, armored vehicles, drones, radars have been deployed to the area. They are active every day. And they are invading northern Iraq at a time when the border guards of Iraq, Iraqi army border guards, are standing by and just watching.

As you may know, as the result of the agreement between the Iraqi state and the Turkish state, Iraqi border guard forces, let's say, they were decided to be sent to the Iraqi-Turkish border.

Now these border guards are not on the Turkish-Iraqi border, the border that we know. These border guards have been deployed 40 kilometers, 30 kilometers deep into the Iraqi territory. They don't go to the border. They are guarding the invading Turkish army. For the people of the region, this means yet more trauma and more displacement.

There are already more than 1 million displaced people in southern Kurdistan, and some of them are living in pretty terrible conditions. I've seen those refugee camps when I was there last October. But these operations have created more. Here's just one anecdote of displacement shared by CPT on their website. We met a man named Kakbushir who had tried to build a cafe here. His dreams of a cafe had been shattered by Turkish artillery and small arms fire coming from the Turkish base on the hillside nearby.

He was originally from Sigire village, but had been displaced to Gani village by the Turkish military five years ago. Due to the loss of his farm in Sigire, he has planted some vegetables next to the site of his cafe. He gave each CPT member some sweet basil and invited us to his village. When we arrived, a man dressed in immaculate traditional Kurdish clothes stood transfixed, staring into the valley. He was staring at Mize village, his home.

Mize is one of at least nine villages displaced by the recent Turkish operation. Kakbaşir told us that displaced people from the valley would visit this place daily to gaze upon their cut-off towns and farmland below. Despite months of shelling and bombing, the military strongholds of the Kurdistan Freedom Movement remain intact, and the more obvious damage has been done to civilians rather than military targets.

The HPG, which is the fighting arm of the BKK, has been able to obtain loitering anti-aircraft munitions, shot down several drones, but it's still unable to shoot down fighter jets like the US-provided F-16s that are currently bombing them. For civilians, without mountain caves or tunnels to hide in, the impact is severe, and people who have faced oppression and persecution from Saddam Hussein, ISIS, numerous other states and groups, are now once again being displaced.

I want to finish up with the end of Zagros' message to me, in which he made a comparison with Palestine like I did at the start. On the day I first interviewed Zagros, bombs made in the US had just been falling from Israeli planes onto civilians in Palestine again. And we discussed the fact that all the solutions being discussed hinged around the need for states, one state or two states, to solve the problem.

But this was a problem created by states. And it was states sending bombs to another state to drop on children, both in Kurdistan and in Palestine, that was the problem. Here's Zagor's reflection on nearly 10 months of bombing in Palestine and Kurdistan. And I just want to explain here that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was at one point the leader of ISIS. He's dead now. And when he says Daesh, he's referring to the former so-called Islamic State. The struggle that is now...

waged in the mountains of Kurdistan against the invading Turkish army. It is a continuation of the struggle against Daesh in Iraq and Syria. Because, ideologically, there is no difference between Erdogan and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Baghdadi first took Mosul and now Erdogan wants to invade Mosul too.

Erdogan attacks all those places which have been hubs of resistance against Daesh. He attacks Sinjar, he attacks Kobani, he attacks Kandil mountains, which are the home of those who inspired and organized the fight against Daesh on the ground. Erdogan's army is Daesh in NATO uniforms, in NATO fatigues.

In recent days, Erdogan accuses Netanyahu of committing genocide against the Palestinians. Netanyahu also accuses Erdogan of committing genocide against the Kurds. In fact, what these two men say against Ishadl is to some extent right. Both of them have been commissioned by the forces of capitalist modernity to eliminate two people, to eliminate the Kurds and the Palestinians.

What Netanyahu does against the Palestinians is exactly what Erdogan is doing against the Kurds. What is needed is to draw the attention of the world public opinion to the atrocities of Erdogan's regime and the genocidal and ecocidal crimes he commits against the Kurdish people and their land, which is Kurdistan.

The struggle in Palestine and Kurdistan are one struggle, the struggle of two people against genocide and extermination. Both struggles need support from the youth, from the women all around the world, from democratic forces, from intellectuals, students, unions, workers, from all people.

People need to be united against Erdogan as they were united against Daesh, as they are now united against the genocidal attacks in Palestine. The Turkish regime can be protested everywhere in many ways. Turkish goods and commodities can be boycotted because they are the source of funds for Erdogan's war machine, for Erdogan's genocidal army.

Delegations can be formed and they can come to visit Kurdistan and see with their own eyes the extent of ecocide and genocide in Kurdistan. Free journalists can shed more light on the atrocities of Erdogan in Kurdistan. Revolutionary youth, revolutionary people, men and women can come and join the struggle in the mountains of Kurdistan. Kurdistan is your home.

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. Did you know Tide has been upgraded to provide an even better clean in cold water? Tide is specifically designed to fight any stain you throw at it, even in cold. Butter?

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