It Could Happen Here Weekly 142
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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. Trudeau Muskie to a noise fit intro. How do we do that? Bzzz.

They don't do buzz. That's why you get baked. You can't hear them. Okay. Keep it in. Okay, yeah, yeah. Here we are. That's it. That's the introduction. That's all you're getting. And you will be grateful for it. It's me and Shireen. Hi, Shireen. Hi, James. Hi, Shireen. Are we doing vegetables today? Are we doing genocide? Which part of the vegetable to genocide spectrum are we on?

I feel like we're closer to vegetable than genocide, but you could argue the opposite as well because I get eaten alive by these things. So I don't know. I think we're kind

in the middle here i think it's a good even middle yeah yeah we've already split the difference look at us go yeah yeah it's right it's things that eat shereen alive uh today is flesh eating bacteria day uh it's not it does not have a flesh eating bacteria off the episode i thought we were doing yeah yeah i like to surprise you sometimes just see how you react we're doing mosquitoes actually shereen mosquitoes yep

Yep. Little guys, little friendly guys who... They're not friendly and they're not always little, but... Yeah, some of them are absolute chonks. Yeah, I've seen some big dogs recently. Did you know the mosquito, Shireen, is the most deadly animal in the world? Really? Yeah. It's an animal? Yeah, I mean, it's in the animal kingdom, right? I suppose. It's an insect? What a nuisance. No, it's not an insect, it's not an animal, it's a nuisance. I guess I didn't realize it was considered the most deadly animal. Why is that? Just from, like, malaria? Yeah.

Yeah, and all the other diseases it vectors, right? It can do parasites, bacteria, and viruses. So it's really like a triple threat. You can get like chikungunya,

I've got a whole list of them. Why are they still around? That is an interesting question, Shireen. I've always wondered that. Bees have benefits. They're cute little guys and they make honey and they just want to pollinate around. Lots of mosquitoes do too. Lots of them also, or they don't make honey. Lots of species of mosquito just feed off flowers. They're not out there to get you. It is just the lady mosquitoes of certain species. It's always the lady insects, man. It's the queen bee.

It's the black widow. I don't know. Yeah, it's true. Yeah, I guess maybe they're a matriarchal society. I guess technically a spider is not an insect, right? It's like a...

arachnid yeah i don't know if that's correct me on the reddit yeah yeah please please post your genus and species stuff on their on their reddit i would love that so yeah you get mosquitoes they're stacking some bunnies about three quarters of a million people a year in fact which is quite a lot of people for those of you yeah i guess we're closer to the genocide in this on the spectrum

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, sadly. I don't know. The mosquitoes don't have so much agency, so I don't feel like they're quite as evil, you know? Mm-hmm.

The word, of course, a mosca. A mosca is a fly in Spanish. You're saying, of course. Like, why? I don't know that. Yeah. I thought you might know that. No, I don't know that. I'm just going to look this up. Mosquitoes. Or origin word. Una mosca is a fly. Ito is a diminutive ending. So it means like a little fly. Oh, little fly. Yeah. A flylet. And there's also a Spanish word that means long-legged.

Hold on. From mosquito? The Spanish call the mosquitoes mosquetas, and the native Hispanic Americans call them zancudos. Mosquito is Spanish or Portuguese, and it means little fly, while zancudos is a Spanish word that means long-legged. Ah, okay. There we go. I'm learning the etymology today. Yeah, I learned. I didn't know that. I just had little fly based on it being little fly in Spanish. I mean, that's kind of cute. Yeah, I like the long-legged. Well, we have daddy long legs, I guess, but he's not a mosquito. Yeah. Yeah.

So technically, mosquitoes are actually micro predators, which is kind of a fun word. I feel like I've met some micro predators in my time, but they were not mosquitoes. And that is because some of them thrive by drinking human blood. Tell me about it. Yeah, that is the reason, Shireen, that you have encountered mosquitoes. So I want to talk first about their life cycle and then about their predation on Shireen. Mm-hmm.

So mosquitoes lay their eggs in stagnant water. That's water that's not moving, right? I know some things, James. Okay.

Okay. Not everyone knows about stagnant water, Shireen. There are listeners too. Sorry, okay. They might not know. So their eggs hatch into lava and the lava become pupa. These stages are all aquatic, right? They all happen in the stagnant water. Right. And then the adult mosquito hatches from the pupa and it hatches on the surface and then it flies off and it fucks up your evening. I didn't realize they had anything to do with water. Yeah, that's why like...

did this not happen in la um a few years ago they this council was like sending people around san diego to like scope out your garden to see if you had standing water i don't remember if that did happen i have no memory but it was during like garden peak yeah let's see uh maybe that's why like it was peak like zika panic oh that makes sense that that would happen yeah yeah it does and we definitely get them like i have to put a little uh over side and like a thing that

Kielce eggs into my chicken water. If I'm having a big standing thing of chicken water. I try and have smaller and I refresh it more frequently now. But yeah, you definitely have to be careful of stagnant water. And as we'll see, one of the main ways to control them is limiting the amount of stagnant water. Right.

For some species, only the females of those species are the bloodsuckers. And in some cases, they don't need the blood. And in other cases, to lay their eggs, they need to have a blood meal, as it's called. Which is a nice word. That's...

Unsettling. Okay. Yeah. So the mosquitoes that are vectors for human diseases, so they're like the transportation vector vehicle for the disease between one person and another. Those are the guys who often need a little blood meal to lay their eggs.

They don't only attack people, actually. They sort of have a preferred species, but in a pinch, they'll go after anything with blood. I've seen them get really thick on cattle and stuff in the summer, or horses. Yeah, I can imagine that. Yeah. Because cows just sit there. I mean, if they're being mosquito-attacked, they get pissed off, but there's only so much they can do. In some cases, I think horses, equine encephalitis is spread by mosquitoes.

So they can actually get diseases from two. Terrible little guys. And they can literally die from being overbitten if they get completely swarmed on. Wow. Yeah, that's if they're unable to get away from them. Because if you have a water tank, right, and then mosquitoes are breeding in a tank, it's where you want to keep that tank moving. Like,

Right. So it's not stagnant water because stagnant water means it's not moving. There you go. Look at that, Shireen. Feeling knowledge interaction. I love that for you. It's like one of those Duolingo things where you learn a word, then use it in a sentence. Exactly. All I do is use that word. Yeah. So mosquitoes come out at dawn or dusk, which is to say they are crepuscular. Another word that everyone already knows. I mean, I did learn that word.

I did like an audio book and I had to look this word up. And so I know what it means only because of that. But it's a very interesting word, I will say. It is, isn't it? It sounds like creepy. Like I would have no idea what it meant if I didn't look it up. Like there's nothing that clues me in. Yeah. Crepuscular. It sounds like, yeah, kind of gross. Because like diurnal, nocturnal, you can kind of, if you know one, you can work out the other. But crepuscular just coming out of fucking left field.

Does that mean, which reminds me, it means that they're active dawn and dusk or that they're eating dawn and dusk? I think it means that they are. I'm not actually sure if it means they're active or they're eating. That's a good question. Because I feel like I've heard cats are also described as that. Yeah, cats are definitely that way. Animal appearing active in twilight. Active in twilight. Wow, that's very poetic. The first animal I see here is a cat. Yeah. Lion, American woodcock, firefly, short-eared owl.

Cool. Yeah, the real pantheon of animals. So they do the feeding at dawn or dusk, and they actually use compounds in your exhale breath to sniff you out. So they are hunting for people. They specifically prefer to feed on people who have type O blood, an abundance of skin bacteria, high body heat, and pregnant women. Okay.

If you fit one or all of those criteria, I guess there's that. Because people definitely, I feel like I have type O blood. Yeah, me too. I feel like I'm victimized more than most people by the mosquito. They choose me. Yeah, I feel like me and my mom are both type O and we get eaten alive, so that makes sense. Yeah, somehow they can smell that on you. I'm always cold though, so I don't think I have high body heat. Not always cold, but I can, I don't know, I have bad circulation. I'm not pregnant.

I guess they must have an abundance of skin bacteria. Yeah, it's got to be your skin bacteria that are doing it, Shireen. It's my process of deduction. No, but type O makes sense. I think that is enough, I suppose. Yeah, because when there's a lot of them, you know, and when one of them starts feeding on you, that's going to trigger more of them.

to come feeding on you. How? Because they're like, look at this idiot. Let's go feed off him. Yeah, yeah. Look at this delicious blood that is typo. Yeah, got it. Yum, yum, yum. And then they're giving off their little feeding sort of vibes. And then other mosquitoes come.

which can be useful to trap them. Oh, that's a fair point. The trapping of mosquitoes, as I learned when I was doing this, very fucking interesting, actually. Ooh, okay, tell me more. Actually, maybe not now, but whenever you get to it. Yeah, we'll get to it soon. They have a very interesting set of mouth parts, including the labium, which is like a gutter-shaped thing.

Mouth tube. Okay. I guess. And it's super sharp. And they can use it to soar through your skin painlessly. So you never... That's why you don't feel... So that's the needle-looking thing. Yeah. That's like the little thing they poke you with. Well, they do that. Then they have little needle-looking things that are contained within the gutter shape that they use to suck out your blood. Fucking gross. Their saliva stops your blood from clotting and it...

and it prevents vascular constriction in the area where they're biting so they can get a little bit extra blood before it clots. I guess some people can become desensitized to their bites over time if you're getting bitten all the time. Others can become more sensitive and increased sensitivity is known as Skeeter syndrome. Skeeter syndrome? Skeeter syndrome, yeah. I've got to look this up and what it looks like because I'm very sensitive to them. Okay, maybe.

Maybe we've got two diagnoses in one episode. We've got skin bacteria and Skeeter syndrome. I don't know what I need to have to have Skeeter syndrome, but I will say...

I'm extremely sensitive to mosquito bites. When I get bitten, they become gigantic. I won't itch them because I know not to at this point. But I'll get these gigantic welts, essentially. And they're bright pink. And then over the course of a week or something, they become bright red. And they look like someone put paint on my leg. It's a crazy color of red. Okay.

And then when they eventually do stop itching, I'll have that welt there and that red mark for like months. Damn. Months. It becomes like this weird scar.

Yeah, you could be a mosquito syndrome. I guess so. Yeah, yeah. I will say, when I was a kid in Syria, when we would go visit there, they have so many mosquitoes. I got eaten alive because we'd go there in the summer, too. But there was one time I got bitten on my eyelid, like this. Oof. That sucks. And so I genuinely couldn't open my eye for, like, a week and a half. That was the worst one, I think. I met that with bee stings. Like, they...

They swell up like crazy. I don't think I'm like anaphylactic, but a couple of times. One time I was racing in Laguna Seca, which is like a car racing track in Monterey. And I'm racing along and I guess I'm riding along with my mouth open. Just like, you know, thriving. And a mosquito flew in and bit me. I don't know, a mosquito, a bee. And my whole...

Whole face just was like In your mouth? Yeah it was crazy it was bad Holy shit James Yeah it was fucked and one had just stung me before Like the extent to which I swell up when bees sting me I got stung in the leg On a training ride

and I had to upgrade to like XL shorts because like my thigh just become like elephant dices. And then one got me in the mouth. It was a bad day. I had an epi pain. I had, uh, I think I had some IV Benadryl at some point. Yeah. It was fucking. I mean, I'm glad you're not anaphylactic, but that's pretty close, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty close. You can get one time. I got, I got stung in a face when I was trying to go to lecture as well. And, uh,

like walked in with like elephant man face and my students were just like,

dude it's like those photos or videos you see of like animals like a dog ate a bee and their face is like gigantic yeah yeah it is uh dogs do love to eat bees i will say i don't know if you've ever done 23andme but i did it years and years ago for another show i was on and on 23andme you can select if you want like health traits as well as like ancestral traits or whatever like yeah and on that it said i'm more likely to get bitten by mosquitoes there you go maybe it just knew your blood type but i didn't give them my

I gave them my blood. I gave them my spit. Oh, yeah. I don't know. Yeah, that's crazy. Maybe there's something in your spit that tells no blood type. I don't know. I don't know. We've just discovered that Shereen was on a eugenics podcast. No, it was for my podcast. That was about ethnicity. Okay. Yeah. Some real problematic folks do love 23andMe.

It's very funny when the white nationalists go on 23andMe and find out something that upsets them. Yeah, I love that. It is always fun to see. So the real problem with mosquitoes is not just that they make you atriot, but they're vectors for disease. They infect 700 million people a year with their little bitey mouths. They can spread all kinds of diseases, including viruses, parasites, and bacteria. Some of their greatest hits include yellow fever, dengue, malaria, tularemia, Zika, chukungunya, and West Nile virus.

Speaking from experience, some of those are really shit. Mm-hmm.

And you are best avoiding all of those. That's going to be my advice to you as a doctor in modern European history. It really fucking sucks to get some of these. I've had some diseases from some mosquitoes and I would not recommend. The mosquitoes don't actually get sick themselves. Its immune system can destroy the virus, but if it bites someone else and then bites you before its immune system destroys the virus's genetic code, you can get sick.

And some parasites, apparently malaria can make mosquitoes more apt to go biting. Interesting. It kind of turns them into zombie brain mosquitoes is how I like to think about it. With malaria, which is kind of the main mosquito vector disease, I guess, that we think about, the parasite replicates in the liver cells and then moves about by the bloodstream.

if you get bitten again, the blood could then pass that malaria to the next victim of the mosquito. I'm going on a trip soon for work. I'll probably be on it when you all hear this. Because people are traveling more, these different diseases are becoming more common, right? Because they're endemic in one area, and then people come from that area to another area, and then mosquitoes are hopping around when they're in a new area. They're now spreading in that area. So I was talking to some folks, like,

on the areas where migrants travel north, all the types of malaria are now currently present, which is great because you've got people from all over the world, right? And then the mosquitoes are hopping from someone from China to someone who's come from Mauritania and...

and spreading their little mosquito vector diseases around. So that is bad. Do you know what else is bad? I'm sorry. My mind went so blank. But ads are not good. No, no, they're not bad. Ads are great. Ads are so good. Yeah, we love them. Yay, ads.

Okay, we're back. And I want to talk about how we stop the mosquito menace. Please, help. So I'm going to talk about eliminating them, and then I'm going to talk about some products and services, actually, that you can avail yourself of. I've been thinking about this a lot recently for work reasons. Right. Yeah, doing some jungle travel in the next few months. So how do we prevent them from biting us? First of all, we can stop them having little useful pools of stagnant water to replicate in, right? Mm-hmm.

Like this means like, if you're like me, one of my friends refers to my, uh, my garden as a quote, Alaska yard, which I think is, is a, is a way of saying that it's a mess. And there are lots of like car parts and, uh, like little, little things that I am fixing soon, you know? And I guess having an Alaska yard is bad for the mosquitoes. Like, especially things like tires, right? Like, you know, if you have a big car tire, water pools in there and they can have a little breed in there. Same with buckets. Um, in my,

In marshy areas, what people do is they dig ditches that allows water to move so the water doesn't sit completely still. And then introducing certain fish can also help. Certain fish will eat, including the mosquito fish, will eat the larva of the mosquito. Tilapia also do this. So you can have a nice little, if you're a person who eats fish,

A nice little situation where you're reducing the disease burden and also providing a food source, which is something they're working on. You can drain swamps, of course. Donald Trump famously has drained the swamp. Right. Yeah. What a hero. No malaria in D.C. anymore because of Donald Trump. But doing so obviously destroys an important habitat. So you don't want to just be draining swamps.

I was reading about something in Florida they do called rotational impound management, where they kind of allow water levels to fluctuate. And then they have these clever little gates that mean that other species like the fish and the crustaceans can move about. They're keeping the water moving to stop the little mosquito eggs from forming.

The other way to do it is to try and kill them, right? So there are various ways of doing it. One of them is to create an environment where they would want to lay their eggs, but then have that environment kill their eggs. So there are various at-home ways of doing this. So you could make a stagnant water thing and then blitz up the eggs or filter them out. Or you can put things called oversides in there, which kill the eggs. Some of them also kill the mosquitoes when they come and lay their eggs.

You can also use their little hunting senses against them, right? So you can create an environment that attracts them either by seeming like a person or by seeming like a good place for them to breed. And then you can filter out the eggs from where they lay them, right? Or you can kill them when they come on in. There are things called lava sides. Maybe that's what I'm using with my chicken thing, actually. They destroy the lava. They're just like little bricks that you dissolve in your water. And there are some pretty...

low-risk insecticides that you can use. And there are also high-risk insecticides or at least unpopular insecticides. And this is where a friend of the CoolZone Media Network, DDT, comes in. Are you familiar with DDT, Shireen? No. They're our friends. Yeah, they're our friends. We love DDT. Big appetizer on the pod. We love them because until about...

60 years ago, the US government fucking loved DDT, right? It's an insecticide. They would put it in walls, in mattresses. People rubbed their pets with it. For a while, people thought it treated polio. They would even go through towns, spraying down whole neighborhoods with DDT, right? And people kind of became aware that DDT actually isn't

a great idea, both for ecological and health reasons. About 60 years ago, Rachel Carson published a book called Silent Spring. It's kind of one of the foundational texts of the modern environmental movement. And I think people often credit Rachel Carson with being the only person. That's not necessarily true. You can look at migrant farm workers, actually. Mm-hmm.

and see that they have been for a long time being like, I don't think it's great that you're dosing us with this pesticide all the time. Like maybe stop spraying us with the DDT. Stop playing the places. I want to quote a really good piece that are in the New Republic on DDT. We now know that DDT causes tumors in mice and rats. It thins bird's eggs to the point that mothers inadvertently crush their gestating offspring.

It may disrupt birds' sense of orientation, sending them out to sea to die. It fundamentally alters the reproductive organs of an array of critters. It can poison animals even decades after spraying has ended. Further, a growing body of evidence has linked DDT to numerous forms of cancer in humans, especially breast cancer. Studies have shown how the levels of DDT in our bodies track inequalities in human society. For instance, there

There are higher DDT levels in black people than in whites and higher levels in poor people than in rich ones. Sounds like you were lying to me when you said that they are our friends. Yeah. I feel like within the cool zone media network of making podcasts about evil shit, DDT, I think, fits perfect. That's terrible. Yeah, it's terrible. There's recently like a resurgence in, I guess, like people standing DDT again. Hmm.

and questioning some of their research around it. But we know for sure that it's ecologically damaging, right? And what we don't know is the consequences of wiping out a bunch of species in the ecosystem. So we probably don't want to use DDT. One thing we can do to kill them is introduce predators, which is kind of cool. Tilapia is one predator. Dragonflies are another. I love a dragonfly. Ooh. Big, interesting flies. So in Burkina Faso, they're working on a fungus with a mosquito-specific neurotoxin. Ooh.

which is kind of cool. It can just grow and kill the mosquitoes. The World Mosquito Program is also trialing a bacteria that when mosquitoes carry it, it amps up their immune system. So like,

They kill the virus or the parasite or whatever it is more quickly, so then they're less likely to be vectors. There's also programs which introduce male mosquitoes, which are not able to have kids. Either they're sterile or they're breeding results in eggs that won't hatch. So that's kind of interesting, right? They kind of control the population that way. And they also have these really interesting genetically modified mosquitoes that need antibiotic tetracycline to grow.

So they raise a batch in the lab and gives them the tetracycline that they need. And then they let them out to breed. And then when they breed, because they're young, don't have tetracycline, they don't grow and they don't make it. It's really interesting to think about. Some folks are advocating for completely eradicating them.

Just wiping them off the face of the planet, which would seem to have many benefits, right? With all these diseases that they vector. I'm one of those people. Yeah. You're a mosquito genocider. I found this interesting thesis that they're like a forest defense mechanism against humans. Like if we look at the ecosystems way of... Being like, get out of here. Yeah. Like leave this place alone.

Yeah, which is interesting, but like, I know it's hard because the people who mostly die from mosquito vector diseases are the people with the least access to resources, right? Right. Yeah. Like even things like, you know, when you're very sick with some of these things, you need to be, you know, kept hydrated and kept cool as your temperature gets up and stuff. And you don't have AC and maybe you can't get an IV or whatever, like a very preventable death could occur. Right. And so...

It's hard real hard for me sitting in America to be like no we shouldn't but right I guess I understand that argument But if we go about it by fucking dousing whole areas in DDT again, then that's not great either rain I can have it sir that can then can have its downsides You know what else has its downside Shereen what dreams it's having to pivot to ads every 10 to 15 minutes In this job that we do so we're gonna do it now. We're back. Oh

We are entering the final trimester of our podcast. And yeah, do you like that? I like to think of them as trimesters. The last slice of this little podcast cake for you guys. Yeah. So I wanted to present some little strategies that

that I like to use when I am going to places where I am worried about being eaten alive by the little flies. - Wait, okay, you see all these like DIY, like this is how, attract mosquitoes somewhere else, but like none of those have been mentioned. So is that all bullshit? - What do they talk me through it? - I don't know.

i have to look it up but i feel like i've seen like little things where it's like put this bucket of water here or like put like lemon or honey or like something to attract like general insects and then mosquitoes or like even like light can attract mosquitoes so you put like a light somewhere but this sounds all like bullshit now yeah you can do that you can even use a fan right because i know very good flyers like they uh you can just kind of blow them away from you uh so yeah in terms of like small

scale mosquito prevention. Yeah, I'm going to get into some of those. Okay, cool. The most useful thing for me is mosquito nets, actually. So like in the jungle, I like to sleep in a hammock.

This one called the Jungle Nest that Eagle's Nest Outfitters make that has a built-in mosquito net. That's nice. Yeah, it's really nice. I like it because I don't have to fuck around with draping it and worry about little gaps. Right, yeah. And I use that a lot. I use a whole little system that they make and it's really nice. If I'm in hotels, Sea to Summit makes a sleeping bag liner. A, I like to take a sleeping bag liner when I'm going places. Like, I...

I got fucking fleas from a hotel bed in Rwanda. Oh, no. Yeah, it was bad. Like, if you think mosquito bites, try having them. For people who haven't seen me, I'm a hairy person. I have long hair and had a beard and fleas were just upon me. And it was bad.

So I like to take a little sleeping bag liner now that's treated with a mosquito repellent. But it must be safe for skin and stuff though, right? Yeah, yeah. It's embedded in the fabric. It's called permethrin. We'll talk about it in a second. The last thing I use is a head bug net. I'm a massive advocate for the head bug net. I know you look like a complete lemon, but...

Like, it's just, I don't like to be bitten in the face. No, I have been bitten in the face. So yeah, it's not fun. Yeah. Take it from Shireen, Bite Survivor. If you have a brimmed hat, it's much nicer because it sort of hangs in front of your face then. But I wear one of these all the time. If you like to like see wildlife, it's nice too because it's kind of camouflaging. Like it takes the glare off your face.

You get really bad insects up in Scotland. Like when I've been out there in the summertime, I've worn one and I wear a lot in California. Like there are some places like to hike where we have year round water here, but it's definitely pretty gross by like the end of the summer. You know, like it's been sitting for a while, but water is a big constraint on your, on your hiking out here. Right. So you kind of need it.

So I'll go down there and filter my water, but I wear my little bug face net and it works great. I love it. Right. So after that, you can also do repellents. These come in two forms. There's a one that you put on your clothes and the ones that you put on your body, right? The one that you put on your clothes is called permethrin. The thing with permethrin is that it's a neurotoxin for cats, which is very bad for cats. So Sawyer makes a little spray bottle of it and you

And you can spray it on your own clothes and treat them, right? But if you have cats, you must do this outside. You can't do it in your house with your cats. It's safe once it's dry. So you can spray them, let them be on your washing line or what have you. And then when it's dry, you can bring them inside. Then it's safe. Honestly, you can also send them off to a company. I think it's called Insect Shield. And they'll spray them for you. And the way they do it somehow bonds it for much longer. Normally, it lasts for about six washes.

But with them, you can get like 10 times as many washes. You can also buy shit. Like I just got a hoodie from a company called First Light who make like fancy hunting stuff that has the insect stuff built in.

Yeah, I like that because then if you have a hoodie as well, you can put, you know, you get like a lot of coverage. But like if a cat like sat on this clothing. It's fine now because it's bonded. Yeah, your cat could like go curl up in it and have a sleep and things. Even if it gets wet, that's okay. It's when the permethrin itself is wet, the first application.

That's when it's risky. Okay, I see, I see. If you're going to do that, you want to do your socks as well because they fucking love to bite around the ankles. Yep, my legs are their prime target. Yeah, that's their favorite area to bite in here. I don't know why. I mean, they're probably easier to access and you're less likely to see them, I suppose. And also, I feel like if you're sitting, you're...

moving probably your upper body more than your lower body. So it's like, I don't know. Yeah. It's still like, it's sneaking though. Bastards. Yeah. So things to like repel them. One of them is, um, have you seen the thermo cells? Are you familiar with them? No, it's a brand called off that makes them too. Um,

It emits something called methofluthrin. And methofluthrin is like a non-toxic. I was looking at the EPA guidelines for this. It's mostly non-toxic. It should be fine in your house, but it is toxic to aquatic invertebrates, fish and bees. Because

Because with all these things, I don't want to just be spraying an insecticide into the world, right? Yeah. And damaging innocent non-micro predators. So what the thermosol does, you know when people have those little things in their houses where they put an essential oil in and it puffs and it makes your house smell nice? Yeah. It's like that. It's like that? Okay. Yeah.

And it does that, but with this metaflithrin. And they work okay. Like if you're in your tent and stuff, they work. Like they don't work. If it's windy, they don't really work. But they can be nice. Like if you set them up and let them get going for a while and then come into a space, they can be really nice.

And then you have other things like a fan. You can have the electric traps, right? Which kind of bring them and electrocute them. How do those electric traps attract them? Just the light? I think it's the UV light because, yeah, it has that really bright. I actually don't know, but I think it electrocutes them when they land on it, right? Yeah, I think it's the light. Those seem to be like a more multi-purpose insect zapper, though. Right. So, look, I've not preferred those. I don't want to be killing everything else. Just try and, you know, leave no trace. Yeah.

And then the last thing is, for some reason I've become obsessed with this recently, the different creams you can put on yourself to stop mosquitoes going away. Ideally, you can kind of layer up all the things, right, to limit, you know, like the amount of just chemicals you have to rub on your skin. DEET is the most popular one. People are probably familiar with DEET. It was developed by the US Army in the 40s. The big thing with DEET is it's really hard on plastics. So...

I'm not a contact lens or glass wearer. I don't know. A contact lens is made of glass or plastic. You're asking the wrong person, man. Okay. Yeah. I've worn both and I have no idea. I was going to say, look at us with our perfect vision. I've worn neither, so I don't know. I mean, I don't think it's crazy if it was made out of glass or plastic, right? Hold on. What are contact lenses? Welcome to the portion of the podcast where Shireen Googles, I think.

I guess they are types of plastic, but not the kind of plastic that comes to mind when you hear the word. High-tech polymers that allow oxygen to flow through to reach the cornea. Body, body, blah. So I guess, yeah, sure. Yeah, be careful with your deep. Okay, actually, there's a question that says, are contacts glass or plastic? So I guess I'm a dummy because that's a legitimate question. Yeah, no, it's a good question. That just sounds crazy to me. Anyway. I don't know if the deep can get to them. It can definitely. Oh, yeah, it does. Contact lenses. There we go.

It can damage your contact lenses. It definitely will mess with your rain gear, your tent, your sunglasses, especially in higher concentrations. So like deep, you can get 10% deep, you can get 100% deep. You get maximum protection at 30% deep. So after that, it's just you're buying yourself more time between applications. Also, if it gets more concentrated, you're risking damaging your gear. And like, I don't like the way it makes my mouth feel. Like with the spray, if you spray it, you get this like materialism.

metallic dry mouth. It seems like you're killing yourself when you walk into a cloud of deep. Okay, cool, cool, cool. I like Picard in

It's a synthetic version of an element that's found in pepper plants. Yeah, that's what I usually use when I go camping. Yeah, their little... Soya makes a really nice Picard, and actually, it's got like a blue label on the bottle. Yeah, that's the one I use. Yeah, it's Soya. We like Soya. I got to try... The reason I've suggested so many Soya products is because the Soya Foundation were there in the Marshall Islands when I was there. Oh, nice. I mean, I like their shit, so... Yeah, I do. I think they're a really cool company, actually. They seem to make stuff that like...

Solves problems and then just keep making it. They don't make a new thing every year in a different color and try and rehype it. They did really cool shit in the Marshall Islands. It was cool to see. And yeah, as companies go, I think they're pretty right on. They also gave us some water filters to help the migrants the other day.

which is very nice of them. We needed some water filters for folks crossing the border, and they gave us some. So they are my friends. But yeah, their one is good. They make a nice sun cream, actually, as well. So you can double dip there. I'm sure it's not up to the standards of your imported sun creams, but...

Just FYI, that means sunscreen. It's a British translation. Yeah, if you can't make the logical leap from sun cream to sunscreen. Yeah, that is what I'm talking about. In the British defense, though, it is definitely a cream and not a screen. So, yeah, that's on us. Another incidence of British excellence. Oh, my God.

Podcast over. Yeah. To be fair, one of the few. What have we got? We've got that. We have the baking show. And that's about it. Yeah. Can't think of much else. So there are also like natural ones, you know, like citronella is the one that people like. But I have just found that those don't work very well. I feel like it's a hit or miss. Yeah. I was going to say, I feel like it's like kind of for fun. Yeah. Like you'll feel great that you've done something. Yeah. I think they just work by being strong smells that kind of mask your other smells. Yeah.

You can get synthetic and natural plant oils. And there are people who will sell you bracelets with like a little thing that's supposed to secrete the citronella. Oh, I've used those. The ones I have used look like phone cords that are all spirally. Yeah. But they're little bracelets and I put them on my ankles, put them on my wrists. Sometimes they work and sometimes I look like a

dummy but uh i don't know so it was worth i've tried everything yeah sometimes i just burn incense and that kind of works again i think it's kind of it's a strong smell and the mosquitoes don't like it okay that makes sense having incense and a box fan is not a bad solution like i've done that in places where uh you know nothing else was available

And that's pretty good. But yeah, if you're in a place where this is a problem, and it's becoming a bigger problem, right? The world is getting hotter. The climate is changing. These swampy, marshy areas are drying up. So we're getting more stagnant water and less through flow. This is becoming a bigger problem. And our healthcare system is continuing to be fucked and getting worse, certainly in the United States, but also in the United Kingdom and other places. So yeah, be careful.

Of the mosquitoes, remember to do your sun cream before your mosquito cream or lotion or whatever you're using. Screen, your mosquito screen. That's all I've got on mosquitoes, Shireen. You got anything to add? No, I think that's a good little summary about what to do for mosquitoes. I hate mosquitoes so much and I'm one of those people that don't think they should be around. But since they are, I guess we've got to deal with them. Yeah. It's nice to know that I use a good...

thing like i think if i use something that you use i'm like wow i did something right by myself that's a list solely to get way ahead of me on the uh on this on the sun cream but no i i think it's a it's helpful to know i'm sure many people out there are sensitive to mosquito bites and anything will help if they i don't know yeah

It sucks. It is getting so hot and they're everywhere. And now what's really bothering me is that they're getting smaller and harder to see, but they're just as annoying. Yeah, the bite still hurts, even if they're smaller. Yeah, yeah. You've got to get a really fine mesh for your mosquito nets for that. You can't be using other products. Yeah, I don't have a mosquito net. I should get one. Yeah, get a mosquito net.

I love a head mosquito net. It's great. It serves you some... It stops the mosquitoes biting you. It stops other people talking to you. Wow. It's a great thing to have. I have seen these videos of like...

someone having a mosquito net on them and then like the mosquitoes you see it poking and not being able to reach it's kind of funny like mosquito armor it's very funny yeah yeah exactly but yeah cool yeah thanks james yeah that's fine that's a podcast brought to you by me hyper focusing on things which is what i do this is the way i deal with my anxiety about going to places which aren't necessarily uh places people go for fun word all right bye see ya

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Welcome to Kid Appen here. I'm Andrew Sage from the YouTube channel Andrewism, and I'm joined today by... James, it's me. Hi, Andrew. So James, just before the show, we were talking about a couple of different places that we've either been to or would like to visit.

Have you ever been to the Andes? No, I don't think I have, actually. I'd like to. I like mountains. Yeah, the Andes is one of my bucket list destinations for sure. They've always enticed me, you know, as a place of settlement, a center of culture, a place of political struggle. So, you know, I had to do an episode on the development of anarchist cynicalism in Peru. Sort of continuing along with my previous research on anarchism and other parts of the world.

Much information I've gathered is thanks to the work of Stephen Jay Hirsch and Lucien van der Waals, particularly Anarchism and Cynicalism in the Colonial and Post-Colonial World, 1870-1940. And, you know, people don't usually think of Peru when they think of anarchist-cynicalist struggles, not even in the context of Latin America.

Folks familiar with that history would quicker consider Brazil or Argentina as sites of anarchist cynicalism. In Brazil, the roots of anarchism can be traced back to the late 19th century, through the influence of European immigrants, and by the early 20th century had anarchist ideas gained traction across the working class, with the establishment of various associations and newspapers like the Brazilian Workers' Confederation, founded in 1906,

Atticus would play, of course, a crucial role in the general strike of 1917. And then, unfortunately, with the rise of Getulio Vargas and his Estado Novo regime in the 1930s, there was a very severe repression of Atticus' activities.

In Argentina, you also had anarchism taking root in the late 19th century, again largely due to the influence of European immigrants. And by the early 20th century, Buenos Aires had become a hub of anarchist activity, with numerous anarchist newspapers, clubs, and unions. The Argentine Regional Workers' Federation, founded in 1901, was a leading anarcho-syndicalist organization that advocated for workers' rights and direct action.

Sadly, the movement reached its peak during the first two decades of the 20th century and, fortunately, similarly to Brazil, due to the repression they endured, particularly during the infamous tragic week in 1919, where a major workers' strike led to violent clashes and a crackdown on anarchists and labour activists, the overall movement went into a decline. Peru during this period was predominantly an agrarian society with a large and economically marginalised indigenous population.

It hardly resembled a nation in the throes of industrialization. So although there was significant capitalist growth in Peru's export sectors, chiefly mining, sugar, cotton, and wool, vast areas of the country remained largely unaffected by these capitalist changes. Aside from Lima and its adjacent port city, Calao, which served as the nation's administrative, commercial, and financial hub, sizable urban economies were conspicuously absent.

This lack of urban centres, typically associated with industrial growth, posed a unique challenge for the development of a robust labour movement. But a labour movement would still arise. The working class in Lima Cala would emerge beginning in the 1890s and early 1900s, spurred by the export boom that invigorated the urban economy.

Profits from the export sectors were reinvested into new financial institutions, infrastructure projects, utility companies, and consumer goods industries by native and foreign capitalists, and this economic growth led to a dramatic rise in the urban labor force. In Lima, the number of manual workers grew from about 9,000 in 1876 to nearly 24,000 in 1908, making up 17% of Lima's estimated 140,000 residents.

In Calhau, the workforce grew at a slower pace, doubling in size between 1905 and 1920 to around 8,000 out of a total population of 52,000. So this is not a bustling industrial heartland by any means. And peasant-based societies are not exactly known for their cynicalism. But despite its unlikelihood, Peru was indeed also a place of anarchist cynicalism, though most notably within Lima and Calhau.

The 1910s and 20s were the heyday of cynicalism through, as anarchist ideas and publications were circulated by a small handful of radical immigrant intellectuals, alongside the labour-organising efforts of craftsmen and machine tenders, who were inspired by Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin and Malatesta.

Thanks to their efforts, anarchist cynicalism would come to dominate the still fledgling labour movement in Peru, spreading its influence beyond Lima Calao to the working classes along Peru's northern coast and central and southern highlands. Workers in factories, crafts, transportation, and rural settings all found appeal in the ideals and practice of the ideology.

Of course, at the size of the movement at the time, the anarchists may have dominated the movement, but the movement itself and the anarchists within it constituted a minority of Peru's urban and rural working classes. Keep that in mind as we proceed.

So the emerging Peruvian working class was highly diverse. They had workers of different origins, gender, race, ethnicity, age, skill level. And despite these differences, they all were dealing with long working hours, often between 12 to 16 hours a day, in poor conditions for meager wages that barely covered basic living expenses.

Seeking to improve their dire working and living conditions, workers began to turn to anarchism because the elite-dominated political system in Peru was simply not taking them on. But there was a handful of sympathetic, disillusioned elites.

Like Manuel González Prada, an upper-class intellectual who became an anarchist after interacting with French and Spanish anarchists during a self-imposed European exile between 1891 and 1898. González Prada founded the first anarchist publication, Los Parayas, in 1904. And this was soon followed by other anarchist newspapers like La Semiente Roja, El Ambriento, Humanidad, and El Oprimido.

Anarchist slogans like Kropotkin's "liberties are not bestowed, they're seized" were prominently featured in these newspapers. And these publications, mainly produced by radical intellectuals such as Glicerio Tassara, Angel O'Rihe-Cali, Carlos del Barzo, and Innocencio Lombarosi, introduced workers to European anarchist ideas and perspectives on the state, the bourgeoisie, the church, property, and class relations.

Anarchist study circles further promoted these ideas among workers. Operated by both workers and radical intellectuals, groups like the Centre of Socialist Studies, First of May in Lima, and Love and Light in Kalau provided spaces for discussing anarchist principles, and these study circles, like the anarchist press, emphasised workers' self-emancipation and cultural advancement.

And somehow this man manages to come up in practically every single one of my explorations of anarchist history, that being the Spanish anarchist Francisco Ferrer.

He was the guy who kickstarted the modern school movement in Spain and led to the creation of anarchist schools worldwide. And he was also unjustly executed by the Spanish state. Yeah. Ferrer is like a guy I like to a lot. I like to, if you're in Barcelona, you can visit him along with Ascaso and Durruti on Mujweek. They're in the cemetery there. They have like a little...

little area with the three of them. Oh, I was wondering for a second there. He said, Oh, you could visit him. I was like, well, really pretty sure he's six feet under. Yeah. No, he's immortal. Like they've re reanimated him. It's like zombie for that. Yeah. I feel like the Simpsons did an episode of that with Lennon. Fortunately, I'm trying to think, I'm pretty sure that anarchists have, we have spared the world, the embalming of our leaders. Yeah.

Fortunately. Yeah. Fortunately. I mean, his death though, despite not being embalmed, his death still continues to reverberate across these historical episodes. Across the world upon his death, anarchists went out in their numbers to protest his execution. And Peru is no different.

On October 17th, 1909, the Centre of Socialist Studies, 1st of May, organized a public protest in response to the execution of Ferrer by the Spanish government. And these sorts of demonstrations were not new to the workers in Peru at the time. In the previous year, an anarchist musical group associated with the centre held a performance to commemorate the 1907 massacre of Chilean mine workers.

Furthermore, annual May Day celebrations in honor of the Chicago Martyrs were also supported by the study circles and the anarchist press. The first May Day celebration in Lima, organized primarily by the Federation of Bakery Workers, Star of Peru, took place in 1905, highlighting international working-class solidarity and the struggle for the eight-hour workday while honoring Peru's first worker martyr.

And through the dedication of anarchist leaders, publications and study circles, the early years of Peruvian anarchism and labour organisation laid the groundwork for a movement committed to justice and dignity for all workers. We can say that by 1911, anarchist syndicalism had truly, firmly taken root. Why? Because this was the year of the first general strike in Peru by the urban working class, spearheaded by anarcho-syndicalists.

In March 1911, 500 workers at the US-owned Vitarte cotton mill initiated a strike demanding higher wages, a reduction of the workday from 13 to 10 hours and the elimination of the night shift. And I found these demands very interesting because I'm imagining even now people back then saying, you know, how lazy can you be? You know, you only want to work 10 hours. Yeah.

Like, come on, some of us are putting in 16, 17, 18 hours. Pick up the slack. Yeah. And it's always like these early anarchist demands, you just realize the unfathomable misery of being like part of the industrial working class in the late 19th and early 20th century. Yeah. It's like, can you ease the boot off my neck?

for like two seconds a day. Yeah, it's people fighting and dying to work. Like,

the amount of hours that most of us are awake in a day they would work that much without taking care of any of their family or personal or other needs it's like can i please see my family for more than an hour yeah absolutely not no you must and then the pinkertons come out and like yes exactly like like yeah people are asking for a 16 hour day and their response is is to send out someone to murder them yeah it's

It's ridiculous. Yeah. But I am impressed by the tenacity, you know? Oh yeah, absolutely. Even with the, what I would consider to be

rather soft demands. I mean, a 10 hour work day, higher wages and the elimination of the night shift. I mean, those things that some people take for granted today, right? Yeah. Um, but that's something they had to fight for and their strike lasted 29 days. Oh, wow. That's very impressive. Yeah. This has reminded me of like, I'm working on a, on a book right now and I've been reading this biography of Duruti for a while that Abel Paz wrote. And, uh, in Paz's book where Duruti goes

goes into exile for a way to intern travels across South America. And these, these anarchist schools are being set up along the, this is the modern system as envisaged by, if not just for that. And they don't have any funding, right? Because everyone's so poor that like that there isn't much surplus to contribute to their children's education. And when they have, once they've taken care of their subsistence needs,

And there's this line in the book, which for whatever reason, it's just like a line. I aspire to write something this beautiful. It's Daruti was very fond of children. And so he risked his life robbing banks to fund their education, which is like, I just love the pivot from like, he liked kids and therefore he conducted armed bank robbery throughout the world. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. It's like, you know, put the money in the bag and maybe some textbooks while you're at it. Yeah. And like he, at this time, like the anarchists were so pure at this time and like in their sort of aspirations and in their actions in many ways and other ways not, of course, that they could not rid themselves of some of their gender assumptions. But

but they would make an accounting of everything they stole, which is really not like if you're involved in crimes and you're listening, it's not a good idea. Yeah. Don't write down the exact amount you stole. Yeah. But he would do it to like prove to everyone that he wasn't stealing for his own personal benefit.

And they'd be like, we gave this to this school and we bought some textbooks and like that, you know, they needed school lunches. So we got some sacks of rice and bananas. And like, as you can see, the entire money from this bank heist has been redistributed and we're off to another country to do the same now. I'm just imagining this guy, like...

He's keeping all these records because the anarchist auditor is going to come and, you know, check all this. Yeah, exactly. Like, I'm not sure who would like doubt the commitment of the man traveling around the world, robbing the banks. But apparently they felt that like no one should be above reproach, which is admirable. Yeah. Yeah. You know what's not admirable, Andrew? Ads. Yeah. It's our obligation to include products and services in these podcasts, but we have to. So here we go.

Okay, we're back. And you were telling me about their 29-day general strike. Or their strike, rather, not general strike. Yeah, their strike. But you're close because the strike started in March as a regular strike. It lasted 29 days and it eventually escalated into a general strike. Oh, hell yeah. On April 10th, bringing Lima's business and transport to a complete halt. And so the following day, President Leguilla intervened and forced the mill's management to meet the workers' demands.

That's a win. It is a winner for 10 hour workday, but a win nonetheless. Yeah, I guess it's a proof that you can force them to change and then you can, you can continue from there. Yeah. Yeah. And so to save safeguard their hard won victories, textile workers in Vitarity established the textile workers unification of Vitarity in May, 1911, dedicated to defending the rights of all workers.

Inspired by Vittarite's example, workers at other major mills in Lima began forming their own resistance societies, dedicated to serving and defending the rights of the proletariat in general, and the textile workers in particular. The movement continued to gain momentum in 1912 and 1913. In October 1912, the La Protesta group succeeded in forming the first workers' regional federation of Peru, uniting various worker resistance societies.

Modeled after Argentina's Workers' Regional Federation, the FORP, as it was also called, advocated for both immediate improvements and long-term social revolution, aiming to unite workers across Peru. Unfortunately, as is the case with many worker struggles in this time, economic instability and state hostility during World War I led to the dissolution of the FORP in 1916.

Thankfully, this setback was temporary. Between 1916 and 1919, anarcho-syndicalists redoubled their efforts, focusing on organising both urban and rural workers. Following the death of Manuel González Prada in 1919, worker-run union presses emerged, spreading anarcho-syndicalist ideas and replacing earlier anarchist publications. This renewed activity strengthened the labour movement, leading to the establishment of new labour federations and the revival of the FORP.

And with the deteriorating conditions during the war years and real wages falling sharply, there had to be a wave of strikes in 1918.

The most significant strike occurred in December 1980, when nearly 2,900 textile workers demanded an eight-hour workday. Finally, we're making some progress. Yeah, yeah. We're getting there. What I find so interesting about the demand of an eight-hour workday is if we look at their first demand, 1911, they fought to reduce their workday from 13 hours to 10 hours. Right. And then a mere seven years later...

1911 to 1918. A mere seven years later. Yeah, they get them down to eight. They go from 10 hours to eight hours. And by the way, by January 1919, they organized a general strike. They moved on to a general strike that led to street clashes and business shutdowns. And despite the arrests and the torture of strike leaders, the strike continued until President Palo Alto conceded to the eight-hour workday.

So in seven years, they went from 10 hours to eight hours. And then we've all collectively, as a global society, been stuck on eight hours for the past century. Over a century at this point. I mean, it's 2024. This was 1919. Yeah, wow. Putting it that way, that is bleak. We should be down to an hour at this point. Yeah, yeah. We extrapolate, right? We take two points and draw the line. That's what happens when, like,

They see the success of the people in the streets, right? And then they know they have power and they can keep going. Yeah. Yeah. Because they wouldn't have felt so bullish to demand the eight hours if they didn't fight and win that, that 10 hours.

at first, just a couple years before. Yeah, like it's why we have made the first International Workers Day, right? Because like the number of rights that we enjoy vis-a-vis our employers and the state were all fought for and won by people who sometimes died in the process. And like, we ought to remember that I think like some

sometimes now organizing forgets how hard fought those were, but also like they won. We have not had many dubs in the intervening period. Of course, the state has grown exponentially stronger. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the situation has changed. We have to acknowledge that. Yeah. But it's just, it is very fascinating the way that, you know, these small wins was able to embolden

bigger wins yeah later down the line and that keeping that momentum really is vital yeah definitely like it still works that way when i like you know in the last couple of years i've been to rajava and to myanmar and like they have done things that would have seemed inconceivable to them 10 years before they did them and in both cases it's by staying in the streets right or staying in the jungles or the mountains or wherever you're fighting and then refusing to like

accept that the state can tell you what to do even when the state tries to bring its coercive violence against you and like that's how all of these these wins occur but it doesn't happen without organization without community without like all the things that they had built in peru right like before they did their first strike they had to have confidence that their strike would succeed and presumably a strike fund and a means to collectively support the people who weren't getting paid and

they had to build all that. And then like these things can kind of cascade once the, once the movement has a strong base. Exactly. There's a reason that I'm going through these histories, you know, these are the sort of lessons I want people to be able to glean. Yeah, totally. I think it can be frustrating otherwise, like it can be frustrating to, to be people. I'm not saying people right now aren't trying because people do a lot and they're working hard, but it can be frustrating until you see that it takes years of building that base. And then things can, things can seem to come quickly, but,

But there's years of work sort of behind the scenes that has to happen first. Absolutely. So in the months following the general strike, workers continue to protest the rising cost of living. Organizers like Adalberto Fonken and Nicolás Gutara formed the Committee for the Cheapening of Prime Necessities, mobilizing thousands.

I think we definitely need a committee for the cheapening of prime necessities today. Yeah, that's an amazing group. Like, I was just, what a great thing. Yeah, fantastic name. When the demands were ignored, and, you know, here we go again, a general strike was declared in May 1919, resulting in violent clashes with the state and the arrests of Gutara and another figure, Carlos Barba.

Upon their release, resolve unshaken, Kutara and Barba defiantly addressed President Liguia, stating in part that the populace of today was not the tame one of yesterday, which had silently borne all tyrannies. Sounds like a threat. Yeah. Two days later, FORP was reactivated with a mission to dismantle capitalism and create a society based on mutual aid and equality.

The anarcho-syndicalist movement had dissolved any lingering passivity among Lima-Calau's workers. The passion, hunger, and aggression towards state and employer threats had reached a crescendo by this point. For example, in September 1921, textile workers seized El Inca mill in response to management's plans to close the factory. Although they were eventually dislodged by troops, their active resistance demonstrated their determination and boldness.

And isn't that fascinating that these workers were willing to seize the mill they had worked at because the management plan and closing it down. They were willing to take control of that place and work at it and, you know, quote unquote, contribute to the economy. But the troops were mobilized to ensure that they did not exercise autonomy as workers to self-organize their own labor.

It's either you're under management or you're out of a job. There's no working for yourself or working as a collective. Also in 1921, the FORP was replaced by the Local Workers Federation, or FOL, which lashed out against the government's legal ruse against strikes. So in 1920, President Liguia...

put forward a new constitution with very strict provisions to regulate this wave of strikes and to put the labor conflicts under arbitration by the state. And so the local workers federation, the FOL, which had replaced the FORP in 1921, lashed out at this government's legal ruse and vowed to completely ignore it. At the time as well,

Alongside the labor struggles, anarcho-syndicalists were struggling to transform culture. Contrary to the idea that the FOL neglected cultural issues, evidence shows that they actively developed a distinct working-class culture. Their strategy was a war of position against the ruling elite, aiming to create a counterculture that challenged the dominant bourgeois values. At the 1921 FOL Congress, workers affirmed the importance of both economic improvement and cultural uplift.

which led to the establishment of initiatives like a workers' daily newspaper, a popular library, and various cultural associations. One key example was the Centro Musical Obrero de Lima, founded in 1922, which used music to promote workers' rights and solidarity. Workers also participated in social events like the Fiesta de la Planta, a secular festival designed to compete with Christian holidays and promote class unity. They also held May Day celebrations and organized tributes for fallen comrades.

Moreover, the FOL supported the creation of popular universities to educate workers and foster cultural and political awareness. Meanwhile, also in the late 1910s and 1920s, the southern highlands of Peru saw the emergence of a dynamic network of anarcho-syndicalist movements. This network thrived amid the burgeoning wool export economy.

The World Trade's expansion spurred economic links and infrastructural development, which turned Arequipa into a key economic centre and the hub of the anarchist-syndicalist network in the region. Anarcho-syndicalism in Arequipa was influenced by four major factors: a radical liberal press, the labour movement in Lima, immigrant anarchists, and cross-border connections with Chilean anarcho-syndicalists.

Influenced by thinkers like Manuel González Prada, intellectuals and artisans critiqued Arequipa's conservative society through radical publications such as El Ariete and Bandera Roja. These radical ideas spurred significant actions like Arequipa's first major strikes in 1902, the inaugural May Day celebration in 1906, and the establishment of pivotal organizations such as the Workers' Social Center of Arequipa and the Workers' Coalition of the Neighborhoods.

The labor movement in Lima, along with influences from Argentina and Chile, further inspired Arequipa's workers. By December 1918, motivated by reports of worker struggles abroad, artisans and workers in Arequipa found the Society of Workers and Mutual Assistance . In July 1919, following Lima's example, Arequipa's main labor organizations established a committee to combat the rising cost of living.

When the demands were ignored, they too launched a general strike, which lasted eight days and received widespread support. While some wage and benefit demands were met, many of the committee's requests remained unaddressed. So after the general strike, Arakipa's workers founded the Arakipa Worker Federation to advocate for their rights and demands further.

That federation was one of numerous unions and federations, another being the Local Worker Federation of Arequipa, or FULA, which emerged between 1919-1926 in response to calls from the FORP to enhance the workers' capacity for direct action against capitalist and state oppression. Like their counterparts in Lima, Arequipa's anarchist-syndicalists employed direct action to achieve both immediate and long-term goals.

The protests against a railway tariff hike in 1923 pressured the government enough to suspend the increase, but 1925 was perhaps their most pivotal year, because the Popular Workers' Assembly, which was an ad hoc coalition of anarchist syndicalist groups from Arequipa and Lima, called for a general strike against the road conscription law, which required adult males to register and to work on unpaid state infrastructure projects for upward of 12 days per year.

For the Assembly, this was more than just an unfair law, this was a symbol of the state's utter disregard for the working class. As the strike unfolded, the authorities sought to crush the movement, arresting labour leaders and attempting to dismantle the anarchist organization's influence. But even with only a small industrial sector and a relatively small population, Atta Kippa's labour movement demonstrated a remarkable level of class consciousness and solidarity.

beyond strikes, to use a variety of methods to build solidarity and consciousness among workers, from worker libraries to football clubs. One key figure in this movement was Ramón Rosiñol, a Spanish architect and passionate anarcho-syndicalist. Arriving in Arequipa in 1919, Rosiñol turned his office into a hub of anarchist thought and activism.

His influence was profound as he trained future leaders like Jacinto Leandro and Francisco Ramos, who would become central figures in the labor movement. Rusignol's efforts extended beyond traditional activism. He also founded a popular university in the footsteps of Francisco Ferrer, and it served as a place for workers to receive education and become politically conscious. In Huyendo, a key port city in Peru, the influence of the international workers of the world was particularly strong.

Luis Armando Triviño, a key Chilean IWW leader, published a series of influential articles in a newspaper called La Protesta in 1922. He extolled the virtues of the IWW's methods and called for international solidarity among workers. He was best received right in Moyendo, where by early 1925, maritime workers from Chile had established close and secretive ties with the local Peruvian workers.

Under the cover of darkness, they held clandestine meetings in an old house on Islay Street. These meetings would lead to the formation of a local IWW branch right in Moyendo. But it wasn't just a meeting of the minds, but of the shared struggles and victories of the workers that cemented these ties. In February 1925, a popular general strike in Moyendo saw workers fighting back against unjust practices by British-owned companies.

The strike was a massive success, and the solidarity from Chilean IWW members bolstered the Peruvian workers' resolve. The government's response to the anarchist and socialist movement was severe. Fearing the spread of what they saw as Bolshevik ideas, they cracked down hard on the Mayendo labour movement. Security forces were deployed to suppress protests, and activists were arrested or deported to Chile.

Of course, government repression efforts were not fully successful due to the resilience of loose, flexible, and decentralized organizing. The seeds of anarcho-syndicalist thought had already taken root. Throughout 1926 and beyond, the labor movement in Moyendo continued to be a site of struggle and resistance.

Workers engaged in protests and work stoppages, driven by the ideas of direct action and social justice, that had been nurtured through their interaction with Chilean Wobblies. Do you know what was almost certainly not nurtured through interactions with Chilean Wobblies, Andrew? Ads? Yeah. And we are back from the ad break. Beyond the cities, anarchist cynicalism had a profound impact on the rural indigenous communities.

In Cusco and Puno, internal migration and the exchange of ideals led to the rise of a new political consciousness among the peasantry. Carlos Condorena, an indigenous peasant from Puno, became a key figure in the Tijuana-Tisuyo Pro-Indian Rights Central Committee, the CPIT, where he championed indigenous labor rights and the struggle for better working conditions.

His work, along with that of other provincial migrants like Ezequiel Urviola, bridged the gap between the urban anarcho-syndicalists and the rural indigenous communities. Urviola was a passionate advocate for both indigenous rights and the broader anarcho-syndicalist cause, pushing back against the paternalism of the state toward the indigenous community and connecting the struggles of workers and peasants alike. He spoke out against bourgeois pigs, Yankee imperialism, all while encouraging pride in one's indigeneity.

Alongside Urviola, Salazar and Ayulo would also guide the CPIT and the Peruvian Regional Indian Workers' Federation toward anarcho-syndicalist ideology, organization, and tactics. Even after his untimely death in 1925, Urviola's legacy continued to inspire anarchists and indigenous movements. Indigenous leaders and activists had been growing fed up with the abusive practices of local authorities and the gabinales, the rural bosses who exploited the peasants.

Pedro José Rada Igama, the Minister of Government and Police at the time, blamed these uprisings on known agitators. He claimed that these agitators were convincing the indigenous people that the road conscription law and other municipal laws were designed to oppress them, even though the indigenous people could see for themselves the effects of the law. Both the anarchists and the indigenous organizers had laid the groundwork, but it was the people themselves who chose not to accept such state impositions.

Uprisings broke out across Cusco and Puno. District authorities had to suspend the conscription in several provinces due to the intense resistance. The sheer force of the crackdown was so extreme that the city mayor and the municipal council had to appeal to President Liguia for the suspension of the law. And it succeeded at least temporarily until July 1926. And as soon as the law was reinstated, the popular assembly reignited the resistance.

They even went as far as issuing direct threats to the officials enforcing the law, noting that they had the home addresses of the conscription council and was not responsible for any potential consequences of their actions. That's definitely a threat. That's definitely a threat. Yeah. They also sent delegates to Lima to organize a nationwide campaign against the law, which led to their arrest and sparked even more protests in Arequipa and Lima.

Throughout the late 1920s, despite increasing state repression, the anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists did not let up for as long as they could. So, over the first three decades of the 1900s, anarchist syndicalism in Peru spread thanks to a mix of factors. The distribution of radical ideas through publications, the influence of activists from other countries, and most importantly, the work of local organizers, most prominently in Lima, Calao.

Despite facing immense challenges and a significant decline by the end of the 1920s, the movement laid the groundwork for future Labour politics. Former anarcho-syndicalists joined new political parties in an effort to carry forward their ideals, compromising along the way. So the influence didn't fully disappear, but it did transform. Still, their spirit lived on somewhat in the ongoing fight for justice and equality in Peru. One that continues to this day.

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Hello, podcast fans. It's me, James, and my friend Shireen, and also Shireen's cat, Bunny. Yes. Yeah. She is here. She is here. And ready to pod. Yeah, she loves to cast a pod, and so do we. Today, Shireen, we have the great pleasure of talking about the border again, which is something I talk about a lot, something that...

Politicians also talk about it a lot. Today, what I want to talk about is the difference between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump when it comes to the border. Because

Shockingly, there has been a lot of crap reporting on her border stance. There has been some good reporting. And there's always going to be right-wing disinformation any time you talk about the border, right? Just today, Border Patrol released video of a woman falling to her death from the border wall. Border Patrol agents stood there for 24 minutes watching her struggle. There was a ladder and they decided to watch her struggle until she died. As she fell and then she died.

Wow. Watching this like objectively tragic thing, right? Like when we think about how we get to fascism, we get to fascism when my taxes pay people to stand there and watch a woman die rather than do a single thing to help her. And then a bunch of fuckwits on the internet immediately start excusing this. Like it's so predictable that it's going to happen. Yeah.

I don't know. I'm just once again disgusted by the whole fucking apparatus that is the border, I guess. Yeah. So I want to talk about the things that have changed. And I want to talk, we'll sort of start by outlining who Kamala is with respect to the border. So everything she took over from Biden, Kamala has been sort of offering more platitudes than specifics, right? Like her campaign is mostly based on vibes. Like I went to her campaign website to see what her stances were on the border. It is not mentioned. I think that's

But recently in some speeches, she did offer some concrete ideas of what her border policy might look like. So I'm going to start with her campaign ad. This ad, incidentally, opens with what I'm pretty sure is a drone shot from Campo, California. I've taken pictures there.

In reverse of that shot, hundreds of times, you can find them on my website. Slate bought some of them off me. Maybe a month or two ago. No, not even. Maybe two or three weeks ago, I guess. I watched a mother breastfeed her five-month-old child, maybe a couple of miles from there. It was 105 degrees. We were able to give them water. I saw someone in severe hypothermia, very hot. We were able to cool them off.

I spoke to a Sudanese family who were really struggling with making this long walk they have to make out there. None of that shit made it into the Kamala border advert, right? No, of course not. So I'm just going to play this advert for you, Shireen. On the border, the choice is simple. Kamala Harris supports increasing the number of Border Patrol agents. Donald Trump blocked a bill to increase the number of Border Patrol agents.

Kamala Harris supports investing in new technology to block fentanyl from entering the country. Donald Trump blocked funding for technology to block fentanyl from entering the country.

Kamala Harris supports spending more money to stop human traffickers. Donald Trump blocked money to stop human traffickers. Kamala Harris prosecuted transnational gang members and got them sentenced to prison. Trump is trying to avoid being sentenced to prison. There's two choices in this election. The one who will fix our broken immigration system and the one who's trying to stop her. A cop or a clown? Who should we vote for president?

And that's exactly it. Right. She's leaning really heavily on this like I am a cop thing. And like we have spent and continue to spend billions of dollars on border cops. That is not the fucking solution. It never will be the solution. We cannot make this giant border so full of cops that it's impossible for people to cross it. People will still cross it.

Because cops ain't going to go to the middle of the desert because, you know, the inherent in being a cop is also being lazy. So I want to play some stuff that she said in Atlanta this week. So here is my pledge to you. As president, I will bring back the border security bill that Donald Trump killed and I will sign it into law and show Donald Trump what real leadership looks like. Oh, fuck off.

Yeah. So I'm going to subject you to some Kamala and some Trump today. It's OK. I signed up for this. OK, so here's another one of her. And this, I think, is really telling. Right. Where she is bragging about the most conservative Republican supporting her bill. Donald Trump, on the other hand, has been talking a big game about securing our border, but he does not walk the walk.

Or as my friend Quavo would say, he does not walk it like he talks it. So look, our administration worked on the most significant border security bill in decades. Some of the most conservative Republicans in Washington, D.C. supported the bill. Even the Border Patrol endorsed it. So...

I'm going to read some transcripts from that speech as well. This is pretty much the only point of data we have on her proposed border policy, so we're going heavy on this speech that she gave in Atlanta at a rally. "I went after transnational gangs, drug cartels and human traffickers that came into our country illegally. I prosecuted them in case after case, and I won," Harris said. "Donald Trump, on the other hand, has been talking a big game about securing our border,

But he does not walk the walk. That's what you just heard, right? And then she goes on to reference Quavo, which is cool and normal. So let's talk about that leadership and let's talk about the bill she's proposing, right? This is a bipartisan bill that was proposed last year and that didn't succeed, right? It's the one that Democrats are making a big fuss about Republicans getting the border bill.

It's one of the only good things they've ever done, actually, because it represented a massive rightward swing from where Democrats have previously been on immigration. In the bill, DHS could close the border if Border Patrol encountered 4,000 or more migrants on average over a seven-day period. The border would then have to be shut down if encounters reached a seven-day average of 5,000 or if they exceeded 8,500 in a single day. Does that happen? Are these numbers realistic? Yeah.

Yes. Well, a really important thing to remember when we talk about these numbers is did you notice that it was phrased as encounters, not people? So this is a thing that is apparently impossible if you write for a fucking broadsheet corporate legacy newspaper to understand. An encounter does not represent a unique individual.

Border Patrol do not give us data on unique individuals. They give us data on encounters. And this is important because under Title 42, which I made a series about last year that you can listen to, I would like it if you did, people can be returned to Mexico. And as you'll see under this proposal, people can be returned to Mexico. And then they will try and come back because most of the people coming to our border are not from Mexico, nor do they have roots in Mexico, nor can they be safe in Mexico.

So they will try and come back and they will try and come back in a different place, in a more remote place. And that will result in a higher risk to their lives making that journey. Right. So,

8,500 individuals across the whole border doesn't mean 8,500 people. But yes, those numbers are reachable. That's just so disingenuous to word it that way. Yeah. Border Patrol just had like, I don't know, they had so much success with doing this under Title 42. Like, we're flooded with migrants. And like, I've spoken to people who have tried seven times to cross, you know, it's extremely disingenuous.

And I think we're going to get onto this, but this is a debate about the border happening by people who never go to the border and don't understand what it's like here, both in the media and in politics. And I think that that is a problem.

So when it's closed, quote unquote, now we can't close the border, right? Like A, physically we cannot. B, we're not going to close the border and be like, okay, Mexico, no tomatoes. Okay, no tourists can come into Orlando now, right? That is not what it's about. It is open to capital and it's open to wealthy people. All we're doing is closing it to the people who most need our help, that being people seeking asylum, right?

So when it's quote unquote closed, they would still process 1400 migrants through ports of entry. That would presumably be people arriving using CBP1, which is a fatally flawed app, which doesn't work for black folks, which...

has been hacked, all the appointments are sold, booked up a month in advance. You can only use it north of Mexico City. It's a complete mess. Every single migrant I have encountered has tried to use CBP1 and given up. It's not even available in that many languages, right? I think it's English, Spanish and Haitian Creole right now.

It's ludicrous to suggest that this is accessible. And it doesn't work very well on Samsung phones. I have a PRA, a FOIA, I guess, a FOIA out to CBP about that. But maybe in six years after several court cases, I'll get it back. But I

I know that people are buying iPhones. Migrant advocates, both in Mexico City and north of there, to allow migrants to access the app. They're trying to help them overcome these hurdles, right? But like, fucking come on. We've got the entire US government here and it's my friends trying to get five bucks from whoever to buy an iPhone so migrants can share it. It's obscene.

Only unaccompanied minors will be processed if they entered between ports of entry, right? So that's people under the age of 18 without their folks.

Anyone who tried to cross between ports of entry, so port of entry is when you cross the border with your passport and you go through an office, that's a port of entry, right? So if you cross in another fashion over a river, over a wall, around a wall, under a wall, through a wall, just across a desert where there isn't a wall, that's between ports of entries. If anyone tries two or more times, then during a border emergency, they will be barred from the United States for a period. I think it's a year.

I should note that this bill didn't pass, but Biden did write an executive order setting an arbitrary cap at 2,500 encounters per day, which you will notice is lower. And it removed the requirement that Border Patrol ask migrants if they fear persecution. So this is really important. It's called a shout test. And the difference here is between me saying, Shireen, you've just come across the border. Are you here because you fear persecution?

Can you not safely go home? And me just saying, get in the fucking van and you having to articulate that you fear persecution, right? Which is, that requires them to know that they have to articulate it. It requires them to be able to articulate it in a language that's intelligible to the officer or whoever's interviewing them, right? It's a much higher barrier. And in both cases, right, you could have the same person and they could be rejected because they didn't pass this so-called shout test. That's ridiculous.

That's ridiculous. It's a really bullshit workaround for someone who is clearly eligible for asylum, right? Yeah. And like any good faith actor wants to find out if that person is going to be persecuted when they go home. And so moving to a shout test, like you are...

saying some people we're going to send home, they will fucking die or they will be tortured or they will face persecution of other means, right? Because they didn't articulate in the right words their fear of persecution. And it's just, there is not a good faith argument for this. It's just getting numbers down at the cost of human suffering. So in this case, right, I have met migrants with pretty rock solid claims. I don't want to go into the details of their cases too much. I will in the future, but like,

You know, I'm out of the border a lot and I'm out in the backcountry there a lot. And I try and help people whenever I can. I talk to them about their claims. And I'm not going to ask someone to justify their trauma to me with 17 documents. Right. But some of them have shown me things which I do believe would be a very cast iron asylum claim. And they seem to be, since Biden's executive order, just getting booted back across the border.

So he kind of worked around that part of the bill failing. But let's look at what else is in it. So if the bill that Harris is saying she will reintroduce, of course, she herself can't. It's a legislative act. So Senator or whoever the House would. The bill would limit border closures to 270 days, 225 days and 180 days for the first three years.

which there's no limit in the Biden executive order. So I guess that's better, I guess. I mean, fucking 270 days when you can't claim asylum. That's a lot of days. There's also funding, a lot of funding for more Border Patrol agents, of course, more asylum officers, as well as more than 100 judges. We do need to move people through the immigration system, but a lot more pressingly, we need to open legal pathways that are not walking across the desert and passing a shout test.

It would mandate detaining migrants if they try to enter the U.S. outside of ports of entry pending their asylum claim. So this is really big, actually. It's going to result in a massive increase in the amount of asylum detention beds we need. The bill contains funding for another 10,000 more beds. We'll probably end up needing more than that. But all of these beds are not in state-run facilities, right? They're in private facilities that ICE coordinates with. It's core civic. It's people who...

When Biden first came into office, he wrote an executive order about getting rid of private prisons. These are the private prisons. This is how we reallocated money to those same people doing this terrible thing, which is locking people up for profit. I've heard terrible stories about the conditions in some of these detention centers.

And this is the guy who ran on and bragged about closing down private prisons, sending more money to private prisons just for migrants, not citizens, because apparently their rights don't matter as much. Their lives don't matter as much. Talking of things that don't matter, Shireen, should we take an ab break? Sounds beautiful, James. Thank you. So we're back. And I want to talk about what Harris has done as VP, which is...

They put her on this root causes beat, right? Where she's supposed to go after the root causes of migration. So I want to start with this message that she sent to the people of Guatemala. I want to be clear to folks in this region who are thinking about making that dangerous trek to the United States-Mexico border. Do not come. Do not come. The United States will continue to enforce our laws and secure our border.

There are legal methods by which migration can and should occur. But we, as one of our priorities, will discourage illegal migration. And I believe if you come to our border, you will be turned back.

Do not come. Yeah. I think I've seen that before. Yeah. She took a lot of shit for that one. Rightly. Understandably. Yeah. Yeah. This is not the only time the Biden administration said this, by the way. They were tweeting do not come in Haitian Creole in 2021 from the embassy of the United States in Haiti. This has been their message and continues to be their message.

Now to the ongoing crisis down at the southern border, the focus of Vice President Kamala Harris's first overseas trip since taking office. She heads to Mexico today after spending yesterday in Guatemala, where she announced several initiatives and delivered a message to potential migrants there. Do not come to the United States. The vice president also sat down exclusively with NBC's Lester Holt, who began by asking her about that warning.

In the news conference here in Guatemala City, you had a message for would-be migrants, don't come. Why should they believe you when they know that people are getting in? I've been working on this issue for a very long time. And the kind of...

and danger that is associated with that trek, especially when we're talking about from Guatemala through Mexico to the United States. It's extremely dangerous. We are looking at

a situation where people are fleeing because of hunger, because of the hurricanes, because of the pandemic. So the reason I am here is to address those issues, knowing that the people who are here for generations, they want to stay. They don't want to leave.

But they need opportunity. They need assistance. They need support. Americans don't see a lot of that on a daily basis. What they do see at their own border, children being lowered over fences, children coming in with phone numbers stenciled on their hand. And so the question has come up, and you heard it here and you'll hear it again, I'm sure, is why not visit the border? Why not see what Americans are seeing in this crisis?

Well, we are going to the border. We have to deal with what's happening at the border. There's no question about that. That's not a debatable point. But we have to understand that there's a reason people are arriving at our border and ask, what is that reason? And then identify the problem so we can fix it. OK, so all of this was while the Biden administration continued to defend and enforce Title 42.

If people haven't listened to the series I made about Title 42, I know I've said that twice, but there's like two or three hours of me explaining Title 42, so that would explain it better than I counted 20 seconds here. Title 42 is a public health law.

The idea of Title 42 was to prevent people with tuberculosis coming into the United States. An element of Title 42 of the United States Code contains this. The idea was never to use it as a de facto block on asylum, which is what the Trump administration did for a year and the Biden administration did for nearly three years. The Biden administration did it for much, much longer. This ended in May of 2023.

And it was used, they called it catch and release, right? It was used to bounce people straight back as we spoke about before. Catch and release. It's like you're literally like an animal practice, you know? Right, yeah. Like these people are fucking fish. And I don't like doing that to fish personally. I shouldn't stress out a fish. It's just vibing down there. Don't ruin its day. So later in that same interview, she was very defensive about...

her failing to visit the border. But I think

There are very reasonable questions. Sometimes these criticisms are used in bad faith by Republicans. So is everything, right? It doesn't mean that we shouldn't talk about this. We should. I didn't see a single elected official from the Democrat Party. I guess fucking Jim Desmond turned up, but I wish he wouldn't. He turned up, told lies about who paid for the aid, and then forced his intern to apologize for it when a bunch of people turned up at his office.

Really great integrity. I didn't see a single Democrat for the months that Border Patrol held thousands of people in open air detention without food, water or shelter. And for the months that my friends and I took care of them.

Instead, what Harris was doing was trying to connect business leaders with economies in Central America to, quote, create jobs. Right. She had some success with a Japanese car factory in Guatemala and a Swiss coffee processor buying more beans and committing to more coffee purchases. Right.

Like this shit does not work and it has never worked. Right. Obviously, my position on global economics is not the same as hers, but we can't trickle down the causes of migration. We can't do this with like a rising tide levels or boats, GDP stuff, even if we do buy this kind of freakonomics tier bullshit.

It doesn't matter because the change is going to take decades to come, right? You can't just change a national economy, change deals with unemployment, with violence, with state violence, with non-state violence overnight.

It's very likely that the pace of climate change alone will outstrip any benefits that these programs provide, because we are seeing increasingly people coming from countries that are the most impacted by climate change to countries like the United States, one of the countries that has made the largest contribution to the climate change. But this idea of trickle-down economics to stop migration, it doesn't address the issue that migration

Most of our migrants are no longer coming from the places she's going. So she's worked pretty extensively in the Northern Triangle, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.

These are places which sent a lot of migrants maybe in the early Obama administration, but that's not the case anymore, right? Those are not typically places I see migrants from, right? I see migrants from Venezuela. We're going to get a lot more of those. I see migrants from Turkey, many of them, but not all of them Kurdish. I see migrants from North Africa. I see migrants from the Sahel. I see migrants from India. I don't particularly see people from the Northern Triangle. So the idea that like,

lifting the economy in the Northern Triangle is going to move the needle. It's just not. Even if we buy the idea that it's possible, I don't think it is. So that's Kamala. Let's take a look at Donald Trump. I guess I should give people a trigger warning. I'm only going to include a little bit of Donald Trump audio here, but you can tap the skip button if you don't want to hear Donald Trump talking.

So Donald Trump's policies largely are in response to things that are not real or proposing things that the president or Congress cannot do or that the president cannot do without the support of Congress. So his first thing is talking about ending birthright citizenship. This is not a thing that he can do by executive order. This is an amendment to the Constitution that requires...

an amendment to the constitution to pass it back. Now, you can amend the constitution, but I don't think you'd ever get support for ending birthright citizenship, right? This has been the case since after the Civil War, and it exists to stop people disenfranchising the children of formerly enslaved people. Under Biden's current policies, even though these millions of illegal border crossers have entered the country unlawfully, all of their future children will become automatic U.S. citizens. Can you imagine?

They'll be eligible for welfare, taxpayer-funded health care, the right to vote, chain migration, and countless other government benefits, many of which will also profit the illegal alien parents. This policy is a reward for breaking the laws of the United States and is obviously a magnet helping draw the flood of illegals across our borders. They come by the millions and millions and millions.

So another thing that Donald Trump wants to do is do away with the diversity visa program. Are you familiar with the diversity visa? No, I'm going to say no. I'm familiar with it, but not enough to know what it is in detail. So please tell me, James. Okay, I would love to tell you, Shireen. The DV program, I will avoid using that acronym, actually, because it could be an unfortunate misunderstanding. Yeah, we're just sending cops all over the world.

That's funny. Yeah. No, the diversity visa program, better known as the green card lottery, allows about 55,000 or exactly 55,000 in theory, immigrant visas a year for individuals from countries that are underrepresented in the U.S. immigration system. I remember that. Wait, that sounds familiar. Yes. Okay. Yeah. So like you'll meet people almost everywhere I go.

I tend not to go to countries that are highly represented in the US immigration system, right? Those being countries that find it easier for people to get visas like H-1Bs, right? Because they are more economically maybe close to the United States and have educational credentials that translate across. So the Trump administration had made the diversity visa program such a massive clusterfuck that

that it effectively didn't work and the way that this happened was because you don't just win the green card lottery and they mail a green card to your house so like come on over bud you win the lottery and that gives you the right to go to the embassy to do an interview and then you make the application right then they check check you off on any checklists you might be on all the stuff that would normally apply to a migrant it's not like an amnesty visa and what the trump

did was make it very hard for these people to get these appointments, especially during COVID. And this has been the case with the Biden administration as well. They get the lowest priority now. They can book an appointment, but other people's stuff gets to sort of overtake them in the line, right? Because you only have a year from receiving it to claiming it, de facto, this means that people don't get it, right? So we are not, 55,000 people are not coming to

because of the diversity visa. Even if they were, this is not very many people. And like, it's just Trump. I don't know. Maybe he saw the phrase diversity and became triggered, but yeah.

It's a weird little bugbear, which I guess if you can focus on weird little things. But still, the diversity visa is great. The people I know who often most deserve visas, people who can't even afford to make the trip, right, to walk here. Or, you know, if you're not in the continental Americas, it's a lot more expensive. You have to fly. I guess you could take a boat. But some of those people, I mean, my friend who drove me all around Iraq is applying for a diversity visa. And like, I really hope he gets it. Lovely man. Trump also...

It has this bug there about DHS paying benefits to quote illegal aliens. Crooked Joe Biden is running a nonstop conveyor belt importing illegal aliens from all over the world.

into our country and the Biden Department of Homeland Security is abusing its so-called parole authority to give them more governmental benefits than many law-abiding citizens, including our vets. Our vets are being taken advantage of. Our citizens are being taken advantage of. It's very unfair, and it's not going to stand.

The Department of Homeland Security doesn't pay any benefits to anyone. I guess it pays like Border Patrol agents and people who work for it, but it's not giving anyone public benefits, right? Undocumented people are normally ineligible for most benefits. Even people who do have legal status, and he consistently conflates asylum seekers with undocumented people, right? Maybe because he genuinely doesn't know the difference and doesn't care to learn the difference.

Even people who have legal status face a range of hurdles. Like sometimes they have a 40 quarter work bar, for example, right? So that means you have to have been working for 40 periods of three months consecutively. Again, this is kind of, he might be talking about something called the public charge rule, which can interfere with your citizenship or visa application if you've taken certain times of benefit. So maybe he's looking at,

to make that a little bit broader. But again, it's really unclear and it's kind of like identity politics grifting. The next thing is we're getting towards QAnon territory now. Great.

This is some weird shit, first of all, right?

He talks about using Title 42. This is not, as I've talked about three times now, what Title 42 is for.

It's very obvious that he thinks Title 42 is immigration law because he very obviously used it as that. Right. He was not using Title 42 to stop people getting covid because he did square root fuck all stop people getting covid. Right. And there were not exemptions for vaccinated people. It's very obvious that they use Title 42 cynically as an immigration law. That is not what it is.

Also, deporting someone back to the situation they were trafficked from, maybe not smart. Like maybe, especially a minor who is trafficked here, maybe we could help them. You know, one of the richest countries humanity has ever seen. Maybe not just bumping them straight back to that country. Maybe showing a little bit of compassion. Human trafficking is a problem, but this is not the solution. So Harris kind of touts her prosecutorial experience when she talks about human trafficking.

She's actually been better than some at not punishing people who were trafficked. So I was reading that at one point she asked prosecutors not to use the term teenage prostitute.

Because, like, that's not really a thing. What we're seeing there is somebody who is being trafficked, right? Or somebody who has been victimized, taken advantage of, manipulated. And seeing them as perpetrators is fundamentally missing the fucking problem. And this is what the legal system does far too often, right? It goes after the people who are the victims, not the criminals. She twice bought criminal charges against Backpage.com, which is a website, I guess, where people can, like, find escorts.

I'm not familiar with these things, but I know that some sex workers were opposed to that because they felt it drove them kind of onto more underground platforms, which were even more risky to them. But obviously, people were also being trafficked on this platform. So like...

Her record, I guess, is somewhat mixed. You know what else is somewhat mixed, Shireen? What, James? It's the products and services that we get to support this show. You know, sometimes it's the cops. Sometimes it's terrible coffee. Sometimes it's gold. You never know what you're going to get. Ooh. We are back. And we are back to one of Donald Trump's oldest chestnuts. And that would be his stupid wall, right, that he wants to build.

We created the most secure border in U.S. history by far, dealing a major blow to the cartels and traffickers. We built hundreds of miles of wall. We renovated hundreds of miles of wall. We never had anything like it. And then I got Mexico free of charge to give us 28,000 soldiers to protect us from people coming into our country illegally.

He talks about building hundreds of miles of wall. He says that a couple of times, right? We've renovated hundreds of miles of wall. Did they build hundreds? Maybe just technically. They really fudged the numbers. I filed a lot of freedom of information requests for that.

I guess what's more relevant is that Biden also built the wall, right? Kamala's not talking about it, but as we've documented numerous times, Biden has continued to build the wall. He's continued to build the barrier, which is a wall. He has repaired other sections of wall. He has upgraded sections of fence to wall.

They're both doing this, right? There's maybe Donald Trump would do more of it. But sometimes I feel like his general incompetence might prevent him from doing any more than Biden's like competent migrant. They call it deterrence, right? Deterrence through death is probably a better way of phrasing it.

Trump also talks about a total ban on taxpayer dollars to give legal aid to undocumented people. Again, I'm not sure if he knows what he's talking about. I don't know what he's talking about. He might be referring to that. We have a program in San Diego County where San Diego County pays for some people to defend migrants who are detained by ICE so they can have access to a lawyer. ICE has responded to that by moving those people to Texas. Oh, okay.

That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. Totally normal. Good. I'm glad we voted for the anti-fascist guy. Everything's going great. Exactly. You can listen to my episode about that if you want to know more about that. But I don't know if he means they don't get public defenders if they're accused of a crime. Certainly. Isn't it just true that he can also just use these trigger words to make people mad? Yes. Yes. That is what he's doing. Yeah. Yeah. It's not necessarily has to be based in fact. No. As we found with Donald Trump, this doesn't matter. Yeah.

And then finally, talking of stuff that doesn't have to be real, his absolutely batshit insane idea of fucking invading Mexico to kill members of cartels, which... That's, yeah, unhinged. Yeah, that is unhinged. That will result in more violence. It will result in more instability. It will result in more death. I think Kamala's pretty much in the clear when it comes to that one. Like, she is not proposing invading Mexico. So much of what Donald Trump says...

is insane and it doesn't make sense. So I wanted to look at some of the people who kind of lean on Trump, some of the people who might be a little bit more coherent when it comes to crafting that policy. Couldn't get Stephen Miller on the podcast, sad, but we did get these people from the Texas Public Policy Foundation who Robert and Gare spoke to at the Republican National Convention. So here's them talking about visas and immigration.

I've tried to hire people from other countries. It takes months and months and months to get that done. They usually spend a lot of money doing it as well. And so the system is disincentivized to do that. So, you know, actually during the last Trump administration, they started looking at like, let's reduce the number of visas and have broader categories. Right. So I think they're trying to get down to about 17 visas.

get to a more merit-based program to fit the needs that we have and make sure that you can, you know, it's not about like what is the total number, but if we are needing labor, we need people in these areas, you can kind of like as a dial, you can turn up and down in certain areas and certain visas. And so I think you do have to first like stop the problem and then you also have to make systemic changes that will overhaul the system and make it a lot easier so that people are incentivized to actually do it the right way. Yeah, so...

These people aren't stupid, right? They won't just spew hate. They're much more competent in their fascism. So I think what we're seeing here, right, is this undoubtedly is a way to reduce what they see as undesirable migration, which is to say poor people and brown people. You can phrase it however you want, right? I mean, in the Republicans' eyes, maybe a lot of people's eyes, all migration is undesirable migration, I feel like.

Yeah, well, people will talk to me. I'm, for those of you who have just listened to me, I guess, a white person. British. You're not white, you're British. Yeah. Sorry, I didn't mean to laugh. Yeah.

which is more like a kind of translucent, really, when you think about it. So, yeah, I am a British person, which is important, I guess, because people will talk to me about immigration like I'm one of the good migrants and they can't go fuck themselves. That position, right, that like,

it's a like implicit white people are okay. Yeah. That's all that means. It's like, oh yeah, you speak English and you're like me. Great. Come on, come on into my racist country. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I'm like funny foreign as opposed to like evil foreign, I guess. I think it's also just like, they don't see you in whatever in their mind is a threat, right? Like to, I don't know. It makes no sense logically, but.

Yeah, it does if you understand it through a lens of race. Yes. Yeah. But I mean, their perspective makes no sense to me. No. Yeah. Same people who are barking about my fellow British people being a threat because they happen to be Muslim or brown or Sikh. People don't understand that Sikhs are not Muslims. So what we actually need is more legal pathways. He is correct that the visa system needs changing and we need ways that people can apply and come here safely and not have to be trafficked.

and not have to take massive risks, right? I wanted to see what Robert and Gare had asked about this mass deportation thing because I'd seen some people holding like mass deportations now sign at the RNC. And that's always a good sign that we're not sort of sidestepping into fascism. So let's hear what they said about that.

Is that plan kind of the mass detention and expulsion of undocumented migrants in the U.S., something that you think is a good idea, something you support as the Heritage Foundation? Yeah, generally. You know, obviously, you've got to look at implementation, right, and how you actually go about doing that in the right way. But...

Yeah, absolutely. Generally, yeah. And in what kind of time frame then? Because you just said this is something you have to like lay some groundwork on. And what time frame do you see it being feasible to carry out something like that? You know, I actually don't have a good answer for that because you have to first get your arms around

problem we don't even know how many people are here and you know you don't know where they come from and so it's not like you're just trying to deport them all just to mexico or something like that or southern border right like you you you have to first get your arms around the problem that's the first step and then i think from there you can actually under figure out what a reasonable time frame to do that is yeah so this is pretty fucked like

I should point out that the bill that Harris is proposing also proposes bumping people back to Mexico without the permission of Mexico. Right. I think so many of these policies just rely on Mexico being kind of a sponge for U.S. policy. Like, oh, they'll be fine. Like, God forbid, Mexico act as a sovereign country. Yeah. But this one seems different. Right. We have, I feel like, pretty good.

liberal support on abolish ICE under Trump that has completely evaporated under Biden. Because we solved racism and everything, right? Yeah, we fixed it. I'd forgotten about that. Yeah, that was the big crunch point. So what this means is taking people who have homes, lives, jobs and families and tearing them away from all of those things and sending them back to a country that they may not have been to in decades, that they may never have been to at all. A place where

they will undoubtedly face hardship, if not persecution. And certainly having lived here, having family here, will make them more likely to be ransomed or blackmailed or any of these things that happen to migrants when they're deported.

This is pretty bleak. I guess Harris hasn't advocated for this, which seeing the amount of people who fucking respond to my tweets with your going home too. A, I'm a US citizen and B, fuck you. They do that? Yeah, all the time. All the time. So stupid. Yeah, it's so funny. What a life. But yeah, it does seem that there is a wing of the Trump community

And I talked to Trump people. I was in the mountains this weekend. I was in Wyoming, I meant to sing about in the mountains. It was lovely. But I talked to some people. And I've never really come across anyone who can, in the flesh, maybe it's just because those people are so repulsive, I wouldn't talk to them. And it's probably quite likely. But advocated for this, right? This idea of mass deportations, like I said at the start of this show, how does a country get into full-on fascism? It is this.

It is my taxes and your taxes and some of the people who are listening taxes paying for people who have done nothing wrong, right? Who have lived here, who haven't done any crimes, who haven't hurt anyone to be at our expense, expelled from their home, detained in a private prison whose owner company makes massive donations to politicians.

And then flown across the world at our expense and then dumped into a country where they no longer belong. And that is as close as we get, I think, to like someone saying, like send them to the camps without saying that. Like, look, what was the Armenian genocide? The Armenian genocide was a mass deportation, right? Of people forced to walk across the desert and die on the way. Like, if you don't think this Trump shit is fascist, like, I really don't know what to do. It doesn't matter if it's fascist or not, right? Like, like,

This is the kind of rhetoric that's genocidal. I don't want to argue about Robert Preston and different definitions because that doesn't matter. This shit is... It is genocidal. It is dehumanizing migrants, which has been a project of the right-wing news media and increasingly the liberal news media and also the Democrat Party now, apparently, as well as the Republicans. But this is...

a market step to the right. Both of these are, right? The Overton window has moved so far right on migration in the last eight years that it's almost an unrecognizable place. And I guess what I want to end up by saying, what I always say about this is like,

The solution is not within the argument about who to vote for. Yeah. These are state policies. These are also often set by the legislature, as we saw when Biden's border bill failed. Right. And that would require a change in the legislature. There isn't a third party that can get a majority in the legislature right now. Yeah. So the way we fix this is ourselves. Right. Like.

We are seeing in the UK right now, like violence towards Muslim people, violence towards mosques, violence towards Islamic cultural centers and people stepping up to defend them. Like that is the only way we fix this is by stepping up and shouldering our responsibility to our communities. And people did that.

in the Trump administration to a degree. Like when I, in 2018, when I was down in, in Tijuana looking after folks who were part of the caravan that Trump made a big spectacle in the midterms, people showed up, churches showed up, a soccer mom showed up in minivans and, and helped us. And it was cool. The thing was fucked, but like, I respect that we look after those people. And that hasn't happened to as much of a degree since, right? And we've had more people than we had in 2018 in the open air detention sites. And,

And so like, I guess where I want to end is whoever wins, it's still our responsibility to take care of migrants because neither of them is going to. And we are continuing to,

with policies that will accelerate climate change. We are continuing with policies that will impoverish people all over the world and enrich people who are already super wealthy. And those things will continue to drive migration. We can't change those things in an actionable amount of time. But what we can do is try our best to meet people who come here with kindness. And so, yeah, I would urge you to do that, I guess. If you want to

Volunteer, you can email alottorolado.org. Border kindness, always need your money. Borderlands Relief Collective, always need your money. Those are always things that you can volunteer with or places you can save your money if you don't have your time. But

You can also organize in your own neighborhood. I'm speaking to some people today who are organizing in Maryland to take care of some Kurdish refugees who I know. And they weren't doing anything a year ago, right? They saw a need and they saw it being unmet and they realized that they could meet it. And they've made a huge difference to people's lives. So wherever you are, there are migrants in your community and you can do that too.

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Welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm Garrison Davis. And today I'm joined with authors Shane Burley and Ben Lorber, who have a new book out called Safety Through Solidarity, A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism. Shane reached out to me to talk about both the book and a variety of issues revolving around this topic. Thank you for coming on, both of you. Yeah, thanks for having us on. Yeah, thanks for having us.

So a few months ago, I put out an episode looking at a genuine uptick in anti-Semitic incidents that have happened in the United States and Europe. And sometimes it feels kind of like a tricky thing to talk about in some ways. It's like you're threading a very difficult needle. It's like you're caught between a rock and a hard place when discussing this topic. Because if you point to an actual trend that you're seeing showing a genuine spike in anti-Semitic incidents, there's like a subset of people who are very focused on the genocide in Gaza, very rightly so. But there's a lot of people who are very focused on the genocide in Gaza.

But they might push back since claims of anti-Semitism have been so conflated with any display of anti-Zionist politics. Or even worse, they might even question why are you talking about this when there's this other horrible thing going on, right? The actual genocide in Gaza. Now, I think meanwhile, if you avoid this as a lesser or a non-issue, if you don't talk about these things…

I would argue that actually strengthens the Zionist political project of tying Jewish safety solely to the state of Israel. And in some ways, I think ignoring this entire issue legitimizes a degree of criticisms that are being leveled against these massive protests and calls for a ceasefire and justice in Palestine. So I guess, how long have you been putting together this book? And how much did the war in Gaza this past year kind of change the scope of it as you were writing this?

Yeah. I think Ben and I started talking about this in 2019, beginning of 2020. It was a totally different context when we started working on the book.

And what we had been wanting was actually to sort of like drive a wedge into what you're talking about here, which is like that there isn't really good discourse on what anti-Semitism actually is that takes it seriously, that doesn't just kind of deflect and project onto anti-Zionism. Since Ben and I both come from like a history of organizing a Palestine solidarity movement, me with Students for Justice in Palestine on campus, Ben with Jewish Voice for Peace,

So we had seen basically firsthand how accusations of anti-Semitism basically leveled just constantly at Palestine Solidarity protesters. And then also in researching covering the far right, seeing obviously the growth of anti-Semitism and white nationalism, both in the US and internationally. And that only increased over time. So we wanted to work on something

They took that seriously and also sort of revived different traditions from the left that talk about anti-Semitism, whether it's anti-fascism or different kind of Marxist trends or the Jewish left, kind of bring it to one place, talk to other folks who are also taking it seriously and weave that together.

All of that is different. And before October 7th, because we were turning in the draft of our book like a matter of days after October 7th happened. Oh, wow. We went and talked to the publisher and we're like, well, the whole world just changed. I mean, we have to make changes about it. And so we've made some and basically addressed some questions there. And I think you can kind of see in the conclusion, like the very end of the book, kind of where we cut it off in November, December area.

and sort of acknowledge that things are different here. But I think that there's also bigger questions that we're talking about now that like we're doing interviews and writing articles and stuff afterwards about how that's changed. But a lot of this really, I think one thing that's important is that because we make very clear, like very incredibly clear, the anti-Zionism is not the same as anti-Semitism in a way the conversation is the same as before, because we're actually talking about where real anti-Semitism lives. And if you look at the way that discourse is now, particularly from groups like the Anti-Defamation League,

is it's basically built entirely around attacking college protests, attacking these mass anti-genocide demonstrations. And since that's so foundationally different than how we understand anti-Semitism, there's a way in which

like the conversation that has the book is sort of the same. And what do you think about this, Ben? Yeah, no, I mean, I agree that it really hasn't changed that much, even though it's just a lot bigger and more prominent. And the forces that are trying to attack the movement for justice in Palestine are stronger. They're trying to pass legislation, taking away our free speech rights. They're trying to restrict academic freedom. They're trying to go after the IRS status of

of justice organizations. So the stakes are really high, but I think the intervention that we've always been wanting to make is to really put the conversation back where it belongs, like on the rise of the far right, on the rise of white Christian nationalism, right? Antisemitism is part of

the right-wing worldview. It's just like the other systems of oppression, like anti-Blackness, anti-LGBTQ bigotry, Islamophobia, anti-integrity, xenophobia. Anti-Semitism is deeply connected, right? These George Soros

Conspiracies are being used by authoritarian leaders like Donald Trump and J.B. Vance and the rest of them to build up the MAGA base and to attack the foundations of our multiracial democracy. And we've seen it.

have deadly results for Jews and for other groups. White nationalist mass shooters who are motivated by anti-Semitic conspiracy theories have attacked synagogues, have attacked Latinx communities, have attacked Black communities. And so, yeah, anti-Semitism is part of that machinery of oppression. And so our book tries to reframe the conversation and give justice organizers a way to take back the conversation away from the right.

Would one of you be willing to give a workable definition of antisemitism? Because this is a word that's certainly been used a lot, but I think it's a word that signifies possibly a lot of different things. And I guess, what is the definition of antisemitism that you are using in your book? Yeah, so at root, we really see antisemitism as a form of conspiracy theory thinking that developed out of

of Christianity in Christian Europe, and that essentially sees Jews as the root cause of evil or the root cause of the world's problems kind of behind the scenes. It trades in images of a cabal lurking behind government or the media or the economy. And these conspiracy theories are core to an authoritarian and nationalist worldview that mobilize

Why do we have a harder time pinning down this term? I think people have a general idea and a pretty easy way to see what's Islamophobic, what's racist.

There's a few points in your book that you talk about, you know, instances of people maybe unintentionally spreading anti-Semitism, that if they were instead talking about like Muslims or like trans people or like black people, they would like easily identify as like, oh, this is very clearly a form of like xenophobia. This is very clearly like based on some kind of like conspiratorial discrimination. Yeah, I mean, I think there's a few reasons for this. And we talk about this in the book. I mean, one of them is that

The way that antisemitism has operated is generally a narrative about punching up against power versus a lot of narratives of oppression, which are basically about how various groups are subhuman or lesser than dominant population. That's slightly different with Jews, though that has been a component of some pieces of it.

historically is basically a narrative that people who feel disempowered then use to sort of like reclaim a sort of kind of populist energy. In a lot of ways, it ends up being a place where folks are directed by people in power to put their class anger away from the actual ruling class. So I think in a way when people see

anti-semitism they also recognize that there's legitimate class anger and legitimate like disenfranchisement and i think that's actually troubling to sort of people don't want to undermine that feeling always necessarily

I think there's also just the complexity of Jewish identity that's shifted over time, different populations, different communities, different politics, sometimes religious, sometimes more cultural, sometimes more ethnic. That can make it confusing. So it's hard to use one model for understanding oppression and then project it onto this. And so in a lot of ways, you kind of have to come at this question distinctly from kind of other forms of oppression. That's actually true of most forms of oppression. They have a lot of distinctiveness.

But I think you have to kind of learn about those contours. And then again, I think part of it is also that this hasn't been a big part of the left conversation in the last 20 or 30 years. It used to be more frequent that this would be like, you know, maybe trainings and left spaces where people would talk about that. It just simply hasn't been the case that much recently. And so I think there's actually a big lack of just understanding of how to notice those things and to talk about them. And then I think weaponization has become such, it's not just

such an overwhelming part of it. It's actually the dominating conversation on antisemitism, particularly in the US. So when you hear about antisemitism, it's overwhelmingly going to be directed by the center or the right or firm institutions directed at Palestine solidarity movements. And again, people get hard and skinned to that because they don't want to like give an inch on those sorts of things. And I totally understand why. And so I think that also has created that boundary of where examination would normally take place. It is interesting looking at like

how much the right wing has been able to weaponize claims of anti-Semitism against the left. I think the term that you use in the book is selective outrage on anti-Semitism. Because, I mean, I was just at the RNC and you're hearing Marjorie Taylor Greene talk about how there's like anti-Semitic protests happening around the country. And you're like, wait a minute.

You're the Jewish space laser person. What are you talking about? And I think it was DeSantis who just called all university protesters Hamas. Right. Not saying that they're like Hamas, but just literally saying like these people are like are Hamas. Like Hamas took over university protests. Right.

Meanwhile, you would be hard-pressed to find anybody on this camp talking about the strong degree, especially considering DeSantis, the strong degree of anti-Semitic people either involved in their own campaigns or their actual supporters. It was just a year ago where DeSantis' campaign staff released a video saying,

of him with the sonnet rat. It's like, come on, buddy. So it is interesting how they've been able to try to weaponize those claims while completely ignoring the structural anti-Semitism baked into this new wave of nationalist politics that we're seeing in the United States. Yeah, no, totally. The example of Marjorie Taylor Greene is so striking. I mean, she, I believe in the same day once,

She called the protesters on college campuses of anti-Semitic. And then she said that they were funded by George Soros, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And she's using them both for the same purpose. And it's not only DeSantis and the right. I mean, Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the EDL, I remember like a few months ago,

said that students on college campuses were Iranian proxies. And when you use that language, you're basically authorizing military counterinsurgency against protesters. It really puts Jews in danger, not to mention Palestinians, Muslims, basically all groups, right? Because Sharia

Sure, there's occasionally a stray anti-Semitic comment that shows up at protests because anti-Semitism is part of our world. There's anti-Blackness, injustice movements, anti-LGBTQB history, and anti-Semitism, sure. But that's no comparison to when you have like Elon Musk, the richest person in the world, one of the most powerful people in the world, saying that Jews are engaged in hatred against whites, right? There's no comparison in terms of power and threat level. So it's really making Jews less safe.

Yeah, and we also talk about the fact that because anti-Semitic conspiracy theories are such a foundational part of the right's form of populism, it's sort of how they explain kind of class anger and energy from the base, that there's really no way to detach it. And so it ends up being this foundational piece that even when they talk about Israel consistently...

The way that they've built a connection with their base is by trumping up George Soros or Rothschild's conspiracy theories or basically presenting kind of us and them populist narrative around theories about globalists and things like that. So there's really no comparison that we're talking about antisemitism when it shows up on the left versus the really deeply inlaid way that it exists on the right.

And like Ben was saying, right now we have a situation where the right is overwhelmingly united in support of Israel and using that as their evidence of support for Jews and then pushing great replacement theory claims, which are inherently anti-Semitic on the one hand, or really kind of mobilizing Jews in their rhetoric for their own kind of geopolitical aims, which again, is not based out of like a deeply held love for Jews. It's either built on sort of a

Christian Zionist eschatology or just simply opportunistic use of this minority group to sort of push their other political values, which itself is kind of a deeply held anti-Semitic way of treating the Jewish community. And so when we're looking at this, we can't let the rhetoric that's become the dominate actually stand for how we understand anti-Semitism because it's been so politically motivated. Yeah. And we...

As a researcher, it has been quite frustrating because I've used to, you know, a lot of people used to be able to rely on some degree on like data aggregates like the ADL and putting together like lists of incidents, like maps. And as I was putting together my piece looking at this uptick in anti-Semitism a few months ago, I was, you know, looking through this ADL map.

And the amount of, like, equivocation between just a standard pro-Palestine protest, protests that I was present at, and I was like, this was a Jewish-led protest, and having that be equivocated with acts of, like, actual, like, neo-Nazi terrorism, as well as acts of, like, genuine anti-Semitism from people on the left. Basically, it's resulting in, like, data poisoning.

which makes it really hard to actually unpack some of these larger issues that are facing both Jewish people, people who are very concerned about Palestine, and people who take the threat of far-right nationalism quite seriously. Yeah, I went through all of the ADL's 2023 anti-Semitism data in this project with Jewish Currents, and the reality is that the standard they use on left-oriented Palestine protests is...

is to have almost any measure of support for Palestinians or any kind of global call for justice in Palestine that is de facto anti-Semitism. And like you said, it then overwhelms the data. It sort of shuts out other things. And the way that they even

set up the reporting system just privileges those kind of protests. So people, it teaches, for example, they'll partner with other organizations and show people how to report. And so they'll end up mass reporting these protest events and then under-reporting white nationalist incidents or like violent incidents. So what you end up seeing in their data is that they've actually undercoded white nationalist events because of the way that they kind of set up the data. And they don't really track things like

housing discrimination, workplace discrimination against Jews, those kind of things really don't fit into their model. So what you end up with is this kind of map that just privileges people saying "from the river to the sea" as like this inherently anti-Semitic meme, and then undercounts like what often Jews will report as what makes them feeling unsafe, you know, comments at work or actual pressures when buying homes, things like that, like that doesn't really show up.

you'd experience as a jews in prison those don't show up so you end up with this really skewed image of what it is where you assume that the left is overwhelmingly the responsible party and then it actually invisibilizes a pretty growing force on the right and even institutionally just like in structures of kind of like uh american culture

So it's really hard then to say, well, how do I know what's actually happening here? The ADL is the largest organization. Every organization then uses their data. Where am I going? It leads you in a really big kind of a gap in how to understand what's happening. So we can look at pretty clear evidence that there's a rise in anti-Semitism by looking at things like street attacks or by looking at the rhetoric on the right. But it's hard to get a clear picture of it because every organization is oriented looking at the left.

Like, I was just going to say, like, this goes way back to the ADL. Like, you know, in our book, we talk about how even in the 1970s and the 80s, the ADL was, like, spying on left-wing activists as part of their pivot towards seeing the most important side of anti-Semitism on what they call the radical left, right? In the 1970s, as global criticism of Israel's occupation mounted after the 1967 Six-Day War, Group 60 ADL, like, really pivoted

further from whatever original mission they may have had about like genuinely countering bigotry to really becoming like Israel defense organizations. And so in the 70s and 80s, like you saw them spying on anti-apartheid activists. You saw them attacking Arab American, you know, professors at universities. You saw them spying on ACTA, even left-wing Jewish groups like New Jewish Agenda, you know. And so it's not only Jonathan Greenblatt. It's not only since October 7th.

EDL has been playing this role for a long time, along with a whole lot of Christian Zionists and both sides of the U.S. political establishment. And yeah, like we were saying, the stakes are extremely high. The right and the center are trying to legislate their definition of anti-Semitism to destroy free speech and to protect Israel's genocide. So the stakes are very high about this right now.

I think one of the most troubling notions about how there's groups like the ADL and others that are kind of, like you said, lobbying for legislation and trying to encourage extreme crackdowns on human rights protests and anti-genocide protests

is that this also materially harms a whole bunch of Jewish people who are involved in these protests and in organizing. You're trying to get the FBI to investigate Jewish people who are protesting against a genocide. And we saw this with the campus university protests. We saw this, you know, especially at Columbia. A lot of these kids are Jewish people who are heavily involved in these protests.

And in calls to do a very extreme crackdown and investigations, it's hard to see how that's not just like,

calling for for our government to like further further oppress these Jewish people who don't like agree with one side's opinion on something. Yeah, yeah, you see it, you know in the most kind of ironic, you know twist of history in Germany where you know the state those once a Nazi state is enforcing some of the most brutal crackdowns on the past on solidarity speech

And Jews are disproportionately represented among the crackdown there. And so you have, you know, German police pulling people with kippahs and arresting them, you know, shutting down events with Jewish speakers. Right. So it's it's really like literally policing Jewish thought. Right. We know there's over a century of Jewish opposition to Zionism.

and Jewish solidarity with Palestinians from the very beginnings of the Zionist movement, which was originally a Christian movement in Christian era, by the way, you know, and we've always had long traditions of Jews who have resisted it. And so when the state is legislating saying only like a certain expression of Jewish identity is valid, that's also an antisemitism, right? Like,

And we see it not only from Trump, right? You know, Trump will always say, oh, Jews who are Democrats, Jews who are quote-unquote disloyal to Israel are problematic. You also see it from Biden, who says, you know, without Israel, there's not a Jew in the world who's safe, right? So I think, you know, Jews who dissent on Israel are rapidly becoming enemies, in a way, of the right, you know, and of forces aligned with the right. And I think that's an aspect of anti-Semitism that's not talked about enough today.

Yeah, and there's a lot of examples of this too. During the Labor Party controversy around Corbyn and anti-Semitism, it was Jewish members who were overwhelmingly expelled from the party. I think it's almost like a dozen times more likely to face kind of consequences there, right? So like those ended up being the centerpiece of it.

But I think even when you broaden out, this ends up being the case, and we kind of talk about this as like a good Jew, bad Jew distinction, where anti-Semitism ends up being mobilized against whatever kind of the culture decides is a bad Jew, or whatever the organization decides is the bad version of a Jew, the kind of Jew that they don't want to actually deal with.

And this happens in this pro-Israel consensus whereby Likud, Netanyahu, basically the far-right coalition running Israel right now, builds alliances that they need around the world with far-right parties in Hungary, in South Asia, India, with Hindu nationalists and with other places. And then those movements are pretty explicitly anti-Semitic, therefore making Jews in various countries around the diaspora less and less safe.

Right? And so this sort of model of making Israel the bottom line on defending against anti-Semitism is one that strengthened the right, helped to build up Christian nationalism domestically, and then that creates this kind of general culture of unsafety for Jews, where the only Jewish voices that are then held up are the ones that justify Christian nationalism on the one hand, like you'll see at the National Conservatism Conference.

or ones who are so aggressively pro-Israel that they're totally willing to partner with Christian Zionist groups or the far-right wing of the Republican Party or national conservative parties in Europe. And so this ends up as a situation where an increasing number of Jews, particularly in the U.S., or Jews around the left, which again is still disproportionately Jewish, feel increasingly targeted by the political consensus. And at the same time, this pro-Israel rhetoric ends up being the de facto measure by which anyone's kind of set to.

Yeah, I did like there was this part in the book where you were talking about the good Jew, bad Jew binary, specifically on the left, where there's like a minority of Jews who identify as anti or non-Zionist who are very like celebrated. Sometimes maybe even in like a tokenizing kind of way, while the rest of Jewish people who do not identify as such are belittled as unworthy or like untrustworthy or their opinions are dismissed or

or seen as morally compromised on an inherent level. And this can also be coupled with this assumption that every Jew is a secret Zionist until proven otherwise, and you have to get every new Jewish person you meet to prove to you that they're not secretly a Zionist, which is very anti-Semitic.

And we also do have this good Jew, bad Jew binary mirrored in like an inverted form on the right with Zionist Jews, you know, being seen as the good ones and anti-Zionist Jews have their like Jewishness questioned or are seen as like untrustworthy or inherently evil.

And I do believe it is worth discussing kind of the flip side of this. And I think avoiding talking about actual antisemitism on the left, I think only serves to harm all of us.

Because it is something that I think is happening and I think should be talked about even if it makes people uncomfortable. And I think it is a mistake to assume that just because you're on the left that you're somehow immune to anti-Semitic thinking, whether purposeful or not. Like both of you have mentioned, we live in a society that has a

great degree of structural anti-Semitism. And a lot of these people, I think, who might be attending some of these protests or might just be posting online, who knows, might not even be intentionally spreading anti-Semitism, right? But in action, that's kind of what they're invoking through like ideas of like, you know, the Zionist cabal that secretly controls all of the media, all of the government, you know, those types of things. We're starting to like invoke these like larger secretive organizations that are pre-planning this whole thing.

And just to some degree, from a lot of the discourse that you see,

I feel like some people think they can just like control F Jews to Zionists. And like, if you're able to control F Jews to Zionists and the sentence still works, that means that you're doing it wrong. That means that you're, you're probably approaching this from a problematic standpoint. And there's a whole bunch of aspects about, about this sort of thing that you do talk about in the book, like, you know, including identifying Judaism with Zionism and how that also only hurts all of us.

including this like weird uptick in like Jewish race science that you're starting to see more and more of claiming that like all modern Jewish people only come from Europe and

And it's like, there's just a whole bunch of this kind of stuff that we're all kind of pushing to the side. But I do believe it is like worth talking about in some degree, because this is going to not only harm people who are calling for an end to the genocide in Gaza. I think it does like strengthen this notion that a lot of the Zionist project is built on, which is saying that like we need Israel as a way to like secure safety for Jewish people around the world.

Yeah, I think we talk about this, you know, we have a couple chapters that talk kind of explicitly about this at different points in history. But I think there's a tendency, and I kind of get where this comes from, to basically see any ally or any kind of voice in support of a movement as like a partner, particularly when you're trying to build like mass support against something that basically has kind of mass opposition on the other side, like liberating Palestine.

But what you see oftentimes when you see a movement grow really dramatically, really quickly, is that there's just not a kind of common baseline understanding always of that. And conspiracy theories are a great way to fill the gap on that. And that's true of really any movement. It's just that in particular in this case,

We have this long history of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Jewish power in particular, and then we're talking about sort of like powerful political actors on the other. And so making clear distinctions is just not there necessarily. So, you know, we talked with lots of folks that have been sort of litmus tested when entering kind of left spaces of Zionism. I talked to folks where other organizers asked to see their passport before they're allowed to come to meetings. It's crazy.

It's wild. And you think in most of the cases, people would kind of identify that as being kind of wild. We make a lot of distinctions. We talk about like the sort of difference between talking about a Israel lobby organization like AIPAC and its power or kind of a vague, diffuse Israel lobby that controls Western politics, that kind of thing. Like a parenthesis, parenthesis, parenthesis Israel lobby.

Exactly, exactly. And instead talk about, like, why would we understand Israel as part of kind of a Western imperial project rather than the flip side, this kind of small country controlling Western foreign policy, that kind of thing. And make a lot of those clear distinctions. And again, I think it's been sort of suggested, like, these ideas, anti-Semitic ideas, are a part of the culture. And, you know, I've been around the left long enough to see, like,

virulent transphobic ideas show up to see like queer phobic ideas in general be very very present there's no reason to believe that anti-semitism wouldn't show up here either where folks are sort of like consumed by anger what people are looking for clear answers what people are trying to identify that

And I think the easy answer is often to paper over it. And I think what we talk about here is that that exactly is what sort of pro-Israel voices want in this case, is to know that the left isn't going to deal with it. And so the alternative to that is to both create a sense of how would we confront

anti-Semitic institutions and where structural anti-Semitism comes from. And then also, how do we deal with that internally? And we talk with a bunch of social movements that have done that, right? Anti-fascists are actually pretty used to talking about anti-Semitism when it shows up on the left. That's pretty common. The Jewish left has talked about this historically. There's other voices. So bringing that back and sort of making that a safe place to confront and then figure out then

where is it like, you know, just a bad idea that you deal with and you talk about, you have like education and where do you draw lines where like, you know, this is now not a person that's not allowed in, or these are our voices that we can't partner with that kind of thing. I think that's something people work out on the ground. And you make a really good comparison in the book about how like anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, you know,

inhibit a actual understanding of the mechanisms of capital. It makes you unable to actually analyze how capitalism operates. And similarly, having an anti-Semitic conspiratorial view of anti-Zionism, that also will mask the root cause of Palestinian oppression by distracting from the very real geopolitical mechanisms that have caused this situation to take place

And distracting from that with these tales of, you describe it as innate Jewish wickedness or a global Zionist power. And I think that's a really good understanding because people often, I think, have a general idea that, yeah, anti-Semitism is in a lot of ways used as a way to

not fully confront like the mechanisms of capitalism and realizing how, you know, it's kind of, it's kind of like a similar situation with Palestine is a way for people to like understand that a little bit easier. Yeah. And to like reiterate the point about how, you know, you're not immune to antisemitism just because you're on the left, right? Something else you also bring up in the book is like Marxist-Leninism has a very mixed history.

history with their relationship to antisemitism. And I think you do see this with the degree of the discourse on this issue. If you compare anarchist viewpoints on statism and anti-Zionism to a whole bunch of Marxist-Leninists talking about this issue, I do believe there is generally maybe more antisemitic undertones among some of the more statist communists

And I think you talk about like the Soviet Union's own oppression of Jewish people and kind of the continued pogroms that happened even after the end of World War II. Yeah, I'd say like in the history of the 19th and the 20th century left, I think the record of both camps has been fairly mixed. I mean, I think it was anarchists like, you know, Bakunin, who maybe like

Sure, sure, totally. And, you know, like, I guess I also have to say, you know, with the 1917 October Revolution, that was, like, probably one of the first times that a left-led society did pass, you know, laws outlawing anti-Semitism. And then, like, they did, you know, defeat the Nazis. So I have to give them some credit where it's due. But yes, there's also, like, a very mixed, you know, record, especially in the 30s and the 40s and beyond. And certainly, yeah, today,

I would completely agree with you that like the more statist camps on the left are the most kind of aligned with conspiratorial thinking, with campism. And yeah, I really liked the way that you broke down just how these conspiracy theories can distract us from the root causes of power. And that's really, I think,

where if you want to develop a structural understanding of antisemitism and how it connects to capitalism and all the other systems of oppression, that's where you got to go, right? Seeing how, especially in times of crisis and mass discontent, like today with the rise of nationalism, with widespread alienation, that's when antisemitism really rises and is mobilized by authoritarian and nationalist leaders

When there's millions of people who are fed up that they don't have a job, they don't have any savings, they know the media is lying to them, they know that politicians don't represent them, that's when these conspiracy theories really take root on the right and on the left, and that's why you have

you know, Trump and Steve Bannon and the rest of them, you know, saying, oh, go look at the globalists, go look at George Soros, go look at cultural Marxists, right? And I think the more that, you know, the left can advance our own understanding of why the world is so fucked up and how to make it better, then we can really undercut the root causes of anti-Semitism and move more people into our coalitions. So yeah, that's really key, I think.

I have two examples I like to kind of bring up as ways to like springboard discussions on like how we can actually like

handle this going forward, whether that be if you hear someone say something at a protest that makes you think, eh, that's a little questionable, or as ways to actually just continue your own active participation in calls for ceasefire and ending the genocide in Palestine and whatever justice in Palestine might look like. So a few months ago, I was at the Emory University campus occupation, and

Maybe like a week in or so, enemy of the pod, Jackson Hinkle, showed up in person along with Haas and a few of those kind of like cronies, right? These are people who are like conservative communists, mega communists. They're basically like Duganists or like third positionists. And they basically become influencers that monetize the genocide in Gaza for their own like personal political profile.

So this guy showed up one night and no one really knew what exactly to do. Like people knew who he was. There were people talking with organizers and like organizers tried to talk with him and be like, hey, can you like not be here? And he's like, well, no, I want to be here because blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And, you know, certain people would try to get into like political arguments with him, which I think is completely useless. And it was it was kind of a weird situation.

And then we learned that he was slated to speak at an event the next day. Now, it's unclear if he was kind of hijacking this event or if he was actually invited to speak. But regardless, he was going to show up and make some kind of speech at an event later that next day. So some people put together this flyer kind of going through Hinkle's politics, his history of anti-Semitism, rabid queer phobia, racism, all these things that explain kind of who he actually is as a person.

And these flyers were distributed that morning, like before he was slated to speak around the venue.

As he went up on stage, a decent number of people in the audience who had these flyers protested. They'd be like, no, you can't be here. He was escorted out of the building, and then he was escorted off of campus. I think this was a very effective way of handling a situation like this. It didn't give him an opportunity for extra clicks. It wasn't a super volatile way to handle this. It was very simple. It was kind of elegant. There was just no way for him to really...

weaponize this effectively. So we have something like that as a way to like, you know, clamp down on people who are either disingenuous or just actually anti-Semitic who are trying to like infiltrate or take over in some degree this kind of general call to stop the genocide in Gaza. Meanwhile, a few weeks ago, there were protests in D.C. as Netanyahu was speaking to Congress.

And there was this video going around of people, like, graffitiing the fake Liberty Bell with, like, just pro-Palestine slogans and stuff. And, like, everyone was freaking out about this. Not everybody. You know, a certain section of political people were freaking out about this. A whole bunch of other people were like, okay, well, it's graffiti on a fake bell. Who cares?

But I actually watched that whole video, and after they look at the Liberty Bell, it pans over to this other monument nearby, where in big red lettering is written, Hamas is coming. And I see this as a pretty bad way to handle a situation like this. Because from what I can tell here, all that matters is just being edgy and freaking out libs. And it kind of destroys...

and the ability to cultivate forward momentum. It's like they're doing it just so that Democrats will be pressured into condemning it to reinforce their own hopelessness, performative spiral of doing nothing but edgy graffiti as political praxis. And I see this as kind of a general pattern of people trying to establish themselves

as like the most radical and using that as a weapon against anyone else. And it's just like a form of political posturing. It's hardly any different from posting a black square on Instagram. They don't want any actual movement or any actual change. They want to be the coolest, most correct people as the world ends. It's kind of like a cowardly way out. Because as you point out in the book, it's kind of hell to actually have to deal with and work with people who have some degree of like morally compromised politics.

And that actually requires like caring about the ends, but it's the means that make you look cool. Things like this are kind of bound to happen at any kind of protest that has more than like, you know, 50 people, right? There's going to be someone who does something that the main protest is not aligned with. And on that note, like,

What advice would you have to people who are attending these protests and you see someone who maybe does something that's a little bit questionable, whether that be, you know, like harassing just a random, like visibly Jewish person or, you know, writing graffiti on a synagogue, right? These types of things that are like really not helpful and actually kind of do display a degree of maybe like coded anti-Semitic motivation.

Yeah. So I think the spray painting of Hamas on the statue, I think it's an interesting example because that was just brandished all over right wing media. You know, Tablet Magazine did an article about how these folks should be deported. It was all over Instagram. It was like a trending thing on Instagram.

And it did very little, like, protest-wise, right? And actually, at that same demonstration, there was a number of rabbis, particularly kind of like movement elder rabbis, Linda Holtzman, other folks that were arrested by cops pretty brutally and then detained, right? So there actually was police attacking like a Jewish contingent of like religious figures. Totally. I think...

Also, there's been a number of examples, I think, where folks really just aren't prepared for something. And I think this is actually sort of a long conversation people should have on the left. I remember years ago, I was with a group

that created sort of like an accountability document. And the idea was, is that if something happens in an organization, it often just destroys the organization. If there's interpersonal issues, if there's like interpersonal trauma or assault, things like that. And so getting out in front of it, just like having a sense of like how you want to deal with things and like having consensus amongst folks of like, this is like appropriate behavior. This is how we want to handle stuff. That's always a strong thing to do.

But at the George, I think it was the George Washington University campus at the end of April, Patrick Casey, who's formerly of Identity Europa and the American identity movement, showed up at the encampment and wanted to talk to people, wanted to ask them questions and that kind of thing. And people were totally obliged to him. They were in photos with him, let him take video. That's because they didn't know who he was. Yeah. Right.

In reality, he didn't actually find anyone that was going to basically support his vision. He stopped people and asked, "Will you allow right-wing anti-Zionists here?" They basically said no. He did find one person with a hat that said "Israel did 9/11," who then told him that the Jews rejected Christ, but he was also kind of on the edges of the encampment.

Sure. The reality is what happened was a white nationalist came into an encampment and took photos of Jews and posted them on a white nationalist website. That's what happened. So there actually was anti-Semitism. It affected the Jews at the encampment. But no one knew who it was. And I think the flip side of that is having partners with groups that actually do know who Patrick Casey is and be able to say, oh, that guy is not here. It's not legitimate. I think with someone like Hinkle, MAGA communists, that's really confusing to people. I mean, that's why he does it. Like it's

a duganist and kind of gray zone types and this kind of version of authoritarian kind of like right leading right coded so-called communists

It's there literally to confuse people and to bridge the gaps between the right and the left. And so, again, building that base of people, talking to them, having internal trainings about how this stuff works and what these groups are, I think that's always going to be a good thing. We talked with one organizer who had an organization that had put together a training for other groups on anti-Semitism and invited all these groups to come and wanted to get feedback on the training. So they

They did the training and everyone kind of like thanked them and then went on to ask them questions. And the questions were exceedingly anti-Semitic. It was things like, well, how do you talk about the New York housing market when clearly Jews control that? No, no. And these were major, major organizations.

And so basically they had like a choice, like, are we going to deal with this here? Are we going to cut these relationships? And they basically were like, okay, let's talk about this. Let's deal with it. Yeah. Yeah. And it moved the organizations huge. Like they were like, we don't want to make these kinds of decisions. We want to realize where we made mistakes. That's not true of everyone. Do not be polyamorous about it and assume it's always going to go over well. But I think we have to actually attempt to make those changes. And the reason is, is that the left and building kind of left social movements build on solidarity and equality.

That's the only option we have to do something about anti-Semitism. The right has never made Jews safer. We have right now a system where Israeli nationalism is supposed to be the primary vessel for Jewish safety. I don't know about you, but when I look at Israel, I don't think to myself, what a tremendously bunch of safe Jews.

Like this, we have a situation that I don't think the political solutions actually offer Jewish safety and instead just create like more and more social division and more and more social hierarchy. So we have to kind of look at the left and how to build a left that can confront anti-Semitism. And that is really the only option we're being given.

Yeah, I think avoiding this whole issue out of fear is that it somehow takes away from other bad things that are happening in the world. Somehow it takes away from the genocide in Gaza. I think it's so misplaced thinking because I view this as all part of the same struggle and actual active efforts to combat any degree of anti-Semitism that is witnessed, I think,

will serve to only like strengthen the, a general like overall united call to stop what's going on. And I think like people have this like inclination that maybe we shouldn't talk about it. Maybe we should just like try to ignore it because it's uncomfortable or it might like hurt the cause. And I,

think that's just absolutely reversed. I think, like you said, like making inroads with like anti-fascist researchers to help like identify, you know, when these things are happening, who bad actors might be, you know, people that might try to Trojan horse certain issues to kind of alter a popular movement is all great ways to start. Ben, do you have any other kind of thoughts on how to handle this like unique political moment?

Yeah, no, I mean, I've been around Palestine solidarity movements for like, you know, over a decade. I remember like a decade ago, I was at a rally and, you know, most of the signage there was like really inspiring and awesome. But at one point I saw like a sign that showed like kind of like a hook nose Israeli soldier who was like feasting on children's blood. And it was like, okay, this is definitely, you know,

Like, there's some anti-Semitism here. And I actually, like, went up and, like, talked to the person. And they were, like, really nice. And, you know, I explained to them, like, you know, there's a thing called the Blood Bible, which is an anti-Semitic myth that's harmed Jews for centuries. That Jews, like, feast on Christian children's blood. And that, like, it seems like that image of the Israeli soldier is, like...

seems to like have a big nose and that's kind of like a stereotype from Europe. And they were like, oh, I didn't really like know these things. They took the sign down and left feeling like it was a good conversation. And so like things like that, I think there's some understandable fear like among Jewish people that you might see signs like this at rallies. And when you do, I think just like trying to have conversations, it doesn't always go well, but often it does. And I just think like, you know, for any marginalized group,

group or form of oppression, the more the people just deepen their understanding of like what antisemitism is, how it shows up, what some of these tropes are, like the more that it becomes normalized, the more that it will become second nature to people and people won't be as afraid to talk about it. There won't be this kind of like weird silence around it. Like

And there's some anti-Semitism in that silence, to be clear. Like, for any kind of oppression, if you thought, oh, people don't want to talk about, like, anti-Black racism in the movement, that itself is, like, is part of anti-Blackness. Right? So we should be clear. And I also think, like you're saying, the fact that

So often, like, accusations of anti-Semitism are weaponized against our movements, makes people not want to talk about it, makes people think, oh, like, this is just a right-wing issue, or if we talk about it, we're just lending credence to the right. But I think that's changing, especially with the growth of the Jewish left and with an understanding that anti-Semitism is real and needs to be tackled. And so I think, yeah, the more the things keep changing, this conversation will...

will be a lot easier. Yeah. Is there any other thing that you would like to mention kind of near the end of this piece? You know, anything on like the Jewish left, any other kind of closing thoughts that didn't get brought up? Oh, the only thing was I can say we spent a lot of time

talking about the stake that non-Jewish folks have in this. And I think there's a couple of things that are worth considering, like we've sort of talked about. You know, anti-Semitism, one of the key features of anti-Semitism is that it's not true. Like, it's a bad actual analysis about power, state, empires, and capitalism work. So if that is sort of seeping in—and this is true of conspiracy theories broadly—

If that's seeping into politics, that's just a failure right there. And so it's really incumbent on people to sort of try and move past that and confront those things, because that's the only way that social movements can actually gain an efficacy. And the other thing is that they're directly tied to other forms of oppression. If you look at the all-out assault on trans healthcare and trans institutions right now, it's overwhelmingly using anti-Semitic conspiracy theories as sort of the scaffolding to hold it together.

Absolutely. And this has been historically true about anti-blackness in the US and other forms of oppression. And so these things are intertwined. So I think it's important just to acknowledge that like anti-Semitism is not like just a Jewish problem or affecting Jewish people. It's really baked into these kind of interlocking systems of oppression. So we should see it

as a way of confronting other things as well. And to make that kind of give it value or value to confront on its own terms. Yeah. And I think this book came out really at a moment when like these conversations are needed more than ever. And also at a moment when the Jewish left is just growing by leaps and bounds. And I think to end on a hopeful note,

And that gives me a lot of hope, along with the growth of the left, you know, more broadly, right? Surging to the streets in support of Palestine. We're seeing like new generations and folks across all generations in Jewish communities who are building new ritual modalities, new modes of Jewish identity, new politics.

who are really questioning old ways of doing things and really building a Jewish future beyond nationalism and militarism and connecting our struggles with all other struggles as they've long been connected. You know, like the Jewish left has been around for a long time. And so, yeah, we're really living at a historic moment.

both around this issue and around all of our movements in general. So that gives me a lot of hope. Thank you both so much for coming on to talk about these not very fun topics. I spent two hours this morning reading through the book. It was very good. I strongly recommend people read it, especially considering everything that's happened like these past eight months. I think there's a lot of...

very good insights in there. Where can people find a copy of Safety Through Solidarity? I think you can pick it up anywhere. Appreciate the kind of words. Appreciate you having us on to talk about it. We've been directing folks to sort of like movement bookstores and we've been partnering with a bunch of them, you know, so I think like local rad bookstores are always a great place. We have to like

actively sustain those places and be a part of them so i think that's a great place to do it and also kind of requesting them at libraries sort of like pointing folks to both of those things so that's a great way to support the book great really appreciate you having us on garrison it's been a great conversation and we appreciate all the work you do so we're going to be connected all right thank you so much

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even more rewarding. How do you cash back? Learn more at chase.com slash freedom to be. Chase, make more of what's yours. Restrictions and limitations apply. Offers subject to change. Cards are issued by JPMorgan Chase Bank and a member FDIC. Welcome to Nick and Affin' Hero podcast. Once again, I have forgotten to write an intro for. I'm your host, Theo Wong, with these James. I'm here. It's great to be here. Intro on. Yeah, and this intro-less episode is, I think, the first episode that...

Well, Can I Promise is the first episode that was recorded after we learned that Tim Walls was going to be the vice presidential nominee defeating the sexual assault guy and then the other sexual assault guy who probably covered up a murder. Yeah, don't slack on the also covered up a murder there, Mia. Yeah, that was a truly impressive, truly impressive sort of set of candidates that party elite were choosing from. It's still somewhat surprising that they didn't like...

I mean, they will still fumble. We have months to go, but that's true. Yeah. I mean, to be fair, I think, oh, God, we figured out this guy covered up a murder is probably the kind of thing that like even the Dems like dog shit opposition research people were like, hmm, we shouldn't run that guy. Yeah. Yeah. They're tweeting about his murder cover up. Let's leave this one.

Yeah, that's Shapiro out of Pennsylvania, who's one of the other candidates, by the way. Yeah. Suck shit. But, you know, so the guy we ended up with is sort of folksy Midwestern. Actually, I think it was just a defensive coordinator or whatever, the defensive coach for his football team. He's a very sort of folksy guy. We're going to get more into him next week.

But the thing that I wanted to sort of start our discussion about the vice presidential candidates with is attempting to reconcile something that I've seen a lot of discussion about. And it's sort of, I don't know, kind of confusion to some extent about about how do you actually make sense of the sort of two halves of Tim Walz's record, right? Which on the one hand, he's signing a bunch of extremely progressive records.

sort of welfare legislation while being the governor of Minnesota, including things like universal free school lunch. I should, it was lunch or breakfast. I don't remember. I think it was both. It was both. It was both. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, on the one hand you have this sort of sparkling record. And then on the other hand you have, you know, him calling in the national guard and deploying it to suppress the uprising in 2020, which less we forget started in Minnesota. Yeah. That's where the third precinct burned. Yeah.

And also using the police to sort of like horribly brutalized protesters against line three, which is an oil pipeline through a bunch of indigenous land that,

Probably, I don't know, we're probably two years out from like an unbelievably horrific oil spill coming out of it that everyone's going to go, how can we possibly have predicted this? It only had spilled a million times before, et cetera, et cetera. And that walls like rammed through and had people who were resisting it like horribly beaten by cops. So how do you sort of reconcile these two halves of this guy's record?

And there's like a local politics explanation, which I see bandied about a lot, which is true to some extent. And that explanation is that he's not really a progressive and he's mostly kind of a moderate who's just going along with a fairly progressive Minnesota legislature as getting credit for just like signing bills. And that's kind of true. But it's also, I think, ultimately a cop out because we are on year about 140, right?

Of the welfare state. And this shit keeps happening every single time. And what's really sort of at stake here analytically is that the relationship between the welfare state and violence is significantly deeper than the record of one guy.

And so today what we're going to be doing is not really talking about Tim Wall so much. What we're going to be doing is we're going to be going back through some of the history of social democracy and trying to understand how it became entangled with the sort of use of force and with police violence. Because I think there's a story there that's been completely buried by the tidal wave of just like, I don't know, whatever Walls takes.

And, you know, I think presidential elections are something that has a tendency to just destroy everyone's analytical capacity for like two years. So let's resist that and go do something interesting. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So I think the place to start with this is this is a place that we start, I think,

Not infrequent amount on this show, or at least I do. And that's the sort of original debates from, you know, about the 1830s through roughly the 1870s, early 1880s when it changes, about what socialism was going to be. There's always been, to some extent, like a bunch of different kind of understandings of it, but...

Something that you'd call the sort of left wing of the Democrats, which is like everyone at that point, right? And the anarchists kind of agree about, and this is the thing that Marx agrees about with sort of the anarchists at the time, is that socialism is, it's the free association of producers, right? It is the working class abolishing itself, but then also like being the people who directly run the new society that's sort of brought about by this thing without sort of the state or sort of political mediation, et cetera, et cetera.

And even, you know, people like Engels, who are, like, arch-statists, right? Like, Engels, you know, uses a theoretical justification for, like, every time a socialist picks up a machine gun to shoot someone, and that socialist works for the state, like, that's Engels' justification for it. But even he's talking about how, like, one day the state will be, like, put on a shelf in a museum, and people will walk past and look at it, and then, like, walk by it, because it's, like, it's a tool of a by-be-gone era that nobody needs anymore. And in this period, it's very clear that

Socialism is workers directly controlling the music production and it's directly democratically managing their lives. This becomes less clear as the 1800s go on.

Something that David Graeber points out, and I think I've quoted this on the show before, but it's important here. While this is sort of going on, right, there's two kind of trends in the development of the state and the development of sort of socialist ideology. One is a move in the 1870s and 1880s. Socialists start watching states build railroads, and this drives them completely nuts, oblivious.

It obliterates their brains. It's like this and the post office just like absolutely nuke their brains. And they start going, okay, hold on. But what if instead of workers directly managing their affairs and having, you know, workers coordinating like the production of society, what if instead...

The state did that, and socialism was literally when the state did things. And this is something that, like, even Engels is, like, pretty hostile to in the sense that, like, he's a statist to some extent, but he also is very wary of doing things like calling state-owned enterprises socialism, right? Because, like, well, no, obviously that's not necessarily true because, like, you could just have capitalist state-owned enterprises, like, lots of places, including, importantly, sort of Bismarck's Germany in this period, which we will come back to in a second. Right.

Yeah, and lots of the places that people on Twitter think are socialist paradises today. Yeah, are just these SOE, like state-owned enterprise hellholes. We've talked about this extensively with China elsewhere. And this sort of like shifts the conception of what people think socialism is. And you get these more sort of reformist trends in sort of socialist circles. You get your Kotskys, you get your Bernsteins, people who think that like you don't need a revolution. You can sort of just like, you can vote your way into the state-owning property.

And that will somehow achieve socialism or you can sort of like stabilize capitalism and make it not bad anymore. Now, that's what's happening on the socialist side. So there's this sort of project of like autonomous workers control over everything, right? That had been the original socialist project is being eaten away on the one hand from its own parties, right?

But then on the other hand, as David Graeber points out, the capitalist class realizes that all of these sort of autonomous institutions that the working class is building, like your unions, your giant political parties have their own sort of welfare system. The state realizes that you can replicate these and use it as like a direct buy off to stop these people from revolting. I'm going to read a passage from David Graeber's The Utopia of Rules.

Audubon Bismarck's reaction to socialist electoral success in 1878 was twofold. On the one hand, ban the socialist party, trade unions, and leftist newspapers. On the other, while when this proved ineffective, socialist candidates continued to run and win as independents, to create a top-down alternative to the free schools, workers' associations, friendly societies, libraries, theaters, and the large process of building socialism from below.

This took the form of a program of social insurance for unemployment, health and disability, etc., etc., free education, pensions, and so forth. Much of it watered down versions of policies that had been part of the socialist platform, but in every case carefully purged of any democratic participatory element. In private, at least, he was utterly candid about describing these efforts to buy out working class loyalties to his conservative nationalist project.

When left-wing regimes later did take power, the template had already been established, and almost invariably, they took the same top-down approach, incorporating locally organized clinics, libraries, mutual banking initiatives, workers' education centers, and the like into the administrative structure of the state. So there's two interesting things here. One is that the development of the things that are going to become the body of welfare state

This is implemented not by, you know, all these sort of policies that we're talking about Walls doing now. These were originally implemented not by the left, but very deliberately by Otto von Bismarck, like the arch late 19th, early 20th century conservative, the guy who is literally responsible for the foundation of Germany, right? Like that's his project. He is the guy who creates the nation of Germany and thus will forever live in infamy as one of the most evil people in human history. The line directly from him to Hitler is incredibly straight, right?

But the second part of this is what social democratic politics turns into, right? Which is this effort to sort of centralize all of the sort of autonomous institutions that the working class had constructed and to centralize all of that activity into the state, right? You know, this is like having your sort of clinics be state-run, having your libraries be state-run, having your like mutual banking things, like all of these things that had been independent institutions are folded into the state project.

By folding these things into the state, Graeber's interested in the extent to which they become bureaucratized and the sort of democratic elements vanish entirely. I am less interested in that here, and I am more interested in the extent to which it ties all of these things to state violence.

Now, James, do you know what else is tied to state violence? That was a masterstroke, Mia. Did not have that one written down. Came up on the cuff. Absolutely fantastic. Please tell me, Mia, what is connected to state violence? It is the products and services that support this podcast.

We are back. So we've gotten into sort of how these things that used to be mutual aid, right? These are the sort of programs that were developed by working class institutions to support each other were sort of folded into the state. And now we have to get into the reverse of this process, which is how violence was folded into social democracy. In the 1800s, this is something I think is kind of well known among the extremely nerd left, but I don't know if it's very well known outside of that. But

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, everyone who is like a Marxist in any stripe is a social democrat. And this is true equally of reformists like Bernstein and also people like Lenin, right? Like the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks both are split from like the Social Democratic Labor Party. Is it Social Democratic Labor Party? I forget the actual name of the party they split from, but it was the Social Democratic Party of like Russia, right? Yeah.

This is the thing, like all of the communists and all the socialists like split from these sort of social democracy things, which means that inherently, and this is something that you can see reflected in the ways that they come to power and in the ways that they sort of govern. Leninist communism and social democracy are both just two variants of the same thing. And you can see this most clearly through the ways they come to power, the way they embark on this project of centralizing power, violence, production, and the organization of society into the state.

Both of them take power by machine gunning their enemies in the left with the newfound power of the state. Alongside the Russian Revolution, there is the German Revolution. And the German Revolution is defeated when the Social Democratic Party of Germany, which had been the party of angles, right? Like Marx writes stuff about their platform. This is the premier Social Democratic Party in the world, right?

They take power by stopping the revolution, slaughtering the communists, and using the sort of proto-fascist Freikorps to just kill them all. This is how Rosa Luxemburg is killed. So the first social democratic government to come to power in Europe since, I guess technically there was about two months in 1848 when there were social democrats in France. But that lasted a very, very brief amount of time.

So the first time they come to power is in Germany. And in Germany, they come to power in this bloodbath that sort of destroys the rest of this armed left and attempting to centralize politics and military power in the hands of the state. This is how they defeat the revolutionary movements. In Russia, basically the same process happens, right? There's the first revolution, which is the February Revolution, 1917. And

And then the Bolsheviks take power in the second revolution. And the moment the Bolsheviks take power, they spend basically the entire rest of the Russian revolution and the Russian civil war just straight up slaughtering every single other left-wing faction in the entirety of Russia, which ends in sort of the massacre. And beyond. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. They kill a lot of Ukrainian leftists. They are killing anarchists from like Azerbaijan to like fucking Spain. Make a prominent appearance in Spain, killing anarchists in May, 1937.

Yeah, in the sort of immediate Russian context, right, this is solidified by the massacre at Kronstadt, where the Bolsheviks seal their sort of opposition to any kind of like autonomous working class, right? For the Bolsheviks, the working class is going to be directly subordinated to the Bolshevik party and to that platform. And any deviation or any attempt to sort of like manage yourself like autonomously is just going to be stamped out, right? And Lenin's attempt to do this is going to be sort of

Like, followed by Stalin doing this even more. Yeah. And so what you have here, right, what collective ownership is in social democracy, and this is true of both the German social democrats, who are what we think of social democrats today, right? They're sort of like electoralists. They're like capitalists. And also the Bolsheviks.

What collective ownership is, is the state owns things. And if you try to do anything about this, they shoot you. So this is sort of the origin of like these two forms of social democracy. There's also sort of more liberal forms of this, right? Like FDR does not conceive of himself as a social Democrat. Like he thinks of himself as a liberal, but the American liberal tradition is a bizarre one. But, you know, we actually talked about this in my episode about the time that

Wizards of the Coast, the creators of Magic the Gathering, deployed the Pinkertons against a guy for revealing what was in a magic product too early. Right.

Amazing. I think it also has some roots, I think, in this kind of... I mean, the examples I'm most familiar with are British, post-1832 Reform Act, of this paternal state benevolence. They all lie in the same thing, which is state trying to buy off co-op resistance and doing so in a way that...

It's carrot and stick, I guess. Yeah. There's elements of this in Leninism too, right? Like Lenin's like great theoretical contribution to whatever is when Lenin talks about like trade union consciousness, people bring this up a lot because like, yeah, like there is obviously issues with just like all of your organizing being, you make a trade union and then your trade union becomes the AFL-CIO and tries to actually not even tries to successfully overthrows Allende and installs Pinochet, right? Like,

There's a thing there. But when Lenin is talking about trade union consciousness, the thing that Lenin believes is that they need middle class, petite bourgeois fucking theorists to come in and teach them what socialism is. And this is an explicit part of their theory, right? This is that same sort of paternalism that they have to be led. Even the sort of vanguard working class needs to be led by these theorists who, I don't know, emerged from Lenin's friend group in exile in Switzerland or whatever. Yeah.

And FDR's sort of policy works is, I think it's not really understood how similar FDR's stuff is to...

Like how the New Deal scene at the time, even by people like outside of the country, as compared to like the others from massive social upheavals that he placed as opposed to sort of Soviet communism or even like fascism. Like Nehru, the guy who was going to become like the founding prime minister of India, has this whole thing in like 1941 where he's looking at the New Deal and he's going, this is either going to produce communism or fascism. So like the New Deal is a fundamental rewriting of the American social contract.

And a big part of it is he's doing the same thing that the social Democrats are trying to do, which is he's trying to centralize everything into the state. He's trying to centralize partially this is welfare benefits, right? He's trying to centralize like unions very specifically into the state. And he's also trying to centralize violence into the state because before this,

The US, I mean, we've talked about sort of Blair Mountain on Behind the Bashes before, right? Like there are just open wars between the literally capitalist armies and sort of union armies. Armies formed by labor unions, not like the union army. I feel like I need to clarify this. Yeah, the great anti-capitalist of the union army.

And a big part of what FDR is like running on, like part of his platform is like, okay, we need to end this like era of gun thugs, right? Like we can't have these fucking like robber barons running around with their private armies killing people. And like, yeah, that's obviously good, right? But his solution to this is, again, we're going to centralize all of the violence into the police. And unfortunately for sort of the rest of us, right?

If you're going to maintain like a capitalist system, somebody has to be pulling the triggers. And that's now the police instead of these sort of like private armies. And the other part about this bargain is that the unions also have to basically disband their armies. Right. Because the miners are blurbing, right. They have like 17,000 guys. Like all of them have rifles. They will go out and they will fight. They have machine guns. Like they have cannons. Yeah.

And it's FDR who begins the gun control in the US because of the National Firearms Act of 1934. They talk a lot about prohibition era violence, but what happens at Blair Mountain is why you have the NFA.

Yeah. And so what you have, it's the same process, the process of sort of turning mutual aid into state programs, right? Walls is very explicitly doing this, right? I saw people talking about how like, oh, he's achieved the dream of the Black Panthers, like free breakfast program by like making it into the state. And it's like, no, you don't understand. The reason the Panthers were doing that was to build the roots of an autonomous society. The reason the state is doing that is so that you don't fucking revolt and you don't do 2020 again. Yeah, these are different things.

Yeah. And this is something that as the U.S. welfare state cycles through, you get various versions of it. There is another version of this that is the products and services that support this podcast by centralizing all of your money into their pockets and then using it to hire security guards. We're back. So the Great Society, which is Johnson's sort of like big, we're going to end poverty thing. You know, he's doing the Vietnam War at the same time. Yeah.

So, you know, there's this sort of domestic kind of returgency stuff and the centralization of state violence is now being projected out. And in the US, it's always happening, right? The US fundamentally is a project of colonial expansion going from fucking one coast to the other, killing everyone, your path and seizing their land. And the contradiction of this, right? The fact that like the people who...

nominally want sort of a welfare state also normally are like revolted at the fact that they're burning millions of people alive in like Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Like this contradiction is kind of what tears apart of social democratic politics. And what replaces it is, you know, like if social democracy is a carrot and a stick, right? Neoliberalism is just the stick.

It's just more prisons that hit you with the thing instead of this sort of like more genteel process of, well, we're still hitting you with the stick, but also here are these handouts if you don't like oppose us. Yeah. So we've talked about these examples. I wanted to kind of move into some more modern examples of this because I think I

Everything I've been saying is old, right? But this stuff is still happening today in the social democracies that exist, right? Like one of the biggest examples of this is there's two kinds of social democracies that people point to depending on where on the political spectrum they are. One is like the Nordic countries, right? Mm-hmm.

And this never worked on me because one of my foundational experiences, like as an activist, when I was like a little baby, 15 year old in 2013 was talking to someone who had a mounted Calvary charge done against them by the Swedish police because they were doing an anti-fascist action. And they got trampled by fucking horses because that's, that's what the state is. And yeah, so like, that's like kind of on the one hand, but the thing that we're seeing right now is that,

you know, the remains of the welfare state being paired with this incredible, like rabid anti-immigrant violence. Right. And this is the thing you see in places like France too, right? We still sort of have the welfare state. It's also this unbelievable violence against sort of nonwhite people and anyone who's trying to like enter the country. Yeah. I think it's, was it Sweden or was it Denmark that had these laws were like, they would like seize the property of any immigrant who like came into the country. Yeah.

Jesus. I don't remember that. I know more people who have migrated to Sweden. I think it might have been Denmark. I'm not familiar. Yeah. They're also part of the sort of broader like European border project, which is unbelievably violent. And you're getting this with walls too, right? He's signing on to sort of Kamala Harris's like fucking terrifying fascist border violence. And that's again, because like all of this project is tied in with state centralization. Well, okay. So what happens when you centralize a state? The answer is it starts enforcing its borders. Yeah.

Yeah, in order to sort of like create underclasses of incredibly dispossessed and incredibly battered and brutalized people who can be exploited for labor. Yeah, like people who are insecure with respect to the state, right? And so they can be exploited by the state or by capitalism that supports the state. Yeah, you know, obviously like the US is sort of one of the global pioneers, but like the Nordic social democracies are also really sort of part and parcel of the system. The other things I want to turn to here is

is Latin American social democracies. Because I talked about this at length in the Brazil episodes, right? Brazilian social democracy, Lula's like first term, right?

has simultaneously this massive sort of push in social spending and then also enormous like a budget increase for the military there's this incredible unbelievable spike in police violence like rate of police killings is way worse than the us yeah and this is true in like fucking all of these places right like this is surely how the coup worked in 2020 was because the bolivian government kept just like handing money to the police over and over again and the police like did a coup against them right this

This is also true in Venezuela, which has unbelievable rates of police killing, terrifying. Oh, yes. I was there after the revolution, but I saw some of this happening, right? The revolution going from spontaneity and workers' control and people's control to a degree to being corrupt, which happens in almost every revolution that we've seen, right? It begins with the people and then it becomes corrupted by the state.

it's wild to see like the equipment and weapons of their police on one hand and then the poverty of yeah folks that they are policing on the other and then this has also been omlo's thing in mexico right like even though he came in on the like hugs not bullets campaign which for some incomprehensible reasons you still see like the fucking washington post writing about omlo talking about how he was doing like hugs not bullets like he never he there was not a single day where he implemented that

shit she came in and immediately was like hey the army do you want control of even more of the country yeah like it was very funny when Amla came in right and he was doing it like hugs not bullets English translation and then simultaneously I was getting press releases being like we have deployed several thousand more troops to the Tijuana area come to the parade and I was like no look are they huggers

They sent in their tactical cutlass. Lula does this exact same thing in Haiti, where he goes to Haiti and he plays soccer with these kids and he says, we will show them another way. And then just like in the background are all the armored vehicles from the Brazilian occupation of Haiti. And it's just like, well, oh my God. They're showing him something. Yeah. And so the tie between this absorption of socialist politics into the state, you know, and this sort of centralization and increasing of state violence is something that continues to today. And, you know, we're now kind of in the last decade

Decades, probably too strong, but roughly decade where we're kind of seeing social Democrats like who want to break out of this in the form of the kind of like moderate abolitionists. So these are the people who are, you know, whose thing is like, OK, we're going to defund the police and we're going to like reallocate their resources to like funding welfare programs. And this is like obviously this would be good.

But if you know anything about what happened after 2020, none of this stuff ever happened, right? No one ever defunded the police, right? Like there was no sort of movement. We defunded the libraries. Yeah. But even on a fundamental level, like I don't believe that this can work.

And the reason I don't believe that this can work is because in order to have a state that functions, you need an apparatus of violence. It can inflict on its subjects. Oh, I'm going to turn here. Oh, this is a joke you're probably not going to get. Oh, no. I'm going to turn here to famed political philosopher Brennan Lee Mulligan. Quote,

Laws are threats made by the dominant socioeconomic ethnic group in a given nation. It's just a promise of violence that's enacted. The police are basically an occupying army. You know what I mean? I'm aware of this, dude. He plays Dungeons and Dragons on the internet. Occasionally he says something that's right. And the important thing about this is that without the threat of violence behind it,

Laws are just suggestions. You can't have a state without an apparatus of violence. You can't stay in power without one. And this has always been the sort of central contradiction of social democracy. In order for Walls to have his sort of pretty sparkling programs, he needs to have the cops to destroy you if you attempt to do anything different. And this is what 2020 was. 2020 was...

was the most serious uprising in the US, like the most serious challenge to the authority of the sort of draconically anti-black settler American state, right? And it was something that promised something different.

And even in, you know, and that meant that everyone, whether you were a fucking like hardline fascist or, you know, you were Tim Walls, right? Your one goal was to smash it and was to deploy state violence, the state violence you had in your hands, which in this case was a National Guard, was to send them in to make sure that these people never fucking burn another police station again. And that's what happened. Yeah, it's like.

Obviously, the ability to have... I've been thinking about this a lot because I've been writing a book and I'm really trying to get it fucking finished. So I've been writing it a lot. And when a conflict, be it one within a country or between countries, stops being between states or about what the state should do and starts being about whether the state should be

then we see the entire state system pivoting on all its suggested morals and just being like, "No, we cannot allow this to happen." I think we've seen that domestically to a degree in the US, but the state can't abolish itself. The state won't abolish itself. The sine qua non of the state is ability to lock you up, beat you up, or shoot you up if you do what they don't want.

that will always be the state doesn't matter if it's got like a hammer and sickle or like you based bashar al-assad or whatever like it the state will still come and kill you if you become a threat to it yeah and that's the solution to what hopefully will be the title of this episode why did tim waltz call the national guard and the answer is to make sure that you're never going to be free hey we'll be back monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe

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