Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 123
Episode Date: March 23, 2024All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file. You can now listen to all Cool Zone Media shows, 100% ad-free through the Cooler Zone Media subscription, available ...exclusively on Apple Podcasts. So, open your Apple Podcasts app, search for “Cooler Zone Media” and subscribe today! http://apple.co/coolerzone See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Get ready for anarchy in Atlanta.
This is an illegal protest.
You guys need to disperse or you will be arrested.
Anarchists start work.
They struck again this week.
Cops are approaching now.
Obviously got a flashbang.
This is It Could Happen Here.
I'm Garrison Davis.
For the past three years, a wide range of people in Atlanta, Georgia have been working
to prevent the construction of a now $110 million militarized police training facility
in the South River Forest in southeast Atlanta.
I've continuously covered the evolving struggle on It Could Happen Here for the past few years
now.
In this episode, I will attempt to summarize some of the actions from the past six months
and the wave of recent repression targeted against the movement.
I will also offer some analysis and critique on behalf of anonymous force defenders who
spoke with me in dedicated conversations.
After the last week of action in summer of 2023,
it was clear the movement needed a new way for people to engage in the struggle against Cop City
beyond the referendum and the occasional nighttime sabotage. Forest encampments were essentially
impossible, and the weeks of action seemed to expunge their usefulness. A small group of people began organizing
what would become known as Block Cop City. The idea was that on Monday, November
13th, a mass mobilization would descend upon the Cop City construction site in
an act of non-violent protest and perhaps plant tree saplings where the
forest once stood. This marks the first time that the framing of quote-unquote strategic nonviolence and
nonviolent direct action were embraced for a mass action like this, hoping that it may
attract NGOs and activist groups to co-sign onto the action.
Historically, throughout this struggle, such quote unquote nonviolent framing was at least
avoided if not explicitly rejected as a limiting restriction toward achieving measurable victories
against the Atlanta Police Foundation and Cop City contractors.
Throughout the end of summer and the start of fall, a speaking tour for Block Hop City
traveled to over 80 cities around the country to promote the action and recruit people to
travel to Atlanta come November.
Blockup City started as a very vertical top-down plan.
The central conceit was decided upon by a small number of individuals, many of whom
were not from Atlanta, and the finer details would be worked out in a series of public
meetings in the days before the action.
Whether or not local force defenders liked or disliked the proposal, Blockop City acted
as a gravity well, sucking nearly all of the energy, time, and attention into its orbit
for the entirety of fall in Atlanta.
Throughout the nationwide Blockop City Speaking Tour, a small subset of attendees voiced objections
and disagreements with the proposed strategy
and its use of time and resources.
Those opposed to Block Cop City thought the idea of a large public march to the worksite
was going to put people in unnecessary harm without doing much to achieve a measurable
blow against Cop City.
I'm going to quote from a report back that was published online shortly after the action,
quote, Something that tends to happen in autonomous action is that there ends up being
an inner circle at the core which can limit the scope of who is able to meaningfully contribute
to the direction of an action because it creates a hierarchy. At spokes council, it felt like this
at times because it was primarily a small group of speakers who were directing the entire Block Cop City movement.
This led to dismissal of certain concerns which were brought up by affinity groups."
In the planning stages, organizers pushed back on the notion that getting arrested was
a part of the plan.
But on the day before the November 13th action, a Block Cop City organizer told press and
media in a private meeting to have your
cameras ready because there will be arrests at noon, demonstrating some form of intent
to use people's safety and freedom as a way to generate online buzz with the hope of inspiring
people to once again take action in the forest.
The possibility of arrest was obviously mentioned at the spokes council meetings, but was framed as far from
a certainty, with rallying cries insisting that the march will be able to all leave together.
During the two days of spokes council meetings, the route and formation of the march to the
construction site was decided upon, and quote unquote direct action trainings took place
to prepare people for the march on Monday morning.
The march was to be split into three distinct clusters, a front line, middle and rear.
Before the march, there was limited communication between clusters, making it difficult to have
informed expectations of how a confrontation with police will happen.
Part of the quote unquote strategic nonviolence stipulation meant that thrown objects and
projectiles were explicitly disallowed.
On the morning of the march, word started to spread around that what was left of the
front line cluster decided that only bullets will make the front line fall back and that
they would withstand all other forms of police violence, mostly
less lethal rounds, tear gas, batons, etc.
Now this whole thing about live rounds was not widely communicated to people who just
showed up for the action on Monday morning.
During the spokes councils, it was learned that a vast majority of attendees had never
before been to Atlanta or the forest, and a great many of attendees had never before been to Atlanta or the forest, and
a great many of whom had never attended a protest or engaged in a clash with police
before.
Some local forest defenders took issue with the perceived strategy of primarily recruiting
young people from across the country with little to no experience going up against police.
Come Monday morning, the number of people gathered to march on Cop City was far fewer
than what was initially hoped.
It's impossible to say for sure whether the limiting of acceptable tactics and the nonviolent
framing hurt or helped the final number of attendees.
Regardless, the 400 or so brave people that departed Gresham Park was not the mass action
initially envisioned by organizers.
We've got about three dozen riot cops and SWAT teams stationed here, blocking off the
road heading to the west.
Got police shields, we have Air 15s, we have tactical response vehicles, ATV, a
lot of cops behind us, a lot of cops in front of us.
We are completely sandwiched in by the police right now.
The frontliners approached the police riot line at the big intersection near the entrance
to Enchantment Creek Park.
Two large banners formed a V-shaped wedge and the crowd advanced
into the police line. People are pushing through, cops are putting up the fight.
People are continuing to move forward. The march is pushing the cops back. Under
the pressure from a few hundred people, the police line was pushed back by one
or two dozen feet. Frontliners withstood police batons and less lethal munitions.
Steady progress was being made.
That was until tear gas got deployed.
Cops are continuing to move back. Flashbang!
We got gas.
CS Gas was first launched into the middle of the crowd.
Police paused to put on their own gas masks,
but instead of using this moment to advance further,
the bulk of the crowd held their position,
with large sections of the middle cluster
subsequently entering into the tree line
of Entrenchment Creek Park,
as continuing volleys of tear gas were fired by police.
This caused the front line to retreat back,
effectively ending the offensive portion of the action line to retreat back, effectively ending the
offensive portion of the action, as the group that entered into the forest was
later escorted out by police, rejoined the march, and eventually returned to
Gresham Park. Everyone knew that it was a near certainty that police would
confront a mobile crowd, and outmaneuvering police all the way to the
construction site would
be highly unlikely.
The only way a mass of people would be able to get to the work site is if police allowed
it.
Still, there's much to learn from Block Cop City and even just the brief skirmish with
police, so forgive me for engaging in some tactical analysis based on the good portion
of my life spent in riot jousts and
input from others with more on the ground experience. We first have to think about what
will cause a mass of people to break up, scatter, and retreat, both on the protester side and on
the police side. The front lines are meant to act semi-fluid. Typically, projectile launchers are
behind the front line and are designed to scatter the opposing front line and middle sections of the
enemy side, to disrupt an offensive formation so that it loses its capacity
for forward momentum, or to stagger a defensive line enough to force retreat.
As was the case on November 13th, when a layered defensive police line is backed up with vehicles
like a Bearcat, the on-foot line will most likely not retreat back behind their vehicles.
Frustratingly, these massive police vehicles occupy a sort of paradoxical role as a 10-ton
roadblock that would force a center advancing line to break apart in order to pass, putting
the advancing line in a less strategic position.
Even though if the vehicle was threatened by being overrun, police would probably attempt
to pull the vehicle back, signifying retreat.
So how has this paradox been solved before?
Well, with ranged attacks like bottles, fireworks, and what the state of Ukraine was teaching
its civilians to make in the early days of the Russian invasion. ranged attacks like bottles, fireworks, and what the state of Ukraine was teaching its
civilians to make in the early days of the Russian invasion.
This is why projectiles are of such a strategic importance.
One cannot break through a police line without employing violence.
Utilizing projectiles is necessary to force rear police vehicles to retreat, along with
the cops' own projectile launchers placed behind their riot line, which are used to break up the opposing front line.
And police have no such tactical non-violence scruples against using projectiles.
Some Atlanta anarchists have also noted that the resources put towards acquiring a great
number of plants that ended up just being abandoned, could also have been used to acquire gas masks for the metal cluster, reinforced shields, and ancillary materials
put towards prioritizing the crowd's efficacy and safety against the use of crowd control
munitions.
Thankfully, there were no arrests made in direct connection to the march.
But I don't believe this can be accredited to any comprehensive organizing
when the day prior, media was told that arrests would be taking place by lunchtime.
For whatever reason, the police let a kettled crowd of people go free. We can only speculate
on why between the logistical hassles, the stretching of prosecutor resources, and the
bomb squad that was actively sweeping the area of Entrenchment Creek Park
and checking all of the bags and backpacks that were dropped in the area where the splinter of
the march was escorted out by police. When talking with force defenders in Atlanta who've spent
years now engaging in militant struggle against police, they offered a more fundamental critique
of this action. If the choice to employ a strategy of nonviolence is in response to grossly inflated charges
and repression the movement is facing, as some block-up city organizers have stated,
that means that you're allowing the state to determine your rules of engagement.
The entire idea of announcing your plan to walk onto one of the most policed areas in
the country did in fact prevent people with more on the ground experience from participating
on the day of the action.
Risk requires reward.
A small core of organizers were so steadfast in one particular version of how this event
would take shape, branding people with disagreements as all overly online, disaffected nihilists no longer involved in the struggle in Atlanta.
Not only were online critiques discarded,
but opportunities for in-person conversations and input from people with
more on the ground experience in Atlanta were also turned down.
And I think it is important to state hats off to the many young people that
traveled from around the country to participate in this action.
One can hope that Block Cop City broadly and going up against this line of armed riot police
was a useful learning experience for whatever happens next in these people's lives as we
approach the 2024 election and who knows what is to come.
The night after Block Cop City, six vehicles owned by the company Ernst Concrete
were set on fire in Gwinnett County, Georgia.
Earlier that fall, Ernst Concrete trucks were seen
working on the Cop City construction site. After the arson, Ernst Concrete released a statement
saying that they were not going to work on the Cop City project. In an Atlanta Police Department
press conference from December 2023, Chief Darren Sheerbomb discussed a wave of recent arsons.
Chief Darren Sheerbomb discussed a wave of recent arsons. The most recent one happened in Gwinnett County this past November.
This was Ernst Concrete when a number of construction equipment was set on fire.
Then we go to three arsons that happened right here in Atlanta, McDonough Boulevard where
a contractor, Brent Scarborough, was targeted three different times in the month of October
of this year, July of this year, as well as April this
year. We see that the same group takes credit each and every time on their source of giving
information out. And so it's likely to be that same group, very small in number, moving from
state to state is likely the profile of these individuals. It's very, very small. It is a
handful of individuals that are having a much larger impact on the safety of the city than they
should have. Atlanta Fire Chief Roderick Smith and John King, the Georgia
Insurance and Fire Safety Commissioner, both talked about how these arsons negatively affect
the contractors working to build Cop City. As we talk about impacts caused by arson,
it affects our businesses, those that are participating in helping out building
the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center. We suffer from additional costs due to arson
that these companies face and individuals face. This affects every one of our citizens in there
because all these losses, yes there's an insurance company that will probably cover some of the costs
there because all these losses, yes, there's an insurance company that will probably cover some of the costs, but those losses will be passed on to the customers. So we all will
take the losses.
On January 17th, APD put out another press conference to discuss, even though the police
are already doing such a great job out stopping crime when it's 14 degrees and homicides continue
to decline, even still, a new state-of-the-art police
training facility is vital to maintain safety in the city of Atlanta.
We've asked you to come together again today because there is an effort underway by a very
small group of individuals, anarchists, that want to impact the safety of Atlanta, Georgia.
Just yesterday, a piece of equipment aligned with one of the construction companies that
is building the Public Safety Training Center for every Allanton was set on fire.
Next door in a neighboring state of South Carolina, we had a construction company that
had a loose connection to the project here in Atlanta that was targeted by an individual
that used one of the tools of violence, fear, and intimidation that has been used mainly
by this group, which is arson, set equipment on fire, going after concrete trucks.
And so soon the individuals that have been in the dark of night impacting every one of
our neighborhoods will be held responsible as we bring these individuals to justice.
Police in South Carolina were able to identify a suspect and ended up arresting and charging
them with arson. The fire chief elaborated on the theoretical risks of arson,
such as injury to human life
and the ugly sight of burnt rubble left over in neighborhoods,
as well as reiterating how it affects the Cop City Project.
What are the effects of arson?
Financial, as we've heard earlier,
the impact that the equipment being burned
plays a role with the companies working delays in the project due to this.
Less than a week later, the city had another press conference in front of burnt husks of equipment
outside a construction site run by a cop city contractor.
If you look over my shoulder, you will see the equipment that was burned.
It belongs to a private contractor.
There were a total of four pieces of heavy construction equipment
that were damaged this morning.
Chief Sheerbomb quickly linked the attack to Stop Cop City
due to a post online about the attack accompanied by the hashtag Stop Cop City.
The hashtag is present.
Shearbaum also gave an updated account on the number of arson attacks
which have targeted construction equipment.
I believe now we're right at 34 that have occurred here in the state of Georgia
and elsewhere.
The vast majority of them are concentrated in North Georgia,
but there are others that have occurred elsewhere.
We're very fortunate of an arrest in South Carolina. There's clearly at least one other person. This individual
or individuals don't care about life and safety. They firebombed at police precincts. Their
goal is to erode proper public safety infrastructure and to erode the government.
Very cool stuff indeed. I do believe that 34 number is a gross undercount, but hey, if they've forgotten a few attacks,
really no real harm in that.
We have, however, gotten a few recent numbers on the monetary damages caused by Stop Copsity
activity.
In a Georgia State Senate committee meeting near the end of January, State Senator Deborah
Silcox said that APD Chief Administrative Officer Peter
Ammon told her earlier that day that the estimated cost of nationwide property damage made in
protest of Cop City exceeds $100 million.
That beats the ELF numbers.
Now four days later, the Atlanta Police Department tried to backtrack that
number to New York Times reporter Sean Keenan now saying that it was $10 million in property
damage, a 1000% difference, which either way is a massive amount of money. And we do know
for sure that the city has spent at least $1.3 million just in the legal fees related to Cop City.
We know at least some of that $1.3 million was used to combat the Cop City referendum
campaign.
An initiative started last summer to collect petition signatures to put Cop City on an
upcoming ballot.
I talked with Sam Barnes of the Atlantic Community Press Collective to get an update on the current
state of the Atlantic Community Press Collective to get an update on the current state of the referendum.
The referendum has more or less been stalled out since last fall in response to a lawsuit
from DeKalb County residents who claimed that their First Amendment rights were being infringed upon because they were not allowed to canvas for signatures, a court
issued down an injunction basically allowing the referendum campaign to have additional
time to collect and then turn in signatures.
The city then appealed that injunction. That whole situation is currently before the
U.S. Court of Appeals, who heard arguments from the city's lawyers and the vote campaign's
lawyers in January and who have not yet issued a ruling on that appeal.
The referendum campaign has turned in what they say are 116,000 signatures, which, if
verified, should be more than enough to get the referendum onto the ballot.
But the city of Atlanta has said that they cannot start counting these signatures until
the Court of Appeals issues their ruling.
It's not really clear where in case law or in Georgia code or wherever they are getting that legal precedent from,
but it is the line they are sticking to.
So long story short, even if the city was to start counting votes today, and even if
there were enough to get this referendum on the ballot. The next election it could appear on the ballot
in is the general election in November 2024.
Cop City, per APD and the APF's repeated claims, is going to open in fall of 2024. Now, I don't
personally have a lot of faith in that. At one point it was going to open in August 2023. Just the simple
fact of every construction project runs into delays. But I think it is pretty clear, especially
given the clear cutting and the concrete pouring that has already happened on the site, that
it will make significant progress by November.
It's pretty obvious that the city's strategy here is to just delay and delay and delay
the referendum until the thing gets built.
Effectively, just making the referendum dead in the water.
On February 8th, the Federal Bureau of Investigation conducted a series of house raids on three
homes in South Atlanta that they suspected of being linked to Stop Cop City activists.
Phones and computers were seized, along with Stop Cop City-related zines and posters.
Occupants of the house were dragged outside, sometimes literally.
A few were detained for hours on end, with one being driven to a police headquarters
for interrogation, but was released
later that evening.
This morning at 6 a.m. investigators of the Atlanta Fire Rescue, Georgia Bureau of Investigation,
Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and the
Atlanta Police Department, joined by uniformed elements of this department of Georgia State
Patrol, executed search warrants signed by judges who'd reviewed the probable cause,
allowing us to
enter three locations to seek evidence connected to acts of vandalism and arson that have occurred
over the last few months.
As investigators went to those locations, they were armed with an arrest warrant.
It's worth noting that the search warrants cited federal statutes on the destruction
of vehicles and Rico.
While executing one of these raids, police located
an individual whom an arrest warrant was issued for days prior and brought them into custody.
This arrest, along with the one in South Carolina, also marked the very first arrests linked to
clandestine nighttime attacks in the three-year history of the movement. We're processing all
the locations now.
The evidence to make that arrest had already been in possession of law enforcement
even before we executed the search warrants this morning.
So the arrest warrant was signed before today,
and the arrest warrant was not connected with the search warrant.
Those were independent of the arrest we'd be making once we located this gentleman.
In a city press conference, the mayor opened by saying this arrest was,
quote, linked to
multiple acts of vandalism and arson, unquote.
Yet they were only charged with one account of first degree arson, which police linked
to the burning of eight police motorcycles last July, near the end of that summer's
week of action.
This particular arson is unique from the many other cop city related arsons in a
few ways. This was not targeting construction equipment, instead it was
directly targeting police infrastructure. An unexploded plastic incendiary device
was left at the scene and the police training building that was singed. The
city now claims was occupied by a police officer. What was often overlooked is
inside of that precinct was a protector of this city.
The land of police officers inside.
As police have said, they only had enough information to make this one arrest linked
to this one specific instance of arson.
Thus, these raids can be seen both as an intimidation attempt and a last-ditch effort to collect
additional information necessary to make future arrests. be seen both as an intimidation attempt and a last ditch effort to collect additional
information necessary to make future arrests.
More arrests will come.
They will come soon and will continue to hold people accountable to everyone that has been
involved in these acts, are in jail and before a judge.
The investigation is very active ma'am.
There's a reason we serve three search warrants today.
We do, we are looking at a wide range of areas we believe evidence is held
that will identify who is responsible for the others and who else was responsible besides this
gentleman. The investigation will play that out but there are others that I anticipate will be
resting in the weeks to come. This messaging from Chief Scheerbaum is obviously meant to spread
panic and paranoia amongst activists, organizers, and the anarchists of Atlanta. Those in Atlanta were quick to prove that repression would not stifle attacks against Cop City.
On the night of February 9th, a police car was torched outside of the home of an APD officer
in the Lakewood neighborhood of Atlanta.
The next day, police claimed that they tracked the movements of two alleged arsonists
via ring doorbell and street cameras to a house in Lakewood
and conducted a raid that afternoon. Nothing was found and no arrests were made. The FBI and the
ATF viewed the vehicle arson outside of the home of an Atlanta police officer as a significant
escalation and made their first on-camera speaking appearance on Channel 2 to discuss the possibility of
introducing federal charges.
The house raids, threats, doing all these press conferences, it's all part of this
media frenzy to elicit fear.
Earlier this year, Chief Scheerbaum unveiled plans to put 450 billboards all across the
country offering reward money for information specifically placed in cities
they believe anarchists are traveling from to set fires in Atlanta. Every single press
conference the police do, they are desperately begging for members of the public to snitch,
saying the only way this case will be solved is if anonymous tipsters come forward with
information, offering increasingly comical amounts of money if information leads to a conviction.
Fear is one of the greatest tools the state has to bear.
But through this sequence of events, police and investigators are also kind of showing
their hand here, demonstrating the current limit of their actionable evidence.
It has now been well over a month since these raids, and as of now, no subsequent arrests have been made.
The timing of these house raids also seemed intended to disrupt an event planned for later
that month called the Nationwide Summit to
Stop Cop City, a convergence located in Tucson, Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. That was planned for
February 23 to the 26th. I was not able to attend but I spoke with Sam from the Atlantic Community
Press Collective who covered the summit in person. It was a four day convergence in Tucson, Arizona, called for by the pretty well entrenched
radical organizing scene there in Tucson
that was just intended to be the kind of summits
we've seen here in Atlanta
that are often called weeks of action
that can no longer take place here in Atlanta.
So it was intended to be just a gathering
of like-minded people to share ideas, build community, have fun, frankly.
And there also were some direct actions that occurred during the week.
The hub for the summit was a park kind of on what I'd call the north end of Tucson called Mansfield Park.
And there was a small camp space set up and organized by locals.
The structure of the summit and of the camp space in general was again very familiar to
anyone who has attended any of the Weeks of Action in Atlanta.
There were camp meals, breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
There were camp announcements.
A lot of spontaneous activities within the camp.
A couple movie nights were held. Tucson, Arizona. Tucson, Arizona.
Is about 100 miles from the US-Mexico border. Sam told me about a panel they attended on
the intersections between the border, Gaza, and Atlanta. If you've been paying attention
to the cop city struggle, you're probably already familiar with these themes. The Atlanta
Police Department participates in the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange, the GILI program, where they train with members of the IDF.
The talk featured Jewish Americans, Palestinian Americans, a correspondent from Indian Collective
who was there to cover the summit as well also spoke during that event. And that intersection was, I think, even before Aaron Bushnell self-immolated
that Sunday, was probably the most profound theme when I threw the weekend, again, especially
with Tucson's proximity to the border and to native lands that are on the border and
which are often surveilled using, wait for it, Israeli
military technology.
The sort of official name of the summit was the Nationwide Summit to Stop Cop City, which
was a sort of wink wink nudge nudge at Nationwide Insurance, which is the main underwriter of the insurance policies that
insure what would be Cop City. Nationwide has a major corporate office in Scottsdale,
Arizona, which is in between Tucson and Phoenix.
On the first night of the summit, a small group of anonymous vandals attacked three
subsidiaries of Nationwide Insurance in Tucson, Arizona, breaking windows and vandalizing their
buildings. Later on in the week, there were two more public direct actions that happened during
the summit. The first was a Black Block March on the night of February 25th in downtown Tucson, Arizona.
Tucson, Arizona?
As a crowd of a little under 100 people moved through downtown, stop cop city graffiti filled
the plaza, and a PNC bank as well as a recently closed Wells Fargo branch had their windows
smashed.
Wells Fargo is affiliated with the Atlanta Police Foundation, and PNC is a financial
backer of the Mountain Valley Pipeline in the Appalachians.
Police were able to arrest at least three people suspected of participating in the march.
Oddly, they were charged with arson of an occupied building, I believe due to fireworks
being thrown in or near one of the banks.
Given the name of the nationwide summit, it was expected that there would be a public action targeting Nationwide Insurance.
So Monday morning, we headed up to Scottsdale, Arizona, again just outside of Phoenix.
Phoenix is about two hours away, where we stopped by a sort of sidewalk rally type situation that was happening outside of the nationwide regional
offices which was honestly quite locked down, quite hard to get access to it as we were
leaving the sidewalk rally and being followed by Scottsdale's finest bicycle riders.
I thought it was interesting that one of the bicycle cops had a life behind bars personalized
painted bicycle bell.
It was Teal and said, a life behind bars.
And when we asked him about it, he just said, I just thought it was funny because, you know,
I'm a cop and I'm behind bicycle bars.
It was delightful and look forward to further coverage of this exciting story
in a soon to be released ACPC video feature. So after the rally outside of Nationwide's
offices, we got a tip that a lockdown style action would be happening somewhere in the Scottsdale Phoenix area that afternoon.
So maybe around four or five o'clock, we traveled to the hills of Maricopa County, Arizona,
formerly home to America's toughest sheriff, Joe Arpaio, into this sort of enclave of gated dead-end
streets with fabulously expensive homes.
One of these homes is owned by a nationwide insurance executive.
So the activists that locked down placed their bodies in front of two entrances to this enclave
with the intention of disrupting the evening of this nationwide executive and their
neighbors.
There were six activists in total that locked down, three at each entrance.
They used a device that has been described to me as being called a cupcake, meaning
it was a bag of concrete placed on the inside of a car tire set with some rebar and a kind
of pipe sticking out of it, where I assume there was some sort of like handcuff locking
on the inside of the pipe. The gates were also locked shut with like bicycle locks.
People were locked to the entrance of the gated community for almost four hours before
being arrested.
All six were ultimately given misdemeanor charges and released within 24 to 48 hours.
Sam also talks to me about how these big public gatherings, like the summit in Tucson, Arizona,
seem like they just can't really happen in Atlanta anymore.
So in November here in Atlanta, we had the block cop city convergence, which was organized
to a pretty significant extent by folks not from Atlanta.
I know one reason I heard for that was it's pretty well known that organizers in Atlanta
are tired.
And there was a group of people from outside of Atlanta that felt like they could carry that
lift to organize an action here in Atlanta.
The summit in Tucson, to my knowledge, is the first major convergence that has been
organized outside of Atlanta with a call for folks to come from the nation over.
It was a very keen or very sharp feeling of grief that this was not happening in
Atlanta, that it could not happen in Atlanta, both because the forest has had a huge chunk of it
bulldozed, but also due to the police occupation of the forest, that this could not happen in
Atlanta right now, in the Wilani forest. and I think especially given recent events in Atlanta, in anywhere in Atlanta, in Georgia, frankly.
Even if due to extenuating circumstances,gences can and probably will continue to happen anywhere
and everywhere. For a long time, a slogan of this struggle has been, cop city is everywhere.
Even if there weren't similar cop city-like facilities planned or already being built all over the country. I believe the latest count was 69 or 70. I can't quite remember who did that research.
But even if it wasn't for that, again, to go back to like the sharp through line of Gaza, the border, indigenous lands, Gili, Israel, genocide. This struggle
is the same everywhere. The police are the same everywhere, as recently discussed on
this podcast.
As this episode draws to a close, I'd like to air out some thoughts I've had ruminating
around my head for a while about inter-conflict as desperation.
These comments are not about any specific city or situation.
This simply reflects a pattern I've observed in various struggles caught in a down spiral,
particularly during the fallout of the 2020 protests nationwide.
Historically, I think Atlanta has actually proven to be pretty resilient against
this sort of thing, but as the stakes are quite high, I would hate to see something similar happen
as the cop city struggle here in Atlanta seems to be entering its latter stages. First, I'd like to
say it's always a worrying ticking clock once people start getting treated as disposable or
as political props to be
sacrificed in the service of spectacle.
But primarily, I've been thinking about, at a certain point, far enough within a struggle,
it becomes easier to fight each other than it is to fight police.
Which is not to say all conflict is bad.
Conflict can often be good.
Tension can result in new innovative action that otherwise might not materialize.
But when said actionable conflict starts to materialize more frequently against each other rather than against the state, that signals impending doom.
Being able to consistently put your beliefs into practice with a like-minded group of people, to directly engage against systems of oppression like the police or the state, especially in your own city, is a life-affirming process, almost intoxicating. It's very easy to
become addicted to high-intensity conflict. Unfortunately, this state is a resilient bastard,
even if you can land a few sizable blows. Over time, this state can gather a lot of resources
to push back. It may take a few days, weeks, months, or even years.
Only in our minds may the glorious first spark of uprising last forever,
the burning of the Third Precinct, or the first year or so of Defend the Atlanta Forest.
But nostalgia is a trap, and eventually the Empire does in fact strike back.
But as it becomes harder, more dangerous,
more frightening to engage against the state, the desire for that rush of conflict stays,
it lingers. So what is one to do? The walls are closing in, but you have this need to fight.
So you take out your anxiety, PTSD, and frustration on those around you.
It is much more scary to fight the police. This, by comparison, is easy
while still feeding that conflictual drive. We must keep on fighting, and since it's harder and
more scary to continually fight the cops or the state, we instead are looking for ways to fight
each other, to find scapegoats to purge, often in service of some unrelated personal grievance
or in-group self-preservation. Constant attack, constant strength, constant purity.
These conflicts can take form as blame as to why a desired outcome is not being achieved,
intensify the stratification of in-group, out-group dynamics, as in,
these are the bad people in the movement,
whereas we are the enlightened affinity group with the only successful strategy,
or conspiratorial
co-intel pro-like actions such as cop-jacketing, snitch-jacketing, and more general bad-jacketing
against people who you have simple organizational disagreements with.
This can also manifest as a deep unwillingness to hear preemptive critical commentary and
the assumption that all criticism comes from place of bad faith.
A recent article in a popular anarchist publication roped in genuine critique and disagreement
as somehow being in alignment with the state's motivations against the movement.
And is this not just a form of cop-jacketing?
Saying that if you disagree with a particular strategy, that means you are in alignment
with police because they also dislike a particular strategy, that means you are in alignment with police because they also dislike a particular strategy. But the police dislike the strategy for a completely different reason,
because they dislike any form of resistance. Claiming that critique from anarchists and
criticism from the state come from the same fundamental place is simply laughable. It is
in moments such as this when repression is increasing that justified frustration and
fear leading to paranoia can be turned into a weapon by the state.
At these moments, people must be the most vigilant against their own fear resulting
in retreat from battle against the state and turning to intra-conflict as a desperate form
of alternative struggle.
Solidarity, love, and care are paramount, including harsh love,
including well-meaning critical commentary, debate and constructive conversation.
Well, that's enough of that.
Finally, I'd like to give an update on the cop city construction timeline.
The past few months, city officials and the Atlanta Police Foundation
have made a series of statements claiming construction is very much on schedule and quickly approaching completion.
I want to say this.
The construction of those training centers on schedule will be moving in in December.
It will be operational this time next year.
The new facility is almost 70% complete with construction.
Many have pointed out that this is a ridiculously high number considering that a video published
by the police just a few days ago showed an unfinished foundation and a single paved road.
Now Sam from the Atlantic Community Press Collective helped explain what this number
might be referring to.
There are no walls built, to say the least.
I personally believe that to be a very charitable reading of a document with a construction
timeline we've seen as a result of our open records requests that sort of break the, what
a layperson such as myself would call the construction process up into things like permitting,
pre-construction,
development, construction.
On that timeline, they were about 70% done with the development and they were also about
70% done with the whole process ranging from permitting to cutting the red ribbon.
What, again, as a layperson, I would also call the construction process,
meaning the whole, you know,
roof walls, doors thing on that particular document
was 0% complete or like, I shouldn't say 0%
because they have poured like concrete pads and stuff.
I don't remember exactly what the date on this document was,
but it was zero to a very small percentage of complete.
So yes, on the grand construction timeline of filing the first document to, again, literal
walls, yeah, sure they're 70% complete.
By any measure of construction to the average citizen, no, they are not 70% complete.
Before I close this episode out, I do want to let listeners know about ways to support
Jack, the person arrested in the house raid last month.
In the show notes, I will link to a fundraiser that goes towards his legal fees, jail commissary,
and phone calls.
You can also go to the website freejack.co for information on how to mail letters and
books to Jack while he is currently being held in jail without bond.
Trials and court cases related
to the Georgia cop city recon-dictment
have all been delayed till at least this summer.
Follow the Atlantic Community Press Collective
for updates on that as they happen.
See you on the other side.
Do you think he's fled the state?
You know, obviously he's not here, and we're seeking him, See you on the other side. If I could be you and you could be me for just one hour if you could find a way
to get inside each other's mind walk a mile in my shoes walk a mile in my shoes
walk a mile in my shoes we've all felt left out and for some that feeling lasts more than a moment
we can change that learn how it belonging begins withorg, brought to you by the Ad Council.
-♪ Walk a mile in my shoes.
-♪
Beauty Translated Season 3 is coming soon with...
What?
A second host?
I'm Carmen Laurent, and this season,
I am joined full-time by world-renowned Janie Danger.
Janie, what are we talking about in season three?
We're talking about life, Carmen.
Beauty Translate is about the many fragmented lives
spreading across this rich tapestry of the trans experience.
Janie, this sounds like an all-new format.
Podcasting 2 is finally here.
Thoughtful perspectives on current events.
Stunning, sexy, bold interviews with an all-star lineup of guests.
And the all-new Beauty Translated Love Line, the first ever.
Be a part of the Beauty Translated Transcendental Podcasting Experience
by calling our helpline at 678-561-2785.
For any problem you may have, we will do our best to make it worse.
Listen to Beauty Translated Season 3 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you get your podcasts.
Bye!
Bye!
Hey, it's Alec Baldwin.
This past season on my podcast, Here's the Thing, I spoke with more actors, musicians,
policymakers and so many other fascinating people like actress and director Cheryl Hines.
They were looking for an unknown actress to play Larry David's wife.
I said, well, how old is that guy? Isn't he old?
And author David Sedaris.
You know, like when you meet somebody and they'll say,
well, I want to be a writer or I want to be an artist.
And I say, well, is it all you care about?
Because if it's not, it's going to be pretty hard for you.
If you're not on fire. It's like opening the door of an oven.
And it's like, wow, you take a step back.
It's all they think about.
It's all they talk about.
It's all they care about.
They don't have relationships.
They're not good friends for other people.
This is just what their laser focused on.
Listen to the new season of Here's
the Thing on the iHeart radio app Apple Podcasts
or wherever you get your podcasts.
Welcome to Get Up and Hear. I'm Andrew Sage from the YouTube channel Andrewism. And today
we'll be shedding light on a recently popular discussion on the problems with modern cities and more
specifically the growing absence of third places. Now love them or hate them, cities
are here to stay. And if you spent any time on urban planning YouTube or really just looked
around, you know they have some issues. Traffic congestion is a big one, a notorious nemesis of modern cities stemming from increased
population, poor urban planning and excessive vehicle usage, creating a big waste of time
and straining our well-being.
There are also issues of physical and mental health among city inhabitants.
The environmental impact of urban areas can be quite terrible. Housing issues seem to be globally hellish, but still people flock to cities because that's
where the opportunities are, hence the growth of slums and the overall strain on infrastructure
like utilities and transportation and the functionality of cities, many of which are
currently well above their capacity.
Of course, many of these issues just don't
touch the wealthy in the same way. Within the city's gleaming skyscrapers lie
stark disparities in income, access to resources and opportunities. And for
another issue more relevant to our discussion here, in the midst of a crowd,
urban dwellers often grapple with feelings of loneliness and disconnection. The paradox
of being surrounded by people, yet feeling totally alone.
In his seminal work, The Great Good Place, published in 1989, American sociologist Ray
Ollenberg presents a captivating notion for a balanced and fulfilling life, a harmony
among the three spheres, the home, the workplace
and the realm of third places. These third places encompass inclusive social settings,
crucial for community bonding and foster meaningful interactions.
Now as for what qualifies a third place, common examples come to mind. Cafes, pubs, stoops,
parks, however not every cafe, pubs, stoop or park
captures the essence of a true third place as Ollenberg described it.
Historically, these places have been a powerful force in shaping the course of revolutions
and cultural movements. During the American Revolution, the Tavern was a vital hub of
political discourse. In the French Revolution, the café was a crucial meeting place
for the revolutionary intelligentsia and common people. During the Enlightenment, coffee houses
in London assumed a central role in fostering the intellectual and cultural transformation of society.
And during the Harlem Renaissance, third places could be found in theatres, churches, jazz cafes,
and more. Serving as vital havens for for African American musicians, writers, intellectuals, the source
they develop and celebrate their cultural identity.
Ollenberg outlines eight key characteristics that define the allure of these communal spaces.
He takes a rather strict approach, and this is key, emphasising that his description excludes the majority of venues, even if they exhibit
some of these defining traits.
And I suppose you can argue with that, but I think that's a quibble I've had with the
discussions about third places, because people seem to be more infatuated with the vague
idea of them, and not so much interested in what the term has actually been coined to describe.
So you end up with people labeling all sorts of spaces, clubs and organizations third places,
even if they don't fit the criteria. At this point, the internet has seemingly lost the plot
on third places and taken a life on its own independent of what Oldenburg intended.
But he's dead. His book is still around, but
I don't think a lot of people have read it. But I did in preparation for this, and so
we'll delve into some of those characteristics now.
For one, a third place lies on neutral ground. No one is expected to play host for the others,
no one is obligated to be there, and people are comfortable and free to come and go where they please.
Play places are spaces where people can just be, where opportunities can exist for fraternization
in a safe public setting that can be found in the privacy of the home or the professional
boundary of the workplace.
A space where a variety of relationships can blossom, including the ones that don't go any
deeper than friendly public encounters. Secondly, the third place is a leveling place. It requires
no formal criteria for membership, it places no emphasis on one's social status, and provides the
possibility for people of a variety of backgrounds and experiences to associate on the merit of their
personality alone. Within third places, people can find friendships with those whom under ordinary circumstances,
they might never cross paths.
Third characteristic of a third place is that it is a place in which conversation is meant
to be the main activity.
It doesn't have to be the only activity, for example card games or pool or dominoes
make for an excellent social lubricant, but the space should be comfortable enough to facilitate pleasurable, light-hearted and entertaining conversation.
Now, it's not difficult to create a space that can facilitate good conversation,
but it's also easy to ruin the flow of good conversation. Music, personal screens,
egotistical people, they can all be quite ruiners to the social energy that a good third place tries to foster.
Fourthly, third places need to be open and readily accessible.
That means being accessible in the sense of being in a convenient location and open whenever
the demons of loneliness or boredom strike or when the depressions and frustrations of
the day call for relaxation amid good company.
In other words, third places are available when people need them to be.
Now, the form of accessibility that Oldenburg describes is not the form of accessibility that disability justice advocates fight for, and that is one of the quibbles that I have with
Oldenburg's conception of third places that I'll get into later. Next, third places are given their
appeal by their regulars, who help set the mood of
the space and provide a welcoming environment for newcomers.
Every regular was once a newcomer, and the acceptance of newcomers is essential to the
sustained vitality of the third place.
Sixth, third places keep a low profile.
They're not exclusive, extravagant, pretentious or overly fancy.
They're not usually openly advertised, and they tend to be older places with a modest
or even seedy atmosphere.
They're certainly not tourist traps.
7th and we're almost done, third places have a playful mood.
People go to third places for the banter and the laughter, not tension and hostility, so
that's what the space is set up to encourage.
And lastly, number 8, third places are meant to be a home away from home, offering a sense
of intimacy, regeneration and community that puts people at ease in a warm and friendly
atmosphere.
So, to summarize, third places exist on neutral ground, function as equalizers of social status,
provide an environment where conversations are at the centre, keep a low profile, are open and
accommodating, have an essence shaped by their regulars, characterised by playfulness and a sense
of home away from home. Third places with their unique characteristics present an array of
advantages. They are not only enhanced enhancing individual social and conversational skills,
but also foster a sense of genuine connection and belonging within the community.
Their places are a respite from the monotony of daily life under the weight of modern capitalism.
They inject much-needed novelty into our routines,
offering a diverse and free-flowing atmosphere that stands apart from the rigidity of our daily grind.
They are a balm for our
emotional wellbeing, a spiritual tonic, and they allow us to tap into our creative and
expressive selves.
Crucially, third places offer what Oldenburg coined as friends by the set. They provide
convenient spaces for social gatherings, offering routine and reliable interactions with a diverse
array of individuals, both casually and intimately, without the hassle of scheduling meetups.
Unfortunately, third places kind of fell off in many areas.
Obviously not everywhere, but especially in places where American-style urban sprawl and
suburbia has proliferated.
I've been describing the characteristics and benefits and historical potency of these
spaces, but I've only gotten small tastes of some of these myself.
And for a lot of people, I think particularly of my generation, besides perhaps the approximate
experience of a college common room, third places are a distant cultural memory, not
a lived experience.
So Oldenburg basically asks what's up with that and
according to him the blame for this vanishing out falls squarely on the
suburbs. These sprawling enclaves prioritized private abodes over public
spaces, perpetuating an isolated narrative that confines the good life
within individual homes and yards. Suburban designs, often imposed
by distant developers, stifle community connections. Few opportunities exist within them for organic
social interaction beyond your immediate neighbours. The car-centric layout further thwarts the
revival of third places, as reliance on cars diminishes chance encounters and informal
gathering spots along daily routes, fostering a culture of detachment among neighbours.
But it's not just the suburb suffering this issue. Urban environments too have succumbed
to efficiency and profit, sacrificing space for genuine human connection. Standardised
franchise genes dominate, erasing the character and
charm that encourage communal interaction, replacing it with sterile environments.
And technology hasn't exactly aided third places either, as the allure of the internet
has been a substitute for real-life interaction that tends to keep people indoors. Sure, you
can see the internet as the frontier for new third places, and in
some ways they are, but not quite in the same way. And of course, I mean let's call it out
even though Oldenburg doesn't. Capitalism plays a significant role in the decline of
third places. Work-life imbalances leave scant time for social engagements. The relentless
commercialisation, privatization of public spaces,
gentrification, closed international hubs, and profit-driven urban designs all contribute to this
decline. The disappearance of three places isn't an accident of history, but a consequence of our
modern societal choices and systemic pressures.
So Wilming's ideas have been catched on a lot lately, especially with younger generations.
Like I said, it's this distant yet alluring cultural memory.
For obvious reasons though, things
kinda suck right now and a lot of people are taking a half-understood grasp of the
concept and running wild with it. Like for example I also see some people like just
blankets applying the internet as the new third place and while there are
corners of the internet that do approximate that experience and I
recognize the potential of virtual spaces
such as Discord to embody the characteristics of third places.
I firmly believe that virtual third places lack the tangible elements inherent in traditional
spaces that are essential for fostering deep emotional connections and empathy that are
vital for healthy community life.
These social media platforms, particularly sites like Twitter,
often lack the authenticity and nuanced communication
present in face-to-face interactions.
That's by design, of course.
Twitter thrives on conflict.
That's why I'm not there anymore.
But it's all too easy on sites like those
to misinterpret intentions or to use anonymity
for negative interactions
like cyberbullying, trolling or online harassment. In real life, trolls get kicked out, bullies
in some cases are dealt with, people who are harassing people also tend to get kicked out,
but online all those things often run rampant.
Moreover the permanence of online interactions can hinder the relaxed vulnerability often
experienced in traditional spaces as everything is recorded which makes trust easier to breach.
But despite my critique of how some people have been running with the term third places, I think the actual book and its concepts do deserve further scrutiny and in my view
radicalization. Wollongberg's idea of the whole in the workplace in the third place
is a sort of a pecking order. It also really sidelines domestic labor as like
not really work as if it's separate from the workplace and I also don't like the
idea of work being prioritized over like essential
social interaction.
I think there's also the interesting aspect now that for a
lot of people like myself included, work and home are now
the same spot. And there is ever since the pandemic, there's been
a large surge in people working from home, which kind of
complicates this dynamic. Yeah, yeah. Pre-industrialization, I think especially
that idea also coincided, you know, the first and the second place, the home and the workplace were
also a bit blurred. And now I think we're witnessing a similar blurring today, you know, post
industrialization and as a consequence of the today, you know, post-industrialisation
and as a consequence of the pandemic, with remote work really catching on and blurring
those lines for sure. I think another major oversight in Oldenburg's work is the gender
bias within historical and contemporary third places. You know, these spaces have been predominantly
male dominated or gender-segregated.
I think it's nostalgia for third places, which you kind of pick up on in the book, neglects
the historical limitations women face in accessing these spaces.
So I think if third places were to make a resurgence, we would definitely need to address
these systemic barriers, like the double shift that many women juggle to ensure their inclusion in future three places. I think
another critique I would have is on ownership, control. You know third spaces
are touted as neutral but when they're operating under the whims of private
owners or state authorities they very easily succumb to those profit-driven
motives. I don't think a community space, a space that is central to a community, should
be so concentrated in the hands of private developers or private owners. I think those
spaces are the types that should be collectively stewarded.
There's also the cost barrier of food places, you know, due to financial constraints.
Everybody's able to, you know, spend the time there and spend the kind of money there that those spaces kind of require for you to stay there for extended periods of time.
You kind of have to buy something in all those places.
They kind of have to buy something in all those places. A lot of the places are alcohol-oriented, which is not exactly inclusive for people
who are not interested in alcohol consumption or recovering from addiction.
But of course, speaking of inclusivity, Ollenberg's idea of accessibility, like I said before,
doesn't really come from a place of disability justice, but that has to change, you know?
We need a broader grasp of accessibility.
Which is why despite my critiques, I do acknowledge the merits of what are often termed as virtual
third places.
They serve as more accessible alternatives for the immunocompromised or disabled individuals.
These spaces break down geographical barriers, uniting people from diverse backgrounds and
locations, fostering connections based on shared interests, passions and identities
without the constraints of physical distance.
And unlike physical third places, virtual third places are offered around the clock.
Catering to users' diverse lifestyles and rhythms, often a flexibility that is rarely found in real life settings.
At the same time though, in Ollenberg's defense, he does point out that third places will not resonate with everyone.
There is this popular notion that third places have to be for everybody, and then I see people criticizing saying oh well I prefer to
just stay at home I don't really like the places I don't like social interaction
or whatever or I don't like that form of social interaction and that's cool you
know third places shouldn't be the sole remedy or the main remedy for social
ills preferences will of course vary and that everyone finds cafes or bars
appealing which is fine.
But I still think we can radicalise state places a bit further, not just in the sense
of diversifying it, but also in the sense of bringing it under popular power.
You see, radical state places, in my vision, aren't content to merely exist in a neutral
ground dictated by capital or state initiatives.
Know they're envisioned as collective grounds, common grounds, where individuals not only
frequent but co-own these spaces, invest in time, energy and resources to ensure their
survival.
Emerging spaces that transcend the typical light-hardenedness associated with third-places.
They wield the power to spark social revolutions, serving as zones for decompression, rallying
spots for union activities, and nurturing grounds for mutual aid, a nucleus of community-driven
change.
What sets these radical spaces apart is not just the accessibility and location operating
hours but also a culture of inclusivity that goes beyond nostalgia
for traditionally male-dominated third places. It's about welcoming a broader spectrum of perspectives,
identities and abilities. Imagine this, not just a space away from home, but integrated with the
neighbourhoods and mixed-use buildings, fostering community integration. As for how we bring these
radical third places to life,
the Rote Flora in Hamburg, Germany, I think,
provides some great inspiration.
Formerly a theater, it was transformed
into a political and cultural hub by activists in 1989.
Today, it stands as a symbol of resistance
against social injustice and a space pulsating
with artistic expression and vibrant dialogue.
They achieved that place through squatting, and squatting is risky, yet revolutionary,
but it isn't the only path for securing such spaces.
I think we can mobilize communities empowering them to actively participate in shaping public spaces
instead of waiting for decisions from above.
I really like the idea of, I can't remember where the term comes from, but it's
guerrilla urban planning, you know, painting lines on the pavement for bike paths, you know,
reclaiming the sidewalk, claiming spaces in your neighborhood, taking control and not asking for permission
to shape the park or the spaces that you share as you see fit. It's really about co-creating
our environment, it's not merely accepting what's imposed upon us.
Reformist strategies in instances like these can have their merits.
They don't exactly advance revolution,
but advocating for walkable neighborhoods
or improved public transportation doesn't hurt.
But the crux remains, these actions,
this effort to push for reform,
it can slowly accomplish potentially some change, but the crux remains,
you know, empowering people to manage their own lives and spaces, not relinquishing that
power to uncaring autocrats. The decline of third places might not be catastrophic, but
until we recognize and harness our power to shape physical environments,
our urban social life will continue to lack vibrancy.
I think we have to acknowledge our profound influence on our surroundings and seize our
agency to actively craft our spaces.
All power to all the people.
This is Andrew.
This is a good opportunity. Peace. You could be me for just one hour. If you could find a way to get inside each other's mind.
Walk a mile in my shoes.
Walk a mile in my shoes.
Walk a mile in my shoes.
We've all felt left out.
And for some, that feeling lasts more than a moment.
We can change that.
Learn how at belongingbeginswithus.org,
brought to you by the Ad Council.
Walk a mile in my shoes. brought to you by the Ad Council.
Beauty Translated Season 3 is coming soon with what? A second host? I'm Carmen Laurent,
and this season I am joined full time by world renowned Janie Danger. Janie, what are we
talking about in season three?
We're talking about life, Carmen.
Beauty Translate is about the many fragmented lives
spreading across this rich tapestry
of the trans experience.
Janie, this sounds like an all-new format.
Podcasting Two is finally here.
Thoughtful perspectives on current events.
Stunning, sexy, bold interviews with an all-star lineup of guests.
And the all-new Beauty Translated Love Line, the first ever.
Be a part of the Beauty Translated Transcendental Podcasting Experience
by calling our helpline at 678-561-2785.
For any problem you may have,
we will do our best to make it worse.
Listen to Beauty Translated Season 3
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts.
Bye!
Hey, it's Alec Baldwin.
This past season on my podcast, Here's the Thing, I spoke with more actors, musicians,
policymakers and so many other fascinating people like actress and director Cheryl Hines.
They were looking for an unknown actress to play Larry David's wife.
I said, well, how old is that guy?
Isn't he old?
laughs
And author David Sedaris
You know, like when you meet somebody and they'll say,
well, I want to be a writer or I want to be an artist
and I say, well, is it all you care about?
Because if it's not, it's going to be pretty hard for you
if you're not on fire.
It's like opening the door of an oven
and it's like, wow, you know, you take a step back. It's all they think about. It's all
they talk about. It's all they care about. They don't have relationships. They're not
good friends for other people. This is just what their focus is on.
Yeah.
Listen to the new season of Here's the Thing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you get your podcasts.
Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, the podcast that's happening here in your ear.
And one of the things that we love talking about here is a critical ingredient towards
creeping authoritarianism, towards growing corporate control and surveillance
over all of our lives, which is of course technology
that makes it even easier to monitor you
than it already is.
And we're not talking primarily about like
the government monitoring you,
because they can do stuff like just pull your phone data
from which cell towers it's pinged.
We're talking about the kind of stuff that allows basically
whoever can get an app on your phone to track and stalk you.
And yeah, I'm going to first introduce Mia Wong.
Mia, welcome to the show that you also host.
Yes, I am here.
So what are we, what are we talking about today?
And who are we talking with?
Yeah, so we are talking about stalkerware, which is the sort of broad name
for the category of software that Robert's been talking about.
And we are talking about someone who hacked one.
Well, a stalkerware stalker.
Yeah, the first one of the stalkerware companies.
My arson crime, you the famed hacker of the no fly list.
I had yet returning guests always happy to have you on.
Yeah, always happy to be on.
Yeah, so I think I think.
I don't know.
I think there's there's a real tendency among
and I see this among leftists a lot for kind of good reasons and kind of not good reasons
to really only focus on state
and like large corporate actors in terms of surveillance.
And that's a mistake.
Yeah, probably.
Yeah. And so I guess I guess the place where I want to start
before we get into the specific company that you do, is it still called owned?
I kind of I it's fine to call it owned or pawned or whatever.
I still do that.
Sometimes people get confused.
But yeah. Yeah.
But before we get into that, I want to I want to ask you a bit,
because you've done a lot of sort of
I guess you call it research, both actual research wise
and then in terms of poking around their servers,
research and chandelism and whatever you want to call it.
Yeah, yeah.
So I wanted to just start off by asking if you can give sort of like a brief
summary of what stalkerware is.
Mm hmm. Yeah.
So so so stalkerware, like as a category encompasses
like a number of different types of apps, most of them, like on the service,
advertise themselves as like parental control software,
which is already bad enough.
Yeah. To be clear, that is like advertised for like spying on your children's phone,
like seeing their location in real time, seeing their messages that they receive,
any photo they take.
Ostensibly, this is to prevent bullying and help with them
when they get depressed because they don't trust you
and talk to you for whatever reason.
But obviously, a lot of these are done furthermore,
because that's like, sure, that's a target audience,
that's a demographic you can advertise to.
But then there's this even bigger potential target demographic of people who are insecure
in their relationship, mostly men, not only men, but who are then solve this idea that
they can use software like this for stalking their partner, for finding out if they are
cheating on you, things like that, which is obviously an even bigger problem, which once again not to discount the problems that's buying on your
children is already like bad enough. But yeah, this leads to this whole like big industry of
these apps being used by partners against each other. Like also just by people like against anyone
in their surroundings that they suspect might be doing something,
shady, might be like talking behind their backs.
It often kind of turns into like, it obviously turns into this obsessive thing, especially
if you're solved this idea that this app can magically solve like interpersonal issues,
like with anything that sells you this magic idea of being able to solve any problem, that
these people start kind of spying on everyone in their like, circles, to some of them, like not everyone most like a lot of people on these by and like their partner or like their child or whatever.
But it often like spirals out of control into this like controlling everyone and their surroundings, knowing what everyone is up to where they are, and spending like hundreds of dollars a month on on doing so and yeah, that's pretty fucked up if you ask me.
Yeah.
Yeah.
One of the things that's interesting too, it's also in a lot of cases illegal.
This is going to vary, you know, from country to country and state to state, but in the
U S there are states like California, which gets pointed out in the very good tech crunch
investigation on truth spy, where there are really strict laws that journalists
like have to abide by as to when you can record someone that these apps absolutely break.
Yes, it's specifically a thing that also most of these apps will have like a disclaimer
at the bottom that is like, this might be illegal in your jurisdiction and please ask
for consent before doing this.
And then they have lots of tutorials on how to install this in someone's device without
their consent.
Yeah.
It's like always like a we do not take any like we it's not our fault if you break the
law basically, which obviously like it's so far not a lot of this has been challenged
in court, but I don't think this would hold up too long.
Oh, I don't think just saying we make a product to do crimes with, if you
do crimes with it, it's not, I mean, it works for the gun industry.
So yeah, the difference is that like the, with the gun industry, it's a product where
there is a legal and an illegal, like clear way to do it.
The thing with stalker wire as well is that like a lot of them will also explicitly say
the only real use of this, we allow you to do do to use it for is to surveil your child, which unfortunately
is legal in most jurisdictions because children are property of their parents.
Yeah.
In quotes, because I do not agree with that, but.
Yeah. It's one of those things where people using it, like someone installing an app on their exes
or their partner's phone or whatever, without consent, could
very easily lose any court case.
Whether or not the company would get in trouble, I think is going to rely a lot on the stuff
the videos they're posting about how to get these apps on people's phones without them
knowing.
But they do have that out with like, no, it's just for surveilling children, which is great.
Yeah, and for anyone else, you need consent or whatever. But I it is important yeah to point this out very early for anyone who's listening to
this because they think they might have stalker wear on their phones or because they know they
have stalker wear on their phones you can use this in a domestic abuse case this will immediate
this is explicit proof that abuse is happening and no matter anything else because like that's
the thing generally with domestic abuse cases it's really hard to prove abuse is happening no matter anything else because like that's the thing generally with
domestic abuse cases it's really hard to prove abuse is happening stalkerware and any other type
of spying device like also physical GPS device trackers and stuff that is immediate proof that
there is a that there's controlling behavior going on that you are being spied on this it cannot only
be used and is explicitly admissible evidence
This is also usually like makes cases worse like not not for you like it just yeah
It like I can potentially add charges and make it more serious in it
It can help making cops give a shit about like abuse which yeah, I hate that
I need to say that but yeah, it's like it makes it more serious
because there's like spyware and whatever.
It's easy evidence.
First off, like you can prove they're spying on you
and second, if you are in one of the states
where that violates the law,
then you can immediately say this person is breaking the law.
Like we don't have to debate whether or not
they've crossed a line.
Yeah, and even if it doesn't directly break the law to spy on someone on a partner,
like depending on the on the on the region, it can be kind of a hazy like thing,
especially if it's a device you might call on, if it's like a state where you were
with like co-possession or whatever in the US.
I do not know US law very much around this, but yeah, there's like laws like that.
But usually still the fact that you're being spied on can be used as proof for other abuse things you might be alleging,
because it's like hard proof that something is happening. And also, usually these companies
will somewhat have to respond to SAPOINA. So they will have to give out like who the account
owner is behind, like the spying on your phone. For some of them, there's also tools that help you
find out who is spying on you,
or there is like someone with forensic background can help.
Yeah.
And I think people, one thing we should note is that
if you're kind of curious,
has my device been infected by some of these tools?
The one that we've been talking about most, Truth Spy,
if you go to that TechCrunch article.
Or to my article, it also has a link, yeah.
Or to your article on your website.
There's a tool you can use where you,
it'll tell you how to get your IMSI, I think it's the-
IMII.
IMII, yeah.
Which you just dial a thing on your phone
and it gives you that number.
It's basically how you identify specific phones
and you plug that in. It will let you you identify specific phones. And you plug that in, it will
let you know if your device has been compromised. Now, like December last year, up until there is
the data and if you can pretty much tell you if you've been spying on using this specific tool
until then. For other stuff, there's also guides usually on TechCrunch and otherwise also on
stopstalkerware.org, which is the US coalition against stalkerware.
And also just generally, I think a lot of more local anti-stalking,
anti-abuse orcs are not as informed yet as they should be,
but there's still a good point also to reach out to or...
Like, yeah.
Yeah, now one of my questions about Truth Spy that I'm hoping you can answer
is I know that you can, like like text messages get transferred via it, like your call records, all that kind
of stuff get and who you were calling.
Does that include messages for like encrypted apps like Signal or is that not accessible
through this?
It depends.
Like for some of these it will like get Signal messages, WhatsApp messages and everything
generally by reading the notification content.
Because from notifications, you know what messages have been received.
Sometimes it will only then have the received messages and not the sent messages.
Often these also include a keylogger component that maps messages then sent back as well.
It depends a lot what these apps collect. But for most of them, also the collection for other texting
apps is usually kind of broken.
None of these apps are really well maintained.
They're mostly just quick cash grabs.
Yeah.
They're to maintain features usually don't really work.
And it seems like based on that, one thing people
can do outside of checking to see if their device has
been compromised is do stuff like turn off notifications for apps like Signal.
And that's actually just generally good advice.
Notifications are a compromise of the security that Signal offers.
Don't have them enabled.
Yeah.
Or at the very least disable them on the lock screen on Android. I think that's also possible on iOS, but I think iOS doesn't show message content
on the lock screen anyways.
I'm not sure anymore.
But yeah, it's just also small things like that.
And also like one of the key tells that someone probably tampered with your phone, especially
for Android, is if Google Play Protect is disabled and you do not remember disabling
it for something else,
it was almost definitely disabled
because someone installed something on your phone,
just try re-enabling it
and it will probably tell you something.
The thing also to keep in mind,
if you find Stalkerware on your phone,
please get professional help.
Do not just delete it.
Do not necessarily confront whoever you think
might be your abuser about it, unless you're very sure that that's the situation you can handle.
Because that is one of those things that bringing it up or just deleting it can very quickly lead to complicating the situation a lot.
You know what else complicates the situation?
These ads.
And we are back.
So when it comes to the actual fight against this stuff, obviously what you're doing is a big part of it.
Getting inside these companies and finding out like what you're doing is a big part of it. Getting inside these companies and, um, finding out like what they're doing and
their capabilities is, is huge for, in terms of like what regular people are
people who are interested in becoming activists about this can do.
What is the, what is the struggle to actually fight this stuff look like?
Like, how do we, how do we put a bullet in this industry's head?
I think one of the biggest things
and also like why I do the work I do with like hacking
and with encouraging others to like send me data,
be that insiders from these companies,
sending it either to me or like TechCrunch
specifically currently, because like me and TechCrunch
are like the only people really doing like journalism
on this like regularly.
And the important thing with like journalism
and all of this is like
awareness. It's very important to create awareness about this. That's also why I do the media work
with like being on this podcast and things like that. I think the most important thing is to make
people aware, like talk about this in your feminist circles or whatever, things like that.
Especially bring it up just also in like general info things about abuse or how to detect abuse.
I think the most important thing to do against stalkerware is demystify it.
Because most people don't even know that this is a thing.
That there's just commercially available spyware that anyone can install on your phone.
It's just important to not like give in to some sort of paranoia as with any of these things.
It's just important to like, yeah, generate awareness, talk about it, and like, spread these articles. I'd let friends know
that this is a potential thing. And then, yeah, I, the hard thing with this is that, like,
obviously, it should probably help if there was some sort of legislation against some of this.
It's gonna be very hard to get any proper legislation that
ends this industry because in most western countries, which are the only countries which
unfortunately would have enough power to like actually get these apps shut down because that's
the world we live in. But the problem there is usually that like this notion that children are
owned by their parents is too strong to really make a full case against these apps. And at the very best what
I can, like the very best I'm kind of hoping for from from
like, let's just like, there's this just a ban on advertising
these apps on use against other adults, which would be big
already. But that's Yeah, doesn't really solve the issue,
because there's still going to be enough people who know of
their use for use against adults. And there's still gonna be enough people who know of their use for use against adults and there's gonna be enough people on like credit threads talking about hey well yeah you oh think that's also why like I am so focused on like,
the hacking and the like, blowing these companies up and showing like who's behind them. It's
because at the end of the day, the most effective thing we have against these companies is like,
the grassroots movement of making them too scared to run in this business, making it not profitable
enough. Because as I said, most of this is like quick cash grabs
from like web design studios and outsourcing companies.
Yeah, that are just making a quick buck from this
because otherwise they don't get paid enough.
Like that's the sad thing really is how much
of this industry is in all of these countries,
Western companies outsource their IT too,
because there's lots of IT companies there and they are entirely reliant on like Western companies outsource their IT to, because there's lots of IT companies there
and they are entirely reliant on like
Western companies giving them very underpaid tasks.
And you have this problem that you now have
a bunch of employees and not enough money
to always pay them.
And what do you do?
You like find some weird niche of like a tech product
you can quickly build.
Yeah.
And this is like one of those easy niches.
It's like always the scummy stuff. And this is like one of those easy niche. It's like always this gummy stuff. And,
and like, yeah, it's, that's also why like so many of these
companies are like based out of Vietnam out of Iran and
whatever. It's just companies that already have it hard
enough to do business globally, where the IT industry is like
falling apart because there's not enough like local
customers and anything that's
international. You're just the cheap workforce, right? So yeah, it's, it's, it's once again,
also like a class problem. I don't like most people working in this industry know that
they're working in a like scummy industry. Yeah, of course. But like, yeah, you got to
get paid and that's yeah. And that's like why I think making it more scary to operate in this industry is
like, yes, they wait to go because like with with just like these like four hacks
that have happened against these companies over the last like half a year or so,
two of them, three of them, three of them have shut down completely.
Others seem to be slowly moving towards just building other software primarily.
Yeah.
It's just like, yeah, it's like with any other like shady industry that the best we can do is just to not make it
profitable to run the software because at the very best anything else we will get is just pushing them more into the shadows,
which is not going to solve the issue at all.
pushing them more into the shadows, which is not going to solve the issue at all.
Yeah. I, I think a lot about like strategic thinking, which I do believe is kind of often in part
because of how rightfully negative most people on the left think about the military.
There's a tendency to ignore some of like the theory around how to actually win a conflict
and all of it, all, all strategy really, when you're
talking about like defeating an opponent revolves around denying and taking
operational area from them, right?
And that's what you're talking about when you talk about, well, we need to stop this.
You know, one of the first things we can do as part of fighting this is to stop
them from being able to advertise certain places, right?
It's, it's making sure that they're not able to operate without being seen.
It's basically cutting, cutting down their area, their space to maneuver,
their ability to profit, which cuts down their money, their access to people,
their ability to actually like operate, right?
Like that's, that's what we're looking at in terms of how do you kill this stuff?
It's not one single really, I use the, the comparison of like a bullet, but
it's never going gonna be one bullet.
These things are too durable.
There's too many countries that play to do that.
Yeah.
That's also why I like put so much emphasis
on doing media work about this
and getting more people to talk about this
and getting more awareness of it, this out there.
I do the point where I'm willing to work
with more conservative newspapers on this
because everyone needs to know about this at the end of the day. This is how we stop people from falling victims to this.
Most people who are a victim of stalker apps have never heard of stalker apps before.
And I think that's one of the biggest ways to tackle this. And on the other hand, we also have
I think another big leverage point with how many of these are getting hacked, because none of these apps are very secure. That's
another thing is this can also be leveraged against like the
abusers in this scenario, I think just pointing out to them
that all of these apps get hacked all the time. And that
this is how they get found out that this is how their data of
them as abusers and sub landing on the internet. I think that's
also like a very important angle at the end of the day is just to make it clear,
yeah, no, not even you are secure from this
having consequences for your life,
beyond direct interpersonal or legal consequences.
This can and in the past has result in your email address
being on a list of people who do abuse to people online.
You don't want to be on such a list.
I think that's also important just to point out.
There isn't one stalker app that's not eventually
going to get hacked.
There is a big war against these apps.
There are so many different hacking groups
that keep sending me data from these.
I'm already working on another article that already,
once again, affects the data of like, I think like
80,000 more like abusers and it's just abuser data this time
but I'm still going to report on it. Like it's it's it's this
is not going to stop. It's even also not going to stop when I
stop reporting on this myself. Like I've there's been work
before me down on this. I also, the first time I got involved in finding Stalkerware
was back in 2020.
People have been hacking these apps forever
and will keep hacking them.
Like just look at the Wikipedia page for Stalkerware.
There's an ever growing list of these apps
that have been hacked.
And I think at this point,
the like official count being kept
by one of the people at TechCrunch
is that like 13 apps, a few of which have been hacked two or three
times. Yeah. These are not, these are not secure apps for any.
No, no, no, of course not. Yeah. And they, yeah. I mean, it makes sense
that like an app dedicated to violating people's privacy for money would also basically violate the privacy of the
people using it. Yeah.
Also, they don't care. Like, like I said, it's a it's a cash
grab. It's nothing else. There's a few apps that are like a
little more than a cash grab. But it's usually just because
they're made like they're still a cash grab, but they're like
more well made. But it's because they're a cash grab from a
company that
has better developers or more money
to do the initial investment.
The thing is also most of these companies
don't have a lot of initial investment.
And I think the important thing to consider as well here
is one big area of this that I have not yet started tackling,
but I do want to look into more sometime,
is a big reason this industry is so big and most of these apps have a lot of users
despite there being so many of them is the affiliate marketing industry once
again our very beloved friend yeah all of these apps are parts of various
affiliate marketing networks some of them started by stock aware company as
some of them just other like things to advertise all the shady things like all those phone number
locator apps or whatever that's also part of those same affiliate marketing networks.
And there's lots of money flowing here and there's lots of money flowing to very big tech YouTube
channels. And I might soon have some proof for some of that. But that's how these are advertised.
It's everyone who advertises Dockerware to you who has a big platform is doing that because
they're getting money.
Not for any other reason.
We need to do more ads.
We will be back shortly. And we are back.
Well that's all I had Mia.
What do you got?
Yeah, I guess there's there's another thing I wanted to ask a little bit about which Zach
Whitaker who's been one of the journalists at TechCrunch doing a lot of the research.
Yeah, he's been one of the journalists at TechCrunch, doing a lot of the research.
Yeah, he's great.
One of the things that he brings up that I think is another
I know it's kind of a playing with fire angle on them.
But one of the issues that these companies seem to have is.
Payment platforms, because a lot of payment platforms
look at this and go, wait, hold on. Yeah. So yeah, I was talking about that a little bit. That's an angle we have also been fighting on a lot of payment platforms look at this and go, wait, hold on.
Yeah. So, yeah, I was wondering if you talked about that a little bit.
That's an angle we have also been fighting on a lot, like me and Sang.
We've worked on most of these stories together.
Like I it's kind of funny.
We both got each other into the stockover thing back in 2020.
As I mentioned, that was the first time I stumbled into a stockover
app with a security issue.
I reached out to some random journalist
at TechCrunch about it.
And now he is the only one talking about this forever
because I reached out to him that one time
and he got sucked into this horrible,
horrible world of spying.
But yeah, like one of the things we focus on a lot
is reporting these companies to their payment providers,
to their server hosters,
to the point where sometimes for weeks,
SAC will just wait for them to switch to a new provider
after we got them taken out from PayPal,
and then from their other PayPal account
where they're just using the checkout experience
from one of their completely unrelated software projects,
which they will later claim is not related at all,
and they are different companies and whatever.
But then eventually they get taken down from that as well.
And usually we can get them taken down from most like Western hosters,
like especially US hosters will immediately take them down.
You do not want to risk being the company hosting by my own US grounds.
Yeah. Yeah.
You just like same with EU hosters like the few companies
that we've seen that were on heads.
And they immediately react because it's like, yeah, no, like under EU law, you don't want to like risk
that and also just because you don't want to host that, like there's no reason for you to host shit
like that. It will have like image consequences. And that's an important thing that is maybe also
something you can do as more like a grassroots thing.
It's also like if you find one of these apps and if you see, oh, they're using like PayPal or whatever.
Just reach out. I think PayPal is even harder to reach as like just an average lay person.
Don't expect them to reply. They might still take action. You will have to manually check.
PayPal doesn't really reply to things ever.
But yeah, same goes with hosting company.
If you see they're hosted on a European or American hosting
company, just reach out.
Be like, hey, there's someone running
spyware on your thing.
Also use the word spyware, not stalker,
where they will not know what that is.
And it is spyware.
So yeah.
And that can usually get them taken down.
And often, they don't have proper backups and will
have a few months of data missing and it's like, yeah, that's how you slowly grind them
to a halt.
Yeah.
And also, once again, like if you have tips about any of these companies, be it having
found a vulnerability just or insider info, especially, I'm always very happy about insider
info.
You can reach out to either me or Zach Whitaker.
We're both very happy to talk about this.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's something that's been used really effectively
by right wingers to target sex workers.
It's been a huge thing.
There's been a bunch of campaigns to get platform companies.
And yeah, so it's.
It's interesting that for once we can use the very restrictive and conservative
rules of payment providers for our good. Yeah. But yeah, basically any of the big payment providers
will not respect something like this. Some of the like small regional odd ones probably won't really
give a shit. They have no reason to. It's like revenue for them. But yeah, it's generally worth
trying. And I'm always glad like
if someone just reaches out to these companies and we don't have to do that ourselves. I think me and
second to a few other people like actively working in this are doing more than enough work currently.
But yeah, like just if you find one of these things, don't go digging too deep. It's a depressing
world. But if you stumble upon one of these somewhere or whatever
Just just report them. It's it's it's gonna disrupt their operations and if it happens often enough, they might just give up
Yeah
and I mean like in cases like like the truth spy they are willing to do extreme amounts of fraud to
to get to money easily because they started with mostly just in the market they
could get with their Vietnamese payment providers.
Eventually they realized, well, the US is this really big market, but for really easy
US stuff, we need a PayPal thing.
They made over 12 fake American identities with fake passports and fake addresses and sign
up to paypal a whole bunch of times and had various employees at the company move money
around. Yeah, that's obviously not a thing the US government will like if you do that,
generally speaking. They moved like millions like that. So yeah, which is pretty crazy. Like that
the money, that amount of money that's moving in this industry
is crazy. Like, yeah, actually, like most of these app apps will
be half broken, which no one ever complains about because
like, it's shady. Like you, you don't expect like if you go
online and you search for something shady, like anything
like be piracy or whatever, you don't expect it to be the best
experience ever. Like, you know, you're getting some some weird service and it's probably going to be half broken.
But yeah, most of these talk about apps start at like $40 a month and more. And sometimes for more
features you pay up to $60 or $70 or so. And then all of these have like tens of thousands of users,
sometimes hundreds of thousands of users. Yeah, you can do the math yourself. It's crazy. This is a
really big industry, which makes it so crazy to me that it's like not a
thing that's talked about more, especially in like, feminist spaces and
things like that. Because this is such a like big angle of like modern tech
enabled abuse that I really think should should be more of a topic.
Yeah, especially on the left, like this is this is bad. modern tech enabled abuse that I really think should be more of a topic. Yeah.
Especially on the left.
Like this is, this is bad.
Yeah, no, this is like critically bad.
I agree entirely.
And also like the whole thing with like all of this data being so easily
accepted, your data can end up getting sold on some dark web forum.
You're both as the abuser and as the target, right?
And the government can find these.
Like I have no, like this is not me making a statement
of that's a thing that's happening,
but there's nothing preventing the government
from hacking these companies and getting shit.
Like I sometimes, like whenever I get these data sets
and it's always hard to work with data sets
that include like non-consensually collected data
of people, right?
But like I do always likeually collected data of people, right? Yes.
But like I do always like do some due diligence checks, like mostly trying to
find if the government is using a specific app.
Sometimes yes, there is always like the odd correction of the officer who has
signed up for one or two of these apps or like education people and whatever.
But then I also sometimes search through the text messages for just some code
words and the amount of people moving drugs have stalker were on their phones. It's, you know.
Yeah, and it's it's one of those things where there are laws like technically, if I if my understanding of the laws around this are correct, it is illegal for an organization like the FBI to utilize these apps. But.
Yes, but we have an organizing called the NSA who.
And it is, it is on paper illegal for them to do this with a third party app.
But one thing that often gets done, particularly by the FBI, but, but, you
know, not just by them is it's not illegal for law enforcement agencies
to contract with private agencies. And if those agencies, you don't, you just don't
check in on what they're doing. You know what they're using, but like, yeah.
Or like if an informant, or like if an informant like sends you the state, like you're not
going to say no, right? Exactly. Exactly. And also you don't really need to disclose
that because it's information coming up from an informant. You do not need to say no. Exactly. Exactly. And also you don't really need to disclose that because it's information coming up from an informant. You do not need to disclose that
informant in court ever. So yeah, it's like, it's, it's fair. There are, there are ways
around, you know, the laws that we put up, not that we shouldn't continue to extend to
those laws, but you shouldn't like just because, well, you're, they're not allowed to use this.
Doesn't mean they can't get access to the info. Yeah.
Yeah, and also there's all this important thing,
like there's more, like also globally,
like there's other governments that can't just be using this.
Like for one of the apps I got the data for.
Yeah, the Indian government and the Russian government
don't give a shit.
Yeah, like there was also like another thing where I,
like for one of the apps I got data for,
there was some indication that at some point,
the Colombian national police did a bigger evaluation of using commercials spyware for their use because you're in a country with not that big
of a like police budget in comparison you cannot afford like all the cool Israeli tools everyone
else has so what do you do you just look for random apps you can find you know yeah you you
find the Walmart the Kirkland version the wish.com, yeah, yeah, yeah. Alibaba spyware, right?
Yeah. I don't think most of them move forward with this because these apps fucking suck.
They're bad. That's the other thing. They don't even really do their job well. They're bad. And
you don't know who is behind them. You cannot even go up to someone and be like, yo, don't do this. You also cannot
go to the cops and be like, this company is scamming me because
yeah, I assume some people have probably done that before. But
it does involve admitting to a crime. So yeah. It's like, yeah,
these companies just get away with not giving a shit about
their product because like, yeah.
a way with not giving a shit about their product because like, yeah.
Yeah. Well, I think that's that's all we had. Thank you, Maya, for both the work you're doing and for talking to us. Yeah, is there anything you wanted to plug before we we roll out here?
Just my just my blog, I think, where like I do this journalistic work and also more. Yes,
about to be another cool investigative piece out soon, which I think actually involves more tracking and whatever. And also involves like Hollywood and more. It's a
crazy big story, I promise. That will be out like hopefully in a month or so. But yeah, my blog at
maya.crimeu.gay. Crime U as in crime W. Yeah, and gay as in gay. Yeah. Yeah, just check out my blog. At
the bottom of the blog, there's all my links to my social media for anyone who's like listening
to this and has been wondering where I am. I am back on Twitter as well. Yeah. For now.
Yeah. That's for all of us these days. That's always like a hard out. Yeah, that's poor. But yeah, I am back on Twitter.
I'm posting there sometimes, yeah.
All right, well, thank you.
And thank you all for listening.
We will be back tomorrow unless this comes out on a Friday,
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-♪ WHOOSH! -♪
Hey, it's Alec Baldwin.
This past season on my podcast, Here's the Thing,
I spoke with more actors, musicians, policy makers,
and so many other fascinating people,
like actress and director Cheryl Hines.
They were looking for an unknown actress to play Larry David's wife.
I said, well, how old is that guy?
Isn't he old?
And author David Sedaris.
You know, like when you meet somebody and they'll say, well I want to be a writer
or I want to be an artist and I say, well is it all you care about?
Because if it's not, it's gonna be pretty hard for you.
If you're not on fire. It's like opening the door of an oven
and it's like, wow, you know, you take a step back. It's all they think about, it's all they
talk about, it's all they care about
They don't have relationships. They're not good friends for other people
This is just what they're all that energy goes. Yeah
Listen to the new season of here's the thing on the I heart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts
or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to A Good Appetite, the podcast where getting medication takes like four fucking
hours because of a bunch of unbelievable bureaucratic bullshit.
I have your host, Mia Wong, who was asked by my pharmacist today and I quote, have you
been pregnant or have there been pregnancies?
So-
I like have there been pregnancies? So I like have there been pregnancies.
Yeah, that was that was what I was like.
What?
Like the officer involved shooting of a human life.
She like she walks up to the thing, right.
And she she she puts the like she puts the meds like it like
she's about to ring them up.
Right. And then she stops and then turns and walks with another person,
starts talking to her boss and then comes back
and then asks me if they've been pregnant.
So I was like, what?
It's like I am not passing.
I'm just wearing I'm just wearing like jeans,
like a mask and just like a red coat.
I is.
So it's for the it's been a time.
Yeah, achievement in the world of healthcare where they can simultaneously, like ask you
to be pregnant and then make you fucking labor unpaid for half a day to obtain your like
basic hormone therapy or whatever it is that you need.
Like my favorite is when the health insurance makes me, it's just exist a podcast about
health insurance and how we hate it.
I hope you're enjoying it.
When they're like,
hey, we need a doctor to confirm you still need the insulin.
What the fuck do you think has happened?
If I cured the shit, you would have heard about it.
I didn't at home pancreas transplant,
didn't bill you guys for it. You're welcome.
Yeah, with me is James, who is from a country that is more normal about health care,
but is now here. Yeah. It's a country.
More normal is not the right word, but it's less shit is the correct word.
Unless you're trans, in which case it's about a toss.
I was going to say, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Country, which has a different approach,
at least at least like has accepted the fact that if we're going to say, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, a country which has a different approach, at least, at least, like,
has accepted the fact that if we're going to have the state pay for, like sending bombs to kill little children in Palestine,
it should also pay for my insulin, which I think is is a good
a good place to start, I guess.
Yeah, there's an ideal combination there.
No, no one is yet reached. This is this is this is the task of international
socialism etc etc. Yeah, I will accept the necessity of the state only when it funds
insulin not bombs. Yeah, but we are here to talk about another incredibly violent state
bureaucracy and the people who run it. We're going to be talking about a series of very bizarre and incredibly authoritarian crackdowns
that Democratic, well, governors, city councils, many, many such cases, yeah, have been invoking
to nominally crack down on crime, a thing that is down everywhere
and has been down everywhere for a long time.
Yeah, I know many such cases.
It's great that that Democrat, like local politicians are now doing everything
that we were warned that Republican president would do four years ago.
Yeah, it's really fun.
And I mean, this is one of these things.
So the place we're going to start is
New York Governor Holtroll.
Holtroll? I think that's your name.
Holtroll? Yeah, I don't know.
New York keeps going through politicians faster when I can learn
how to pronounce their names.
So with what they're going to have like Andrew Cuomo, the fourth in power
by the time this episode goes out, they'll be like two.
There will be two new kings of England.
The secret sibling.
Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. We're not making a podcast about the royal family nonsense. new kings of England. The secret sibling. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We're not making a podcast about the royal family nonsense.
We don't know.
No, this is this is this is this is the best that you're getting out of that.
But yeah, so who has deployed 750 national guardsmen
to stand outside of some subway stations?
That's a tongue twister.
Try saying that one five times fast in the mirror
to like do bag checks
and generally just sort of stand around and be intimidating.
Yeah, it's great.
I'm sure it's what those people signed up to do.
I'm sure they feel fulfilled and I'm sure everyone in New York
feels safer and happier as a result of random people in camouflage
being standing around a subway.
Yeah, and we're going to get into this sort of emotional
effective aspect of this, because that is ultimately what
this is about. But I think, okay, there's a lot of sort of
interesting aspects of this. So okay, there's been a lot of talk
about what the sort of precursors to this are. And I'm
going to ask you about because there's a lot of national there's
a lot of very weird, absolutely dogshit National Guard deployments
that have happened.
Yes. Yeah. Yes, there are. I have.
Yeah. Yeah, we can get on to that. Yeah.
But I think I think the most immediate predecessor to this that
that leaps to mind is something I talk about on the show all the time,
because everyone else seems to have completely forgotten it.
I refuse to let this be memory hold, which is the time that my previous
shitty mayor ordered a bunch of in twenty twenty ordered a bunch.
This is in February twenty.
So this is this is pre uprising put just started putting SWAT teams on subways.
Oh, great. They immediately did the thing that SWAT team does,
which is they started putting SWAT teams on the fucking red line.
They immediately shot a guy for no reason.
Like, I think I if I'm remembering correctly, the thing that
originally they said it was fair evasion and it wasn't fair evasion,
it was the guy walked from one train car to another train car.
I think that like millions of people do every day.
Yeah, and the capital punishment for fair evasion is also wrong and bad.
Yeah. Well, it's like this guy somehow survived.
They shot him in the back.
But yeah, they also tased him a bunch of times and then shot him.
So right. Good. Yeah.
Bad. However, thankfully, this guy survived.
But yeah, but this is something that that happens.
This is something that, you know, with the current crop of right wing mayors
have been doing and, you know, the twenty twenty one and it was such a fiasco
that even even like Chicago's machine,
well, it wasn't really quite the machine, but like even Chicago's right wing
Democrats were like, OK, we probably shouldn't do this.
Less the SWAT teams have their like start the killing moment.
But, you know, so that's like one sort of predecessor to this.
And the second one is I wanted to actually ask you specifically about the
the federal National Guard deployments on the border, because I think, yeah,
that's the part of this has been like disappeared.
Yes, exactly. Again, those have been like completely overlooked
and kind of memory hold by most apparently like since since Biden came to power.
Like there's there's the Texas state deployment, right, which we're very familiar with, they
get cheated out of their, their benefits, they tend to die from suicide, from bringing
their own firearms on deployment, or getting drunk and driving around.
They've had like higher casualties than they've had in deployments to Iraq in their Texas
deployment, right.
The federal one is different. I see these dudes often, it's nearly always dudes.
Of course, women could be deployed in that capacity, but I haven't seen them.
And they are, for the most part, like scared kids with firearms guarding prison camps full of
children. Like I had one of these guys go to draw his pistol on me the other day because I was trying
to alert him. Yeah,
I mean, like, I guess it gets better in that situation that like, it's not my first time
having someone draw a pistol on me. And I can tell him to sit down and stop being a
dick. But this, in this case, right, someone had had was was experiencing cardiac distress
and when I'd gone to the nearest person who I can do right like I can't call an ambulance
and have them come in there have to go to either get BP to radio or in this case, National
Guard.
So but what they're doing is in addition to like guarding these open-air detention sites
on and off is they are conducting kind of surveillance along the border.
So often I'll see them with like surveillance arrays cameras.
I assume also like listening to radios and stuff like that. They're not actually like interdicting or arresting
migrants, they're not supposed to be anyway, but what it's supposed to be doing is like kind of
having that surveillance capacity and I guess protection when it comes to the to the OADs.
But yeah, they are everywhere. Like I see these people all the time down here in, you know, certainly
on the Eastern San Diego County border.
And I don't, and they're all in rented vehicles as well, which is weird
that they haven't got their Humvees or whatever.
It must be a significant expense.
And obviously border crossings are not decreasing thanks to them being there.
Right.
They, you know, they mostly like cruise like cruise around outside out doing a water drop on Sunday
and you'll see them cruising around the dirt roads.
And then obviously people therefore just avoid the roads.
It doesn't make doesn't reduce migration like everything else.
It just makes it more dangerous.
And they've been here for a while.
It's one of these things where, you know, they're doing OK.
So like the guys in New York just basically seem to be standing around
and doing bag checks, whereas those guys are doing a lot more.
But I think there's one of the things that's been happening here.
And this has been this is, you know, this is not just the focus has been on
on the like the Republican tax deployments. Right.
But this is something that both the Republicans
and the Democrats, this is from what we're seeing in the US
and the federal government have decided that, you know,
the thing that we are going to be doing is what are what are.
And I mean, active militia deployments like that's insane.
Like that is a level of that is a level of authoritarianism that.
Is that that has become effectively normal, right?
Like there was there wasn't I mean, there was kind of an outcry against
the subway stuff, but like it hasn't stopped.
Like, as best I could tell, like, they're still like, yeah, like it enough.
Nothing. None of it stopped it that we've been, you know,
what the thing that we've been forced to accept is not even not just, you know,
because we've already been forced to accept the sort of demilitarization of the police.
Right. But now it's just straight up the total militarization of society
to the extent that like, yeah, we just have a bunch of soldiers wandering around
doing like random security checks and doing surveillance
and like holding people in these open air prisons.
Yeah, exactly. And like deployed way outside their state often, right? Like I think some of
the people here from Missouri or Illinois, like some of the less kind of insane, are you, you know,
the people who mistake me for, I guess, for a member of the cartel judging by that guy's actions
or like some ridiculous, somehow a threat to him, you
know, that we can talk to them and you know, it's a very bullshit mission. I think most
of them would agree like, further east, they're just like standing around by the border wall
in the baking sun in the desert just just yet doing security theater. But with as you
said real consequences.
Yeah, and it's like the thing that is happening is these people have realized that the National Guard, if you are a senior enough state official,
is just your private army.
You could do whatever the fuck you want with it.
And this is the thing that they're doing with it.
And I think you should know it's worth looking at what the sort of justification
for this is, which is probably also I neglected to mention
that there were a dozen Republican governments, governors who have deployed their National Guard to the border,
right?
Like, not as part of the federal deployment, like to your private army thing.
And I believe the North Dakota, it's funded by a private individual.
Like a private individual is covering the state's cost to deploy them to the border.
Like this is-
It's nuts.
Yeah, fully insane.
Like they're serving as a fucking PMC.
Yeah, but I mean, we're seeing, you know, very explicitly,
we're seeing this fusion of like personal state and corporate power
and that's being used to just deploy a bunch of guys with guns
to a bunch of random places.
And, you know, like it's worth mentioning that like crime rates are down,
they're down year on year, they're down like the broad trend is down.
They're down like outrageous.
Like I think it's like almost like 50 percent or something from the 90s.
Right. Yeah.
And likewise, the ratio of people
crossing the border to agents to process them is
is much lower than it was in the 90s.
We have more border patrol agents, we have a more militarized border patrol.
They have all these assets that were previously seen only as like, I see a Black Hawk all
the fucking time.
We call it the scrap hawk.
It's like several Black Hawks.
It's like it's not any particular sub model of Black Hawk.
It's like the surviving pieces of several black hawks. It's like it's not any particular submodel of Black Hawk. It's like the surviving pieces of several black hawks.
But yeah, they have a lot of kit that you would think would be military kit.
Yeah. And, you know, so I was I.
So when I was reading about this, I was like, OK, so I try to figure out
how many crimes are actually happening on New York subway system.
But I'm going to read this paragraph from Reuters because it is outrageous.
There were 38 robberies and 70 thefts,
including pickpocketing on the subway system in February
compared to 40 robberies and 98 thefts in the same month
last year, according to police data.
There were 35 assaults, the same number as for February 2023.
About 90 million trips were taken on the subway
over the month.
Now, that is nuts.
The subway, including pickpocketing, right?
You're at about 100?
Yeah, yeah, like a trivial number of incidents.
90 million trips, right?
This means that like per trip,
your odds of being pickpocketed
are almost literally one in a million.
This is about the same odds you have
of being struck by lightning.
You are 17 times more likely to get killed
by a bee or a wasp sting
than you are to be like pickpocketed.
Like pickpocketed, not romp, pickpocketed
the subway, right?
So there's I from what I can tell, I think there was three
killings on the New York subway in February.
Yeah, there was a shooting, I think, today or yesterday, wasn't there?
Yeah, yeah. But this is the thing.
So these things get a get a lot of attention, right?
But again, 30 million trips.
We're talking like maybe three,
maybe four people getting killed a month.
So that's like one in 30 million rides.
Yeah, someone gets shot.
That is outrageously safe.
Like that is bafflingly starlingly safe.
But this this sort of brings us to well, OK,
the thing the thing that this immediately brings us to is an ad break, but it will be a second thing
Great I hope it's a good one
All right, we're back for the ads. We're bringing you actually, amazingly, advertisements.
Part of what part of the whole thing is happening here, because, you know,
one of the one of the big drivers of what's happening in New York
and the reason everyone thinks the subway is unsafe is New York's media market.
And very this is a bit like, you know, so like the media market
in the US is not good, right?
But very specifically, the New York media market is absolutely batshit.
They are nuts.
And this is one of these things where, you know, you may have like a one in 30 million
chance of getting killed on a subway, but every single one of those 30 million
like incidents like all those 130 million is every single one of those 30 million like incidents like why all those 130 million is every
single one of those is like front page news, right?
Because this is, you know, this is this is both part of the part of the actual
sort of conservative politics of these media organizations.
They are, you know, the media market is dominated by a bunch of right wing tabloids
and a bunch of newspapers that are normally not right wing, but are.
Yeah. And so, you know, there's this sort of
breathless coverage of every single time one of these attacks happen.
And this is one of the things that Kutrow very much
like literally says about this, you know, like we're at a point
in this sort of crime cycle where enough journalists have been screamed at
by people who are like the crime rates are all down,
that the journalists have to include in the article a thing that's like the crime rates are down.
This took like four years of just screaming at them.
Eventually it worked.
But you know, like Kuchel's like asked about this
and she goes, yeah, well, it's about people feeling,
it's about the feeling that people have
because they don't seem safe.
It's like- To fight against policy.
Yeah, yeah.
And you know, this is one of these things where like,
this is like how insane the New York media market is over this stuff has had like an actual
substantive political impact.
And this is something that, you know, the Democrats embrace of this sort of like,
especially in New York, this like tough on crime thing has gotten to the point
where literally Eric Adams has to be the guy who's like, no, no, no.
Actually, hold on.
Like it's the New York is safe.
Please stop panicking. I got my got New York is safe. Please stop panicking.
I got my, I got my police funding already.
Please stop like fleeing the city in terror.
Yeah.
It's amusing that that's similar to what's happening in San Diego.
Another city, Democrat councilor mayor.
Right.
So we have this talk, Gloria, terrible mayor, serial bullshitter.
And in Gloria, in his state of the city speech was saying we should be locking
up criminals,
not laundry detergent.
This was his big line that he was very proud of.
I have successfully purchased laundry detergent that was not incarcerated since then.
But I think he was talking about Target, I guess.
Apparently he's legislating for the interests of Target.
But you have then his opponent in the mayoral race, who's a former Marine cop, Republican guy,
being like, yo, I think we fucked up on our homelessness policy.
We're just like, criminalizing this is not just the answer.
And then we've got Gloria just being like, no, lock him up.
You know, like, they're trying to push this continued, like, this California bill that
will force incarcerate people with mental illness, right? And against their will.
Just yeah, it's, yeah, it's, it's, it's fucking, I mean, it's not
bizarre because like, I think so many Democrats and, and like,
certainly publications here have really leaned into like suburban
grievance politics.
Yeah.
You know, like fix the potholes and make it so I don't have to see
poor people is their entire ideology
But it it's still I know it's just kind of I don't I'm struggling for the words here
It makes me really fucking pissed off the people who showed up to one or two BLM marches are now out there like
Barking for a second border wall and machine gunning the unhoused
Yeah, and you know and this has had a
especially in New York, this has had an actual this.
This has been having a substantive like electoral impact.
One of the stories that kind of got buried in 2022
is that you can actually if you look at the electoral map in 20 in 2022,
you can actually literally see
where the New York media market ends, because all of the districts
in the New York media market became significantly more conservative.
And this is this is and this is not a joke.
This is literally this whole cuff on crime shit is literally the thing.
Like in this New York media market, this this is what cost the Democrats the House.
Because basically everywhere else in the country, there was OK.
So like like red district shifted red.
Yeah, every single district that was contested, like all of the sort of like
purple, like districts, they all went they all shifted to the left
because of abortion stuff.
But then specifically a bunch of the likes
were supposed to be like very safe blue districts went red
because they were all because all of them were doing this insane tough on crime stuff.
And those seats, like the seats they lost in New York
are the reason the Republicans have control of the House.
So like, you know, this isn't working for them electorally, but
they're still doing it because it's their ideology.
And we're going to get into a bit more about why
about that, that part a second.
But before I do that, I want to talk about, I think, another one of these things
that has gotten kind of lost in the shuffle, which is, do you do you?
Have you heard about the giant like DC crime omnibus bill?
I've heard about this. Yeah.
Yeah. Like I will say, I'm not familiar with it other than like
hearing that it's bad. Yeah.
So OK. So so in D.C., the city council passed this enormous sort of like
giant set of like omnibus set of like policies are supposed to be there
like keep D.C. safe crime omnibus thing.
I look OK.
There's a couple of things to note about this.
One is that it's actually not as bad as it was originally going to be
because there was so much like uproar, because I mean, the original one
like had provisions that was like banning masks at protests and shit.
And it was like it was really bad and it got like nuked.
But it's still really bad.
And there's a lot of it's a lot of really weird kind of grievance stuff.
Like there's this provision specifically that's supposed to be about like
like targeting quote quote organized retail theft,
which is one of the insane.
This is yeah.
This is one of those like storm in a teacups that has been going for a while now.
Yeah.
But I mean, there's also kind of like this is their standard police stuff,
which is they're trying to expand pretrial detention, which they did.
One of the absolutely insane ones that have been declared unconstitutional,
but apparently it's just back now, is allowing police chiefs
to designate certain areas, quote, drug free zones
where, yeah, sorry, people can see I'm I'm so I'm confused.
Basically, what it lets it basically what it lets you do is
it lets the cops just harass a bunch of people even more than they already do.
Like mostly, mostly what it does is just when you declare one of these areas,
it's where all the black people are.
And then the cops just have cops have like an incredible,
like incredibly increased ability to just randomly stop people and search them.
Right. Yeah.
It's a shit stop and frisk law.
Yeah.
And there's so there is a thing
that like part of the mask
provision state in force, which is that they're making it.
Basically, it's like like wearing a mask with the intent to commit a crime
is a crime. Right.
The thing is, that's the cops like determine. wearing a mask with the intent to commit a crime is a crime. Right.
The cops like determine.
Right. Your intent. So like, yeah, it's one of those laws like they do this a lot with gun laws, right?
They pass gun laws that don't make anything that wasn't already illegal.
Illegal. They just make it so that if they if you if you're
if you're caught, you're going to prison for longer now.
Yeah, this is actually there.
There are provisions like that in this, too.
There's also a bunch of random gun provisions.
There's other like more nuts ones like there's there's one
where cops can arrest you.
So if they're trying to cite you for not paying a toll,
if they they claim that you didn't pay a you didn't like pay a transit fare.
You have to give them your full name and address if they don't.
And if you don't, they can arrest you.
Which is nuts.
This is so like don't disrespect me on the train in front of everyone,
or isn't it? That's what that is.
There's another one. There's another one, which is like, I don't I don't have another way
to describe it other than this is the this is the how to get away with murder,
Bill, which is this is so one of the things that they're doing
is letting cops review their own helmet footage
before police inquiries.
It's great.
Ah, this is this is the get the narrative straight.
Yeah.
Bill, do you also get to edit it?
Oh, I don't.
Well, OK, so here's here's the thing about that.
Quote unquote, no, however, comma, these things mysteriously vanish.
Time is seriously disappears.
Yeah, there's also like a whole thing about like
there are certain groups of people who the cops can just like force DNA collections from.
Oh, wow.
Which is it's a lot less broad than it used to be.
But yeah, it's still a provision in there.
But yeah, this is a nightmarish pill that they've been able to pass.
And, you know, I think it's worth thinking about why this is actually happening,
which is that all of this stuff, all of these are sort of long range reaction to 2020.
Right. This is this this was the sort of strategy
after 2020 for rebuilding legitimacy of the police.
And, you know, and also now rebuilding sort of
rebuilding the I don't know, psychological capacity, I guess.
Yeah. To, you know, I mean, just deploy a bunch of troops on U.S. soil.
Right. Right. Yeah.
Sort of building up that tolerance.
Yeah. And you know, like this is all of this stuff is sort of born on,
you know, on on on protest crackdowns.
One of the things that's also sort of worth noting about this is all of this stuff.
I mean, the DC crime bill, but in the works for a long time, but the subway stuff is all
stuff that happened like pretty quickly after the Air and Bush, else off in Malaysia.
So a big part of this has been.
The sort of the the Democratic ruling class kind of losing their minds after watching how widespread 2020 was,
watching the extent to which they were forced to like,
you know, like, like there are Democratic politicians in 2020
like talking about like, I mean, there there are like a lot of people
talking about defunding the police.
There are like they're all remember the weird like
that whole like kneeling thing in Congress. They all did. Oh
Yeah, yeah the picture the morning can take with yeah. Yeah
Whoo-hoo. Yeah, that's a powerful instance of cringe
Yeah, but there's a lot of like, you know, there's there's the sort of memory of that has been has been sort of drilled deep into into the Democratic Party.
And so what what what has been happening?
Like, you know, and what's been happening in this has been happening in blue states
very explicitly is this is this strategy of hyper militarization with the explicit like
my explicitly with the implicit but not very well concealed goal of putting everyone back in their place after 2020.
And that is extremely grim.
I mean, I think.
I don't know.
I'm glad the DC stuff isn't as bad as it was originally
because the original one were just like straight up a bunch of fascist shit.
This is also fascist shit, but like not as unhinged as the original bills were.
So, right. You know, it's like the tide of this stuff isn't inevitable, right?
But also very, very powerful factions of the Democratic Party have decided that this is the
thing that they want to do. And it absolutely sucks. And, you know, and this is, you know, and this is in a similar way
to sort of the stuff on the border being bipartisan.
I mean, at some point, I'm going to do an episode about the absolute shit
show that's been happening in Chicago where.
Yeah, like a kid, a kid got fucking measles in in one of these
and one of the migrant shelters in Pilsen in Chicago.
And now the mayor's like evicting a bunch of a bunch of people from the migrant shelters in Pilsen in Chicago. And now the mayor's like evicting a bunch of a bunch of people
from the migrant shelters.
Jesus, you know, so like there's a vibe.
I mean, this is the thing like in Chicago.
I mean, there's just.
Outside of like, you know, we're like outside of just
like basically every like Walgreens or just on street corners,
there's a bunch of refugee families like just
sitting out there in the cold trying to get some money because there's fucking nothing
for them here.
And this is a bipartisan, you know, this is this is a bipartisan political project.
Yeah.
I'm, you know, just sort of sheer terror inflicted on the most vulnerable people in society. Yeah, it's it's really depressing to hear that,
just because I know that, like, you know, I see people here
and then they get out and my friends see them and we take them to the airport
and my friends feed them and look after them there and they get on their planes
and we hope for the best for them, you know, and then then then they go
to some other city where some other dogshit Democrat who lied four years ago
is going to do everything they can to make life as hard for them as possible. Yeah, they just go to some other city where some other dogshit Democrat who lied four years ago is gonna
Do everything they can to make life as hard for them as possible
Yeah, the good thing is you have to vote for them while you're voting for fascism
Ray how sad
Yeah, that that that that's what I got today. We'll be back tomorrow with something
What are we back? Yeah, it will be a podcast.
It was tomorrow, Friday.
Oh, yeah. Tomorrow's tomorrow's Gaza Day.
So it's not getting any better for you.
Yeah. Lucky you.
Lucky tomorrow we'll be hearing from our friends at Parkour Gaza.
If I could be you, and you could be me, for just one hour, if you could find a way to get inside each other's mind, walk a mile in my shoes, walk a mile in my shoes, walk
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Beauty Translated Season 3 is coming soon with what?
A second host?
I'm Carmen Laurent and this season I am joined full time by world renowned Janie Danger.
Janie, what are we talking about in Season 3?
We're talking about life, Carmen.
Beauty Translated is about the many fragmented lives spreading across this rich tapestry of the trans experience.
Jamie, this sounds like an all-new format. Podcasting, too, is finally here.
Thoughtful perspectives on current events. Stunning, sexy, bold interviews with an
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Bye.
Bye.
Hey, it's Alec Baldwin.
This past season on my podcast, Here's the Thing,
I spoke with more actors, musicians, policymakers,
and so many other fascinating people,
like actress and director director Cheryl Hines.
They were looking for an unknown actress to play Larry David's wife.
I said, well, how old is that guy?
Isn't he old?
And author David Sedaris.
You know, like when you meet somebody and they'll say, well, I want to be a writer or I want
to be an artist.
And I say, well, is it all you care about?
Because if it's not, it's going to be pretty hard for you
if you're not on fire.
It's like opening the door of an oven.
And it's like, wow, you know, you take a step back.
It's all they think about.
It's all they talk about.
It's all they care about.
They don't have relationships.
They're not good friends for other people.
This is just what they're focused on.
Listen to the new season of Here's the Thing on the iHeartRadioApp Apple Podcasts or wherever
you get your podcasts.
Hi, everyone.
It's me, James, just introducing this podcast. I'm recording this the day after we recorded the episode, so today is Thursday the 21st of March.
I wanted to just update a couple of things and correct a couple of things, so I've just listened through the episode, so I'm going to do that now. when I meant Strelitz. It's a Strelitz portable surface-to-air missiles have been refitted
with new batteries in the Syrian Civil War specifically, and I've included a link to
a document about that in the show notes. So apologies for getting those two things confused.
They're both, I guess, former Soviet surface-to-air missile systems.
The other things I wanted to mention are that throughout this episode, we've used manpads,
right?
That's kind of the colloquial term or the official term really for person portable anti-aircraft
systems.
Like it obviously doesn't mean that you have to be a man to use one.
Certainly like the fact that HPG are using them and that the Kurdish Freedom Movement
are using them.
Obviously, women can use them, non-binary folks can use them too, everyone can use them.
And finally, I just wanted to mention that there have been some suggestions that the
thing that was used to shoot down the Bayraktars was like loitering munition, which is something
that is often called a suicide drone.
In this case, it's not a loitering munition that impacts something on the ground, but impacts something on the air.
There's an Iranian system that does that, but apparently it's possible to replicate
that with a large number of off-the-shelf or sort of commercially available pieces.
So maybe that's what's going on. This episode was a little bit speculative,
and we still don't have lots of hard answers, but we hope you'll enjoy it because it represents a change in the relationship between the state and people who are not the
state and that's why it's important. Okay, hope you enjoy.
Hello podcast fans. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm joined today by my friend Mia. Hi Mia.
Hello.
We are talking about, of course, surface to air missiles, a topic that I'm sure is at
the top of mind for all of
you as you drive to work this morning. Why are we talking about surface to air missiles
today? Well, today is, it is Wednesday, the 20th of March. And today, I'm sure maybe some
of you would have seen some of you, most of you probably will not as you go about your
daily lives, that the KCK, the KCK is the group, the Kurdistan Communities Union,
the joint group between the various groups in the different parts of Kurdistan.
Right. So you have the PKK, you have the YPK, YPJ in Syria, PKK in Turkey, right.
The PJAC in Iran and the KCK brings all these groups together.
Do they? Is there a name? Do they?
Is there like an Iraqi branch? That's the one that I don't know.
You have the Yavish, the the Azidi group, right?
Yeah, but is she a Kurdish one?
I think everyone I reconsider my statement.
The people who I have become aware of who are in Iraq,
who I know about journalistically are KCK people.
Okay.
Little bit of smoke and mirrors for you there.
But yeah, the people who I know who are in the Kurdistan autonomous region are KCK.
autonomous region, a KCK. So I think that I think most of the sort of people within the greater like Kurdish freedom movement, the Apochi people, the KCK within Iraq, it is in the Kurdistan autonomous
region. So like Iraq in a technical sense, but only really in a technical sense. Like when you
go to the Kurdistan autonomous region, you don't even do Iraqi immigration. You do Kurdistan immigration, which is nice because it's a
lot easier. I was there in October of 2023. And since February of 2023, the KCK have announced
they have shut down 13 Turkish unmanned aerial vehicles, right, which you and I would call drones. And we're not talking about drones like
your friend has a drone and they use it to film you at the beach drones.
We're talking about like Bayraktar drones, which are it's an aircraft, right?
Like if you saw one, you would be like, oh, there goes a plane.
Yeah, it's like it's like the Turkish version of the predator drones.
Yes. Yeah, yeah. It's it's like it's like the Turkish version of the predator drones. Yes.
Yeah, yeah.
It's, it's, yeah, it's a very similar thing.
It's very popular drone system actually, right?
They've sold Bayraktars to, I think, dozens of countries like, like, yeah, I mean, most
all over.
Yeah.
31 countries that they've exported the Bayraktar to.
So they're very widely used.
They're kind of the sort of drone of choice for people who are just like buying on the open market,
right? Carta uses them, Ukraine uses them a lot, but even countries like I'm
looking here, Burkina Faso has Bayraktars. So what's notable about this is they've
also shut down Akinchi's. Akinchi's are like the newer Bayraktar variant. They
make a slightly different noise.
I've spent some time in places that are being attacked by drones over the last year and
it's a highly unpleasant experience.
But people who are used to this, which I am, I guess, thankfully not, will tell you that
they can tell the difference by the noise that these drones make.
But there was the Akinchi, for instance, I believe it was an Akinchi that did some of the attacks and I was unfortunate enough to be nearby when I was in Rojava in
October. So what's notable about this is like the KCK obviously like they're a non-state
actor right because there is not a Kurdish state. There is a Kurdish nation, one might argue, but it's split between four states.
Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey.
And so them being able to shoot down drones is quite remarkable.
Yeah, no one's not none of the non state actors
really in the last like 20 years have been able to do this.
Like I said, like everyone talks about how advanced like ISIS is capabilities were for a non state actor and they were but they couldn't do it.
Like it's wild.
No like who these have shut down some Reaper drones.
Yeah, but but they're but they're a state like that's the thing like they have huge swaths of the regular Yemeni military are just like, yeah.
And they're supplied by other state actors, right?
Like very clearly.
So it's a little different.
What?
Yeah, it's, this is relatively remarkable, right?
That they've been able to shoot down like, and not just, it's not just like, oh, we got
lucky.
We got, we got lucky and dropped a single drone.
ISIS had, if I remember correctly, I, ISIS had some Igla man pads, like the oh, we got lucky. We got we got lucky and dropped a single drone. ISIS had, if I
remember correctly, ISIS had some Igla man pads like the old Russian man pads. The thing
with those, and we're going to talk about this a little bit later, they they have like
a battery and that battery will run out over a certain or they're sold. Some of them are
just being sold on the black market without batteries from what I've seen.
Some folks in that we've seen in the civil war in Syria have worked out how to somehow
make that battery work with with or make another battery or make another electronic system
for them.
They don't have like a lockout, right?
They don't have a like, we've detected that, you know, like, like your iPhone will sometimes
get mad if you're using a third party charger. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. So Tim Apple has was not involved in the design of the NK 38 igla. Most most of pity. And so he wasn't able to engineer a third party lockout. But those have been repurposed. But yeah, we did not see the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham dropping US drones.
In fact, the reason like the thing that allowed there were two things that allowed the defeat
of like the so called Islamic State, right?
One, the heroism of the people who fought against them, be they like Iraqi Kurdish,
a lot of people fought against them.
15,000 Kurds died fighting ISIS, but also the fact that the US had
complete air dominance and could just fucking obliterate things from the sky whenever it wanted
to. It did. It did a lot of obliterating things from the sky, right? And so the ability to shoot
down drones is something that has been very hard for non state actors. And it's not like it's not like the KCK has a state sponsor. Right.
Yeah. Yeah.
Also, so like life example, like Hezbollah has shot down to these
weren't actually they shot down to Hermes, like Israeli Hermes drones.
So those are just those are surveillance things.
But the thing is, like Hezbollah did this by getting surface
to air missiles, like getting surface air rockets from Iran. Yeah, sure. Yeah. That's like, like the thing is, like Hezbollah did this by getting surface to air missiles, like getting surface to rockets from Iran.
Yeah, sure. Yeah, that's like, like, you know, the way that you can do this
is if either like Iran, the U.S., I guess, technically China and or and or Russia
like hand you them.
But if but if none of those four countries are willing to play ball
or I mean, I guess technically the UK, I guess or like France could send you one. But like it's really, really like I don't think any
non state actor who wasn't being just directly armed by one of those states has pulled it
off.
No, the other non state actor who I've seen with man pads very recently are the Karen, the Karen National Liberal
KNLA.
The KNLA have been putting out these pictures.
This is in Myanmar.
Yes, this is in Myanmar.
So for folks who haven't listened to our previous Myanmar episodes, go and listen to them.
But yeah, they're some of the work I'm proudest of.
But these KNLA guys have, these photos have come out that are then
they're not not posed photos right they very clearly they wanted these photos to
come out and it shows them with these man-pad system I'm actually not sure if
it's a strilla or a Chinese I think it's called the HN5 Chinese it's
essentially the same thing but they have the grip stock for them but they don't
have the coolant ball and the
battery at the front so like they're what they have is a fancy looking doesn't appear to my eyes to be
uh like fully functional like in terms of tracking and shooting down an airplane although
footage from friends of Hunter aircraft deploying like flares
over current state and then like turning around and leaving. So
perhaps there's something I'm missing here, like, like, it's entirely possible that like when they decided for these photos
to come out, they they they're in a certain fashion. And like,
I've those guys have engineered an entire arms industry of their
own using Reddit and AliExpress.
Like I, if anybody can make something work, they can make something work.
I have great faith in their ingenuity.
And as I said, like it's people in Syria have previously made
systems like this work, they're not, they don't have that lockout.
So it's quite possible that they did, but I've not seen a video
of anyone in
Myanmar shooting down any kind of aircraft yet.
Right.
The Russian aircraft, they have shot down aircraft and literally someone
shot one down with a grenade launcher, a single shot grenade launcher.
Yeah, I saw that video.
Yeah.
It's one of the most Chadly things anyone's ever done.
It's some like modern warfare or whatever the computer game is called.
Battlefield, that's what it's called.
Yeah, talking of Chadly and exciting stuff, this might be an advert for like being a prison
guard or something exciting that we have to introduce now.
Okay, don't be a prison guard or something exciting that we have to introduce now. Okay, don't be a prison guard.
All right, and we're back. I hope you found gainful employment elsewhere outside of the
carceral system. And we're talking about surface-to-air missiles, particularly these 13
surface-to-air missiles or 13 drones that the KCK have shot down, right? One thing I thought that
was noticeable is that they did say missiles. They are people who were able to provide the missile
system necessary. So like, there's a theory that I've seen that they were able to crash a drone of their
own into a Bayraktar, like a, kind of, I guess, like a suicide, I don't like the word suicide
drone because it's not the drone that's dying.
Like normally when people talk about suicide drones, they're killing people.
Yeah.
But like a...
A ramming drone. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, like a like a robot wars.
But they said missile in their press release.
So, you know, if we take that on the if we take that on the face of it,
that that suggests that they shot them down.
And certainly there are this like there is good video evidence of these.
Me and I just reviewed the video
Incredible soundtrack will link to it in the
Will link to it in this show notes
In the videos you very clearly see oh it's a drone. Oh, it's a huge explosion
That gravity is now having its effect on this drone like it is
plummeting to yeah, like, like it's definitely not a like we've fired a machine gun in the air and it
hit it somehow or something like it's right. It got hit by an explosive. Yeah, that's remarkable.
Yeah, one of the there was a shooting down of an aircraft in Myanmar wasn't one of them makes I
forgot what it might have been. It was a two seat training plane. I can't remember quite what it was,
but that was shot down supposedly by small arms fire or maybe like a generally the
like the air defense of most non-state armed groups has been dushkuts, right? Like a it's a thing that
you've seen in the back of a pickup truck going like bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, with a
big sort of spade grip. It's a classic like technical gun. But this isn't that. This is something very
different. They're exploding. When these drones get hit, they're exploding. And they've all
been in, I think, oh yeah, all of them are in areas of what we call the Kurdistan Autonomous
Region of Iraq, right? So some of them are in Zap, which is near Dohoc, but towards north of there.
Some of them in the Kandil Mountains, which is part of the Zagros mountain range. Again,
it's in the north of that Kurdistan autonomous region. And I think some of them are in it.
I think it's Gare, it's pronounced, but they're not in like, I think obviously when a lot of people think about the Kurdistan freedom movement and think
about Rojava, this isn't there. The US did shoot down a Bayraktar or an Akinchi over
Rojava while I was there, but they only shot it down because it flew over their base. They
continue to let the Bayraktars bomb civilian infrastructure all over the AANES.
So these are not there. So perhaps whatever they're using, it's very interesting, right?
Like maybe it's not something they can take there or maybe it's not, you know, like they're not able
to get it out of the mountains. It's too much of a risk. No, it's interesting.
I mean, for a number of reasons,
what, yeah, partially that they're not using it in Syria, partially they're also
they don't seem to be using them in Turkey either. No.
It's interesting when they take off.
It's not that like subtle, right?
It's a big, big aircraft.
They'll get some warning when they take off and that would allow them,
I guess, to prepare their munitions.
But yeah, they don't seem to be using it.
They seem to be using it in like, in this this area, whether they're very strong, right,
whether these mountains are extremely fortified.
They've been fighting Turkey there a lot in recent days and weeks.
You can always I mean, obviously, you're going to see some somewhat traumatic combat footage,
but guerrilla TV always has like updates on these things. So that's the sort of thing that you
were, you know, like to keep up to date with. But yeah, they're not using them there. They're
not using them. They're very close to Turkey, right? But yeah, not not quite in and Turkish
soldiers do occupy some areas inside the Iraqi Kurdistan autonomous region.
So like a kind of all and Turkey seems to be kind of trying to ramp up its
operations against the Kurdistan freedom movement in inside the Kurdistan
autonomous region.
But this is a significant impediment to that, right?
It's also very interesting that like, we have not heard shit about this from turkey.
No yeah well I think I think part of this is you know like I think it's something that's an
indication of how serious this is because I mean this has been you know the law of the 21st century
is that if you are a state actor you have unlimited air superiority over any non-state
group you're bombing and you can you, especially like especially if you're like the U.S., you can send
bombers or drones into like any country you want and you can bomb them.
Yeah, and that has been true.
And this has been the basis of U.S.
military power. It's also been the basis of a lot of like, you know, the Turkey obviously doesn't have the same air doctrine as the U.S.
does, but like that's been the basis of a lot of Turkish operations that they like.
They're the people who have air power
and because they have air power, because they have drones
and because you can't shoot back at them, they can do whatever the fuck they want.
Yeah, like I've been in the situation
where you are completely powerless and very afraid
because at some point something could fall out of the night sky and kill you
and there's fuck all you can do about it.
And yeah, that has been the way of the world, like you say, for this entire century, right?
It's what we've seen only in Myanmar, the pro-democracy forces are gaining ground every
day.
They're doing an incredible job.
But like, I've also talked to people whose whole unit has been
wiped out and they've hidden under the dead bodies of their friends because there's a plane
or a helicopter circling around. And it's the one area where they've really struggled to defend
themselves, right? I'm writing a book about anarchists at war. Eventually I will publish
that book. But this is the thing that defines like the benefit, like,
the state, even when the state like loses its monopoly on legitimate violence, it still has
a monopoly on airborne violence. And the question that monopoly like is, is incredibly dangerous
for the state's ability to, for the state, I guess, in general, like for its continued ability to crush movements, be they
liberatory or be they otherwise, right? And we can-
Yeah, I mean, this is something I think is really interesting. This is something that's been a fear of, I mean, everyone from like
Western intelligence people through like, I mean, you can see people in like Hollywood freaking out about this.
Like like rebel group gets access to a man pad is like one of the most common
like spy show plots. Yeah.
And yeah, it's like something that, you know, you can you can you can listen to
like the US military talking about this is this is something that they're
really concerned about.
Yeah, they won't.
Like it's there where it's where they draw the line with the groups
who are quote unquote allies, right?
Who we quote like the US will tell you that the SDF are their allies
in the fight against ISIS, but they're willing to let their allies die
rather than give them man pads. Right.
Like I've seen this.
I have seen the funerals, you know, because they and the US, I've also driven
right past the fucking US base. And I know that there are plenty of plenty of plenty of anti
aircraft systems there, because they shot down a Turkish drone while I was there, but they're not
willing to give them to the even the people who they'll fight side by side with, because their
fear of having man pads get into what they would maybe turn the wrong hands is the one area where they have,
I guess, complete domination. They've given them to Ukraine, of course,
but despite repeated allegations, there is no evidence that Ukraine has sold surface-to-air
systems anywhere. They obviously weren't given to them to Myanmar, right? So it's,
yeah, if this is what it appears to be, then it's a really massive change. Talking of a massive
change, you could, you know, you could make a massive change to your financial situation
by purchasing gold. We're back.
Yeah, I think something that's really interesting about the way that the sort of man
pad getting to non state actors is talked about is that usually the way that it's.
Like usually the US line on it is like we like
we can't let anyone get these because they're going to use it
to shoot down civilian airliners.
Yes. Yeah.
And now, to be fair, people do accidentally shoot down
like militaries accidentally shoot down civilian airliners all the time.
Yeah, that's a very common thing.
But I think I think that's that's a smokescreen, right?
Because like even like the actual thing that if you're if you're a militant group,
usually the thing that you want to be doing, if you have one of these weapons,
is shooting down the people who are bombing you.
Yeah. And I think there's a really interesting sort of like
psychological thing going on here.
This is this is the sort of propaganda thing that that, you know, to get to get
like you random person to be terrified of like, you know,
the Kurds having surface to air missiles
is they use the they use people's like fear of getting blown up in an airplane. It's like, no, no, like, look at like, you know,
evidence suggests that what is actually what actually happens
that these is that they shoot down drones.
Yeah, yes, exactly.
And not like the other thing, which is somewhat remarkable,
it would be one thing to have got your hands on one or two, but to have been to have shot
down in a one year pit, well, just over one year from February the 13th, 2023 until March
the 1st, 2024. They have shot down 15 UAVs. Like that's a that's a decent number of man
pads, or maybe not man-pads.
That's the other thing we kind of didn't mention, right?
Like Bayraktars can fly very high.
We were just sort of checking this out before the show,
and I think they can fly around 7,000 meters, which would in theory put them outside of the-
20,000, 25,000 feet.
25,000 feet, yeah, which is about twice the height previous generation man-ads like things like Stingers and Igla's can
operate at. I'm not sure if the what the for an Igla reach targets a maximum altitude of 2500 meters
so yeah that's a little under as high as these like attack drones can fly. Maybe they have to
come lower to like launch their munitions or
maybe they come lower to search for people.
They're presumably looking for the Kurdistan freedom movement has guerrillas all over these
mountains right here, extremely well camouflaged and extremely adept at avoiding drone attacks
because that is what they have been doing for a long time.
Maybe that's how.
But also maybe maybe there's something that that we're not aware of
or some kind of maybe it's not a man portable system at all.
Maybe it's something that is like fixed in place.
Well, and that and that comes to I think one of the one of the really interesting
questions here, which is how on earth did they get these?
Yeah. Whatever system they're using, you know, normally like the only way.
Like, you know, like Hezbollah or the Houthis get them from Iran, right?
But the Iranians are absolutely like under no circumstances are they going to?
I mean, maybe if Turkey declared war on Iran,
there's like a five percent chance, maybe in like their darkest hour,
they might try this. Like there's no way.
Yeah. Like Iraq's no way.
Yeah, like Iraq and Iran have repeatedly attempted to mobilize
the Kurds against each other. Right.
But yeah, I think that they would draw the line at handing over manpads and.
Yeah, and they're definitely not getting them from the U.S.
No, they're not using them in areas where they're with the U.S.
and the U.S. Yeah.
And very clear is like, like, you know, it's definitely not.
I don't think it's any other Western country either.
Like, it doesn't make any sense.
Like, I mean, maybe like based Sweden's
motherland has in or something.
But like, I really doubt it, which leaves it really up in the air.
I mean, like maybe Russia, maybe somehow.
I don't know. It's it's it's all very weird yeah and I
mean like in recent months the Assad regime which is backed by Russia has
been an open conflict with the SDF so I think it's it's very unlikely like the
Assad regime has been fighting with and killing it and dying with with Yepige and Yepige in Syria.
So it seems very unlikely. Yeah, it's very, that's what's very strange, like the,
there seem to be a couple of different groups of people, right, like the Karen have popped up
with with these previous generation, these Igla kind of manpads. The Kachin have shot down a lot
of planes recently, and it's not entirely clear how. So the Kachin have shot down a lot of planes recently and it's
not entirely clear how. So the Kachin are another ethnic group in Myanmar, somewhat
closer ties to the PRC. The United Wastate Army have man pads. They are the sort of closest
tied to the PRC of the EROs in Myanmar. I'm using a lot of acronyms here, aren't I?
Yeah, this is the problem with talking about Kurdish groups and also talking about Kurds
in Myanmar. It's really the two great acronym wars.
Don't be overlooking the Spanish Civil War, the alphabet soup of conflicts. Yeah, this
is a life I've chosen for myself. So yeah, the ethnic revolutionary organizations in
Myanmar, the closest to China, it's the United
War State Army, who have been at the fringes of the conflict, but
certainly not fully committed to fighting against the junta in
the same way that the Karen, the Kachin, the Arakan Army, the
PDF, or the other groups that form up the resistance in Burma or
Myanmar are. But there have definitely been more planes shot down
in Myanmar this year than in the last few years.
So there's, perhaps there's some kind of source
in the world for these surface-to-MSRs.
Like there will come a point in the human future, right?
When one of these is either reverse engineered or someone
just really, if someone had said to you 10 years ago that like several people online,
some of whom I've spoken to, some of whom our friend Jay Cameron had spoken to, would
be able to construct a gun that you could print from your computer, like you'd have
said you're barking, right?
And at some point in the human future, someone will work out how to use things they already have to make
something that can shoot down aircraft. But it's baffling. Like, there seems to
be no obvious answer as to where what the source of these the the last thing I
will say is that there was a Yakuza boss. Yeah, Yeah, this guy, legend.
He's just like, yeah, he, like this man's,
my man's done nothing wrong.
He was convicted of selling,
trying to sell man pads to the Karen,
and I think to the Kachin.
I can't remember if it was the Kachin,
it was definitely one of them with the Karen.
And he was trying to do so, very funny,
he was calling them cake and ice cream,
incredibly,
incredibly good cipher. It's a hell of a it's a banger of an indictment. Everyone should
read it. Takeshi I forget what his last name was, but he he was trying to sell them man
pads. And what he was actually doing was being monitored by the DEA, but the man pads that he thought that he had access to were fictional.
Like it was, it was the, it was the feds who had conned him into
thinking they had man pads.
Um, they, they did have some 84s.
He met them in the Netherlands, took an incredible selfie with a light
anti-tank weapon, um, you can look it up, leather jacket, like I think
he's got blue aviators on
like my man's been arrested for having incredible drip and it's very sad but yeah the man pets he thought he was selling were fictional but the fact that people were like yeah this seems reasonable
uh like that people were like okay we're prepared to enter into this deal with you they weren't like
what are you on about suggests that maybe these things are entering the market.
The people will always say that they came from Afghanistan,
like after the US left.
But I don't think the Taliban would have any reason to sell them.
They're getting bombed by Pakistan right now.
Like, yeah, yeah, it doesn't seem it doesn't make sense to me
that that that they would sell them.
Yeah. And one thing I should also mention is like every single time
there is a war anywhere in the world, there are a trillion rumors that come out.
They're like, oh, there's like this guy selling like X weapons or whatever.
And it's like 99% of them are false.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
You hear this all the time and it's never true.
Yeah. So that makes it really hard to sort out like where these things are coming from.
Yeah, exactly.
A friend of the podcast, Victor Boot, is he's free again.
He's back.
Maybe maybe maybe maybe he's gotten back.
Maybe the God of War is is back, baby.
That would be incredible.
There will be an incredible narrative arc for Victor
Boot. But like, as we said in that episode, right, like, it's very easy to point like,
to Victor Boot as being this evil guy. But in fact, like, we've sold a shit ton of weapons
to people who turned out to be pretty, pretty uncivil as the United States. A lot more people
working at all the other places that have offices in San Diego made a lot more money
than he did selling weapons to people.
So we, you know, we ought to be, uh, you know, popcorn and the cow back a bit there, but
clearly, uh, something is up with surface to our missiles.
I hope this makes your spring break flights more exciting.
It just gives it a little edge as you take off.
Don't fly in Turkey.
Yeah. Yeah. Let's see.
Our tip is to, to not fly from, not land, I guess, in, I mean, like we said, the KCK
ain't going to shoot down your civilian plane.
They're nice people.
I'll just say the KCK and my experience have been very nice, very forthcoming, extremely
communicative and responsive to press requests, which like uh, like much more so than, uh, a lot, a lot of other state actors.
Um, and I don't think you have any worries about them shooting down your aircraft, but
it is, it's an interesting development that like, yeah, will fundamentally challenge the
way that states are able to squash non-state armed groups going forward.
Yeah. And if we, if we figure out where they got them from and that becomes public,
I will, you'll, you'll see the next episode called, we found out where the
man pads are from.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Um, I think in all likelihood, it's in no one's interest to, to know, to like
announce where these are from.
And I don't think, you know, the ones in, in Myanmar, it's not inconceivable that they came either directly or indirectly from China.
Yeah. And certainly like that, that would be the most feasible, but seeing them elsewhere,
it's fascinating. Like, like it's, you know, if somebody has like either reverse engineered these
or there's a large number of them available on the black market, like that would be a sea change in the way conflict
happens, right? Like, it's, you know, Israel right now is able to
bomb Palestine with complete impunity. If non state armed
groups had access to man pads there, that maybe wouldn't be
the case. But yeah, it's a change. It's a change in the way
the world goes to war. I think it's always interesting. It's
always interesting, like,
for a podcast that was built on speculative fiction about future collapses, like, this certainly is something that challenges the monopoly of the state. So, yeah, it's something to keep an
eye on. I will attach in the notes the Guerilla TV video of the Bayraktars being shot down. Please
enjoy the soundtrack. Yeah, it's banger. And we'll also include some
links to those videos of the Karen National Liberation Army with their manpads. If you're
a manpads understander, you know where to find me. It's all over the internet. And yeah, with that,
I will leave you. Have a great weekend. Don't fly your Cessnas. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of
the universe.
It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media.
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