Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 127
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Either snow nor rain nor heat nor darkness can stop the Persian courier service.
Welcome to Nick Kadappi here, a podcast about postal services.
We asked the question, can the American capitalist class finally stop the American post office?
I'm your host, Mia Wong, and with me to talk about what is going on with the post office,
what's going on with the post office unions and yeah, how things are going downhill for the noble people who carry your mail
is Tommy Espinoza, who's a union steward for the National Association of Letter Carriers.
Tommy, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for having me.
Thank you so much for giving us the mail carriers, the mail carriers, a platform to stand on.
Yeah, I'm really I'm really happy to and I'm really happy to get to talk to you about this.
So I think the place we should start is with a bunch of very, very weird stuff
in how labor law works.
So. OK, for like most people in the United States,
you have a federally protected right to strike if you have a union.
That is not true for federal employees.
That is especially not true for members of the post office.
And that is a real issue
because the government has decided that like, yeah, no,
all these people who do a vital service are not allowed to go on strike.
And it absolutely sucks.
Yeah, so I think this this gets into sort of
where I want to start, which is with the sort of history
of the National Association of Letters Carriers, a union that is not allowed
to strike and how sort of weird that is.
So, yeah, I was wondering if you could talk a bit about sort of the origins
of the union and what effect that has had on
how organizing works or doesn't work.
Yeah, the right to strike has been a rather divisive topic.
I'm sure you're familiar with unions and just generally people on our side
of our side of politics to be in fighting a lot.
It shouldn't come to a surprise.
So in 1969, just over 50 years ago, the salary for postal workers was under $2 an hour.
People were working months straight with no days off.
And those were close to
12 hour days. And so these postal workers at the time qualified for welfare and decided
in 1970 to go on strike despite it being illegal. This conversation is not new. It was illegal
then, it's illegal now.
And I do want to be crystal clear here.
I am not advocating for a strike.
That would also be against the law and we don't advocate for anything that's against
the law.
What I do want to advocate for is the right to strike because being quasi-federal there's a lot of
limitations in what the NALC and the general postal unions are able to do. In
total there are nine bargaining agreements and seven unions within the
post office, some of which are the manager's union, so take that as it is. Yeah, on top of not being able to strike, none of our money that we collect as union
dues can be used for lobbying purposes, so they can't support a single candidate or any
of the parties involved.
We have a separate fund for that with the NALC called the Letter Carriers Political
Fund to try and circumvent the restrictions that are put on there. And as a result of
that, it's like we're fighting with our hands tied behind our back. We are unable to organize
effectively. Our union leadership seems to be afraid of protests and picketing for fear that it'll
be misconstrued or labeled as a strike. And they're, I think, generally afraid of public
opinion.
Yeah, that's a debilitating set of conditions because you've effectively taken away sort
of the two major tools that, you know, unions of basically across all political
stripes use, right? You've taken away the ability to strike, you've taken away the ability
to use your dues money to influence elections. So this immediately means you've taken away
the tool that sort of militant unions use, which is strikes, and you've taken away the
tools that more conservative unions use, which is buying Paul attempting to buy politicians.
And then also your leadership is like, we can't strike.
As we can't protest because someone might think it's a strike
and the public might commit it.
It's like that. That doesn't seem I don't know.
It really seems like it's like it's not only if you tied both hands behind your back.
You've like tied them behind your back to your legs.
You're now rolling around on the ground. Right.
And so talk about what happens when we push past all of these barriers and just do it
anyways.
You know, in March 1970, 210,000 postal workers defied law, defied the general leadership
of the time and it all started in New York where people clocked in and at nine o'clock
they just walked out. Soon, let's see, it was Cleveland, Chicago, Los Angeles, the nation joined
very shortly after once it broke the news that they were calling for a national strike.
Nixon called in the National Guard to try and deliver mail.
The National Guard had no idea what they were doing.
There's an amazing video that I'll try and send you afterwards.
It's just the National Guard at our cases where we sort the mail.
An interviewer is asking him, do you think that you're doing a good job? Just the National Guard at our cases where we sort the mail and
An interviewer is asking him. Do you think that you're doing a good job? It's just like no, it's just some kid, you know
And I don't don't get me wrong. I'm just some guy but
They you need the training you need to know what you're doing and it's not something that
Anyone can pick up in a day, but it's a job that anyone can do.
Yeah, for the first time the mail had stopped and that one us collective bargaining binding arbitration, which is a process.
I think most people within unions know what I mean, but to explain it arbitration is what happens when our parties cannot agree on a settlement
for a grievance and eventually we call in a third party, an arbitrator, to decide for us.
And those are generally lawyers. On top of binding arbitration, it gave us a new pay scale and set in motion, I think over,
it's gotta be hundreds of raises between the colas
and the new pay table.
It used to be 21 years for you to reach the top pay scale,
which is absolutely ridiculous.
And now I think it's about eight.
Yeah.
So the post office was forced to reorganize and so was the union. This is where the American
Postal Workers Union was born. And from this strike, we were able to settle on the national
agreement. So there's the national agreement, which is our binding contract. There's the
J-CAM, which is the Joint Contract Administration Manual, which is what the post
office and the union use as the interpretation of the contract.
That way we are not arguing and spending time about what the contract could mean.
We can just focus on whether or not someone broke our agreement. So after this, one would imagine
that a quasi-federal institution would honor the contract
that was created, bargain in good faith,
and treat their employees fairly, isn't that right?
Yeah, no, spoken like someone who has never watched
a federal government in action.
Yeah, absolutely not.
Before we get into issues that.
We face today, I do want to say that one of the main goals of
our contract negotiations or of this episode really is to
create public knowledge of
how our contract is not being adhered to.
If there was one main goal that I'd have in mind is just to have the post office honor what they signed and agreed to do.
Yeah, I mean, it's something that that it's a part of being in a union that doesn't get talked about very much,
which is that the contract doesn't mean anything unless the union enforces it.
Because the moment the contract happens, the bosses will attempt to not abide by it.
And this is what a lot of union militancy back in the sort of heyday of militancy was.
I mean, like, you know, if you look at like how the UAW worked in like the 60s, right, They'd have a guy with a whistle standing on the line.
And if someone did a contract violation, he would blow the whistle
and everyone would just sit down and you'd immediately have a strike.
Right. And it you know, and like that level of built and see,
you don't need to like be at that level to enforce a contract,
but you have to actually be willing to do stuff and to fight management over it.
And if you're not willing to do that, your contract is effectively meaningless.
And that's a real issue with a lot of unions,
which just kind of circles back to one of the big issues that we face,
is that if we were to do that, that would be a willingful delay of mail.
And we could be charged for it just for trying to enforce the contract.
Yep.
Yeah, which I think the thing I think is really interesting, just to circle back to the 1970
strike is that so the strike was illegal, right?
Nixon brings in the army and the National Guard to break it.
And the strike still wins.
And not only does it if you know, I mean, you could argue
whether it achieved total victory, but not a single person who walked off
the line got arrested, even though all of them technically committed a crime.
And that's something that like, you know, I think.
Let me look at it. OK.
The the enforcement of laws depends on sort of the depends on a set of relative balance
of forces and whether people care about enforcing the law, which is how, like, for example,
if you pirate like seven movies and you get you get three copyright strikes, you go to
prison. But, you know, like the Sam sam altman or whatever like a company can literally steal everything on the entire internet and get money for it no one will prosecute him right.
So so you know whether or not something is illegal is to a large extent or the difference between something being illegal and you going to prison for it
largely has to do with the balance of forces involved.
And that's something that you should keep in mind when and this is this is this is a thing that that
cuts the other way a lot too, right? Like a lot like employers
just do illegal actions literally all the time and it doesn't matter because the state doesn't care. Yeah, by and large, labor laws in America are set up in favor of the businesses of the
employers. If you're familiar with workers comp or any of the systems involved in the
Federal Employees Compensation Act, it's not enforced. We have cases that are pending arbitration where someone's been run over by a worker
has been run over by a postal vehicle.
While they were working, the post office effectively takes them off of payroll to increase the
damage done to the
individual. Eventually the Department of Labor says yes we will pay this
individual and the post office is liable to pay them but now they are off the
rolls which means there's a greater period of time before this individual
gets their money and there's a certain form that within the post office,
the managers need to fill out, I believe it's an 8130,
or all these forms have some numbers associated with them,
that they just refuse to fill out and there's no recourse.
There's no path for us to take to make them hurry
or make them get this individual the money that
they're owed.
Some people, this doesn't ruin their lives and they've already paid off their house or
whatever, but I imagine for many, many working Americans, that's their livelihood immediately
down the drain.
Unfortunately, we need to go to ads for a little bit because, unfortunately, my boss's
boss's boss's livelihood depends on these ads.
Mine technically does too, but like Lord knows I don't see that money.
So ads.
We are back.
And yeah, I guess that leads into the next place you want to go to, which is talking
about what, what are the specific grievances today that you all are dealing with and the union is
not dealing with?
Right.
So in terms of grievances within the union and our negotiation, a lot of it does have
to do with aforementioned workers' compensation.
Employees are just simply not getting paid. I think the biggest problem with the union and the grievance procedure today is that
management has figured out this really effective strategy.
If they don't settle on the lower levels and it gets pushed up to arbitration, then we have a massive backlog of cases, a pending arbitration,
which could be scheduled years out.
Yeah. I think if you do the math for our current rate
of handling these cases and.
How many cases we have, it'll take around 15 years to get through them.
Oh, Christ. That's assuming there's no new ones.
Yeah, yeah, that's like, you know, when you go to a restaurant and there's that little
stanchion out there that says it's a five-hour wait from this point, that's the point that we're at.
Anything beyond today will be further along. Jesus Christ.
And so I think that is just a major problem for us, clearly.
Yeah.
Management just not complying with any of this and it makes it so that our employees
have to wait.
Something I do want to talk about that's outside of the grievance procedure, if we can, is
just what's going on with the post office and the postmaster general.
Yeah.
All right.
So I want to go at this from the customer perspective first, because I think that's
the best way to relate to people.
I think by and large, people are losing faith in the post office.
Either you have no idea what's going on or you don't care and that's fine. I'd say before I joined I didn't
think of them at all. You know, they're just the guy that shows up at my house
every morning. A lot of people seem to think that the post office is going out
of business and our customers are facing increasingly long lines, misdelivered or lost mail, and an increase in postage
for a service that is getting worse.
People are paying more for worse service.
And it's easy to point out those issues from the outside
and be rightfully upset at them.
I do feel like we're doing a disservice to our customers,
and I'm really not trying to attack them
when I say that they're uninformed or clueless
to the inner workings of the post office.
I do directly want to attack Congress
and say that when they post,
they had pushed forward a bill
called the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act in 2006,
which required the Post Office to pre-fund 100% of its retiree health benefits and liabilities
75 years into the future.
What?
So overnight, the Post Office was handed a $5.5 billion burden.
And that's where the whole, I don't know if you remember, I certainly wasn't conscious
of it at the time.
The Save Our Post Office stickers that were being sold and trying to fund the post office.
And really that's where the rhetoric of the post office is going under comes from.
The other thing I want to point out is that we are quasi-federal.
We actually accept nothing from taxpayer monies. It says it's a service, but really the post office
is ran as a business. We don't even get subsidized because they don't need to. My local union
president loves to remind us that the post office is a business that has a revenue of
$78.2 billion. And he'll want me to stress that the point office is a business that has a revenue of $78.2 billion. And he'll want
me to stress that the point two is extremely important, because point two of a billion
is 20 million. They are not in jeopardy. We are not going out of business. And the postmaster
general Louie DeJoy, he's the second highest paid public servant in America, just underneath
the president of the United States.
He's played word and clearance Thomas.
Wow.
Yeah, I think it was like 380,000 a year or something like that.
DeJoy was appointed by Donald Trump.
I'm assuming that this is kind of a baseless assumption, so forgive me on not doing my
research here, but I'm assuming that they're buddies because DeJoy has no idea.
Yeah, wasn't she the guy that Trump brought in like specifically to destroy the post office
as part of the campaign to steal the election?
Yeah, so there's been a lot about DeJoy defrauding the election process.
I wasn't part of the post office to see the inner workings of it, so it's kind of hard
for me to say if it was hearsay or not.
But I'd believe it because DeJoy has no idea how to run a post office.
He's never been involved with this kind of business.
He is in the same way that Trump is a businessman,
a horrible businessman,
and his delivering for America plan
could really be redefined as consolidation efforts
for a business.
So what they're doing is they're consolidating infrastructure
and the workforce,
which means closing post offices in order to save money
and shoving three installations into one building.
That's why the lines are getting longer.
It also means that from dispatch, the employees have to drive an extra mile or two into their
working zone, which of course means that we're going to go into overtime.
And this just throws a wrench in the mail handling process. He has single-handedly
made the service a lot more reliable. And I do think that you're right.
Unreliable.
Yeah, sorry, more unreliable. And I do think that you're right. He wants to destroy the
post office, not only for the election, but to the point where it makes more sense to
go private.
Now is the time to point out that DeJoy is a major shareholder in FedEx, which is a
subcontractor for the USPS, and he has millions of dollars in equity involved.
He's got skin in the game.
I love open corruption. So great.
And so on the local level on what's going on in my office, I actually have one of the
better offices that I've seen or heard about. I have been sent to other offices and I have
experienced firsthand the bullying and harassment from management pushing us
to go faster.
But even at one of the better offices, I work 60-hour weeks.
I don't have set days off.
It's not even a rotation.
When I get home, I'm spent and my commute isn't that bad.
I think I'm about 15 minutes each way. I really can't
imagine driving two hours after an 11 hour shift just to eat and come back and do it
again.
I mean, that's just unsafe. Like, that's...
Oh yeah, it would be illegal, but since it's in the contract, it's not illegal.
Oh my god. So the sacrifice that you make when you're joining the post office...
Well, I guess I should explain.
When you join as a letter carrier,
the first 90 days, they can fire you for any reason,
and you're something I call either a CCA or a PTF,
and that means part-time flexible or city carrier assistant.
You are only guaranteed four hours for showing up for work.
You're not guaranteed to be scheduled.
So if they don't like you,
they just will schedule you once a week for an unknown amount of time until you quit.
If you're in a busy place,
then that just means that they're going to work you to death.
So when you join the workforce, immediately you lose time with
your family, you lose time with your loved ones and your friends.
And I myself am so fortunate that all my loved ones have been
beyond understanding.
But every time I talk about it, I get asked the same thing.
Why don't you quit?
Yeah.
And the truth is this job is awesome.
I love it.
I want to work it.
I just want it to make sense and be livable.
And I'm not gonna give up just because
we haven't reached the point where it is.
If you walk away now, it doesn't get better.
I'm sure someone would take my place, but it helps to have people stick around.
That's actually a pretty common, I mean, this is one of Amazon's shredding, right, through their warehouses. They intentionally want to cycle through people because the more
new people you have continuously cycling through, the less organized and the less sort of like
knowledge they have, the less you have to pay them, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And so if you can just cause high turnover rates on purpose's that's a thing that a lot of these sort of business ghoul
like nightmare factory people
Love in their workforces and makes everyone else's life just a living hell, but you know, they're getting they're still getting paid
Right and so I try and hold that in mind when I've been overworked and I'm at the end of one
of my major shifts because I had to carry part of another route because someone else
called out.
I really have to stop and think to myself that this other person who called out is just
as exhausted as I am is probably going to get a letter of warning for calling out.
That's another issue. They don't want you to use your leave.
Jesus Christ.
I'm going to file an unfair labor practice because they've been doing that a lot at my office.
Oh my God.
As well. It reminds me a lot, our issues of your recent episode, I think it was you,
our issues of your recent episode, I think it was you, about the Nurses Union, the shift change episode.
Their members are dealing with a lot of the same things
where the unions are so big that they become detached
from the membership and we are finding out afterwards
what our bargaining agreements are, what our strategy was, everything's after
the contract has been signed.
And that's just not how unions were meant to be.
They're meant to be from the bottom up by the workers, for the workers, but it really
does feel like it's, like national is its own entity.
And so I guess that would bring us to talking about the union and the future of the union
Yeah, let's get into that
so I got to be careful here because
Brian Renfro, he's our national leader of the union
He's been struggling with problems in his personal life, and I don't feel like I'm ousting him as its public knowledge
And I don't feel like I'm ousting him as it's public knowledge, at least within the post office, it's public knowledge.
He's dealing with substance abuse, with alcoholism,
and that's something that hits very close to home within my family.
And I really don't want to demonize that he's struggling.
But what I do want to say is when you're going through something like that and you've accepted a position on the national level like this, you really
need to either step down or appoint someone to handle things in your place.
As negotiation started over a year ago, he kind of went missing. And it was later revealed that he was an inpatient,
which is fine, get your help. But there was nothing left, no notes left for us to strategize
with. And our membership is just in the dark. And beyond that, the leadership has gone missing. It's very dark times for the NLC.
Well, and that's also just sort of like an organizational problem, right?
Like if your organization is set up in such a way that a small number of people being
incapacitated means total paralysis and no one has any idea what's going on, that's just
a bad way to run something.
And especially it's a terrible way to run
a union because the union's power is supposed to be from from its
organization and from the collective power of a large, large organized group of people
who can make decisions for themselves.
And if that's not happening and you get
to the point where these decisions are being made by a very small number of people
who can just sort of vanish like that's that for whatever.
And, you know, literally whatever reason that is right, it could just be you get sick.
It could just be like whatever happens.
That's just a terrible way to organize things.
And I guess it's also like I want to make take
like a little tiny tangent to be like, if you're doing any organizing project, your goal is to organize yourself out of a job.
Like you're like ideally if you were in an organization, it should be able to function without you. There should not be having an indispensable person is a fiasco. Don't do that. This is true of both like your tiny local mutual aid group as much as is true of your giant national
union.
So this has been Mia talking about the indispensable person don't have.
Well, yeah, that's kind of the funny thing about joining a union from an anarchist perspective.
It gets a little funky how hierarchical they typically are and the problems that we know we are going to face when you have a system that's built like a pyramid.
Yeah.
Oh yeah. And so I was saying, we're in dark times, but there's such a bright future that I can see for us. us, branch nine of the NALC and namely this individual Tyler Vassar, who when I had originally
posted on Reddit asking for attention, he's the one that I thought would be great for this interview.
His branch, branch nine, has passed a resolution to form an open bargaining strategy for contract negotiations.
And I hope this sweeps the nation. We're not allowed to strike, as I've mentioned,
and our leadership is so shy when it comes to activism or mobilization of the workforce.
They don't want to touch the topic. The closest thing we have to it is a rally
that is enough is enough, that's being held in Baltimore soon about the violence that's
being done to postal workers. We're being robbed and we're being harassed. But even
then we're missing a large chunk of the danger that is posed to postal workers.
Because yes, we're being robbed on the streets,
but we're also being bullied and harassed inside of our workplaces by management,
by the people who are supposed to empower us to do the job effectively.
And so they don't want to touch the topic of a strike,
I think, for fear of retaliation.
But to me, pushing for the right to strike is a,
I'm not sure how to word this,
it is such an important part of the NALC's identity,
the postal strike of 1970,
that it seems silly to ignore it today and pretend
like it didn't happen.
So for the future, I think that activism is our key to success.
I think that the old heads that lead our union come from a time where unions were frowned
upon, where activism was frowned upon.
But I think that public opinion
will be largely in our favor
and that public opinion can really put pressure
on the legislative branch, on Congress.
And if we are transparent about our union,
what we're asking for, the issues that we're facing, I think that
the public would be on our side. If the people in America knew that management
was falsifying time records or training records and interfering with workers
comps claim and back pay or that they're not paying the settlements that they've
agreed to pay, that they're not paying the settlements that they've agreed to pay,
that they're not scheduling arbitration sessions,
big or small, that they would care
and that they would join us in the streets.
One major thing that happened,
I think it was last year in the summer,
we had a letter carrier, his name is Eugene Gates, who died in the Texas heat.
Jesus, yeah.
Because management told him not to take as many breaks or he would face discipline.
These pressures that we face when you're threatened that you will lose your job if you don't listen
to us, you will push yourself to if you don't listen to us,
you will push yourself to the point of exhaustion and further.
Yeah.
I think that the post office killed Mr. Gates.
Yeah.
There wasn't as much outcry or anger behind the movement.
I often find myself thinking that while I don't have
the answers, I do know that we need to care more.
Yeah.
And it's hard to care when you're exhausted, I acknowledge that.
Yeah, well, I think there's two things about that.
One, I mean, I don't, and this is something I've gotten to
with a lot of the sort of interviews that I've done
on this show is that I think a lot of very, very basic jobs
have labor conditions that are unimaginably appalling
that people just don't know about.
And I think people are very sympathetic to
once they actually understand what's happening
in the kind of just a horror show stuff that's happening in these workplaces.
And the second thing i think it's sort of important in terms of.
Getting people to you know what try trying to actually do like.
Master of all stations even just to get people to understand what's going on is that i think a lot of people who are facing these conditions think that they're alone.
I think a lot of people who are facing these kind of conditions think that they're alone and think that it's just something that happens to them or they've been in them for so long.
They think that it's sort of normal and having a bunch of people go no like a this happens
and be it shouldn't happen is extraordinarily powerful because you know that that feeling of isolation is is the thing that all of that
you know your that your bosses depend on to make sure that you know you just keep going
along with these conditions even though they are just objectively horrific and I think
any strategy that's not based on that is just not going to go anywhere.
Right. And one of the strategies that I really want to push forward as I grow within the union,
and don't get me wrong, I want to stay a steward. I think that educating our members and
being part of the workforce is my place in the union. But what I want to push is for union solidarity. I want the NALC to hire organizers, specifically
organizers, to try and get the public mobilized and as well as the workforce so that we can
put pressure on Congress so that we can show our bargaining teams that we support them and so that we can have clearly defined bargaining
terms.
And yeah, I think that having solidarity between unions and reaching out to the other movements
in a time where union support is higher than ever is such a clear path that we are just
ignoring for whatever reason because
people are afraid to speak out against the post office. And so I'm really not
sure what's going to happen with our current contract but I do know that the
fight never ends and that while we stand on the shoulders of giants we have to
pay respect to these giants by not giving up now. And I'm a relatively new
employee and steward, but I'm really walking in the footsteps of some warriors. The branch president
I mentioned, Ken Lurch, has given me so much support and education and has done so much hard
work over the years that I don't have to reinvent the wheel, none of us do.
We just have to continue the struggle.
Yeah, and I think that's a great place to end,
unless you have anything else
that you wanna make sure we get to?
No, nothing on this topic.
Yeah, so how can people support you and postal workers just in general if there's specific place you want them to go?
In general there is on the NALC site
Which is just NALC.com. There is a section where you put in your address and it
it'll give you the email addresses, the phone
numbers for your representatives so that you can make some noise. Again, we're
amazingly limited in what we can do so there's not really anything that you can
donate to to help us including the Letter Carrier Political Fund.
But yeah, just pay attention to us.
Maybe leave a bottle of water out in your front door,
says for the postal worker.
You know, there's nothing better that you can do
than talking about it.
Word of mouth is the best advertisement.
Well, yeah, we will put that in the show notes.
I hope you all win.
And I don't think I've ever said this genuinely in my life, but thank you for your service.
I appreciate that.
Yeah, I never imagined myself to become a federal employee.
And it is just as bad as I imagined.
Yeah.
So I do want to shout out actually, it's a little meta I guess, but I do want to shout
out some important episodes of It Could Happen Here that hit me very closely if I can.
Yeah, yeah, go for it.
Because a lot of the people listening will be postal workers that have been pointed in
this direction. Please look at the Myanmar
episodes, the free Burma, the Burmese revolution, and look at the work that, Mia, I believe
you've done the same work as James with border kindness. Those are two topics that I think
y'all hit really well and that really touched me as a person.
Sometimes I'll re-listen to those episodes when I'm having a hard day,
just to remind myself that it's all the same. It's all the same fight.
Yeah, it absolutely is. And I mean, I think that's sort of the beauty. I mean, it's both the beauty and the horror of
of this world is that on the one hand, all of us are being crushed by the same sets of forces. But on the other hand, it means that whatever fight that you're
taking is also a part of the larger fight, forget all of us free.
Yeah, exactly. So just fight the burnout and stay in the fight. Yeah.
Yeah, this is Nick Adapa here. Go make trouble for people who suck. If you love sports and true crime, then there's a new podcast from executive producer Dan
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Hi everyone, it's James. We just wanted to let you know that some new shit has come to light
since we recorded this. Specifically, a former staffer of World Central Kitchen who resigned,
who was of Palestinian descent, wrote an op-ed, I guess, in Monde Weiss, which is a publication that covers
Israel and Palestine and the United States role there. And it's given us some more information
about world civilization that we didn't know when we first recorded this. And so we are going to
address that at the end. So after the second ad break, Charles will go, Shireen and I will come
back and we're going to address some stuff that we found in that op-ed.
We will also link it in the description to this podcast.
Yes.
It's a really good article.
I recommend you guys give it a full read.
But yeah, we will be talking all about it at the end.
So please listen to the whole episode.
Hello everybody.
Welcome to It Could Happen Here.
Today I am joined by my illustrious colleague, James.
Hi, James.
Hi, Shireen. And my now friend, Charlesous colleague James. Hi James. Hi Shireen.
And my now friend Charles McBride.
Hi Charles, welcome back to the show.
Hi now friends Shireen, it's wonderful to be here
and to know that you're a real person
and not a fellow Psyop.
Yeah, fun fact, I have met Charles in person
but I have not met James in person
and I think that's pretty funny.
That's why I got colleague and Charles girlfriend.
No, don't! Don't think we're not taking got colleague and Charles got friend. No, it's not.
Don't think we're not taking notes over here, Shireen.
No, don't read into that.
Don't read into that.
Okay.
What do we have?
We're talking about World Central Kitchen and the tragedy that happened last week in
which seven aid workers were killed.
Both of these gentlemen have personal experience with the organization, so I thought it would
be good to talk about.
But James, take it away.
Okay. So, yeah, I think we should maybe start off,
Charles, you and I have both seen World Central Kitchen
in different places.
Like, my longest experience with them was starting in 2018
in Tijuana, right, when we were trying to feed people
who were part of a caravan of migrants
who had arrived right before the midterms.
And what was a relatively normal thing became a really big political sort of
football, which resulted in the people remember like people being tear gassed in
Mexico from inside the United States, people being held first in a baseball
stadium and then in an old strip club, which was really gross. And there being essentially no NGO presence at first and then neutral aid
presence and then World Central Kitchen were one of the first people to show up
and cook for people. And like at this point there was a really dire need for
food. I have this vivid memory of three of my friends and I riding in a bed of a
pickup truck into this refugee camp and people just mobbing for food and water.
People were good about not stamping on children once we stopped, but I was really worried
there was going to be a crash.
People were very hungry and very thirsty.
I had just had massive respect for people showing up and just being like, we are people
who cook food and what we're here to do is cook food, and
these people are hungry, so we're going to give it to them.
And so I've, I've always been admiring of their work since
then. And I wonder, Charles, like what your sort of initial
experience was with them? And if you could describe like, sort of
what sort of work you've seen them doing?
and sort of what sort of work you've seen them doing?
Yeah, so first experience that I had with World Central Kitchen was actually hands off. It was when my friends and I we created
this thing four years ago called the farm link project, which is
a food rescue organization. It basically finds food that's
going to waste on farms and pays the wages of the truckers
and the drivers to transport the food to food banks that are overworked.
We sort of tagged in with World Central Kitchen in the beginning of COVID and talked with
them a little bit, but there was never any official partnership.
Some of their comms people gave us advice. Some of their fundraising people gave us advice.
First time I ever saw them in operation was coming into the Zemesh train station, week two of the Ukraine war.
And they were the organization feeding all the refugees coming in.
There was a bunch of people in World Central Kitchen.
And, and the thing I noticed was none of them were speaking English.
They were all speaking Polish and Ukrainian or Russian.
And I started to realize this is an organization that knows how to mobilize a local population
and a local response as a part of the thing.
And that's something I really noticed when almost a year later, I flew from Ukraine to Turkey when a 7.5 magnitude
earthquake went through southeastern Turkey, Kurdistan.
And I flew into Adana and then basically linked up with the World Central Kitchen people in
the city of Osmaniye.
And one of the things I noticed was how quickly
they were able to get into Syria
when nobody else was getting into Syria.
And the reason is because it's just chefs.
It's just using chefs in restaurants
in places where they already exist.
Every place in the world has chefs and restaurants.
And Jose Andres has this amazing quote that I really like.
He says, everyone already works for World Central Kitchen.
They just don't know it yet.
And I saw that in action.
I saw all these kitchens transformed into, you know,
shelters and food distribution sites.
And I got to work alongside their team.
So my project, I was trying to fundraise for heaters and blankets to heat the
Afad tents in the affected regions in Kurdistan, in the Kurdish villages on
the border with Syria, because it was still very cold at that time and there
was not adequate attention paid to that.
Obviously Afad and its cronies is part of the whole reason that that incident was as bad
as it was, but World Central Kitchen stepped up in a big way in Turkey. And I was really impressed
with kind of their outfit. We were working at the same distribution center. I got to accompany
Jose Andres on a couple of his deliveries and we went to Hatay and walked around and saw the extent
of the devastation and visited all the World Central
Kitchen feeding sites.
And it was just, it was all Turkish people and Kurdish people who were there working
for World Central Kitchen.
They had been mobilized by this entity.
So there's this decentralized element to World Central Kitchen that I found really impressive.
It didn't feel like the top-down bureaucratic thing I kept running into in my humanitarian work with these big NGOs, it was much more grassroots, much more
bottom up. So again, a lot of respect for me in that sense.
Yeah, I think that's a really good point to make that they do have a different
model allows them to be flexible. It's allowed them to be places where other
people aren't like, I think a lot of people perhaps are not as familiar with the NGO world
as you and I might be. NGOs often present themselves in places where people need help.
It's like they have large office buildings on white land cruises and they have one way
of doing things and it's their way and sometimes that doesn't work. I can recount countless
examples of this, NGOs that exist to do things in a certain way and don't adapt to a local situation
or culture.
And that's something the World Central Kitchen have done really well in my experience all
over the world.
Yeah, they graphed themselves onto a local response.
And everywhere that they go, it takes on the local flavor.
And I think that's why this happened, is because they inserted themselves into a highly volatile
situation and because they are so decentralized and because they are so on the ground, they
also expose themselves to the realities of what Palestinians have been facing in Gaza
and lost members of their team as a result.
And I think that is, part of that is there's a lot of people
who won't even go into Gaza if they had the opportunity.
Like you said, these big NGOs,
I think last time I was on the podcast, Shireen,
I talked about seeing these big UN advertisements
in the Copenhagen airport saying,
save Ukrainian children when I first
when I was going over there.
And then as soon as I got there, I mean, the minute you go east of Lviv, you're not going
to see a UN truck anywhere.
And it was it was that way for nine months.
You know, and yeah, it was just a bunch of people with like brand new white land cruiser
Prados sipping cocktails in Lviv while subcontracting with actual humanitarians
working closer to the front line. World Central Kitchen was not that way.
They were all the way out, all the way out in the East. Everywhere I went,
there was World Central Kitchen cars, even deep into Donetsk.
And that was really impressive. It felt antithetical to the whole
nonprofit industrial complex model that I'd become familiar with. And I was
impressed by that.
Yeah, so perhaps we should speak about exactly what they were
doing in Gaza, because I think people are perhaps a little
confused. There's been a lot of like, misinformation from from
all kinds of angles about what they were doing in Gaza. So do
you have a good handle on that?
from all kinds of angles about what they were doing in Gaza. So do you have a good handle on that?
I mean, World Central Kitchen positioned itself, they engage in slightly more activist humanitarianism
than most organizations, which is why, I mean, Jose Andres went big on Ukraine.
He was there, he brought the whole team.
I mean, they dedicated so many resources to Ukraine to Ukraine and for him it was unequivocal
Ukrainians are the good guys Russians are the bad guys. We're helping the victims of this conflict and
you know, we're on the side of of the angels in this and that was the positioning and I
think it was a bit of a wake-up call when after October 7th, he did the same thing in Israel and went and gave food to the different kibbutzim that were affected by the October
7th attacks.
And at first, very much positioned to himself as like, we're here to help relieve the affected
Israelis, which again, for like polite liberals in the humanitarian world, you know, Israel,
Ukraine, both aligned with Western interests, Western values, theoretically.
And I think, and then, you know, suddenly the war focus goes from what happened to the
Kibbutzim to what's happening in Gaza.
And so they went to Egypt and they started helping the refugees
and then they tried to get into Gaza.
Then they did get into Gaza.
And they set up an effective system of food aid.
And I started to notice while that was happening
that the perspectives of a lot of the people
that I was working with in the aid community
were starting to shift on this whole thing.
People who didn't have a political interest in supporting the Palestinians and were just kind of supporting Israel because of the default.
When they actually went to Gaza, they started to really change their tune.
And you see this a little bit with Jose Andres as well. I think Jose Andres was, yeah, I mean,
in terms of his personal views on Israel,
they seem to have very clearly evolved.
You can see very soon after October 7th,
he is calling out the Spanish prime minister
on calling what's happening in Palestine and genocide.
He's saying that Israel has a right to defend itself.
And then he spends a bunch of time in Gaza and now he's greeting everyone in Arabic.
And then this thing happens and he immediately points the finger at Israel. He says, you
guys targeted my team. You killed them deliberately and you made sure the job was finished. And
that is, that is just so reproachable. And in doing so, he became one of the only, like, really big celebrity voices to make what appeared to be something of a 180 turn on that conflict.
And pretty much everyone that I've worked with in the humanitarian or journalism space has also done the same thing in regard to Gaza.
I'd say most people thought my views on this were too extreme after October 7th, when I began immediately criticizing Israel.
And now the ones who have actually been there
pretty much unequivocally say
they're the bad actor in this region.
And I think you saw that shift happen in real time
with sort of the attitude that World Central Kitchen took to Gaza.
All of that stuff is available from public statements. I don't want to share private sentiments that have been shared with me by members of World Central Kitchen took to Gaza. All that stuff is available from public statements. I don't want to share private sentiments that have been shared with me
by members of World Central Kitchen staff. Those are their own and they don't
represent the organization. But I think even just watching the yo-yo of Jose
Andres' perspective on this change has been enlightening.
Yeah, and I think like, it's easy to be critical of someone for having opinions which like have not
aged well, right? Like, and sometimes that's okay. Sometimes sometimes we need to do that.
Sometimes people say shit, which is unforgivable. But like, I think in this instance, like, we can
be critical at a point. But I don't think now is the time for that. Like, I think now is the time
for like everyone who wants the starving and killing of innocent
people in Gaza to stop is on our side right now. And we need to welcome that. And like,
there are a lot of people in this country, right, who we need to do that same 180. And giving
examples of people doing that is good. Like they, and there are a lot of people who don't see
themselves when
they see dead people in Gaza.
And that's a problem, right?
And that's some shit that they need to examine.
And because there's a lot of bigotry there, but if they see themselves in
those aid workers or they see themselves in Jose Andres and look fucking,
when I saw the bodies of those aid workers, right, you have a tall, skinny
British guy with, with long hair and a plate carrier with a badge on like that.
That's what I look like to 99% of the world.
And it's hard not to feel like, oh shit, like that could be me.
Um, and, and I, I have, I feel like I have a lot of empathy for people
in Gaza, our friends in Gaza.
We, we speak to them on the podcast.
Sherine and I spoke to them last week, but whatever it takes for those people
to change their opinions right now is what we need.
And we can dissect how we got here later,
but every minute that this continues,
more innocent people die.
And if we can stop this one minute sooner,
then there's important lives that we can save.
And I think it's really important to focus on where we are,
not like how we got here right now, if that makes sense.
As far as global conflicts go,
I believe it's like 224 aid workers have died in Gaza,
which is not a normal number in any kind of war.
So that's according to the UN.
Yeah, a hundred journalists, right?
Like every, there is one person I can think of who I've worked with in Gaza who is still alive.
Everyone I know has lost family members.
And that's just my tiny slice.
I'm by no means as affected by this as most people.
But yeah, three times as many children have died since October in Gaza as are normally killed in conflicts in a year worldwide.
It's fucking horrific.
And yeah, we will do well to like put aside our differences and make it stop, I think.
Yeah, I agree.
Opposition to genocide and wanting to end it should be a very big tent.
And the fact that some people on the internet are trying to make it a smaller one doesn't
make a lot of sense to me.
Yeah. It promotes infighting, which is not helpful right now.
Yeah, it is helpful to not call it a war and continue calling it a genocide because that's what it is.
So, yeah, just continuing to change all the rhetoric around this genocide, I think is important. This is also not the first time that Israel has directly targeted aid workers that are
clearly labeled as aid workers.
In 2006 in Lebanon, Israel struck a Red Cross ambulance right in the center of the logo.
Right on top of the truck there was, or the van, was a Red Cross, a clear Red Cross, and
it struck right in the center.
I think that image is now going around again.
It's from 2006 again.
It's not the first time that Israel has directly targeted aid workers, and I think it's really
appalling seeing leadership in Israel just kind of apologize half-heartedly being like
this was a mistake, and then they just move on.
It's if this was the red line for people, I one I find that frustrating, but if it's finally the red line for people, I just hope it continues and people don't let it go. There's that story
that was absolutely fucking heartbreaking right of that young girl who was trapped in her car
and she called the ambulance and the ambulance came and they bombed the ambulance right and they
killed her and they killed the ambulance drivers.
Like those two ambulance drivers were Palestinian.
They were working for the Palestinian Red Crest and they deserve every bit as much outrage
as the world's central kitchen people do.
What they did with every bit as admirable.
But like, if this is what it takes for people to change, then like, I hope that they will
also acknowledge
that everything else that happened before was an atrustee too.
Talking of like, atrustees, we have an advertising break now.
That was good, James.
Good job.
And we're back.
Charles, you recently got some online attention for a video that you posted that was highlighting
the vast imbalance of attention that the targeted assassination of the aid workers got in comparison
to the murder and genocide of Palestinians. Specifically people were talking about how there was also a Palestinian driver
who was murdered along with the aid workers, and his name was not getting mentioned.
His name is Saif Issam Abutaha.
And just a reminder of how frustrating it is that this had to be the red line for people.
There are over 33,000 people in Gaza who have been murdered, nearly half of which
are children. There are probably thousands more who are trapped under the rubble and
other thousands that are just unaccounted for because of the bobbing of hospitals and
the lack of records. So to have the killing of six aid workers be a red line for people,
that's what I mean by saying it's frustrating because it is a tragedy,
but tragedy has been taking place for the past six months and also the past 76
years. So, so yes,
the video that Charles made got some well-deserved attention and I'd
love for you to talk about it a little bit.
Yeah.
So this was like a strange convergence of things for me
because I had been keeping up with the WCK team as they went into Gaza.
I'd actually even been in conversations with some of them about potentially going there.
But I hadn't, I mean, like these were just buddies from a humanitarian trip.
I mean, you know, like James probably knows, you make friends really fast
when you're connected,
when you're in these sorts of scenarios. And, you know, I had, I made friendships while I was in
Turkey that I've, I've maintained. And, but then my, my Palestinian advocacy was separate, you know,
I'm, I'm, I'm over here educating and everything. And then suddenly there's this convergence of like
And then suddenly there's this convergence of like former, you know, coworkers on this team dying.
And then it being the fault of this regime that I've spent the last six months trying to educate people on why it's bad. And I posted a video which was my tribute to the fallen WCK employees who
were very close friends of people that I got really close to on that project.
And it was a tribute to them and also a way of pointing out how their martyrdom has overshadowed
the martyrdom of so many Palestinians who will never get the kind of press and attention that they did.
And I think it achieved that effect. The video went very, very viral. It's exceeded a million
views on TikTok. It's at around a quarter of a million on Instagram. And more than that,
on the accounts that have reposted and shared it, sometimes without the context that I am not a
World Central Kitchen employee, nor do I represent the opinions of the organization. And one of the
things that I think made that story go viral is that I did shift the attention to, I said,
this is a genocide. And I said, as, as grieved as I am at the loss of these people that I have this
connection with, I do want to point out that it is overshadowing the horrendous loss of life of Palestinians.
And I think that resonated with a lot of people.
It also resonated with my former, my friends at WCK who reached out to say,
we appreciate you using your platform to talk about this,
especially considering the fact that WCK employees do
not typically are not really supposed to be making statements online about this.
So they have a little more leeway with that, considering the fact that the head of the
organization has explicitly now condemned Israel for this strike.
But I've had some very interesting conversations with friends of mine that either still work
or are connected to the organization.
And that's a slightly complicated thing because World Central Kitchen subcontracts with so
many different people.
So at any given point, there are people who are connected to World Central Kitchen who
are not representatives of the organization or technically employees.
So you can't say definitively, this is what the majority of people in WCK feel about Gaza or Israel or anything, you know, different people have different opinions
about that whole situation.
I think what you tried to do was obviously not to represent them and it would be
disingenuous and I want to suggest you did, but the internet does that.
I want to talk about one more talking of disingenuous things on the internet.
I guess there was this thing that went around immediately in the
aftermath of the photos coming out of the different people's corpses,
that, like, it seemed to be mostly like tankies, or perhaps people who
still believe that they can generate revenue from views on Twitter, saying
that, like, because these people had a security team, the security team
was somehow spies, and this is evidence they were
working for Israel, right? Like, you can speak to your
experience Charles, like, I've worked with security teams and
seen people working with security teams all over the
fucking world because war is dangerous. And you have the
thing that everyone needs.
If you have the misfortune of being a veteran of the global
war on terror, you have a very few outlets for your skill set. One of those is providing security for
humanitarian actors and journalists. And that is one of the most pro-social applications of your
skill set. Yeah, there are a lot of worse things to do with those skills, believe me.
Yeah, there are a lot of worse things to do with those skills, believe me. Right.
Very good point.
So, I have encountered a lot of people in my time in Ukraine and elsewhere who have
decided to turn their sort of military intelligence background experience into, you know, well,
okay, I'm good at this.
I'm familiar with these types of scenarios.
And if there's one thing I'm decent at, it's well, at least trying to, to
keep people safe and give them intelligence.
And that is a, that's never a guarantee, but in all the people I've met who
actually are legit, you know, security consultants or just veterans who have
applied their skills towards a pro-social humanitarian purpose, are pretty good guys. And while I'm sure, you know, there are some of them who are
connected to various, are still connected to sort of the intelligence services of their various
countries, I think that's definitely a possibility. A lot of them are not. They're just veterans who
are trying to help and they,
this is a way that they can make a living
while doing something that has a low moral hazard.
So yeah, I dismissed that stuff.
There's a lot of conspiracies.
The problem is, I mean, in the vacuum of the sort of
post-manufacturing consent world where none of us trust
the Western liberal media,
a lot of people trust stuff that's even dumber, including just like takes on the internet that somebody pulled
out of their ass. And a lot of it is if you if you have set yourself up against everything
that comes out of the West, then every everything that looks like a fingerprint of an intelligence
agency or anything is going to ring your alarm bells.
Obviously, James, I feel like Ukraine is a great example of this.
The fact that the United States supports Ukraine means that Ukraine must be the villain and
that the entire thing must be a CIA Psyop and there's spies everywhere.
And I'm a spy for going to Ukraine and helping grandmothers get their insulin.
All of those things have been said about Ukraine, about me, about that sort of thing.
We know it's not true.
It's just that people... I mean, as far as I know, these were guys who were security
consultants, very similar to... I work with a lot of British veterans of the Global War
on Terror, basically on various different projects, some of it having to do with PTSD,
others having to do with environmental conservation, some of whom have worked in Palestine, and been in the West Bank. And I think Brits, by and large have a more sane perspective on Palestine than people in the US do. I've just noticed that there are like fewer ultra Zionist Brits than Americans. I think our politics is less dominated by that perspective.
There are ultra Zionist British people, but yeah, it's also just, I
think a little bit harder to live a life in Britain where you don't know.
It's not Palestinian people, Arab people and Muslim people, right?
And that, that complete demonization and dehumanization of Muslim people that the Western media did for 20 years
to manifest your consent for war
that wasn't about weapons of mass destruction
or women in Afghanistan.
It doesn't stick the landing quite so well
when like you have friends
and you can kind of see through the nonsense.
Yeah.
Well, also I think the percentage
of like evangelical Christians is probably much less. Yeah, no one's breeding a fucking red cow in England to take it to this third temple that I know of.
That was one of the things I was going to point out is I don't think you even have to know,
like to be a Zionist you don't even have to know Jewish people in the U.S. I was raised an ultra
Zionist without knowing a single Jewish family because I came from an evangelical community in South Carolina that was very Christo-nationalist, very kind of culturally dispensationalist,
even though my family wasn't dispensationalist. It was all about in times you support Israel
because that's where, you know, that's where Jesus is going to come back. So yeah, I remember,
I mean, I, I, we even had like fake Passover ceremonies in our church. God, this is, this
is bringing up some interesting.
Yeah.
Into the trauma box.
But truly, I mean, one of my early sort of, I would say I was completely anti-Zionist
before I was even a leftist.
And part of that reason was because I got to know a Palestinian friend in Washington,
D.C. while sharing a desk with an Israeli conservative and a liberal Zionist.
Wow, that is a joke.
Like these people walking to a bar.
Trio of people.
So I like, I think I had kind of, I got peeled on Palestine.
Part of it was because like I was a history major in college, so I learned historiography.
I just never applied historiography to the Israel-Palestine conflict.
And then having these two voices in my ear while like living and working in DC, I was
like, oh, I need to actually look into this.
And so, yeah, I mean, I would say even before I was like a leftist, I was down on Israel.
I figured they were not the good guys. And then I think reading
the fateful triangle by Noam Chomsky really solidified that. And obviously,
Ilan Pappé kind of was the nail in the coffin for me. So yeah, and speaking of like, you know,
what happens in DC and, you know, Americans opinions on the Middle East.
Most of them are dogshit opinions because most people do not have some sort of strong
point of reference to this zone.
But it goes back to what we were saying about how being against genocides should be a very
big tent and we should resist efforts to make it smaller because I'm reading through the
Hundred Years War on Palestine right now, Rashid Kaldi.
And one of the things that he said is how the war
is fought in the United States, in Congress,
because we hold the keys.
So as painful as it is to try and change the minds
of dumb Americans with no geopolitical understanding.
It's absolutely essential to holding Israel to account.
It is actually one of the best things that you can do.
And when someone who has the international appeal
of Chef Jose Andres points the finger at Israel and said,
you killed my employees deliberately and you're starving Gazans.
That goes a long way towards shifting the opinions of the people
who actually hold the keys to everything Israel does.
Yeah, I think that's a very good point.
And like, that's what we need to do, right?
Like, stop, stop them getting bombs to kill people,
not argue on Twitter or Instagram
or what have you.
Like we need to make the killing stop.
I wonder like you spoke a chance about knowing people, I know World Central Kitchen are no
longer working in Gaza for the time being?
Is that still correct?
They've publicly announced that they're scaling back their efforts.
Yes, I'm not sure if they're going to totally close down their operation.
I think right now they're probably trying to reconsider their security protocols
before making another step.
Yeah, I mean, I Don't really know what?
Has there are things of course, but like they did attempt to deconflict I guess and and they were using a road which is
Designated for the use of they were using it for and
Israel knew where they were they like it's they have to report where they are
So I mean it would be fucking crazy if Israel attacked eight workers again right now But also it's Israel. I mean, it would be fucking crazy if Israel attacked aid workers again right now.
But also it's Israel.
I mean, yeah, also they've done crazier things.
Yeah.
But can we like dwell on that for a second?
Like, Israel constantly boasts about its ISR capabilities.
And ISR is intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance.
So, like, Israel is constantly reassuring people that it is doing everything it can to avoid civilian casualties
it talks about its chain of command for approval and
In light of that none of the things that they've said about this make any sense whatsoever
Because if if their protocols because they're either it's like they can't decide what they're trying to gaslight
the world into believing.
Every claim that they're making is muddling what they're trying to get the world to believe
about them.
And it just gives everyone the distinct impression that they're recklessly incompetent, lying,
evil, or potentially all three.
Right.
Like even if you look, I was, because I don't know why this is the thing that I do, I was
looking at like trying to work out what munition Israel had used, right?
To destroy those vehicles.
And Israel has, they have a number of different sort of munitions that they could have used.
But one of the things that they do, and the US does it too, but it's a bigger thing with Israel,
is if they have inert or low yield Hellfire munitions,
so like guided munitions that are fired from a helicopter or a drone, and they use them to do a thing
that they call roof knocking, right, which sounds maybe like you're knocking on someone's
roof. What you're doing is sending a missile through somebody's roof, and that is the means
by which you alert them to evacuate the building because you're planning a larger strike. That in itself, yeah, we have this great ISR capability.
And what do we do with it?
We launch missiles into the homes of civilians and then hopefully they will
run away in fear for their lives so that more of them don't die when we blow up
that block 10 minutes later.
Like it's just, you know, you have to look at what's happening, not what's being said.
I guess.
But no, they're absolutely allergic to accountability.
And I think you can see just how far they've been able, they're scrambling now because
they've been able to get away with so much for so long and their excuses are falling
apart because they're alternatively depicting themselves as a highly disciplined and professional
army or that they're just making mistakes because it's war, and that people
should get off their back because no one holds anyone else to the same standard that they
hold Israel. So it's like, which is it? Like, what are you trying to get the world to believe?
Are you either this like crack disciplined unit with a very sophisticated chain of command
and an AI software that you're really proud of for targeting? Or are you, is this the
fog of war and you're just making mistakes and everyone makes mistakes
and we should get off your back for it?
Because you can't have it both ways.
The civilian casualties are too high
for you to have it both ways.
So either you were making mistakes
and too many people are getting killed
and you're violating the law's rule
or you're doing it deliberately, which is worse.
Yeah, people can make up their own minds, I guess.
Charles, thank you so much for joining us today.
I really respect all the work you do, and I am
grateful that you have shared your voice with our
audience once again.
Where can people find you on the Internet if you
want to be found?
Thank you, Shrain. Yeah, just you can find me
pretty much everywhere except Twitter with Charles
McBride, and that Charles McBride and that's
McBride with a Y rather than an I.
It's on Substack, Instagram, TikTok, and my website charlesmcbride.com will be live at
this point when this episode drops.
If you want to support the humanitarian work I've been involved in in Ukraine, you can support Mission Harkiv on Instagram.
It's mission.harkiv and their website is missionharkiv.com.
And if you're looking for an org that is already working in Gaza to provide life saving aid in the wake of, you know,
UNRWA being gone, World Central Kitchen now pulling out, Anera pulling out.
Global Empowerment Mission is still there
and still fulfilling a lot of the same functions
that those organizations were doing.
Thank you so much, Charles.
["The Art of Being A Human Being"]
Shireen and James from the future here giving you an update about the article that we mentioned at the top of the episode.
So the title itself is I resign from World Central Kitchen because they refuse to tell
the truth about the Israeli genocide in Gaza.
The ex staffer is Ramzi Tadhami.
The article itself has some really damning information about WCK,
so we're going to get into it. He says, for months, World Central Kitchen leadership
censored material coming out of its Gaza operation and refused to honor staff concerns about their
work there, and even though they're finally taking a stand after its personnel have been murdered,
it is much too late. So he resigned in early March of this year, and at the time he was the only staff member of Palestinian descent at WCK.
And there is an amendment there. He says that while WCK hired many Palestinian contractors in Gaza and Egypt,
he was the only Palestinian with staff status following the departure of one other longtime employee.
And he resigned in protest of the extensive, unexplained censorship regarding Gaza at the
organization.
They talk about how in December 7th of last year, they sent a letter to WCK's executive
team and that letter called for WCK to join other regionally active NGOs in calling for
a ceasefire and condemning Israel's blockade, as well as conforming its language and coverage
of Gaza to the standard that was set by the coverage
of Ukraine, as well as stopping meal service in Israel.
It got 43 signatures and the WCK executive team declined to meet up with
the people that signed the letter and they failed to respond to any inquiries.
And they also actively still served the meals in Israel while the second day
of the ICJ genocide hearing was happening in January. There's one paragraph that I want to
dial out as well, just because I think it's very crucial when we're discussing the fact that these
people died working for a tetra kitchen, and that's this paragraph that I'll just pick up halfway
through. In another instance, a video of a WCK kitchen caught in an IDF bombing
was put on hold entirely.
It appears this incident, as well as the fact that WCK personnel were aboard a UN
convoy that was bombed, have not been mentioned anywhere externally.
Like I think that's a really crucial getting off point.
You can have shit politics, but if you're not
saying stuff when your people are getting bombed, like until they're getting killed,
A, I don't know what's wrong with you. And B, if you didn't change things, I don't know,
didn't change things, right? That's not detailed here, but like, you have to change things if
your people are being bombed. Like if I'm working somewhere where that's a likelihood, you know, like if,
if we get bombed once and we're lucky enough to be okay, we do not continue
doing the same shit and I'm not entirely sure that they did.
I don't want to for a moment suggest that like this, the people who died
were in like complicit, right?
And that's not what I'm saying.
It's not what Shireen's saying.
I very much understand the desire to, to go to places where dangerous things are happening and help the people who did nothing to deserve this.
And I think the people who did that deserve our unending gratitude and respect. I'm not for a minute saying that that's not true.
I'm saying that this organization needs to really think about how it does shit if it wants to continue operating.
And yeah, the blame is on the executives of this organization.
The article also talks about how the character of WCK's relief response to Gaza,
it was revealed very early on after October 7th, the Chief Communications Officer, Linda Roth,
she had put out a statement about the communications team's input, which is apparently breaking
precedent, and it was about how Hamas attacked Israel with no mention of the Palestinian
lives that were lost, and then three days later, Jose Andres posted a video to WCK's
Instagram where he only makes reference to the October 7th attack with no mention
of the climbing Palestinian death toll at the time or the blockades. And then on social
media Charles mentioned this at the episode. On October 16th he tweeted at the Spanish
Prime Minister to be removed for her protest of the Israeli tactics and at the same time
WCK continued to work closely with the IDF over the course of the relief response.
The initial statement, as well as Andre's video, were decisions that were made by leadership
against the concerns of the WCK personnel.
There's this paragraph that I want to read just verbatim.
Much of the work in a genocide is not pulling the trigger, but instead minimizing and denying
that a genocide is going on.
Genocide is a phenomenon of gradual boundary pushing.
Each increment must be accepted by the parties with agency for the next to be reached.
Under the direction of CEO Aaron Gore, Linda Roth, and quote, chief feeding officer Jose
Andres, World Central Kitchen recklessly endangered its personnel, shelflessly exploited the situation for its own benefit,
and actively participated in the normalization of an ongoing genocide.
I think what I want to say more broadly here,
it's my stance, I guess maybe other people share it, maybe they don't,
this situation is not going to be solved by NGOs,
and it's certainly not going to be solved by NGOs,
which have this very explicitly neoliberal
political agenda, right?
Like at best, they can plug a hole in a leaky bucket and it's good when they do that, right?
If one less person starves, that's good.
It doesn't mean they don't have to be perfect to help, but they don't get to be exempted
from criticism because they're helping, right?
Like World Central Kitchen didn't want to help us at the border in
Hickamber. My friends reached out. They didn't want to do that. Yeah,
I don't think you should expect NGOs to share your radical politics. It
doesn't mean that they can't do harm reduction and doesn't mean that when
they are doing harm reduction, they sometimes need your money. And even in
the situations where this is happening, you should give it to them if you
can't help more directly, right? But like, you know, if we look at their communications, we do see them calling for
a ceasefire, which is about what you can expect from an NGO, you know, we actually, it appears
that we see Jose Andres calling for a ceasefire. And we see World Central Kitchen saying Jose
Andres called for a ceasefire, which I don't quite know why they don't just say we are
calling for a ceasefire. They didn't sign that document with the other range. I don't
know if they're trying to play like have it both ways. I don't know. I don't I'm not privy to those
conversations, right? They didn't sort of wholeheartedly say this is a genocide,
but they have to get permission for Israel to do stuff. I mean, now they're saying it, but
after the atrocity that happened, the whole world is
watching, right?
Not that the whole world shouldn't have been watching from the start.
But I don't think NGOs are ever going to be as radical as people on the internet want
them for.
They're also there doing stuff and people on the internet aren't.
So we have to respect that.
And I don't want any of this to take away from the fact that some people from all over
the world, right, from Europe, from Australia, from the United States, have died feeding
people who need to be fed because like that's the most any of us can give is our lives,
right? And so I don't for a minute want any of this to detract from the sacrifice they made,
nor should their sacrifice be held in any higher regard than the sacrifice made by hundreds,
if not thousands of Palestinian aid workers, right?
People working for the Palestinian Red Crescent,
even the Palestinian people working for international NGOs, right? or the United Nations people who have been killed.
None of those sacrifices should be ignored or undermined.
Because people are certainly given a lot more than I have. I don't have any right to say that.
I think it changes communications. I think they've obviously realized that there is no nicely, nicely about this.
You have to call a spade a spade when it comes to what's happening in Gaza, which is a deliberate
and targeted attempt to kill civilians, thousands and tens of thousands of children even.
And I think until we move the conversation on to one where that is being called by its
name, that is to say genocide, then
I don't think we'll see the reactions that we need. And I think they appear to have reflected
on that. I wish they'd got there sooner, but they're there now. And I'm sorry that it took
these people's lives to get there. But what I see from them is what I see from other NGOs.
It's not, they're not certainly not uniquely bad. In fact, there are better than very many NGOs. They were there when other people weren't and they're delivering food
when other people weren't. So I don't want to distract from that. But yeah, this messaging,
this internal conduct, like there's some of these internal messages, they are troubling.
And like, again, it's just what I expect from any other NGO. Whereas I've seen these guys
do things in many ways that are better than other NGOs. But none of that messaging takes away from these people
giving their lives. And I don't want to suggest that.
I think the most telling thing is that they're making the biases of their, the top people
that work for this company very evident. In the article, it goes into Linda Roth's background
and her pro-Israeli stances in the past and the fact that in all the outwardly facing
materials about Gaza it was very typical. To change the word siege to conflict or to question
the blockades it talks about how the people at the very top, their biases just seeped through
and the people that were actually working for the organization were in disagreement with this.
I think the last thing I want to read from this article just
really highlights that WCK did not protect the people that worked for them. It says,
save the possibility of genuine incompetence, the WCK leadership's decisions were not made
to maintain neutrality, did not increase effectiveness, and as April first demonstrated, did not
protect personnel. The leadership's failure
to honestly portray the dire reality in Gaza and lack of an attempt to influence the genocide
in Gaza via its status and close ties to the Biden administration means that they bear
responsibility for its outcomes. Let no one say they did everything they could."
And this is obviously talking about the leadership versus the personnel.
And then he goes on to close the article saying that his experience is one experience.
And when he resigned, there was a palpable, widespread atmosphere of disappointment
among the staff and employees.
And he ends with just calling on current and former WCK employees, contractors
and volunteers to publicly share their stories as well in order to force
accountability and change.
Yeah. Look, if you work for Central Kitchen, you can message us. I'm here to hear your stories.
But yeah.
Yeah. We just wanted to make sure that this perspective was shared. And again,
the article will be in the description, so please give it a good read. But yeah,
that is the episode.
Thanks for listening.
Free Palestine. If you love sports and true crime, then there's a new podcast from executive producer Dan
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Tongue Unbroken Season 2. This podcast explores complex concepts of identity, resilience,
erasure, and genocide. Table for Two Season 2. Think of the show as a deconstructed Oscar party
in podcast form. Each episode takes place over the romance of a meal and feels like you're seated
next to a different guest at that dinner. Hear these podcasts and more on your free iHeart
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radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart.
When things fall apart, one of the things that happens is you get a bunch of opportunities
for a lot of weird little guys, a lot of Nazis and other kinds of scums start sliding up to the surface in the hopes that
they can get some of the sweet, sweet oxygen of collapse.
And that's why we brought onto the program and are bringing into the network our good
friend Molly Conger for a little recurrent series I like to call Look Who's Stalking.
That was the stalking joke. I wanted to open
the episode with mommy.
From the attorneys, I'm not stalking anyone. I would never do that. That is a crime. This
is reporting.
It is reporting and the line between reporting and stalking always clear.
You know, I think it's, uh, it's on the publication.
Yeah, yeah.
So Robert, today's topic is such a perfect mashup of so many of my favorite things.
It couldn't be more my speed unless this whole story took place on a wiener dog ranch, right?
Yeah.
This story has city council meetings that got rowdy.
It has Unite the Right Attendee getting docs.
It has the internal comms of a hate group getting leaked.
It has regular ass people putting their foot down about hate in their town.
It is a years long arc of one man's journey from fucking around to finding out.
His evolution from chanting, you will not replace us, to getting replaced at the ballot
box.
This is the story of Enid, Oklahoma Ward 1 City Commissioner Judson Gannon Blevins.
Oh my God. Enid, Oklahoma, Ward 1 City Commissioner Judson Gannon Blevins.
Oh my God.
Oh, we're going back to my old home.
That's right.
You spent some time in Oklahoma as a kid.
So Judd Blevins was raised in the town of Enid, Oklahoma.
And the listener, you'd be forgiven for thinking this is a story of a small town.
And I'll be honest, I did.
I'd never heard of Enid.
But you grew up in the area. Do
you have any sort of pre-existing notions of Garfield County? Yeah. I mean, Enid was like
a bigger place. I grew up in Ida Bell, which was really out in the sticks. So kind of everywhere
was more civilization than Ida Bell, but Enid certainly was, although not much. No one would
accuse it of much civilization.
It is apparently the ninth largest city in Oklahoma, which was surprising to me.
It's an hour and a half outside of Oklahoma City.
76 percent white, 60 percent Republican.
And according to a 2021 article on Yahoo News that reads like it was written
by an intoxicated chat bot, it is ranked one of the most conservative cities
in the country.
Yeah, that all scans for Enid.
It scans.
Now that scans for a lot of cities in Oklahoma, mind you.
Right, they could have named any of them.
Yeah.
But it has a population of about 50,000,
which is actually the same size as Charlottesville,
my hometown, and a city that Judson-Blevins
happened to visit in the summer of 2017.
In 2018, the former US Marine moved back to his hometown
to work at his father's roofing business.
In 2019, he was publicly identified as a regional leader
in a white supremacist organization.
And in 2022, he announced he was running for office.
I mean, that's a very Oklahoma politician root.
It's also like, I'm not a white, like from, from roofing to white supremacy,
not a wildly uncommon route for people to take in Oklahoma.
Oh, don't worry.
He's still doing both.
Okay.
I mean, you never want to give up on your passion for roofing.
That would have made me sad.
Although some of his supporters have pointed out that he hires lots of
non-white people to do manual labor.
So how could he be racist?
Yeah.
I mean, you don't want to get up on those roofs yourself.
That's dangerous.
It's hard, Joe.
It's hot out.
Yeah.
This is all pretty Oklahoma so far.
On February 14th, 2023, Judd Blevins narrowly won a seat on the
Eden City Council, defeating the incumbent by just 36 votes.
His past ties to the now
defunct white supremacist group, Identity Europa, were no secret. Of course, by 2023,
Identity Europa didn't exist anymore. So I don't blame you if you don't have a clear
memory of exactly what kind of Nazi group they were. And I want to make it very clear.
I don't want time, distance, and white polo shirts to soften this. Identity Europa was
a neo-Nazi organization.
Oh yeah. They were also just like the most infiltrated group of the Trump era.
Like of all the Nazi orgs in the Trump era, I feel like they were the one where every week someone else got inside their comms.
Well, I guess, um, Blevins may be part to blame for that as the regional coordinator.
Oh good. So he was doing a great job.
But Identity Europa was modeled after the far-right French Identitarian movement and
sought the creation of a white ethnostate.
The You Will Not Replace Us chants you remember from Unite the Right were actually popularized
by Identity Europa at their rallies earlier that year.
And according to testimony from a former girlfriend, one-time Identity Europa leader, Elliot Klein, considered himself, quote, an unironic exterminationist.
He had violent fantasies about killing Jewish people himself.
So it's not just guys hanging out, right?
No.
Identity Europa was founded in 2016 by Nathan D'Amico,
a former Marine who went to prison
after drunkenly pulling a gun on a cab driver
for quote, looking Iraqi.
Well, I guess at least he's honest.
But while he was doing his time, he read David Duke's autobiography.
Oh, and he had an awakening, right?
He read my awakening and he had an awakening in prison.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You know, you go to prison for a hate crime,
you read a little David Duke, you get some ideas.
Man, it's not a good book.
Like that's my thing about having David Duke's
autobiography be like your life changing event
is it's not even a good book, right?
Which I guess neither was Mein Kampf,
but I feel like everyone's lying about that one.
So according to some, this is so off the beaten path here, this is, I have to say it, according
to some payments that came out in a divorce proceeding, David Duke made payments to Kevin
Strom for ghostwriting it.
Kevin Strom is the pedophile who actually said that thing that people think Voltaire said
about the Jews. Oh, cool. Yeah, great. So just something to think about when you're reading
David Duke's autobiography in prison, I guess. I mean, I guess I had wondered what happens to
pedophiles like when they're back out in the world, how do you know he has a better file wife now? No, that was before that was yeah. No, he's got a kid now. So oh what no, he shouldn't do that
How is that? Okay, great
Not allowed to live near a school, but I guess they can't stop you from procreating
We should evaluate some of that. I don't know
Back to our friend Nate, right? So
Nathan Amigo got it gets out of prison, makes his own hate group.
You may also remember him as the guy who bravely beat the shit out of a 95 pound woman at the
rally in Berkeley in April of 2017.
Oh yeah.
And they memed the hell out of that.
They squeezed it for all it was worth.
They used that image of him beating that woman in the street for promotion and recruitment.
D'Amico himself touted a spike in membership applications,
which he attributed to the popularity of the video.
Identity Europa was heavily involved in the Summer of Hate,
that rash of violent white supremacist rallies across the country in 2017.
They were instrumental in planning his Unite the Right rally.
But when the group's Discord server was leaked in March of 2019 and published in full by Unicorn Riot,
their leader at the time, Patrick Casey, quickly announced a rebrand, Identity Europa is no
more, they were the American Identity Movement now, much to the displeasure of the American
Indian Movement, whose acronym they stole.
But the rebrand was not successful, and the group died out completely in 2020.
And Casey tried to pretend the rebrand wasn't just an attempt to escape the fallout of the
leak, but it really was the leak that killed Identity Europa.
At least seven active-duty military members were identified in the leak, a school resource
officer at a high school in Virginia was suspended, a Minnesota national guardsman was recalled
from basic training, so Judd Blevins was just one of dozens of members of the group to be
identified in those chat logs.
The work of anti-fascist researchers
who identified Blevins in the leaked chats was corroborated and published in an article on
Right Wing Watch by Jared Holt within weeks. And it's about as solid as an idea as you could hope
for from a chat log, or depending on your position, the kind of idea you really don't want.
A user called Conway was Identity Europa's regional coordinator for Oklahoma. He recruited and vetted new members, organized outings for banner drops and social events,
and frequently posted pictures of the white supremacist propaganda he'd been putting
up, encouraging others to do the same and offering tips on how to create more effective
visuals for the group's online accounts.
In over 1,100 posts over a nearly two-year period, he left a lot of clues.
He posted a link to an article in his hometown paper, the Enid News and Eagle.
He posted a photo of a relative's baby, details about his parents' lineage, his plans to
move home to work for his father's business.
And in the lead-up to the Unite the Right rally, he excitedly shared in the Discord
that he would be carrying the original flag of the state of Oklahoma, a red rectangle with the number 46 inside of a white star. And photos from the rally show just
one man carrying that distinctive flag that was designed by a member of the Daughters of the
Confederacy, Judd Blevins. As he grew into his role as regional coordinator for Identity Europa,
he coordinated member meetups, getting several guys from Oklahoma to drive down to Texas for a get together.
Conway posted about the meetup and photos posted by other attendees
show Blevins standing shoulder to shoulder with other members,
holding a large Identity Europa banner.
Conway even posted about his appearance on a 2018 episode of Identity Europa's
podcast, where he emphasized the importance of staying in the
You Will Not Re replace us mindset. So by the time he announced his run for office in 2022,
it had been over three years since he'd been out at his Conway, the hate group member who
attended the Unite the Right rally. And you could see why he would think it would work,
right? Because that you will not replace us thing. It's become like the mainstream Republican politics, right?
Like this ideology has at least one in the Republican party
but it's also one divorced from these guys
because even they are,
like they're too toxic for even the modern Republicans.
Like it's remarkable,
but I also get why he thought this would work.
And I think, I mean, I don't know what his connection remained to other members of IE after it dissolved,
but towards the end of it as it was dying, right?
So under Elliot Klein, you know, Klein wanted to make a militia for Richard Spencer.
He wanted to, you know, build IE into a fighting force.
But under Patrick Casey, they sort of moved back towards, we should be trying
to influence inside of politics.
We should be going to colleges and getting, you know, conservative students
to become more based, right?
So this, this is a rational course of conduct, I think, for where he was in 2019
when Identity Europa died.
But in any case, by 2022, anybody in Enid,
you could read his posts praising Hitler
and celebrating Identity Europa for striking fear
into the heart of the Jew, his words.
You know, you could see pictures of him at Unite the Right,
both on the morning of the 12th in the park
and the evening of the 11th with a torch.
You could see pictures of him going to Texas for IE meetups.
You could see the dozens and dozens of photos he posted in the Discord
of Nazi posters and stickers he had put up on telephone poles and college bulletin boards
across Oklahoma, and the posts where he reveled in the media coverage of the recruitment materials
he left inside library books.
His hometown newspaper, the Enid News and Eagle, ran an article about the allegations,
which he never denied a month before the election.
And without ever having to give a straight answer on the issue, he won.
And that could have been the end of the story, right?
We've seen this trend in the last few years of these radical right-wing elements trying
to melt into the mainstream Republican Party.
They've got these horrible little griropers working in congressional staff positions,
and, you know, Nazi's going to CPAC and not getting ejected.
They're getting out of the streets and into the meeting rooms.
Yeah.
An account tied to Blevins that he recently,
for the first time, denied this was him.
It's him. This has been widely reported.
It was a Twitter account called at abolished journalism,
posted in 2019, quoteote, I agree with the argument GOP cannot be changed from the bottom up. However, I
do not believe in discouraging our guys from getting elected into smaller offices such
as city council, county commissioner, or even state legislators. Basically, positions where one can fly under the radar,
yet still be effective.
And that's what this is, right?
This isn't a guy who got out of white nationalists organizing
and in an unrelated fashion became a local politician.
No, he said years before he did this,
that this was a good idea that he had.
He never said, I renounce my previous actions and beliefs.
I regret bringing an active recruiter for a hate group.
He just changed the way he was doing it.
And he said countless opportunities to be clear
about what he believes today and whether that's different
from the beliefs he espoused between 2017 and 2019.
And he won't.
He won't say, I no longer identify with the posts I made
when I was enthusiastically posting the 14 words. And that's probably because he just found a better way to do it. But there were
people in Enid, Oklahoma, who saw right through that.
Yeah, this is where the story takes a turn that like, I don't know, it made me hopeful
because the first time I ever met a Klansman was, you know, in Oklahoma. It was the dad of a friend of mine. Like he,
like this kid bragged about it and I didn't know what a Klansman was. I had to go to my parents and
be like, Hey, so, you know, so and so said this about his dad. What does that mean? And my mom
was just like, well, you're not allowed to go to his house anymore. That's what that means.
to his house anymore. That's what that means. Jesus Christ. If this guy had like, if shit had gone well for him, I guess that would have been my assumption. But that was my assumption
based on me not giving a fair shake to Enid, Oklahoma. Right. I think that's, you know,
what's so remarkable about this story is people didn't think Oklahoma could do it.
what's so remarkable about this story is people didn't think Oklahoma could do it.
But you know who can accomplish everything they set out to do?
That's right, these sponsors, all of whom are available in Enid, Oklahoma. And we're back.
Okay.
Alrighty, so I'm happy to hear the next part of this.
Levens took office in May of 2023.
Local election law requires a six month wait between being sworn in and when a recall attempt
can be initiated.
But the residents who opposed Lelevins didn't wait quietly.
A group called the Enid Social Justice Committee
protested his swearing in, with some protesters holding
posters bearing a photo of Blevins holding a torch
at the August 11, 2017 Nazi march
at the University of Virginia.
And now this, I didn't even think about it
until I was writing this, that what an incredible
coincidence of timing, right?
So May, 2023, he's being sworn into office.
It was just, I think, maybe two weeks before he was sworn in that the first indictment
was unsealed against the guys who are now facing felony charges for participating in
that torch march, right?
So he was, we did an episode on this a little bit ago, but if you're not familiar, the guys
who marched in that torch march at UVA in 2017, some of them are now being charged with
a felony under Virginia law for burning an object with intent to intimidate.
It's obviously a law aimed at the Klan, sort of a crossfire type law, but they had these
burning objects and they were menacing people. It was racially motivated. So they're being
charged with this felony for burning an object.
Fair. It does feel like that's a pretty good fit.
But so right as he's being sworn in, you know, these people are protesting his swearing in
with this photo of him with the torch. And a couple of guys just showed up in jail here
in Charlottesville on that charge.
So it's just a remarkable cognitive dissonance, right? To see these people, some of his supporters
in Enid downplaying the seriousness or even outright denying that Blevins attended this
rally. But the guys he was standing next to that day are pleading guilty to felonies.
He's up there voting on resolutions and passing ordinances about stormwater management
or whatever.
I think one of his accomplishments in office
was getting a Texas roadhouse in Enid.
First off, you shouldn't be proud
of having a Texas roadhouse anywhere.
As my job used to...
It might've been a Sizzler, I can't remember.
Something like that.
I would be much more excited for a Sizzler
than a Texas fucking roadhouse.
I'll say that much.
But you know, he's up there getting a, you know, affordable chain steak restaurant in Enid.
But there's a non-zero chance that he could be arrested at any time
and extradited on a felony charge.
I mean, look, if if there's one thing that's appropriate for the Sizzler,
it's knowing that the guy who put that Sizzler there could be arrested on a felony charge at any moment.
We don't know what the strategy is.
The prosecutor's office, obviously, they're not going to charge everybody who is there,
but it's on the table, right?
He's on video at that march with the torch in his hand.
He fits the criteria for the 10 other guys that have already gone to jail for this.
But in November of 2023, those six months had passed.
Recalls on the table now.
And before the group made the final push to actually file for the recall,
they made an offer of reconciliation.
All Blevins has to do is acknowledge the truth, denounce his past actions,
just own up to it, start making amends, just say,
yes, I did that. No, I don't do it anymore. And he can't do it throughout this entire ordeal.
He's never owned up to it. There are pictures and video and his own words across multiple
online accounts. There's no plausible deniability here. There's no saying,
well, maybe that's not him. It's him. So just admit it and say you're not that guy anymore.
But he has consistently refused to even acknowledge it.
Right, on several occasions, you know, when really pressed,
he dismisses that 2019 article by Jared Holt
as quote, a hit piece posted four years ago
by a George Soros funded leftist outlet,
calling it smears and slander.
Nothing smears somebody like their own words and actions.
I'm being defamed by this photograph of me.
I'm being judged simply for the things I chose to do.
I thought this was America. But he won't actually deny specific facts. He won't say,
that isn't me in the photo, or I did't me in the photo or I did not participate in
that, or I did not post those nice things about Hitler. He just attacks the people saying
it.
While Blevins has never denied the truth of the allegations, some of his supporters do.
At one of those council meetings in November of last year, a woman speaking in support
of Blevins said the allegations weren't credible as they came from organizations like the SPLC that quote, only exist to smear conservative
Christians.
There we go.
First of all, the SPLC didn't publish it. It was right wing watch, Huffington Post,
but whatever Susan. And it was at that same meeting that the council declined to even
vote on a resolution to censure Blevins. The council was at that same meeting that the council declined to even vote on
a resolution to censure Blevins. The council was putting forth a resolution to say, we
don't agree with what that guy did. You know, it wasn't like punishing him. It didn't actually
strip him of any powers. It didn't do anything except say, the rest of us, we don't like
that. And they couldn't, they wouldn't even vote on it. It got tabled. Um, and at that meeting, uh, commissioner Derwin Norwood, the only black member of Enid city council
offered Blevins his forgiveness and gave him a big hug and told him he loved him. Never
apologize, right? You can't forgive someone who hasn't apologized. He had never and still
has never apologized. And he was pretty clear on where he stands on apology saying, I am not going to apologize
for the lies that others tell.
Yeah, it was a great meeting.
I watched it from home.
I had, you know, I love a meeting.
Oh yeah, no, that's, I mean, I don't understand it, but I respect it.
So with their peace offering roundly rejected
by an unapologetic Blevins, they moved forward with the recall.
The Enid Social Justice Committee gathered enough signatures
to put it to a vote.
And in January, Cheryl Patterson threw her hat
into the ring to replace Blevins.
And to be clear, this is still Enid, Oklahoma,
where 60% of voters are registered Republicans.
This wasn't some liberal coup.
Patterson is also a lifelong Republican.
A candidate formed the week before the election.
Patterson was quick to say, like right off the bat
the second she opened her mouth, she said,
contrary to the rumor, I was not recruited by the Enid Social
Justice Committee.
And she said, you know, she'd been thinking about running
for a while.
She loves Enid. But she was pushed to action by her opponents
inability to clearly denounce his past involvement with the white supremacist
group. And it is remarkable, right, to see conservative Republicans
in the South saying like
that that Nazi stuff is too much for me.
Yeah, I mean, and that's, that's actually an important part of turning this shit back
is getting these people who are otherwise conservative to draw a line and actually hold
to it because it at least arrests that rightward momentum to an extent.
And we're just not going to get out of this unless we have some of that.
But I'm not I'm not living in a you know living in a fantasy land where the city of Enid, Oklahoma is represented by a
council of six socialists.
That's not on the table.
I accept that.
But at least their Republicans can say, ah, the 14 words is not my vibe.
Yeah.
Literally participating in a white supremacist terrorist action is a line for us.
And I'm glad there's a line.
So you know, she said she was inspired to run for office because he, not because of
what he did, but because he couldn't even denounce it, right?
That, you know, people can grow and change.
I pray that his heart moves, but he's unable to even denounce it.
And he really does seem incapable.
The very first question at that forum
the week before the election was about this, obviously.
A lot of the questions were.
And he gave another non-denial, right?
He said, this election is about the next three years
of this city, not about organizations
that disbanded five years ago.
But he went on to say that he would, quote,
gladly plead guilty to speaking out against
what is being done to this country and the anti-white hatred in the media.
So he tries to talk around the issue saying, you know, he was just advocating for the same
policies that got Donald Trump elected.
But it's not like he was on the local Republican committee, right?
He wasn't working on a GOP campaign.
He was an organizer for a group that supported those policies of the Trump administration
explicitly because they believe those policies were a stepping stone towards the full Nazification
of American politics.
The relationship between those two things?
Troubling, concerning, but you can't pretend there's no difference between voting Republican and
holding a torch at the Nazi parade.
And that's what he's trying to do here.
He's trying to blur that line.
So, you know, I'm just being punished for being a proud conservative.
And it's like, which part?
Right?
People who want free speech.
And I say, which word do you want to say?
And at no point during this recall campaign, from when they announced it in November to
the election two weeks ago now, at no point during this recall campaign did he publicly
denounce any of the white supremacists who supported him.
Outlets like V-Dare, a white nationalist publication run by an English-born anti-immigration race
scientist who lives in a castle in West Virginia, wrote fawning editorials which were promoted by prominent white nationalists, including Identity
Europa founder Nathan D'Amigo.
Fascist Telegram channels provided guidance to subscribers about Oklahoma's campaign
finance laws, which would allow them to donate to Blevins' campaign anonymously as long
as they kept it under $50.
According to reporting by Chris Mathias and Huffington Post, a man in Texas who runs a
business with a known patriot front member donated nearly $2,000 to the campaign, which
made up the bulk of the donated cash.
And you might give him the benefit of the doubt and say, well, maybe he didn't know
he was being endorsed by some of the largest elements in organized white supremacy in America.
Sure. But he did.
He did know.
As a member of the city council, he definitely saw the letters that were addressed to the
city council in support of Blevins from the American Freedom Party, an explicitly white
supremacist political party that occasionally runs a Nazi for president.
But he said nothing.
And when a constituent, Father James Neal, asked him directly why his campaign was funded
by members of Patriot Front, he told the priest to, quote, shut up.
Again, he chose the company of neo-Nazis, Holocaust deniers, white supremacists, white
nationalists, and ethnostate enthusiasts.
How can you expect people to believe you're not that guy anymore when you have their public
praise, their endorsement, and their money in your pocket. But you know who does not have $2,000 in cash from Patriot Front
in their pockets? No, no, they keep that shit in the bag. I mean, they don't have it. Here's
And we're back. So on April 2nd, that's two weeks ago now as we're recording, the people of Enid returned
to the polls and Judd Blevins was voted out of office as Ward 1 City Commissioner by a
vote of 829 to 561.
And I don't know if you're a math guy, I'm not a math guy.
Yeah.
I'm going to calculate her out for this bad boy.
But this turnout was significantly larger than the vote that put him into office.
A 72% increase in total votes.
That's a lot.
Yeah.
That's a lot more people who showed up to an off-cycle special election.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's specifically weird.
And unlike the slim margin of just 36 votes that won him the 2023 election, he lost the
recall by nearly 20 points.
That's a spanking.
It's hard to chalk a loss like that up to a lunatic fringe, right?
That's the electorate speaking.
But Matthew Gebert, a former State Department employee who lost his job for failing to disclose his active involvement in white supremacist organizing, noted in his telegram channel that
while the loss is disappointing, an open white nationalist winning 40% of the vote is, quote,
nothing to despair over. And you never got a hand at the guy who hosts a podcast about the joys
of Nazi fatherhood or whatever.
Yeah.
But the numbers are what they are.
You know, he did 40% of the vote.
And this was after months of very public debate in the national spotlight
that made it impossible not to know what the allegations were.
And it's not like these were just die-hard
conservatives who would walk into the voting booth and put their checkmark next to wherever
the letter R was, right? In this election, the other name on the ticket was a Republican
too. Like these were people who walked in there and knowingly and intentionally cast
their vote for a guy who used to vet new members for a Nazi club. This isn't a fairy tale. It's reality, right? This wasn't an offensive win by progress or the left or what have you.
This was an effective defense.
And I hope conservatives can see a little less in here, right? Like the story is too often one of ever ratcheting extremism.
You can only win if you go further, if you go wilder, if you're appealing to the people who are on the absolute extreme end of what's acceptable to say in the party.
But this was a case where a fellow conservative said, hey, I want to take some books out of
the library too.
I'm not a liberal.
But we just can't be out here saying the 14 words.
And I think some of the buzz around this story comes from people in bigger cities or bluer
states.
I mean, honestly, I'm guilty of this as well, who are shocked that, you know, purple-haired
liberals and progressive clergy even exist in a place like Enid, Oklahoma.
But this red state, blue state dichotomy is a myth.
Most places are purple.
Most places are 60-40, even in places that reliably 100% of the time
vote Republican, there's still a large minority of people who are not represented by that.
So even in a place like Enid, which is Republican at the polls, you have a pretty big chunk
of the population isn't represented on that two-colored map.
Yeah.
That doesn't mean they don't care.
And when I watched those Enid City Council meetings,
I saw Charlottesville, right?
I've gone to every City Council meeting in Charlottesville
for the last seven years.
Like I know what it looks like for people in a town
that size to show up and say, what the fuck?
What the fuck are you doing to us?
Right?
You know, it looked like one of our meetings.
You know, I saw regular people, moms and students and grandmas and teachers
and ladies who bring muffins to the church bake sale.
People who know that their town can do better than to be represented by a guy
who won't apologize for attending the largest Nazi rally on US soil in our
lifetimes.
Yeah. And I feel a lot for the folks who are kind of not represented by either
of the two big lines on the political map.
And maybe most of the time feel like, I don't know what the fuck I can actually do or should
do, but I know this Nazi shouldn't be in office.
So these were just regular people.
These weren't party apparatchiks or, you know, this wasn't the Democrat party doing this, this wasn't
the Republican party doing this. These were just people who didn't think that a Nazi should
be their city commissioner. And that's, I think, another myth at play here, right, is
that that activist is some sort of separate class of person, that there is some portion
of the population whose only goal in life is this nebulous, nefarious thing called activism.
That, you know, it's sort of this boogeyman of the professional troublemaker.
And throughout this process,
Blevins and his supporters have smeared the group
organizing the recall, the United Social Justice Committee,
as some kind of fringe radical group.
They're Antifa, they're freaks, they're not like us.
Yeah.
They're coming for our children.
His recall campaign website called the petitioners
an unhinged group of left-wing
fringe activists. And the campaign website didn't say what he could do for you. It attacked
the petitioners and said, this is what they will do to you. And I've seen this in my own
city council meetings, right? This sort of bizarre tendency of those in power to write
off the people they don't want to hear from as activists. Well, those aren't people we need to listen to. Those are activists. That's a different
kind of person. Anyone who's asking for something they don't want to do, something that's uncomfortable,
something that requires them to look inward or look at the structures they're upholding.
They undergo this instant metamorphosis from constituent to activist. This is no longer
a voter or a constituent.
This is a crazy person.
This person isn't your neighbor anymore.
They're an activist.
Yeah.
I think there are people who wear that mantle proudly and why shouldn't they?
It's a usually positive thing.
But the use of the word as some sort of delegitimizing cudgel is so consistent that I think it's
worth thinking about when it gets used against the recipient's will.
Yeah.
And there's no ending to this story, right?
This is never really over.
It is happening here.
It is happening there.
And I don't know what's next for Blevins.
Maybe he just melts quietly back into society and puts roofs on houses.
A week after the recall, he filed paperwork to change the name of his dad's contracting
business from invincible contracting to Great Plains Roofing.
The paperwork filed shows that the company is now registered.
The company is now registered at his address, a house in Enid that he bought last summer
with a VA loan.
But now that he's free of the self-imposed restraint of running for office,
maybe he leads into it and becomes this guy, right? Maybe he's just the guy that this happens to, and he goes on the cancel culture grievance circuit.
Maybe he goes full throttle and tries to get back into movement organizing.
I think his failure to come out and really celebrate the movement and really own it
and say, yes, I said that stuff and it's good.
I think that failure as they would perceive it
would hurt him a little bit
if he tries to reenter the movement,
but not so badly that he couldn't do it.
They're so desperate for new material
that they would probably embrace him
if he wanted to be the figurehead of the month.
Yeah.
Hopefully he just does the roofing thing though.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Hopefully he does the roofing thing and then the falling off the roof thing and then.
You know, he's not doing the work himself.
He doesn't even have a contracting license.
I checked.
I hope he hires someone who is like a very large person and they fall off and are okay
because they land
on him.
That's I think where I'm going here.
And to be clear, that's Robert speaking.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But that is also the official opinion of iHeartMedia.
I don't know that he's made any great pronouncements.
He hasn't showed up on any Nazi podcasts yet.
I will put $10 on a bet
that says he will. He'll be on somebody's podcast by the end of the month, I don't doubt it. But
hopefully he just does roofing. Yeah. Stick to roofing. As for Enid, they won a battle that
they shouldn't have had to fight. It should be kind of a no-brainer that we don't elect guys like
this.
That's becoming less certain every day.
Like the fact that there was any question about how the recall might go is concerning.
We shouldn't be in a position of wondering, will people vote for the
guy who won't deny he loves Hitler?
But I think we can applaud the tenacity of the folks in Enid who did what was
necessary in a place where it wasn't easy.
Yeah.
You know, and there's, there's lessons to be learned here.
Go to the meetings, get a seat in city council chambers,
go to the library board meeting,
go to the school board meeting.
You don't have to be an activist, whatever that means,
but be in the room because nobody's going to change
the world on their own.
And maybe changing the world isn't even
a meaningful objective.
I don't know what that means.
Yeah. But today, maybe there's something you can do with your neighbors to stop the rising tide
in your town. You can't change the weather, but you can put down some sandbags. And there are Jud
Blevins everywhere, hiding behind mealy-mouthed rhetoric of conservatism and quietly chipping
away at your local institutions.
Yeah, so
it's doable fighting the Judd's blevin of
I chose a different way to
pluralize his name
of your wherever you live your state your city
Like is doable and it's doable if, if you stick to this very simple platform of like, but
not a Nazi, right?
We can agree not a Nazi, you know?
And you think conservatives have any, if conservatives had any sense, they
could retake a lot of ground by saying like, you know, we, we love all the stuff
you love fellow conservatives, but we're not that guy, right?
Like I, if they had any, if they had any pride, they would stop pandering to the
lunatic fringe.
Yeah.
And it is just kind of looking at how congressional race is shaping up where
it seemed like it should have been pretty easy for them to retake the house.
But you know, now they're kind of like flailing a little bit in part because
they keep backing these maniacs who just aren't good. Yeah. I don't really believe that those
ideas are popular. They've just have fallen into this trap of thinking like this is the only way
to win. So I guess I have to do it, but she don't. The Senate, not the House. Anyway, whatever, we'll cut that.
Who cares about those guys?
Yeah.
But you don't have to do it, right?
You be the Cheryl Patterson you want to see in the world.
Yeah.
And just be a milk toast Republican and beat the Nazi.
Yeah.
At least, I don't know.
I'm mixed because like,
I do like it when the Republicans fail over much, but I also
feel like it's bad to take the bet of like, well, if we hope for more Nazis that push
people away from the Republicans, maybe it'll work for us in the long run.
Statistically, that kind of gamble is real dangerous.
That's not a crime I want to keep turning.
Not often successful. Yeah. That's Enid. That's not a crime I want to keep turning. Yeah.
But yeah, that's Enid. That's Enid, baby.
Good work, Enid.
Congratulations to the Enid Social Justice Committee.
Honestly, I'm.
Yeah.
Very impressed.
You get our coveted Oklahoma City of the Month.
Award, which is confusing because you are very near Oklahoma City, but they shouldn't
have named it that.
Oh, that's all I got.
That's all I got. Yeah, I was just trying to put a button. I'm trying to put a button
on that bad boy. But uh, yeah. That's Oklahoma, baby. Yeah. Good for you. Good for Oklahoma. If you love sports and true crime, then there's a new podcast from executive producer Dan
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Oh hi, I'm Rachel Zoe and I'm back for another season
of my podcast, Climbing in Heels.
You might know me from the Rachel Zoe project
or perhaps from my work as a celebrity stylist.
And guess what?
I'm still just as fully obsessed with all things fashion, beauty, and business.
My podcast Climbing in Heels is all about celebrating the stories of extraordinary women
and this season we're taking things up a notch.
I'll be talking to some incredible women across so many industries.
From models and beauty industry stars to doctors, entrepreneurs and TV personalities.
Climbing in heels is here to bring you a weekly dose of glamour,
inspiration and fun. Every week listeners will be able to ask me any questions.
I'm answering it all.
My life is absolutely crazy with so much going on and I'm so beyond excited to
bring you along for the ride. Whether we're talking red carpet looks,
current trends or products I'm obsessed with. I'm here to be your fashion fairy godmother. Listen to
Climbing in Heels every Friday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your
podcasts.
Welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm Garrison Davis. On this show, we try to apply political
and cultural analysis towards speculative
futurity. What can we learn about the future by looking at how our present relates to our past?
And now, as we approach a whole decade of a resurgent far-right gaining cultural prominence,
we're entering a moment in time where pop culture and media is starting to catch up to the current
political zeitgeist. Our media landscape is
inundated with depictions of unreality, political extremism, collapse, and rising civil tensions.
Some of these succeed more than others, but most are still deeply neoliberal in their depictions.
The Obama-produced Netflix movie from last year, Leave the World Behind, was a speculative look
at a collapse orchestrated to jumpstart a second American Civil War.
Alex Garland's voyeuristic Civil War movie just released, which sort of gestures at politics,
with offhand mentions of Portland Maoists and the Antifa Massacre, but as a movie, it
completely fails to understand the moment we currently occupy, and I believe is even
more out of touch than the Obama collapse movie.
But we're not talking about that today.
For my thoughts on that, you can look up my review on Letterboxd and refer to the reviews
I liked for a more robust critique of Garland's deeply troubling depiction of quote-unquote
neutral war journalism as uncritically virtuous.
Instead, this episode will be turning to a depiction of modern day extremism that
I'm not sure is better. It's still deeply neoliberal and honestly more overtly copaganda,
but one that I still find more interesting, and I believe does understand our political
moment much better than Alex Garland does, who comes off as less and less intelligent
in every single interview he does.
Last month, the television show Law & Order did an episode focusing on Robert Rundow's
far-right fitness groups, the white supremacist active clubs. To discuss, I am joined by longtime
far-right researcher Molly Conger. Hello, Molly.
Molly Conger Hey, thanks for having me on. And you probably
didn't know this about me. I am a secret enjoyer of police procedurals, so I've actually watched a lot of Law & Order.
I have never seen a single episode of Law & Order until this week.
So I was really inundated.
I don't know.
I watch a lot of kind of troubling media though, and media that tries to comment on like current
political extremism.
And often when I talk with my friends about my interest in viewing things like this episode,
I get confused or even adversarial reactions.
And I do truly understand their hesitations.
Pop culture media like this is often very sensational, turning very real pain, trauma,
and death caused by the far right into this form of
kind of mindless entertainment, and often reifying the role of like good government
and good cops to maintain order against racist insurgents, even though more and more of their
ilk begin to occupy public office and become cops themselves.
But politics and culture are hand in hand.
Lots of what became the alt-right grew out of Gamergate, and I think there is a real use in understanding how the political activities of fascists and anti-fascists are depicted in mass media.
I believe there is some value in knowing what NBC and the writers of Law & Order think an active club is, as like a sort of cultural litmus test, and also to see
how well people like us are doing in trying to educate about these types of
groups. But I totally understand that not everyone wants to suffer through a
40-minute Law & Order episode about cops beating the Nazis, so instead I will
watch it for you and talk about exactly how they depicted this with Molly here today.
So, I think the most efficient way for me to do this is to kind of give a recap of the
episode, and as I start going through it, we will discuss certain points.
I can't just summarize all of it in like a short paragraph.
I mean, I could. I just think that would miss out on a lot of stuff.
So instead, we're going to go through the episode and comment as things happen. And this episode ends up being about a lot more than just an active club.
It's actually pulling from a few other influences that we will talk about probably towards the end.
Anyway.
That felt sloppy to me. I feel like they tried to tackle several specific,
like I don't know how familiar you are with the Law and Order franchise,
but they call these episodes the ripped from the headlines episodes, right? several specific, like, I don't know how familiar you are with the Law and Order franchise,
but they call these episodes the ripped from the headlines episodes, right?
Where they take a real life high profile case and write an episode about it.
But they tried to combine several elements that I felt didn't blend well and it gave
them more material to work with than they were able to address.
And so it just felt, I just, it felt unresolved to me.
I mean, yeah, I assume lots of these police procedurals are kind of undercooked as like
pieces of art.
I mean, the Dick Wolf extended universe is turning out so much content that like, I don't
know how they're still doing it.
I mean, Olivia Benson has been on television since I was a child.
So let's get into the actual episode.
The cold open begins.
It's night in New York City.
A nervous looking white woman enters a subway station and she's startled by a sleeping
homeless man.
As the subway approaches, eerie music starts playing.
The anxious woman walks onto the subway, and a black man catcalls her, as a group of other
men kind of join
in. The woman quickly switches to a more empty subway car, where she then bumps into another
black man whose eyes look kind of vacant and is making weird grunting noises, and then
the man appears to lunge towards the woman.
We cut two crime scene tape stretched across the subway station. Two police detectives
enter the subway car, where a dead body lies on the ground. But it's not the scared white woman, it's the
oddly grunting black man who appears to have been strangled to death with no
apparent witnesses. He's identified as 24 year old Ellis Joiner, a stand-up
comedian who a detective says quote, came from down south, loved to talk about how
much he loved New York. The other
detective remarks, great place to live, not such a great place to die.
Cut to title screen with music that I assume has not been updated in like 30 years because
the actual theme song sounds so, so 90s.
They can't change it now. There are thousands of episodes of this show, Garrison.
It's history. So already with the cold open, we have like, ooh, the dangerous subway, scary homeless
people, this poor white woman, a lot of stuff's being thrown at us. Right, and obviously playing
on the idea that like, oh, the white woman is going to be under that sheet, like that's going
to be her body totally totally
so as we return to the episode a forensic pathologist says the man died after being put in a quote-unquote sleeper hold which cut off oxygen to his brain his medical records reveal he
also had severe asthma and his hyperinflated lungs indicate he was currently suffering an asthma
attack when he was killed by the lethal chokehold in the 50-minute window for a time of death, the train passed
through six subway stations, four of which all had broken cameras.
Which is supposed to remind the viewer that we really need to fund the subway cops.
Correct. A lot of this episode is about how subway surveillance is under-equipped to deal
with crime, and we could probably fix a lot of problems if there was more security cameras in the subway.
Or just a hundred cops.
What if they put a hundred cops on there?
Sure, or more cops.
And like, to my surprise, the subway in New York City
historically has not had security cameras
inside the actual train cars,
though they are expected to by 2026.
But like the light rail in Portland,
the kind of like, not subway, but like the
public transit train in Atlanta, they all have cameras inside the actual train cars.
I was surprised that the subway in New York did not. I just never knew that. Anyway, back
to Law and Order. Ellis Joyner's credit card identified the station that he got on at,
which also had broken cameras, but police pulled street cam footage from a few blocks away, which shows
Joyner getting into a fight with another comedian where Joyner got punched.
The other man is recognized as Malcolm Page, a standup who quote, used to open for Chappelle
back in the day, unquote.
So already setting up something fantastic.
The detective's interview page and show him social media footage of Joyner's set from
last night, making fun of Paige for being old and irrelevant.
Paige says that Joyner verbally attacked him, because Joyner quote, got his panties
in a twist, unquote, over some of Paige's jokes.
Quote, hit too close to home for fancy boy, unquote. And when Page says fancy boy,
he does this little shaky hand thing, which the detective asks if that's supposed to imply
that Joyner is gay, which the older comedian says yes.
I mean, I've seen this sort of like limp wrist hand movement.
But this isn't a limp wrist.
But that wasn't what he did. That wasn't what he did.
It was just like a weird like like, shaking, like, hand.
Like, fancy boy.
It was the way you sort of shake your hand side to side when you mean, like, kind of
or maybe.
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
It was the wrong hand movement.
Like, get your homophobic gestures right.
It was really weird.
I found this whole interaction kind of bizarre.
And unnecessary.
Like, you write in this kind of red herring when you're trying to fill time, but they
had plenty of script. They didn't need this.
This episode's so focused on different forms of racism so much, adding in this weird gay
subplot, it doesn't end up going anywhere, and it's just kind of bizarre. So anyway,
this—basically, this older comedian was telling homophobic jokes, Joyner then made
fun of him on stage, and this older comedian, Paige, assaulted
him outside. Paige then left in an Uber, and Joyner ran off with his boyfriend, who, according
to Paige, weren't getting along either. So there's some kind of like…
Like a couple conflict.
A new suspect arises.
Exactly, exactly. So police look through Joyner's emails and texts in the cloud, quote unquote, and can't find
any record of a boyfriend making detectives surmise that he must have been in the closet,
which is a baffling thing to surmise.
Cops then contact, quote, the Traveller app.
That's Traveller spelled T-R-A-V-L-R.
You have to cut out a vowel or it's not an app.
So Legally Not Grindr gives NYPD complete access to Joyner's account.
And it's, I'm sorry, like, are gay male sex apps usually like pink and purple?
The color scheme is pink and purple.
Yeah, not my experience.
But yeah, I think it's also referenced like travelers, like
fellow travelers, right?
Right, but it was obviously supposed to be Grindr.
It's just Grindr. It doesn't matter. But legally not Grindr gives NYPD full access to Joyner's
account, which shows he's dating a guy named Michael Zane. And this whole thing is so wild
because if you're dating someone, you should not be primarily communicating through Grindr.
And he said later they've been dating for six months
and they've never texted.
They're just using Grindr to chat?
Whenever you go on Grindr,
the goal is to get off of Grindr as soon as possible.
Why would privately texting each other instead
out you as gay any more than having an identifiable
Grindr profile?
I feel like having Grindr up on your phone and it has a very distinctive like text tone
like that's way more likely to ouch you dog just text regular.
Exactly.
It makes no sense.
Anyway, the traveler messages between Joyner and Michael Zane indicate a sort of ongoing
fight or argument.
Now Zane has a prior conviction for aggravated
assault last year.
They didn't actually... So I went back and I went back and double checked this because
I have some beef.
He doesn't have a conviction.
They said he was arrested for assault last year.
He was just charged. He wasn't convicted. My mistake. Yes. But also the episode does
not make that very clear.
No, because I have a reason I went back and checked, because it makes no sense.
So yeah, his boyfriend was charged last year for aggravated assault, so the detectives
pay him a visit, because they think he's like a suspect, right?
Zane says that he didn't kill Joyner, he loved him, and that their fight on the night of
the murder was about Joyner's own self-hatred, and Zane believing that things would be better
if they could just live openly as a couple, but Joyner was concerned that it would threaten his comedy career.
Zane maintained nothing ever got physical between each other, and explained that his
assault charge was from trying to break up a bar fight, but when the cops arrived, they
targeted Zane because he was black, to which the two NYPD detectives nod solemnly.
They're like, yeah, that does sound like something we would do.
Yeah, other cops are racist, but not us.
They're like, okay.
Zane claims that Joyner wanted time alone, so he got off the train a few stops before
and went home.
But mentions that there was a white guy with short brown hair, bright yellow sneakers,
and a hoodie with some kind of symbol on the back, who was looking
weirdly at him and Joyner. Security camera footage shows someone matching that description
exiting the train car one stop before Joyner's body was found, and one of the detectives
recognizes the symbol. We will learn more about this mysterious hoodie, sneaker, and symbol
mysterious hoodie, sneaker, and symbol after the sad break. So, at first I just want to describe what this symbol is. It's this octagon with spiky corners, and like two Ks facing like, one facing backwards,
yeah, one facing forwards, one facing backwards, but smushed together, and the shared middle
pillar is like an arrow pointing upwards.
It looked like nothing to me.
They tried to design something that looked vaguely racist, but it's just not.
It just looks dumb.
It looks like, I don't know, like a tech company logo or something.
Yeah.
It doesn't even evoke anything for me.
No, it's not good.
They're trying to make it scary with lots of different angles, but it's not.
It's not scary.
Anyway, the detectives arrive at an MMA gym in Chelsea called the Kovac Academy.
It opened about a year ago
and they've been peppering the neighborhood with flyers.
Well, that sounds familiar.
Extremely accurate. The cops are greeted by a jacked staff member with a shaved head.
And they asked to speak with the owner and this skinhead employee says that they just
missed him. But there's a picture on the wall of the owner holding a trophy and he's
wearing the exact outfit in the subway security footage. The detectives are told that he was getting
a cab to the airport. Now, I thought this was going to be like a classic Rondo move,
right? Do some crimes, flee the country. But allegedly, he was actually flying to Toronto,
which actually will kind of get explained later on. Cops run outside to see if they
can spot him before he leaves, and they see a man in yellow
sneakers and a logo emblazoned hoodie walking towards a cab.
They sprint, tap him on the shoulder.
The MMA guy throws detectives against the car, starts fighting, not realizing they're
NYPD because he has like earbuds on.
Cops pull their guns, then he surrenders.
The owner of the gym is named Dominal?
Dominal?
It's a weird name.
I think Dom- Dominoll? I think it's an Irish name?
Dominoll... yeah. Dominoll Kovak. He has four previous convictions for assault, all against black victims, with two charged as hate crimes.
A detective notes that Kovak has a tattoo on his right arm of laced up combat boots with the number 88, which the detective calls
a white nationalist symbol.
Okay. Okay. I looked. I looked hard. I looked hard through a lot of photographs of Nazi
tattoos and the boot tattoo is not common and you only see it in skinhead culture.
And this guy's not a skinhead. The actual owner of the gym does not appear to be a skinhead.
He has like a big beard. He has like long brown, like longish brown, not long, but like medium shaggy brown hair.
But yeah, he has this combat boot 88 tattoo.
Like that's, there are a lot of Nazi tattoos and that's not the one I would have picked for this character. No, it's obviously like some long order writer googled like a Nazi tattoo and just picked
that like.
But that's the thing is if that's what they had done, I don't think they would have picked
that because like I said, I was looking through all of these sort of like lists of different
kinds of tattoos.
Yeah, yeah, by different nonprofits.
There is one one picture in all of these databases of a tattoo that's even similar to this, where
it's a pair of boots with the number 8 on each boot. I found one.
Yeah. I mean, I think that that is the one they used. I think they did want to bring
in some level of the idea of dog whistling, kind of, with Ad8, which will come up later
in the episode. But it's not well done. Anyway, Kovacs says that he's never seen
El Estrella before, and that the night of the murder, he was running a late-night intensive
training program called the Combat Academy, based on the Navy SEALs training course.
So many red flags are going off here. It ended around midnight. Afterwards, Kovacs said he walked
to his girlfriend's nearby apartment. He was never on the subway. But he explains that the gray hoodie and yellow
sneakers are part of the Combat Academy uniform that all members wear.
It's so important to wear matching outfits with your boys.
And in one of the more accurate moments of the episode, as soon as he's in even a little
trouble, he gives out all the names of the members in his group.
Did not even wait for a subpoena.
He's like, would you like their credit card numbers?
Did not hesitate.
He's like, no, absolutely.
I'll give a DNA swab.
I'll tell you the names of all the guys.
It wasn't me, I swear.
So the detectives locate the recently divorced Brandon Arnaud
outside of the...
I like that they added the
detail he was recently divorced, but this never actually comes-
It does not come up. It does not matter. The second they walk up to him on the street,
he was like, oh, my wife left me.
My wife left me last year.
My wife left me.
So-
I got really into grappling with the boys because my wife left me.
Yes, exactly. So they find him outside the elementary school he teaches at.
Which also never comes up again.
Nope. And after very, very little questioning, very tame questioning, he immediately admits
to killing Joyner, saying it was an accident and that Joyner was attacking a woman on the
subway and Brandon here was trying to protect her. At the police station, the police say that they can't find any footage of the woman
Brandon is talking about, but the defense attorney asks if the cameras were even
working at every station, to which the cops roll their eyes.
They're like, oh my god, this fucking guy asking if the cameras are broken.
The cops tell Brandon that they found Ellis Joyner's
missing cell phone in his gym locker. They searched his house, they didn't find
anything, but they got his they got a warrant for his gym locker and found the
cell phone. And they allege that he stole it after he realized that Joyner
recorded a video of the fight that ended up with Joyner being strangled to death.
And that's something we call consciousness of guilt.
The defense attorney ends the interview immediately as soon as they bring this up.
Like, why wouldn't you tell your lawyer that? Tell him that before you go in.
The search history on Brandon's laptop shows him trying to figure out how to unlock the phone to delete the video.
Now, this part's a little bit odd.
The cops debate, even though, quote, he admits to killing Joyner, I'm not sure we have enough evidence to charge, unquote,
which is not true. You have so much evidence. You have a confession.
You have so much evidence to charge. This is so bizarre.
Like, how often do you have a recording of a murder happening and then the guy admitting that he did it?
And he admits. Yeah, it's ridiculous. They charge on far, far less.
They have that conversation in the room where they're like, well, we can charge him or we
can let him go.
He's like, I mean, I understand a conversation about like, is this murder too?
Is this manslaughter?
Yeah.
But it's not a question of whether or not you charge him with something.
You're charging him with something.
Come on.
Yeah.
I mean, I think there's a reason actually why they had this conversation, which I will
get to at the end of the episode if you remind me. I think there's a reason why they discussed
this option of letting him go versus charging him. But at this point, we now switch to the
law half of the episode after we finished the order half. I don't know why these are
reversed because they do the police part first, then the court part, but whatever. It should
be called order and law, which I guess just doesn't sound good. So, a front page story in the legally not New York Post
is being passed around the DA's office. It reads, self-defense or racist killing, hero
or zero.
A recurring story in New York City.
The prosecutor who's played by Hugh Dancy, who I'm just going gonna call Hugh Dancy because I don't know his character's name, states
that half the city believes Brandon's self-defense story, and the other half just sees a white
man killing an unarmed black man.
ERIK That is what happened.
GOOSE A litmus test for what people want to believe,
says the main DA.
ERIK I think at this point, the writers in that
room are just tired.
GOOSE Oh yeah.
So-
Like, you can only do so much cocaine before it just, like, stops working.
The DA's office says that Brandon held Joyner in a chokehold for so long after he was unconscious
that even if it started as self-defense, it escalated to homicide.
They debate between manslaughter and murder, saying the former would be easier to win,
with a clear use of excessive force regardless of Brandon's story of trying to help the girl. But based on the cell phone
video, the DA decides to pursue a murder case due to a quote, depraved indifference to human
life, unquote, displayed by choking someone for full three minutes after falling unconscious.
I'm not sure if you mentioned, so when they found the phone, so the victim had been recording
the altercation and then it got knocked out of his hand and so it was recording audio
of the murder but not video.
I'm going to get to that once we get to the court scene.
Hugh Dancy is nervous about Brandon's literal white knight story and that he has no history
of violence.
But the DA insists on second degree murder saying quote, this is George Floyd all over again.
In what way?
And I'm sure as hell not going to end up
on the wrong side of it, unquote,
which does not make the DA sound like a good guy.
It just makes him sound like he doesn't want to have
like a bad press.
It comes off as very slimy.
I, you know, I said I watch A Lot of Law and Order,
and so I have seen probably a thousand hours of it,
but I haven't watched it in several years. So I don't know if maybe the tone has evolved a little bit,
but I got the impression that like, I don't know, maybe this is a guy who's consistently
worried about getting reelected, right? Because his job is an elected position. Yeah, yeah.
Just doesn't want the press. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So finally, we cut to court. The prosecution
plays the cell phone video. Seconds after Joyner starts recording on his phone, Brandon knocks
it out of his hand,
landing camera side down, continuing to record only audio of the struggle.
We hear Brandon putting Joyner into a chokehold, Joyner repeatedly saying he can't breathe
before appearing to pass out, followed by three minutes of silence, up until Brandon
releases his arm from around Joyner's neck.
He picks up the phone, sees it's recording, and turns it off.
As the video is playing,
the prosecutor and the jury are all shaking their heads so that we know that they don't
agree with it.
Hugh Dancy questions the medical examiner, who explains that after Joyner lost consciousness,
he could no longer pose any lethal threat to the defendant, who continued to choke Joyner
for three more minutes. The defense suggests that a surge of adrenaline distorted time
and awareness of his surroundings,
which in the panic of the moment made Brandon not realize Joyner lost consciousness for
that long.
Ellis Joyner's secret boyfriend testifies next.
He says the defendant was weirdly staring at Joyner and himself, and that Brandon moved
aggressively to step in Zane's way when he was trying to exit the train, and said
quote-unquote, watch yourself in a quote-unquote racist tone.
The defense brings up Zane's past aggravated assault charge to cast doubt on his testimony.
They can't do that.
You cannot do that.
There is a very limited set of circumstances in which you can bring up a witness's criminal
history, and this isn't it.
There is a lot of funky law decisions going on in this episode.
You can't do that!
Speaking of funky law decisions, well, actually, speaking of, speaking of, this ad break. We are back. Speaking of troubling law decisions, the defense calls a surprise female witness,
Rebecca Lasky, something you cannot do.
I looked it up. The average time to take a felony to trial in New York is a year. So from time of death to this going to trial, best case scenario,
probably like a fucking year.
They had a year to find this woman and she shows up on the last day of the trial.
It's definitely not the last day because if this was, you know,
this is obviously sort of mimicking the what is his name, Daniel Penny.
Yes, that's what I mean.
I too, too. It's obviously mimicking the Daniel Penny case.
Like this would have been on the New York Post
like every day leading up to the trial this woman would have been located.
The murder happened in January.
The trial starts I believe in early March and lasts about two weeks according to the
timeline of the TV show.
So that's not how it works.
Anyway, Rebecca Lasky the female the surprise female witness.
She testifies that she accidentally
bumped into Joyner, who, quote-unquote, appeared mentally disturbed and was making aggressive
grunting noises before lunging at her.
She then claims Joyner reached into his pocket and she was scared he had a knife or something,
so she screamed for help, and Brandon Arnault saved her.
She testified that Mr. Arnault grabbed Joyner away from her, and the two men started fighting. Lasky calls Brandon
a hero, and the jury looks on inquisitively.
After the female witness's quote-unquote compelling testimony, the prosecutor talks
with the DA about offering a manslaughter plea. But the DA is steadfast, since the video
clip of a man begging for his life and being choked to death for three minutes after falling unconscious has not actually changed.
Hugh Dancy remarks that new context for the video isn't really in their favor, to which
the DA just replies,
"...just because a white woman saw Joyner as a threat doesn't make it true."
Like, okay.
Base to New York DA!
I guess.
Back in court, the prosecution asks Rebecca Lasky if she was actually present, when, quote,
the defendant choked the life out of Joyner, unquote.
She clarifies that the train stopped as the men were still fighting.
Joyner was reaching into his pocket. She was scared that he maybe had a knife, again.
SONIA He was probably reaching for his inhaler.
GOOSE The inhaler or his cell phone to record this fight.
She curiously mentions, though, that after Brandon grabbed Joyner's arm and the fight
started, Brandon kept yelling at Joyner.
He was yelling to, quote, surrender, and that he was bleeding, and that he was dirty, or
fighting dirty.
I don't really remember the exact words, unquote.
This destroyed me.
I almost turned it off. Everyone in the courtroom gets a really funny look when she mentions the word dirty.
So we will get to this in a sec.
Under questioning, Lasky admits that she never saw any weapon of any kind, let alone a knife,
and Hugh Dancy suggests that after being attacked by a fellow comedian and having an argument
with his boyfriend, Joyner was probably suffering from an asthma attack triggered by high stress. He wasn't mentally ill,
he wasn't acting aggressive or grunting in a threatening manner, he was stuck in a subway car
having an asthma attack. And he addresses Lasky saying, quote, you saw a scary black man making a
noise. Objection! Sustained. So yeah. But they didn't, but that's the, so they objected there, but then when he says like,
and isn't it true that his behavior was consistent with an asthma attack, nobody
objected to that? She can't offer a medical opinion.
Rebecca Lasky, a ballet dancer, not a medical professional, cannot offer an opinion on what
his medical symptoms can be consistent with.
When she starts getting upset, saying like, oh my god, this is all my fault, like this
happened because of me, like, at that point, no prosecutor would have allowed her to continue
speaking. He would have said, just answer the questions, just answer the questions.
He would not have let her get emotional up there and blame her. That's poison.
Yeah. But it makes not very good television.
Thrilling television.
So, after Court for the Day, the prosecution wonders if Brandon allegedly saying something
about blood and dirt could have really been, quote, the Nazi slogan, blood and soil.
No, no, no, Gare.
No, no.
The new battle cry of white nationalist groups, unquote.
See, here's the thing.
So this is where the episode goes fully, fully off the rails.
So like when I was watching her testimony, she was like, he said something about like, you know, he was bleeding and like he was dirty.
At no point did my mind connect that to and and I quite literally just yesterday was watching videos of guys yelling blood and soil
This is something that's on my mind
It is a ridiculous jump. It's it
There because yeah, he's yelling something about being about like bleeding because his lip was bleeding and sure a
Remark about being dirty could be could be construed as as like a racist
remark, but the jump from bleeding and dirty to blood
and dirt to blood and soil is fucking baffling.
It's just not even the same words.
But, and not to nitpick here, not to nitpick, I just don't know that blood and soil would
have been the chant he chose as he was doing the choking.
It's bizarre. He would have said a slur.
Hugh Dancy is also skeptical.
None of the interviews with Brandon's family or coworkers indicated anything about racial
extremism, but the other prosecutor suggests that they look into his fitness gym, the Kovac
Academy, as the owner, quote, has ties to a few white nationalist organizations.
Uh oh.
The DA's office decides to investigate further.
They arrive at the gym as the buff skinhead staff member
from the start of the episode is closing up for the day.
He claims to not know Brandon very well,
and when he's asked if he's ever heard Brandon say something
that could be interpreted as racist,
he responds by saying,
I'm sorry, but I can't help you.
The prosecutor makes a snide remark and starts to leave,
and the man quietly says, Look, I can't help you." The prosecutor makes a Snyder mark and starts to leave, and the man quietly says,
Look, I can't get into details, but let's just say you're heading down the right path,
but I can't help you because it would blow my cover."
Whoa!
Oh my god!
He's a cop infiltrating the Nazi Fight Club!
I mean, there are some cops in there, right?
I don't know if I would say
they're infiltrating. The next scene is the funniest in the whole episode. After
stumbling on to the undercover operation, the head DA arrives at the NYPD
Counterterrorism Bureau as they have info pertaining to the prosecution's
murder case. But the Counterterrorism Bureau explains their scope is much larger
than this one case, and they have quote, had their eye on Kovac for a while now. They explain
to the DA that his MMA gym is actually a quote, active club, part of an international network
of white supremacist sleeper cells that all front as MMA style gyms." Unquote. So, okay.
Okay.
Okay.
White nationalists have been using MMA gyms to front for activities for decades.
I just found a new one the other day.
This does happen.
This does not mean they are active clubs, nor do active clubs have to be MMA gyms.
These things are Venn diagrams that can sometimes overlap, but not
always. The version of active clubs we see in this episode now starts getting pretty
fictitious.
At first I was like, oh, that's a fairly reasonable, yeah, we do have active clubs at MMA gyms,
that's a real thing. And they're stockpiling weapons to do it January 6th.
Yeah, so- what? What?
So they say they've identified over 30 active clubs across nine states
and several provinces of Canada.
So nine states far too low.
There's active clubs in way more states than that.
There's also not necessarily like if you have 30 active clubs across nine states,
that's a bizarre ratio. That means there's a lot you have 30 active clubs across nine states, that's
a bizarre ratio.
That means there's a lot of active clubs in like a few states, which generally isn't
how it kind of ends up being.
There's maybe like one or two, maybe three, like per state.
We don't fully know, but I will give them points for adding in the Canadian chapters,
which most people kind of overlook.
But also like, why is the NYPD investigating something happening in nine states?
That's the feds territory. To be fair, that is fully accurate. The NYPD Counterterrorism Bureau
investigates things all over the world. But it's like just let if it's interstate let the feds
handle it. Their jurisdiction is fucking bonkers. They're like the third biggest like counterterrorism
like law enforcement group in the entire world. They're like one of the world's largest standing armies. Yeah, no, it is absurd. They say, quote,
the clubs operate as recruitment centers. They lure in young white men under the guise of getting fit,
while indoctrinating them in racist ideology and training them in military combat, unquote. Now,
the training that people receive in active clubs very often does not equal military combat training.
In fact, they often have very poor fitness regiments and really bad advice on how to get fit.
I mean, if getting hooked on gear and rolling around on the floor shirtless with the boys is military combat training, then absolutely.
If you look at the, there's a pretty extensive docs of some of the active club members of
the state of Georgia last year, and they were, their fitness information was not up to stuff.
They were mostly 17 year olds who were arguing about different ways to like lift better.
Anyway, law and order says that these active clubs are quote, trying to build an army.
It's the new face of hate unquote. A very,
a very kind of retro slogan. We don't really use that anymore, but if you look like 10 years ago,
or like, yeah, around 10 years ago, you would see a lot of like liberal articles talking about
the new face of hate. Quote, no more white sheets or burning crosses. They've adapted and created a facade
to mask their racist beliefs. Unquote. So the DA wants their undercover guy to testify
to secure the conviction against one of the active club members, but the counterterrorism
bureau doesn't want to blow their nine-month undercover operation even for a murder conviction,
as they've quote, recently received credible intel that Kovac is now stockpiling firearms
and explosive materials unquote.
So they should probably go ahead and arrest him for that, huh?
Yeah, yeah, right?
I don't know.
It's time to move.
I guess now they're combining like active club stuff with some like atomwaffin and militia
stuff just like throw just just smushing together all these different groups into one, like, mega-boogie man, I guess.
Quote,
These men are terrorists. They're capable of significant violence. Unquote.
So, the Counterterrorism Bureau suggests that the DA takes a, quote, big picture view of the situation. Unquote.
So, the DA breaks the news to the prosecution team that the undercover will be unable to testify because the active club is quote, planning a coordinated attack along the lines of the January 6th insurrection,
unquote.
So you should probably, like the undercover operation is over. Like if you have credible
intel that there's an imminent attack, like the operation is over.
So also, like this is just not what active clubs do. This is like, they don't care about J6.
That's like a Proud Boy thing and some militia dudes.
Like, most active club members would be like, no, all of the J6 people are like fucking
like conservative, like Trump brain dead losers.
They're like, it's really...
I mean, I guess there was that thing a couple years ago where those members of the base
were arrested right before they were going to try to kick off the civil war by inciting
They were gonna shoot into the crowd at the gun rally in Richmond at the Virginia gun rally
And then the plan was that everyone would start shooting each other, you know
It's like so they had a pretty large stockpile of weapons that one of the guys was Canadian. So like maybe
They got mixed up with that. Yeah base. Yeah
They're combining elements of the base Adam often active clubs proud boys, into like this mega boogie man, right?
He's just a villain.
The DA says that this new attack will quote, only be more violent and without advance warning
this time, unquote.
What do you mean without advance warning?
You just said no about it.
He's a fly.
No.
Are you going to let it happen?
Right, right.
You're going to let this happen? The greater right. You're gonna let this happen?
The greater good is for us to allow this to occur.
The undercover investigation cannot be jeopardized in any way, but as this looks more and more
like a racially targeted murder, according to the DA, the DA's office has defined a
different way to show that Brandon is racist.
Quote, it's for the greater good.
A phrase that Hugh Dancy says helps justify a lot of otherwise
unjustifiable positions. And they start getting into this kind of debate around
like the ethics of like, doing a long term infiltration operation versus
seeing like an active threat or like seeing a way to like, currently clamp
down on a like arm of an organization, even if they can't get the whole thing yet.
And they have this debate of, is it better to do a long-term strategy or to just chop
off as many limbs as we can as we go on?
And again, it doesn't make sense because if they have all this credible intel, why not
just get them right now?
But whatever.
Right.
Wrap it up.
So, back in court, Mr. Kovac is on the stand. Hugh Dancy asks if he and the defendant have
ever discussed, quote, racial ideology, to which Kovac says, I don't know what that means.
Believable.
The, the process. I mean, yeah, that is the correct answer for this situation. The prosecutor
elaborates racial purity, interracial marriage, what role black people should or
shouldn't have in society.
And Kovac once again feigns ignorance.
Hugh Dancy asks about Kovac's 88 tattoo being a Nazi symbol, and Kovac just says, I don't
know, I just like the number 88.
And then he doesn't, the prosecutor doesn't explain to the jury no no doesn't mean how Hitler he just he just he just moves on
Never once in the episode is it explained that the 88 symbol meat is a reference to heil Hitler
Never actually say it never say it yeah
Dancy does bring up mr
Kovacs for prior convictions for assaulting black men two of which were charged as hate crimes and Kovac just says that was a long time ago
for assaulting black men, two of which were charged as hate crimes. And Kovac just says, that was a long time ago.
And now see, I do want to say, because we made such a big deal about it earlier,
about how you can't ask about prior convictions,
I think in this case it is an allowable exception because it goes to direct impeachment.
Like, if he said, like, you know, he made a statement himself about how he's not racist,
and you say, well, you have a hate crime conviction.
And later in the courtroom he says that he, of course, obviously doesn't have any problems
with black people when being questioned by the defense attorney.
But Hugh Dancy pulls up Kovacs' social media accounts, all of which contain the phrase
blood and soil in his bio.
Objection!
Relevance!
The prosecution then argues that Rebecca Lasky's testimony
of hearing something about blood and dirt may have been a vague recollection of hearing
blood and soil.
Dancey describes blood and soil as a Nazi reference to a racially uniform society.
The jury would not have been allowed to hear this. This would have happened outside the
presence of the jury.
Kovac just says the phrase means that you're proud of who you are and where you come from.
Covac taught the defendant how to fight, how to do a chokehold.
So to end the questioning, Hugh Dancy asks if he also taught the defendant to hate black
people.
Objection!
Oh wow.
Objection!
All right, so the defense's closing argument frames the subway as a dangerous, lawless zone, and
Brandon as a peaceful elementary school teacher who has never gotten as much as a speeding
ticket.
Probably because he doesn't drive.
Yeah, because you live in New York.
Who saw someone in danger and bravely decided to step up and do something.
The prosecution's closing argument frames Brandon Arnault as a closeted racist, who
saw an opportunity to put his white supremacist ideology into practice in a situation where
he thought he could get away with it.
Quote, people like Mr. Arnault keep their bigotry buttoned up.
They only discuss it with people who share their hateful worldview.
They rely on plausible deniability, because if the racism isn't overt, many good people
are all too happy to assume it isn't there.
But every once in a while, in moments of panic or anger, the mask will slip."
Hugh Dancy closes by saying that Ella Steiner was an innocent, unarmed black man suffering
a medical emergency, and the two white people on the train assumed he was a violent threat,
and they attacked him. And even if there was no intention to kill at the start, quote, At some point the defendant's focus shifted and his racial hate began to manifest, unquote,
yelling blood and soil at Joyner, quote,
A declaration of hatred for all people of color, unquote,
as Brandon choked him to death.
Okay, here's the thing.
Here's the thing.
This whole situation with the undercover, the counterterrorism, I have
to believe that they're trying to set up a longer plot arc that that's going to come
back in a later episode. Or so they have a new spinoff called Law and Order Organized
Crime with Christopher Maloney, Elliott Stabler from SVU. I wonder if they're going to cross
it over to organized crime because it makes no sense. That's what I assume. I think this white nationalist group is going to come back and be even a
bigger plot point in a future episode. Otherwise, it didn't need to be in here. Otherwise, the
inclusion in this in this piece is really bizarre. So, but no, so they think but what
I was going to say is they did not need that under covers testimony because the only testimony
they wanted to elicit from him was like as a
Character witness to say like oh, yeah, I've met him and he's racist
Yeah, that wouldn't really even be admissible in most like like even if the judge even if the judge allowed the jury to hear that
Like this isn't a hate crime case. It doesn't matter
What matters is whether or not he used excessive, like,
more force than was necessary for a self-defense argument.
The entire legal strategy they shift to halfway through the court proceedings is so obviously
a dead end that doesn't actually relate to...
And wouldn't have been allowed.
Yeah, it's so bizarre.
And if they wanted to get information about, like, his views that maybe his family didn't know about,
that people at work didn't know about, why did they not get warrants for his phone and computer?
I mean, I think they did because they mentioned searching through his phone and computer multiple times through the episode.
They said they found that he had searched for how to delete from cloud or whatever from the guy's phone.
Again, I think that's mostly just like undercooked.
You didn't open like his Telegram account
to see what he's in?
Exactly.
You didn't see the active club chat season.
You didn't see, like you didn't talk to any other members
of the combat academy, no other members of the gym.
Really?
Anyway, so the jury finds the defendant not guilty
because-
Oh.
Yeah, okay. Outside the courtroom, the head not guilty because... Oh! Yeah, okay.
Outside the courtroom, the head DA says, quote,
we did the best that we could.
Here's another problem.
So not all states allow this, but in New York,
the court can submit to the jury what are called lesser included charges.
So if you're charged with murder two, I think was what they charged him with in this case,
the jury can deliberate on the actual charge, murder too, but they can also consider what are called lesser included charges.
So something like manslaughter. So the jury can say, well, we're not going to convict on murder too,
but we do think it was manslaughter. So we're going to convict on that even though that wasn't the charge and the indictment.
So I can't imagine that this DA would not have pushed for lesser included
charges.
Well, Hugh Dancy may agree. He says, quote, No, we could have done better. We just chose
not to for the greater good.
No, but they could have done that.
I think he says that kind of sarcastically. The DA affirms that one day soon they will
take down the whole racist organization, but
behind the two DAs here, Brandon walks out of the courtroom and celebrates with the other
members of the active club.
End of episode.
Okay, so, but when they put Kovac on the stand and they were saying like, oh, like, did you
teach him about racism?
The better line of questioning at that moment would have been, okay, you're his grappling coach.
Did you teach him how dangerous chokeholds are?
Right? Because like, I don't know anything about a chokehold, so if I accidentally killed someone with one, maybe I didn't know that would happen.
If you are taking five hours a week of private hand-to-hand combat lessons, you probably do know.
And that would go to, you know, foreknowledge
and like, why didn't they ask that?
Again, I started this episode because I thought it would be about active clubs. And it turns
out by the end, it's really not.
It's really about Daniel Penny.
It's really about the killing of Jordan Neely. So this is the actual Rip From The Headlines
piece that they're doing, which I did not really realize until the episode was over. So this is kind of riffing on the incident that
happened on May 1st, 2023. Jordan Neely was a 30-year-old black man. He was a Michael Jackson
impersonator. At the time, he was homeless. He was running the subway in Manhattan and appeared
emotionally distressed. He was yelling about needing food and water. No one was helping him. He was yelling that he didn't care about going to jail. He was
ready to die. This was reportedly frightening other writers.
Daniel Penny, a 24-year-old former Marine, approached Neely and placed him in a lethal
chokehold that lasted anywhere from five to seven minutes, depending on if you ask the
prosecution or the defense. Penny was repeatedly told by other
rioters that Neely appeared to be dying. By the time first aid was being administered, he was
already dead. Daniel Penny was let go after being questioned by police and only arrested 11 days
later. I think this is the part where they're like, do we want to let him go or charge him now? I
think that's kind of what they're doing here. On June 14th, 2023, he was indicted on the charge of second degree manslaughter.
The trial is scheduled to start on October 8th, 2024.
So this episode also, I think it fails in a lot of ways in this depiction of active
clubs. It uses certain terms like the term active clubs, which I was surprised they just
I'm surprised they use because that's kind of more of like a niche term. But they just made it to be this like MMA elite Nazi squad. And I think them trying to include this bit does an incredible disservice to trying to depict the killing of Jordan Neely, which first of all, like there's already problematic aspects of right of turning this, like this like really fucked up thing into a piece of entertainment. That's kind of why I started this episode with that monologue.
But I think by cramming so many other elements in here,
like this homophobia angle, this active club angle,
it does a real disservice to the actual incident that they're trying to comment on,
where there was a man in a very crowded subway who very publicly was basically lynched,
because a few riders were not super comfortable when riding the subway because this man was
yelling for food and water. So it's not great. But after watching Leave the World Behind,
Civil War, and this, I think this is the best depiction of our current political moment out of all of those three things, which is a pretty fucked up bar.
I guess, Molly, do you have any other thoughts on how they depict Nazi stuff in this?
I mean, not well. Not well, bitch.
No, I was just gonna say I was looking on reddit and
Seeing people's people's takes on it on the law and order reddit and I found this fantastic comment
They did take the Daniel Penny case but changed the whole story to make penny look guilty
Probably to make the real penny look like a bad guy in real life
Objection objection objectionion, your honor. Mods? Mods? Not, yeah, not great. Because also, yeah, also, like, for people who are, like, looking
at this as a parallel to Jordan Eadley, like, oh, why did they change so many details to
make him look even more guilty? I'm like, no, that's not what's happening at all.
Like, I think they did a disservice to that story by changing so many elements. I mean,
like you said, there's, there's a conversation to be had about the ethics of depicting the
story as entertainment, period.
But if they're going to do it, and they've been doing it for 30 years, right?
That's just what Law and Order does.
If they're going to do it, I think they have a responsibility to not do this.
To not do this.
Yeah.
Well, again, they have bigger frish to fry since there's that upcoming worse than
January 6th attack led by these MMA guys who are stockpiling explosives. So watch out for
that I guess.
Yeah, I guess I'll have to watch the rest of the season to see if the MMA gym blows
up New York.
Yeah, I will not be until they release a direct follow up. So I think that does it for us today.
This is already way too, this episode's already long.
It's already longer than the Law and Order episode.
So that does it for us today.
Thank you for listening.
If you want to check out my review of Civil War,
it's very short, but it's kind of to the point.
I'm on Letterboxd at Hungry Bowtie.
And then the reviews that I liked,
which are underneath my own review,
go into more depth about kind of the problems with that film in my opinion and other people's
opinion. Anyway, where can people find you online, Molly?
Oh, I am on Twitter at Socialist Dog Mom and my newsletter, The Devil's Advocates, on Ghost,
and I guess that's it for me. Oh, I'm podcasting sometimes now.
No objections from me.
Yeah, I guess by the time you're listening to this, you can listen to my latest episode of this show yesterday.
All right. See you on the other side. If you love sports and true crime, then there's a new podcast from executive producer Dan
Patrick and hosted by me, Jay Harris, that you won't want to miss.
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Join me on the dark side of sports
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On the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts. Who hasn't heard names like Achilles or Odysseus, Cassandra, Medusa, but how much
do you know about them from the ancient world?
Let's Talk About Myths, Baby is the podcast bringing the ancient sources to life.
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app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi everyone and welcome to the show. It's me, James, today, and I'm joined by Dr. Maung
Zarni, who's an activist and scholar with 35 years of experience advocating against
genocide and for freedom in Burma, and one of the founding members of the anarchist activist
platform Forces of Renewal Southeast Asia. Welcome to the show, Dr. Zarni.
Yeah, thank you so much. Yeah, it's a pleasure to have you here.
And also I should mention Nobel Peace Prize nominee as of yesterday or the day before.
Congratulations on that also.
Yeah, thanks so much.
It happened in January before the deadline.
But I just released the announcement for the Burmese New Year occasion because, yes, the country has been
torn apart by armed revolutions, genocide, the racism, anti-Muslim violence, and so thought like this may be a tiny sliver or positive thing.
And so if activists want to have, you know, some sustenance for their grassroots revolution,
here's somebody who's who has been grassroots for 35 years.
So that's why I released it.
But that's secondary anyway.
Yeah, I know.
If it can get the world to look at what's happening and pay attention, then I think
it's a good thing.
So one thing I wanted to ask you about today to start off with is something that when I
talk to people in the US and the UK about the revolution and the coup in Myanmar,
the context of like ultra-nationalist Buddhism is one that is very hard, I think, for people
who don't have a great understanding of how that works to understand.
So I was wondering if we could start off with you explaining like this, this long and painful
history of like ultra-nationalist Buddhism in Myanmar and how it's
empowered the genocide of Muslim people and also the the hunter today.
Well, when we talk about, you know, ultra nationalism or various strands of nationalism, I
think we need to periodize or put in different historical periods, because the term nationalism
was a progressive, emancipatory, ideological umbrella when the local society, all primarily Buddhist and also other people, but the majority political
systems were built on the foundation of the Buddhism in Burma, you know, like different
kingdoms. We were under the British for 124 years, the internally warring Buddhist kingdoms, like
Rakhine and Mourn and Burmese and Shan, they're all like Buddhist kingdoms.
And they formed this oppositional ideological identity as nationalist Buddhists that would confront
the alien colonial British rule.
So in that sense, nationalism was not a bad thing at all because it was primarily for
emancipatory struggle.
Yeah.
But then like, you know, then fast forward,
post colonial independence, PVA, 1948 onward, right?
When the British rule was removed
at the end of the second world war, three years after,
the oppositional Buddhist nationalist umbrella identity collapsed.
So, Rakhine's want to foreground their ethnic city, given that the main oppositional commonality,
colonialism was no more. And so that's when the ethnicity was reinjected
into the ideological formation. And interestingly, as you would know as well, the end of the
Second World War was followed by the Cold War, right? And on the one hand, like you've got, you know, godless, communist, atheistic Russia,
Soviet Union, and China, and then on the other hand, you know, essentially Christian West,
you know, or at least allegedly Christian West. And in that context, the ultra-nationalism was essentially encouraged
by the by the United States and allies. You know, like, this is nothing new. If you look at
the rights of like a socialist governments across the Middle East, you know, primarily
Muslim Middle East, you would find like the rise of Muslim Brotherhood and you know what
we call today fundamentalist Islamists, right?
But the, you know, the Buddhist with an ethnocentric orientation were encouraged, you know, by the United States through grants
and aid.
Yeah.
But the same way like, you know, the rise of, you know, fundamentalist Islam was encouraged
or mid-Wi-Fi with the US money. Because, see, this is important because
through the eyes of the Cold War strategists, the only way that egalitarian leftist ideologies
could be confronted was through this faith-, so, so I don't want, I'm not saying that the Burmese
nationalist and also nationalists were not responsible for their own growth. But I also,
what I'm saying is that there was a larger global context in which this monster was hatched.
Yes.
And then, and, and, and so, but even, you know, like the, the, going back to the
1930s after the Wall Street collapse, you know, then like, you know, the, the,
uh, the recession pervaded across the world and a colonial economies like
Burma with massive agricultural
export economy, the British founded Expedient to basically turn to a
religious divided rule. And like you know the Burmese Buddhist
laboring classes were pitted against the, uh, Indian laboring classes of
different religions.
But that was more like the Buddhist nationalist, ethno-nationalist versus, you know, like what
we would call today migrant laborers from India, you know, under the, because we were
part of British Empire. After the British left, the Muslims began to be scapegoated.
And, and then finally, I think like the, we cannot understand, as you, as you know, very well,
the nationalism or ultra nationalism without some kind of political organization.
And, and, and that organization is what we call Burmese political state, whether
it's controlled by the civilian elected politicians or the military as an organization. Political
states always there, whether it's, you know, fascism in Nazi Germany or Italy or Japan,
or like, you know, the genocidal Myanmar about 15 years ago, state wars, the engine, actually,
it's not the people that were generating this toxic ideology. It was the state that was inventing, manipulating and mobilizing towards their sinister ends.
Right. Yeah. And it's the divide and rule strategy and the fall, I guess, to the falling back to this, these kind of colonial methods of rule is something that I guess I want people to understand is still happening in in Burma or Myanmar, right?
We see the military, the the junta doing it right now, right?
Like attempting to ferment inter-ethnic conflicts to prevent the formation of a popular front or a coalition against against their rule, right?
Yes, I think the here the one observation I want to make is that independence from Britain,
restoration of modern form of sovereignty to Burmese people,
was not a clean break from the colonial past, because the state in Burma as it exists or
it has existed over the last 70 plus years remains a colonial state. It was an instrument economic exploitation or racialized or ethnicized administration and all the security laws and
ordinances and whatnot.
They were formulated with the interest of the ruling colonial interests or power, like
at the time British.
And what the, what independence did was really transfer
of this internally racialized entity, we call state,
from the white man's hand to the brown man's hand,
you know, the Burmese. So when you, the state wasn't actually
finding it difficult to foment racial or inter, we don't use the term race here,
but inter-ethnic conflict or inter-religious conflict. the state itself embodied this divide and rule outlook because
it remains internally colonial.
You see what I mean?
Yes.
So, I think that it isn't simply the policies of the, you know, XYZ regimes that have ruled Burma since independence, but the state itself is conducive
to or supportive of this kind of inter-religious and inter-ethnic contest because there are no principles of equality as ethnic or religious communities,
or there was no sense of horizontal or vertical fairness among the political class and the majoritarian agrarian communities.
And so the state itself is problematic.
That's why like, when Aung San Suu Kyi came to semi-power
because the military still controlled
or backseat drove her regime,
she found it really difficult to maneuver
because she was straight jacketed
in this internally colonial share.
Yeah. And then so, so I think of course, like, you know, you are correct. What the military is
doing now, say in Rakhine state, where they committed genocide against Rohingya Muslims,
you know, they drove out, you know, close to 800,000 Rohingyas of genocide
all across the border to Bangladesh in 2017 and also 16.
They are now arming and training
and, you know, forcibly conscripting
able-bodied young Rohingya men into their ranks and to fight the progressively
militarily stronger Rakhine Buddhist Arakan army.
That's just one area.
But you know, if you look at other regions like Shanstey for instance, there's extremely
complex ethnic
contestations happening, right? So what life political scientists call like, horizontal violence is taking place. And so
it's like there are multiple conflicts at work, you know, of
course, like the military is number one problem maker, but there are also lesser evil forms
of political and ethnic conflicts taking place.
Yeah, I think it's very much okay.
Shan state is, I think, particularly complicated and interesting.
As we look at the situation now in the different, like both in the liberated areas or the areas
without control of the, like, napidot state, they may still be controlled, kind of in a
sense by other kind of like pseudo
states, I guess. Are you familiar with this? There's this argument, I think it's probably
like articulated, I'm sure you are articulated, like most notably by James C. Scott of like,
he looks at the example of Myanmar has been rightly criticized in some areas of like the mountains as an area where people
can, I guess, choose to opt out of the state or to be like where the state is not completely
consolidated, I guess, and never has been.
Yeah, I know Jim's work, you know, like the, he divides people into valleys and mountains.
What's interesting is it's a lot more complex than the dualistic understanding of hill
people versus plain people.
Even in the hills, there are highlands and there are plateaus.
But also I think like that I find it more useful to look at this
not through geographic lens but through the colonial lens because you've got the colonial
state because Jim is essentially an anti-statist,
but as a matter of value, yeah, I am with him,
because I'm bent on the anarchism as my value.
But analytically, I think given the fact
that the colonial state continues to live on
and continue to haunt the Burmese society.
I think like the way I look at it is like, you know, center and periphery, right?
Yeah.
Irrespective of the altitude.
I mean, at this point, like altitude's no longer really strategically important because,
you know, we're, we live in the age of drones and like, you know, MIG 29 and F
16. So mountains are no longer cover. You see what I mean? Right?
Yeah. Yeah. The construct of the mountains as like non-state space or a
place where you can go to choose to be non-state. I think like
it's interesting to hear young Burmese PDFs fighters now be like, oh, I chose to go to the
mountains even though it sits very much alongside that cannoli analysis that you had of like the
wild people or like quote unquote savagery, right which, or when I speak to Burmese people
who are like 21 now who joined the PDFs at 1817, after the coup, they had all been very
much indoctrinated with the idea of non Burmese people as quote savages or wild people who
lived in the quote mountains or jungles and like choosing to go there to escape the state.
I think it's really interesting to hear like that analysis reproduced in their storytelling
of their own lives.
Yeah, I mean, I think, I think, you know, it has been in the Burmese political psyche.
You move away from the center and you are more autonomous and you are, you know, freer from
the reach of the center, right? Because we still have this center periphery mentality. Yeah, I mean,
you know, culturally, yes, you're absolutely right. The way people in the center,
like the group that I belong to,
Burmese, Buddhist majority,
we look down on people that are on the periphery, right?
The way people dress.
I mean, it's also like the rural and urban divide as well.
Even like those who grew up in the in the non majoritarian,
you know, regions, you know, what I call that the peripheries of the Burmese colonial state,
when they settle in Rangoon or Mandalay or, you know, major urban areas, they they begin
to dress they they begin to, I mean, they necessarily adapt to the Burmese way of life, the majority dominant
customs and whatnot.
So I still stick with this whole colonial relations the organizationally and psychologically. The, yeah, I mean, the also like the, the, we have the vocabulary.
If you want to oppose a central state or the central regime, we say we take
refuge in the forest, right?
Yeah.
And we take refuge in the forest or under the tree against the scorching sun or like pouring monsoon rain, right, or the
the evil center, right. And so it's all built in, it's in the language even, you know, like
organizing an armed revolt or going underground is described as taking refuge in the forest, the jungle, you know.
And what's interesting though is like, you know, from the state's perspective, if you're
taking refuge in the jungle, of course, like that's treasonous and, you know, that is an
act of criminality. But if you use that language or if you do exactly the
same thing literally, physically, if you're a Buddhist monk, you are considered holier than
monks that continue to live in the city. You see what. Yeah. So you go, you have a forest monks versus like a city town or
village monk, right? So this is quite a fascinating linguistic,
you know, twist here, on one hand, like, you know, but from
the revolutionaries perspective, if you're in the jungle, you grow a certain
aura around you.
You are in the jungle, right?
And you don't wear jeans or you don't look like city people, but you're wearing, you
know, like the fatigue, army fatigue and, you know, jungle paraphernalia. And as a revolutionary, that's like Che Guevara
time. You see what I mean? Yeah. Revolutions start or organize around jungles. So it has nothing to
do with altitude. You see what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's just, yeah, I like that periphery
colonial model.
So I wonder, like, I think people who listen to this will both be very much like amenable to anarchism and see the problems that state societies create and also
to the revolution in Myanmar and to the young people and then the young people who are fighting
it. I wonder like how do we build a future for Myanmar that doesn't replicate this colonial
core periphery model that doesn't, the sine qua non of the state that's centered in Napier
door is like the, it's
this use of violence to control and this colonial relationship, right? So how do we not replicate
that in the post-revolution future? Well, I think, you know, there's a danger in,
what should I say, the romanticizing the mini-states or sub-states, right?
the mini states or sub states, right? If establishing autonomous states does not confront the colonial nature of the state
from which these mini states, you know, emerge as oppositional entities. In other words, whatever administrative structures
that, you know, the, the, the current armed revolutionary organizations set up, they need
to first make sure they don't replicate that the internally colonial nature of the state that they have been fighting and to some degree of success at this point in history.
Because the coloniality is very much connected with the idea of pure ethnic identity.
You see what I mean?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And in this day and age, whether you've been to Karen State
and other places in Burma and in the Middle East,
or Kurdistan, but there are always
like the idea of pure ethnic identity, right?
Even if you're a revolutionary.
But the truth is, even small places,
you will find Muslims and Hindus and Christians,
or people with different migratory histories
and class background,
you flatten them into a single ethnic identity.
That in and of and I mean,
self perception, we are a new current state or
cranny state or kitchen state, right?
Even kitchen, the late the term label,
the label kitchen in the know,
you know, they have about like the three or
four major groups there.
And then some resent are being referred to as.
Gachin, but they go along because they are against the more evil
central Burmese Buddhist state.
Right.
So, so, so, so that's why when I, when I explained to you, you know, at the outset of this conversation, this like a Buddhist identities merged as
an oppositional umbrella, anti-colonial identity against the British when that common oppressors
has gone home.
And then we start fighting each other.
You saw me?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So number one is like, you know, the, the, is very, very important.
These new entities do not define their political organizations along any idea of
like, you know, blood and soy. Yeah. Yeah. And that's very, very important.
Otherwise we, we, we replicate what we fought against. Right.
And secondly, Otherwise, we replicate what we fought against.
And secondly, I think no military organization
should control administrations. But at the moment, with the exception
of the Korean National Union,
most other ethnically organized
armed resistance organizations in Burma,
when they set up administrations,
administrators are guys who are,
like carrying AK-47 or some other weapons.
You see what I mean?
Because what they need to do is,
as soon as they have secure any like ancestral region
what they need to do is they need to separate law and order maintenance from the defense yeah and
and the the the reason we have gotten into this bloody mess is because the military did not separate law and order administration
as a civilian function from the national defense.
So the current progressively militarily successful ethnic resistance organizations have to demilitarize self consciously and as a matter of policy
their new administrations. So these two things, you know, move away from blood and soil idea of
identity and demilitarized and civilianized the administration. Yeah. Do you have hope?
Like I find when I talk to especially younger people in the PDF, who are most people, like,
maybe it's easier for them to see the obvious colonial relationship and the way that these constructs have harmed them
and prevented them from finding solidarity with people of other ethnic groups. That's something that sometimes they will articulate
to me, right? That like, you know, we were told these people were bad and evil and savage
and they're not, and they're our allies in this fight against dictatorship. Do you think
that that's replicated in the leadership of EROs, like that idea that this blood and soil identity
is something that's been problematic and divisive and will always be so?
Or do you not see that replicated so much? still, you know, the old conservative orientations in these EROs with respect to two things.
The acceptance of, you know, younger generations into policy making circles, right?
And then the other one is the half of the population of these ethnic communities have remained
marginalized.
And that is war men.
On one hand, it does make sense that men with guns and men with like 50 years of revolutionary
experience are going to play a leading role.
But these guys have to make a conscious effort in changing their own value system, which is like,
you know, bring in new generations with more progressive ideas into policymaking circle, leadership circle, and bring in women.
And I wish I know more about
the Kurdish revolutionary organizations.
My own very limited understanding is that,
gender equality, I mean, for the Islamophobic crowd,
it might be quite shocking, but the Kurdish revolutionary
organizations are much more gender equal than white democratic societies.
Yeah, that's right.
And I think their analysis, if I can summarize Appo's thought, is that colonialism begins in the
patriarchal family and that the first colonized subject is the woman and therefore if we can't
decolonize off familial and community relations then we have little hope of decolonizing ourselves
as a group or as a society. So their analysis rests in the same place as yours does.
as a society. So their analysis rests in the same place as yours does. And I think that
I think increased solidarity and communication between the Kurdish Freedom Movement and the resistance movements in Myanmar, which I hope can only do good for that, especially with regard to
gender relations. It was interesting to see the Kareni, KNDF Battalion 5 issued a statement which
said that they had a long way to go in terms of gender relations and they looked to the Kurdish model of example of where they can get to, which at least it gives me hope that these things can get better.
organization, Korean National Defense Organization, right? Korean, Korean. I mean, they are led by very progressive, sort of like, you know, semi anarchist type young people. Yeah. You
know, the ethnicity and gender discrimination are self consciously avoided and discouraged.
Yeah, so basically, I think we cannot,
we cannot have a successful revolutionary movement,
you know, just by trying to, you know,
take power from the center.
You know, there has to be, you know,
it's an armed rebellion is different
from a revolutionary movement.
Revolutionary movement involves a shifting fundamentally the non-progressive values and
outlooks, right?
That is what is something that needs to happen.
And that, that in my view, is a deeply, you know, intellectual, psychological process. But I think that is
happening, you know, and so that ideological progressive shift is going to hit the ceiling at some point because you've got all men in decision-making
positions who haven't bought in entirely the need to shift their value system. And then partially it's not simply ideological.
It's also self-interest.
When you're the boss for 25 years,
you're a little like autocratic tyrant.
You know what I mean?
You're a little organization.
So shifting the, you know,
giving women and younger generation spaces me, you know, you shutting up 50% of
the time and letting the other, you know, people speak 50%.
You know, like there are no normal like monologue for one hour.
You see what I mean?
Yes.
So even like, you know, the air time you have less air time.
That's like your less, that's your self interest, your air time, you know, let alone economic
and other interests.
That this is just like talking in a meeting.
You surround me.
I've been through like some of the meetings and stuff.
And so, you know, like guys think that the only they have important things to say, you
know, especially military matters or big
items.
So, okay, like women talk about welfare of children and widows kind of shit.
Yeah, yeah.
It's very sort of still like separate spheres, gender model.
Yeah, I have hope for the young generation, but I remember one of the guys I met, he told me that,
like, um, he said, he said, like three years ago, I had some gender problems
and I didn't understand what he meant.
And he was like, I thought that women couldn't do things that men could do.
And now I realized I was wrong.
And like, they were telling me that the police wouldn't, there was a, there
was a taboo to walk underneath a woman's, uh, laundry.
Yeah.
So, yeah.
So they hung them around their protest camps when they were in Yangon fighting the police
and then the police wouldn't come in.
So they were like, oh, this is when I realized that sexism hurts everyone.
So I think it's, yeah, we, I have hope for that generation.
I think it's, uh, it's been one of the things that has given me so much hope
For the world in general as I've been covering the revolution in Myanmar is to see people
Reconstruct and change their identities in a progressive and inclusive way
And people you know people in this country's and the UK as well are so stuck in their sort of regressive identities and to see young people there acknowledge that sexism, homophobia, these racist and inter-ethnic like hierarchies are damaging everyone, it's given me a great deal of hope for the future.
Yeah, I share optimism and then part of it is, you know, the progressives or people or younger people or like older people with progressive outlooks.
I mean, everything is constructed, you know, like if you change the material situation
in terms of, you know, who's making decisions or the, you know, under what conditions decisions are made.
I think that people are able to shift their thinking.
You see what I mean?
And so I think like, but definitely let political leadership is very important.
You know, I mean, I don't, I don't believe believe in this like a vanguardist idea of like a
group of men, you know, guiding the herd, right? But at the same time, I think like
these older men should meet the younger generations halfway. Yeah. And I'm not saying like, okay,
all right, you know, like, you know, like, don't trust anyone above 40 because I'm not saying like okay, all right, you know like, you know, like don't trust anyone above 40 because I'm
Still want to be trusted
But yeah, I mean I'm 60 and I can take shit from
18 year old junior friend or colleague who tell me you're full of shit and
Here's the reason I listen right?
you're full of shit and here's the reason I listen, right? So I assume like other people my age, my generation
will be able to do the adjustment, right?
And especially for the better.
And the, but I think that there are really articulate
young people and women whose voices need to come to the full.
Like, you know, like people, the people, I mean, like we don't live in isolation anymore.
Like in the 1960s and 70s and 80s, Burma was very isolated.
And so, you know, and so the ideological currents did not reach within the Burmese society.
Um, so the, the type of religion is or religions, I mean, Christianity, uh,
the type of Christian practices outlook, whatnot, remain extremely conservative
compared with like, you know, even like a conservative, like Christian country,
like USA, but yeah Christian country, like USA. Yeah.
Yeah. And then, but now like, you know, with the, we live in the social media internet age.
And so, you know, young people, you know, use the term like intersectionality.
You sure?
I mean, yeah, they start to see like race, class, gender, and other issues, you know, like intersecting and then producing
or reproducing or ending like different forms of, you know, repression and, you know, exploitation
and whatnot. We still have a very, very long way to go. We can shift, but that not not to say that, you know, we should feel like discouraged. Right. But we, we won't see instant changes.
No, yeah, but I think over time, yeah, I have a deal of a great deal of
optimism for the future of Myanmar. Dr. Saini, that's just, it's been really
great talking, where can people, especially people who are interested in your work and in the future of Myanmar, how can they follow along with your work
with these struggles to create a more equal and just and democratic in the non-state sense?
I mean, well, I mean, I use social media, especially Facebook a lot.
And I began consciously writing in Burmese language
because I don't need to inform the world
because the world knows the shit that's going on in Burma.
And so I think my Facebook's okay.
But if people read like English,
or even like other languages,
you know, our own mother tongue,
the forces of renewal,
Southeast Asia 4c.co,
it's a good platform where we encourage
and actually we seek out,
you know, very radical ideas in multiple languages, Burmese or Chin
or Kareni or whatever language they want to use. We don't censor anyone. They can say
anything as long as they're not advocating fascism or violence or like, you know, things like that.
And so, yeah, I encourage you to take a glance at our, you know, Southeast Asia network of
anarchistic activists and scholars.
Yeah, yeah, it's a great website.
I'll include a link to it in the description.
Thank you so much for your time this evening.
We really appreciate it. Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for it could happen here, updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com. Thanks for listening.
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