James Stout
Appearances
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah. Literally, I reached out to a friend to book a room last night because I knew they were good at that stuff.
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Yeah, I organize with people who have kids. I remember four years ago, fuck me, 2020, a long time ago and also yesterday. But like we were organizing to feed unhoused people and we were having a big Thanksgiving dinner. And like some of my friends have very young children and they bought them. And I think that's actually really cool to do that. A, like for those kids, it is normal that like,
Behind the Bastards
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We look after people in our community. This is what we do. And ever since I've been little, this is what we did. And like, it's also very nice for people. Like a lot of my friends also brought their children down to the border, especially last year when we had, because there were children there anyway, right?
Behind the Bastards
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Some of my friends who bring their children down and their kids would play with the other kids. And like, it doesn't matter that some of the kids are Kurdish and some of the kids are from China and some of them are from Colombia or whatever. They'll get along just fine when they're four or five years old. They don't care. They just want to kick a ball or see a teddy bear or something.
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And I think it's really good for your children to, you know, you're bringing them into a world which is...
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cruel and and at times unequal and like your kids seeing that like we can make a difference and we can do this i think it's it's one of the best educations you can give your children yeah and it's something that's good for everyone involved yeah exactly and it's also very i think one of the things i see a lot when people are organizing with refugees of the unhoused is like they're just people like you don't need to be afraid of them like they don't want to hurt your children and
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Having your children around shows that you have grasped that they're just people and that you feel safe and your children are safe around them. And I think that's valuable too. You're giving both parties some dignity in that moment.
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Yeah, definitely. If you've been a teacher or in any way, you probably have this skill. You might not consider it a skill, but even if you've been a TA in grad school or something like that, you probably know how to do this.
Behind the Bastards
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Hi everyone, it's me, James, and I'm coming at you today with one of these little requests that I make sometimes when there's something that we would like you to do, when it's very important to do so. Today, I want to talk to you about Syria, and specifically, northeast Syria.
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So with the world's eyes fixed on Syria, many are rightly celebrating as the brutal dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad comes to an end. But for Kurdish and other minority communities, recent days have brought violent attacks, ethnic cleansing, and occupation by Turkish-backed jihadist groups.
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In an attempt to take advantage of the chaos by crushing the Rojava revolution, Turkey and its mercenaries are openly committing war crimes against the region's autonomous communities. Many thousands have already been forcibly displaced, and thousands more are in danger. To make matters worse, this remains largely absent from the mainstream media reporting on Syria.
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If you'd like to show your solidarity with the people of northern and eastern Syria, please call on Congress to take urgent action by passing emergency legislation to stop the violence, hold Turkey accountable, and commit U.S. support to the Syrian Democratic Forces and the diverse communities under their protection. If you want to take action today, you can go to defendrojava.org.
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That's D-E-F-E-N-D-R-O-J-A-V-A dot org. If you are able to, the most effective action we can take right now is to call a couple of representatives, one representative and one senator. The representative would be Gregory Meeks. He's from New York. He's a Democrat. He is a ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. His phone number is 202-225-3461.
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Yeah, claiming deep on the ground understanding of a place from Reddit. Yes. That is not us.
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It's good times. But my fixer would come around noon for whatever reason when I was in Rojava. And I hate sitting in the hotel, so I'd go out for walks around the market.
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People are lovely. Yeah. I'd be walking down the street and like, I'd be looking around, see if there's anything interesting to go and see. And then, uh, you can literally take one wrong turn down the street and walk into, to regime Syria, as you covered in, in the women's war. Like I was walking down one street and this man walked up to me. My Kurdish is not very good.
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Tried to say hello, told him my name and stuff. And then he starts getting more agitated and he just starts repeating a higher and higher volume. Assad, bad man. Yeah. Assad, bad man.
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The other one would be Senator James Risch. He's an Idaho Republican. He's a ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. His phone number would be 202-224-2752. If you'd like to have some talking points, you can find those on DefendRoshaba.org.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, it was a very strange situation. It is no longer a strange situation because in the last week, the Assad regime has crumbled. Statues of him have been torn down all over the country, which we love to see. That's another of our stances as a network is fuck a statue. Yes, yes. Fuck most statues. Most statues. There are probably some cool ones.
Behind the Bastards
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There's the lady hitting the Nazi with a handbag in Sweden. That's a good statue. But yeah, most statues. Most statues of dudes in suits. Don't love them.
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Yeah, I'm sure it will. So these statues have been torn down because the Assad regime has basically crumbled. It failed to really put up any meaningful resistance to this advance by different rebel groups, right? By HTS, by SNA, by the Southern Front as well.
Behind the Bastards
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And despite, I guess, even what I would have said two weeks ago, even after they lost Aleppo, I assumed that they would regroup in Hama or Homs, and they did not. They completely failed to do so there. Russian backers more or less abandoned them, focused on getting their stuff and their people, those who survived, out of the country. And as a result, there is no more Assad regime, right?
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Assad fled the country at some point. It was initially speculated that Assad had fled on an aircraft on Saturday night as rebels were entering Damascus. That seems to be untrue, or perhaps it was true, but there's speculation that aircraft had crashed or been shut down, certainly. It does not seem to be true.
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Yeah, he didn't want to be found in a hole in the ground like Saddam Hussein, right? Like he, yeah. Or end up like Gaddafi, I guess. So he left. It's quite possible that he was doing a sort of final please, please help me tour of Russia around, which turned into his eventual exile.
Behind the Bastards
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In breaking news, Robert, I don't know if you've seen this Telegram post, and obviously we can't confirm it because we don't have a Derek Lime's The Assad Regime, but... Allegedly, he is planning on setting up a specialized hospital in the field of ophthalmology in Russia, Abkhazia, and Dubai. Yeah, great.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, cool. Not at the Hague where he belongs. Yeah. Anyway. He's gone, and we have seen in response some of the worst social media posting that I've seen. And I don't want this to be like Twitter review. I think that obviously that's pointless and pure-up. But I want to address, I guess, this kind of really disappointing response I've seen from a lot of people on the left that...
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If you'd like to donate financially instead, especially to the humanitarian aid effort for the tens of thousands of people who have been displaced by the SNA's advances, you can donate to two organizations that I would suggest. The first would be Have Your Soul, the Curtis Red Crescent. That's H-E-Y-V-A-S-O-R.com. And you'll want to go slash E-N if you want to see their website in English.
Behind the Bastards
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Oh yeah, well, you have the grey zone tendency, right? That Assad was great, actually, in the protection of human rights in the region, and Syria was socialism incarnate, which is obviously nonsense. This is a person who, as we have seen in the last week, whose regime prisons were... holding thousands of people, killed tens of thousands of people, tortured people to death.
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In some cases in Sednaya prison, which is a big prison in Damascus, or near Damascus, I should say, it's towards the coast. It looks as if there were children in that prison who were possibly born in that prison and may have never been out of that prison, which is like one of the most horrible things I've ever had to think about, you know, like a little child, four or five years old,
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never having seen the sky. It's just, it's heartbreaking. Like a lot of the things we are going to find, the things we're going to hear about in the next few weeks are heartbreaking. And anybody who's prepared to apologize for that or prepared to say that that was good, I think you really need to question if there's someone who's aligned with you. But,
Behind the Bastards
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In addition to that tendency, there's one that sort of holds that in Syria, what will come next is worse. What will come next, or we don't know. Of course, we don't know what will come next. None of us can see the future. But what will come next will make Assad look like it was a preferable option. And I feel that we need to address that because I think it's one of the...
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Some of the weapons, sure, that the U.S. supplied, Timber Sycamore, are probably still in the hands of HDS.
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No, the entire weaponry of the Syrian Arab Army is now also in the hands of the... HDS, which we'll move on to, actually, because maybe we should address that now before we address the responses, actually.
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When we talk about international involvement in Syria, right, we talk about the United States, who has supported the SDF not as a project – and this is important – they don't support the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria as a democratic project – What they support is the SDF as a partner force in the fight against ISIS.
Behind the Bastards
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And that's been very clear when they have failed to defend the ANES against ISIS. genocidal violence, ethnic cleansing, and Afrin, what we're seeing again now in the Tal Rafat area. I'll use that terminology because if you want to look it up on Google Maps, that's easier to find.
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The violence that we've seen repeatedly from the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army or Turkish Free Syrian Army, as it's sometimes called, the United States hasn't defended the people of the ANES against that. And it won't because that's not what it's there to do. And as much as we would like it to, I don't think that that's in the nature of the U.S.
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mission in Syria, and I don't think it's in the nature of the U.S. as a state. To support a project which is seeking to build democracy without the state, it's not in the nature of the state.
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You can donate there. The other one will be the Free Burma Rangers who are currently working in Raqqa. I was talking to my friend Habat who works with them. You can donate to them at www.freeburmarangers.com. We will put all of this in the show notes, all the URLs. So if you're driving, you don't have to write them down.
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Yeah. This is not a U.S. proxy state, as some people are trying to tell you. This is not a CIA revolution, as some people are trying to tell you, indeed.
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They have good music and they like to dance. Generally cool people, yes. Yeah, I enjoy their company. I have vibed with the YPG.
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Yeah, it's one of the cooler things that's happened to the Middle East in the past century. Yeah. And like the United States does not have a plan for what has happened in the last two weeks. And it appears to be trying to think on the hoof right now. Joe Biden's foreign policy has been dog shit. And it doesn't look like he's going to pull a 180 now. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
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We should not expect the United States to save Rojava. We should do everything we can to get the United States to continue supporting the people that who gave more than 10,000 of their children in the battle against ISIS. The US didn't want to send ground troops, right? Obama didn't want to have another ground war, neither did Trump. And so they got people from the SDF to do the dying.
Behind the Bastards
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And a lot of the killing, well, they maintained an aerial presence with a light ground footprint. We shouldn't expect the US to show up for the people who showed up for it. That's not in its nature. The only state that had a plan for what happened in the last two weeks appears to have been Israel, disappointingly. Right. Russia and Iran seem to have largely scrambled, extracted their state assets.
Behind the Bastards
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Russia got some of its people out. They took some of the aircraft out. Iran. Likewise, the U.S. seems to be kind of scrambling. I'm sure there are still some like ODAs and special forces guys embedded with the SDF.
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I'm sure that in the areas where ISIS has risen up, because in some areas where the regime has pulled back, there has been an increasing presence of ISIS sleeper cells trying to sort of once again control territory and attack the SDF. In those areas, I'm sure that there are US special forces like directing airstrikes, but I don't think the US is going to come and save Russia.
Behind the Bastards
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But the only country that had a plan was Israel. And what Israel's plan was, was to invade Syria in the Golan Heights, to increase their area of control, and then to bomb almost all of the aircraft. And perhaps, I don't know if it also includes air defense systems, but from what the IDF is saying today, they have bombed all of the Syrian Air Force's aircraft that had fallen into rebel hands.
Behind the Bastards
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This includes ammunition for the aircraft. It includes the ammunition dump at Kamishlo Airport. About half an hour before Robert and I started recording here on Monday, I saw a video from a friend in Kamishlo of the ammunition dump at the airport, which had previously belonged to the regime, now belongs to the ANES. exploding after it had been hit by an IDF airstrike.
Behind the Bastards
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So what they're trying to do, I guess, is deny any of those weapons to people who they perceive as a threat to their interests. And there's been, I don't know if you're seeing this also, Robert, but a lot of Israeli accounts being like, oh, we stand with the Kurds. Israel and the Kurds are one. And
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Those are the concrete ways that we can help right now in what is unfolding as a very terrible situation in North Syria. Thanks. I hope you enjoy the episode.
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First of all, I want to warn you, I want to warn you that we have an advertising break coming, Robert, is what I want to warn you about.
Behind the Bastards
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We're back. Yeah, firstly, I think when you're seeing analysis about Syria, anyone who talks about things in terms of these monolithic blocs, these Israeli accounts are often like, we will support the Kurds. I would be, sometimes I'll maybe use that to refer to AANES or the SDF, but I really try not to because it's a multi-ethnic project, right?
Behind the Bastards
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Like the areas that we'll talk about in a minute where the SDF is being attacked are Those areas, the largest component of the SDF is Arab forces, right? And that is the case in the SDF as a whole, actually. The majority of the SDF is now Arab, not Kurdish. I would be very sceptical of the expertise of anyone who refers to things in these monolithic absolutes, right?
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The Sunnis, the Shias, the Alawites, the Kurds. There are a lot of different groups in Syria, and those groups are comprised of individuals, and those individuals, shockingly... have different and distinct goals and experiences and desires. There are absolutely Alawites who will have remained loyal to Assad. There are others who demonstrably did not, as we've seen in the last week, right?
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And so... I would be skeptical of anyone who tries to paint things in those terms. And I would be skeptical to return to what we were talking about earlier, Robert, of people who tell you that we should expect... The one I see most is Syria to turn into Lebanon, right? And you and I have been talking about this before we recorded, but...
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That's not a useful example in my mind of what we're likely to see in Syria, right? And the reason for that is that in Lebanon, yes, there was a US air component as there is in Syria. That's true. But I don't understand why we would look at the example of Lebanon, a place thousands of miles away, when we have at least two examples of of governance in Syria, right?
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People who have been governing, in one case, for more than a decade, significant parts of Syria. Like, they have... government project. In the case of the AANES, I don't think it's fair to call it a state project.
Behind the Bastards
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They would tell you that they're trying to build democracy without the state, which might not be popular with states, evidently, which doesn't net them the support of many states, as we've seen. But we have, and with HCS in July and the Salvation government, we have these two governance projects. They're extremely different, right?
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The Salvation Government under HDS is people have been arrested for playing music at their own weddings. It is neither democratic nor particularly liberatory. And then we have the ANES, which I would argue is the only democracy in the Middle East. Certainly the only democracy where people of different ethnicities and genders matter the same amount.
Behind the Bastards
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You're just straining the definition of democracy if you're constraining it by ethnicity, right? Right. So I think you can make a good case for it being the only democracy in the Middle East. I saw this really atrocious BBC interview this morning. Some networks now have reporters on the ground in Damascus, and I've been trying to watch those to see what's going on.
Behind the Bastards
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It can be very hard to just get your news from Telegram. I would also caution people who are perhaps new to this, who are finding these Telegram channels, to take everything you read on there with a pinch of salt. You'll see a lot of disinformation there. one of the BBC had an expert on and he was like, oh, every time we see people pulling down statues of dictators, I'm a bit concerned.
Behind the Bastards
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And like, I have to think about how to express this. It seems to me deeply Islamophobic or bigoted or racist. I don't quite know the right term to say, oh, the people of this country and the places in the last 10, 20 years where we've seen people pulling down statues of dictators have largely been in the Middle East, right? Yeah. To say that, oh, these people are incapable of self-governance.
Behind the Bastards
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These people are incapable of living in peace with one another. But they're not. We've seen that in Rojava. And I don't think that the right response now is to respond with skepticism to the... the Syrian people's ability to live in peace. They've been at war for 15 years, 14 years, 13 years, 13 and a half years.
Behind the Bastards
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But I think that there is not an appetite for more killing and more dying, certainly from what I've seen and what I've heard.
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Yeah. I mean, some things I don't know how to interpret, right? HTS has asked the regime police and authorities in cities to stay on. Some of that is probably good, right? Like the people who ensure that the water gets pumped. I hope that they stay pumping the water. the people who were the police for the Assad regime, Syrian Arab Republic. I don't want those people to stay on.
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I want those people to fuck off and I want those people to be held accountable for the crimes they committed. But it doesn't point to sort of wild sectarian violence. We don't have the situation we had in Iraq, right? We have a US occupation which sits inside its bases and it only leaves, seemingly, to kill people.
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From the perspective of the people living in Iraq, that's what the US occupation looked like for the most part. It's guys in big military vehicles who kill civilians by mistake. We don't have that here. There's not that resentment, generational resentment that allowed the Islamic State to grow there.
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Now, the Islamic State did grow through capturing a lot of state institutions, which is what HTS has done. But I don't see that same resentment and I don't see that same desire for sort of redemptive violence that we saw there. I might be wrong, right? There might be more intercommunal violence. I have seen some videos of what looked like summary executions in Damascus today.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, I can't blame someone. I can't understand someone doing that. What are you going to do? I can understand that in the next few days there will probably be more of that violence because we are literally, in some cases, opening the lid on some of the worst crimes against humanity of this century.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah. Yeah. And they got a lot of people. They kind of had it coming to them. I'm not particularly concerned about that. I'm more broadly concerned with, like, what are you doing on the left if you see people in the streets, you see people tearing down statues of dictators, you see people celebrating the end of a regime that oppressed them for decades, and you immediately go to, oh, this is bad.
Behind the Bastards
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Like, why do you even bother if we don't believe that people can govern themselves, if we don't believe that the people in the street are normally the people who are right, and if we don't believe that... the downfall of tyrannical regimes is a good thing.
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Yeah, this is a person who dropped chlorine gas on blocks of flats with little children in them, right? Like, fuck this guy. It's good that he's gone. I wish he was dead. I'm sad that he gets to go and be an ophthalmologist. Like, he, of all people, needs to be held accountable for his crimes.
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Yeah, yeah. You never know. Yeah, I guess people... He's in Russia now. He's in Russia. Someone will find him in his high-end eye clinic one day.
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Yeah, we can hope. Robert, I want to take one more break. Talking of stabbing, maybe we will get an advert for knives, you know?
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Almost any knives, even crappy gas-stitched knives. Like, if you make the ones that look like an oil slick, get in touch with the advertising department at iHeartMedia. We'll pimp them. All right, we're back. The last thing I want to talk about, Robert, is how the rebels won. Because there was not a lot of fighting after the collapse of Aleppo, but before there was fighting.
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And in part, how that fighting went, I think, led to the downfall of the morale of the Syrian Arab Army, right? So there are some things here that... Both Robert and I are somewhat nerdy about conflicts, right? Like, it's something, even when we're not attending wars, we like to read about them.
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And you and I both take a great interest in history, and I think we'd be unwise to not look at this and learn from it. Especially with HTS, who massively professionalized since the ceasefire in 2020. I think professionalized is probably the right word, like...
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their command their technology the way they operated looked a lot more like a modern military than it did you know the militias like i'm sure you and i both remember the early syrian civil war for people who are a bit younger than us like some of the most incredible improvised weapons that I've seen.
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That they had literally taken out of the museum in Aleppo.
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Really incredible, and it speaks to the ingenuity of people and their desire not to be oppressed, their desire to fight against state tyranny. But when we compare that to what we saw with HTS in 2024, a world of change, right?
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In particular, I think it was very interesting that they captured armored vehicles and then they were able to combine armor and infantry very effectively, which is not easy to do, right? That is alluded even some professional militaries. They also...
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very effectively use drones, both drones to drop bombs and drones to adjust their artillery and mortar fire, which I think is something that, again, that modern militaries do, but it's not easy to do, right? And it's not like HCS could do massive...
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exercises in the lead up to this operation like they they seem to have professionalized very quickly another area that they were you can see that they've learned a lot from the conflicts in in ukraine and perhaps in myanmar too was their use of fpv drones a first person view drone how do you describe it it's like your eyes are on the front of the drone is that a good description Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
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It's like you're flying. Yeah. And there are videos of whole classrooms of HCS, I guess, soldiers, militants, whatever you want to call them, practicing flying drones or using the controllers to play a computer game where you have to go through checkpoints and follow a route and things. And they seem to have developed a training course that then gave them this drone brigade, which they used...
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incredibly effectively. They had these massive first-person view drones that were almost like a sort of ersatz cruise missile. And it was, I think, one of those that penetrated some kind of command headquarters in Aleppo in the early days of the battle there, killed several important officers and commanders, and helped to then spread that panic which they rode all the way to Damascus, right?
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So this use of drones was extremely consequential. The other thing that they used and which we've seen the SDF use a lot is these pulsar thermal optics. So a thermal optic sees heat, right? I guess would be the easiest way to describe it. And it maps heat in a visual fashion for the user. And in this case, they put them on their rifles and they're able to see other people at night.
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Our friend Carl, who we had on last week, week before maybe, Carl made a really good video about thermal versus night vision on his InRangeTV channel. I'll link it in the notes because I think it's worth people checking out if they're not familiar with this technology at all.
Behind the Bastards
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The optics he used were not the optics they're using, but these thermal optics, you've seen them a lot with the SDF, especially in Afreen. They'll do these night missions, right? Yeah. When you look at the recording from the thermal optic, it looks like people are glowing because... They are the hottest things in that area. And it makes it very easy to target people.
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And HTS used these a lot when they were attacking Aleppo, right? These thermal optics that they mounted on their rifles and that allowed them to pretty much The United States used to talk about owning the night, right? Because it had night vision when no one else does.
Behind the Bastards
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Night vision has proliferated a long way now, and that means that some of the ways that they used to use night vision, they can't anymore. Like, for instance, they used to send out lasers that were only visible under night vision to aim weapons. If your adversary has night vision as well, you've now created a giant line that goes right back to you if you're using a laser aiming device.
Behind the Bastards
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So you can't do that. But these thermal optics, especially when they're fighting against the Syrian Arab Army, who, I mean, these conscripts are massively demoralized, right? They're underpaid. They're underfed. Did you meet any when you were in Rojava? Did you meet any people who defected?
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, extremely. And I think when you meet the people who have been regime soldiers and come across, often they're like... They seem to be happy being waiters or working in the market in Rojava because their pay was so bad and their lives were so miserable as conscripts that they'd rather just come and work any job they can get in AANES. And I think...
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When you've got those guys going up against well-trained people from HTS with these thermal optics, with these using drones, their communications were solid. You can tell from their appearance that a lot of these guys are professionalized. They're almost indistinguishable from US troops.
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I think you and I had both responded to this tweet about some YouTube guy was shocked that people were wearing helmets online. and body armour, which that has been the aesthetic of violence, at least in places where the US has operated for decades. I don't know, half a decade, would you say? Like the sort of US special forces look.
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I think number three as well, like we should not understate the desire to look like your avatar on call of duty.
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Yeah, people, I think, if you've not been, you won't realize how young a lot of these people are. This incredible professionalism, incredible professionalism, I'm overstating it, but this dramatic change in the appearance and conduct of these rebels, particularly HDS, occurred over about three or four years from the ceasefire in 2020 to this offensive in 2024. And I think...
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gives us an insight into the way that war is changing, right? That access to information is easier than it ever has been. And access to a lot of these technologies has proliferated massively. Because we've seen in Myanmar, right, drones proliferate. People 3D print little night vision goggles in Myanmar. I spoke to Meowc about it about a year and a half ago.
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People remember Meowc from our Myanmar series about 3D printing little night vision goggles that use the camera from those security cameras that can kind of see at night. They use those and then a tiny LCD screen. Of course, drones are everywhere now, right? Things like plate carriers. Even you see rebels in Myanmar wearing them, buying them from AliExpress.
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All of the technology, all of the tactics also look much easier to find on the internet. Robert and I have both spoken to people who have said they go on YouTube to learn about military tactics and small arms even, and how to use different weapon systems when they capture them. I think it's a real change in the way that conflict is conducted.
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And it's one that we will probably continue to see as like... you know, the world isn't getting any more peaceful. Nope. And with a lot of, you know, Russia and Iran took a massive L in Syria. That doesn't mean that they're not gone as sort of global actors. We will continue to see, particularly Russia, obviously fighting in Ukraine.
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And I think it's worth looking at what happened in Syria so that we can understand what we're going to see in other parts of the world.
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And it might still be. Already, Germany and the Netherlands have stopped processing asylum applications from Syria, which is concerning. But yeah, I think it's worth continuing to keep an eye on. I will continue to post about it. We will continue to inform you about it here. We will continue to bring on people who have more expertise and insight than we do.
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So yeah, we hope you'll keep an eye on it. I just want to end by saying that the democratic project in Rojava is under a great deal of threat. Yes. Currently, more than it has been for perhaps a decade. Yep. They do not have an ally in the United States. They do not, as far as we know, have an ally in Israel. And from what we've seen, It's one thing what Israel says.
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It's another thing what Israel does. And what Israel has been doing today is bombing ammunition that they already have in the ANES. And that means that it's more important than ever that you do what you can to support them. If you go to the emergency committee for a Java, you can find them online. You find them on all different kinds of social media sites.
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They have a toolkit for supporting Rojava right now. I would urge you, if you care about that project, if you care about building democracy without the state, if you care about building a place where women and men are equal and the revolution was led by women. It's not a revolution that includes women. It's a revolution by women for women. I would encourage you to do what you can to support them.
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Yeah. Also, the problem is a lot of the orgs that are currently dominating leftist spaces in the United States are trash. Yeah. And bad for people. Bad for people in them, bad for people who are not in them. Yeah. Here's a little test you can do. Is your org currently sad that Bashar al-Assad is no longer governing Syria? Because if that's the case, leave.
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Yeah. Can I tell a little organizing story? Do we have time? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, go for it. So I remember in like 2018, I am on a trip with a friend. We're coming back and we see the arrival of the migrant caravan. One of the migrant caravans, the one that everyone decided to have a fucking cow about right before the 2018 midterms.
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And at that time, they were corralling the people of the migrant caravan in a baseball stadium in Tijuana. And, like, it was raining every day, so the baseball stadium ends up looking like the Battle of the Somme after, like, a couple of days, right? You know, kids in needy mud and shit. And I didn't particularly know what to do, but evidently there were people there who were hungry and thirsty.
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And so I get three of my friends. At this time, I was still making... about half my money riding bicycles and the other half writing. So my friends and I are supposed to do a long bike ride. All of us are people who make a living riding bikes, right? We're not like expert organizers. And I was like, hey guys, this is fucked. What should we do?
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We called a friend who has a company who makes waffles. We obtained as many waffles as we could physically carry across the border. At that time, we weren't able to get in. We found a way to get in. We began distributing the waffles. After that, we put something online. People sent us money and we continued feeding people for months. None of us, I think, had a particular plan or a schedule.
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Yeah, it was a bit chaotic at times. But A, we were able to do that with a lot of other people. Clearly, it wasn't just us, right? But we were able to process tens of thousands of dollars and feed thousands of people.
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B, everyone there, and I've seen this countless times, especially working and organizing with, well, with refugees for the most part, people are so good at organizing each other and themselves.
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Like when we got there with bottles of water and food, there were a thousand people there who have not had sometimes a drink for days, let alone more than a thousand, I think, let alone something hot to eat, right? Yeah. Everybody made sure that the children and the sick people got what they needed first. Organizing is something that is very inherent in us as people.
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Yeah, literally, it was this morning. So I'm tired. Yesterday morning, I have some of my house neighbors, right? And it was cold. And so I went out and gave them some hot breakfast or hot coffee. It's super easy to do. If you are struggling socially, wherever you are, maybe you're finding it hard to make friends.
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I know that's the thing that people often struggle with, especially if you've moved to a new place or post-pandemic or you're still concerned with large gatherings or any of those things. If you start doing that, you will find other people who want to do it too. So many of my friends I organize with are people...
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Like, when we had the end of Title 42 and people were in between the fences there, a lot of the people who I organize with now or who I help people with now, I didn't know. I just showed up with a giant solar generator that I happen to have and some stuff that we had to whip around a cool zone for.
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And, like, people who care about the same things as you are generally cool, and it's a good way to make friends, and then you can go on from there.
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Yeah, it could literally be anything, right? Like if you've got some people to go to a bar, you have the skills.
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Yeah, I think the best solution for despair is... I'm thinking of a quotation here, something, the busy bee has no time for despair. But the thing that makes me feel better about the world is that I have seen that people can fix massive problems with very few resources by just showing up.
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And I think organizing is what gives me, what allows me to enter this period of time that we're entering into with a great deal more hope than I otherwise would have done.
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Is it the products and services that support this podcast?
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If you've ever been a person who uses dating apps, especially if you're a woman, then you know how to OSINT, actually. Maybe you don't credit yourself with that skill, but 100% that like you've developed that skill to keep yourself safe.
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Yeah, sure. So open source intelligence is an acronym that doesn't really need to exist. It's gathering information from open sources, things that are openly accessible, as opposed to like HUMINT, which is like being a spy. or SIGINT, which is capturing signals.
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Open source information is you're creeping someone's Instagram, creeping their Facebook, looking at the weird fucking shit that they put on Goodreads, right? All the data that is out there largely on the internet about us. A lot of people put a lot of information on the internet and it's very easy and...
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I would imagine if you're under 50 and maybe if you're over 52, you just know how to do this because it's what you do anyway when you want to find out about someone. Especially if you are a person who goes on dates with people who you haven't met before and haven't been introduced to by a mutual friend, but you meet on the internet, you probably already do this to keep yourself safe.
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The man credibly accused of sleeping with an underage woman lots of times.
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The amount of things that people can't access because they can't get there is vast. Especially when I talk to migrants who have recently arrived in the US. They don't have a US cell phone. They can't Uber. Oftentimes, nowadays, you can't even pay for mass transit with cash. You have to have a special card. And then you have to get to the place to get the card, right?
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The problems you can solve by being able to drive someone five miles are enormous. Yeah. especially in the US where everything is designed around everyone owning a motor car at all times. Yep.
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It's useful. It's important. It's okay if that's not something you can physically do or that works for the way you like to live your life. Another thing I was thinking of, which can be massively important and people don't realize, is If you know how to take off a taillight and replace the bulb in it... Yes.
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Like, we're entering a time when people with DACA, people with TPS, people who are undocumented, people who are on temporary migration statuses are going to be deathly afraid of any interaction with law enforcement.
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If you can... change the bulb on someone's taillight or their turn signal indicator for those of us in the UK, then you can meaningfully protect that person in a really important way.
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That's a badge for those of us in the Commonwealth. Also, if you have a sewing machine. Yeah, I was about to mention that. Yeah, you're a hero. Yeah, one of my friends recently made me a little patch and it's really cool and I like it and I'm putting it on my stuff. But if you can sew, like that's a skill that I do not have. And it's so great when people can...
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like fix stuff for someone or you know make stuff fit someone you know if you're a person who finds it hard to get clothes that you like to wear that make you feel good and someone one of my friends could do that and uh one of my friends was making uh clothes for another friend for like a uh renaissance fair and like it was the nicest thing I've seen someone do for someone else in a very long time it really made her like yeah
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feel nice and cared for. And you might think that this is just a weird little thing that you like to do with your sewing machine, but you can meaningfully really make someone feel cared for using that.
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I remember one of, we had one night last September, it was so cold, we were in the desert, and there were like a thousand people, right? And we were, at that point we were really struggling to feed everyone even, you know, because there was so few of us. But my friend bought out like their guitar and some bongo drums they had, and I think I had my harmonica in my truck.
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And we were sitting around with these, we had some Sikh guys, had some Uyghur folks come from China, and then some Kurdish people, and they were all just playing their different music. And it was so nice. Taking people out of a shitty situation for a moment with music, again, don't underestimate how important that is. Don't feel like if you have that skill, it's not a useful one.
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Yeah. And going back to your music as a, like, morale is a terrain of struggle. Like, the other memory I have last year of playing guitars is in Rojava, being inside at night because everyone was getting drone struck all the time. And it was dangerous to be driving around, sitting around with some Azidi friends. And, like, we spent all night playing the Oud, which is like a...
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It's like a guitar with a gourd on the bottom. I don't know how to describe it. It's a stringed instrument. It's a stringed instrument is what it is. And that made everyone so happy. We had such a nice evening. Everyone was able to get through this relatively difficult thing.
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It sucks that people are being killed just for driving around or existing and they're bombing all the civilian infrastructure and the power keeps going out and all these things. But there's a reason those people have kept Ood around after 15, 13 years of war. And it's because it is important. And so don't overlook that.
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I don't want to call out any organization in particular. There is an organization that perceives organizing to exist solely in the realm of wearing a high-vis vest and carrying a clipboard and getting people to write their email addresses down and then telling them to attend things. And maybe there are several organizations like that. I don't know. I've perceived one locally.
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If you don't have those bonds, those interpersonal relationships... These things won't hang together. So many of my happiest organizing memories, again, going down James's memory lane, I guess. I have a memory of Christmas Eve last year, 2023. Me and my friends have been out.
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I know some of them listen because some of them have come across from different states to help us over their Christmas holidays, which is nice. And it was cold. And we had been feeding people all day. And then we'd heard some people in another location that we'd gone to find.
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And then we got to the end of the day and like, rather than just going home, I had a bunch of, we had some MREs left, the refugee MREs, sort of vegan. Lots of us are vegan. So we were like, oh, we're not going to find any other place. vegan food in the middle of nowhere out here.
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So we all sat around eating our little vegan MREs and like just talking and like sharing some thoughts and things we experienced over the last months of doing this. And like, it's those moments that make your organizing group so much stronger.
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No one's telling anyone to do anything, you know, like those genuine bonds and the love and friendship we build up between each other, doing things that are very important. Don't overlook the value of those because it's extremely valuable.
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Yeah, definitely. I've had some wonderful meals in war zones and I've deeply appreciated those people. More broadly, though, those ties, like the way we organize without the state, the reason I believe that that is the way we should organize and the way we will continue to organize in a way that we can make the state irrelevant is different.
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because we understand each other as people and care about each other as people. And then we approach our organizing holistically, right? With everyone in it, knowing this person is good at this, but they're struggling with this right now. And I care about them. So I'm not going to make them do that right now. That is how we can build sustainable communities in a way that state cannot.
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And in a way that capitalism cannot, right? Because, uh,
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fucking hurts rent a car doesn't care or know about its employees in a way that we who organize with people and care and love one another do and like that's where organizations will always be stronger than those created by capitalism or the state yeah unfortunately speaking of capitalism or the state we're taking our last ad break yeah hopefully it's hurts rent a car
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Yeah, yeah. Famously, no other regimes have harkened back to the classical era.
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I'm ready to report the news. I have never been more ready. Okay, this is going to be a long run because there was a raft of executive orders about the border in the... A flurry. A flurry, yeah. A sounder.
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We can't use a murder like crows, you know, the collective noun for crows. I mean, this is going to result in a murder. Yeah, well... So, let's start with a couple of the big ones, right? The first one was essentially revoking the right to asylum to anyone, quote, engaged in the invasion across the southern border, end quote.
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I want to highlight this invasion language because, obviously, I'd venture to say I've spent more time at the southern border of the United States than anyone in the executive branch and most people reporting on it, too. Mm-hmm. The idea of an invasion is laughable. I've been at the border twice since Trump was inaugurated. It's extremely quiet. I've never seen things more quiet.
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The only remarkable thing I saw was a pig, a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig, which some people have released, which now lives there. But I think it's being rehomed because of some other stuff that we will talk about later. But this invasion language is important because...
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It's used as a justification for some of the things that the executive branch is doing, which would otherwise seem to be outside of its authority. It's getting the national security and counterterrorism treatment. And anyone who's followed US politics for the last 20 years will understand that that means an effective waiver for all of your constitutional rights.
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And migrants have always been people who don't have rights. And this is just something that we're now seeing further pushed. So let's go through some of these orders aside from the effective asylum ban. He directed the United States Northern Command to quote-unquote seal the border. This has resulted in a deployment of about 1,600 United States troops.
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Most of them are military police or engineers. We've got Marines and we've got Army. In the San Diego sector, it's First Marines out of Pendleton. They're the ones that I've seen locally. He has directed...
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various government departments and the Attorney General to begin, quote, identifying countries throughout the world for which vetting and screening information is so deficient as to warrant a partial full suspension on the admission of nationals from those countries. This is effectively the travel ban that we saw in the first Trump administration or a version of that, right?
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It's a visa revocation or travel ban for people from certain countries. And we can guess what those countries will be. Last time they were, for the most part, majority Muslim countries, right? And we might well see that again. They have attempted to rescind birthright citizenship for children of undocumented families, right?
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This is one, if people go back to our, like, what can Trump do for mass deportations podcast that Robert, Sophie and I did sometime in November, I think. You'll get more information there on what is and what is not possible than we have time to go into today. But you're seeing a lot of the things that we talked about there coming into reality now, I guess.
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Specifically, the attempt to rescind birthright citizenship relies on the idea that they are not, quote unquote, under the jurisdiction thereof of the United States, which is how the 14th Amendment is phrased today.
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Generally, it is understood that people who are not considered to be under the jurisdiction of the United States and therefore don't get citizenship when they're born here are the children of diplomats because they have some diplomatic immunity, right? So they're not necessarily governed by United States laws in all areas.
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And that is why children of diplomats don't get citizenship even when they're born here. The Trump administration is arguing this applies to children of undocumented people as well. There are five court cases challenging that already, so they've got an uphill battle in the courts there. He has attempted to restart the Migrant Protection Protocol, MPP, better known as Remain in Mexico, right?
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The Migrant Protection Protocol requires migrants to wait in Mexico where their immigration cases are processed. In practice, it puts them in a lot of danger, right? Some of them are fleeing Mexico. Others are fleeing groups or states that can reach them in Mexico. So it leaves them in an unsafe place.
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The other thing he did while Trump was still in the inaugural ceremonies, literally minutes after taking office, was canceling CBP-1. CBP-1, there is a lot of misinformation about what CBP-1 is. CBP-1 is an application that allowed migrants to make an appointment, and they had to be either in southern border states of Mexico or north of Mexico City,
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They could then make an appointment to approach a United States port of entry, those are the places where you can enter across the land border, and make their case for their asylum, right, do their first asylum interview.
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Yeah, making a CBP-1 appointment is quote-unquote the right way.
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Yeah, you have a legal right to enter between ports of entry and still make an asylum claim, which is what we saw earlier. in the outdoor detention situation, right? But doing it via CBP1 is like the belt and braces correct way to do it. People who had appointments at noon Pacific on the day Trump was inaugurated saw those appointments canceled. They can't make appointments anymore. CBP1 is gone.
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Those people who have waited an average of nine months in dangerous places have wasted their time. They now don't have a pathway to asylum in this country. If you go back to my episodes on the Dalian Gap, you will hear some of those people, right? Those people are now stuck in Mexico without really any legal means to enter the United States and claim asylum.
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Trump has directed ICE to increase detention capacity. We spoke about this in our previous podcast. The amount of detention beds they would need to hit the 13 million deportations they talked about is immense. But one of the things they are doing is starting to house people. It's people whose countries won't accept them for deportation, right, which is a thing that has happened.
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The United States has begun using military aircraft for deportations in the last two weeks. I want to stress that this isn't a capacity issue. Biden deported 8,000 people in a month in the September to October of 2021. Trump is aiming to hit 5,000. Biden did it all with contractor flights. Trump is doing a lower number and using Air Force flights. This is not because he can't get the contractors.
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It's purely an aesthetic choice. And it's an aesthetic choice which has ruffled enough feathers in South and Central America that you have Honduras saying that they're going to revoke the U.S. mission to have a military base in Honduras as they mistreat migrants. We had Colombia briefly refusing U.S. military flights with deportees. Mexico doing the same. Briefly entering a trade war with Colombia.
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Yeah. The trade war with Colombia was averted when Colombia sent its own military plane to get these deportees. Yeah, Colombia caved immediately. Yeah, that they will continue to accept U.S. deportees, as they have done for a long time, right? Again, if you listen to my Darien series, you'll hear of some Colombian people being deported. We're now getting into things that are like more...
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These are orders that we haven't seen realized yet. One of them is he has talked about having the attorney general remove as far as possible federal funding from so-called sanctuary jurisdictions, right? These are normally places where local law enforcement will cooperate with federal immigration enforcement. ICE makes a majority of its detentions from people who are already detained.
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People who are like arrested by police. Yes, exactly. Yeah, for whatever. And then those police notify ICE and ICE come get them. We've seen a lot more of door-to-door ICE raids in the last two weeks, and they've been ramping up even really this week, but ever since Trump was inaugurated. We've seen ICE attempting to enter people's homes.
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Often they just have a warrant issued by themselves rather than a judicial warrant. So we've seen people refusing to let them into their homes. We've also seen the removal of the quote-unquote sensitive places doctrine. Sensitive places had previously been understood to be schools, churches, and hospitals. Now ICE is conducting quote-unquote enforcement operations in those places.
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Those are actually places, like the sensitive places doctrine had been in place for a long time. This wasn't like a Biden thing. This had been a long-term thing. So ICE is now, and we've seen immigration actions conducted at a church in Atlanta, for instance. We've seen, I think there were actually Secret Service agents who identified themselves as ICE agents at a school in Chicago.
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because a child had posted an anti-Trump video. And then I guess the last thing that we are seeing is this designation of organized crime groups as foreign terrorist organizations. This is an interesting one. We haven't really seen any action on this yet, but it's one of his executive orders in day one.
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In his first administration, he designated Iran's Quds Force as a foreign terrorist organization and then proceeded to kill their leader, right? So this FTO designation opens up the possibility of... A lot of like covert activity. I'm talking like CIA and like tier one special forces units.
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It also allows him to bring about economic sanctions on anyone materially supporting these organized crime organizations. In practice, that would encompass huge swaths of the Mexican economy, right? Because there are people... in agriculture, people in business who are paying protection or they're being extorted to pay money, right?
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And so in theory, those people are now materially benefiting a terrorist organization and they could be sanctioned as well. We will have to see how this plays out, I guess. And there's still, the directive was to look into and then name these groups.
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Yeah, Hexeth has talked about using special forces in Mexico. Oh, yes.
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Yeah, it's also in our Agenda 47 episodes if people want to go back there. Direct action raids in Mexico, drone warfare in Mexico. Obviously... Doing this without the permission of the Mexican government would be an act of war, right? Like killing foreign nationals without the permission of their government, conducting direct action raids, bombing another country. That is an act of war. The U.S.
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has had an FID, Foreign Internal Defense Mission, right, where it trains, advises and assists Mexican law enforcement and military for a long time. The guys who arrested El Chapo, for instance, were trained, I think, by MARSOC. But this has been happening for a long time. But to go from that to unsanctioned direct action would be a huge, huge step up.
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The only really analogous, directly analogous thing I can think of is Clinton with the Plan Colombia designating FARC as a foreign terrorist organization. But that was very much with the cooperation and support of the Colombian government. We're seeing a much more adversarial situation. between the United States and Mexico right now. The last thing I want to mention is this deployment.
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I'd spoken about it, but there are about 1,600 troops deployed right now. Biden deployed 1,500 troops in the summer of 2023. This is not a vastly different number They are doing different things. They seem to be chucking razor wire on top of the wall and being photographed. They're two major jobs at the moment. We will see how that plays out.
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Also, with reference to the military, Trump immediately cancelled the refugee resettlement program. This left people all over the world stranded, including Afghans, many of whom worked for the United States or are family members of US service people. The refugee resettlement program, people don't come to the southern border.
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They go do all their background things and then fly into the United States to different status to entering and claiming asylum. Those people, many of whom had booked flights, found their flights were cancelled. They're now stranded. Lots of them are stranded in Pakistan and facing immigration enforcement there in the case of the Afghans.
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So yeah, that is a speed run of all the terrible Trump immigration executive orders. We'll be reporting on this pretty extensively, so you can keep coming back for more. But another thing that we have more of right now is advertisements.
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I mean, Denali has been Denali for longer than America has existed. It's just... Right, right, right.
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Yes, yeah, yeah. You're not going to get much buy-in on that.
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Let me tell you, Panamanians, not stoked. I've been receiving communications from Panama where I was in September. They are burning American flags.
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Well, he did deregulate drilling in Alaska. Drill, baby, drill. I will be up there later this year talking to people in Alaska about drill, baby, drill. Very excited for that. Mm-hmm.
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I mean, look at Colombia, right? He immediately went to like 11 on the retaliation scale and effectively received concessions.
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Right. Yeah. And like Biden did significant legwork for detention that is cruel and unusual. Yes. With his legal defense and his establishment of outdoor detention for migrants since the end of Title 42 in May of 23. Mm hmm. And I think, like, we have to acknowledge that. I know people are very much into the, like, don't criticize the Dems right now.
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Like, if they don't change, if taking a fat L in what should have been one of the easiest elections of the century doesn't change them, then nothing will. And, like, we have to acknowledge that we are going to concentration camps quicker. I mean, there were foreign outlets that called the outdoor detention sites in Hakumba concentration camps. Yeah. Right? Because they sure as hell look like one.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 167
right now like yeah no no stop it yeah like we have you can trace a line from like Bosque Redondo right where they sent the Navajo people right Bosque Redondo is a great thing to bring yeah yes and you can trace a direct line from that to the outdoor detention camps we saw in 2023 where people were forced to remain in one place without food water or shelter and people died as a result of that last year two years ago
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 167
And like from there to Guantanamo Bay, it is not a massive leap. And yeah, just being like, we don't have Auschwitz. It's just asinine. Like if you, if you can't acknowledge that America has a long history of doing this and you really need to examine your own preconceptions before like speaking for others. Yep. All right.