James Stout
Appearances
Behind the Bastards
Part One: The Grifters Behind The Fake Autism 'Cure' Industry
They're incredibly brave people and they've saved more than 300 lives. You can read more about them by going to my Patreon post, which also includes all the links for donation. The website for that is tinyurl.com slash help hyphen Myanmar. That's
Behind the Bastards
Part One: The Grifters Behind The Fake Autism 'Cure' Industry
tinyurl.com slash h-e-l-p hyphen m-y-a-n-m-a-r if you'd like to donate somewhere else an organization that you can donate to is the free burma rangers free burma rangers.org they're a fantastic ngo they've been doing a lot of medical work uh in the liberated zones of myanmar for a very long time they've also worked in rajava and lots of other places around the world where people need help
Behind the Bastards
Part One: The Grifters Behind The Fake Autism 'Cure' Industry
I spoke to Dave from FPR today, he's well, and he told me that they're already starting to respond to the disaster. So to donate to them, FreeBurmaRangers.org. Thanks very much. We appreciate your support.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: The Grifters Behind The Fake Autism 'Cure' Industry
Hi, everybody. It's James here. If you didn't listen to what could happen here, you might not recognize me. My name is James Stout, and I am the guy who pops onto this feed every few months to tell you something very sad and then ask for your money. And that's why I'm here today. A terrible earthquake struck Myanmar today, the day I'm recording this, which is Friday, the 28th of March.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: The Grifters Behind The Fake Autism 'Cure' Industry
It was 7.7 on the Richter scale. We know of more than 100 deaths, but it's likely the death toll is much, much, much higher. Lots of the telegraph and internet infrastructure has been taken out by the earthquake and the Hunter restricts internet and social media access. So we don't really know the full story.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: The Grifters Behind The Fake Autism 'Cure' Industry
extent of the death, but we can imagine it will be very high as one of the areas most affected was Mandalay, which is the second largest city in Myanmar. I've spoken to half a dozen sources in Myanmar today, people who Robert and I have interviewed before. They're all okay, but they all shared how terrible things were.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: The Grifters Behind The Fake Autism 'Cure' Industry
They said things were as bad as they were at the time of Cyclone Nargis, which was a terrible disaster in 2008. If you would like to support the people of Burma who are currently fighting against a tyrannical dictatorship, as well as dealing with the consequences of this natural disaster, there are a couple of ways you can do so.
Behind the Bastards
Part One: The Grifters Behind The Fake Autism 'Cure' Industry
I was actually already running a fundraiser on my Patreon for MobiePDF. They are a casualty evacuation team in Southern Shan State, right at the fiercest part of the fighting right now. They don't fight. What they do is they go and they evacuate people who have been injured and they provide medical services to internally displaced people. They've been doing this since 2021.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Grifters Behind The Fake Autism 'Cure' Industry
They're incredibly brave people and they've saved more than 300 lives. You can read more about them by going to my Patreon post, which also includes all the links for donation. The website for that is tinyurl.com slash help hyphen Myanmar. That's tinyurl.com slash H-E-L-P hyphen M-Y-A-N-M-A-R.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Grifters Behind The Fake Autism 'Cure' Industry
If you'd like to donate somewhere else, an organization that you can donate to is the Free Burma Rangers, freeburmarangers.org. They're a fantastic NGO. They've been doing a lot of medical work in the liberated zones of Myanmar for a very long time. They've also worked in Rojava and lots of other places around the world where people need help.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Grifters Behind The Fake Autism 'Cure' Industry
I spoke to Dave from FPR today, he's well, and he told me that they're already starting to respond to the disaster. So to donate to them, FreeBurmaRangers.org. Thanks very much. We appreciate your support.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Grifters Behind The Fake Autism 'Cure' Industry
Hi everybody, it's James here. If you didn't listen to What Could Happen Here, you might not recognise me. My name's James Stout and I'm the guy who pops onto this feed every few months to tell you something very sad and then ask for your money. And that's why I'm here today. A terrible earthquake struck Myanmar today, the day I'm recording this, which is Friday the 28th of March.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Grifters Behind The Fake Autism 'Cure' Industry
It was 7.7 on the Richter scale. We know of more than 100 deaths, but it's likely the death toll is much, much, much higher. Lots of the telegraph and internet infrastructure has been taken out by the earthquake, and the Hunter restricts internet and social media access. So we don't really know the full...
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Grifters Behind The Fake Autism 'Cure' Industry
extent of the death, but we can imagine it will be very high as one of the areas most affected was Mandalay, which is the second largest city in Myanmar. I've spoken to half a dozen sources in Myanmar today, people who Robert and I have interviewed before. They're all okay, but they all shared how terrible things were.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Grifters Behind The Fake Autism 'Cure' Industry
They said things were as bad as they were at the time of Cyclone Nargis, which was a terrible disaster in 2008. If you would like to support the people of Burma who are currently fighting against a tyrannical dictatorship, as well as dealing with the consequences of this natural disaster, there are a couple of ways you can do so.
Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Grifters Behind The Fake Autism 'Cure' Industry
I was actually already running a fundraiser on my Patreon for Mobier PDF. They are a casualty evacuation team in Southern Shan State, right at the fiercest part of the fighting right now. They don't fight. What they do is they go and they evacuate people who have been injured and they provide medical services to internally displaced people. They've been doing this since 2021.
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In my defense, I'm on a lot of podcasts. I was going to say that just because Robert Evans lives in like a constant podcast.
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Yeah, if you didn't get the turkey joke, we explain it in detail there.
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Yeah, it is like the opening credits of a disaster movie, the White House Twitter feed right now.
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They seem to be an open violation of that, though. Yeah. Like they were told to keep paying USAID stuff and they just said they won't.
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Yeah, perfect. Okay. So what I want to talk about is this. It was first reported by the New York Times. I've since confirmed it with sources on the ground in Panama. The Trump administration is detaining migrants that it can't deport to their home countries in Panama currently. So currently, these are places where the US doesn't have good relations with their government, right?
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There'll be Afghans, there'll be Iranians, people like that. The US seems to have found a way to deport Venezuelans using an airline that was sanctioned until the day it apparently landed in the US military base to take Venezuelan people back to Venezuela. If you want to hear about people leaving Iran and why they're leaving Iran, you can listen to my episodes I did in The Dalian Gap.
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They came out late October and November of last year. But Right now, they're being kind of corralled in a hotel in Panama City, from what I've heard. And just this morning, the transport to San Vicente began. So the New York Times kind of mischaracterizes the detention center at San Vicente. I'm guessing this is because they haven't been there. And I have.
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They called it like a detention center that's being built, quote, close to the jungle. It looks close to the jungle if you're looking on Google Maps, I suppose. It's off the Pan American Highway, actually. You literally take a dirt road off the Pan American Highway and you come across this shithole.
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huge prison facility it's all big modern white buildings the old facility that was there burned down and it's been rebuilt largely i'm guessing with money from when the biden administration was funding deportations from panama in 2024 it's a vast detention facility at the time when i went there my fixer daddy and ella and i weren't allowed to access the facility the
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But it was very clearly like too big for what its stated purpose was. Its stated purpose was people who had warrants for their arrest and had been found to have warrants for their arrest when they entered Panama and were being deported back to the countries where they had warrants. I've spoken to half a dozen to a dozen people who were detained there.
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And I just got one quotation to read and then we can talk about this. They treated us very badly, verbally and psychologically. We all had to do our business in the same cell. They threw food on the floor for us to eat, and we were all in handcuffs.
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Yeah. So the legality of taking someone to a third country is a little unclear, right? Of course, the United States has done this. Well, Guantanamo Bay is technically American soil, I guess, but they've also, they've done it in other places around the world that are not Guantanamo Bay throughout the war on terror. This is not the same as the El Salvador plan.
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The United States Department of Homeland Security, the Secretary for Homeland Security attended the inauguration of the new Panamanian president, DHS and the Panamanian executive have a very close relationship. Got it. The US was funding deportations for Panama under Biden. They claimed that these were only people who had warrants for their arrest in the countries they were being deported back to.
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When I spoke to those people, I was there when they literally took the families apart, put the people in a truck, sent them off to San Vicente and deported them. And these guys, if they had warrants for their arrest, it seems very odd because when they arrived back in Colombia, they were not detained or arrested.
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And if you have a warrant for someone and they get handed to you, that's when you're going to detain them, right? And none of them were detained. They just released back to their day-to-day life in Colombia. So there was definitely precedent for this set by the Biden administration. But what's happening now is a degree worse, right? Taking people...
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I don't know what the long-term plan for these Afghan and Iranian people is, right? Were they going to live in San Vicente? Like, whose custody are they in? Yeah, like, is this like a DHS black site? Yeah, no, absolutely. Are they on U.S. soil in San Vicente? Certainly when I was there, it was secured exclusively by Panamanian authorities, not by U.S. authorities.
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So like the legal process, I'm guessing, like, I don't know if there is one beyond like, we can't deport these people back to their countries. We want to, number needs to go up, right? There's been reporting that Donald Trump is upset that his deportation numbers haven't hit the numbers that Biden did. Yeah.
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And so they're doing things like this, which appears to be move fast and break things, I guess. Like, I don't really know how to describe it.
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Yes, they are. Yeah, including lots of human rights conventions. As we're recording this on Wednesday afternoon, I just heard from a friend in Panama that 300 people were transferred to San Vicente. And it looks like 179 of them have no sort of clear path to be deported back to their home countries, no accepted place to send them.
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So those are the people who seem to be in legal limbo right now in Panama and San Vicente for a matter of time that we don't know in a status that we don't yet. No, it isn't clear. But yeah, this is pretty bad. Like I say, I've been on the ground. I don't have any other reporters who have been on the ground in San Vicente. We're very well sourced in Panama and among the migrant community.
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So we're going to continue reporting on this. I've already sent some requests for comment out. So I would expect us to have something out on this in the next couple of weeks, hopefully.
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Did Garrison say something rude or offensive when I had to take my headphones off to take off my plate carrier?
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Oh yeah, no, they are beaten into a corner. I didn't put up much of a fight.
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Yeah, like, one of the, like, types of guys who I've run into when I'm out in the mountains is people who, like, have very reasonably assessed that people in the United States don't have access to the healthiest food, especially if they don't have a lot of money, and that that is impacting their health, right? That's a fair enough assessment. Sure.
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To go from that to, like, and I just want someone who will do something about it, so I guess this RFK guy is okay.
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It's really worrying. And there's a measles outbreak right now, right? In Laredo, like in Texas. 300 people last I checked in Laredo, around Laredo, yeah.
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If you're not aware of how devastating measles outbreaks can be, I'd really encourage you to look into the outbreak in Samoa and the absolutely heartbreaking consequences of that.
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Yeah, they ran out of child-sized coffins and had to ask for people to send more.
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Like... Yeah, and like, I'll just say, like, I've worked in diabetes education in the past, right? And in various non-profit capacities, not that kind of doctor. But I have seen the people who have died because they have been subjected to this kind of bullshit. Like, I know the people who have lost children and loved ones because of this.
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And it is heartbreaking to think that somebody, normally it's somebody trying to make money, would lie to someone about their health, right? And the people who are most vulnerable to this are the people who are also already struggling to access healthcare and access medications. And it is disgusting to see the government pushing this.
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Yeah, this is kind of foundational to the Constitution, right? Access to an attorney, the right to an attorney. And it's, again, something that, like, even under Biden, the DHS have been taking a swing at. Specifically, we've done an episode last year about transferring... detained people in ICE custody away from their attorneys, right?
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In most cases, it was people from California, specifically San Diego County, because San Diego County had a program that funded some attorney access and moving them to Texas. So you're either going to bleed that program dry, flying attorneys to Texas or...
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have them do it over a phone call, but a lot of these people who are detained because they come from dictatorial countries don't feel like phone calls are secure. And so they're not really going to feel comfortable talking to their attorney on a phone call. We've done a whole episode about that. You can go back and listen to it.
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Yeah, I mean, that's kind of what they're going for throughout, right? But like, I know, for instance, in California, lots of universities have these like know your rights cards accessible that you can have them in your lectures and give them out to your students. They can take them regardless of citizenship status, right? Which is generally the way to approach this, right?
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With an agnostic approach to citizenship. Correct. You don't certainly want to be holding a, if you're undocumented, come to this thing at this time and we'll give you a know your rights session. Like that is not a smart way to approach this. But yeah, like immigration agnostic, know your rights trainings.
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They're kind of foundational to like constitutional rights that they're pretty much front and center of things you're allowed.
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That's right. It's in there. Article 22. It's like they can't put the soldiers in your bedroom unless they're sponsored by. I mean, look, depending on the soldier.
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Tariff talk with Mia Wong. There we go. I thought Garrison said turf talk in a Canadian way. Very different podcast, much more cursing.
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Great. Cool. Luckily, SpaceX has had no notable incidents, and so I'm sure that will be fine. No, they didn't just hide a rocket going off.
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it's certainly not helping right that like the faa was already understaffed like as you as you said people were already dying in plane crashes taking staff away from the faa is not helping like we can't isolate that from every crash that happens and like it's not it's not just that it's also like the continued the continued hiring freeze largely air traffic control operators have not been affected by the firings uh other support staff have which are still just as crucial
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You should explain what a probational employee is.
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For legal reasons, this is a joke. We do not want any nukes. It is coolzontipsatproton.me. You can contact us there. It is protonmailisencrypted. That only means that the mail is encrypted if you send from a Proton email address to a Proton email address. None of that means that you are necessarily 100% secure, but it's the best option that we have for right now.
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If you'd like to reach out to us, please feel free to do so. coolzontipsatproton.me. We reported the news. We reported the news.
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Yeah. And like, I believe he didn't, isn't he like a member of the university Buddhist club?
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Yeah, yeah. The way he and his group were referred to during COVID, he's now using in the same fashion.
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Like you said, we already know because people are seeking out diagnoses. Right. We have better awareness of it now.
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We're back. Thank you, future Garrison and future Mia. So it's my role here to update you on the board of fascism, right? And that's what I'm here to do. Where I want to start this week is in the Roosevelt Reservation. This is something that's been reported on a little bit. It's wreaked largely by people who maybe only found out about it this week and...
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looked at the Wikipedia page and then wrote a story. The Roosevelt Reservation is a 60-foot easement that runs along the southwestern border of the United States from the coast of San Diego all the way to New Mexico. It doesn't cover the Texas border.
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I've written about it before for the Sierra Club and for Drilled News four or five years ago, and I'm going to include a link to the Sierra Club piece in the show notes. The Drilled piece is down now. They don't have that print site anymore. It was established in 1907 by Teddy Roosevelt, and
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It was transferred for three years from the Department of the Interior to the Department of Defense by the Trump administration in 2019 using an executive order. This year, in 2025, all of the Roosevelt Reservation that is not part of federal reservation land was placed on the Department of Defense jurisdiction.
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A lot of reporting seems to have missed this exemption for federal reservation land, which makes up a significant part of the border, especially in Arizona, right in the Tornadum Reservation.
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I'm going to quote from the language of the executive order here, quote, "...to provide for the use and jurisdiction by the Department of Defense over such federal lands, including the Roosevelt Reservation and excluding federal Indian reservations that are reasonably necessary..."
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to enable military activities directed in this memorandum, including border barrier construction and emplacement of detection and monitoring equipment. The way I read this, it also doesn't limit to the reservation. It seems to include other federal land, right? Which could include national monuments, national parks, the BLM and the national forest, all of which exist along the border.
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The Trump administration this week also obtained waivers. The waivers waive dozens of laws that have been limiting construction in the San Diego sector. I'd like to quote a little bit from that Sierra Club piece that I wrote, because I think...
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The aspect of the damage done to the sacred space of indigenous people is being completely overlooked by the legacy media in this, not perhaps surprisingly. So one of the laws waived was the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.
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The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act was enacted by Congress in 1990 to protect and safely relocate native burial sites when construction takes place on sensitive sites. The tribe in question should be consulted, and in the event remains or other archaeological objects are found, construction should be altered so as not to disturb the site."
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In the areas of San Diego where they are digging, what's called midden soil has been found. Midden soil is soil that contains evidence of cremated human remains, in this case of Kumeyaay people.
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With this waiver, they don't have to comply with NAGPRO, Native American Graves Protection and Relocation Act, which means that they can continue digging through what are literally people's ancestors' graveyards. Here's another quote from that 2020 story.
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If this were another country's government destroying a region's holy land, the US would go to war and the people would feel it justified, activist Thomas Barber told Sierra. But it happens here at home in front of us and we just turn away.
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Yeah, it's not even... What bugs me is like not so much of folks, you know, not doing anything. I get that it's overwhelmingly horrible at the moment. It's that this doesn't even get reported. Yeah.
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Big outlets with a massive budget who are supposed to have a border reporter who's never fucking set foot on the border, doesn't take the time to talk to the indigenous people whose land the border crossed, right? Like...
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doesn't take the time to hear their concerns doesn't take the time to think about when you dig 30 feet into this ground to build your border wall that's 12 000 years of someone's history how do they feel about that and like that is a failing of the legacy media has been a failing for a long time and it will continue to be one for a long time and pisses me off
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I guess to talk more broadly then about this militarization of the Roosevelt Reservation and other public land, there's been some speculation about what this might mean. I don't think that you're going to see soldiers pointing their guns at the southern border and shooting anyone who comes across.
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I do think it's likely a lot of the people who have been deployed to southern border so far are MPs, military police, right? Yeah. And it's possible that those MPs will be able to detain people and potentially charge them with trespassing on a military installation.
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That would just be another string to the bow of their attempt to like rapidly deport people because they already have many other kind of options through executive order of doing that, which they're already implying, right? it might also make it easier for them to waive some of these other laws and to construct more surveillance equipment.
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In the Ebrego Garcia case, which we've covered for several weeks now, the Supreme Court has unanimously asked the United States government to, quote, "...facilitate his return." The US government has embarked upon a unique definition of the word facilitate, which it feels like means allowing him to enter the country and providing transport if El Salvador releases him.
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Bukele refused to release him, saying that doing so would be to, quote, smuggle a terrorist into the United States. Gareth and I did a whole episode about this yesterday that you can listen to. Today, Senator Chris Van Hollen went to San Salvador, right, capital of El Salvador, if you're not aware. He met with the vice president because Bukele is still out of the country.
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Van Hollen held a press conference right afterwards that I watched right before we recorded this. In the press conference, Van Hollen basically said that he'd asserted to the vice president of El Salvador that there was no evidence nor any conviction of being a member of MS-13. And he asked the VP why he was holding Mr. Abrego Garcia. And the VP said, because the US is paying us to hold him. Yeah.
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Yeah, they won't even lie. Yeah, no, he's not lying. That's why they're doing it. I believe that. Yeah. And credit to this Maryland senator for being the only one to do something. And it's not enough, and it's just one person. There are 300 people there, right? They're not even going for the hundreds of other innocent people who are there.
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It's one guy, but at least he's doing something while the rest of the Democrats are collectively, I don't know, like voting for Trump's nominees. He asked to meet with Mr. Abrego Garcia and was told that they needed more time. He said, I'll come back next week. They said they don't know if they can organize it in a week. He asked if he could call him.
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They said they didn't know if they could facilitate a call. They said maybe the U.S. embassy would have to be the one that requests that. So he has now requested that the embassy request that he be allowed to call Mr. Abrego Garcia and Mr. Abrego Garcia be allowed to speak to his wife.
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Garrison and I spoke about how it's not in the interest of the government of El Salvador to have people leave this prison and testify to the conditions that are in it.
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That we're aware of, yeah, that no one who's been detained there has left. Yeah. The government wouldn't give him a date when he could meet Mr. Abrego Garcia or when he would be likely able to make a call.
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In a separate case, Judge Boasberg, who we've spoken about before as well, right, Judge Boasberg was the judge who issued the tentative restraining order on the rendition of people to El Salvador, which the government then ignored, has found probable cause that the administration is in contempt of court. What does this mean? It doesn't mean, despite what you have seen on your timeline,
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that this will mean these people will be brought home. When they're found in contempt, they have two options, right? They can purge themselves of the contempt. And the way they would do that would be by providing habeas. not by bringing all these people home, at least not yet, right?
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Or they could present the people who are responsible, and then either an attorney could be appointed by the DOJ to prosecute them, I guess. I don't quite know how that would work consistently. So the judge himself can appoint an attorney to prosecute them for criminal contempt. Again, at least the guy's trying, I guess.
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No, yeah, and he's asserting that they need to listen to the court. They are supposed to listen to the court.
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Judge Ginez, who is a judge on the district court that had its case sent to the Supreme Court for review in the Abrego-Garcia incident also, quoted the Merriam-Webster Dictionary and said that the government's understanding of the word facilitate flew in the face of the common understanding of the word. Again, like I've seen it asserted like, oh, legal experts can disagree.
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Meanwhile, you've got the actual judge in the actual case being like, no, this is what the dictionary says. Your definition is ludicrous. I would caution people to be very careful looking at like blue check legal experts on x.com or people on blue sky. There has been so much misleading stuff about immigration law and the laws in these particular two cases and about the resort reservation actually.
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Just be really careful where you're getting your information, especially on immigration law, from maybe go back and check what that person was doing in 2023 when thousands of migrants were detained in outdoor detention camps, because I've seen so much misinformation.
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And people, understandably, who aren't expert in this, because it's extremely complicated, are likely to be taken advantage of by people who are grifting off what is a moment when a lot of us are afraid and a lot of us are uncertain. So be very careful what you're reading out there.
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Hello and welcome to the show. It's me, James, today, and I am joined by Garrison Davis. Hi, Garrison. Hello. Hello. Garrison has just said some words about something that's happening on social media that I don't understand, and it's made me feel very old. That's what's happening today in my world. It's very sad. We're gathered here today to talk about the earthquake in Myanmar, right?
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I think most of you will probably have been made aware of the earthquake. It's somewhat odd that corporate media has really not reported on the revolution in any substantial way since 2021. But the earthquake apparently justified a lot of networks sending people to Myanmar for the first time.
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Very amusingly, people DMing me on Blue Sky and Twitter asking how to get a visa from the Burmese hunter, which is not a thing I have ever done. The last communication I had with them came in the form of a car bomb that they set off near to a place where we were. But if you're not aware, the earthquake happened on the 28th of March of this year, just before one in the afternoon.
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It was the biggest earthquake in Myanmar since 1912, and it registered 7.7 on the Richter scale, which is huge. Because it's very hard for foreign journalists to get a visa to enter Myanmar. The initial reporting focused on Bangkok and the damage done in Thailand. But the epicenter was in Sagaing, which is near Mandalay. Mandalay is the second biggest city in Myanmar.
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And that was where the worst of the destruction happened. Almost every street in Mandalay has collapsed buildings. It's a little difficult for us to get a sense of the exact scale of the damage because the Hunter refuses to allow... Some media has been allowed in. The BBC, I saw, like, sneaked somebody in. It's very difficult for media to move and report freely.
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And in addition to this, the Hunter has continued its practice of cutting off internet for people in Myanmar, right?
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Yes, especially during emergencies. They've cut it off as a response to this because I guess they perceive it to be something that makes them look weak. This is a tendency that The Hunter has displayed before. So in 2008, Cyclone Nargis affected Myanmar and killed over 130,000 people. And they blocked international aid.
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They said that people didn't need the, quote, chocolate bars that the US and other countries countries were trying to deliver and that they could exist by like hunting frogs in ditches was their suggestion i don't think people realize like how far down the north korea scale the the burmese hunter is
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uh but like they're very worried that any interaction with the outside world specifically with like i guess western neoliberal powers will be damaging for their like ability to control the population so for that reason we don't know how many people have died right um From what I've heard on the ground, the death toll is substantially higher than the 3,600 number being reported.
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The US Geological Survey estimated that an earthquake of that magnitude in that region would kill between 10 and 100,000 people. Obviously, that's quite a big kind of delta there. What I can tell you is that I've heard firsthand that there are some parts of Mandalay and Sagang where the stench of rotting bodies is so powerful that people have stopped returning to their homes.
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There have been so many aftershocks that people are still sleeping in the street because they're worried about the damage structures falling down. The UN has an estimate of 17 million people across 57 townships. Townships are like the administrative districts that are used in Myanmar, have been affected with over 9 million people facing severe hardship.
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And of course, this is all compounded by the fact that there were already 20 million people in Myanmar who needed humanitarian assistance. And there are about three and a half million internally displaced people as a result of the fighting that's happened after the revolution. So like it really came at a pretty difficult time in, in, in a place where the government is not willing.
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They, they said after the earthquake, they wanted international aid, but they've, as we'll see later in this script, they've, uh, they've only accepted it from certain countries. I spoke to a friend who has family in Mandalay yesterday. He told me that the way they're assessing the damage is using open source intelligence.
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They're trying to look in the backgrounds of people's videos on Facebook to work out if their childhood homes fell down. They were using satellite imaging software when I spoke to them yesterday to try and ascertain if their families were okay. They told me Sagang has very famous pagodas and the pagodas are all on a hill.
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And apparently a lot of those pagodas have fallen down and even the hill itself is like listing. So there's been like massive cultural damage as well. Another way in which the damage was compounded by Myanmar's politics was the quake struck, like I said, at 1pm on a Friday, which is Friday prayers.
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This happened during Ramadan, specifically the day before Idul Fitr, which is a very busy day for mosques, if you're not aware. Successive governments of Myanmar since the 1960s have refused to allow even basic maintenance for mosques. That means that these buildings were in great states of disrepair, right?
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Myanmar, there is an ultra-nationalist Buddhist movement, which has been embraced to a great degree by the Hunter, but also limited even like the National League for Democracy, which was the relatively neoliberal aligned party that had previously been in power in Myanmar or somewhat in power, I suppose. Ultra-nationalist Buddhist monks like Ashin Murathu and his 969 movement
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have kind of condemned anything that they did as making them pro-Muslim. And they have this, essentially they have a great replacement theory, right? That Muslims are trying to come in through Bangladesh to replace Buddhists in Myanmar.
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Yeah, I mean, as vicious as any other. People, I'm sure, will be familiar with the Rohingya genocide. There are a lot of monks that supported that, including Wirathu is the most notable one, but there are plenty more. He's literally explicitly expressed how much he looks up to the English Defence League.
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Yeah. Yeah. Like these are people who like, they are part of this, this global nativist movement. People's Orientalism, I think sometimes stops them seeing that or appreciating that this extends outside of like white global North countries. Yeah.
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One thing that I did think that really touched me in the days after the earthquake was young Buddhist Bama people of the majority ethnicity reaching out to me and being like, hey man, this happened in Friday prayers during Ramadan and it has devastated Muslim population.
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Like thousands of people, hundreds of mosques have gone and thousands of people are trapped in a rubble and like no one's talking about it. Why is no one talking about it? This is terrible. And like, it would have been inconceivable that, to hear young Burma Buddhist people so concerned with the well-being of their Muslim countrymen before the coup in 2021.
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This was a country that had been manufacturing consent for genocide against its Muslim minorities for four or five years by that point. Specifically on Facebook, there's a Behind the Bastards episode on this. You can also listen. If you're new to the show, Robert and I have made two scripted series about the revolution in Myanmar, which we'll include in the show notes.
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But that change to a real genuine solidarity and care between these two groups was really touching in the moments after the earthquake and the days after the earthquake. When we come back, I want to talk a little bit more about the revolution and I want to talk about how the revolution has been responding to this and the impact it's had on the revolution. We are back.
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And of course, the revolution hasn't stopped because of the earthquake. The conflict is still ongoing and the PDFs and their allied ethnic resistance organizations are still fighting against the hunter. In fact, within an hour of the earthquake, the hunter began using paramotors to drop bombs on Hangu Village in Sugang. This has been a thing that they've started to do recently.
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In a sense, I guess it's a good sign because it shows that maybe their jets and other aircraft are in a poor state of repair or that they're struggling to keep enough of them airborne. Initially, I wondered if they were using the paramotors because their runways had been damaged, but that doesn't seem to be the case. They've been air striking just as much as they ever did. which is unfortunate.
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Satellite images or reports from my sources on the ground suggest that they're able to continue carrying out bombing raids at a pretty similar rate from when they did before.
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Despite this, the National Unity Government, which is kind of the shadow government composed mostly of people who were elected and then deposed by the coup in 2021, and the PDF, who in theory are commanded by the National Unity Government, called a two-week ceasefire right after the earthquake to allow for a humanitarian pause.
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The Three Brotherhood Alliance, which is an alliance of the three most powerful ethnic resistance organizations in Myanmar, also called what they called a humanitarian pause for a month. In both cases, they said they wouldn't undertake offensive operations, but they would defend themselves, right? Because I think they had a sense that the junta wasn't going to stop attacking them.
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The junta did declare its own ceasefire on April 3rd, and the Kachin Independence Army, which is another ethnic resistance organization, followed shortly thereafter. Notably, that ceasefire from the junta came the day after its troops fired on a Chinese Red Cross convoy. which is not a great look for them. No, never loved to see that. Yeah, we don't love to see people firing on the Red Cross.
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This is especially bad for the Hunter because China has been growing closer and closer to the Hunter and supporting it. China's had this weird back and forth relationship with the revolution. At times it supported the revolution, it seems like, specifically supporting the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army, which is a group that broke off the Communist Party of Burma in the 1980s.
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Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. There's also the United War State Army, which isn't part of the revolution, which has the strongest relationship with the PRC, and they're just chilling. They haven't really entered the conflict. It's called straight chilling, by the way, James. Straight chilling? Yeah, there you go. That's how they use it. I've marked myself out yet again.
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Straight chilling, the United War State Army. Thank you, Garrison. Actually, it spoke to some cadres from the Burmese Communist Party recently. The Communist Party of Burma re-entered after 2021. And they're not focusing on proselytizing the Maoist gospel to people. They're focusing on fighting the hunter and developing alliances. And it's interesting to see where that will go, given...
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Marcus Leninism is definitely not the majority ideology of the revolution. Most people are committed to some form of federal democracy, which, when you speak to different fighters, varies from, like, we want what you guys have in the US to something more akin to the democratic confederalism that people might be familiar with in Rojava. China is competing with Russia in politics.
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So both of them are interested in supporting the junta, right? And obviously both their ideologies are far from liberatory. They're interested in propping up a totalitarian state. So we have seen both Russia and China send support to the junta, send rescue teams after the earthquake. Meanwhile, the US offered $2 million, which... I was kind of surprised they offered anything.
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Three USAID workers, at least three, I should say, three that I'm aware of, were laid off, like literally they received emails telling them that they no longer had a job while they were on the ground assisting earthquake survivors. Department of Government Efficiency. Strikes again. Highly efficient.
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We'll send you the money and then also pull out our own people who I guess are supervising how the money is spent or would be. It definitely shows a strategic shift in the region. China, Russia... China obviously is interested in Myanmar because of its rare earth metals, because of jade. China has traditionally had a lot of jade trade with Myanmar. And then...
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because it controls a large amount of seafront. China wouldn't want to fall into what you would see as someone with adversarial interests. Russia is still interested in just kind of projecting itself as a global power, even as it continues to shrink every day in terms of its global abilities to project power.
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But there definitely are both Chinese and Russian assistance helping the Myanmar hunter now. Meanwhile, the US doesn't seem to give a shit what happens here now. Not that the Biden administration was doing very much either, but at least we had USAID.
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And USIP was very invested in Myanmar and actually did a really good job of almost being the foreign affairs, not branch, but they explained the revolution to the world. Whenever a journalist wanted to understand the revolution in Myanmar, it was USIP they went to. Obviously, all the contacts that have a USIP have now been doged, which is a shame. So despite the ceasefire, right?
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I said they fired on these Chinese troops. The Hunter has in fact not stopped bombing earthquake struck areas since the earthquake. Madeleine PDF, who I'm in contact with, they're the revolutionary forces in the area that was most affected by the earthquake. On April 7th, told me that they're aware of 10 airstrikes in their area of operations.
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Since the earthquake, a three-month-old baby and a 10-year-old child were killed in an air raid on Naikar village in Papoon Township. That was in Karen State. On April 10th, they bombed a school, something that the junta likes to do a lot. They dropped two 500-pound bombs on a food court.
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They then circled back and dropped another bomb on the people responding to and giving aid to the people they'd initially bombed at the food court. By food court here, just to clarify, I'm not talking about like at the shopping mall. I'm talking about like a market where people can buy like prepared food, right?
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They've killed, at best, I can collate from various sources, at least 72 people and injured about 100 people in addition to thousands who died after the earthquake. There are also reports that hunter quote unquote recruiters here are engaging in forced conscription in the disaster zone.
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I read of at least one person who was on a search and rescue team, that they were a trained search and rescue volunteer, right? So they were moving rubble to rescue people and they were forcibly conscripted while they were doing that. Obviously that's had a chilling effect on people going out to help others, right? What the hunter is not doing is rescuing its citizens.
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The military is detested in most of Myanmar, even in the areas that it controls. And its failure to even try and trap people rescued on the rubble won't help this. There was a video that went viral recently of hunter troops, literally a line of soldiers rescuing bricks.
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They've gone to a collapsed building and they're inspecting the bricks to see if the bricks are whole and then passing them down the line and stacking them up. Don't worry, the bricks are safe. Yeah, the bricks are safe. The people are not. It was genuinely infuriating to see it. I can't imagine for people who have lost family members how it must feel.
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Even rescue workers, like I said, have been forcibly conscripted. Equality Myanmar has noted more than 100 cases of forced conscription since the earthquake. So Myanmar has a conscription rule, a law, so any one men and now women between certain ages can be forcibly conscripted into the hunter's army.
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Yeah. It's people who have been hiding in their homes, right? Who now don't have homes to hide it. Yeah. Or people who came out in order to save their neighbors. And now they're forcing them to fight for them. Just as the hunter did with Cyclone Nargis, they've also delayed and in cases blocked aid. A team came from France to assist in a search and rescue. They spent
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24 hours sitting in an airport waiting for their visa to be approved. And then they spent one day working in search and rescue efforts before being told that search and rescue efforts had now finished and they were to go home. They traveled around the entire world, didn't save a single life. Abundance. It's great.
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Presumably because the hunter wanted to placate China, a Taiwanese team was straight up refused entry into Myanmar. Taiwan had a search and rescue team that they were willing to send who could have saved people's lives and that they weren't allowed to enter.
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All tourist visas have been suspended, so it's not like the hunter is overwhelmed with visa applications, but they're not allowing search and rescue teams to enter from countries I guess they're not politically aligned with. This kind of horrific indifference to human suffering has characterized Atatmador for decades.
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And it's really unlikely to change as it grows even more desperate and it loses even more territory. It's just going to clamp down harder and harder on its people. B1, in the liberated areas, aid is being mobilized using the mutual aid structures which have existed for decades in the absence of the state.
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In significant and growing parts of Myanmar, people are relying on each other instead of the government for aid. And that has its benefits, right? Like people have been out rescuing people from the rebel, but they're also desperately short of resources.
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I spoke to Mandalay PDF rescue team at the first week of April and they literally sent me, they have a notebook of a list of like, we've run out of gauze, we've run out of tourniquets, we've run out of adhesive dressings, we've run out of elastic bandages, right? They're like the literal nuts and bolts of saving people's lives. They run out of
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We did a fundraising campaign for them through Behind the Bastards. We raised nearly $2,000, which is great. So they're restocking their supplies, which is fantastic. But that's just one township all across the country. People are struggling for the basic supplies that they need to save lives. The military has also blocked aid and medicine from entering their areas, right?
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So the military controls a lot of roadblocks and it uses its control of those roadblocks to... Stop aid and medicine. Often it's kind of hoarding it in the capital city, which is Naypyidaw. If people aren't familiar, Naypyidaw is a city that the junta built for itself to govern from. It means seat of kings. Also in Naypyidaw right now is the U.S. aid agency Samaritan's Purse.
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Are you familiar with Samaritan's Purse, Garrison?
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Samaritan's Purse, perhaps most famous for being run by Franklin Graham.
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Yeah, having all their volunteers sign like a statement of faith and being extremely homophobic. For some reason, Samaritan's Purse is establishing a field hospital in Naypyidaw right now.
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Yeah, or just leave them like they did in Afghanistan if they're not Christian. I cannot work out for the life of me what the fuck they're doing. Because the Hunter has made a consistent policy of bombing Christians in Myanmar. In Karen and Karen state, there are a lot of Christian people. On Christmas Day...
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The Hunter bombed people going to services because it knew that Christians would be going to services at churches, right? The Karenni Christians this year I saw celebrated Christmas in caves because they were so afraid of being bombed, right? Like, I have no idea what logical leap you have to make. Bizarre. Yeah. And they're not even at the, in Sagang.
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The only people, the only international aid I'm aware of that was able to make it to Sagang was a Malaysian team. who were able to save some lives. Unfortunately, there were really strong rains this week and that made all the collapse structures even more unstable. And the Malaysian team I saw have now returned home. We're going to take another ad break here.
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And when we come back, we will talk about what you can do to help. All right, and we're back. First, I want to, I guess, have some good news. Despite everything, the military has still been taking massive losses. The all-Burma Students' Democratic Front captured remaining junta positions in Indore. The all-Burma Students' Democratic Front are a group that's been around since 1988, right?
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And they have... armed up and re-entered the revolution since 2021. One of the things that they captured on Monday was an underground Japanese field hospital from World War II, which I guess had been like an entrenched position. I guess they're not covered technically by the ceasefire, but there was a unit under the National Unity Government's command that operated with them.
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And from what I understand... This began as a defensive action. They'd surrounded the hunter. I think it's called Japan Cave Hill. They'd surrounded them on Japan Cave Hill for a long time. And then the hunter, obviously seeing the earthquake and everything thereafter, decided that now was the time for them to break out of this encirclement. They did not break out.
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They took a fat L. And as a result, they've all been captured now. Meanwhile, in Chinland, if people haven't listened to the episode I did a couple of weeks ago with Azad from the Anti-Fascist Internationalist Front, I was just going back and listening to that to understand Chinland.
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But the AIF and a lot of their allied forces from the Chinland Defence Force and the Chin Brotherhood had a significant victory in capturing the rest of the junta's positions in Falam last week. And I think it's very much like on the table that we will see the whole of Chinlan liberated in the next few months or by the end of the year, which would be great to see.
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So people are wondering what they can do to help, right? And I think it's a very valid question because I saw today that the UN was meeting with the hunter in Naypyidaw. And I just have no faith that any money that goes to the hunter is going to get to people who need it.
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I don't... No, they're, like, evil. Why... Yeah, yeah. They are literally genocidal. They have done a genocide that has been prosecuted in international criminal court. I have no understanding why international organizations continue to funnel money to them, other than because they have a status quo bias, I guess. So don't be doing that.
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But there are groups who are making a really big difference. And one of them that I wanted to highlight, and Robert and I are both very familiar with their work from the last time that we were over reporting, is Community Partners International. CPI are really cool because they work by empowering members of the local community to be health volunteers, as opposed to like...
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dropping in some doctors from America, right? Or doctors from the United Kingdom or whatever. And then when those people leave, they take their skills with them. And CPI, the thing is to educate folks within the community so that they can take care of one another. And I saw that CPI has a matching donations thing right now, which is pretty cool.
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So if you donate, someone else will match your donation and that will double the amount that you receive. Otherwise, I will provide a list of mutual aid funds that have been shared with me. Most of them are GoFundMes or things like that. I'll put it all in the show description. They've all been vetted.
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I know people are sometimes reluctant to give to GoFundMes and they'd rather give to a 501c3 or an organization which has a little bit more, I guess, online presence. In this case, you have to understand that a lot... of orgs just aren't operating in the liberated areas. The two that I'm aware of are CPI and Free Burma Rangers. I spoke to Dave from Free Burma Rangers.
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They're trying to get to as many people as they can as well. That would be another great place to donate. And I would include a list of vetted GoFundMes. If you want to have a look through those and see if any of them kind of speaks to you more, you can do that too. What this will mean for the future of Myanmar, We don't know yet, right?
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We have really no sense of how many people have died, of what it's done to the hunter's ability to control those areas. But until the revolution has a way to stop planes bombing people, we will continue to see the same dynamic, right, of the hunter losing terrain on the ground, pulling back its soldiers, and then bombing civilians in the areas that it's lost. That is its game plan. It's continuing.
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to get more drones from China. It's, it's getting aircraft munitions and jet fuel from China. And until there is an embargo on jet fuel and munitions to the hunter, then we will see the same pattern continue, right? They lose terrain, they bomb a school, they lose terrain, they bomb a hospital. It's the same stuff that Israel is doing.
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Um, and they of course previously been armed by Israel as well. Uh, but we don't see as much solidarity for the people of Burma. Um, If you want to stay in touch with what's happening on the ground, I think the Irawiri, I-R-R-A-W-A-D-D-Y, does a really good job of doing daily summaries right now. So I would suggest checking out what's happening there.
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And of course, we'll keep you updated on developments in the Spring Revolution as they come.
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Yeah. Like it made me feel like I found 2023 very hard, like going out and seeing people freezing in the desert and then coming home and seeing Joe Biden eat ice cream on the timeline. But like this was different. This was so like blatant.
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Naib Bukele? There you go. You know, he's Palestinian Salvadorian.
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This is just fucking... I'm sorry if anyone's driving and has had an accident upon hearing that.
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The lights thing, by the way, was a specific policy change by Bukele. There was a particularly violent weekend in El Salvador. And as a result, he stopped letting people who were detained for gang crimes go outside and stopped building windows into the prison and just put the lights on. Like as a way of punishing, I guess, the gangs by punishing the people who were detained there.
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like Bukele has ruled and we're going to do a whole episode on Bukele and like his rise to power and then his use of power but like he's ruled under a state of exception for years in El Salvador which allows him to detain people without warrants without trials right and like it's that state of exception that is now the norm there and that's kind of what he seems to be referring to right like like
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we just get to lock people up. Why would I not do that?
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Yeah, Bukele is very reticent to release anyone for that reason. And there are plenty of allegations, and I think Time magazine has published this, it's not hugely controversial, that he made deals with gangs in the past in El Salvador to get them to reduce the murder rate. And he certainly wouldn't like to hear that testified to, certainly not in the United States court.
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So he doesn't want people to be released from there either. Yeah. Like you said, they don't want anyone to be able to go to any international human rights courts and testify as to what happened to them there. So it's kind of in his interest to never have anyone be released.
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It's not just also, I guess, like in his interest, he's also being paid $20,000 per detainee per year by the United States right now. So he also has a financial interest in keeping people in there.
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There's a lot to break down in what Miller said. It's also just kind of interesting how Miller is amongst the press. He's not one of the people sat on the couches supposed to be giving the press conference, right? He just kind of wades in to... I guess, like, like offer this opinion and kind of like, uh, be the kind of embassy of this, of their response, I guess, in, in a sense. Yeah.
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I think crucially like Abrego Garcia's protection was from being returned to El Salvador, right? Because he had been harassed by gang members when leaving El Salvador and when living in El Salvador.
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Yeah, the gangs that he's been accused of being a part of. But it then follows that it would be legal for them to deport him to a third country, right? And that is the path that they've followed with all the Venezuelan migrants, right? They've accused him of being members of Trenderagua. I have not seen a compelling case made that any of them are yet.
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I'm sure people from Tren del Agua have come to this country, but they have not provided any evidence that the people they have sent to Secot are those people.
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Yeah, and the bulk of this is reliant on some kind of idea that they have entirely created from fiction, that there are tattooing practices when one enters Trenderagua. And for them, even if they can't be returned to Venezuela, they feel like they have this end round, which is, okay, we'll send them to El Salvador. But for the Salvadorians, that's a different question, right?
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And that is what they're trying to find here. And that is worrying because... The case here that is getting the most publicity, that seems to be the one that the Supreme Court has taken up, is about the Salvadorian man. And I hope that doesn't mean that the ship has sailed for the Venezuelans, right? That essentially they don't have a case. Because that was the vast bulk of them.
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I think there was something like 60 Salvadorian citizens and the rest Venezuelans.
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Yeah, I think we should just point out, obviously, the court is not conducting the foreign policy of the United States. It's ruling on the legality of the action taken by the president, which is exactly what it's supposed to do.
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Yeah. Yeah. Like every single U.S. person, right? U.S. person would be anybody who resides in the U.S., be they documented or undocumented migrant citizen, what have you, like has a stake in this.
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Yeah, did you notice he called out Miller? He said, you'll have to look at the laws on that, Steve. Obviously, Miller is not the attorney general.
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Right, but Miller is often credited with being the kind of mastermind behind Title 42, right? Which was an extremely obscure piece of public health law that was then mobilized by the first Trump administration to immediately return migrants to Mexico without giving them their right to an asylum hearing, right? And that's what I'm wondering if they're going for again.
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Steve Miller has been very good at this, at finding obscure justifications in United States federal law for shit that they want to do.
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It seems like a specific case that he's referring to.
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Yeah, I mean, they've sent migrants, third country migrants to Panama before, right? And detained them there. Honduras, I believe, is building like a prison that's not dissimilar to Secot. Like I'm guessing this will be their sort of way of courting allies in the hemisphere. Like they'll sort of pay them a relatively large amount in order to attempt to offshore people they don't like.
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Yeah, it's like a dinner party joke for them. It might just be worth noting that, like, every totalitarian regime has housed its dissidents outside of the imperial core, right? Like, Germany did this in the east, right? Russia sent people to Siberia for a reason. Russia, Soviet Union.
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Right. And where the horrors are so far from the populace that the populace can't really grasp them.
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Yeah, and just to be even clearer, I guess what distinguishes a concentration camp from a prison is that there is no due process, right? People are sent there because of who they are, not because of what they did.
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Yeah, like we are, I don't know what it will take for some people to realize what's happening here.
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Yeah, I mean, he doesn't hide from that reputation, right? He embraces it. His Twitter for a while had world's coolest dictator in the bio. I don't know if it still does, like.
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You don't have to have a PhD in the history of the 1930s to have someone tell you that liberation of the chosen nation by purging of the undesirables is fascist shit. But I'm here with one to tell you if that's what you need, you know? This is textbook stuff, like Garrison's saying. This is not debatable. I know we spent the last four years debating is Trump a fascist or not.
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I don't think that matters hugely. This is a fascist thing.
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I think that's a very skewed sample of people who paid for Elon Musk's hate app.
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Right. So much of this has hinged over what facilitate means, right? Like they found a legal concept that they can argue ad nauseum. And in this case, it's the word facilitate. The DOJ didn't present any new information today, but we see that there's some hopeful things from a district court judge, and then it kind of all goes up in flames. But I think Chinis, X-I-N-I-S is how the name is spelled.
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I believe it's Chinis, said that every day that he's there is a day of further irreparable harm. And then she talks about the process being at the roots of the constitution, right? She's ordered for like two weeks more of discovery, which is going to mean that both sides have more time to repair their cases, right? She wants people to testify in front of the court.
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So the administration has argued that facilitating his return would consist of them allowing him to enter the United States if Bukele released him. and possibly providing a flight for that to happen, but not, crucially, ensuring his release from Secord, right? And so anything else subsequent to that doesn't matter.
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Gini said that their interpretation of the word flies in the face of the plain meaning of the word. quote, when a wrongfully removed individual is, and then I'm adding to the quote here, I guess, or context, she means when a wrongfully removed individual is taken outside the US, it's not so cut and dried that all you have to do is remove obstacles domestically.
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She also said, quote, to the Department of Justice here, you made your jurisdictional arguments, you made your venue arguments, you made your arguments on the merits, you lost. This is now about the scope of the remedy, right? This is a case that Miller is claiming they won. That's pretty unequivocal for a justice.
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However, she does not seem to think that it is within her power to request his return from El Salvador. So she's calling for things to move quickly, right? They want to conduct depositions by the 23rd of April. She said, quote, cancel vacations, cancel other appointments. I'm usually pretty good about it. Not this time. I'm going to be available if you need to do it odd hours or weekends.
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That's what I'm talking about. Anything short of a judge saying you have to go to Secod, remove him from the cell, put him on the plane and bring him back to America is going to be interpreted by the Trump administration to mean that they don't have to do that.
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And like they've done that right. The word facilitate, I think most people who are first language English speakers have a fairly good grasp of what that means. And it doesn't mean like remove barriers domestically. That's what they've gone for.
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The only way that he is getting out is a majority Supreme Court decision that is extremely explicit that directs the Trump administration to go to El Salvador and remove him from that prison. I haven't seen anything to indicate that we're getting that anytime soon. And as the judge said, every day he's there, irreparable harm is done to him. And that's where we're at right now, right?
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With people arguing over the definition of a word as hundreds of people are locked up having done nothing wrong in a giant torture prison.
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Like I've said before on this show, one of the things that I learned in The Darien Gap was how much people can care about their kids. And this shit that I saw people do to ensure their kids have a better life broke my heart in a way that war hasn't, that anything else I've seen in my life hasn't.
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And it's honestly really hard for me to hear stuff like that and not react, just being really sad and really angry. It's fucking brutal.
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And your options include creating networks to take care of one another, right? Like the... things that will probably affect more of you than direct state violence are economic downturns, are recessions, right? Things like this, like those are things that you can take care of one another through. And like, you should plan to do that too.
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You should think about how you're going to pay your bills, how you're going to feed each other, how you're going to take care of your medical needs. Because I don't think that the world is going to want to keep doing business with a country that acts like this. And both economically and in terms of its conduct towards migrants.
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So like your plans don't have to be to leave, like your plans should also include what to do if things get really bad, like in an economic sense. I'm not going to tell you what that means, but it's all the stuff we've already talked about, right? It's mutual aid. It's all the, all the basic preparedness stuff that is not as big and scary as leaving the country, but is nonetheless like vital.
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Yeah. Just to finish up, as things continue to get worse, people keep reaching out to us, which we appreciate. If you would like to, you can email us coolzontipsatproton.me. We will read it. We might not get back to you. Your email is not end-to-end encrypted unless the email that you're sending from is also encrypted. But you can reach out to us there.
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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,
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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,
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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, the longhouse with your they-them nephew in it that you hate and owned you at Thanksgiving is gone.
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Yeah, I guess what's nibbling? Nibbling is a correct non-binary appellation.
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Yeah, I'm aware of at least one UCSC student who was detained at the border and immediately deported. I'm also aware that UCOP, UC Office of the President, made a statement about the impact of service terminations across its campuses.
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But the UCSD Guardian, in a dub for student journalism, reported that UCSD convened an emergency meeting before this of faculty, and it knew about the revocations or the service changes, the revocation of their student status, And it was reluctant to act because it hadn't received guidance from UCOP yet. So we're seeing this from a lot of university administrations, right?
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They don't know how to respond. I did see that the University of Arizona was helping fund some of the legal fees of their students, which is more than many universities are doing. As of now, there seems to be no pattern of prior rest for the people who have had their statuses changed.
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But in some cases, it seems that in some university systems, all of the people who have lost their status are either Chinese, Indian, or from majority Muslim countries.
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Yeah, very familiar. I wrote about it a little bit in my first book and my PhD dissertation. Also, the last living person to participate in the Popular Olympics, which is what I wrote my book about, was an Esperantist, part of the project. of the popular front in Catalonia was to bring people together through sport.
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And then Esperanto is going to be this thing that would, as you mentioned, like bridge the gaps between people.
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I'm excited. I never really did a full rundown on Esperanto. It just appeared. And I was like, holy shit, that's cool. So I'm going to learn a lot.
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Yeah. Not huge. Yeah. It's like, uh, how big, I know we've got a few of those like little ones in Europe, you know?
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I know this, uh, Senate, the Spanish anarcho-syndicalist union was like in its first Congress, like its foundational Congress, I suppose they were like, and everyone has to, everyone should try and learn Esperanto. Like that was one of their like, uh, the things at the foundation of like what became probably the most powerful anarchist movement the world's ever seen.
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Was it one of the Anglophone countries? No. Oh, wow. The French. It was the French. Okay. There is not a state more invested in its language than France. Indeed. They have laws, I think, about broadcasting music and dubbing films and things.
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They're not wrong. France is a language, if you read Peasants into Frenchmen, it's kind of the classic work on French nationalization. But in order to make people French, they did have to suppress Basque and Breton and Catalan and other languages, right? And make people go to schools where they learned French and conceived of themselves as French as a result of that.
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It shows like nations are always projects of the bourgeoisie, right? Like at least I would argue that. And so a lot of other people, but like the French example is one where we can see it more clearly than others. Like it's a state and specifically like a certain class within the state's project to enforce and continue to perpetuate this narrative of nation.
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It's a weird angle from Scott because normally he'd advocate for like what he calls like the anarchist squint, right? Like in seeing history through a perspective of anarchism, I guess, or like an anarchist lens. And I feel like this is very applicable with Esperanto, like the only language which isn't inherently tied to any state or nation or ethnicity. Exactly.
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Yeah. Recently, some listeners very kindly, James C. Scott passed away earlier this year, as I'm sure you know, Andrew.
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But his library was donated to a local secondhand bookshop. And some folks, I asked online and they went and got me some books and sent them, which was really kind. So I have some of his books now.
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That's an interesting one. Like we see this in Spanish too, right? Like with attempts to create like gender neutral forms, the presumptive masculine, or if you're addressing a mixed gender group, then you would use the masculine. But like people who are first language Spanish speakers can correct me. I'm sure you will on the subreddit if you want to.
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So like when I hear in English language media, it's referred to as Latinx, but like, that's kind of a word that I struggle to say in Spanish. Like, is it Latinx or like, is it Latinx? And so there's this very kind of clumsy gender neutral form, which seems to be easier to say in English and Spanish.
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When I speak to non-binary people in Spanish, that's what they prefer to use. Of the relatively small sample size, given that there are probably millions of non-binary Spanish-speaking people, I haven't obviously spoken to all or most of them.
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But it's very interesting to see this outside critique of the language, which seems to also ignore an inside movement within people who are Spanish-first language speakers to create a...
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organic like gender neutral form yeah which could also happen in any language right like like just because esperanto has a certain form doesn't mean that people within that language who don't feel represented by them couldn't create forms within that language to better represent them exactly it's easier because you don't have like a government telling you you can't use it or whatever
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I think this is a term that's new to Garrison, just judging by their facial expression. Yeah.
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Yeah, I mean, if we look at fascism as a concept, too, it has this troubled relationship with modernity, but one of the things it likes to do is flex its new little weapon systems and toys. We're going to see some guys posing with some weapon systems that probably never get used, right? Like, probably some AI targeting shit, stuff like that. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Israel already does that.
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Two very similar biomes where everything is very similar.
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I'm excited to be fucking around wondering who a drone's going to kill next. That has been a really life-affirming experience for me, and I'm excited to have it again soon. It's going to be great. Robert, you mentioned the IRS, and the IRS maybe get less money. So I want to talk a little bit about the IRS. I guess let's start with a little summary of this week's immigration news.
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This week, Chai Rachik, who is the person who runs Libs of TikTok, joined ICE on a raid.
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I just took a moment to reflect on that, and it's not a great thing to reflect on. It's really not. No, it doesn't make me feel good. Yeah, no. Other things that don't make me feel good are the 60 Minutes report that 75% of people sent to Secot had no criminal conviction, which seems to leave open the possibility of there being a crime for which it would be okay.
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to be sent to a foreign gulag with no hope of return, which I don't believe is the case. I'm very disappointed at any reporting which focuses on guilt as if one could ever be guilty of anything which would make this justifiable. You can't. The government is also soliciting for proposals this week to massively increase migrant detention, which again is not surprising.
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We talked about this last November, but it's also not great. But where I want to focus today is on the IRS and the Abrego Garcia case that we spoke about last week. So you will have seen some reporting that the IRS has said it will hand over information of people who are subject to criminal investigation to DHS or ICE, right? ICE being under DHS.
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So they say, what happened here is a part of court filings, a memorandum of understanding between ICE and the IRS was released. In the MOU, or in the court filing, actually, they cite an offense of failure to depart the United States after being ordered removed. So essentially anyone who they're saying, like, you have to go, right, that they could then ask for their tax return information.
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Exactly what the IRS will disclose to ICE is covered by a big black redaction in the court documents. So we don't know that. The entire MOU is submitted, but there's significant redactions in it. One thing that's not redacted is that ICE has to hand over the person's name, address, and the crime for which they're investigating. And it has to be a non-tax crime, not that that matters hugely.
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This is more limited than a lot of people have feared, and it's more limited than a lot of the reporting I've seen. It's possible that there's something else going on. I saw the acting director at ICE was going to quit over this. I saw that this morning. But the fact that they have to have their address suggests that they couldn't locate them using the tax return form, which is a good thing.
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It is one less step towards fascism, I guess. I'm also aware of ICE having memorandums of understanding with other agencies to include HUD, Housing and Urban Development, All of this is going to reduce the amount that migrant communities engage with the federal government to any degree, right? Contrary to what you might have heard, undocumented people do tend to pay their taxes.
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It's actually relatively rare for them not to do that. And this might change if the IRS starts handing over people's tax return information to ICE, right? Obviously, if HUD starts handing over people's information, that's going to lead to people not being as willing to take housing benefits and will be planning on living on the street, right?
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On the other hand, Houston, a city in Texas, for those of you who aren't familiar, have I pronounced that right, Robert? Tejas? Yeah. I thought it was, I wasn't sure if it was Houston. Houston. Oh, Houston, understood.
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So this Texas no man's land town has turned over information, including addresses and license plates for people charged with driving without a license, even though some of this under Texas law is supposed to remain confidential. So that's great. They are also now making immigration detentions at regular traffic stops.
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So I'm aware of one incident where a man was arrested after being stopped for a cracked windscreen, and he's now in ICE detention. So there was presumably an ICE warrant for this person that the Houston police then acted upon.
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We already know that police departments have a tendency to pull over people who aren't white more often, right? And then if you give them this, that's just going to exacerbate that further. Again, it's also going to stop migrant communities interacting with the police in any way, right? This obviously has... Look, not a big police fan, but like in cases like domestic violence, right?
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Sometimes people need to go to the police to be safe and they're not going to do so. They think that means they or people they love will be deported. And this will have negative consequences, specifically in cases like domestic violence. And we know this. There is plenty of evidence for this. Nonetheless, this is continuing anyway.
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What's also continuing is our obligation to pivot to ads, which we should do now. Okay, we are back. We're back. And it's time to talk about the Supreme Court. Do we have to? Yes, yes, we do, guys, because it's the biggest court. It's the big one. And they've been crushing it all week, just sending down decisions.
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The two big ones, I guess, I want to talk about are a 5-4 ruling that it was vacating Boasberg's TRO. Boasberg being the judge who had initially told the United States government that had to stop sending people to sec court, right? And then the US had ignored Boasberg and done it anyway. And then they had this whole court case about how they hadn't ignored him.
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And anyway, it was a secret, even though we're tweeting it. You can go back a couple of EDs and hear about that. In this decision, the court was unanimous in asserting that people removed under the Alien Enemies Act do have a right to due process, but that they have to bring a habeas petition.
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So the reason they vacated the TRO was that the case shouldn't have gone to Boatsburg, that they should have brought this habeas petition. In practice, that's going to be very hard, given the fact that many migrants, even under the current system, even under Biden, most migrants who didn't speak English didn't have access to legal representation. So this ruling is still pretty bad.
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The only thing the people in the court case wanted to stop was their rendition to El Salvador, right? It wasn't even like opposed to other forms of removal. It was specific to this El Salvador situation. The court also sort of cited criminal cases as precedent, which is a very different thing. And it gives this very narrow ruling of the due process available to migrants, right?
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And it relies on migrants having access to a legal team, which could be expensive and complicated for them.
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Yes, yeah, well summarized. You would need to have a lawyer on retainer to file your habeas straight away.
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Well, they can deport you anyway, yeah. I guess you have the right to appeal it by saying, like, I'm going to file this habeas petition. But most people aren't going to do that. So in practice, they haven't explicitly ruled on this thing, right? The Abrego Garcia case, which is the other case, a Fourth Circuit judge required the U.S. to return Abrego Garcia to the U.S.
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And then Chief Justice Roberts on his own issued an administrative stay. So he is effectively telling them that Fourth Circuit judge, you can't order them to have him return right now. We need to take a timeout. We need everybody to get their evidence in order and then bring that to us. So that case, like, remains ongoing, right?
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In the brief for that case, the government referred to Abrego Garcia as an enemy alien. But I don't think MS-13 is covered by the evocation of the Alien Enemies Act. I think it was specific to Tren de Aragua. And then they also claim that they removed him under the Immigration Nationality Act, not the Alien Enemies Act. So none of this, I guess, is hugely surprising.
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We're seeing this sort of post hoc justification of what they did, which is kind of how they operate. But that case still remains ongoing. So we're still... We're still going to hear that one, which presumably will reflect on the constitutionality of sending people to Secod. But like the fact that, yeah, they ruled the other case, right, the one that was five to four.
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It wasn't about whether Secod was legal. It was about whether Boasberg had the right to make a decision on this particular case. but it's still not great. Like it looks like the Supreme court is doing everything it can to avoid a face-to-face showdown with the executive branch. Oh yeah. Because they don't want to deal with the consequences of it, ignoring them. Nope.
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And like we, we said before, like maybe the only court that they will listen to is a Supreme court. Well, if Supreme court doesn't make them, then they won't. So that's where we're at with that. Not great. Not exactly great at all.
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The worst Clash song. By a wide margin. The only Clash song to have been played during Operation Desert Storm, which made Joe Strummer cry.
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That is how we have to work out the global economic future. It's based on posts on truth social.
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Also embargoed, no? Like, we've seized their government assets in the United States. Yep. There's one on, like, Diego Garcia, for instance.
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Yeah, and then they can come read a book instead. And yeah, it would be nice. It reminds me of one of the big projects of the anarchists in Spain in the 1930s was to create popular education centers, which included libraries, right? And they funded these entirely. They were not funded by the state. The state was not interested in making libraries in 1920s, 1930s in Spain.
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It's amazing that they're doing the same shit as like my undergraduates and the people are doing the same shit in their response.
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Most of them are smart enough to like pad it a little bit so that you can't put the prompt into chat GPT and find it. Yeah. And so my lowest effort undergrads
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And they funded them from popular subscription and from people's union dues. And they built these Ateneos, which are now really beautiful places. One of the places I did my PhD in Barcelona. And like, I wonder if there is, I guess it's very hard for us to conceive of a library without the state in the United States, right?
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That's working. Only jobs are things where you wear safety toe boots and everything else.
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Yep. Which Greek letters do they use, and which person's fraternity does it represent?
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And rich people putting little libraries in their middle-class neighborhoods is not the same thing. Right. As much as they'd like to think it is, your little phone box library is not replacing these services. Is there a model for recreating this in a way that isn't reliant on the state, which seems increasingly hostile to it?
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No, I mean, some of us, I guess people still alive in the 1930s. Yeah, I guess. Woody Guthrie has. My fucking grandma, I guess.
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Outstanding. Good. I'm just checking on our Wall Street bets and they're having a real one today.
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He didn't actively stop anything happening other than people not paying attention to him.
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Fiddling impressively while Rome burns. Thanks, Cory.
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Of course, we have to begin my segment today by saying whose birthday it is on the day that you're hearing this. So if you want to plant a tree for Apo... Get out there and plant your tree. Unfortunately, that is the only good news we have today. Border Patrol has spent most of this week touting the quote lowest number of border crossings in history.
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It will shock listeners to hear that this is not historically accurate. Border encounters are way down. If there's one thing that I have ever taught you, it is that border encounters are not the same as unique individuals because people are being sent directly back to Mexico and will tend to return it. attempting a different route crossing the border, right? Those are way down.
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And they're the lowest since they began publishing monthly data in 2000. But numbers were way lower in the 50s and 60s and before then. It's relatively immaterial. It's just sort of a nitpicky point, I guess. Today what I really want to talk about is the case of Mr. Kilmar Abrego-Garcia.
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He was removed by the Trump administration to El Salvador, to Secot, in a way that they have admitted was a mistake. So we have to go back a little bit to understand Mr. Abrego-Garcia's story and how we got here. He was arrested in mid-March due to the United States government claim that he played a, quote, prominent role in MS-13, MS-13 being the Salvadorian gang, right?
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He'd come to the United States in 2011. He was fleeing gang violence. He was allegedly arrested in 2019 outside a Home Depot where he was standing with other men looking for work. However, the incident report for that particular incident gives other names but not his.
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At that point, a Prince George's County Police Department detective filled out a, quote, gang worksheet and claimed that Mr. Abrago Garcia was associated with or a member of MS-13. The evidence he cited for this was a Chicago Bulls hoodie and the claim of a confidential informant.
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The confidential informant claimed that he was part of a group within this gang that was set up in a state that Mr. Abrago Garcia had never lived in. The United States in 2019, ICE argued that he shouldn't be given bond because of this alleged gang membership. And so he wasn't given bond. But through an asylum claim, although he didn't get asylum, he was protected from removal.
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So a judge ruled that he couldn't be removed back to El Salvador, where he would presumably face violence there. When Mr. Abrago Garcia's lawyers tried to interview the police detective who had filed this report accusing him of gang membership, they found no record of his arrest and that the detective has been suspended since then.
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The department in question also settled a lawsuit with its own cops over racism in the department. JD Vance, who has a law degree, right? The JD is, I guess, before and after his name. He has a law degree from Harvard, has claimed that Mr. Abrego Garcia is a convicted member of MS-13. This is not true. I can't find any evidence that he has any conviction of any kind.
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I'm going to quote here from a filing by the United States government. On the 15th of March, although ICE was aware of his protection from removal to El Salvador, Abrego Garcia was removed to El Salvador because of an administrative error. So the government there has admitted in a court filing that they accidentally sent this guy to the prison labor camp in El Salvador, right?
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According to ICE acting field officer Robert Cerner, quote, he was an alternate. As others were removed from the flight for various reasons, he moved up the list and was assigned to the flight. So it appears that they had a large list of people they wanted to put on this flight. This is interesting, right? It's an insight into their process for filling that first flight.
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Some people they clearly didn't feel they had enough evidence for, but somehow this guy, who again has never been convicted of having any membership of any gang, they put on this flight, right? His wife and child are both US citizens, and they have sued in court. That's why we're seeing this, right? They've sued for the United States government to stop paying
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El Salvador for his detention and for the United States government to demand he return. Vance has advanced a kind of unique legal theory in response, claiming that withholding of removal only prevents someone being deported back to their home state. I mean, you could technically, that is what the withholding It's like he can't go back to El Salvador because he will be at risk in El Salvador.
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So they can deport him to a third state, but they deported him to El Salvador or renditioned him to El Salvador, right? I'm going to read J.D. Vance's post here. I'm not going to read the whole thing, but I'll start with the second paragraph. In 2019, an immigration judge, parentheses under the Biden administration, said,
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For those of you who are familiar with dates, 2019 was under the first Trump administration. Yeah, that was the Trump administration. Okay, moving on. Determined that the deported man was, in fact, a member of the MS-13 gang. He also apparently had multiple traffic violations for which he failed to appear in court. A real winner. Father of three is in quotes here, by the way. Yeah. Yeah.
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And gulags generally not capable of doing the apprehensions themselves. If we think of a gulag as a place, it is the police who apprehend the person, send them to the gulag. Moving on. Here are the relevant facts. I'm still quoting. The man is an illegal immigrant with no right to be in our country. Obviously, the judge determined that he was protected from removal.
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Quoting again, an immigration judge during the Biden admin determined he was a member of the MS-13 gang. Again, that's not the case.
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Yeah, it's bizarre. I think what they're referring to is that the initial hearing, right, where he was denied bomb was in 2019, and then he filed his asylum claim and later was protected from removal. But that's not what they're saying here.
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And then the last one, and I think it's most revelatory, because he's not a citizen, he does not get full jury trial by peers. In other words, whatever due process he was entitled to, he received. The immigration court doesn't generally present the opportunity for jury trial, right? Vance, again, holds a JDE. He presumably knows this.
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What's more disturbing is the claim made by the United States government in this lawsuit that the Abrego Garcia family filed. Quote, because plaintiffs concede that Abrego Garcia is not in the United States custody, this court cannot hear these claims. So they're claiming that no U.S. court has jurisdiction over over the question of these people who are in El Salvador because they're not in U.S.
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custody, right? Which, obviously, if they stick the landing on this, it suggests that, like, it is a one-way ticket to the prison labor camp, right? That you cannot challenge that in U.S. court. You ain't going to get very far in court in El Salvador, right? So what they're suggesting here is this is a forever detention that there is no habeas, right?
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That was what they were asking for, habeas corpus.
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Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I guess in the collectivized economy of revolutionary Barcelona, libraries still existed. Athenaeus existed. And I'm sure it was along a syndicalist model because everything was. So yeah, I think that's a good thing for people to look towards. I want to stop and take one more break, and then I want to talk about what people can do to protect libraries. Thank you.
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Yeah, so in this case, we don't have any of that. Mr. Abrego Garcia is still... The way his family found out he was in Secod was that his wife identified him by scars on his head when they shaved it and a tattoo they saw. Jesus Christ. Yeah, they had no idea.
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It presumably doesn't come up on the ICE detainee locator, you know, that you're going to look up your family members, or if your family members are detained by ICE, it doesn't have El Salvador as an option. So, yeah, this is where we're at. This is a case I will be following, right, because I say it's pretty pivotal.
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If they can argue that the court doesn't have jurisdiction, obviously I'm sure at that point that ruling will be challenged and it'll run up the courts. Currently it seems like the only court they're going to listen to is the Supreme Court, but Evidently, this is what they're going for.
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This is their argument here, that once you're in El Salvador, you're out of their hands and they can't do anything. So sorry, even though it was a mistake, you're stuck there forever, which is pretty disturbing.
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All right, we are back. So currently, like, I mean, this is like a funding cliff for the library system, right? I suppose it's hard to say, but like, how long would it take before people stop seeing these services if Doge was to start Doge-ing tomorrow?
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No, this was pure personal dislike of Elon Musk meddling in Wisconsin politics. Well, and everything else has happened since January. But it does seem like Elon Musk's personal presence was a net negative and all the money he spent.
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We'll send you some merch. We reported the news.
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Which is sad, because it's someone's kid who doesn't get to go to the library very often, right?
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Yeah. I think about how... I wouldn't have survived my undergraduate without libraries. All my grad school books are super expensive, especially academic books. And I relied very heavily on interlibrary loan.
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Yeah. Yeah. Cause it's a place where people can kind of exist.
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Without that. Yeah. So let's talk about like how can people engage to protect their libraries? What can they do? What are like some action items they can take?
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Yeah, yeah. And you can even, let's say you're not inclined to go to the library for whatever reason and you didn't like going out or you're worried about COVID or something. You can do most of this online, right? If you have Libby, you can borrow e-books.
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Okay. Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of nicer, nicer experience to read a paper book as well. What about like, if people, I know lots of people who are librarians listen, say email me, like, is there a way that they can organize? Is there a way that people are organizing, um, either to prevent this or like as a way of harm reduction, right?
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Like as a way of reducing the damage that the state can do to people's access to learning.
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Yeah, definitely. Hopefully there's still time for people to do that.
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Yeah, right. Why not start that? And regardless of what happens, we're stronger in this together than we are apart. And unions have done a lot to prevent fascism in the past.
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near you and they're librarians and you know maybe if you do lose some of your funding you can put your heads together and uh you know use each other's resources and have joint programming and things like that that makes sense are people like attempting so i know some of the stuff i mls have is like online archives are people attempting to somehow like download that in order to preserve it in the event that it goes away i don't know that that's really is that not what's a threat what
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Okay, so it's more like along the workplace organizing side.
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Yeah, definitely. It would be pretty tragic. Like there's a library not so far from my house. Like I can ride my bike to it and I go there all the time. And it would be really tragic to be without that. Yeah. So yeah, please continue to organize your libraries. Is there anything else that you'd like to plug or suggest people...
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Hi, everyone, and welcome to the podcast. It's just me, James, today, and I'm joined by Jamie, who is a librarian, and we are here to discuss the pending federal cuts on library funding and, I guess, years of attacks on library funding. So welcome to the show, Jamie. Thanks for joining us.
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It's a pretty bleak time generally, and I think a lot of us take refuge, especially in reading, actually. It's a way you can escape terrible things. Is there anything else you'd like to kind of suggest for people as we dive deeper into fascism every day at the moment?
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Yeah, I think it's really good. Like, it's so sad to think that we should have to quantify the value of everything monetarily. But especially something like a library, like so many people have had such positive engagements with them, which have nothing to do with the cash next. They're sort of like generating revenue. And that's what makes them valuable and what makes them special sometimes. Yeah.
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Hopefully people can advocate for that. How would you find your library's board meeting if you wanted to?
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Yeah, yeah, that is the thing that they do. All right, well, thank you so much for joining us, Jamie. That was great. It was really, really helpful.
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Yeah, this is really great for me because I have been trying to find a librarian for a very long time to talk to us on the podcast. I understand that lots of people have been like really concerned that we covered this, but also very afraid for their jobs, which is a rough position to be in. So thank you for coming on.
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I thought we'd start with like there was an executive order on the 14th of March. I think it was called something like further something, the federal bureaucracy cutting, slashing, diminishing, whatever. You know, I don't really care. One of the outcomes of this was, I believe, the Trump administration moving towards a complete closure of IMLS. Is that right?
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The existential debate among anarchists in arms is this that you've just highlighted, right? It's Need we form authoritarian structures similar to those using, for example, the Cuban Revolution, the Russian Revolution, these kind of status revolutions which characterize the left in the 20th century in some ways?
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Or is it possible for us to go from our community defense and the defense committees, like the six-person groups at the CNT organized in Spain, to a more egalitarian large formation, like a, like a truly revolutionary army. And like the split that you're talking about is a split that almost every movement has.
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Right. They were like following the Castro model. Is that right? Like the Che Guevara kind of guerrilla warfare doctrine.
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Yeah, definitely. Like, because it's easy to do that. It's easy to be persuaded that this situation is unique and different and therefore we need to accept some kind of compromise of the very essence of what we're doing. The method that like the people I have spoken to, both those within formations today and in Rojava and in most in Rojava, but also in Myanmar.
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And those, for instance, in the Iron Column, which was a Phi column in the Spanish Civil War, they're probably most famous for leaving the front line to attack the cops because they felt like they didn't have enough weapons and the cops had too many. And what they did was they created a concept of the minimum necessary discipline.
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Discipline being something that one has for oneself, not the hunting that comes from above. And they had leaders who would lead in times of combat when we needed to make swift and decisive action. There wasn't time to obtain consensus. They used consensus to arrive at those leaders.
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Those leaders were able in times of urgency to make urgent decisions, but that didn't confer to power or status outside of that moment.
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Yeah, we will find out, I guess. So can you explain for listeners who aren't familiar what IMLS is and what it does?
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Exactly, yeah. And that doesn't mean that that person is inherently capable of bossing you around.
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Yeah, exactly. And I think that's something like, you see it again and again when you read the column, the Daruti column newspaper, right?
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They talk about discipline and how we have to have, our discipline comes from our commitment to our cause and to each other, not from any fear of repercussions or like quote-unquote disciplinary action, but from like the fact that we don't want to let our comrades down nor do we want to let our cause down.
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And like when people do do that, right, it doesn't mean there aren't disciplinary actions, but it means that those are like like you said before, you don't break away from the core of what you're doing.
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So they agree by consensus to include with the person who has done the thing that is considered to be wrong, what a suitable punishment would be, or a suitable set of repercussions would be, so that it reinforces the idea of consensus and discipline coming from oneself rather than from fear of punishment.
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Yeah, I mean, the latter is like a system that looks not at people, but at quote-unquote crimes, right? And this is the opposite of a restorative justice system, which looks at people and the situations they are in and not just the worst thing that they happen to have done. We should return to South America, Andrew. We've once again diverted it. Yes, yes.
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Yeah, yeah, true. There's this wonderful line in Abel Paz's book about Daruti that Daruti was very fond of children, so he risked his life robbing banks to fund their education.
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I don't know. I just enjoy it very much. The whole, like, you never know what direction that sentence is going to go in.
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Yeah. Yeah. And like, I think it's really like, he wasn't maximalist for the sake of maximalism. He was maximalist for the sake of like educating children.
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It wasn't, he didn't see the violence as an end in itself. Yeah.
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Right. Yeah. It's hard for a movement to recover from that. Yeah. It's not like a genocide or like these colonial kind of, you could call it like a decap. Well, it's like a decapitation of a movement, I suppose.
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Okay. Yeah. I was, I was wondering about who funded interlibrary loans so that they're the ones who facilitate like the transporting of the books.
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Yeah, anyone with any lived experience, all the things they'd learned, all the mistakes they'd made and learned from, like, are gone. The movement has to begin almost from, like, a blank slate.
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Yeah, especially in a movement that's being criminalized and pursued by the state, right? Like, what they write down is what they risk the state discovering, so that they're only going to risk writing certain things down.
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Yeah. I mean, look at even like Spain still has very strong anarcho-syndicalist movement, right? But like the best of the anarchists died in in Aragon, in Madrid, and in concentration camps afterwards, or fighting in the Second World War. And it took decades for that movement to recover. And it's still not as strong as it was. This was one of the high points.
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Yeah, this has been one of my constant things as a historian is that like when people write histories today, they write them from the perspective of the inevitability of the state. And like, I'm not alone in making this analysis. David Graeber does it. Jim Scott did it too. The idea is that people who exist outside of the state are behind history.
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and that they have failed or chosen not to advance to the more advanced human existence that is the state. And Jim Scott does this in The Art of Not Being Governed, right? If we look instead as people who have chosen to refuse the state,
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then we understand anarchism as a choice that people would make knowing the options available to them rather than a step backwards or failure to advance to the state. And we can look at the whole of history from that perspective and see it very differently. But most historians don't. Exactly.
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Yeah. So there are lots of very important services. And what would it mean if we didn't have that IMLS budget at all? Like, what would it mean? Especially for like, like you said, those kinds of libraries that are financially, I guess, more marginalized in tribal libraries and rural areas and stuff.
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Yeah, and as historians, we shouldn't be making that judgment, right? We should be attempting to learn from and document the past rather than to sort of categorize it into failed and successful.
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Yeah, I think you're right. I think like this applies to lots of places. I think about it like, you know, I'm fortunate to have this like background in history, but also to be with people in their moments of revolution and to like spend time
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revolutionaries in myanmar and like one of the uh the analyses that you'll always see is that like this creation of liberated spaces is a not enough or b like there are also places within the non-government zone where there is still very strong control from a pseudo state right like but i think that overlooks the fact that yeah there are not like like libertarian states
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but people are living their lives without gods and masters that they are like experiencing freedom in every moment. And they are liberated in their own lives as they continue to struggle to liberate territory and other people. And that might be what success looks like.
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Yeah, and if we acknowledge that, it's much harder to go back. Those people can't go back because they've existed before. in liberation, right? Like they've lived in a free way. And like, they will always know that that freedom is possible, that they can live without authority, live without state power, that like liberation is a thing that can exist, not just in our minds, but in physical space.
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And like, they will always know that like, that's available. And if we can tell those stories, so will other people.
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Yeah. Yeah, exactly. We have to remember that when we're looking at these things, like we can, it's easy to look from where something ended and project that back, but we have to understand how it felt when people were doing it too. Exactly.
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Yeah, like I think I was looking online and the budget is something like 0.003% of the federal budget is going to, it's trivial.
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Yeah, maybe we should talk about that. Because I think if people like, maybe they just don't happen to go to the library, maybe they don't, you know, realize they have services they need, or maybe they don't live in the U.S., The library is not just a place where you can go and borrow the books, right? Can you explain some of the services that libraries provide?
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You mentioned some, but they really help people.
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Yeah, it's like... I don't know. I'm amazed how many of my friends and neighbors don't understand how my celebrity does. Like I'm forever like San Diego, our housing prices are ridiculous and no one seems to want them to not be ridiculous. Um, well, lots of us do, but we don't get to choose.
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And so like, we have a large in-house population and I'm always like, uh, helping my in-house neighbors go to the library, like giving them a ride or whatever, so they can, uh, yeah. Like you say, access internet services, apply for benefits.
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Yeah, that was the one that, like, I remember at the time you and I were discussing this, like, in our group chat, and we were trying to work out, like, how the Secretary of State could be revoking a green card. Yeah. And I think you found this, or you found it somewhere in there.
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The Trump administration has been very, very good at finding very obscure pieces of law that it can wield against migrants, right? Like, no one in... 2016 would have foreseen what they did with Title 42, which is a public health law. And they're doing something similar here. I mean, they may have spent the last four years looking for these things, especially when the campus protests began.
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Yeah, and, like, not get harassed by the cops just for existing.
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But this is entirely unprecedented as far as I'm aware.
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Which is the rest of their existence here, sadly. Yeah, these are massively important terms. I think most people, like, haven't... No one... Like, there's not really a big, like, fuck the libraries movement, you know? Like, I think people...
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Yeah, they talk about this a lot. Self-deportation is definitely one of their goals. They talked about it before Trump even came into power. That's what we're seeing a lot of these spectacle raids and spectacle deportations.
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Yeah, exactly. The desires that people leave. Is she a Canadian citizen?
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I wonder what her immigration status is in Canada now.
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Yeah, that would be interesting too, to see what Canada can offer her. I don't think the Trump administration would go after having her extradited back, because as you say, she's not accused of a crime, and they've kind of got what they wanted. It would be interesting to follow that.
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With the other cases of quote-unquote self-deportation, one of the issues is people have had their passports seized and held, like lots of Venezuelan migrants, so they actually can't, or it would be very difficult for them to just get on a flight and leave.
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Yeah, I guess. Yeah, I guess it's the whole, like, people should only read stories if they conform to a certain gender stereotype.
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Yeah, well, fuck those people. Absolutely fuck those people. Talking of fuck those people, we unfortunately have to pivot to ads. So, you know, here are some unfortunate advertisements. All right, we're back. Talking of people I dislike, actually, San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria, who was elected in 2020 and then re-elected, shamefully, this year, which is very disappointing.
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Yeah, I spoke to him a little bit back then, just via direct message. But I think at that time, whatever his agreement was, it seems like there was a component of it that at least he didn't want to talk about it in public, which is fine. Everyone has a right to do that, and he should do what's best for himself. But maybe I'll try and follow up with him again now, see if he wants to speak.
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Because he seems to have, like, he's been, of all of these people, the one who's been able to make the most statements and control his narrative to some degree.
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One of his first actions was to propose a budget which increased the funding to the police, surprise, and decreased the funding to the libraries that would lead to them closing for an extra day, right? And this is our, like, quote-unquote progressive mayor who, you know, has been anything but. But this isn't a particularly uncommon scenario, right?
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I think he proactively filed that suit, right? Yes. Yeah.
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Yeah, I mean, that's leaving it at the complete discretion of the officer, right?
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I've spoken since then to librarians around the country who for the last, at least half decade have faced funding cuts. Can you explain like, why doesn't the state see value in these services?
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Yeah, the anti-American ideologies, again, it's just vastly broad, right?
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Yeah. And I'm guessing this will be either like a literal control F of whatever they can find of your public social media or some kind of AI system. That's what it seems to be, right?
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I mean, I don't want you to like speak for, you know, like the Democrats defunding the libraries to give the cops more money, but can you explain like why there has been this ongoing assault on library budgets?
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Yeah, it seems like he was identified through his wife, right?
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Okay. Yeah, it would be interesting to know, are they searching just through F1 visa databases? I mean, obviously not if they're finding these green card people.
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Right, and then being like, can we deport? He's not a citizen, so yes, basically.
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Yeah, his children presumably, therefore, are also citizens.
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Yeah. And I think that's kind of what they're going for. Like a lot of this is, it's like the politics of owning the libs, right? It's like the politics of being angry at your niece and nephew on Facebook and wanting to humiliate them.
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Like it's not a particularly coherent policy other than like the Palestine protests made a lot of people on the right mad and they don't like migrants and that now they're using this obscure legal provision as a cudgel against everything they dislike.
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Yeah, I mean, again, like writing an op-ed is like as central to the First Amendment as things can be, right? Yeah.
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If we're talking about this liberal idea of the marketplace of ideas, the way that ideas enter the marketplace, you will find nothing more amenable to liberalism than writing an op-ed in your campus newspaper. That is the most well-behaved, straight down the middle, constitutionally protected way to engage in anti-genocide activism, pro-Palestine activism. In a sense,
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This one is particularly disturbing. Like it's a frontal assault on First Amendment rights for non-citizens is what it is.
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People will be familiar with, I don't know if it's Bataar or Bataar, but like you probably have seen videos of them on campus trying to hand pages to people. Pagers.
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yeah like uh making light of the pager attack israel did i mean making a threat like sure like if you're going to come onto a campus and make a fucking bomb threat and accuse someone else of terrorism uh i mean the hypocrisy is kind of the point but uh
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Yeah, right. Like mocking this attack which killed children, which crippled people. It's just disgusting. It's just abhorrent. They seem to get a lot of attention online because they do the thing where they go up to people and say deliberately provocative things and then film their reactions, right? They're kind of IRL trolling.
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It could be his ethnic origin, right? Yeah, it could be his name, right? Yeah, but we should explain the status thing a bit more for people who aren't familiar. Sure. Your status is when you're in good standing with the university. So normally that means you need to be enrolled in 12 credits per year. You might be on semesters, you might be on quarters. I don't think it hugely matters.
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There's a minimum course load. It may be different for different systems. I don't know. You'd also need to be in good standing in terms of not late on your fees, your tuition fees, that kind of stuff. Not in any... you haven't been expelled or excluded from the university for any actions that you've taken, that kind of thing. It means you are currently a student at the university, basically.
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The only time this normally affects international students I'm aware of, as a person who now teaches students, is they can't drop below a certain course load when otherwise they may wish to drop below a certain course load to either focus on, they might have a research They might be doing other stuff on campus like TAing, right? Sometimes that TAing counts towards their course load.
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Sometimes it doesn't, but it can affect things like that. But generally it would be the university that would update that status, right? That would notify US Customs and Immigration if somebody fell out of compliance with that. If I'm hearing right, that doesn't seem like that's what happened here, right? No.
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Yeah, like I don't quite know how that works in terms of like, are ICE supposed to be able to? I don't think it hugely matters at this point.
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Yeah, and they don't have to remove him for that reason. But yeah, in this case, I guess they're going for something else.
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Yeah, yeah. Like everyone else here, he hadn't done anything that would, under normal circumstances, lead to him having any interactions with USCIS.
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Yeah, I mean, none of what they've said is wrong. It's kind of what you can expect from the university, the best you can expect from the university, really. It's like, hey, we've noticed it's happening.
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A tip off. They just let them know what was coming.
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Yeah, absolutely. The IDF completely failed to see this coming, right? But not the folks at the Ivy League universities who were ready and waiting.
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Yeah, absolutely ludicrous. I eagerly await this court case, I guess, to see what evidence they have of this. The evidence is going to be like someone had a Palestinian flag.
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Yeah, this is ludicrous. One of the reasons that maybe we're seeing this so much over the Palestine advocacy is that Hamas is a listed foreign terrorist organization.
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Many other groups, and lots of groups in that part of the world are, but it's just a bigger stick to wave, I guess, material aid, or that no one has been actually accused of material aid to a foreign terrorist organization, as far as I'm aware. But that is kind of the sort of stick that they're waving, right? That is the thing that they're alleging.
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There was no point at which the Biden administration really effusively said, this is protected First Amendment speech.
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We may not like it, but it is central to the Bill of Rights. It's central to what America is supposed to be about.
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Yeah, and I mean, in some cases, right, like I'm thinking of one of Columbia, like professors got away with things which are absolutely unacceptable, like 100%. in some violation of your agreement with the university as a member of the faculty, like doxing your students, photographing students without their consent, following students around, like absolutely unacceptable.
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Like in any other context that you would be immediately shit-canned for that. Like really, really, the only reason you can lose tenure seemingly is being a fucking creep to students or stealing a lot of money. And like universities did allow that for students more than a year under the Biden administration. And like we're seeing the consequences of that now.
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I mean, we don't know everything that they've said.
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Yeah, it doesn't matter. We are defending their right to engage in constitutionally protected speech.
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Exactly, and people are quick to call it out. Yeah, and the State Department of this country has called it out, right? Rightly. I don't agree with everything the State Department does, but I do agree with them on that. Like,
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If you find yourself having a discussion about this, I think almost everyone in America can find something that they disagree with the government on, or have disagreed with the government on. This hurts every single one of us. Everyone's right to freedom of speech is challenged when someone's right to freedom of speech is challenged. I think that is the way to approach this.
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It doesn't really matter If the people whose speech is being challenged right now, their speech is, if it's odious to us, if it's something that we don't agree with, like that isn't what's at stake. What's at stake is everyone's right to say everything without government consequences.
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And the priests who look for him after he dies when he comes back. this, guys.
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Yeah, yeah. I guess it kind of, I used to lecture, I still do lecture at university, actually, starting again next month. But like we pivoted towards like everything has to be STEM in education generally because- Right, because that'll make money or something. Yeah, I don't know why, because like Bill Gates make the line go up.
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Yeah. It's good when you see a 90-degree angle on the old stock market graph. That's when you know someone's really crushing it in the economic department.
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Yeah, you can't really vaccinate against stupid.
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Mayor endorses Reagan coin as the exclusive safe source of retirement savings.
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If it's not already a meme coin 10 minutes after this comes out.
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This is why we're launching Coolzone coin, guys.
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And yeah, we lost so much that has not just intangible value, like you say, but actual tangible value, very, very obvious value. But nonetheless, like- Like you say, it's not easy to put on a graph, so it disappears.
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We're going to be using this fucker for years. Yeah. At least something good came of this. Yeah. When you're struggling to get by with your family, just remember the song.
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I saw a good post. It was like, you don't have a trade deficit with your dentist. You just pay them to fix your teeth.
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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.
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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
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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.