Mia
Appearances
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Crazy Neighbors
Yeah, I think there's construction that literally started outside the window one minute ago.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Crazy Neighbors
If you'd like me to call back, I can also do that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Crazy Neighbors
So I'm currently calling from San Francisco. I live in San Diego, but we're up here for the week visiting friends and my husband's family. And funnily enough, this is where the story takes place. Late 2015, one of my best friends, Dominica, shout out, she and I were living together. We were living in a typical old Victorian style apartment.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Crazy Neighbors
san francisco apartment we were on the first floor we had a neighbor who lived directly above us prior to this event we had very typical kind of almost expected noise complaints walking with shoes on in the middle of the night performatively loud sex always like on weekdays did you get a visual on the upstairs neighbor what kind of gentleman was he Sorry, I should have clarified. It was a girl.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Crazy Neighbors
I would say up until this point, it's sort of noise you kind of sign up for living in an old apartment. Anyways, one night, Dominica and I are coming home from a night out. It wasn't all that late for like a Friday night. It was maybe 11 p.m. And we are walking up to our building. We get out of our Uber. Dominica's a little bit ahead of me. She turns the corner to walk into our building.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Crazy Neighbors
And there's a few steps up, a very large glass door looking into our lobby. Dominica quickly turns back around, walks to me and is like, someone's getting eaten out.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Crazy Neighbors
A hundred percent. In order to get to the lobby, there's a few stairs and then the first floor is sort of on an elevated level. So she walking up and had bent over to give you a visual and the skirt was lifted from behind.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Crazy Neighbors
I would say she was a bit older than us. So we were mid twenties. I would guess around 30.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Crazy Neighbors
We sort of step back and decide what to do. And Dominica and I decide like, okay, I'm going to knock and then step back to give her.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Crazy Neighbors
If it were me, I would probably sprint to my apartment and like shut the door. So we step back, give it a second. And then we walk and they're standing there, like almost waiting for us.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Crazy Neighbors
Yeah, I think she's an exhibitionist for sure. I agree. And I had a feeling you guys were going to say that as well. So we punch in the code, we walk in and we kind of are like, okay, let's just walk right by, leave it be. And the girl says to me, oh my God, what are the chances?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Crazy Neighbors
We didn't know her very well. So we think she was an alcohol distribution. I wasn't maybe looking to be her friend.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Crazy Neighbors
That's my mode too. You're just cordial in the hallway, Sasha.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Crazy Neighbors
It didn't after that. I mean, she continued on with her regular antics.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Crazy Neighbors
I think there was some substance that evening for sure. God, if she was sober, that's scarier.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Crazy Neighbors
Wild experience. I think she moved out shortly after that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Crazy Neighbors
It got me here. So I'll end on the typical fangirl moment. I've been listening to you guys from the beginning. So I've been listening through many, many phases of life. Most recently, I just had a baby boy six months ago. Oh, congratulations. I did also want to share that our baby boy is named Crosby. Oh, cute.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Crazy Neighbors
Sweet. And if it's okay, I'll bring him in.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Crazy Neighbors
What a beautiful family you have here.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Crazy Neighbors
Oh, thank you. Yes, this is my husband, Benji.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
Yeah, speaking of everything being on fire, we need to take an ad break and then we will come back and I think the deliberate political intervention here. We are back from capital hellscape to mildly less capital hellscape. Yeah, actually, you were going to say?
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
And that brings me to something I wanted to sort of ask about like more deliberately, which is like, what's the kind of specific political intervention that you're trying to make into this moment with, with this project and both sort of, I guess a bit more generally too.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
Love it. Yeah, I think the way I've always thought about it was this kind of like, it's this like flame-tending process, where in these sort of flow cycles, your job is to keep the flame alive. And eventually, you know that you're going to see it, like, you know, you're going to see the explosion again, right? You're going to see the flame...
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
but like that that doesn't happen unless the flame is still there and unless people have been tending it and people have been trying to make it grow and you can't necessarily just like add fuel to it and be like ah it's gonna it's gonna grow now right it you know you don't you don't really have control of how it sort of moves and grows it expands but you have control over your ability to like make sure that it keeps going absolutely all about the embers yeah
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
And I think also, like, I think about the punk metaphor a lot. Like, one of the ways that I've been thinking a lot about, like, what we're doing here and it could happen here is we kind of took the...
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
We took the Rage Against the Machine gambit, which is to say we were like, okay, we're going to try to go somewhat mainstream in order to... I mean, Rage obviously went way bigger than we did, but we're going to go somewhat mainstream so we can spread this thing to a larger group of people.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
That's also very, very dangerous in the sense that it's very easy to just lose yourself in the mire of the field you've walked into. But on the other hand, the upside about it is that we're not the only people...
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
doing this right and there's all of you out there who are doing this like everyone on this call is doing this like is doing the like like the DIY work that is going to be the core of what this whole thing becomes and the more the more of these media projects we get and the more that people are able to sustain themselves doing this the more that we're sort of able to break like I don't know just like the monomaniacal sub stack control of like taking your money and giving it the transphobes
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
Kind of thing, the better shape we're going to be in in the years to come.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
Yeah. And I'm, I don't know. I'm, I'm, I'm excited for this. There's already been a bunch of great stuff that's up on the site. We will, we will have links to everything in the description. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you three for coming on the show. And I'm, I'm really excited about this.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
That's not true. Hold on. Oh, second time. Dang it.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
Yeah. In that spirit, you too, dear listener, can do things together and go disrupt this world. So go do that now instead of listening to whatever else is happening on the show. This ending's not going well, but go disrupt things. Thanks so much.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about the worst coups in all of history. I'm your host, Bia Wong. And we are returning to one of the worst coups I have ever seen. Because a whole bunch more stuff has happened in our most recent unbelievably dogshit coup in South Korea. The six-hour coup in which President Yoon declared martial law and tried to shut down the National Assembly.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
And then the National Assembly... got together and voted to end the martial law, and then it stopped. Extremely bizarre and baffling series of events. And, you know, when we last left our intrepid heroes, the people of South Korea, they had just successfully overturned a coup. No one quite knew what was going to happen in the aftermath.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
We knew an impeachment vote was coming, a vote to impeach President Yoon. The reason we're coming back to this, though, is that the aftermath of all of this has been absolutely baffling. And I think this has all been lost in the news cycle because about a trillion things are happening right now. But the situation in South Korea has been unbelievably weird.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
And so we're now going to take a look at the actual impeachment of President Yoon and the unbelievably bizarre path that led to it. Because, oh, my God, the more I talk to people, the more I realize that people don't know how unbelievably unhinged everything has been since since the military coup, because everyone has moved on. So we're going back.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
So immediately after the coup, there was this whole wave of military guys going like, we didn't know we were taking part in a coup. We're totally innocents like they just let us out of the trucks. And suddenly we were at the National Assembly. We were like, oh, what are we doing? And
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
there's also been this whole thing of all these special forces guys going like oh yeah no no yeah we totally could have taken the national assembly in 20 minutes if we wanted to we just uh we just like didn't want to take a national assembly like we didn't really want to do it man like our heart wasn't in this coup and like Really, I have seen the videos of that shit, man.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
Like, I didn't see you, like, going in there and kicking ass and taking names. I saw you getting your ass kicked by a guy just, like, blowing your ass up with a fire extinguisher and, like, not being able to break a bunch of very well-constructed barricades set up by, like, fucking Senate aides. So that's been extremely funny.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
So you like vanished the entire time this coup was going on and like nobody knew where he was and no one had seen him and things were kind of fiasco. He was just gone. So he finally like reappeared. Right. And as he sort of reappears, he tries to, like, do this explanation of why he did the coup.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
It goes about as badly as you would expect from someone who just failed the worst coup that we've ever seen. Here's from NPR. Quote, In his speech on Thursday, Yoon, a former chief prosecutor, attempted to justify his actions and downplay its significance. He argued that the opposition's, quote, legislative dictatorship, unquote, paralyzed state affairs and disturbed social order.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
Now, this is going back to the thing he did at the time, right? He has this thing where he keeps calling the parliament, which is controlled by the Democratic Party, which is like the liberal opposition party. He kept calling the parliaments like opposition anti-state forces. And like, my brother in Christ, what the fuck is a legislative dictatorship?
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
I mean, like, you know, you could be really strictly anarchist about it and be like, well, yeah, all legislators are dictatorships. But my dude, you are not living under a dictatorship because the parliament that your country elected hates you and refuses to pass your dog shit budget because no one likes you. That is simply not what the word dictatorship means.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
It reminds me of this thing where, like, you know, if you go back and you read, like,
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
people in the 1800s talking about or like in the 1800s like 1700s too you'll read them talking about monarchies right and they'll be like ah if the king can like overrule the will of the nobles we would be living in a pure dictatorship it's like what the fuck are you talking about like sir you live under a monarchy like you are already in a dictatorship you are also like part of the authoritarian apparatus of the dictatorship and this is just like the inverse of that where it's like ah the legislature won't let me do whatever the fuck i want so this is now a dictatorship
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
and so like you know that's simply not what the word dictatorship means and you can't get away with that shit as much in a country where people like in living memory have lived through an actual military dictatorship and understand what that's like the parliament refusing to pass your terrible budget that's not an excuse to institute martial law and try to shut down the legislature
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
So this this was not received well, as you would expect from whatever unhinged speech that was. He did apologize for imposing martial law, which is a very funny place to end up is like you try to do a coup and then you have to go on TV and apologize for trying to do the coup and also try to argue you didn't just try to do a coup. So this is received very poorly.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
As we sort of predicted immediately, the opposition Democratic Party immediately tries to impeach Yoon. And from the way the headlines kind of work in the West and from the way this is being talked about, and even from the way this episode sort of opened, you'd think that this impeachment vote was how we got impeached. But no, no. The first impeachment vote is not how Yoon gets impeached.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
Everything is way, way weirder than that. Now, Yoon's party, the People's Power Party, which is henceforth going to be called the PPP because I am not going to say the words People Power Party over and over again. Good Lord.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
The PPP got a lot of credit from people outside of South Korea for like, you know, some of their members legitimately did show up to parliament to vote against the martial law declaration. And at the time in the last episode, I said, that's bullshit. You don't get credit for voting against martial law. And also, like most of them weren't there. And I kind of got shit for this.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
And I have been absolutely 100 percent vindicated because the impeachment vote, the first one rolls around. The first one happens very quickly after the first coup. Right. Well, the first coup, hopefully the only coup, hopefully is not a second coup, but this happens very quickly. And OK, so the vote rolls around and the entire PPP, the entire party, except maybe like two people.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
Just walk out of the chambers. And because they walk out of the chambers, the vote fails because they don't have they don't have quorum.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
If you don't have a quorum, is it like there's there's like a minimum number of members that has to be in attendance for for whatever you're doing to be legal to stop like two people from showing up in the middle of the night and being like, ha ha, I am in the parliament. We've just passed this like order that makes me dictator or whatever.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
And again, the entire PPP just walks out and they leave and the vote fails because the PPP managed to whip basically its entire membership into trying to keep Yoon in power. And here begins the what the fuck is going on part of this episode, because A, all reports we have suggest that Yoon was planning to have the leadership of the PPP arrested.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
And B, he just literally tried to do a coup, and they're still backing him. And C, we stumble into a very, very thorny question that I saw from people in Korea, like, the moment after all this stuff happens, but didn't really hit the Western press until later, if at all, and didn't really hit, like... the mainstream consciousness? And this question will become apparent in a second.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
So here's from The Guardian. Senior PPP politicians have claimed you can continue as president while delegating his powers to the prime minister. An arrangement Park, that's Park Chan-dae, who's a very powerful Democratic Party politician, an arrangement Park described as, quote, a blatant constitutional violation with no legal basis. Now, this is true. What Park is saying is right. Right.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
And the fact that the Guardian is saying like that their way of framing this is, oh, the opposition party person says that this is a blatant violation of constitutional law with no legal basis. That's not just a thing that he says, like, this is true. Like, there is no legal mechanism for, well, we don't want to impeach our president, but also he just tried to do a coup.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
So instead, we're going to take his powers away and give it to the prime minister so he can still serve without us impeaching him. Like, that's not a thing. You can't do this. There's no mechanism for this. The Democratic Party people are just completely correct here. But because for some reason, the Guardian feels it. I mean, it's the Guardian, right?
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
Like, but they feel it necessary to sort of both sides. Again, a fucking coup. This is where we are. Here's more from The Guardian. Quote, the leader of the PPP, Han Dong-hoon, said at the weekend that Yoon would not be involved in foreign and other state affairs with control of the administration shifting to the prime minister, Han Deok-soo.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
Han said Yoon's televised apology was effectively a promise to leave office. Now, no, it wasn't. It was not a promise to leave office. What the fuck are you talking about? Like, everyone could just go listen to his apology. He didn't say that. He did not say he was going to leave office, right? And no, how he says it's effectively a promise to leave office, but it simply isn't, right?
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
Everyone could just, like, see this. And again, like, you know, OK, so like the thing that the thing that the PPP is trying to do, right, the PPP is trying to have their prime minister like gain control of the administration. Now, there is a mechanism to do this under the Constitution. It's called impeachment.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
The thing that happens when you get impeached is that you get kicked out of office as we're going to get to this later. But you get kicked out of office and the prime minister gets put into power. And this happens until the Supreme Court decides whether whether your impeachment should go through or not. Right. So, like, there's a mechanism for this.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
The PPP doesn't want to, like, impeach Yoon, but they also don't want him seemingly running the country because he appears to be, like, absolutely unhinged and just, again, declared martial law and tried to knock off the legislature.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
So you have this you have this whole sort of steaming mess of a situation where the PPP is trying to, like, have it both ways of, like, not having union power, but also not impeaching him. But this also begs one very important question. Who the fuck was running the country between the first impeachment vote and the second one? No one knows. No one knows who was running this fucking country.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
This is a country with 51 million people and nobody knew who was fucking running the country. And this, this barely made the news. I'm going insane. How, how, why, why, why is this a thing that just like completely disappeared beneath the fucking like chatter of the news waves? This just, this just vanished entirely.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
And, and speaking of vanishing entirely, we were going to vanish entirely to do these ads. And we are back. So as you would imagine from a situation where, again, you have a country of 51 million people where no one knows who is running the country, things have been extremely chaotic. So, you know, we covered in the last episode that like a bunch of ministers were resigning, right?
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
Because, you know, they had just taken part in a coup and they were like, well, shit. The ex-defense minister, who's one of the people who's been sort of implicated as being like Saying that he's to a large extent behind the coup is true, but this was a cooperative effort between Yoon, the defense minister, and a bunch of the people in the army.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
And the defense minister who resigned in disgrace got thrown in jail. So that's fucking wild. He just got arrested by the police. A bunch of testimony also has come out from the National Assembly investigation, which I'm not covering much of the testimony from the National Assembly investigation because it's really unclear exactly how reputable all this stuff is.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
Because a lot of people are just saying shit, right? And some of it may be real. Some of it may be stuff that people have obtained through their sources, but some of it's probably not. But to get a sense of the kind of stuff that is coming out in this investigation... One of the big claims was from I think it's from like a TV host who claimed he got texted it by a guy in the army.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
But apparently he was saying the plan by you in the army, the plan was to have the head of the PPP killed and then drop a North Korean uniform nearby to like do a false flag and implicate North Korean special forces. Now, this is crazy. unbelievably unhinged, right? What the fuck? And it probably isn't true, but, you know, the source isn't great. But, like, who knows, right?
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
Like, we don't actually know if they were planning to do this and fucked it up, or if they weren't planning to do this, or if this person is just lying, this person did get this text, but the person was misinformed. We don't know if this is just, like, misinformation that's being spread around. This is a good demonstration of what the sort of chaos... of this moment has been.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
And, you know, there's been a lot of other stuff that I think in any other time and place probably would have been like front page news. So one of one of the things that happens in this whole process is that the South Korean police tried to raid the house of the president.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
And, you know, like as part of their investigation, there's a whole thing where Yoon's been ordered by the investigatorial services to not leave the country because he's just actively under investigation for this military coup being illegal by just like the regular ass police.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
And so South Korean police like try to raid his house and they can't do it because the South Korean equivalent of the Secret Service stops them from doing the raid. And this in and of itself is something that like, again, would be a giant news headline at any other point in time. And it's just been completely lost. And it's like it's not sort of clear enough.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
Right now, how this is all sort of going to play out and whether the police are going to be able to do this. And, you know, what's actually going to happen to you after he presumably leaves office? I mean, I guess the Supreme Court could save him. But like, you know, there's there's there's a real chance that he we're going to get into this more in a second.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
There's a real chance that he just like fucking goes to prison. Right. And unlike the last president who was removed from office, like I can't imagine him getting pardoned by the next administration because that was merely an unhinged corruption scandal involving the president of South Korea being under the influence of a shaman and doing a bunch of corruption that did a bunch of horrible shit.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
But this is, you know, this is like he tried to do a coup. Right. So it's sort of unclear if he's going to get saved from that. It does seem very likely that he's going to face a bunch of charges for this because everyone is unbelievably pissed off. Here's from DW.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
On Monday, former head of Special Warfare Command Kwok Jung-guen and former head of the Capitol Defense Command Lee Jin-woo were arrested on charges of deploying military personnel to the parliament. Former chief of the Defense Counterintelligence Command, Yeo In-hung, has been accused of orchestrating the implementation of martial law, and Army Chief Park An-soo has been suspended from his role.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
Yoon's former defense minister, Kim Yong-hyun, who stepped down immediately following the aborted martial law declaration, and former interior minister Lee Song-min also faced investigations. So what we're seeing here effectively, right, is the housecleaning of the ranks of the Korean military who have been involved with this whole thing. Right. And they're going through a lot of different people.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
Part of this is also clearing out some of like the cliques in the military who've been sort of backing Yoon and who people have suspected have been a bunch of people behind a lot of this stuff. And this is a good and necessary process. The entire time this has been going on, everyone has been terrified of the possibility of a second coup.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
And the only way to avoid that in the short term is to remove the senior leadership of the military and get them away from their troops. They don't have the ability to sort of plan anything. And sometimes this can make people just go for it, right? Like that's what happens in Bolivia, it looks like.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
Where the failed Bolivian coup was a product of, you know, people trying to do house cleaning and get rid of military guys before they did a coup. And so this makes them go off half cocked. And like, you know, that's that's a bad situation for I mean, it's a bad situation for everyone in the sense that there's a coup happening.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
But it's a bad situation, especially for the military, because they don't have their coup preparations in place. So it's easier to knock them off. But what's interesting about this, too, is that to a large extent, we're seeing other parts of the Korean state like really go after the military. Right. And this I don't know. I mean, like, I'm hoping this kind of like.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
has a precedent inside of the sort of Korean like liberal democratic societal norms that like you can't let this just unhinged military do all of this stuff. The precedent of this sort of like military house cleaning, I think, is a good one. Right. This is going to be a rare a rare Mia agrees with the people who founded the U.S.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
moment because, oh, my God, those people suck shit like a bunch of slave owning genocidal bastards. But, you know, one of the things that they were right about is the political danger to any democratic system of having a standing army.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
right and especially when you have a set a standing army that's like permanently on a semi-war footing the way the south korea's is there's always a real political risk that they attempt to seize power and you have to fucking stop them from doing that And ideally, you just fucking axe as much of it as you possibly can, right?
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
I mean, I think you should axe the entire political system to make sure this doesn't happen. But, you know, this is hopefully a good first step. I also want to mention that the specific charge of insurrection is being thrown at a lot of these people, and also at Yoon himself. And, like, he absolutely did it, right? Like, there's not much of a dispute that he did, in fact, do...
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
An insurrection under under sort of Korean law. And this technically like carries the death penalty. But I don't think they're going to kill him. But, you know, this is the sort of severity of of this stuff under under the Korean legal system. And OK, so like all of this fucking chaos is happening. Right. And eventually there's a second impeachment vote.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
And this time, the public pressure is enough that the PPP stays in the chamber to vote no. And only about a dozen, like per NPR, only about a dozen PPP lawmakers actually vote to impeach the guy who just tried to have their fucking parliament disbanded. You know, and this is like one of the really depressing things about this, right? Even after everything, right?
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
And this is something that we can trace back to sort of the roots of the conservatism of the PPP. Even after all of this shit, right? Like these people still backed him. And that's a really, really grim and depressing thing.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
And part of the reaction to this has been from the South Korean trade union movement, which has been calling for just straight up the disbanding of the PPP as a political party. Right. And that's something that I think is extremely reasonable. Again, if your party's president tries to do a military coup, I think I think you shouldn't be allowed to have a party anymore.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
This is the meal meal liberal opinions. Right. OK, so like eventually this vote does go through and the stage that we're at right now is that, OK, so once you get impeached by the National Assembly, you're suspended from all your duties and the prime minister takes power. So what's happening right now is he doesn't have any power formally, but we're still in this sort of holding period.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
We're waiting for the Supreme Court to weigh in and either like approve the impeachment or not. And that's kind of where things stand now after an unbelievably unhinged week and a half of just everything being extremely, two weeks, I guess, everything being just unbelievably, extremely weird.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
And yeah, but I think there is a mild hopeful note, which is that if you fight back against these people, they can be defeated. It sucks, but you can eventually get them to crumble. And all I can really say for this is I hope the South Korean people prevail over the shitty military dictators. And I hope that we, too, are able to sort of prevail in the U.S.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
against our sort of equivalents of these forces.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that I introduce the same way almost every time. I don't know, you listen to the show, right? You're listening at like some point in the future. You probably know the things falling apart, putting back together again intro. I don't have to do it.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
We are doing something that we have done before and I guess we'll continue to do, which is talking to other anarchist media projects about their work and how things are going and stuff. Yeah, the general why, how, what of it all. And today we're talking with the Collective of Anarchist Writers.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
And very specifically, we're talking to Shuley Branson, who is a writer, translator, and teacher currently living in so-called New York. Carla Joy Bergman, who lives across the border in Canada and is a mom, writer, artist, and loves crows. Very important. We'll be coming back to that in a second. And Vicky Osterweil, who is a worker, writer, and agitator based in Philadelphia.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
And all three of you, welcome to the show. Hi, thanks for having us. Hi. Thanks so much for having us.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
Yeah, I'm excited to talk about this. And partly I'm excited to talk about it because the acronym for this is C.A.W. And there's a whole crow theme going on. And we love a crow here in Portland. It is maybe our big thing.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
Yeah. Yeah, there's a huge thing in Portland here where we have the mega murder. So every morning, all the crows sort of fly off into their different little murders and they go out and hang out in the city. And then at around sunset every day, all of the crows fly back into the city to have their giant mega murder meeting. There's thousands and thousands of them.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
You look up and you just see them, like the herds. The murders of crows flying past. There's specific spots in Portland where you can just go see all of the crows hanging out. And, you know, doing whatever the things crows do when literally an entire city is where the crows gather together every night.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
It's not a spokes council, though, because all of them are there. So I feel like that's an assembly.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
Yeah. One of the things that, you know, you kind of have to do here in Portland is you have to kind of like negotiate with the crows. You have to like you leave them like peace offerings and you sort of, you know, when your friends come, you let you introduce them to the crows. So the crows know that you're OK. It's very sweet.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
Yeah. We love a crow based society. And speaking of a crow based society. Yeah. Do you want to, I guess, give a brief sort of overview of what Caw is before we get sort of more into it?
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
Yeah. And I think one of the other issues with this, too, also, like the pay is just so bad, like even the like almost especially the leftist groups like pages so rancid and all of the combinations of those things make it really, really hard to just sort of be an independent writer. And also, OK, jumping back a second to their racing anarchism exists.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
This is why I the one that makes me always lose my mind is like I'm specifically going to name Jacobin here because I don't like them. But like one of the things that Jacobin will do is they'll be covering a strike that is organized by the IWW. It is an IWW union that they will have pictures of the strike.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
where there are a bunch of people holding IWW banners, and they will never mention that it was the IWW who organized the strike. So like, yeah, there is this real sort of conspiracy of silence, I guess, about our politics and the stuff that we do in the world.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
yeah very involved and they just will not mention them i'm like and they sometimes there's really good history and analysis on that podcast but like this is an omission that they clearly are choosing yeah and i think you know self-organization is effectively the only way out of this because otherwise you just sort of i don't know how to deal with all the sort of media gatekeepers like sitting there in front of you with a stick going no anarchism
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
Unfortunately, speaking of sustaining work as a platform, unfortunately, the way we are sustained here is with these ads. So hold on. And we are back. And this, I guess, brings us to the kind of work that's happening here. I was very excited because one of the things y'all have done is an interview with Raul Zabecki, who is the author of, like, one of my favorite quotes of all time.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
I think I've said on this show, like, multiple times. I weirdly ran into... In a sort of completely unrelated book called Rhythms of the Pachacuti, which is about the water and gas wars in Bolivia. I talk about this book on the show like all the time. This quote goes roughly like struggle illuminates the divisions of a society like lightning illuminates the sky. And I love it.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
It's like it's like it's the best explanation of what happened during 2020 that I've ever seen. And this is sort of what's happening. Like right now, too, is like you have these sort of flashpoint moments where we're, you know, suddenly like all of how society works very briefly becomes visible and you have this sort of moment when you're illuminated by it to act.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
And so I'm I'm really excited that you are talking to him and. Yeah. Can you talk a little bit more about what's been going on and what's to come?
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
Yeah, and that's something I think is useful for everyone listening to this, is that it's a lot easier to develop better ideas, and it makes your writing more clear, it makes the way that you, just the way you act in the world a lot more clear when you're working with other people, and it's the process by which the best stuff gets created.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
The older anarchist movement. I mean, when I say older, I mean like anti-globalization era stuff. It seemed like there was a lot more of a kind of anarchist media sphere.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
But yeah, no, no. Well, this is good, too, because like I think that's everything I've been realizing is like people don't I mean, in my generation, too, but like people younger than me don't really know the history of this stuff. Like all the time I have conversations, people where I start talking about like the Oaxaca uprising and they have no idea what I'm talking about.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
And I'm like, oh, no, we need to like we need to like resuscitate the history of like the 2000s because stuff happened there.
Watch What Crappens
#2655 RHOP 0911: Virgin Lagoon
Okay, well, you can get lit if you want to, but I shall not be getting lit because I'm going to so much. That's where I crashed into a median because it was too much for me. What Ray did that caused me to crash into the grass, the road, the clay and the rocks and the Monopoly board games and such.
Watch What Crappens
#2655 RHOP 0911: Virgin Lagoon
And Ashley's like, I'm very excited to go to Panama. I mean, the Panama Canal. Hello. I get to see it in person.
Watch What Crappens
#2655 RHOP 0911: Virgin Lagoon
Mia's like, well, I know that your invite says bring a special someone. And I know that you asked me to bring Gordon, but he can't make it.
Watch What Crappens
#2655 RHOP 0911: Virgin Lagoon
No. And that's not a thing anyone can get on a plane. But anyway, I wanted to know if maybe I could bring... No. No. I'm just going to say no right now. No.
Watch What Crappens
#2655 RHOP 0911: Virgin Lagoon
That's right, I said no, because I'm pouring into myself.
Watch What Crappens
#2655 RHOP 0911: Virgin Lagoon
And Cameron goes, there she goes! There goes the mermaid! Yay!
Watch What Crappens
#2655 RHOP 0911: Virgin Lagoon
No, I'm just touching the temperature of the water. She goes, stop that. Don't touch the water that has mermaids in it, Ray!
Watch What Crappens
#2655 RHOP 0911: Virgin Lagoon
She's like, oh, and everyone, I'm going to pull the first question. Oh, my God. What are the odds that I pulled out this question first? Who's cheated?
Watch What Crappens
#2655 RHOP 0911: Virgin Lagoon
But that doesn't count as cheating if you're sleeping with a merfolk fictional character. I don't think so. So, yes, I don't think you ever cheated.