All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file. Anarchism in Paraguay feat. Andrew What’s Happening In Rojava The Madison, Wisconsin School Shooter Was A Columbine Copycat: Here's What That Means Who Is Running South Korea? Collective Media in the Second Trump Era You can now listen to all Cool Zone Media shows, 100% ad-free through the Cooler Zone Media subscription, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. So, open your Apple Podcasts app, search for “Cooler Zone Media” and subscribe today! http://apple.co/coolerzone Sources: The Madison, Wisconsin School Shooter Was A Columbine Copycat: Here's What That Means ttps://shatterzone.substack.com/p/the-madison-wisconsin-school-shooter Who Is Running South Korea? https://www.commondreams.org/news/south-korean-president-impeachment https://www.npr.org/2024/12/12/g-s1-37854/south-korea-yoon-martial-law https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/dec/09/south-korea-ruling-party-accused-of-second-coup-as-opposition-pushes-for-new-impeachment-vote?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=bluesky&CMP=bsky_gu https://www.npr.org/2024/12/14/nx-s1-5228633/south-korea-parliament-impeach-president-yoon-suk-yeol https://www.npr.org/2024/12/11/g-s1-37718/south-korea-president-insurrection-charges https://www.dw.com/en/south-korean-military-faces-scrutiny-amid-officer-arrests/a-71092765 Collective Media in the Second Trump Era https://www.cawshinythings.com/ https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/help-launch-cawSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Welcome to Decisions Decisions, the podcast where boundaries are pushed and conversations get candid. Join your favorite hosts, me, Weezy WTF, and me, Mandy B, as we dive deep into the world of non-traditional relationships and explore the often taboo topics surrounding dating, sex, and love.
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Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode, so every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.
Hello and welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm Andrew Sage. I'm on Andrewism over at YouTube. And I'm not on YouTube right now. I'm on It Could Happen Here. And I'm joined by the disembodied voice of the one and only... Garrison Davis.
Yes. Well, one and only that I know of, unless there's another one going around, which would be freaky. There might be.
There might be. But today, I want to continue our journey through Latin American anarchisms and their histories. Now, compared to all the other countries I've discussed so far, such as Peru and Chile and Argentina and Brazil and Cuba, this one had a bit less information about anarchism in its past.
So this will be a sort of a smaller sandwich anarchist history, perhaps fitting of the country that is sandwiched between Argentina and Brazil. I'm speaking, of course, about Paraguay, known for its fraught history of warfare, politically volatile landscape, series of dictatorships, and indigenously intertwined cultural and social fabric.
Anarchism took root in this rather unique setting, and thanks to the work of Angel Capileti and a few other scattered sources, I've been able to piece together the history of anarchism in Paraguay. Without further ado, nos comencemos.
For much of its early history, Paraguay's identity was distinct within South America, from its time as a Guarani settlement to its formation as a Spanish colony in the 16th century. Spanish Jesuit missionaries wielded significant influence, and for over a century, Paraguay was a self-sustained colony with a rigidly hierarchical system based on the Spanish casta system.
Paraguay's economy primarily revolved around agriculture and cattle herding, unlike the mining economies in other Spanish territories. The Guarani people had a significant cultural impact throughout Paraguay's history, and their language and traditions remained central even as Paraguay evolved through the centuries.
Even today, most of the population speaks some variety of Guarani alongside Spanish. Fast forward to the early 19th century, as South American nations began declaring independence from Spain, Paraguay took a unique approach.
Rather than aligning with the neighboring revolutionary movements, Paraguay, under the leadership of José Gaspar Rodríguez de la Defensia, declared independence in 1811 and adopted an isolationist authoritarian path. Francia ruled as the country's supreme dictator for nearly three decades, envisioning a self-sufficient, hermetic society.
He strictly controlled foreign influences, banned European migration, and restricted trade. By the mid-19th century, Paraguay had built up a significant state infrastructure under Francia's successor, Carlos Antonio López.
However, this era of economic development was short-lived as Paraguay entered the catastrophic War of the Triple Alliance between 1864 and 1870 against Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay over territorial disputes. This conflict proved disastrous for Paraguay as they suffered staggering losses. Nearly 70% of its population died, its economy was shattered, and its territory was significantly reduced.
And yes, you heard me right, nearly 70% of its population perished, including most of its male population. In the war's aftermath, Paraguay was plunged into political chaos, economic ruin, and a period of foreign interventions. Due to the economic devastation of the war, the country became indebted to British creditors.
And with that leverage, Britain pushed for the development of a free market economy and privatization, which brought Paraguay into closer contact with the global economy and eventually led to a more pronounced class divide and establishment of an exploitative agricultural export system.
Land that had once been communally managed was swiftly privatized, driving indigenous communities and small farmers off their lands and into the workforce of larger estates. On those estates, workers would find themselves in debt bondage. Tied to the estates are small debts that workers owed to landowners would spiral into insurmountable debts that would become nearly impossible to repay.
Labourers, called peonies, were typically paid in vouchers or scrip that could only be redeemed at the estate store, where prices were exorbitantly inflated. Any attempt to leave or challenge the conditions was met with violent repercussions from estate managers, creating a cycle of economic entrapment that was essentially slavery by another name.
Paraguay became a country of ever more wealthy and powerful landowners with a struggling rural working class. As the 20th century approached, the labour struggles and social divisions within Paraguayan society were glaring.
Crone inequality, exploitative working conditions, and the dislocation of indigenous communities created fertile ground for radical ideas among rural campesinos and urban workers. European immigrants fleeing political repression brought with them some rather radical ideas that began to resonate with Paraguayan workers who were desperate for a way out of their circumstances.
For a people who had survived centuries of oppression and authoritarian rule, anarchism had a unique appeal. By the 1880s, workers in Paraguay had begun organizing mutual aid societies, and one such society of typographers would organize themselves into a union, the first in the country's history, by 1886.
That same year saw the rise of construction workers, carpenters, tailors, postal workers, and baker's unions. Those bakers would also conduct the country's first ever strike action in October of 1886. The first distinctly anarchist publication I could find in Paraguay was organized by a group called Los Hijos del Chaco, who published the Libertarian Manifesto in 1892.
They call themselves anarchist communists and declare their intent to abolish private property, the clergy, the state, and the armed forces. We seek the complete emancipation of the proletariat as we fight to abolish the unjust exploitation of man by man.
We dedicate all of our moral and physical strength to overturn all tyrannies, to establish genuine liberty, equality, and fraternity in the human family. We seek to transform private property into a common good. We seek to do so because individual property is the basic cause of all the evils that afflict us.
It is on that basis that the dregs of humanity, government, clerics, lawyers, militaries, entrepreneurs, maintain themselves in power, live as parasites, and the continued enjoyment of their plunder finances large armies with the products of our labor. End quote.
Even prior to that manifesto, anarchists were making moves in the graphic, railway, and bakers' unions as early as 1889, fighting for and winning the eight-hour workday by 1901. Strike actions in this period were focused on that goal alongside wage increases and other improvements to working conditions.
The anarchists also tried to establish a national trade union center, but unfortunately did not succeed. In 1892, thanks in part to the growing Spanish and Argentine immigrant populations, there was a wave of libertarian union formation throughout Paraguay.
The anarchists were also quite successful among the peasantry, as they helped organized armed resistance societies to aid in their struggles against the landowners. Anarchists also managed to establish Rafael Barrett Cultural Center in the early 90s, hosting an impressive collection of books by fellow Paraguayan and foreign writers, and emboldening the formation of even more trade unions.
Rafael Barrett, by the way, is one of the most significant figures in Paraguayan anarchist history, according to every account I've read. Born in Todavega, Spain in 1876, Barrett's early life was typical of a well-to-do intellectual. He studied languages, piano, and eventually engineering.
By his late 20s, he was drawn to Latin America, partly by adventure and partly to make a difference, driven by a growing commitment to justice and solidarity. He arrived in Buenos Aires in 1903, where he found work as a journalist, soon making waves with an article that condemned the stark inequality he observed in Argentina's capital. This critique cost him his job.
Yet it deepened his dedication to speak for those who were voiceless. Barat's experiences of seeing European immigrant workers toiling under brutal conditions fueled his indignation against unchecked wealth and poverty's vicious hold on the working class. In 1904, Borat made his way to Paraguay.
He was initially welcomed as a correspondent for El Tiempo and even held government positions, including as the director of the Department of Engineers and the Railroad Agency. But his commitment to exposing the country's political and social rot soon put him at odds with Paraguay's new liberal government.
He saw that simply swapping out conservative leaders for liberals did little to improve conditions for ordinary Paraguayans. as demonstrated by the continuous labor struggles that arose in response to the industrialization undertaken by the liberal government. Workers were fighting to abolish child labor, improve their conditions, increase wages, and so on. He couldn't stand by in silence.
So he resigned from government service, now fully committed to social justice, even as his growing radicalism began to alienate the political elite. Barrett's personal experiences sharpened his perspective, transforming him from a sympathetic observer to a dedicated anarchist.
His writings in Criminal became essential reading for workers and peasants alike, urging them to see beyond superficial reforms and to challenge the entire structure of oppression. Perrette condemned the government's abuses and spoke out against exploitative systems that kept the majority of Paraguayans marginalized. He was a fiery advocate for social justice.
And one right in particular, Augusto Roa Bastos, called him the discoverer of Paraguayan social reality. Because Barrett didn't just observe these injustices, he threw himself into exposing and condemning them with fufa. His impact was so significant that even when he was forced to flee Paraguay in 1908 under government pressure, his ideas endured.
His health was deteriorating from tuberculosis, but he continued to write, receiving support from intellectual comrades in Uruguay and Brazil. His final years were just a continuation of his relentless dedication, even as his health continued to decline. In 1910, he went to Paris to seek treatment, but his health failed and he passed away in December of that year.
But just before Barrett's exile and passing in 1906, De Anacus would form the first and for some time only workers' federation in the country by joining together the illustrators, carpenters, and drivers' unions. Raphael Barrett actually became something of a thought leader for this group.
And this was the Federación Obreras Regional Paraguay, or FORB, partially inspired by the Federación Obrera Regional Argentina, or FORA, where they borrowed many of their programmatic ideas. If you recall the episodes I did on Argentina, you know that the reasoning for the name was ideological.
By adding the adjective regional, it made plain that the country in question, whether Paraguay or Argentina, was not being considered a state or political unit, but a region of the world in which workers struggled for their liberation.
Soon after its founding, on the 1st of May 1906, the FORB held the country's first International Workers' Day demonstration, despite police attempts to shut it down.
FORB also launched their official publication, El Despertar, in the same year, and the paper carried articles about the anarchist movements in Europe and Latin America, printed works by authors such as Peter Kropotkin and Anselmo Renzo, published reports of the FORB's activities, named and shamed the known strikebreakers, and encouraged its members to pay their union dues promptly.
Subsequent years would introduce other libertarian newspapers such as La Rebellion, La Tribuna, and Asia El Futuro. After the 1908 coup by Emiliano Goncalves Navarro destabilized the economy and restricted Asuncion's labor movement, anarchism still found strength among rural and tannin industry workers.
Despite increasing hostility from figures like Presidents Gondra and Jara, labor strikes continued, which were met by fierce repression, arrests, and forced deportations. With the outbreak of the Paraguayan Civil War from 1911 to 1912, anarchists and other labor organizations faced a government crackdown. Groups like the FORP became inactive, temporarily at least.
By 1913, in the wake of the war, a schism was emerging as some unions moved toward reformist ideologies, influenced in part by the populist Colorado Party. Meanwhile, FORP reaffirmed its anarcho-syndicalist roots, forming a federal council that included both workers and intellectuals, aiming to rekindle its union activities amidst a wave of reorganization.
Post-World War I, a new surge in demand for Paraguayan exports revitalized labor activism. In 1916, the Corp, or Centro Obrero Regional del Paraguay, took on the role of championing anarcho-syndicalism and labor rights. This movement gained support from a wide network, launching influential publications like El Combate and Renovación.
Other groups like Mayday and the Revolutionary Nationalist Alliance, which sought a federalist union of the peoples of Latin America, also took part in the resurgence of anarchist ideas. In 1922, the Paraguayan anarchists were able to finally establish links with the International Workers' Association.
By the 1930s, Siriaco Duarte emerged as a prominent voice, advocating for workers' rights despite, you know, everything. He was a protege of fellow anarchist and printmaker Felix Cantalicio Aracuyo, a Paraguayan mestizo of mixed indigenous and black ancestry.
At one point, Aracuyo and his comrades had helped organize a tram worker strike in Asunción, which compelled the government to round them up and dump them in the middle of the jungle in Mato Grosso, hoping that they would die.
And yet Aracuyo and his friends made their way through over 1,300 kilometers of mountain jungle, surviving on roots, fruits, and game to make their way back to their hometown of Encarnacion. And speaking of Encarnacion, both Duarte and Aracuyo took part in the little-known attempt at an anarchist uprising in Paraguay, which was actually centered in Encarnacion.
On the 20th of February 1931, a group of 150 workers and students, organized in a couple popular assemblies, took control of the city of Encarnacion with the goal of establishing a libertarian commune, part of a plan to spark a wider anarchist-syndicalist revolution in Paraguay.
This was the culmination of a series of strikes and widespread leafleting by anarchists and students in support of revolution.
It wasn't meant to be centered in Encarnacion, as there was a planned construction worker-led general strike in Asuncion and similar action in Villarica and Concepcion, but key organizers in those struggles and those cities were deported in the days leading up to the action, so those planned actions ended up failing.
After 16 hours, when their efforts were not reinforced by workers and the rest of the nation, the insurrectionists of Encarnacion took over two steamboats and made their way along the river to Brazil. But not before they attacked the Yerba Mate companies and burned the records related to indentured laborers in two ports. Their solidarity never died.
Even after they went through everything they went through, they didn't lose their sight on what really mattered. Sadly, the 17 students and workers who remained in Encarnacion were arrested. Duarte found himself jailed and interned on Margarita Island after Liberal Party President José P. Cuguiari outlawed trade unions.
Other revolutionaries were dropped off in the jungle to die at random points along the Parana River. Seven of the captured 17 met this fate, and the other 10 spent a few months in prison before being deported to Argentina. The movement then faced distinct challenges during the Chaco War from 1932 to 1935 between Paraguay and Bolivia, which halted much of the anarchist activism.
Many anarchists joined the war effort reluctantly, including Duarte, who performed duties in the rearguard while working as a typesetter for various presses, including anarchist presses. With the Paraguayan victory, following the war, the return to domestic concern saw a resurgence of anarchist and labor activities.
The government's crackdown of leftist ideologies in the late 1930s and 1940s under President Mori Niko's rule led to severe repression of anarchist and syndicalist groups.
Duarte spent some time as a worker representative at the National Labor Department, or DNT, but was under considerable fire from the communists, who had taken hold of the trade union movement after anarchism waned in popularity. He finally resigned from his post in 1941 after a workers' coordinating committee of seamen, tram workers, beakers, print workers, and other trades
issued a protest note to President Morinigo threatening to withdraw from the workers' delegate for the infringement of their rights of assembly, to unionize, and to strike. Of course, their protest note was completely ignored. The president's authoritarian tenure pushed several anarchist and socialist organizers into exile.
Duarte himself ended up in exile in Argentina by 1942, but eventually was able to return and reclaim his appointment as a worker representative. But then, not long after, he became a victim of a police crackdown during the 1944 general strike.
After the labor movement was hijacked by the Republican Workers Organization after 1947, Duarte dropped out of trade union activity entirely and refocused to publishing articles in trade union publications abroad. and urgent research into Paraguayan trade union history. He had faced repeated arrests and took part in strikes anyway, advocating for workers' rights across various industries.
He continued his activism against fascism and authoritarianism, operating from Argentina at times, while still supporting strikes at anarchist literature in Paraguay. The 1954 ascension to power of General Alfredo Streisand marked a significant period of intensified authoritarianism. Streisand's regime violently suppressed opposition, including anarchists, for over three decades.
Even in his 70s, during the 1970s, Duarte was harassed by Stroessner's secret police. Many other anarchists were imprisoned, exiled, or disappeared by Stroessner, who imposed tight control of unions and labor organizing.
The 1954-1989 dictatorship of Stroessner stifled anarchist activities severely and forced them underground, where they would have to preserve anarchist literature and ideas through secret print publications and solidarity movements.
The result of this dictatorship was that anarchism in Paraguay experienced resurgence much later than other Latin American nations, with the spark rekindled only in the early 2000s. This rebirth of anarchist sentiment emerged largely within the punk counterculture and youth-led social movements, often interconnected with struggles for indigenous rights, economic justice, and environmental causes.
The establishment of spaces like La Terraza and Anarchist Squad provided platforms for activists and community engagement, while publications such as Autonomia, Zine, and Grito fanzine disseminated anarchist ideals.
Despite Paraguay's history of anarchist repression, these newer movements, however small, signify some small hope for a renewed interest in libertarian ideas within Paraguay, one that can be seen even more vibrantly in other parts of Latin America. Paraguayan anarchists have shown us that the drive for freedom and equality is a daily commitment to defy tyranny and resist exploitation.
Despite facing decades of silencing and the destruction of dictatorship, anarchism did not disappear. The seeds of resistance lay dormant, but they are ready to bloom again as new generations can take up the struggle. As we conclude, let us remember the words of Rafael Barret, who fought tirelessly for the people he came to call his own. Justice, justice above all things.
Justice, even if it costs blood. All power to all the people. Peace.
Welcome to Decisions Decisions, the podcast where boundaries are pushed and conversations get candid. Join your favorite hosts, me, Weezy WTF, and me, Mandy B, as we dive deep into the world of non-traditional relationships and explore the often taboo topics surrounding dating, sex, and marriage.
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Welcome, I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time.
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Hi, everyone, and welcome to the podcast. It's me, James, today, and I'm joined by Dani. Dani's an engineer and photographer who lived in northeast Syria from 2018 until 2023 and a founding member of the RIC, which is the Rojava Information Center, if you're not familiar. And she worked for the Self-Administration and Civil Engineering while she was there. Welcome to the show, Dani.
Hi, James. It's really good to be on.
Yeah. Cheers. Thanks for coming. I know it's like a stressful time. So what I thought we would do is there's been a lot of reporting on Syria that people have probably seen if they're living in the US or the UK. Nearly all of it has either excluded or like footnoted what's happening in North and East Syria and specifically in the areas that are under the self-administration.
So I was hoping today we could give people a little more introduction to what's happening there. There's been a lot of jubilation about what's happening in Syria, and things have been very far from universally positive. There's a massive displacement of civilians, ethnic cleansing of areas that have been captured by the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army.
And genuine peril for the self-administration project, the like of which we haven't seen for a long time. So perhaps if listeners aren't familiar, would you give them the real basics of the self-administration of the AANES and what it means and what's going on there?
Yeah, well, that's a big question because it's a big project. It's been going on for quite some time.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's kind of been lost in discussions and news about the Syrian civil war because it has been such a complex, multipolar, multi-ethnic conflict. And it's been going on for, what, like 13, 14 years now? Yeah. coming up to 14 years, the Kurds in the northeast had been preparing for some time before the outbreak of civil war back in 2011 for something like this.
Obviously, they didn't know this was going to happen, but they had been working on revolutionary emancipation for decades and in particular since around 2000 they'd been working on this concept of democratic confederalism which is moving away from a sort of
what they call an old paradigm of Marxist-Leninist thought, to this system they've now quite effectively built up there, where democracy is bottom-up, it's structured around small communes and self-organising units, cooperatives.
There's a market economy, but it's not a capitalist economy, where there's sort of radical emancipation of oppressed peoples, particularly women, who are really centred in the revolutionary process and organising that. And I think because they, maybe you can't call them conflict avoided, but they haven't avoided conflict. They very famously defeated ISIS amongst other groups in the Northeast.
They fought against al-Nusra Front and various other jihadi groups. They also didn't enter into serious conflict with either the FSA, as they were, or the regime and the Assad regime. Mm-hmm.
And so they kind of managed to carve out a sort of democratic and semi-enclave, I mean, people would describe it as a state that they quite vehemently say it's not a state, in the northeast of Syria, whilst the worst of the fighting was between the Assad regime and the FSA and groups that came out of the FSA in the west and south of the country.
Yeah, I think that's a very good summary. I think, like, it gets missed... maybe because of how relatively successful it's been compared to other democratization projects within Syria, it gets missed that when people are talking about what will happen in Syria now, bizarrely, and I don't quite understand how we get here, but people seem to go to Libya. I understand how we get here.
It's through a process of orientalism and ignorance. But we have a functioning democracy, an example of... It's not just Kurdish people, right? It's lots of communities living together in North and East Syria. And because of democratic confederalism, they're able to coexist and still feel they have enough sovereignty to be safe. Is that fair?
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think something that is hard to convey or fully understand unless you spend a lot of time there or you're deeply involved with any of these communities is quite how hard that was to do. Yeah. A lot of different ethnic groups, political groups that hate each other, you know. Yeah.
The Kurds, they brought in lots of different policies like the right to be taught in your mother tongue. When they took power 2012 onwards, they were very keen not to just sort of replace everything with Kurdish, make it a Kurdish state, you know, start being the oppressor instead of the oppressed.
They made sure that they continued using Arabic as the majority language because it is the majority language there. The north and east of Syria is still an Arab majority area. And this is despite the fact that they've been pretty horrendously oppressed by the Arab population through the Ba'ath Party and its oppressive systems for decades.
So it has been a pretty hard ongoing process to negotiate and to put aside pretty serious conflicts between quite a few different groups that exist there.
Yeah, it won't be any easier across the whole country than it was there. But like they have a system that works and it's kind of frustrating to see these discussions of what happens next that just ignore the fact that there's a functioning multi-ethnic democracy right there.
If we do just look at women's liberation, you know, I've reported from lots of places around the world, lots of places in that part of the world. And the difference is profound in like everyday life. It's not just a kind of rhetorical commitment, right? Like, at least my impression as a man is that like, this is a revolution by women, not a revolution. It's about women. It's not...
A revolution by men that like seeks to liberate women says it's going to liberate women. You know, with the US invaded Afghanistan saying it was going to liberate women and look what we got. And like the difference in just the way people are able to like every aspect of everyday life is completely different. But that's in danger right now.
The narrative, I guess, that people will be familiar with from Syria is that the state has been defeated. The Assad regime has been defeated. and that therefore the revolution has succeeded. But the Assad regime is not the only state in play in Syria, right? So can you explain the Turkish antipathy to the project in North and East Syria and how that's manifesting itself currently?
Yeah, it's pretty hard to discuss any of this stuff without talking about Turkey and without understanding where they're coming from. I think it's something that isn't said enough or understood enough that the modern state of Turkey is an ethno-nationalist project. I don't say that as a slur, that's like a basic founding principle of the state.
It's a state founded on genocide and the mass forced demographic change across the whole country. And it's continued that way. And there have been reforms for sure. But that's still a founding principle. And even now, sort of speaking a non-Turkish language in the Turkish parliament is a pretty serious violation.
And the size of Turkey, the size of its economy, the size of its military, the regional power status they have in the Middle East means that they have an enormous gravity. They have an enormous amount of power over Syria. A lot of the goods and services that Syria relies on come in through Turkey or rely on Turkish industry.
And the Turkish military is a huge supporter of the groups in the northwest, like Hayat-ı Al-Sham and the Syrian National Army. And of course, The Kurdish question within Turkey is the main reason for their antipathy towards what's been built up in northeast Syria.
As much as the self-determination for oppressed people as minorities is something that's an issue, the fact that it's Kurdish-led and in particular it's emancipatory for Kurdish people threatens this ethno-nationalist aspect of their state. And it... they see it as something that needs to be nipped in the bud, right?
And they've sort of done that with northern Iraq, the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, by essentially vassalizing the KDP, the main party there. And they know they can't do the same in northeast Syria, and the military option is their best chance, their best hope. of nipping Kurdish emancipation and Kurdish self-determination in the bud and preventing it from sort of snowballing across the region.
Yeah, I think we should probably mention that, I guess, if we talk about the electoral method or the electoral path, people in Turkish Kurdistan, in Northern Kurdistan, whatever you want to call it, in addition to the armed struggle, which has been there since 1984, they have also tried to vote and repeatedly seen their votes ignored or changed or their elected officials removed.
This is within the last year. I'm not talking about back in the 80s and 90s. And like Turkey has been aggressively attacking any attempts at like self-determination within the country. And then, as you say, like militarily attacking the Kurdish freedom movement within North and East Syria.
Do you want to talk about the Syrian National Army or the Turkish-backed Free Syrian Army, whatever you want to call them, and explain like... I think part of what we're dealing with is that Turkey has a very well-established state media project, and they seem to do very well at creating viral social media content.
So people might not be fully familiar with who the SNA are and specifically Turkey's role in creating them. Do you want to explain that a bit to people?
Yeah, I mean, this is one of the reasons why I think it's so hard for people to report on the Syrian civil war. It's very hard to convey like a simple coherent narrative of one side versus the other, you know, like Ukraine versus Russia, the Russian world and Ukrainian world. Mm-hmm. Because there are so many different groups in the SNA, it's an important one.
And they are grouped together with this concept of the rebels that have liberated Syria. Despite the fact that they're not actually part of Hayat al-Sham, the liberation movement, as it calls itself, that have taken over Syria. Yeah, the Syrian National Army, it's kind of like a loose collection of various, some of them call themselves brigades or groups.
It's essentially a military proxy force of Turkey. They don't have a coherent political framework. They're not revolutionary groups. They're not liberatory or emancipatory. They wouldn't describe themselves as that in the same way that maybe HTS would. I mean, the Kurds in northeast Syria describe them as gangs, which kind of sounds like a propaganda term.
But when you actually look at what they do, they really are like sort of a criminal enterprise, a criminal gang that's used as a convenient proxy force by Turkey because ultimately Turkey has a massive military. Their navy is quite underfunded and not particularly well staffed. The air force has suffered pretty seriously from the fallout of the The coup in 2016. But the army is massive.
It's relatively well funded and their drone program is huge. The thing that they struggle with is the losses that are incurred against Kurdish groups, particularly the PKK in the mountains between Iraq and Turkey. And they need to they need to control that because they realize that they've been fighting militarily, as you say, since the early 1980s.
And they can't have a Vietnam situation of a mass movement against their military occupation and against their military efforts in Syria. They can't afford financially or politically to get into a quagmire there.
And so by funding this sort of collection of groups called the SNA, that's their way of being able to incur pretty massive losses without having to report on it, without that creating unrest or opposition within the Turkish population of Turkey.
Right, and I think especially when some of the things the SNA have done, which we can maybe get into in Manbij, it gives them a deniability that wouldn't exist if that was regular soldiers doing that. Some stuff which is war crimes is, I guess, a nice way of saying it, like a more sanitized way of saying it, but horrific stuff, really terrible stuff.
This has been happening since at least 2018, but Turkey doesn't have to be held accountable for that because, like you said, it's not the Turkish army. Do you want to explain how the situation in North Syria has changed since, when was it, like two weeks ago, a week ago?
I guess that they moved south from Aleppo and the HTS largely with some support from SNA moved towards Damascus and then the SNA launched its own assault on the self-administration. Can you explain a little bit of what's happened there in terms of displacement and in terms of the terrain that the SNA have captured?
Yeah, it's been very fast moving. As you say, it's only been two weeks since the battle for Aleppo started, if you can call it a battle. So the SDF, so this is like the alliance of military groups that falls under the remit of the self-administration in the northeast Syria.
So the YPG and the YPJ are like the most famous and largest components of this force, but there are a whole bunch of Arab and Syrian and Armenian units within the SDF. Yeah. they held this sort of salient pushing out into northwest Syria towards Afrin, which was captured by the SNA in Turkey in 2018. That was on one side surrounded by HTS and on the other by the SNA.
When things really kicked off, the SNA started a pretty concerted campaign to capture this area known as Sheba. And because of its position and its relatively difficult terrain and difficult logistical position to resupply, They pulled back from that towards Aleppo and Manbij, which is the only major city that the SDS still held on the west of the Euphrates. And it's the area closest to Aleppo.
They got hit pretty hard. If you follow a live update map or any of these sort of update maps, it looked like that collapsed pretty quickly. Actually, it ended up being a sort of large gray zone of cities. the guerrilla attacks potentially still ongoing.
It's been really murky and hard to tell what's going on there, but essentially there's a large area of uncontrolled but heavily contested territory between Aleppo and the Euphrates River now, which the SDF and the SNA have been fighting over. One of the curious things for me is that the Turkish Air Force and military did not get involved for a while.
But after about a week, they did, and they started hitting Manbij very, very heavily. And at that point, when the center of Manbij started being contested and far over, the U.S. stepped in. We don't know the details of it, but there seems to have been some kind of negotiation, whereby the suggestion is that if the SDF fighters pulled back across the Euphrates,
the SDF would assure their protection from any further assault. We don't know how true that is, and we know that today further negotiations on this failed. But it's really hard to tell right now as we speak what's disinformation and what's truth, because stuff is only coming out officially in dribs and drabs.
Yeah, and stuff's coming out unofficially often that is just not true every five minutes and getting blasted by maybe people who just don't understand or who do understand but have a certain agenda to push on social media, especially, but on Telegram too. And it can be really confusing and it's really frustrating.
Yeah. For instance, like just before we came on air, I saw a couple of videos being posted by pro-Turkish accounts of purportedly showing mass troop concentrations lined up against this border wall waiting to invade. And I realized that they were from 2019 when Sirikani and Talabayat were invaded and they were just reposting material from then.
as disinformation on these movements and whether the attack's going to happen, what the negotiations between the US and Turkey turned out to be. And the truth is, right now, we don't know exactly what's going on.
Yeah, and you probably won't, and that's probably a good thing. One other thing is that, like, The SDF tends to have much better operational security discipline than the SNA does. So you won't see as much of media with an SDF spin or people directly streaming. I mean, one thing the SNA likes to do is a war crime and then post it on Telegram.
And so it can be easy to only see that and be like, oh God, it's terrible. And it is terrible. Those things are horrific. But because you're not seeing when the SDF is making movements or making advances... until a bit later, until you get something from like an official press channel, it can give the impression that the SNA is just romping around, which is not the case.
Yeah, we saw this a few times when Man Beach was reported to have been captured by the SNA and they posted videos of themselves in the middle of the city. And then an hour later, the SDF posted a video from the centre of the city of 20 or 30 dead SNAs blitting about the streets and them flying their own flags. So, yeah. Yeah, it's really it's really hard to tell. It's also really hard.
It's like anyone who cares about the region or has been there has reported on it. And anyone interested in the kind of politics that the Kurds have built up in the region and others, I should say, is, you know, it's been a multi-ethnic project. If you care about that, it's really hard not to be glued to social media to see what's going on. But it can be quite detrimental to morale.
It can be quite an act of self-harm to be constantly checking on this because it's so murky. And as you say, things can turn around within two hours of info or disinfo getting out there.
Yeah, and I think it's a super important time to be looking at trusted sources and be considering if you need to be on Telegram that much, something I have been considering this weekend. So let's talk about like right now, certainly the focus is on Kobani, right?
But there's also, well, there's a lot of the self-administration that could potentially be under threat if Turkey decides to go as hard as it can against the self-administration, against the existence of Turkey. I guess, any form of democratic project in North and East Syria, attempts to kind of bring the whole thing under one government from Damascus.
Can you explain what might happen, what people can do? And we should talk about what's at stake as well, especially with the prison at Al-Hol, which maybe we can come to after those two things, because I think that's a lot to ask you in one question. But maybe if people aren't familiar with Al-Hol, we'll leave that one.
But can you explain at first what could potentially happen if Turkey decides to go as hard as it wants to here?
I mean, I think the best way to answer that question is to look at what's already happened. So in 2018 and 19, they already captured three significant cities that were under control of the self-administration. So the first and most famously was Afrin, which was in the far northwest of the country. like just north of Aleppo, sort of jutting out into Turkey. That was a majority Kurdish city.
I don't know exactly, but it was something like 80 or 90%, which I think is higher than any other city in northern Syria. And it was also like, it had seen the least fighting of pretty much anywhere in Syria by that point. So the war had been going on for like, what, seven years, and everyone was pretty much untouched. So it was in a pretty good state.
And Turkey and the SNA invaded just as the war against ISIS was winding down. And I mean, it's become hell on earth. It's been almost completely depopulated. I think it's less than 10% now Kurdish ethnically.
Yeah.
It has been ruled by a number of different groups. We can say the SNA, but different groups within the SNA have fought over it. The HTS at times have had control over certain parts of the area. And there's been a lot of infighting. There's been horrendous war crimes committed. rape, murder, and thousands of disappeared people.
And as you say, they really like to openly put videos out of them committing this stuff. I mean, they're pretty shameless about it. There are some pretty disturbing videos of them mutilating the bodies of fallen YPJ soldiers, of committing some re-executions, of wiping out whole towns. It's been awful. And
The same thing happened again in 2019, around in October, when they captured Sary Karni and Tal Abyad. And it's worth also pointing out that these were not Kurdish-majority cities as far as I'm concerned. I think that Sary Karni maybe was about 50%. And...
Tel Aviv, which is kind of close to Kobani, I'm pretty sure wasn't Kurdish majority city, but it was organised under the self-administration and it was organised quite effectively. And they committed the same horrific crimes there. They are an anti-Kurdish force, if we can say that. They are... They do have a stated goal of committing genocide against the Kurds. That's not an exaggeration.
That's something they openly say. But they don't seem to care who they steal from or who they rape or who they extort. Wherever they go, it's death and destruction. And it still is now. And there's still something like a quarter of a million internally displaced people from Kurds.
from these areas in northeast Syria, hoping to go back and now having to see the situation get even worse and not knowing if they ever will be able to.
Yeah, and I think what you were talking about, we're seeing it right now in Manbij, right? The SNA seems to largely be in control of the city, albeit with YPG fighters kind of more, I guess, in a guerrilla role. So it would seem still fighting there.
But I believe we're on the second day of a general strike in Manbij, after less than a week of the SNA holding it because of looting and executions and other war crimes.
Yeah, I think this is actually a really good political education to see what's happening, because what's been built up in the Northeast has been built up over decades, right? They like to use this analogy of the mycelium and the fruiting bodies of a mushroom.
They appear to magically emerge from the earth in the autumn out of nowhere, but actually, you know, they've been brewing underground for years before. And they use this analogy because it took decades to put in place these structures. That's why they were ready
As soon as the regime, the Assad regime, pulled out and collapsed in the face of ISIS in the early stages of the war, they were ready to build up these structures. They already had self-organized militias. They had the economy planned out. They set to work immediately. And the SNA don't have any of that. They are... a force of convenience.
They're mostly sort of young men who were in groups before that were defeated in Syria, like ISIS, who are simply taking the opportunity to enrich themselves. And that's also very convenient for Turkey because they do the dirty work against the population of northern Syria.
So I think it's worth saying that that aspect of it, that preparation, that resilience, is something that also works in favour in the event of the worst case of full invasion of northern Syria. I do think they are significantly better prepared than they were in 2018 and 19. And even if the worst happens, even if militarily it's defeated, that's not going to be the end of this project, right?
It's not going to be the end of this emancipation. There's now... An entire generation of young people in northeast Syria who have grown up entirely living amongst a liberated and emancipated region and people. That's not something you can militarily defeat. So I, you know, I'm not completely hopeless. Obviously, I'd be like devastated if... The worst does happen there.
But I don't think it means the end of this incredible political. And it feels wrong to call it a project because it's not. It really is a revolution in every possible meaning of the word. And it's deeply embedded now.
Yeah, and I think everyone I spoke to there, there's a deeply held conviction that they're not going back. Some people who have seen first-hand the fascist violence of ISIS, and fascist is the right word, it's something maybe worse than fascism.
Certainly speaking to women in Rojava about how they're not going back to the gendered violence that they experienced for decades, to include ISIS, but by no means only from ISIS. And
I guess that kind of brings us on to, I wanted to talk a little bit about the situation in the parts of Syria that are controlled by HCS and in so much as they really are controlled, controlled is perhaps the wrong word, like they haven't fully established their state project yet, but they're certainly moving towards that.
They've sort of captured the institutions of the state rather than destroyed them. You'd spoken about like, there's this very, I guess maybe I'll use an example. Sorry, I'm phrasing this question in a very meandering way. I saw this CNN clip where they're like, oh, we found a guy who's in this prison and he was stuck here. And the second part of this was not broadcast on CNN.
This person turns out to be like an Air Force lieutenant who was in fact himself someone who tortured and killed civilians. Yeah. And like, there's this very liberatory, very excited messaging coming from media in the West, I guess, some of which is good, right? Like it's good that the Assad regime is good. Assad was fucking terrible and tortured and killed hundreds of thousands of his own people.
But that doesn't mean that things are all perfect in Damascus. Do you want to talk a little bit about like some of the worrying stuff we've seen in the last few days from those areas?
Yeah, I mean, this is something that I worry isn't being spoken about enough. I don't as a non-Syrian don't want to say to people, you know, you shouldn't be celebrating your own liberation because people should absolutely should be. And it's their right to be. And I'm like, yeah, extremely happy that.
this brutal dictator has gone i mean it's it's hard to summarize quite how awful he was and it's it's deeply frustrating that he's probably not going to see justice yeah but it's also really hard to see stuff which is really reminiscent of like uh 1979 tehran 2003 baghdad of a sort of jubilation whilst at the same time there are videos of sort of pogroms being carried out against minorities
minorities like the Alawites who were in control, and you don't know if the person being executed in the street was a torturer, an intelligence agent. You don't know who they were, but this is happening. But you're also seeing Salafist groups raising their flag, hardline Islamists raising their flag in places like Latakia and Tartus that have significant minority populations.
I am very, I mean, concerned is the right word. Like, it's hard to feel that spirit of liberation when you see not only these things happening, but that the people who have captured these state institutions are admitted former members of Al-Qaeda. And they are jihadis, hardline people that have now got to very effectively have made themselves out to be moderates. But
My gut feeling is that we're going to see something like 1979 Tehran of a lot of talk of reconciliation, a lot of talk of the concerns of the Kurds or working with the communists. But mass executions and oppression is not far around the corner. And I guess when the jubilation dies down, my question is, what's going to happen when
Minorities do demand their rights or women don't want to wear a hijab inside the buildings of state institutions. And I'm finding it very hard to believe that these men who are professed Islamists are going to allow a moderate future to exist.
Yeah, it's... I don't know. Every day we get different information, right? But like, yeah, I don't know if concerned is the right word either. I don't quite know what the word is. But like, I'm worried, I guess. I'm worried that... I'm especially worried when like... rather than what we saw in the self-administration was not like a continuation of institutions, right?
When the Assad regime left in 2011 and 2012 and areas that the regime or ISIS have left since then, like it wasn't like, okay, we'll take over these institutions, administer them differently. It was, we will build democracy from the bottom up. No, we'll just change the people in charge versus what it seems like we're now seeing for Damascus.
It's like, hey, can the police from the Assad regime please stay at work, which is concerning. Talking of police, the last thing I wanted to address was the Al-Hol camp.
I've spoken about it before on this show and people can look back on other episodes, but if you've not heard about it, can you explain briefly what Al-Hol is and then the massive risk that this Turkish-backed invasion poses to Al-Hol and other camps? I guess Al-Hol's not the only camp, just the biggest one.
Yeah, Al-Hol is a really important point to talk about. Al-Hol is a very large camp. It's hard to sum up what kind of camp it is because it's so vast and has different sections. It's near al-Hasakah, which is one of the largest cities in northeast Syria. It mostly contains families who were members or were resident in the Islamic State when it collapsed.
So in the beginning of 2019, ISIS was sort of squeezed into this little corner in the eastern side of Syria between the Euphrates and the Iraqi border. And when the state collapsed, or the caliphate collapsed, a lot of these people had nowhere to go. And a lot of them were foreigners who were coming from abroad. And when I say a lot, I mean like tens of thousands.
Yeah.
There were something like 20,000 families left within Susa and Bagos, like the last parts of the caliphate, to hold out. And they didn't have anywhere to go. There were already camps set up for IDPs and for members of ISIS and families in northern Syria. But al-Hol was rapidly expanded to take these on. So it's a sort of semi-prison, semi-open camp.
that I think peaked at 75,000 people, which it sounds like a lot on its own, but when you consider that a large city in northern Syria is about 150,000 people, it still is significant. You probably have more accurate recent figures than me, but I think the current population is about 40,000.
Yeah, it's shrunk, definitely. I'm not sure what it is exactly.
The big problem that the self-administration have had is multitude, really. Many of the people there are foreigners. Many of them don't have papers. Many of them come from countries that either don't want them back or will almost certainly execute them if they're sent back, like Iraq, which is against the policy of the abolition of death penalty in Syria.
There are some in Al-Hol, but mostly in other camps in the north and east of Syria, former ISIS members like Shammam and Begum who come from countries like the UK who simply won't take them back. And the UK is taking back some families that simply refuses to take back their citizens who joined ISIS as, you know, card-carrying members. Yeah.
So they've made a pretty massive effort to repatriate as many families as possible. They've made a big effort to rehabilitate and de-radicalise as many people as possible. They have shrunk the camp massively, but they're still... yeah, 40,000 or something left there. And these are like really, a lot of them are really radical.
Like I think, I don't know what an exact number is, but something in the order of 10,000 of them are still like professionally members of ISIS. And they have a lot of children. And this was something that shocked me when I was at the end of the caliphate in Baghdad and witnessed tens of thousands of people coming out. And I could not, have imagined how many children there were.
And this was like, what, five years ago now, coming up to six years ago. So some of them who were, you know, seven, eight, nine years old are now like heading towards their mid-teens. They've spent their entire lives being radicalized. And like, what do you do with them?
And I think it's no coincidence that in previous Turkish attacks, because Turkey's been attacking the north and east of Syria for the last five, six years now, through the air, through information warfare, a lot of their attacks have focused on trying to break the people out. They have bombed the entrances to prisons multiple times.
They provided funding and arms and ammunition to groups that are trying to break them out. and they provide a safe passage back to Turkey for those who have managed to escape.
So it's massively in their favour, but of course it's a Pandora's box, because if that does break open, if these people aren't repatriated or aren't de-radicalised, then that's a lot of people who have pretty much only known their whole lives an extremely radical, fascist, Islamist ideology. I don't think they're just going to give it up. They're not going to join this moderate future Syria.
No, those people probably have terrible experiences within that camp and they don't tend to be moderating and sort of pacifying experiences. And I'm sure that there'll be a lot of hate coming from there when those people come out. And I don't want to apportion blame too much, but we've had a long time to deal with this. The world's had a long time to deal with this.
Oh, I mean, I would happily apportion blame. This is entirely on the hands of the coalition. Northern East Syria is a very poor place. It's deeply impoverished. It's been kept impoverished by sanctions, by Turkey. The oil refineries, the industry, the economy has been smashed to pieces. They've held on really well. All credit to them. They have maintained this camp.
They have tried to give these people a life. But it's pretty awful conditions.
yeah and this could have been sold if the international community if the coalition in particular united states had uh helped with these repatriations who put political pressure on european countries in particular to take back their citizens and had just provided the funding you know for right they have provided funding i'm not saying they haven't pretty much but like
It's a drop in the ocean compared to the Department of Defense budget. You know, we're talking a few tens of millions here and there, as opposed to a concerted effort to de-radicalize and repatriate people that could pose a serious threat to Europe and the US.
Yeah. And like, you've got Britain doing the opposite of what's helpful, which is fucking like removing people's passports, right? Like de-nationalizing them, leaving these people stateless and like saying it's not our problem, which is pathetic. And
I'm incredibly short-sighted. I don't like using the word terror or terrorism because I think they've become meaningless terms. But ISIS did commit horrendous acts of terror in Europe and the United States. And these people, a lot of them I'm sure, would happily do so given the opportunity. So I don't think the threat is sufficiently understood in the West.
Yeah, and it's going to end up biting them in the ass because they've put this off and put this off and wouldn't spend the money to have justice, to go through a system and to have a chance to plead their cases, to have a tribunal, whatever it is. Instead, these people have just been essentially abandoned by most of the world.
The self-administration has been forced to take care of the people who...
did horrific things right there and yeah at some point this population will continue to grow if we don't keep removing people from it and that's going to be a problem for the whole world even if the whole world wants to pretend it's not happening right now and it is just endlessly frustrating to see it not even be covered let alone kind of addressed in in the west
Yeah, I think that's a really important point. When similar atrocities have been carried out in Europe, we see international tribunals, we see the ICC and the ICJ step in, we see arrests, we see prosecutions, you know, like Milosevic, like the Nuremberg trials. And ISIS was a massive state. It had something like 10 million people.
inhabitants it committed multiple genocides you know and this isn't just you know people in the region saying oh they're committing just like these are like western highly studied highly understood accepted by western states as genocide against like the azidis They committed horrendous atrocities. They posed an international threat and a massive regional threat.
And at the end of the caliphate, as a territorial realm, as a serious military presence, it just disappeared off the radar. I think this is a really... It really shows the sort of racist and colonial mindset behind this rules-based international order that the people who were their victims and who had left to pick up the pieces after it's got very little support or recognition.
And they've been calling for tribunals for years and it's just fallen on deaf ears.
Yeah. And sadly, I don't see that changing given the incoming administration in the United States. It's deeply concerning. Deeply concerning is the wrong word. It's just fucked. I want to ask, people, I think, want to be in solidarity with the revolution. They want to help if they can. They want to support. I did a fundraiser last night. Thank you to everyone who gave their money and came.
That was really nice. But What can people do to, you know, it's one thing to like be in solidarity or post or whatever, but like what concrete actions can they take to help?
This is a question that gets asked a lot.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's also a question that's really hard to answer given how things are just across the border in Palestine. You know, I personally find it hard to... to engage and ask for help and ask for solidarity when there's a genocide being committed next door. But we might be about to see the same thing happen in Syria. And I do think we should be taking it seriously.
And yeah, anything from raising awareness to actually going there and lending support, anything on that spectrum, it's not just the material contribution that you can make. It's the people that do...
really feel left out they feel betrayed they feel let down by the international community by the rest of the world yeah and any act of solidarity goes on incredibly well like the first year i was there i was basically useless because i didn't speak the language i didn't know my way around i was like a burden on society more or less
And for people just like happy that you're there, you know, showing solidarity. And it's not about being useful. It's about that act. It's about more than that, is what I'm trying to say. And if you can show solidarity in any way you can, like this is, you know, incredibly, incredibly important to find to do it.
Yeah, I think like, I don't know, if I go back to when I moved to the US, which was 2008, George W. Bush was president. And like I had my little free Palestine badge when I got off the plane and my little keffiyeh and like was immediately sent to secondary inspection by the customs people because like that was not really...
Of course, there were Palestinian people and people in solidarity with the people of Palestine in the US then, and there were for a long time before. But, like, I would never have imagined that I would see thousands of people in the streets for the Palestinian cause.
And, like, the only thing that has materially held back the genocide of the Palestinian people has been the solidarity that they've experienced. And, like... That shows the power that people have, though obviously it's been able to do comparatively little, and Israel still seems to be killing little children every day.
But it shows that we can build solidarity really quickly and really meaningfully. You don't have to go, but you can go. It's much harder to get to Palestine than it is to get to northern Syria. I went last year. And I think people who are already organizing can bring that into their organizing too. These things don't have to compete. There's a lot of solidarity to go around.
But I would say a lot of the news we see, unfortunately, from Turkey, and that will unfortunately give you information that's extremely biased when it comes to Northeast Syria. So being conscious of your media consumption is very important.
Yeah, absolutely. I think I would just add to that to say that solidarity with any group is a long term project, right? You're not going to jump in and be able to make a huge difference immediately. But also at the same time, like if the worst happens, if Turkey invades Fulon and there's genocide in northern Syria, that isn't the end of it. It's a massive international movement.
And there are practices from it that are being put in place in Turkey. And things that actually don't even have anything to do with the Kurds as a nation. And there are ways of organizing. There are methods that they use. There's personality analysis. There's criticism and self-criticism. There's a lot of that that goes far beyond a single geographic region.
And I think engaging with that can... And I've seen with my own eyes since I've been back, there's a lot of groups around the UK that use techniques... for self-organisation within land rights movement, within worker struggle, within anti-cuts campaigning.
And these have got nothing to do with Rojava, but they have seen that through solidarity with Rojava and Kurdistan, that there are ways they can improve their own practice and their own actions.
Yeah, I think that's really important too. And those are things maybe we'll cover in the future and there are plenty of good resources online. Are there any... resources you'd like to plug or like personal social medias, things you think people could follow to get good information on what's happening?
Definitely the RIC, that's the Rojava Information Centre. They are probably the best source on the ground in Rojava and Rojava They are a collective of journalists, a mixture of locals and internationalists who've been working there for six years now. So they're Rojava IC on various social media platforms. You can follow me as at Lapinesque, L-A-P-I-N-E-S-Q-U-E.
I'm also posting about it, although I'm not there anymore. I'm posting updates from friends and people I know there. And my take on the situation based on my experiences of being there for almost five years.
Yeah, I think it's good to follow if you can. Thank you very much, Danny. What we're going to do now is I got some voice notes from some friends who are at the front with Atakosin Anasist, which means anarchist struggle in Kurdish. They're a group within the SDF that is an anarchist group that's there now.
fighting, and in this case, actually doing frontline medical support on behalf of the self-administration, on behalf of the revolution. They sent me some notes this morning, it's Monday, today, from their positions on the frontline. So look, obviously, those notes will be a little bit, they'll be like 24 hours old by the time you hear them.
But I still think it's very important to hear from people who are there when we can, not from like... someone who's supposedly an expert but hasn't set foot in Syria in 15 years and hasn't really talked to anyone who's Syrian either. So we'll drop those in after a little advertising break here. And with that, I will say thank you very much, Danny. Thanks for giving us your time.
And we really appreciate all your insight today.
Thanks very much, James.
provisional press office of the Russian anarchist. And we wanted to share a bit about the situation ongoing here in northeastern Syria. Because, as you probably know, the regime has fallen. And Bashar al-Assad left the country on the 8th of December after a big offensive that started from Idlib that took over quite soon, quite fast. The
We wanted to explain how is the situation right now on the ground and also give some insight on the situation of northern Syria and what the media is covering of the different events and situations Right now, two main conflicts ongoing, military conflicts. One is widely reported, the other not so much.
We are talking about the war that HTS, or the offensive that HTS launched against the Syrian Arab Army, and the other is the offensive that the SNA and Turkish proxy forces that write under the name of Ex-Syrian Nationalists for this liberation movement leading the war against the Islamic State and establishing this autonomous administration.
So let's go shortly to the first conflict, this offensive of HTS or the Haifa Free al-Sham, that it's an Islamist group, direct heritage of al-Nusra, that was the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda, that has been governing On the 27th of November, they launched this big offensive that led to the collapse of the regime. We could reflect deeply about the reasons.
Now, on one side, the Syrian army was exhausted after years of war here in Syria, but especially their main allies and supporters were also in a bad situation. been a war in Ukraine for two years almost. Iran recently had been also engaged in supporting their militias in the conflicts against Israel after the virtual occupation that Israel started on Gaza a year ago.
So these two conflicts create a situation that both as they did in the past. And this led also to the collapse of the front lines of the Sierra La Parma, allowing the offensive of HTS to overrun very fast the defenses in the city of Aleppo and also taking control of the city of Hama. for a long time to start also taking action in southern Syria, in the regions of Suez and Dara and Quneita.
There was also an autonomous military operation room that started coordinated insurgents against the regime. This sparked the collapse of the regime. A lot of soldiers were defecting their positions offensive took Damascus.
This was an offensive that was really not very bloody in the sense of like a lot of the Syrian army soldiers were just leaving their positions and running away and the offensive was able to advance very fast, very easily. Right now this offensive led to the transition that we are seeing in Damascus
public speeches and declaring the triumph of the revolution, trying to harvest the revolutionary spirit of 2011 for their own benefit. And they imposed or composed a transitional government that is formed exclusively of our interview right now just mentioned that their authoritarian government in Egypt has been also really criticized by local population organizing protests against it.
Right now, running this interim government, they are already making proposals for morality, police, Islamic courts. So, I don't know how much guide to understand what could be happening in Syria if HDS takes control of the state as it seems to be happening. So this is one of the conflicts ongoing that is widely reported. The only one maybe is not so much reported.
We see how the Turkish state has been for a long time for more than 40 years and the last chapter of this started in coordination with this offensive of HDS where the proxy forces started to attack mainly the region of Tahrifat from Afrin were living.
Afrin was a region that was already occupied by Turkey in 2018, and a lot of the people from the city were displaced and living in refugee camps in the region that already had to leave their homes more than five years ago, 2018. Yeah. So forcing them to flee once again. A lot of these people was trapped in a caravan that suffered brutal raids, attacks, kidnapping, ransoms.
It has been a really terrible experience. the offensive of these Turkish proxy forces, and most of them are now arriving to Tabqa and to Raqqa, to the regions of the self-administration, where they are finding, where they can find shelter.
And for those willing to help, we can mention that Heva Sur is the humanitarian organization, one of the biggest humanitarian organizations working in northern Syria, and has been
So those willing to support economically in this humanitarian crisis that we are experiencing, they can easily find the website and the bank account of Heva Sur to donate to them to support all these people that once again lost their homes. But the offensive didn't stop on Jaffa. And this was a really heavy clash.
It was a really serious military conflict that has been totally supported by Turkish artillery and air even airplanes that of course are like nature air force had been bombing positions of the syrian democratic forces allowing these different islamic groups that are part of this coalition of the sma these turkish proxy forces to control of the city at the moment there is already several
started yesterday against the occupation because these groups that occupy the city are looting and even killing local population in a really terrible situation that is experiencing the local people living in Malmich. And they are willing to personnel of the Turkish proxy forces gathering on the bridge that connects the divisions of Man Beach and Kobani and all across the Erfurtage River.
So this war is not so reported, but it's been really and maybe also talk a bit about the work that we have been doing on the ground. We need to remark that this offensive over Manbij and now this stretch on Kobane have not been the only attacks that the Turkish army and the Russian forces are doing all around the street that they occupied in 2018 and 2017.
are part of this Turkish-Portuguese coalition, and they have been intensively bombing the areas and their surroundings. And there have been quiet, widespread rumors of these Islamist groups gathering forces to continue their attacks on the South administration of northern Syria and their war against the Syrian Democratic Forces. democratic forces in case of a new invasion is happening.
Right now the bombings are hitting different areas and it has been really This has been also bringing a lot of motivation to continue the resistance on the ground. Right now, this situation of instability and political transition is still playing in ways that are difficult to predict. countries don't expect to run that it's based on the principles of self-defense.
Maybe to give a bit of context also of what we have been doing here for several years that our organization has been operating in northern Syria, as anarchists we can
socialism and social ecology, like thinkers like Murat Bucin, have been a big inspiration for Abdul Razan, the leader of the Kurdish liberation movement, that has been proposing this political frame called democratic conformism, where especially with the principles of modern liberation, social ecology and
Autonomy in the different regions has been also a very important element to develop the project, especially during the war against the Islamic State. As soon as the different territories were liberated, there was a big emphasis on creating local councils, civilian and military councils both,
the extraordinary learning process, being part of a revolution, living day to day the developments that are happening here and saying, well, what does it mean to make a revolution? Because it's something that's
but we saw how it has been finally in Syria where this movement found the space to put in practice these ideas and to develop the revolutionary society that has been theorized for a long time. So even if we cannot say that Rojava is an anarchist region, but we can say how anarchist principles inspired the project and that it's been developed here and implemented. This is really...
a society with principles of libertarian socialism. It is especially complicated here because of external reasons, like the situation of the embargo, the constant threat of the Turkish army. And this is something that for sure we can point out as like, well, it's very difficult to make a revolution with these factors. But this is also a lesson that making a revolution with
society or to make a reflection from the reflections. all the different elements that we see. And of course, the military conflict that is ongoing, it can seem maybe sometimes far away, not for comrades in Western countries, but I think it's important to remember that revolution and war have been always two sides of the same coin.
And it's in these moments of instability of war where the logic and the Because we can also see it now in other times, in other moments, or even in other places nowadays. What is happening, for example, in Myanmar, what is happening in different areas where the logic of the national state is in question, creates instability, creates a situation where different actors will push to take control.
And we know and we have nice force that is able to react to that situation because authoritarian and hierarchic military structures are quite fast to react. We as anarchists, we need time to organize horizontally because our structures function, they function
are made possible for the revolutionary movement to put their cards on the table, to organize together with the people, and to defend their people and their communities, building this revolutionary process that nowadays so many people have been taking inspiration from. not so quiet. Sorry, we have been quiet some hours.
We've had several weeks that have been extremely challenging with a really few hours of sleep. But I hope not so understandable. I'm always welcoming new questions and hoping we can answer and share more perspective. We have been writing some statements and we are also trying to answer
Welcome to Decisions Decisions, the podcast where boundaries are pushed and conversations get candid. Join your favorite hosts, me, Weezy WTF, and me, Mandy B, as we dive deep into the world of non-traditional relationships and explore the often taboo topics surrounding dating, sex, and marriage.
That's right. Every Monday and Wednesday, we both invite you to unlearn the outdated narratives dictated by traditional patriarchal norms. With a blend of humor, vulnerability, and authenticity, we share our personal journeys navigating our 30s, tackling the complexities of modern relationships, and engage in thought-provoking discussions that challenge societal expectations.
From groundbreaking interviews with diverse guests to relatable stories that will resonate with your experiences, Decisions Decisions is going to be your go-to source for the open dialogue about what it truly means to love and connect in today's world.
Get ready to reshape your understanding of relationships and embrace the freedom of authentic connections. Tune in and join in the conversation.
Listen to Decisions Decisions on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Welcome, I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time.
Listen to As part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Welcome to What Could Happen Here, a show about things falling apart. I'm Garrison Davis, and this episode is going to be a special audio companion piece to an article published last night on Substack at Shatterzone. That's Robert's usual Substack, though last night I published an article detailing the online history and transvestigation discourse regarding a school shooting in Madison, Wisconsin.
The article has pictures and hyperlinks which might help explain some of the stuff I'm talking about, but I'll do my best to relay it here to you on the podcast feed. Another Monday in America and another school shooting.
On the morning of December 16th, a female student at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin, shot and killed a teacher and fellow student and injured six others before killing herself. Initially, police falsely reported the shooter was 17 years old, but late Monday night, they correctly identified the deceased shooter as 15-year-old Natalie Rupnow, who went by Samantha or Sam.
In the aftermath of this horrific event, right-wing influencers and content creators wasted no time in blaming the shooting on trans people, labeling the suspect as another in a series of alleged transgender terrorists. But what really happened here had nothing to do with trans people and is sadly ordinary for the United States.
In August of 2024, the father of the future school shooter took his daughter to a gun range to do trap shooting. Samantha wore a shirt bearing the logo of a band, KMFDM. In another photo of the shooter, we can see the front of the shirt. The same design was famously worn by Columbine shooter Eric Harris, who was a fan of the band.
The bulk of this new shooter's online footprint suggests a general obsession with school shooters and the TCC, or True Crime Community, a nickname used for the de facto international Columbine fandom. This sort of content dominates Samantha's Tumblr, which last posted in May of 2024. An alleged online friend of the shooter said that she, quote, Samantha is hardly alone in this.
There have been over 100 copycats inspired by the Columbine shooting since 1999. A Twitter account believed to have belonged to the shooter posted a series of videos that teased and glorified school shootings in the days leading up to her own shooting. The account was created in December of 2024, and the profile picture featured a young man in camo pants and a tactical backpack.
The male profile picture was used as evidence by some conservative influencers that the shooter must have transitioned, though these same influencers cannot agree on whether she was female-to-male or male-to-female. One user constructed an overlay trying to compare the photo of the shooter with her Twitter profile picture.
This is a ridiculous diagram with about seven images overlaid at different opacities trying to layer the faces and body shapes of these two people on top of each other. This post is only proof that most of what gets passed off as quote-unquote OSINT online today is just completely incompetent rambling and propaganda.
The main issue with this diagram is that the male profile picture is actually another Columbine copycat, a school shooter from Russia, who, similar to Samantha, was only 15 years old when he carried out his shooting.
Hours after the shooting in Madison, Wisconsin, while right-wing accounts were still arguing about what sort of transgender the shooter had been, a neo-Nazi Twitter account named Nitro claimed to be friends with the shooter on Discord and repeatedly denied accusations that the shooter was transgender, calling her a quote-unquote biological woman.
An early complicating factor in establishing the motive and identity of the shooter is that her alleged Twitter account posted a link to a Google Doc of her manifesto. but seemingly forgot to make the visibility setting public. So you couldn't access the Google Doc. You had to put in an email for approval, and the person who was supposed to approve your email was now dead.
So there was no way to actually look at this person's manifesto. The shooter's alleged Discord friend, Nitro, claims to find what he believes to be a snippet of a manifesto draft shared by the shooter in a Discord group chat.
Nitro is based out of the UK, and so if this is legitimate, and that is a big if, this message would have been sent about an hour and a half before the shooting per the Discord timestamp. I'm going to read a bit of this alleged writing from the shooter. Quote, Women are the only hope for this wretched world, but even women have been brainwashed by moids for too long.
They've internalized the patriarchy and turned on each other, always begging for male approval and validation. It's disgusting. I realize the truth. Men are irredeemable. Radfem Hitler was, is fucking vindicated now. They can't be reformed or redeemed. They are a fucking scourge upon the earth. The only solution is to total exterminate them and every foid who worships these fucking parasites.
Every single male must be wiped out, from babies to the elderly. Only then can women be free to create a new world. I'll be the pioneer. I'll be the first one to take the first step. I don't care if they're fathers, brothers, husbands, sons, teachers, police, and especially N-words or politicians. I've been craving to kill them all. This is my mission.
Only when their parasitic sludge has been expunged from the earth is when then the world will be clean and women can start over. It's the only way. In approximately 10 minutes, I should be dead. It's strange, but it feels good. unquote.
Hopefully to most people, this should read like unintelligible gibberish, a reactionary, quote-unquote, feminist screed about initiating a wave of male-targeted violence to cleanse the earth with pepperings of moids and foids, which is internet incel slang for male and female, respectively. Also included are racial slurs and something called, quote-unquote, RadFemHitler,
That last part is a reference to a Twitter influencer by the same name and the handle Hollow Earth Turf, whose content is a mix of trad-influenced right-wing feminism with anti-trans flourishes, advocating for a mass purge of moids. This includes trans women.
This account is derided by those both on the right and left, but has a small dedicated following of conservative RadFem and anti-trans women with trad or often occult interests. The Discord Nazi, Nitro, claimed that the shooter was quote-unquote a fan of RadFemHitler and talked about the account frequently on Discord, though Nitro previously believed her interest in the account was merely ironic.
Now, obviously, an anonymous Twitter Nazi is certainly not the most reliable source, but Nitro was the first person to correctly identify and post photos of the shooter, though they could be utilizing this newfound clout to troll a widely disliked Twitter user.
But the fact that he's been right about all other details inclines me to not discount his claims altogether, but instead just hold them with a billion pounds of salt. Allegations that the shooter was a neo-Nazi Radfem certainly sent Radfem Hitler into a panic, who quickly deleted her account.
Meanwhile, some of her online associates worked damage control, claiming to have contacted the alleged boyfriend that the shooter had been quote-unquote e-dating. with the apparent intention of disproving any ties the shooter had to the Twitter radfem orbit. Through this alleged online boyfriend, the right-wing TERF ecosystem claimed to have acquired a copy of the quote-unquote full manifesto,
This purported manifesto lacks the anti-male, anti-moid ramblings of the Discord screenshot, but unsurprisingly shares its use of racial slurs and glorification of violence, at times evocative of Pekka Erikovinen's manifesto, a Finnish school shooter from 2007 who killed eight people. Ovidin considered himself a quote-unquote natural selector who had evolved beyond the classmates he gunned down.
In Samantha's purported manifesto, he is mentioned by name as a quote-unquote true inspiration. Over the course of eight hours, a RadFem Twitter account released six pages of what they claimed to be Samantha's writing. It contains general misanthropic rambling about humanity and parents being quote-unquote scum.
The writing describes a difficult family life, suicidal thoughts, and admiration for school shooters and white supremacists. Though it briefly references the accelerationist terror-gram saints, the whole of this piece of writing is much more reminiscent of old-school Columbiners than the modern white nationalist terror milieu.
The alleged manifesto directly names the two Columbine shooters and includes a paragraph on Vladiskov Rozlyakov, another Columbine copycat but from Crimea, who also cosplayed as one of the Columbine shooters during his own mass shooting.
Though the Discord Nazi and the reactionary radfems question the authenticity of the other's alleged manifesto, what both sides of the incel war do agree on is that Samantha was not transgender. We're going to go on a quick ad break and come back to discuss transvestigation and the trans terror panic. Okay, we are back.
It seems these days the fastest way to get transvestigated is to do a school shooting. Transvestigating is the practice of trying to determine if an individual is transgender. It's often leveled against celebrities, athletes, and politicians. But in recent years, there's been a new common subject of transvestigation. Mass shooters. In particular, school shooters.
Myself, Robert Evans, and James Stout previously reported on this trend back in 2023, right as it grew in prominence after the Nashville Covenant School shooting, which police say was committed by a trans man.
We theorized that the online right was testing out a new strategy to attack trans people by associating them with mass shootings via the use of selective bias reporting and plain disinformation. That fear has come to pass.
The modicum of believability provided by the Nashville shooting, as it's the only legitimate trans-related incident that meets criteria for mainstream mass shooting databases, was enough to fuel this ongoing strategy for the next two years. Since then, conservative influencers have attempted to link nearly every viral mass-slash-school shooting to trans people to create a false trend.
The strategy operates as follows. During the first few chaotic hours after a shooting, a small group of right-wing content creators weaponized the lack of verified information to make posts framing an alleged shooter as being transgender. This can be done through the use of out-of-context social media posts, doctored photographs, photos of other people, or simply pictures of long or dyed hair.
All they need is a collection of loose evidence to affirm on social media that a mass shooter is really transgender. For more context on this, you can listen to an episode of It Could Happen Here I wrote earlier this year covering the rise of fake trans terrorists. The goal is to get as many of their followers to see and spread these claims as fast as possible.
Even if it's widely debunked the next day, many who heard the false claim won't be aware of the verified correction. All these anti-trans influencers need is a brief window of time to plant the idea into people's minds. And then that becomes remembered history.
If this strategy is repeated every few months, whenever there's a new mass shooting, then it's pretty easy to create the false perception of a growing trend. Now, in reality, trans people per capita are actually way less likely to commit a shooting compared to cis people and are much more likely to be the victim of gun violence.
But this past Monday, conservative and anti-trans influencers tried once again to weaponize a tragedy for their own hateful agenda. Monday afternoon, Ian Miles Chung posted, Trans terrorism must end. Hours later, Laura Loomer wrote, The trans movement is really turning out to be a terrorist movement."
Just minutes after police responded to the shooting, the conservative influencer Matt Wallace posted that an unknown, quote-unquote, witness said that the shooter, quote, looked to be transgender, unquote. Wallace, who has over 2.2 million followers on Twitter, provided no source or citation and has since deleted this post.
But others in the online mega-orbit parroted this language before any identifying information was released, with the user JustJeffFromCalley writing, "...a trans person targeted and opened fire on students at Abundant Life Christian School in Wisconsin. 12 hit."
The right-wing content creator Ryan Mata baselessly claimed that the shooter was on hormone replacement therapy, calling the shooter, quote, another mentally unstable psychopath who was prescribed puberty blocker and hormones, unquote. Mata hosts a show on the right-wing YouTube alternative Rumble and has over 123,000 followers on Twitter.
His tweet claiming the shooter was on HRT racked up 1.6 million, quote-unquote, views and 17,000 likes in just 12 hours. Larger accounts like Chaya Raichak's libs of TikTok fueled undue speculation about the gender identity of the shooter, seeding confusion into the growing discourse and weaponizing a tragedy for political gain.
Quoting the police chief saying, quote, I don't know if the shooter is male or female, unquote. A small group of conservative influencers have just so successfully created an alternate reality in which nearly every new mass shooter is transgender that they don't even have to outright say it anymore.
Accounts like Libs of TikTok and Malaysian blogger Ian Miles Chung can merely gesture to this reality tunnel they've intentionally created. And now thousands of people will affirm this fake reality as the obvious truth. backed up by historical precedent of fabricated memory. Matt Wallace posted a photo of the shooter and the male profile picture saying, what do you notice about the shooter again?
Ian Miles Chung posted, quote, police are unable to identify if the school shooter in Madison, Wisconsin is male or female, but they do know who did it and identified them as a student. Is anyone else thinking what I'm thinking? Unquote.
This speculation fueled conspiracy theories, which spread, claiming that police were intentionally withholding information about the shooter's gender identity in service of some hidden agenda. And actually, they were just waiting to, like, let the family know that their daughter was dead and making sure they had the correct identification. Very basic stuff. Police always do this.
But no, it's all part of some secret agenda and some hidden narrative. As early as 1 p.m. EST on Monday, which is just like an hour after the shooting would have taken place, the neo-Nazi Twitter account Nitro correctly identified the shooter as his online friend Sam slash Samantha.
As this name spread online, the multi-gendered nature of the name added to the speculation that the shooter was trans. Scarlett Johnson, an activist with the ultra-conservative parents' rights group Moms for Liberty, shared self-admitted, unconfirmed reports that the shooter was quote-unquote a transgender teen who went by Sam or Samantha.
As alleged pictures of the shooter started to spread online, courtesy of Nitro, the transvestigation of the shooter only intensified. An unfortunate coincidence is that the shooter's given name matches the ancient Sam Hyde meme. in which extremely online people try to trick journalists into believing the culprit of a new mass shooting was the American comedian Sam Hyde.
In recent years, the meme has turned into the Samantha Hyde meme, used to falsely label mass shooters as trans women. One hide post from an unassuming boomer named Ed Massey raked up over 600,000 views, 4.5 thousand likes, and one and a half thousand retweets. Massey posted, quote, unquote.
Now, it should go without saying, but the use of puberty suppressing medication has no link to increased violence. We're going to go on one last break and return to conclude our discussion of transvestigating school shooters. Okay, we are back. Time to talk about the potential double flipper.
So as this transvestigation continued, the quote-unquote we-can-always-tell crowd ended up transvestigating in both directions, seemingly unsure of what assigned gender at birth the shooter must have had. Some believed the shooter was trans femme, while others concluded they were trans masc. with one reply to an end-wokeness tweet reading, quote, those do not look like female hands.
And another transvestigation post saying, the shooter is a trans kid, a female, pretending to be a male. Exactly why we keep our Second Amendment rights to protect our children from this mental health crisis. Zoom in close on her shirt and hand gesture, unquote.
A now-deleted post from a TERF account also attempted to pass off the shooter as a trans girl, saying, quote, "...the Wisconsin school shooter was a 17-year-old trans-identified male. It just keeps happening." Now, quote-unquote trans-identified male was usually a transphobic dog whistle to refer to a trans woman, as in a male who identifies as a trans woman.
But sometimes transphobes get confused by words and use the phrase to refer to trans people who quote-unquote identify as men. Like this other trans investigation post saying, quote, Shooter was a 17-year-old trans but identified male. Now, one of the most widespread posts claiming the shooter was a trans guy came from an anti-Semitic doctor in Denmark with 1.4 million followers.
She falsely claimed, with no evidence, that the shooter was taking testosterone, writing, quote, unquote. As of Tuesday morning, this post has over 3 million views, 22,000 likes, and 8.3 thousand retweets. In a following post, this doctor blamed quote-unquote the Jews for inventing transgenderism.
As a note, extremism researchers have argued that transphobia is structurally similar to antisemitism. Now, a common piece of anti-trans memetic propaganda deployed in the wake of mass shootings is the Trans Shooter Collage. This format spread after the Nashville school shooting in 2023, and this week, Matt Wallace provided us with a brand new version.
This post is an ugly mishmash of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 people's faces with a variety of backgrounds, a purposeless red circle in the middle of the image, and text that reads, quote, "...almost every child killed in a mass shooting in the last few years was killed by a transgender shooter."
Now, out of all those pictures in this collage, only one person in this collage is actually reported to be transgender, the Nashville shooter in the upper left. The rest of the people pictured are not trans and have never claimed to be trans.
The person with long hair in the lower half of the image is Colt Gray, who is falsely labeled as trans by far-right influencers like End Wokeness and Mike Cernovich. Colt Gray's Discord posts reveal he actually held transphobic beliefs.
A more classic version of the trans shooter collage format is just five pictures with text next to each of them reading the ex-shooter identified as trans, the ex-shooter identified as trans, right? Just a big list of five of these names saying that they all identified as trans. The version I'm using here is courtesy of Libs of TikTok admin Chaya Raichek, who posted this earlier this year.
But just as before, the majority of the subjects in this meme aren't actually trans, and it's just full of disinformation. The Colorado Springs shooter who targeted a queer club is not actually non-binary and simply tried to weaponize a false identity to get out of hate crime charges. The person labeled as the Denver shooter is not trans, has never claimed to be trans. He just has dyed hair.
This individual pictured did plan the shooting with a transgender male who is not pictured. Now lastly, though the person pictured as the Uvalde shooter is trans, this is not the actual Uvalde shooter. It's a random trans girl who was one of two trans women whose photos were used to falsely label the shooter as transgender.
The other two people in this image is the Nashville shooter, who does appear to be trans, and the perpetrator of the Aberdeen workplace shooting. But back to Madison, Wisconsin. So after all of that transvestigating, what do we have? Just another Columbiner with neo-Nazi ties. The right has gotten so good at deploying the trans shooter as a smoke bomb.
It obscures the reality of the over-availability of firearms, the dynamics of online radicalization, and the social issues that fuel alienation and anger in youth. Instead of focusing on all that, on the victims of this epidemic of white supremacist violence, we instead have to spend a whole day debunking the late shooter's pronouns. And that's the point. That's what they want us talking about.
Those who delete their quote-unquote trans terrorist posts after being conclusively proven wrong will try the exact same shtick in a few months after the next mass shooting goes viral. Others won't even care that much. They'll just leave up their post, secure in the stability of the reality tunnel they helped to create. I'm going to close with a quote from Sartre.
Never believe that fascists are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge, but they are amusing themselves. For it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. This post has been deleted.
Welcome to Decisions Decisions, the podcast where boundaries are pushed and conversations get candid. Join your favorite hosts, me, Weezy WTF, and me, Mandy B, as we dive deep into the world of non-traditional relationships and explore the often taboo topics surrounding dating, sex, and marriage.
And love. That's right. Every Monday and Wednesday, we both invite you to unlearn the outdated narratives dictated by traditional patriarchal norms. With a blend of humor, vulnerability, and authenticity, we share our personal journeys navigating our 30s, tackling the complexities of modern relationships, and engage in thought-provoking discussions that challenge societal expectations.
From groundbreaking interviews with diverse guests to relatable stories that will resonate with your experiences, Decisions Decisions is going to be your go-to source for the open dialogue about what it truly means to love and connect in today's world.
Get ready to reshape your understanding of relationships and embrace the freedom of authentic connections. Tune in and join the conversation.
Listen to Decisions Decisions on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time.
Shadows, as part of My Cultura Podcast Network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
It reminds me of this thing where, like, you know, if you go back and you read, like,
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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...
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
against our sort of equivalents of these forces.
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Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time.
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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.
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.
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.
And all three of you, welcome to the show. Hi, thanks for having us. Hi. Thanks so much for having us.
Thanks for having us. Love your project. I also just wanted to give a shout out to our fourth member, Dani Burleson, who's not here today because she's working paid work, who just rounds us out so beautifully and wanted to say her name.
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.
Yeah, I'm in Vancouver. Well, I was in Vancouver. I just stopped from there, but Pacific Northwest. And so it's Crow Highway, you know, thousands and thousands of crows. Oh, yeah, I get it.
I think the crow is like what ultimately sealed the project for us, honestly. Yeah, yeah. Hell yeah.
Yeah, it really came together around the Corvid theme, I think. Yeah. The combination of enjoying shiny things, extreme intelligence, and never-ending spite, I think, are all sort of motivating factors for all of us.
Yep, yep. And that they're a collective and have meetings often throughout the day.
A collective called a murder, which is also pretty badass.
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.
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.
Oh, no, it's a spokes council.
It's not a spokes council, though, because all of them are there. So I feel like that's an assembly.
It's more assembly, yeah. Yeah, in Vancouver, it's called the Crow Highway.
Yeah.
Hell yeah. Because it's so massive and goes forever and ever and ever. Yeah. to their roost. Brief story on crows and resistance. A really incredible story in Vancouver when a park was, a colonial person created a park in the downtown, which was like displaced a lot of indigenous people in their homes. and designed this park that was filled with crows as well.
They also brought in animals from Europe as well to make it pretty. And the crows made it really hard for these animals. And so the city of Vancouver for 50 years, from 1900 to 1950, gave free range to the Vancouver gun people to go into the park and shoot crows every day.
Oh, my God.
And when I see the amount of crows that are still alive, it's just a metaphor for Indigenous resilience. It's just so powerful. So it's another reason why I'm interested in them in terms of where I was living.
As I've been gathering images for our project, I've been specifically trying to find images of crows attacking people because I think that's good. So it's like, you know, the follow-up to what you were saying, Carla, is the crow's revenge.
Yes. Mm-hmm.
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.
Shiny things.
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?
Yeah, I'm happy to take a spin at that. This is Vicky, by the way. Yeah, so KA is sort of like, I mean, it's an anarchist journal of arts and culture that is a collective of anarchist writers. It's also a Corvid Appreciation Working Group. There's a lot of different acronyms for it. And What we are doing is we are bringing all four, at first, just all four of our efforts together.
So a lot of us work on separate podcasts. We have pedagogical tasks. We have many activist projects that center around culture. You know, I have a newsletter. Shuley has a Patreon. Carla has a newsletter. Danny also has an email list. There's all these different projects and projects.
We realized that, like, for all of our talk about mutual aid and working collectively, when it comes to writing and creativity, the market has been so fractured and so alienated and so turned into, like, everyone has an individual newsletter that they're competing with one another, you know. even though they don't want to be like they want to be.
But that's sort of ultimately what's happening is that there's limited customers. And there's also this other trend going on right now of this really exciting kind of worker-owned journals, a lot of them local journalism. There's some in New York and Chicago, and there's one in Asheville and all over the country, as well as like on special topics.
So like Aftermath, which like does, I think the video games and there's 404 Media who does tech. There's just like all these different sort of sites doing this sort of thing. And I think in some ways, all of us are sort of collectively reinventing the newspapers that have been sort of stolen and destroyed by capital, you know, in a big way. Yeah. So there's sort of two goals that we have.
And I think Carla speaks really eloquently to some of this, but One of which is to make writing radical culture work, beautiful, joyful, fun, and also critical like movement work to make it sustainable for us and for anyone else who wants to share in this project who we can sort of expand towards.
But also to make it easier for people who are reading to have access to these things, like in one place, instead of having to, you know, decide who they care for and who they like in order to sort of, you know, do that math of like, who can I afford to subscribe to?
Like, I personally, I don't know if this is true for everyone else, but personally, I usually have about two or three people I can afford to subscribe to a month and then switch it out just like on a very arbitrary basis, you know, or something like that. That was very technical and financially focused. But what we're really excited to do mostly is support each other's work.
Because I think we all really love and admire each other's work and have for a long time. And this is just this really exciting opportunity. Instead of my writing just being for me, it's for Shuli and Carla and Danny now. And that just makes it feel more inspiring and exciting as well as a collective process.
Yeah, I mean, connected to the financial aspect, but I think when we were initially discussing this, the experience of being a writer is trying to find outlets for your writing. And if you're trying to get paid for that, you have to sell it to people, right?
And so it's very hard to get paid at all for writing, and it's very hard to place your writing in venues that publish it, especially if you're coming from an anarchist angle, because people do not really want to publish... things that come to anarchist conclusions. Like they want you to do all the analysis and whatever, but they don't want you to think about like what, what an action is like.
So like, you know, you could write for some of the lefty so-called lefty socialist, whatever, uh, But they don't. Yeah, they won't feature anarchists. They basically even just act as if anarchism doesn't exist, never exists, you know, never existed. They erase the whole history of it. The only serious kind of political forces, some kind of democratic socialism.
So to us, we wanted to create a place where we can do the writing we want to do without having to make compromises in what we want to say. just to get published because that, yeah, just that game of like, of shopping your stuff around is it's demeaning. It's totally time consuming. It distracts you from actually doing the work. So we were like, let's band together.
And instead of each of us going off, wasting our time trying to, to write.
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.
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.
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.
It's so glaring. Jacobin is definitely a big culprit. And then the podcast associated with The Dig, they will be talking about history where anarchists have been...
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
Yeah. And even the projects that have sustained, that have survived, which are all really awesome, you know, like, and exciting, like very few of them have offered real sustainability, like on a professional level. And like, I've been publishing like, quote unquote, professionally.
for 15 years and like i'm the like newest writer on the scene like from our crew basically like we're incredibly experienced and all of us have books out all of us have edited volumes all of us have like podcasts and like are people who i like really respect whose names i think are big and important in in the world of theory and activism and like in the anglophone world especially and none of us can sustain ourselves as writers as such because of the way that
Just, you know, both politically, but also just like the way the market has come down.
Yeah.
And it just feels like something we could apply our politics to solving as a workplace issue rather than just sort of as like a, you know, are you committed enough to sacrifice all your time issue? And so hopefully like that will also function to make more work available to produce and to platform and to, yeah, to sort of work as an example simultaneously. Yeah.
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.
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.
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.
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?
I'm sure. Thanks. That was a highlight, definitely, this year, was talking to Raul. Obviously, you know, a podcast ago, we talked for quite a bit longer than what was on the show. And I think, like, reading his newest book that was translated...
And then doing that show with him, it was completely connected to me, like reaching out to Shuley about doing Ka because there was a way that we, that he talked about this whole idea of disappearing symmetries that the Zapatistas are working on. Like this idea of really, truly looking at all the fault lines and,
within horizontality or autonomy that we don't actually enact in our day-to-day lives and so I really started to reflect on my own life that way and not so much Vicky at this point yet but like Julie and Danny both of them like we just were blurbing each other's books and like supporting each other connecting to publishers or trying to connect each other to publishers and just this
Trying to disrupt the competitive nature that's running underneath, even when we're all really committed to not being competitive. But it is. So all of this to say that, for me, collaboration is at the heart of what we're doing here in a deep, deep way. And for me, collaboration just means that
when something is created that wouldn't be created otherwise without this collaboration so I'm just really excited to see what sparks and comes up individually but also like with each other and even like through collaborations like the show with Raul and like how that spreads seeds and ideas um For myself, I'm going to definitely focus on collaboration in a deep way.
I don't think I'll write very much solo stuff for Ka. I think it will always be in conversation with others and just trying to double down on doing it together instead of individual pursuits.
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.
Yeah, I mean, I think that's really like true. And I think like I have for a long time now sort of accepted that writing is never going to support or sustain me. And all I needed was a push from a few other people to be like, wait, what if we like actually tried to do it collectively to be like, oh, yeah, like. I could actually try that.
I don't have to just accept that I'll always have a full-time job plus whatever writing in whatever hours I can steal and with great difficulty put out some writing sometimes and then always feel guilty when I'm not putting out enough to sustain myself. That whole process, I think a lot of creatives right now know that struggle of having gigs and work and lots of other important things to do. And
And, you know, sort of accepting that that's the conditions. And I think, like, what's so inspiring about, you know, because Carla, as Carla was just mentioning, they sort of brought, I'm the last one on the crew. And I was sort of the closer, you know, or whatever. But I think, like, I don't know what that means, genuinely. But I was brought in.
And I think just having them propose it already, just as a project that we've been thinking of, has, like, changed the way I've been thinking about what is possible with the writing I'm already doing. And so I think just to underline that point and go on and on and on, collaboration is really, really important and supporting one another is so powerful.
Yeah, when Carla and I initially had the seed conversation of this, Carla said something about collectivizing as writers. We talk about it with all these other workplaces and industries and whatever. And it was like, when she said that, I was like, Oh, yeah. That makes so much sense. We're off here doing our own thing.
And as Vicky said, you do it sort of with the knowledge that it's not sustainable. You steal your time to do it. Even the supposed jobs that are there to enable you to write actually make you do all this other work. So the time for writing is always... like endlessly deferred.
And, you know, we have that image also like of the patron or something, or like Virginia Woolf says, you need like money enough to have a room of one's own. But if we put ourselves together in this way, then we are trying to, yeah, I don't know, create more time for ourselves to write.
And then like going back to something Vicky said earlier about like reinventing the newspaper, there was a time in anarchism where like, I think we talked about this amongst ourselves, like where like every block had like a Yiddish anarchist newspaper, right? It wasn't like you had one newspaper telling all the anarchists what to think.
It was like, it was hyper-local in a way and there was so many voices. And so I think that's another thing that we want to do is like help for that proliferation because in the sort of spirit of collaboration, like the reason to write
as an anarchist for me is to have conversations to produce the possibility for people to like receive it and then and contact me and i get into conversations with people and learn things from them yeah and i think there's an angle there too where like i think we're kind of okay so i was a tiny baby when all this was happening so i'm gonna i'm gonna have to rely on y'all for this but like i you know one of the things i get from sort of reading the record about like
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.
Are you talking about like the late 90s?
Yeah, like through the 2000s to some extent.
Like Battle Seattle?
Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
I mean, that was like the birth of anarchy again, right?
Yeah.
I was definitely around. I'm in my late 50s. But the same struggle was there, like that we're swimming in liberalism and like...
that socialist worker like capturing of the movement was just as powerful then and it was you saw it at all the rallies and stuff and you know immediately anarchism was marginalized and pushed off as irrelevant and not practical for the revolution and this is why it's splintered off in all these kind of sectarian movements in the that's my take anyway i think that's
No, it makes sense. It makes sense.
I mean, I've hashed this out with so many older anarchists. I was part of Institute for Anarchist Studies. We talked about this a lot, this phenomenon with Scott Crowe. And you can just see the direct line of where it went into sectarianism from... this sort of rebirth. Sorry, I went off on a different thing instead of like journals and media.
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.
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.
So I wasn't actually active at that point, but I was like very adjacent to some of that stuff at the moment. And some of that was actually because a lot of what was going on in the alter globalization movement in that period was happening through culture. I think most famously, like touring punk bands would also bring zine libraries with them.
So they would have someone distroing zines and playing the show and like I mean, I got radicalized through punk. I know a lot of people who did. That was, you know, when I finally did, it was after that movement had largely crested. But I think there was a lot of focus on culture and also a critique of culture was also pretty central to how people were thinking and moving.
And I think the explosion of social media and, like, posting and, like, the sort of... quote-unquote democratization and leveling of communication capabilities, which in some ways was more real in the early 2010s certainly than it is now. It wasn't totally like a made-up narrative, but it was also over-relied on. I think people sort of reached for a kind of like...
Well, anyone who can use these tools to communicate, like that's valuable. So critiquing sort of media in general or critiquing sort of capitalist media is sort of beside the point because we can go around it. We can sort of go, we can, you know, go on Twitter and subvert it and we can like do all these, you know, go sideways around it.
So I was, you know, a participant in Occupy Wall Street in 2011, which people also don't know anything about because that's just being older. But Occupy Wall Street was started by a magazine called Adbusters, which came out of the WTO movement and sort of managed to stick around. And by 2011, when they did that, we thought it was like a joke.
It was like, oh, these culture jammers who like make fun of advertisements, like they started the movement. Like, that's ridiculous, right? Like, that's silly. And like, this is not to defend Adbusters. I think whatever. Yeah, there's some issues with them, but they also did, I don't know.
Yeah.
But also I think that reaction of like culture jamming is sort of stupid or like, you know, like talking about who wants to talk about culture at this point. I think that that made sense in the context in which we were moving and organizing. But like now, once again, it is clear that by abandoning the cultural sphere in many ways, we have in fact lost a tremendous amount of ground.
So I think it's actually really important to have cultural organizations that aren't just theory, that aren't just news, but that are like really talking about art and beauty and like excitement and joy and fiction and all these things that we find really important.
Because, you know, I think a lot of people sort of think, well, it's a crisis moment, you know, the world's ending, why would you do that? But like the world has been ending since 1492, like the world worth defending has been ending since then. Yeah. And it hasn't ended yet.
And one of the ways it hasn't ended is by Indigenous and Black and other marginalized cultures and stories and narratives and works of art has been an important mode of history and resistance, just as much as organizing and struggle. And yeah, I think we can move some struggle onto that terrain right now. And I think there's a lot of craving for it now.
Because I think also for a while, things felt really oversaturated. But the last five years, the internet doesn't feel helpful anymore. Everything feels like streaming is a mess. Everything's a mess. There's no access to culture that feels good. Everyone hates what they're doing. They know it's exploiting the artists.
They know Spotify is giving people pennies and that HBO and all the streaming services support Amazon and they're... They're just miserable, right? And I think there's a real opening and a real desire for something else at this moment, at the same time that things are indeed quite on fire, literally, ecocidally, but also sort of politically.
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?
Yeah, I wanted to just build on this culture thing because when, you know, when after October 7th, when people are getting together to try to figure out how in the United States to do some kind of work and action and support and solidarity with Gaza and the Palestinian liberation movement, like people were just sort of like, what the hell can we even do?
And one of the things that I would say to people is like just putting up stickers and writing about Gaza on the walls, like in graffiti has a huge impact. And it's overlooked often, I think, as like something that's
effective, but we can see that there has been a giant cultural shift after October 7th in terms of people's awareness of Israeli genocide against the Palestinians and then support for the Palestinians. I think that it has to do really, you know, post-October 7th with the fact that this was like kind of plastered everywhere. And so it's easy to kind of think that that isn't action.
But to me, in a way, doing something like that is more effective than the kind of marching in circles that we can do that we call protest. And, you know, like going back to punk, I think also punk gets a bad rap sometimes because, you know, in that line of like the kind of book chin lifestylism. Yeah, yeah. I don't think we should downplay it.
Like punk created its own culture of people doing everything themselves to make it happen. It's where I got radicalized too. And they were like, it was anarchist, right? It was like explicitly anarchist and you were living in an anarchist way and like creating things in an anarchist way. And it was this whole other world.
So like if we put our anarchist energy into culture, it's part of making a world that we want to live in you know, over and against this world, this hell world that we're also trying to destroy at the same time. So I think we shouldn't kind of just like dismiss this as, as less important than, than the other kinds of actions that we can take. Yeah.
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.
Big question. I mean, my work has always been about intervening around any kind of dominant narratives that things are just now bad or that people don't know what anything or pedagogically they're lacking. Like I've always tried to intervene around this idea that we've always been otherwise and we always are.
And there's always cracks everywhere and eruptions of radical ways of being and knowing and doing. And so it's like a deepening of that. And I think probably on a systemic, Thinking systemically is really about disrupting individualism or liberalism or empire, whatever you want to, colonialism, to really live it in the everyday. So that's partly that.
And then on just a super practical level, all of us don't have wealth. don't have generational wealth, are working all the time to try to meet ends meet. And some of us have housing insecurity and other real basic needs are insecure and health stuff. And so actually showing up for each of us is at the core of it for me.
It feels so good in my body to know that I'm not just showing up to think about what to do for Ka. For me, it's in the act of collectivism for each other. And so I'm just open to what sparks and emerges with our work. I don't have an agenda except for to disrupt things. and intervene belief systems that are ideologically driven by empire.
And I also came of age in the early eighties in the punk scene and had a venue space. And to me, punk is, and I would say hip hop as well. Hip underground hip hop stuff is like always the way to disrupt being captured by empire or from liberalism is to keep that punk ethos of doing it together and keeping it low to the ground. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. I just like to build on that, Carla, because I think that was really beautiful. I second everything that you said. Many of us have a perspective that huge structural change is going to need to come and that often that will come through these big social movements, these explosions of energy, these lightning strikes, right? But you can't force those. You can't make those happen.
And in the meantime, you can... I think I've spent a lot of my in the meantimes in... trying to sort of organize stuff that's sort of oriented towards mass movement, you know, and it just feels, often feels like wheel spinning, you know, like I'm building, I'm trying to build mass movement, organizing, like, you know, like whatever that means.
And in the 2010s, like one of the things that happened from like 2011, arguably 2009, but definitely 2011 to 2020 was that wherever you were, it was never more than probably 18 months before there was like something else going off in the streets. And so, although those could be very hard, those waves could be very difficult. Um,
you still had a lot of periods where, you know, you could just sort of be waiting and it would just sort of happen again. That was certainly what I was doing in that decade in a way that I don't think I appreciated until it was over. Yeah. Because the last four years has been very different. The rhythm has been very different since the pandemic started. And I can't just say panini on this podcast.
Okay.
Everyone does it, right?
Yeah. Since the pandemic started... You know, those rhythms have been disrupted. And I think the Biden counter-revolution against 2020, which has also really disrupted those things. And in that space, it has felt very clear to me personally, and I'm older, you know, whatever. I'm like, you know, a movement elder at this point, just because our movements are so youth focused, not because...
And actually old. Like the decade before 2011, from like 2001, you know, from 9-11 until sort of Occupy is sort of how I periodize it a bit. There wasn't a ton of street movement. You had the Iraq War stuff that was really, really big. And there were important exceptions to that in the U.S., I'm doing a pod of history here.
Obviously there's exceptions to this, but you definitely had all this time and the stuff that was sustained and remembered were largely like sort of cultural projects. And so like, I think like now as we're moving into this era here in North America, um, on turtle Island of extreme repressive danger, right? Like we shouldn't like joke about it or downplay it.
Like we were facing a lot of extreme repression and, uh, fascists back in the streets in a big way. It doesn't feel like big political organizing of the kind that happened during the first Trump administration where people did a lot of marching in circles, but there were targets for the pressure. They don't feel as relevant now. Now I'm really off. Now I'm way off.
But no, I think we're in this moment where the fascists both are quite empowered and very unfocused. They're confused. They They think Liz Cheney is just as much a revolutionary as Assata Shakur or whatever, right? And that leaves us some space to move and to build things that can maintain a spirit of resistance, that can reproduce a culture of resistance, that can also organize.
And another thing that has really been important for me recently with Ka is that I've been doing an organizing project that I won't talk about the details of, but that the skills have largely come from punk music that I did in the 20s, in my 20s, being in a touring punk band. And those skills have made this organizing really easy.
And that's been a huge thing for me because I'm working with other people who are younger, who don't have that experience. Like, oh, how do you do this? I'm like, oh, no, no, it's so easy. You just like do this, you know, here's the skills I learned just from doing music. And like, I don't think that's just like accidental.
As Julie was saying, like the DIY nature of some of that work, the culture work, you know, maybe the band wasn't revolutionary. The bands I was in certainly weren't like the revolution or whatever. But they gave me all of these powerful skills and ideas and concepts for doing really important work.
And I think that that's also a reason to pursue DIY culture in a way that's genuinely sustainable and world-building.
I think if I can build off this too, and I'm going to try to do some tying together of things, but one of the ways that I think about my contribution is to think about, don't look there, let's look over here. And that can mean multiple things, which is often when people think politically, they're looking at these big things.
moments or big actions or like top down solutions, which means that we take our attention away from these other places where we're doing all this stuff. Like, like Carla was saying, like we're already doing a lot of, of important kind of like life making work. And then also there's moments in our movements where we have to,
be like you all look over here while we do stuff over here right like you you don't want to be seen all the time so we have to be able to direct our attention to the things that we do and then also keep some of that stuff under wraps and that means it's hard sometimes to see and because it's so decentralized and anarchism really functions through decentralization like we we're not always aware of how much power we actually have and what's going on uh at any one moment
And going back to the kind of moments, even tracing back to, you know, the battle of Seattle. And I think it's like ever more present today in all of the kinds of organizing for street actions that are being done, that a lot of the groundwork for any of these moments is done by anarchists. And then it's not either claimed by anarchists or it's stolen from anarchists. Like,
like we make everything sort of run and anarchism makes everything run. And then it just gets ignored because it's not about taking credit. It's not about kind of imposing itself. And so I think like that kind of in between of, um, Seeing what we're doing and sharing that knowledge and then keeping under wraps so that we can keep chugging along.
And then just also being aware of when our work is being stolen and then repurposed for something that goes against what we want. I think these are all ways for us to prepare for those moments of explosion or eruption where anarchy really manifests and then we can kind of taste freedom for a moment.
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...
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
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...
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.
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...
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
Kind of thing, the better shape we're going to be in in the years to come.
Exactly. And speaking of which, one thing anarchists are famously bad at doing is accepting that we do require money and asking for it. So I'm going to do that for the squad. We are currently fundraising because it's actually really hard to make something sustainable for four people. Yep, yep. And we have a fundraiser going on.
If you like what we're talking about here, you can donate to our Indiegogo. Literally anything helps. Once we fully launch in February, we're going to have a pay what you want subscription model. So everything will be subscribed, but we really want to have three months worth of living wage for all of us to do two days a week on it, right?
So we're not even, you know, we're not talking full salaries and that's $45,000 because four people for three months, it's not even a tremendous amount of money.
Yep, yep.
Because we're including solidarity funds in that and paying any writers who contribute, lots of other stuff. So yeah, if you have a few bucks and maybe you're thinking about getting off of one of those sub stacks or something and you want to throw our way, we would be absolutely honored and very excited to accept anything in this launch.
And if you don't have that money, which is true for a lot of us, which is why we feel bad asking for the money and because there are so many people who need it right now, you can subscribe online. You can find us on social media and keep in touch until we do launch and then you can join and subscribe that way. That's also a really great way to support us.
If you have a few, few bucks you want to throw, if you want to give someone a present of a year's membership, you can get that for a hundred dollars for the holidays, you know, radicalize your uncle, you know, just with, with our work. We'd really, really appreciate it. And yeah.
Thanks Vicki.
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.
Well, thanks for having us.
Yeah, thanks for the chance to share. And like I always say, if anyone is interested and wants to get in touch, I'm happy to hear from you.
Yeah, same. And reach out to us, too, if you have ideas on what C.A.W. stands for. We love hearing from people. My favorite is, can anarchists write? That's what it stands for. I don't know who came up with that. I think that might have been Shulia or Vicky, but it's a good one.
TBD, TBD.
So yeah, send in what you think. And we are going to have an advice column that's going to be launched soon. Yeah, so send us questions or individually or whatever. But, you know, disrupt individualism. Reach out to us.
Yeah, thanks so much. And yeah, as a longtime listener, first time caller, it's really exciting to be on here. So thank you, Mia, so much.
That's not true. Hold on. Oh, second time. Dang it.
All right, sorry. I was on with you once.
It's like, hold on, hold on.
I just go on so many podcasts, Mia. Like, can you blame me? Sorry. Yeah. Well, anyway, it's really exciting to be here and talking to everyone and we hope to meet y'all in the future. And we'll have a, well, we will have a discord community. We'll be having like writing class. We're going to have a lot of like really exciting stuff.
So even if you can't throw in money right now, please sign up to our website, koshanythings.com to stay in touch and find out all the really cool stuff we're doing.
And just to reiterate, like all the stuff that we're already doing is now going to have a home in cause. So like my essays and podcasts, Vicky's review reviews and essays and Carla's many projects, which include podcasts and writing and these interviews and Danny's writing and classes. Yeah. This is all moving there. Plus new things.
Doing it together. Yeah.
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.
Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.
It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.
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