It Could Happen Here Weekly 109

time period. And specifically we're going to talk about I think a part of the anti war movement that does not get much attention, which is the port militarization resistance that happened and sort of two thousand and six, two thousand and seven, and with us today to talk about this is two people who were part of this movement. If Juliana Neuhauser, Hello, hello, and Brendan Maslaska's done, Yeah, both of whom were organizers and activists while this was

going on. Yeah, I think, thank you, thank you both for being here.

war movement that is not very well known. I think I think a lot of people know about the initial stuff that happened in two thousand and three, and people might know about some of the stuff that was happening against the war in Afghanistan, like right when it started, but I don't think most people know that it like you know, even after a two thousand and three sort doesn't work, that it continues, and then it continues sort of informs that are that are very interesting, and so I guess

I want you to to to start out, I want to ask how we sort of got from the early part of the anti war movement into this, and how you she got involved.

and then the worst of cases kind of insurgency. But then there were small groups of people that at when we saw that it didn't work, and we saw that these giant, peaceful marches from one part of town to another, or voting for John Carey or whatever, it didn't work, that we started to look for other options.

veterans in World War Two. One of them was a marine in the you know, in the Pacific Theater, and still into his seventies, eighties and nineties until his final days, was just dealing with horrific PTSD and had always taught

me from young age never to get involved. So I, you know, and I remember when when the very clearly, you know, I'm sure it's on everyone's minds now, and when the invasion of Afghanistan started, when the invasion of I Rock started, I was at that massive demonstration in Washington, d C. That Juliana just mentioned, and I ended up.

I'm from Utica, New York. I went to a rural high school just outside of Utica, you know, russ Bell generally speaking, impoverished and also very conservative area of New York. And you know, I had the recruiters bothering me, military recruiters in high school, recruiting my friends, and they were just everywhere in the hallways. So it was very present with me when I was younger. I moved out to Olympia, Washington, two thousand and six, and that's one a new student

activist group, Students for Democratic Society was launched. That's how Julianna and I first met. We were both in separate chapters of that new organization in the Pacific Northwest, and the protests started just a few months after I moved out there in Olympia in two thousand and six.

Front group. There was literally no difference, just in terms of their esthetics maybe like is there a donkey or a hammer and sickle on something. That's the only difference we saw. So I don't I don't think there was. It wasn't There wasn't like a conscious like political opposite attention to it. It was just like they're not doing anything, and so we had to look in another direction.

that going on. It's also a military town. It's a little over twenty miles south of what we called Fort Lewis. It's now called JBLM j BLUM or Joint Base Lewis McCord. It's an Army and Air Force base. Now it's one base. So you had all these you know, different kind of elements in you know, in tandem in that town and

the public port. The Port of Olympia is one of about seventy or so public ports in the state of Washington, some of which are I mean, they're used for all kinds of things, you know, for our commercial, private industry,

but also the military and the US government. So, you know, I heard from someone I don't even remember who that the military was sending a ship to the Port of Olympia in late May of two thousand and six, and this happened for ten or so days, and it was just kind of a natural instinct for a whole bunch of us to go down to the Port of Olympia. It was the war machine in our backyard, and the

idea was to just block the vehicles. It started out with just like less than ten people, a number of folks getting arrested, and that very rapidly culminated into larger protests every single day, an act of blockades people those of us like Julian and myself and other folks using civil disobedience or what we preferred to call civil resistance to try and stop or at the very le slow down these striker vehicles and to give folks an idea of what a striker vehicle is. You can look it

up online, but it's kind of halfway between. You know, a tank in a hum vy doesn't have the slacks you know that a tank would have. It's you know. And they were being used in both Iraq and Afghanistan for raids of residential areas. They were really on the front lines of the war in both those countries, and that's what we were trying to stop.

I think the first one of the things that happened here was that they started to avoid that there's there's kind of a geographical thing that I think for people who either don't know was Washington or because they're normal people don't know like the port.

much more industrialized port than Olympia. It's you know, it's like a big port, more normal port, I guess, And that one was honestly pretty crazy because you're just trapped in this giant industrial maze basically at the mercy of the riot cops. The best success we had was definitely

at the Port of Olympia. I think the in two thousand and seven in Olympia was definitely and it's like the glory moment, which was when people were able to on and off like actually hold the port and control it in the a An exits.

But you know, one thing that we did is that we built up contacts with other activists with long short workers all up and down the West coast in California. There are other activists we are connected with in Texas, Hawaii, New Jersey, and New York. There is a desire in the anti war movement and you know, in some extent maybe it's like it was small, but with some folks in the labor movement, especially in Oakland where the ISLWU the you know, longshore Workers Union. It's a lot more

militant than say in a place like Olympia. Yeah, but yeah, I mean people wanted to replicate this model because, as Juliana said, we wore successful in two thousand and seven, we shut down the port of Olympia for a total of it was essentially two days. They were not they're not shipping anything in or out. We set up blockades. We're willing to throw down with the police in the street.

days before eventually they would peer us out. But one of the things is that this does it did create problems for the army because when you work with a port, you know, it's like you've got like a certain timeframe that you've contracted with the port to do whatever it is is you're going to do, and it's not too happy if you take longer than you said.

war movement in the country at that time. One because of this militant direct action that we were, you know, we were building up in the streets and trying to throw a wrench in the gears of the war machine to to at the very least slow it down. Which in some ways we did, but you know, we were up against so much. But the other added element, of course, is the g I resistance and the soldiers who are resisting I've all also known as the Rock Veterans against

the War was very active there. They set up a GI coffeehouse across you know, literally across the street, uh, you know, the the gates for one of the entrances for Fort Lewis. There are a whole bunch of soldiers that were going a wall. We had friends who were active duty soldiers who had fought in you know, Iraq and Afghanistan that were a wall and they were hiding, you know, refusing to go back into these striker brigades

that joined us in port militarization resistance. There are a whole you know, long list of soldiers that were very publicly saying, you know, I'm refusing to fight in Iraq or Afghanistan for you know, various reasons. And so we are very much connected with this movement too, and I think the higher ups in the military they're they're hyper aware of that. They studied us very well, you know, to the point of actually spying on us. So that's like a whole other element of the story too.

faid about this. It was like, you know, if you go back and look at like old system of a down videos, you know, they'll have these things, Yeah, and you'll see these you see these riot police and like you look at them and it's like these people they look so much less armored than like the people that

we have now. And one of the things that I thought was interesting about this was that like this is I think one of the points where you start getting the modern riot police showing up, but that are just like, you know, completely concased in like armor. And yeah, I want to talk about just like the police response to this,

because I think that's that's another thing I think. I think there's no there's a kind of a tendency to sort of project back what the police look like in twenty twenty one, just onto the whole history of police, and I think it's like it's it's it's gotten worse even in the last twenty years.

protests early on in two thousand and six. And yeah, I mean we like they look like RoboCop and it's something I had I you know, I hadn't like I had been to like mass marches and demonstrations like the RNC protests and DNC protests in Boston, New York and like in Washington, d c uh and so I would see these like riot cops, but they were I mean ubiquitous in these port protests. It was like a whole

army of them that was sent out. I mean when Juliana said that things got kind of crazy at the Port of Tacoma protests, I mean there was like a police riot, you know, like the cops went absolutely nuts there, shooting people with tear gas and pepper balls and brutalizing people.

I had never before witnessed anything like that. And it got to the point in you know, in Olympia where we kind of knew early on that we were being traced by the police to the extent where, you know, one friend of ours was followed from our house to the bus station to take a bus to school by the police and then was stopped and essentially assaulted by

them on the street. And we had another fellow activists, and you know, a roommate of mine who was going out to driving out with a few friends, a few fellow activists from Olympia to Aberdeen, about an hour's drive. So Aberdeen, there's a port of grays Harbor there, pretty conservative small town. It's where Kirk Cobain is from.

like nothing in his system. But they he was driving under like one mile per hour under the speed limit. They arrested him for duh d W I you know, eventually fought the chargers sued them, uh and you know what a big settlement out of all that. But that's just one example of many of the lengths that the police would go to. It was pretty severe. Even there's a house of a bunch of anarchist younger anarchists called the pitch Pipe Info Shop in Tacoma, and that was

also a big target. The police were swarming around them all the time.

I was one of the contacts for the Olympia STS group, and it's like, hey, you know there's kind of like a parent organization that's some old like elder activists are in to kind of mentor us called Movement for a Democratic Society. Very small, never really took off, but like I'm interested in getting involved. We met up in public and he seemed like an alright guy. I mean he was,

you know, forty ish early forties. He told me had like you know, been in the military for years, and he actually still worked at Fort Lewis, so he was always open about that, but it only went that far. He didn't ever tell us what he actually did there, and it wasn't abnormal for you know, we had many folks that worked active duty you know, on base and civilian civilian roles or soldiers. As I mentioned that, we're in port militarization resistance. So he gets involved and he

gets really involved with port militarization resistance. He goes to protests, he gets pretty close with this group of anarchists I mentioned who lived in Tacoma, and he seemed like a really solid guy to most of us. And you know, things happens as we progress, and you know, as the military responded to our you know how effective we were in the anti war movement and the GI resistance movement

by changing their tactics. We noticed that, Okay, when we first started the protests, we had the ability to catch the police by surprise by setting up, you know, a blockade here, or having a surprise action there at this time or this port, et cetera, et cetera. And as time progressed, we found out that, you know, we were having these making these decisions for tactics in our strategy. We thought that we're in private and then for whatever reason, the police kind of knew about where we were going

to be before we even showed up. And that I remember that clearly happening in two thousand and seven the Port of Olympia.

near the port. And so that way, if like if for any reason the room was bugged, it wouldn't be caught up because it was just written on a board. And then it was like a small meeting too, so it's like there weren't and then when they got to that diner, there's like full of cops like clearly waiting for them. Like at that point, it's like it was very clear there was some level of infiltration involved.

in San Diego. Like, we knew, you know, former Black Panthers, and we read our history, so we knew about the history of co intel pro the counterintelligence program of the sixties and seventies, and the war on the anti war and civil rights and black power, American Indian movements, et cetera. So we knew, you know, just intuitively early on. But there was one thing that happened in particular which prompted some of us to file for a public records request

with the City of Olympia. And another activist is walking down the street in Olympia. I'm a member of the Wobblys and Dustal Workers of the World Union, and we had like one of those metal newspaper boxes downtown and it was locked to a poll, you know, with a bike lock. And there are some city workers there with a pickup truck and they're cutting the lock to the paper box and they threw it in their pickup truck, and so, you know, this friend of ours was there

was like, what the hell, what are you doing? What's going on? And one of the workers just kind of shrugged and was like, I don't know, the police told us to do this, and they drove off like they stole you know, our essentially like our union property or whatever.

So we had you know, our our lawyer friend Larry Hildes and the National Lawyer's Guild you know, call and kind of threatened the city and and then a number of us got together were like, hey, you know, let's do like a public records request with the City of Olympia freedom of information law right, and so we did.

And the request was, you know, just requesting any all information the city had any exchanges communications by email, et cetera between the police and like other agencies about anarchists, I WW students for a Democratic Society, And their initial search that the city clerk did yielded something like thirty thousand responses. So she's like, okay, I got to narrow

this down. And I don't know, I was working on the request at the time, and for some reason, like I don't know, we're port protests, we're near a military base, communications between the army, not thinking anything, and so the initial responses it actually got you know, maybe one hundred, one hundred and thirty or so different documents, just copies of emails, et cetera, that we're little puzzle pieces for

this massive puzzle. And it was just a few of them, and it was, you know, there was an email talking about our guy in the Navy going to a PMR meeting to get some intel. There's you know, all kinds of things like that. There were a few emails in particular, and the email address was something like John John J. Towery at you know, Army dot us whatever the email

address was. So there's a crew of active that got together, put their heads together, did some research quietly for a few months, and eventually found out by publicly accessible information like voter registration records and also finding out something about like a motorcycle club called like the I don't know, like the Brown Butte Club or the Brown Butt Club

or something and the like. Found out that this John Towery guy that was in this motorcycle club and had his you know, was registered to vote outside of Tacoma in this town there. It was actually John Jacob. It was this guy that we thought was a fellow activist, an anarchist and a friend, you know, I thought he

was a personal friend of mine. Turns out he was actually essentially an Army intelligence officer working for something called a Force Protection Unit at Joint Face Joint based Lewis McCord, and also working with a whole list of different agencies and what turned out to be like a man massive surveillance network that was national in scope. This guy was sent by the Army along with many others to infiltrate us, to spy on us, and to disrupt us was huge.

And then that was what I thought. One of the things I thought was really interesting about this is that like, like I think that this chapter of the anti war movement is even on the left, is like not very well known, but like the serious dis is which the Army seems to have taken it is really remarkable. Yeah, I'm wondering what you think about that.

I feel like, and like I said, it's like one thing that we need to keep in mind was that the peace police were much stronger back then than they are now nowadays. Like as we saw last year, it's like people of learned to throw down, but that was not the case at the time. And so this is a very very small group of people, and I think we accomplished a lot from with how small it was. If it had been larger, it would have accomplished way more.

and ports. And that was something you know, we've talked a lot on here about pipeline protests, but I was interested in what you two think about, because, Yeah, this this is like a very particular moments right now in which you're dealing with all these logistics chain failures, and I was wondering if you do think there's anything that we can learn from how your versions of the sort of of port demonstrations worked for potentially trying to leverage

that in the future, especially with like contract negotiations for port workers in Oakland coming up next year.

front lines of that for many, many years now. I mean, the kind of repression and surveillance that we face really pales in comparison to the kinds of you know, surveillance of repression that folks were facing at Standing Rock for example. You know, I think, of course, one of the well one of the main differences is that it was primarily the military, you know, with us, right that was surveilling us, because this was very specifically, you know, a war issue

and a military issue. But yeah, I mean I think, you know, like I think there's a big questions like what what do we have to do? That's that's new And to me, I say, you know, for both that kind of militant action, but also for the labor movements, like it's not you know, we don't have to reinvent

the wheel. There are things that have a tried and true track record of getting the goods, and that is you know, these more disruptive kind of actions and movements, and so one of them would be you know, I guess my suggestion would be to like go back to the basics, and even like I would say, now, you know this, Remember this is at a time when like Facebook was around, right, like, but we weren't really using

that for our organizing. We really relied on like face to face meetings, you know, phone calls and building up trust with people and building up our capacity to like take actions and make change. You know, I think I'm not saying throw out everything that you know, that at least some of the good that social media has to offer, but like I think going beyond that and going back to these older tactics. And then for the labor movement, like the big thing is you know, and it's just

like a bigger question for for mainstreaming in particular. I mean, they're the whole idea of like union contracts is that workers also lose a lot. Yeah, they get some things, but business owners and bosses have rights carved out in

those contracts. And with the long shore workers, I mean The difficult thing with that, of course, is like there would be some symbolic strikes that, of course, like longshore workers have done and continue to do, you know, around like the Warren Rock historically supporting movement, Abu Jamal may Day, et cetera, like in Oakland, but they have some things for that written into their contracts, and you know, for all these other like unions, it's like, well, you know,

we can't strike at all for the next two years, the next three years, whatever the life of the contract is. Like, I think it's a bigger question and challenge for the labor movement to move beyond that and not be put in this straight jacket of contracts like that.

And I think you wind up in a situation where it seems like you kind of have to plan your tactics around when contract negotiations are happening, because otherwise you can't actually get people to do anything more of in like a one day symbolic strike.

the nineteen sixties. But like we have recent exams samples of workers breaking the law in mass like the West Virginia teacher strikes that happened a few years ago, Like teachers in every single county in that state went on strike. They broke the law, and they want something out of that.

And I think that's what we really need to encourage people, is this idea of breaking out of like the norm and breaking the laws, which you know, the laws that are in place, which are not there to you know, expand our freedom, they're there to contract it.

for the rest of your life. Don't bind yourself by a bunch of like paper that the other side just doesn't care about.

it to the Supreme Court but didn't. But you know, like the the other thing is like the violation of the Posse Commentatos Act. It was a whole other thing. You know, we don't have to get like so tied up into like the legalistic I think, but like the point your point is valid. Like they don't care about

the laws that are already there. They'll they'll just intentionally break them, break their own laws that they have set up, and you know, they'll just get a slap on the wrist because that's really all that's all that happens to them.

as activists today can still learn from. And I think part of that, you know, I don't want to call us elders because we're not that old, but like one part of that is like making sure like our movements are still like multi generational and like we we learned from each other and also as as Julianna and I did, like I mentioned earlier, like we learned from the movements of the past, SDS, the Black Panthers, the Black Freedom Movement,

et cetera. But there's a lot that you know, these these struggles I think have to offer us today.

the migrant camp in Nocumber, one of the camps. It was extremely cold like and I had a good sleeping bag right much much worse for people who have blankets. I had a young woman completely breaking down and crying this morning, understandably because it's terrible and people have been there for five six days now. We ran out of food all our distribution sites today. We just desperately need more help and we need a much larger scale operation, but we can't find that. So if you're able to help,

please please do. I know it's a difficult time of year. I'm not asking you to give money that I wouldn't give. I'm thousand plus dollars deep in this. I'm not asking you to do things that I wouldn't do. Spending half my week out there like, I'm not just preaching something that I am not part of this is something I'm very much part of. I think it's very important to me and it would mean a lot to me if people could help. However they can, either materially or with

their time. Thank you very much, and I hope you enjoy the episode.

doing mutual aid project out here. So if you guys like to introduce yourselves in any way you think it's relevant, that would be great to start off with, and then we can talk about what's been going on here.

were running out of food. Basically we barely made it buy on peanut butter and jelly sandwich, the world famous peanut butter.

really get people out of there. You have a lot of people just processed very quickly. It doesn't pile up. And then because of that, all the infrastructure that we put into these places, and all of you know, the infrastructure that these refugees build themselves, right this is not

provided by Border Patrol, gets basically ruined. And so you have soiled blankets that have become the tops of tents because that's their only use at this point, have not enough shelters, so people are sleeping just among the rocks and trees because it's the best they can. Yeah, and I think one of the most notable points of these open air detention centers is legally speaking, Border Patrol gets around this by not really calling them detention centers, saying

that they're not detained and that technically they're free. But the reality is there's nowhere for them to go without getting you arrested or deported. But because of this loophole, Border Patrol has no obligation to feed them, and so when they do feed them at the start of the quarter, when they have the budget at which they blow it's oranges, it's crackers. It's not enough to live off of when you're stuck there for five days. I spoke to a Kurdish migrant today who had been there for five days.

And you know, we've heard of people staying there for an entire week, just stuck in these camps as they overflow with people because they're not cleared due to whether it be a holiday season or whatever it might be that puts us in this circumstance.

to the because cucumber. If you've got Google Maps, if you're not driving, like, you can put it up and you can look right, we're like an hour and a bit east of San Diego, about seventy miles east of San Diego, closer to our centro than San Diego. So can you explain how people are ending up here by the hundreds or thousands.

language group exactly. And then they get in the morning, I guess at like five or six am. They drive all the way out from TJ to Hakamba and get dropped off at there's three points where there's breaks in the walls, and these walls obviously they don't go over the mountains because Trump was trying to build distance rather than actual stopping people, and so these breaks in the walls are very easy to cross. It's literally just walking over.

There was some remnants of concertina wire or bob wire like in the area, but it's all ripped and super easy to cross, and so the coyotes will drop them off near or bits away from that point and have them walk in when that's where border patrol. After they cross, border patrol will intercept them give them wristbands for the day they arrived.

The translated like, no, we got here three hours ago. We kept thinking they got here three days ago. They kept showing the number three on their hands and so yeah, they give them these risk bands and then tell them to wait in these areas that are very close to where they are intercepted, and border patrol will tell them there's cameras all over the dead that we're watching you, so don't leave, and if you leave, it'll mess up your migroprocess or your asylum process, and so they most

of them stay. We've actually have seen a lot of people walking on the eighty here trying to get to town because they're desperate, they're cold, they're hungry, and they're.

out of here. Like so they finished their sandwiches and then he took them straight back. So that is detention. If you can't leave, then you're in detention.

I had a woman that I was helping give medical care to whose ankles were swollen from a steroid that she was given that she should not have been given and that she had a bad reaction to. And yeah, that's just been their reality traveling here and trying to get here. On top of that, I think that speaking of medical issues and speaking on what you were saying earlier about the threats of becoming undocumented, the threats of you know, being forced to stay in these camps, there's

even fear of having a medical emergency. So like when EMS comes out, when we call nine to one one or Border Patrol calls nine one one, right they're not like working in connection with border patrol. They're just going to a hospital as if it was you know, someone

house person on the street going to the hospital. And so they end up there, and if they're not given the proper information to get a court tape, to finish their asylum process and to really like be submitted properly into the country, they are at risk of becoming undocumented.

And I think that fear has spread among people, and I've definitely noticed personally that there is fear to have nine to one one call to be taken away in an ambulance because they fear you know, becoming undocumented or being.

but there's you know, we're limited. We you know, it's over the counter, it's you know, it's we can't do much.

the person's partner. Sometimes a person could be separated from their children, and so they're obviously very afraid of that. And and to compound that, I think like the release that they're not released in the way they had previously been released, that they're dumped onto the street at certain transit centers, right and then and again it falls onto volunteers nonprofits to help them get to.

good hold. You don't need to keep them really refrigerated much or you know, the YadA YadA, and so it's just peeb and j's water and fruit and we give them each one at least sometimes more if we have the capability, and then we another person who is also here full time will hit another camp on their way because it's on their way to meet up at a central location we call the Youth Center or the YC where all of our donations end up, whether it's clothes, blankets,

food items, non perishables, perishables. We have a fridge and in that place, once we get there, we'll assess what we need to do is do we need to make more food? Do we have enough to go feed the third camp, which we call one seven seven, which is all the way in Boulevard a little outside of Hakamba, And if we have enough, we'll just hit we'll leave and hit that spot and then come back and start dinner.

And in the meanwhile, we have a lot of volunteers that will show up and make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches because that is our easy go to staple.

have been there multiple days, they'll jump in. There's like always two people or three people that are like, I'm here to help Kurdish people, our amazing help and are always willing to step up. But yeah, this morning at Willow one of the camps, we had two guys that were kind of controlling the line and helping keep them back, and one of them like send them to us one

at a time. And at the very end of it, I had nothing for them, and I was like going to hook them up with a cop sandwiches and a little have anybody who helps, I'll cook them up with a cups of extra sandwiches or food items or water or cigarettes even, And yeah, I had nothing for them except for kids sandwiches or kid sandwiches kid packs. So we make these little sandwich bags full of like different candies and you know, granola bars and things that kids would like to eat and give them a lot of

nutrition and stuff. So I just gave them extra that. And once other migrants saw me giving those things out that I had been holding and telling other people know, these are for kids, then everybody swarmed and it was just like, Okay, well I'm giving all the kid whoever's there, whoever's arm is there. They're getting you know, a kid's pack and got rid of literally all of our food. And I think we put in like twelve plus cases of water, forty packs, and they were all gone except

for maybe like ten or fifteen waters. It was one of the more dire mornings that we've had, especially, Yeah, at these camps.

Patrol is like freaking out over. They are, you know, worried because they can't deal with this quantity of people and keep them processing while there's still a consistent flow. And that's you know, it puts a lot of strain on us because, like you were saying, we're running out of food. We don't have enough to feed five hundred people, you know, every day, even though we're just doing you know, two meals a breakfast and as best we can a dinner and trying to make sure that that dinner is

a hot meal because it is frigid out here. I slept in my van and I kept having to wake up to try and warm up and do something to keep myself from freezing. And I, you know, I can only a imagine what it's like for them with what minimal equipment they have. Some of them don't even have tents.

So it has been a lot. I know that today, running medical, I've seen a lot of people with colds, and I am suspicious that that perhaps there is COVID running around, that perhaps there is, you know something, there's definitely something, some kind of very severe illness. Going through the camps and being in this freezing cold is not helping anyone's immune system. And on top of that, I've

seen broken fingers and some other stuff. And that's that's been my today has been treating that and then helping out with dinner, which I will say I tried a little bit of the lentils and rice, and I can say we are feeding them well.

you know, right, volunteers are here during the week. But the reality is is we are all still stuck at work, we all still live in this healthscape. We're all still stuck grinding those gears and making ends meet. And so coming out here for a lot of us is you know, like for me, is a weekend task. It's you know, it's what we can do. It's what we have the ability and the time and the gas money for. And on top of that, a lot of us spent a

lot of our own money. I know that I've spent like at least a grand and a half on just like supplies for these runs, on supplies for whatever I can. And you know, sometimes we get we're able to get reimbursed by our mutual aids, and sometimes the money runs dry and we just you know, we need a lot of support out here that we don't have, that we don't get and I feel like we really felt that today running out of food.

to make pbjs. People have to resupply our stuff and drive it up from San Diego, which is an hour and fifteen minutes away. Like it's a gargantu an effort that it's exclusively taken on by volunteers, and like a relatively small group of volunteers considering the scale of the task at hand. I wonder like if you would like talk about your volunteering experience a little bit. I think it's been great, Like it's a very diverse group of people.

We've had so many. We have the Schultz family who are Quakers who are amazing, who have been like spearheading this since the start. We have like obviously a lot of anarchist people, and a lot of people from various migrant advocacy and aid groups. Uh, that's what we have, the Black Panthers the other day. That's probably a ton of people I'm missing.

the other day. You know from the house that the lady that makes it and then another lady Mormon lady makes us these roles and we'll just like give us like hundreds and hundreds of bread rolls, which everybody loves, even the volunteers.

is going to be like. But sometimes people don't show up, and sometimes especially around the holiday times, it gets really thin because everybody's got their own lives and things to do. And but yeah, I mean I started volunteering just on my weekends when I was working full time at my dead end jup back at home in San Diego, and

I would, you know, saw the need. I was down at Whiskey eight in San de Sidro pretty much every day after work and on the weekends, and then when they started doing street releases at IRIS station in San Diego, I would just be there full time and on my weekends just be there until in Deaf and Haitian Bridge started showing up and kind of took in Detention Resistance and they kind of took over that scene, and so I the need was like, oh, Jakamba needs help.

listening to them, and the Schultz family, who are like the main on the ground people since day one were like, yeah, this this person needs to be out here. We want to have all out here full time, and I'll love Clado got a grant to to basically fund that, and so once that money came through, I just took a sabbatical from my nine to five and I was like, peace, I got more important things to do than give Jeff Bezos more money. You know, so he needs more yachts, clearly, Yeah, clearly, yeah,

and more space trips you know. Yeah.

such a degree that it's been harmful. And I think that that has given us a lot of power and has allowed sort of our creativity to get us through this. I think it's a testament to what non hierarchical organizing means and how you know, lack of hierarchy and lack of a dedicated leader doesn't mean a lack of leadership. I think it falls on all of us to lead.

It falls on all of us to bring what we know to the table, whether that be from the experience that we've had coming here and working here and knowing the details and the minutia of what's going on specifically here in Hakamba with this project, or what we bring to the table from our past experiences. And I think that that has really beautifully coalesced into a really efficient system as best as we can do, as best as

we can manage. You know, we've really made do and kept people alive in a huge way.

and that's a long hike. Had the Moon camp from where they end up to where they break in the wall is what thirty minute walk, ye so or so, and so they are arriving in the pouring rain, their socks are getting wet. It is super cold, especially at Moon because of the location. It's just ridiculously cold, and that's like case for hypothermia. And we're there to you know, to stop them from getting so wet. We're giving them trash bags for their bags, ponchos.

Moon too, at that camp. It's the location.

doing things with people, not for people. Right, Like the other day, I know, like a Kurdish guy and I set up a ton of tents, so Colombian dude and I built this amazing shelter and it wasn't for hit and his family, it was for anyone who needed it.

very stimulating environment out there, you know. So being engaged in a talk, completing stuff and helping people, I'm sure he's rewarding.

obviously like an ongoing situation. And my eyes were hurting just from all the smoke from the fires that they were starting.

I think he was Kurdish as well. We went and found another Turkish person or Kurdish person from Turkey, and I grabbed this this person and I was like, hey, I have somebody here who has a gnarly migraine and they just they.

by where they have to stand to get food. But what do I what I want out of highlight was that because we are interacting with these people as equals, because we are coming here and seeing them as people, and we spend the time to talk with them and to build commune with them, we can build those connections which allow people like the gentleman with the migraine to you know, be taken in and to have, you know, basically a temporary family while he's there and make sure

that he's taken care of. And that's I think something that really highlights the strength of this type of organization and this type of work and this type of you know, the way that our politics, the way that our ideals really shine in this kind of setting.

does it. I Mean, even though I know how to do it, he's like, doesn't even like me doing it because he's responsible for me if anything were to happen. So it's like our capacity is super limited. We don't

have enough burners, we don't have enough containers. So we have a couple one really nice like locking containers that hold hot food and keep the food hot, but not enough to serve upwards of six hundred people at all three camps, and not enough vans, like it would be ideal, like in my situation to send a van that has charging capabilities to charge everybody's cell phone, to feed everybody, to give them water and all their needs, blankets, medical

to each camp all at once. Instead of us driving, it's cooking a massive amount of food of the UTH center and hoping we have enough to hit all three camps. Because the numbers we can try to call border patrol offices and get numbers, but the numbers are always a little skewed or just off, you know, or sometimes lately they have just been straight up not giving us the fucking numbers, like being dicks.

medical distress and their partner. He drove them himself to where they could be ms and ensure that the pretuity they go to hospital, Like I don't have a whole lot of knowledge what happened afterwards that we don't have. We're not entitled to their private medical information and not should we be. But like other times, it could be

much harder. So it's just luck of the drawer, right, Like we there's so much we don't control, I guess, yeah, and like we don't know exactly, Like we can't control who goes when, who has the highest level of need, you know, like constantly people are be coming up to me and being like, hey, like today I was warming up milk for babies in my camping stove right and it was three or four babies, and they were like,

do you think they'll take us first? We have babies, And like, I think most of the people there would rather give up their space and let that baby go out because no one wants to see a fucking baby shivering out there, like it's fucked, it's terrible, but we don't know, and we can't tell you and we can't help you. And so like a lot of that stuff's outside of our control. But the stuff that's within our control,

I think we've done a really good job of. I wonder like if people are listening, I think I just want to convey that we're all just weird, like a group of like we're not like ragcaging, extremely like Motley Crue,

and but we we're really doing excellent work. I think if it may blow our trumpet, but like if people want to come and help, first of all, I would like you probably can people think that they can't didn't have anything useful like a bag problem with you do like if you can, if you can like lift a ladle or like a palette of water bottles, or drive a vehicle, or like.

always find something. Honestly, one thing that I missed doing, which when I first started coming out here, we had a little bit more volunteers, especially I was coming out on the weekends, when the weekends typically we have more volunteers because people have jobs and the weekdays and week

days we have less. But I was when I first started coming out to Komba on the weekends, I started bringing my guitar and my bongos and my you know, different instruments, tambourines, and I remember we gave out all the instruments to the migrants at night while we were giving them dinner to they were around the campfire and so that they can play and enjoy themselves and lift their spirits and so like that would be rad to have somebody on spot all the time with a guitar

and like jamming with the migrants and lifting their spirits because it's they're miserable. And one dude from Muzbekistan once told me spoke really good English, and in fact he told me about there's like commercials and so he worked at like a center where they send people over here.

You know, on a day that I don't have my guitar, I'll bring up that I play it and the migrants will be all excited, wanting me to bring it out or wanting me to to you know, whatever the activity may be, just to stimulate, you know, their minds a

little bit. I mean, this is it's it's really bleak and being there for for days, for just stuck in the desert with nothing to do, right, And I mean sometimes, you know, I've seen a soccer ball out there that the kids play with, and that's that's so heartwight warming. Things like that that really, you know, we want these people to feel like they can still be in community

with each other like they're not. And I feel like things like that really help to repair that sense of desperation because right now, with the level of desperation, we do see a lot of fighting for supplies, a lot of fighting for resources because it's it's hard. It's hard out there. People want to make sure that their kids

have blankets. People are so cold they can't sleep, and I feel like things that bring them together, activities that really make them feel like a community out there and help us feel in community with them allows us to have a more cohesive relationship and allows things to go more smoothly. And I think it's, you know, in some cases, more important than the supplies themselves, because it makes sure

that they go to the right places. It helps us triage, It helps us, you know, it's its own tool for survivals from.

could get processed. And once he ended up out of detention at Central, which is where they released them, we reunited his dog with him. Very emotional on both sides of the separation.

bulk order supply and the you know there. There are these mutual aid groups, you know, they they put in the work to reimburse folks when we do things like that, when we have to go make runs because we can't bulk order, we can't do it the most efficient way

because we have a need right now. And that has saved us in a lot of different moments, especially I used to volunteer down at W eight in sanny Sidro, and that was the primary way that we got resources was through these mutual aid groups who who fundraise and and I yeah, I just wanted to highlight them and highlight the So there's the Rose Cup Collective. I know that they do a lot of fundraising. I know that

you were saying free Ship, Free Shit Collective. There's a few freestore SD Yeah, there's a there's a few different ones who you know, their funds help keep us running, especially in the hardest of times right now.

up Heroin alone in the bathroom. Last week, on November twenty second, twenty twenty three, the Washington Post Editorial Board published an opinion column with the provocative title, if attitudes don't shift, a political dating mismatch will threaten marriage.

gen Z lib broads won't date Republicans right. That is literally like the point of the article is a gen Z liberal women they are less willing to date outside of their political beliefs, and men are getting more conservative, so it's really a danger for marriage. Now, I understand if your first impulse is to say something like, well, when has the Washington Post editorial board ever been right about a single goddamn thing? And that is a correct attitude to have.

still buy into the basic points in this piece. This is generally married to a widespread belief which is actually cited in the article that toxic male influencers like Andrew Tait have tilted huge numbers of young men to the right.

So even though people will be like, well, it's stupid to expect people to date, you know, folks who believe horrible political things that would hurt them, it's true that men are getting more young men are getting more conservative, right, and this is I think generally down to this belief

that has I don't think people examine often. They just sort of like they get concerned about the popularity of guys like Tate, which is valid, he's concerning, but assume that does mean that, like, yeah, we're losing the young men.

They've all been tilted towards these guys. And so without discounting the damage of dudes like Tate, I wanted to give a breakdown of how common the so called right word tilt of young men actually is because spoilers, this is a pernicious bit of disinformation, and I think it kind of blackpills a lot of people unnecessarily. Let's start with the obvious point here. Young men are not growing more conservative across the board than men of other generations. So first off, I want to read you a quote

from this Post editorial. Since mister Trump's election in twenty sixteen, the percentage of young women ages eighteen to thirty who identify as liberal has shot up from slightly over twenty percent to thirty two percent. Young men have not followed suit, If anything, they have grown more conservative now that claim is based, You want to guess, did they cite a bunch of different sources to prove like that it's a really widespread problem, or do they have a single statorial board they have?

tank that tends to produce center rights surveys. And even then, the study that they are actually citing doesn't show what the Post editorial board claims. Again their claims, young men have not followed suit if anything, they have grown more conservative, right, young men, So they are talking across the board about gen Z and millennial males, right, I'm going to quote from that study. Previous research identified a growing gap and

ideological orientation between young men and women. The gender gap in liberal identity is notable among members of Generation Z, but it's relatively modest. Forty three percent of gen Z women identify as liberal compared to thirty five percent of gen Z men. However, the gender divide among white, non Hispanic gen Z adults is considerable, close to half. Forty six percent of gen Z women are liberal, a far greater share than white gen Z men, among whom only

twenty eight percent identify as liberal. Among gen Z adults, white men are significantly more likely than white women to identify as politically conservative thirty six percent versus twenty six percent. So you see what number one the study is doing there? Is it saying forty three percent of gen Z women all gen Z women identify as liberal, whereas and then it goes to thirty six percent of white gens Z

men identify it. It's switching it on them, right. And while it does eventually acknowledge the differences where because it says that like across the board, all gen Z men thirty five percent or conservative, forty three percent of gen Z women are liberal. That's not a massive gap, right. The Washington Post editorial board just makes the claim that young men have grown more conservative, which is not supported by the study. And also the study is specifically talking

about how gen Z white men have gotten more conservative. Right, very different things being claimed here. So the Post just ignored what was actually in the survey to claim all young men, not just young white men, are more conservative, not just gen Z white men are more conservative. Now, this is weird, But even if you take the study, which is misrepresented by the editorial board at its face value, that study does not gel with all of the other

data that we have. Now, when I went through this, it was hard to find good data on just gen Z men. That is not broken out in most of the studies that we get. But we do have some information on how gen Z adult men voted as a group in the twenty twenty two midterms, and that data is telling. Based on the twenty twenty two midterms, seventy one percent of young women, that's a that's gen Z mostly gen Z eighteen to twenty nine, So I think

gen Z taps out at twenty six right now. So presumably a percentage of the people in this are technically millennials, but they're yeah, they're like you, they're day walkers. Yeah, that's like what like, oh my god, I can't I can't do math live on air.

And among LGBT, and again this is not broken down male or female, ninety three percent voted for Democrats, and overall, among non LGBT youth, fifty eight percent voted for Democrats,

thirty eight percent voted for Republicans. So again not massive discrepancies here, and one thing that may help to explain this that again is not really broken down in the Washington Post editorial is that while gen Z white men have are more conservative compared to like gen Z millennial white men, gen Z itself is a lot less white than prior generations, which means overall gen Z men are not really getting more conservative. About fifty five percent of

gen Z is white compared to about seventy percent of boomers. Right, So this is one major reason why. Again this because again if you actually factor in all of gen Z, there's not this huge worry about like a marriage discrepancy as long as you assume that people, you know that interracial dating is not a problem for most people the way it is for apparently the Washington Post editorial board.

Now there's a couple of caveats here. One is that midterm voters are historically more engaged and educated than voters of other generations. However, that may not necessarily hold true with gen Z or millennial voters today due to a

variety of factors. One worthwhile point is that young people tend to be driven far more by what they encounter through social media, which is probably part of why gen Z and millennial voters consider abortion to be a more important thing to vote on than the economy by a

margin that bears no resemblance to older generations. This is why we've actually seen unless four elections soaring youth voter turnout, particularly during the midterms, record levels of youth voting, Which doesn't mean it's completely wrong that midterm voters may be a bit more engaged and educated, but that's probably less of a factor for young voters that it is for older generations. Right, some of the conventional wisdom about who votes when is not as accurate when we're talking about

younger people. This is not something that you can prove objectively, but there's there's significant, sort of circumstantial evidence around this. Speaking of circumstances, you know what circumstances get me to spend my money?

amount than any other generation. One of the things that was noted in one of the studies I found is like a potential line of hope for Republicans is that while this and this is part of where I think some of the fear mongering and these Washington Post articles comes from, although I don't think it says what they think it says is that lower numbers of young people support specific parties. Right, so only about thirty percent of gen zs align with Democrats compared to twenty four percent

of Republicans. And if you just look at that, that's way less.

less interested in straight marriage. And these gen Z kids, male and female, are not getting more conservative, but they're also presumably not going to do the kind of marriage that the Washington Post editorial board was right. I'm going to quote from a Time magazine right up here. In late twenty twenty and early twenty twenty one, gen Z was the only US generation in which a majority believed

there are more than two genders. As recently as the first half of twenty twenty, this was a minority opinion even among Gen zs, a remarkable amount of change over just six months. In contrast, there was only a small uptick in this belief among older generations. That type of data is finally available. Starting in June twenty twenty one, the US Census Bureau offered four options on its Household Pulse survey question about gender male, female, transgender, and none

of these. The last a rough gauge of those who identify as non binary, gender fluid, or another gender identity. With that more terrible way of phrasing that court, it's not a great way. It's better than nothing, but yeah, it's not God with more than with more than a million respondents. The survey is large enough to provide accurate estimates. The results are clear. Gen Z young adults are much more likely to report identifying as either trans or non

binary than other generations. Well, only one out of a thousand boomers report they are transgender one tenth of one percent. Twenty three out of one thousand gen Z young adults two point three percent identify as trans twenty times more. By this estimate, there are now more TRANSI young adults in the US than the number of people living in Boston, which is great because I have long felt that what we need to do is arm trans people to take

over the city of Boston. I believe this for years, and I think we can finally make it happen.

more than three percent of gen Z young adults. Combined with the more than two percent to our trans, that means one out of eighteen young adults identified as something other than male or female in twenty twenty one or twenty twenty two, which is again, it's not true because half of the note it's not it's not it's not the time because again two percent are trans, which presumably, based on this survey and how it's asked, presumably means

identify as either male or female, whereas three percent our non binary of some sort may not, may not identify as either male or It doesn't say that this is this is this is not well written, but the day is interesting. It suggests five to six percent of gen Z our trans are non binary, which is a wild departure from previous generations. Right, And also that's a significant chunk of this These gen Z numbers that are not being included in this Washington Post because presumably a decent

chunk of these people will want to get married. They just don't I identify in a way that the gen Z that the Washington Post editorial board respects.

desert young people are deserting progressivism. Which is going to do musclectorally, and I'm just not seeing that in the numbers.

generations that came before them. Yeah, so like it's like this is this is this is just a thing. Like every generation has a a giant thing where there's like a bunch of right wing like yeah, a big push.

contrary to popular wisdom. You think this, but the reality, you know, it's the it's Malcolm Gladwell syndrome, right where you've got to come up with some like clever thing that shows that you're smart because you don't buy into

the standard wisdom, which is always wrong. I mean, there's and that and so that they have to believe that whatever is really happening is the opposite of what's obvious happening, right, which is why this Actually young men are getting more conservative, and it's I'm the only one who realizes, and I've got to warn every one of the danger to marriage. Speaking of which, here's another quote from that Washington Post article.

religious or political lines. If either partner considers those things to be central with their identity, can be associated with lower levels of life satisfaction, and politics is becoming more central to people's identity. This mismatch means that someone will need to compromise, as the researchers Lymonstone and Brad Wilcox have noted, about one in five young singles will have little choice but to marry someone outside of their ideological tribe.

The other option is that they decline to get married at all. Not an ideal outcome considering the data showing that marriage is good for the the societies and individuals alike. And again, this is only the case that one five number is ignoring queer people.

It means that there's some serious problems with young white men that we need to deal with.

previous version of the same panic that everyone's having. Now this is from the nineties, so it's like all of these people are just like absolute dinosaurs who they've like

dragged out to write this like weird fearmongering thing. And the second thing is I think is interesting too, is like just the deep, ingrained, sort of very conservative assumption here, which is that marriage is good for society, which I don't think is anywhere near as straightforward a proposition as to Washington Post is making it seem like and you know,

and like they have racistical arguments. I mean, the cistics that I've seen, like you know, just just sort of likeasistics that I've seen based on American society is that like women who aren't married are way happier than they are in marriages, and you know, like men do worse.

But like you know, but like I mean, this is one of these things there's like we don't know, like there has not been a version of America where we haven't where the institution of marriage wasn't like our thing that hasn't existed for like two or three hundred years, Right, Yeah, we don't know the Washington Post know what an American society without, like where people don't get married looks like like they have no idea, but they're just sort of

assuming that it's like the apocalypse because they're weird conservatives in the nineties.

they take ill. They're just like healthier in general. But that doesn't that doesn't necessarily mean that it's marriage specifically, and more like yeah, not being alone, right, Yeah, anyway, I want to continue and just kind of go through. I think we've trashed this article enough, but I did find a lot of interesting stuff about gen Z and young voters that I wanted to get into. But first, here's some more fucking ads, pigs, you have, filthy mongrels.

Slop it up, suck it down. Anyway, we'll be back in a minute, and we're back. So one interesting thing I found. I tried to stick to just stuff from like twenty twenty one or later for this, in part because of the Andrew Tait of it. All Right, I wanted to like try to find stuff that was like, Okay, since that guy came onto the scene, has there been some sudden shift because people treat him like the pied piper of fucking fascism, which, again, he's a problem, but

I don't think that's broadly accurate. So one of the studies I found was a twenty twenty one survey from MTV AP and o RC right, And it was interesting because it showed something I didn't really, something I had kind of bought into, was at least less supported by the evidence than I might have thought, which is like the level of doomerism in young people politics. Gen Z actually shows optim like that they are more optimistic than a lot of older people, both in the state of

the world and their role in improving it. Two thirds of gen Z feels like their generation is motivated to make positive change in the country. Part of I think where we get some of the feelings of doomerism is that only about fourteen percent think that they can have an impact on what the government does.

should give more money to cops. Yeah, it's like, yeah, it's like, Okay, we're like defunding the New York Public Library System to buy encrypted radio like things for police units. Like it's like, yeah, like this is objectively true that you have very little influence over the government, like.

So like, they think that their problems are are worse than like what boomers and Gen X and millennials we're dealing with, but they think they're about half of them think they're living better lives. This is pretty similar to

how millennials feel. Gen X feels very different. Gen X or is the most pessimistic generation about the state of the world, which actually makes kind of sense if you realize that, like a lot of Gen Z kids are the children of Gen X people, right, So like they think their standard of living is better than their parents because Gen X is miserable, Yeah, which you know interesting.

Gen Z and millennials are more accepting than Gen X of depictions of same sex couples in media, and hold more positive views of LGBT people, which again, gen X is the worst generation. We all have to agree on that one.

which is still actually not like a massive gap. Right when it comes to this is interesting when it comes to requiring Americans to mask in public places like stores and restaurants, fifty four percent of millennials support that, fifty three percent of Gen X do but does but fifty two percent of Gen Z does, which is all potentially within kind of a margin of error.

Kind of gen X is right in the middle at forty five When it comes to supporting a nationwide ban on air fifteens and other similar semi automatic rifles, gen Z and gen X are at forty two percent for gen X forty four percent for gen Z, whereas millennials

are at forty seven percent. Now, a lot of this breakdown, because I dug into the actual numbers, is the difference between men and women, and conservative men and liberal women right who are liberal women are a lot more common and more likely to support these kinds of bands, whereas conservative men aren't, but that drags the overall numbers down.

It's just interesting to me that there seems to be less support with gen Z over that they're closer to gen X. Increasing security at the border fifty This is where there's a huge gap, fifty five percent of gen X for increasing border security. Millennials in gen Z are at thirty eight and thirty seven percent, So that's really like gen X really seems to buy into the we need more border secure, whereas deutes are are like no,

fuck that shit, yeah yeah. Gen X or gen Z and millennials both tied at forty eight percent support for a universal basic income. Only thirty six percent of gen X supports this, again another significant gap. One interesting thing is that gen X and millennials at thirty eight and thirty six percent support reducing regulations on businesses. Only thirty one percent of gen Z supports this. That's a significant difference. I find that kind of interesting.

have something to do with that. I don't know, though, Like I this hasn't been broken down like granularly that I've seen, but I did find that kind of interesting. And then here's kind of depressing but interesting reducing funding for law enforcement agencies. Thirty four percent of millennials support that, thirty percent of gen Z supports that, which is enough of a gap to suggest like might be somewhat less

popular among gen Z than millennials. Only eighteen percent of gen X feels the same, which is a huge gap, and that is kind of interesting to me. So yeah, yeah, that's all I'm telling.

of like tails off after it. Yeah, and so and so that's the thing that I think is like like that, I don't you know, and this is I think a thing I think is kind of important is like these this stuff is all malleable and moment something happens, everyone,

everyone's beliefs change really quickly. Yeah, and that's the thing and like like that that's a that's the thing with these sort of like you know, with with the sort of doombers and right Andrew Tat is like yeah, like but people, people's actual political beliefs and what they're willing to do for them can change very very very quickly in in in moments where they're sort of you know, I mean there's there's a bunch of people getting shot by cops in the street, right right, like that that

that changes people really really quickly. And I think that's why the gap is so high both between overall Americans, which are at twenty eight percent for defunding police, and between Gen X and Gen Z millennials. Is that a lot more Gen Z millennials people got like beaten by the cops in twenty twenty, and that this does show well, again it's an uphill battle. Most Americans, a super majority

of Americans do not support that way. More young Americans do, and it's probably because so many of us got our asses checked. And also I want to like like like if if you look at what was happening, like the numbers dream the uprising, right, like the number of people who supported the burning of the third Presinkle was like fifty percent. Yeah, so like these are things that change really quickly in the moment too, and now we're in the sort of long backlash and that's you know, and

that's that's driving like some of these numbers. But yeah, yeah, like don't it, don't don't be cynical things. Things can and will get better.

terms of stuff that is pessimistic. I want to end on a note of like where I kind of think some of the lazy, dumbass pundit brain on this is

coming from. And I maybe I'm wrong about this. But I have a little conspiracy theory that involves AI because I did kind of at the end of digging up a bunch of these studies, reading through I don't know, like fifteen articles or whatnot, and you know, the actual like entirety of three or four different big surveys, I decided just to hop onto one of the AI search engines that I use occasionally that is usually not helpful,

just to see what it said. And I asked, like, what is the most recent data on how young gin z men are voting?

called is gen Z coming for the GOP? Not all young people are Democrats? By Ronald Brownstein, And it does not say that, It does not say anything like that. It certainly does not say, and I will tell you what it fucking says, right, because it's wildly fucking different.

An analysis of previously unpublished election data from Catalyst, a democratic targeting firm, by Michael pod Orzer, a former political director for the AFLCIO, shows that even the emergence of these new voters may not break the larger political stalemate that has partitioned the country in a seemingly immovable blocks

of bread and blue states. Podewzer's analysis of the Catalyst data, shared exclusively with The Atlantic, found that over the past four elections, gen Z voters have broken heavily for Democrats and blue states and provide to the party's solid margins and closely contested swing states. But in red states, with a few prominent exceptions, Podhorzer surprisingly found that even gen Z voters are mostly supporting Republicans. Now, when you dig into the data, first off, that does not show that

gen Z people are voting more for Republicans. It's the opposite of that. The vast majority of them are voting for Democrats, but in red states the number and it's not finding in red states that gen Z are more likely to support Republicans than previous generations, they are more progressive than previous generations. They're just still majority supporting Republicans

in deep red states. Now again, if you read that quote, it's also saying there are some red states where gen z are voting overwhelmingly for Democrats, and in purple states they are wildly progressive compared to previous generations. It is, again the opposite of what that AI summary is wondering how many lazy pundits are doing this because they suck at shit and we're just like, oh, well, the Atlantic says they're more Republicans. Like, no, if you read the article,

it does not say that. It's a pretty good article.

why all these people's brains have been completely destroyed. But I don't actually like, it's actually genuinely unclear to me that this is even predictive of how those same people and deep red states are going to vote in like the next like four to eight years, because that was because again this this this, this was a mid term

election with a democratic president. That is, when you're supposed to have the opposition like win a bunch of seats and stuff like that, and like it didn't go the way it was supposed to and so and so I think it's actually even that part is more is more like even the tiny note of it where they're like more like gen Z people voted Republicans, Like I, I don't know, I don't even know if that's gonna hold

in the long run. But all of these pun like, yeah, the fact that they probably are just reading AI.

about twenty twenty four. That is a worthwhile concern, and that is a real problem is that while young people are overwhelmingly progressive as voters, this is not evenly distributed across the country, and a lot of the gains in voters that progressives have seen are going to be clustered in states that were already overwhelmingly blue, and when it comes to an elect a presidential election, those are wasted votes, right, And a lot like that this and this is a

problem that the Republicans dealt with a lot during the Obama years, right where there would be massively more Republican voters, but they would be clustered in these areas that dims were never going to win, and so it didn't help them electorally.

electoral college is bullshit, you know. Yeah, It's like like I've I've lived in Illinois my entire life. It is not possible for me to cast a vote that matters. Yeah, Like it just isn't. Yes, just how the system works, right, It's like it's a great, great, great job, good job. Yeah, he wrote the constitution.

was not guarded. Nancy was away from the house. She had their security detail. Capitol Police does not protect spouses and family members of Congress people. And he used a hammer in one of the two very large backs he brought with him to bust into the house and then had a conversation with Paul Pelosi that he insists was very polite until the police showed up, at which point he started bashing him in the skull with a hammer.

And we're going to get into more of what happened, but I wanted to I want to start by playing that audio. This is right at the point that the police opened the door.

looks kind of stunned. And the police show up and they're like, yeah, man, drop the hammer, and he says no, and they, to be fair to the police, pretty reasonably take a step towards him, and he pulls the hammer away from Paul and hits him in the head several times. The police tackle him off. Paul got hit, hurt very badly. This is a pretty ugly attack. He's an old man. He got hit in the head with a hammer several

times by a much younger man. Pretty ugly. One of the things that becomes clear if you watch the earlier footage of this guy in their backyard, because they have a security camera, and if you watch this footage, is that, like, this is not a guy who had a super clear plan about what he was going to do. This is a guy who was kind of flying by the seat of his pants, and when the police came in kind of irrationally like based on his existing plans, decided to

swing at him. And when he was at court, like some of the things to Pape said were very interesting, he basically like, you know, he busts into their backyard. Paul Pelosi in his pajamas, confronts him when he hears it, and Depap asks, are you Paul Pelosi? Where's Nancy? Where is Nancy? And Pelosi's like, she's not home, She's going to be gone for several days. And de Pap started threatening to tie Pelosi up. He does this like ten times.

Eventually Paul's able to get away briefly to go to the bathroom where he has a cell phone, and he calls the police and like while he's on the phone with a dispatcher, you can hear de Pap like telling him to hang up.

about like why Depap says he did this. Depap explained that he broke into the Pelosi home in order to lure University of Michigan Anthropology and Women's Study professor Gail Rubin to their house. Ruben's research, according to her professional bio, focuses on LGBTQ studies, gay and lesbian ethnography, sexual populations and geographies, sexology, and feminist theory. She is known for her nineteen eighty four essay Thinking Sex, which is considered a founding text.

our schools into pedophile molestation factories. To Pap said, so, one of the things that's really interesting to me is that this guy's in the home of one of the most powerful people in the entire country, who is worth one hundred million dollars or more so also extremely wealthy person. But she's not his target. His target is this woman's studies professor who James Lindsay has convinced him is trying to molest all of the kids in America.

And then the pandemic hits and he's spending all day playing video games alone, increasingly isolated, and he starts going down these YouTube and podcast primarily listening to these right wing podcasters. Lindsay's one of them. He's also a huge

Timpool listener. Who is this super right wing guy who believes that, like, we're already in a shooting civil war with the left, And yeah, these are all big groomer guys, these are all women's studies professors are the most dangerous people in the country, and this is a vulnerable dude who the pandemic isolated from what social networks he had had, and he just kind of completely loses his shit. It's

a very clear radicalization path. And it's a big bummer because this is a deeply mentally unwell man who was taken advantage of by a right wing media ecosystem that exists to churn exactly this kind of guy towards violence against their ideological opponents.

basis for the whole like Judeo Bolshevik conspiracy, which he was one of the big sort of cultural Marxism people. Yeah, well he is.

Paul Pelosi attack. It's to completely obscure the actual power relations of American society to the point where Yeah, the thing we've been talking about happens where because this person thinks that this Marxist conspiracy from gender studies professors is actually the thing that controls the US. He is like kidnapping one of like the husband of one of the most powerful people in the United States because he thinks that as a way to get to a gender studies professor.

It's it's this, it's this interesting I think, like, I don't know, it's I think it's this interesting demonstration of of how of how right wing ideology is specifically designed to act to like conceal the actual power relations to society and then blame like queer people for it. It's like.

all of his grievances are so focused around academics. It's because he still has academia brainworms, where everything that matters is like what this handful of upper middle class professors at fancy ivy league schools argue about.

a Christian online school. He was twenty years old. He spent almost all of his time at home on the internet. He did not believe the Holocaust was real. He had been to the hospital before for mental health evaluations. The FBI referred to his beliefs as a quote loosely organized movement of individuals and groups that espouse some combination of racist, aidy Semitica, zenophobic, Islamophobic, misogynistic, and homophobic ideology, which is a very very broad broadway of saying. Yeah, he was

like a far right nut job. He was very very typical kind of Nazi guy. He had two swastika flags. Now because he died, it's where people are still putting together like what exactly led to him to like do this specific act because they can't like talk to him. But yeah, it was very very typical sort of thing of this guy deciding to go into a Walmart and do a shooting. This is something that other Nazi accelerationists have done before. It's something that will probably keep happening.

this happens. It's so common, you know, like you just can't. You can't continue existing and have the same reaction to these that you had in twenty nineteen.

inevitable result of this sort of thing. So I guess do we want to segue to Vermont for our next next?

Let's let's have us a walk around. And they're they're walking around. They're near an apartment building and this forty eight year old man named Jason j Eaton steps off his porch, pulls out a gun, and apparently without saying anything, fires at least four shots at these three young men. Two of them are shot and they're torso. A third

is shot in the lower extremities. They are all alive. Still, they're all expected to live and think one of them was more seriously injured than the others, but they're all like going to survive, thankfully. And then Eaton flees on foot. I think like the next day the police catch up with them. He used a three to eighty pistol, if that matters to you, which is a fairly small handgun, which probably explains why everybody's survived. And yeah, so that's

the extent of like what physically happened on the day. Again, Eaton doesn't say anything before he starts shooting. There's no evidence that he knew these guys. They are apparently speaking in a mixture of Arabic and English as they walk by, which and also at least I think two of them were wearing like Palestinian color sort of shimogs or kefias.

atomic symbol, which I guess means he likes science. He describes himself as a dad and a part time farmer, a reformed yes stockbroker, and his archived account includes a link to his subs stack, which is our DKL radical. He describes it as yeah, wander wandering ramblings of a reformed broker on the ADHD ASD spectrum. He's claiming at least to have ADHD and autism. It's uh, he's deleted. By the time we got to them. Everyone got to

the most of the posts on his sub stack. The only thing on there is a really extensive post where he's like talking about how how restaurants can keep dishwashers employed. He seems to have worked this one and be angry that they're not always paid fair wage commensurate to back on the Lion or in front of the Lion staff, I guess, which is like not unreasonable, but an odd thing for him to be so focused on.

too concerning. He's like or he's yeah, he's like retweeting like the Libertarian Party of Tennessee saying that they like Bernie Sanders, and like he's he has like this podcast where he talks about penny Stalks, and it's like it's a lot of like you see a lots of these types of guy around and most of them are just like guys in their forties, because that's what he was, Just like a libertarian guy in his forties who lived in Vermont.

was next level, he wrote. He also shared other anti vax sentiments on his LinkedIn, and wrote last year that he'd started deleting or unpublishing certain posts because my ideas make some people not want to hire me. He also has an Instagram account, which is largely dedicated to sharing

images from his farm. Only one post hints at any ideological or political outlook, which is a screenshot from the Urban Dictionary definition of America with a K, a word used to describe the worst sense of the United States, i e. Imperialism, corruption, and the global exportation of American culture. His Instagram links to another blog, which has the same name as his substack and contains rambling podcasts about the

financial system. He's uploaded documentation of his various qualifications over the years. One document indicates that he was a Boy Scout leader between at least twenty seventeen and twenty twenty one. Don't worry everyone, the boy Scouts are not letting this guy continue to be an adult leader.

vaccine denial, vaccine conspiracy theories. And I will say, I've never seen a shooter post like this on LinkedIn before.

LinkedIn because it's like for like business and finance. But it is certainly weird, like the way he was using it is unlike most most like either like like cod COVID, conspiracy shooters, vaccine shooters or whatever his motivation was for this, for targeting three Palestinian people. It's it's certainly certainly a unique facet of this incident.

to act be acting like like his usual self. Not not saying like, you know, not saying that he was acting good, but like he was acting.

and decides, I'm going to just start shooting. I don't actually know, like, I don't know what else it could be. He can't have These people were not like regular walkers in his neighborhoods, so this can't have been like he wasn't laying in wait for them. This seems like from you know, it must have been like a spur of the moment thing, right.

conspiracy theories. I can certainly see how the way the way, like libertarians in general the past three years, past, like five years, six years, maybe even since, like the Tea Party realistically have just have been getting increasingly aligned with like other aspects of the far right where uh, it contributes to like transphobia, or it contributes to racism, xenophobia, homophobia. Yeah, like that that that has big that that Venn diagram

is slowly becoming more of a circle. And I can certainly see if this guy, this guy obviously was listening to podcasts, if he was making he was making a financial podcast at some point, yeah, he Like, I can totally see if if you're listening to libertarian podcasts, you slowly getting all of these other kind of beliefs that have been seeping in to almost the entirety of the

libertarian political project. If you see, like a few years ago, he was retweeting posts from like the libertarian parties of these various states, and now many of those accounts.

this story, this story just sucks. They had actually so these this family and their landlord had been like pretty close friends. Like the family had considered him like like a like they considered him like a grandfather. And this guy comes through the door and the six year old kid runs up to go hug him, and he stabs the kid twenty six times and kills him, nearly kills his mom. He's screaming like the entire time about like, Yeah, he's screaming, You Muslims have to die. You're killing our

kids in Israel. You Palestinians don't deserve to live. And this is a I think this is a kind of a kind of different kind of shoot of well not sually a different kind of like killing than the ones we've been talking about, because this is a very sort of like wake of two thousand and one killing where you have this enormous, enormous spike in Islamophobia, very specifically here, you have this incredible spike in in anti Palastinian racism, and you have this this period like especially in the

week I mean, and this is still happening to this day, but in like the week after, in the week after this all started, you could say fucking anything. You could say. You could you could like you could talk about fucking turning the Gaza strip into glass, like you could talk about fucking dropping nukes, you could talk about killing every single Palestinian on earth. And it was and no one

fucking said anything, Right, all these fucking people. All of these fucking all these fucking journalists said nothing all like the president, Like the president only starts talking about his homophobia after this fucking kid gets stabbed the death and you know, and this guy is listening to right wing talk radio, which is why you know, this is like this is a this is an older like this, this is a this is a s pecific kind of killing that like I think is very very similar to the

the enormous number of Muslims who were killed and I will seek people too, because these people are just really racist. Yeah, and Pealstinian people who are just killed right after nine to eleven, because there's just this wave of the US that gets into one of these sort of murder frenzies,

like one of these sort of racist frenzies. And this kid gets stabbed to death and yeah, this guy, you know, and I mean and like I think, I think the think about this case right like this is you know, this is a radicalization in terms like in terms of like going from going from literally like this kid is running up to hug him because like he had built like a treehouse for the family before this, right, like the like and over the course of like seven days.

This guy goes from that to like we need to kill all Muslims and we need to like stab them to death, right, Like it's it's horrible and and this is you know, like this kind of stuff just keeps happening, and you know, like the only time, the only the media literally only covers this stuff, like in terms of like, oh, it's costing a Democrats support and it's like, you guys, just I don't know the extense of which the media has been utterly and completely complicit in anti Palasinian racism

has been appalling, and you know it's killed people now, yeah, and there will there will be no reckoning with this because the US media does this shit all the time and no one cares.

fairly integrated this community was. And it's the again an example kind of what we're seeing in most of these other attacks we've talked about, say of that nazi is like these people who are a lot more normal. And then I'm going to guess if we when we find out more about the dude who stabbed that kid, a lot of his drift happened after COVID, right. You know, it's a product of this right wing media ecosystem that again exists purely to do this sort of thing, but

it's also a product of COVID. Right, it's a product of this lockdown that just fucking shattered so many people.

this year. Yeah, and yeah, I mean, if you, if you, if you want to understand what transphobes think about trans people, like those texts are as clean as an example that you're going to get about how like all of the fucking right wing media people and all of the sort of like you know, like all of the most sort of like absolutely like committed transphobes think about transfer, But how they talk about us like in in closed like like behind closed doors where they think you will never

see it. And this this is just this is just how they talk about us, and this is what happens is people like people fucking weirder trans people and yeah.

a giant fucking problem and we all need to reject. Like, there is some hateful shit on x dot com and sadly it's in my replies.

the country. Not only is China not celebrating the death of Henry Kissinger China is quite possibly the most popular American in the history of China to this day. Like right now, if you went and pulled like the favorability rating of like every famous American, you can think of the person what the highest rating is almost certainly going to be Henry Kissinger. And you know, I mean, and this is this is and this is not just a sort of like a popular thing, although again he is

enormously popular among ordinary Chinese people. This is a thing that goes from the state down. Xi Jinping, he's actually weirdly one of the last world leaders to talk to Kissinger. So Kissinger went to visit China in July, and him and Chijinping have this like great heartfelt reunion. They have a great time. Xijinping says quote. The Chinese people never forget their old friends, and Sino US relations will always

be linked with the name of Henry Kissinger. In the wake of Kissinger's death, the Chinese government said, from Reuter's quote, Kissinger made historic contributions to the normalization of China US relations, and Chinese people will forever remember him for his quote sincere devotion and important contributions, Wang added, the Chinese Premier and the four Minister also sent messages of condolences to

Kissinger's family and to Secretary of State Anthony Blincoln. So he is getting like he is getting as good a reception in China as any American has ever gotten. And if you if you can understand how this came to be, how like every other country in the region fucking hates Kissinger like everyone else despises him. And if you can understand why China, why he is like the most popular American in Chinese history, you can understand the entire arc of the twentieth century and how we ended up with

the horror that we all live in today. But first, speaking of the horrors that we all live in today, is breaking.

Chinese working class stands victorious. They and they alone stand triumphant over the greatest city in China. It is the last time they will control this city for forty years. The new leader of the Nationalist Party is Chang Kai Shek, a proto fascist drug lord who the Soviets, for some inexplicable reason, thought was going to work for them and was going to like build a socialist state at China. Deeply unclear why they thought this. I don't know. Don't

have stalin running your foreign policy. I don't have.

million people, most of them Chinese workers and peasants. Basically like the entire you know, like like basically the entire urban Chinese left dies in this like like the the in this slaughter, and with them dies basically the entire

internationalist wing of the Chinese Communist Party. Because the internationalist wing, the wing that had you know, very close connections to Moscow, were all like in Shanghai, and they were all but the most importantly not that they were all literally in Shanghai, but they were all part of the urban Communist Party and they get just completely wiped out. And this is the part of the Shanghai Rising. That for our purposes is important because it's the first moment where the rift

between the Soviets and the Chinese Communist Party begins to form. Now, in the wake of the Shanghai massacre, Stalin sends the CCP instructions that are just nonsense, Like he's telling them to stay aligned with the Nationalist Party, but to oppose Shangkai. Shecheck like and literally there's descriptions of the meeting when like this this telegram comes in. The CCP leaders are

like sitting around this I think it's a radio. They're sitting around this radio, and they get the they like they get the instructions, and they're just like these people are just burying their hands in their face because like this is nothing, it is nonsense, and you know, and this is sort of this is that's like the last gasp of the old Communist Party leadership. Those people are just gone, and in their place rises Mao. Now Mao

is not from the urban wing of the party. He is from like Mao was a peasant organizer, right, He's from the whirl wing, and his wing of the party tends to be more nationalist and less sort of like

subservient to Moscow. Than the urban wing of the party, and with Stalin basically getting the entire urban Communist Party and like every other urban leftist in the country killed, you know, the people that are left are MAO and the sort of peasant organizations who have a distrust of the Soviets that they're going to maintain for basically their

entire lives. Now, obviously relations between the CCP and Stalin improve as like World War two happens, but there's a basically the moment the war ends, there's a series of incidents that sort of trained relations. One is that this is less an incident, but Stalin seems to not have thought that the CCP was gonna win the war, like he seems to have thought that the nationalists are going

to beat them. And one of the things that he does is basically de industrializes Japan's giant industrial belt and occupied Manchuria. This is a completely intact industrial belt. It is one of the largest like intact industrial belts in the world, and Stalin, like in classic Soviet fashion, takes the factories, takes them apart, puts them on trains, and ships them across across the so sorry to rebuild this Ovia economy, yep.

continuous fighting and the after the war. China's industrial base in this is nineteen forty nine, right, Their industrial base is smaller than Russia's in nineteen seventeen, which is just nuts, it is and this is small, yeah, and this is the conditions that the everything, the entire course of twenty century Chinese history are defined by these conditions, right, And these specific conditions are this is basically a production bottleneck, right.

And I've talked about this on the show before. This is one of the one of the sort of most important things in twentieth century Chinese like political economy, is that you know, the CCP is trying to simultaneously expand its agricultural production to feed people and also expand its industrial capacity. It's mostly trying to expand it to its industrial capacity. The problem is they can't expand their industrial capacity without expanding their agricultural capacity, and they can't expand

their agricultural capacity without expanding their industrial capacity. And their attempt to just blow through this by like mass use of human labor is the great lead bored. It's complete catastrophe, right, this is just gonna fuck like whatever like intentions like the Chinese Revolution had, this is just going to fuck them because the combination of this and their ideology is

just going to doom the entire project. And you know this and the other thing about this period, the Soviets are really really patronizing, like they talk about like constantly and like diplomatic things, like they talk about the Soviet like the Chinese is like their younger brothers. There's like this weird like thing going on. This isn't enough to substantially threaten their alliance, but the relationship between the USSR and China is never as it's never quite as firm as people.

they have abandoned the path of Marcs Leninism. I am now the only anti revisionist in the world. And you know, and this whole thing like results in these worstening relations between China and the Soviet Union, with the CCP basically calling the Soviets like weak neck bureaucratic social imperialists and the Soviets looking at like the great leap forward and being like, what are these maniacs doing? And this tension escalates to the sixtieses both sides start massing troops on

the Chinese Soviet border. Now meanwhile, so so okay, the sixties goes.

what that actually means is that they don't align with USSR. So Breshnev means this to be about Eastern Europe, right. MAO looks at this and goes, oh shit, Breshnev is going to try to overthrow be and this does not go well. So and you know, I know the looking at it, he's looking at like the Soviet troops massing on the border, and he's like, oh shit. And this is where things get absolutely wild. In nineteen sixty nine, there are a giant series of border skirmishes between this

between Soviet and Chinese troops. People are killing each other across this enormous this is like continent sized border. People are like like like like companies of Chinese and Soviet troops are like firing artillery at each other. Everyone is

completely losing their minds. And this is actually like one of the reasons why, Like every once in a while you'll get these things from the Himalayas and China's border with India, where everyone's like hitting each other with sticks, and the reason you're hitting each other with sticks is that, like the Chinese were like, wait, hold on, it's actually a bad idea to have guys with guns on the border of a nuclear power. Yeah.

been trained in guerrilla warfare. And their second problem is that the Chinese population is to disperse for them to all be killed by a Soviet nuclear weapons. And the CCP makes the same assessment and it's like, Okay, if we fight this war, like the human wave attacks are just going to eventually are going to crush them. We're going to use force numbers that can't kill us all with nukes. So the Soviets plan for this is they are like drawing up plans to line the border with

China with nuclear land mines to stop the chese. It's nuts. Everyone is losing their minds normal times. Yeah, Like I've seen rumors. This is the thing I don't have actually good sources on. I've seen a lot of rumors that both both the Soviets and China like reached out to the US try to get them the nuke. The other side,

it's everyone is everyone is completely losing their minds. And you know, so at this point, like both sides kind of back down because both of them realize that, like fighting this war is the stupidest thing that anything could possibly do, because there's there's like there is there was a little tiny shred of sanity left in both sides. That's like, do we like actually what to have a

nuclear war? And they're like no, okay, but this marks the permanent solidification of what's called the Sino Soviet split. And do you know what else is it is? It is a Sino Soviet split. It's the split between the part of the episode that's ads and the part of the episode that's episode.

about Charles de Gaulle. Yeah, most Frenchman two exists. Yeah, so Degall has been devising a strategy to pull China away from the USSR and towards the West. And this is the origin of what's called Triangle diplomacy. Now Kissinger steals this idea and goes and does it. But this was not Kissinger's idea. This was this was a plan that was already kind of in motion that he stole from the Gaull.

Hey complicated. I'm not going to go through the entire diplomatic history of China, but you know, if you and this is the origin of one of Kissinger's most famous crimes, which is Operation search Light, which is Pakistan's genocide and Bangladesh. They kill about three million people. If you want to really detailed account of this, go listen to the Behind

the Basses episodes. The short version of this is that Pakistan has been a Chinese ally for a while for a lot of reasons, one of which is China's antagonism with India, which peaked in nineteen sixty two when China just straight up invaded and he'speeded border region, conquered it and then like handed Nehru his ass in the process

of what became known as a Sino Indian War. And this is an incredible betrayal, by the way, like Neihru, who was the Prime Minister of India, Nehru had turned down a permanent seat on the UN Security Council because because he was being given the seat as a way to make sure China didn't get it, and he turned it. He turned down that seat to get China onto the Security Council like out of out of like, not out

of geopolitical like. This was basically a pure like ideological I'm doing this because it's the right thing to do thing, and Mao returns him by fucking invading India. So because of this and because of like you know, India Pakistan don't like each other. This is this is known. The Pakistani government is very close to China. Pakistani troops are trained by the Chinese army. They are armed with Chinese weapons and with Kissinger's blessings, so he could use the

Pakistani government as an intermediary to negotiate with China. The Pakistani government seeds to kill three million Bangladeshis.

He doesn't give a shit about Bangwadeshis. Then you know, this is a tradition that has like echoed through the like the e ods of the liberals have ever since the US successfully opens diplomatic channels with China. And soon Kissinger and Nixon are going to meet Mao in China, And I'm going to read from Mao talking to Kissinger so you can understand who these people are. The tree between our two countries at present is very pitiful, is gradually increasing. You know, China is a poor country. We

don't have very much. What we have in excess is women, Kissinger. There are no quotas or terrible for those, Chairman Mao, So if you want so, if you want them, we can give you a few of those, some tens of thousands, Prime Minister show of course, on a voluntary basis. Chairman Mao, let them go to your place. They will create disasters. That way you can lesson our burdens. Laughter. Sometime later, Mao, do you want our Chinese women, We can give you

ten million laughter. Jesus, the Chairman is improving his offer bow. By doing this, we can let them flood your country with disaster and therefore impair your interest in our country. We have too many women, and they have a way of doing things. They give birth the children, and our children are too many. I mean, this is like a deeply CCP moment, like, yeah, this is like this is

one of these stings. Was like there are people in the United States to this day who call themselves Maoists and like and think that this guy was like on the fucking left, and it's like, how do you fucking read that? Like him, just him just doing this fucking banter with the Butcher of Bangladesh and be like no, no, no, this is the guy who figured out to keep the key to achieving like socialism, right, he is the guy you figured ou how to end the class system, end imperialism.

Is this fucking guy poling it up with fucking Henry fucking Kissinger, Like it's terrible, Like I just yeah, it's not.

the thing they have to justify and they can't. And this actually and you know, one of this actually has impacts in the US because like American maoists are confronted with this and are like what the fuck.

Lots of tragedies unfolding. One of them is that you know, this whole thing of like like kissingered bantering with Mao like this it works like the US and China established

mathomatic relations. And this is a this is a seismic shift in sort of Chinese popular culture and media and consciousness because from the Korean War until like the seventies, right, the way people think about America and the way they're portrayed in Chinese media is like as the great imperialist enemy, right, like the last time there was contact between the US

and China. It is a bunch of Chinese troops doing bayonet charges, like wearing sandals in the fucking snow, doing bayonet chargers through their own artillery barages to kill American troops like that. That is like like the amount of hatred like there is is unbelievable. And you know, it's funny because like the US like really forgot that war, but like China did not, right, and suddenly like America

is China's friend. And the human face of this absolutely Parkle shift in basically the entire ideological system of Chinese communism.

The face of this shift in in the just the image of what America is, which is like it doesn't it's not quite mapping on, but it's like like America, like it's it's kind of like how Baptists think about the devil, right like that that that is the role that America has in Chinese like popular sort of culture like up until this point, and then suddenly it's completely pivot on its head. And the face of this shift is Kissinger. And you know and this, uh, this is

pingpong Eurasia is what you're doing right now? This yeah, happened to this all happened due to table tennis, and I won't hear any other way. Oh god, I was I specifically did it include that the table tennis diplomacy at this because I was like, I hate the ship, but.

understand this pivot is how isolated China was. Right Like the US through this entire period is pretending that the nationalists in Taiwan or the legitimate government of all of China, they have blocked off effectively all trade with China. They've blocked off basically all trade from the US. They've blocked off a huge amount of international trade and and you know, and this this this is something that really really cripples

the Chinese economy. Like you know, you can't quite blame it for like the famines because like I mean, for example, like the CCP was exporting grain to the USSR while greatly before what was happening, right like, but I mean, it didn't fucking help that. And one of the the other big consequence of this is that it is almost impossible for Chinese people to go to China. Like you you basically can't do it. And this is an enormous deal because there are tens of millions of Chinese people

across the world who can't go back to China. These people can't see their families, they can't see their friends, they can't go to the graves of their ancestors, they can't they can't go home. And this happened with my family, Like my grandpa didn't see his brothers and sisters for forty years after the war. Forty years just did not see his family. And you know, and it's only when Kissinger and that this is the way that it's seen

in China. It's only when Kissinger re establishes relations, which Kissinger goes out there and advocates and The way they see it is he's advocating for China in the US, which is kind of true. But the way they see this is only when Kissinger reestablishes diplomatic relations, that's when it becomes possible for you to see your family again.

And you know, like I cannot emphasize enough how big of a deal this is in China in the diaspora, Like, if you are in the diaspora, you can't get fucking messages in you Like a lot of people don't know whether their family is still alive because the last time they saw them was the war or and when I say though war, like that could be World War two, that could be the Revolution, that could be people liking

before that. And you know, this is a huge deal in the diaspora too, to the point where like a lot of the people who had been like in the in the Asian American movements in sixty eight, like people who had been like Yellow Peril, Yellow Power, people who are like ally with the Black Panthers, Like these people are trying to get jobs in the Nixon State departments because they want to be there to like help reopen

diplomatic relations with China. It is it is like, this is like it is one of the sort of apocaum moments of the second half of the twentieth century. Is this this these diplomatic relations opening up again. And in the Chinese media, they don't really want Nixon to be the face of it because now there's this is not great. But so they they put they put Kissinger as like the human face of all of this, and you know, and and there's there's and there's a lot of benefits

of China from this. They're getting these massive technological transfers from the US, and this is one of the things that it's in I think it's a very underrated factor, but this is one of the factors that makes their their technology. Like sorry, let me say that again. This is one of the factors that makes it's one of the incredibly underrated factors that makes their industrialization program work.

And there's a lot of places where people try similar industrialization programs to what China is going to pull off, Like Venezuela, for example, tries this, and Venezuela's program completely fails because they don't have access to the technology that the US got from basically sucking up or that China got from sucking up to the US, and Kissinger is directly responsible for a lot of like a lot of these technology transfers, and for this, Kissinger is labeled as

as like as a friend of the Chinese people like this, This is literally the way that it's talked about in the Chinese media, and even sort of beyond just him being labeled like a friend of the Chinese people, like he is like Okay, so there's like one or two other Americans who you can sort of like publicly express admiration for. Who are people who like effectively defected the China or just move to China and like we're there

for the revolution. But those aren't like major figures, right, Like they're like communist journalists or stuff like that, or like anthropologists, like they're not. This is the first like actual public American figure that you were allowed and you are encouraged to be like yay, this guy fucking rules. And in a very short amount of time, Kissinger becomes enormously popular as the man who you know, he's the

guy who restored Chinese American relations. He's the guy who allowed all these people to see to see their families and the saytion to terror regime I mean he doesn't actually end them, but he's helping people work around them, and the sanctions eventually sort of come down. But you know, all of this comes with the price. And this brings us to another Kissinger crime, which is a Kissinger in

the coup against Chile's democratically elected president Salvadur Ayende. So this coup is fully green lit by the US, like Kissinger is involved with it. Pinochet is going to murder forty thousand Chilans. We talked about this on the show a few times before, but what we haven't really talked about much is that after this, after the coup, Chile is like completely diplomatically isolated. No one wants anything to do with them because this just like maybe like absolute maniac,

massive murderer has just deposed like a sovereign government. Like even like the even the UK like won't like refuses to like talk to them, right like like and when when like the Brits won't talk to you because you've done too many crimes?

nineteen seventies money. It's it's a lot of money. And and China is absolutely broke, and they're fucking sending it to and they're they're sending it to fucking Pinochet, and like and and like to get a sense of how weird this stuff is in China, right, Like a lot of people in China think that Pinochet is a socialist because he's being portrayed positively in the Chinese media, so

they assume that he's a socialist. Like this is the kind of shit that's like just the absolute brain worms that are happening in China at this point, because they're their connection to the outside world is really really tenuous, and the Chinese media is suddenly gassing up all of these just like horrific right wing dictators. Now, as as Kissinger Star sends in China, the CCP begins pulling its own kissingers. So this is this is a this is a kind of a story we only learned about pretty recently,

I think in like the last two years. Being Japing was the first like Chinese communist leader to visit the US. And so he got he's in Washington, DC, and he takes time out of his schedule to have a secret meeting with the CIA where he goes to the CIA office to set up like list to set up CIA listening posts in China to spy on the USSR.

Donna Kissinger, They've invaded fucking they've invaded Vietnam. Yeah, and you know, and one of the one of the sort of modern iterations of this right has been you know, there's there's a long period of sort of like China's alignment with the US. And one of the other things that happens that China like becomes increasingly tied to Israel.

And this is one of the things that that's like true of China to this day is like there are a bunch of surveillance cameras in the West Bank that are that are that the Israelis used to surveil Palestinians that are built in China, right the same the same cameras that are being used in shing Jan. A lot of like Chinese h what's it called. It was like Chinese police sometimes special forces units like trained with Israeli

like trainers. There's a lot of like they do like cow like quote unquote kunter terrorism exchanges and and the other big aspect of this is that a huge part of the Israeli tech industry and a huge part of their sort of like defense complex is fueled directly by both Chinese resources and by Chinese raw materials, and also by things like transistors that they're importing from China. And this is the product of the sort of long arc of Kissinger's work in China and Kissinger's work sort of

peeling off Egypt from the Palestinian like Soviet camp. And this ultimately is the price of opening relations with the US. It's not a price that's paid by the Chinese ruling class. Instead, what happens is that every dissident in China, every fucking child in Cambodia, every teenager in these Teamwar and every veteran in Vietnam, Mao sells them the fuck out, staying Shaw Ping sells them out, ku Chaital sells them out,

Xijinping sells them out. They take American money, they take American technology, They shake hands with Kissinger, and they let Bangladesh burn. And for this, Kissinger would remain astead fast ally at the Chinese capitalist classes entire life. When the CCP butchered the last gas of the Chinese working class at Tienemen, Kissinger stood by the CCP and basically is one of the few Americans straight out doing pr for them. He does it again when China's tried to enter the

World Trade Organization. He like, this is the last thing he was doing before he fucking died, was going it was going to China and allying himself for the Chinese ruling class. And you know he meets Chijien Ping and

is greeted as an old friend. And this is how you get to the thing that's been happening today, which is like all of these Chinese, like the Chinese Foreign Ministry, and a bunch of time making Chinese government officials like releasing these statements about how doctor Kissinger is a good friend of the Chinese people. And this ultimately is what Kissinger represents, the prospect of the alliance between the American and Chinese capitalist class built on the blood of the

working class of five continents. It is a world in which there is peace and prosperity for the bourgeoisie, where there was starvation and death for everyone else. This still, to this day is the regime that rules the US, it is the regime that rules China. And they are being united for one final time in their love of one Henry Kissinger. And yeah, that's basically all I've got.

I guess the last thing I can say is one of the things that I think I hope people will understand about this is that the way that the American left thinks about China, like the way that it the way that it's politics function, are completely illegible in China, like,

there are no like in the US. It is very common to have someone who is like pro Palestine, who is like socialist, who is like pro LGBTQ like rights, who like you know, who considers this selves Nancy imperialist who is also pro CCP and also fucking hates Kissinger. And this is not a position that exists in China. There is nobody like this, nobody, fucking like, no one at all believes this because it's just it's a not

a coherent political position. Is it is an American projection of politics on the China because again, meanwhile, like the actual thing that's happened in China is because of the way the media has covered Kissinger. The thing they covered is the normalization of US China relations, and not all of the fucking genocides that he did. And so they have the same fucking whitewashed view of Kissinger that like right wing Americans do and that the American ruling class does.