It Could Happen Here Weekly 134

actually not. It is in fact, really messed up that you can just disenfranchise an entire class of people and maybe the law hurting someone famous will do something good. Now, that's all the time we have to talk about Trump right now. You know, if you want, if you want to hear more about that, you can go to literally everyone who's ever done any media related thing. Ever, however, we now have to talk about the other candidate in the twenty twenty four election, Joe Biden, which means this

is all the fun you're getting for this episode. It is now time for you to suffer and with me to talk about suffering, and specifically the suffering of my Well, I was gonna say my people like like one of my people's question work, I don't know, identities complicated. Sometimes you're more than one thing at a time. Is Karin Green, who's part of a Southern transfem collective launching a very long list of projects that you will be hearing you

out very shortly. She also used to be a work on policy for the Equality Federation and for the Transientered Law Center. Yeah, Karin, welcome to the show.

very similar. One is, you know, I mean just literally the command of the military. Right the president, since since Barack Obama, although Bush was doing similar things, has claimed the legal authority to kill any man, woman, or child the moment they leave us or regardless of her citizenship status. This is this is the legal foundation of the drone program and it is still in place to this day.

You know, the second one, I'm talking a lot about Obama here because Obama weirdly established a lot of these kind of legal frameworks. But you know, the second one has to do with their ability to control the nation's intelligence services. You know, I mean one of the things that Obama did was personally coordinate the mess like multi agency crackdown on occupy. And then the third thing, and this is where really most of the power is is

through the unbelievably massive federal bureaucracy. So like I do kind of get an assessed of this, and anytime you hear the words the Department of that is the thing the president has the ability to do shit with that. That that is that is a very simplified version of it. But yeah, you know, when when when you're dealing with an office's power is largely bureaucratic, it means that if you want to figure out what they're actually doing, you have to dig really deep into the depths of the

American bureaucracy. So okay, let's let's let's do that. And yeah, first I want I want to ask you about p p a c A one five five seven, which is a part of the the Affordable Care Act. Otherwise, is it still better known as Obamacare? Do the kids Obamacare?

of the Affordable Care Act. And so the Affordable Care Act, as people have probably noticed by now, touches practically all of the US healthcare system and has extended, especially through Medicaid expansion, federal dollars into healthcare even more than they had been previously with the supplants for insurance through Medicaid expansion and those kinds of things, And so there's actually a lot of control that the Department of Health or

Health and Human Services and associated other parts of bureaucracy like Center for Medicaid, Medicare Services, those kinds of things have over implementation. And so one of the ways that this works. Is when legislators write a law, they don't go into all the details. They just pass a law.

Congress passes, right. And so in this particular case, for section fifteen fifty seven, it deals specifically with non discrimination, So it deals with race, sex, gender, sexual orientation, any any equality you can you can you typically find in federal non discrimination laws actually in the fifteen fifty seven and so it's obviously been kind of going back and forth as a political football between the Obama administration and then the Trump administration, and then I don't even know

if I'm going to give Biden credit for treating it

as a football. And so there's this regulatory process that has been going forward and been rolled back and going forward and been rolled back, and then simultaneousley there are several I don't know the current number, but several court cases over fifteen to fifty seven from various eras, like I think there's still at least one case ongoing from the Obama era fifteen fifty seven, there's some ongoing from the Trump rag and then obviously folks might have seen

in the news that states like mine louisianatt that have a governor and attorney general super focused on raising their own profile have already filed suit against the recently issued Biden era Section fifteen fifty seven regulation. And so there is a lot of fighting around trans people specifically. Go figure. It has been We've been hot right now for the last four years or so. It's not been a super exciting time, and it is actually impacted if you know

how to read the policy TA leaves. It has actually impacted what we have gotten out of the Biden administration in terms of actual trans policy. And I've been doing transpolicy for a very long time, start at the state level in Louisiana. You can't get paid to do a queer policy in Louisiana. So I moved out to Oakland to work for Transit Or Law Center for a while, and that was actually where I created the joint Protect

trans Health campaign. It was actually the first ever coordinated collaboration between the National Center for Changuer Quality and Transgeneral Law Center. They had never formerly worked together on something before, but for trans policy folks, Section fifty and most of the country. Frankly, obviously, healthcare is like the thing right. It's always been really terrible in this country, no matter what, and so taking care of people's which should be a

right to access healthcare, has been really really important. I kind of considered it since twenty seventeen the most important trans policy issue to work on. And so this is definitely kind of to the sense that you are a nerd like me, and you have, you know, headline regulatory actions that you're looking out for and hoping to influence and doing things around this is kind of the premiere

regulatory action. In my opinion, in the trans polacy space, I'm trying to what it should ideally do is safeguard and guarantee trans people's access to healthcare, including gender affirming care. It does not if you actually read the five hundred and fifty eight page final rule, But if you just read like the press releases and the quotes that the head of Human Rights Campaign give, you might have a different understanding currently, And that's what I'm hoping we can kind of get into today.

with issue advocacy organizations. So most of the nationals, the queer national organizations, avaccine nonprofits have relationships with executive branch folks.

And so when an executive branch agency like HHS is working on a regulation that involves queer trans people, the way it worked in the Obama administration, there was actually very close collaboration between for example, the National Center for Changing or Quality and the administration in the writing and issuance of the first Obama era fifteen to fifty seven

productive regulation. And so before the election and then during transition, the bid administration was obviously in contact back and forth with all kinds of issue of secreups, not just the queer movement but everybody, and they made commitments to the queer movement that you know, it would be a fairly smooth transition to working with them like we had worked

with the Obama administration. If you think back a little while, that was before the kind of current fascist humanization campaign had really kicked off, and so these commitments were made kind of in the overturn window from before the last four years of hell or three years of how however you want a time it when they decided to come after trans people so hard.

is that he absolutely doesn't right. And so one of the things that you would really really want out of a section fifteen to fifty seven regulation in a context where states have been passing trans healthcare bands, is that you would want a section fifteen fifty seve regulation that deals with preventing transcrimination and healthcare. You would want that to strongly and efficiently preempt state bans against trans care

as violating a federal rule against non discrimination. And because these things are you have to follow the Administrative Procedures Act when you're issuing regulations as a federal agency, and most states actually are the same a similar kind of process, and so you kind of have to The agencies have to show how they got to the final rule. So

they issue a draft rule, invite comment. There's a comment period that you might have seen organizations asking you to submit comments for before, and then they're actually required to

read and respond to all those comments. And so if you actually pull up the fifteen fifty seven final rule, it's actually one of it sounds like even wonkier than for example, looking at a bill, But because of the Administrative Procedures Act and the way they have to respond to comments, there's actually a lot more kind of conversational prose or not conversational, but you know, regular ask pros

and not terrifying legal language in this stuff. That is them directly addressing comments people organizations have made and explaining their reason. And so one of the things that I think is most kind of emblematic of how we've been failed and thrown under the bus is because of this process where they have to kind of show you how

the sausage is made. You can look up in this regulation and see that for some initial contacts, we were promised this would come out year one, and then we were promised it would come out year two, and then year three, and then I have actually heard that they were trying to push it, asked the election, and we kind of forced their hand on it. So you can tell that they initially wrote the first draft in this regulation to kill healthcare bans, to federally preempt healthcare bands.

There's actually I did a Twitter thread on this about how one sentence that existed in the draft version of the fifteen to fifty seven role that one sentence alone

could take down. I think the one I used for an example was Arkansas's trans healthcare ban or Missouri's actually potentially because that what that sentence did is it laid out very very clearly that a determination that trans healthcare is never helpful or useful and can never be provided does not meet the bar for considered medical reasoning, right, and so states just can't do it. And that's fantastic, because that is only what these healthcare bands do, right.

And many of them, I think the one I used as an example even actually have include in the non effective text kind of the whereas preamble section of their bands. They can't help themselves. They go into all this flowery language about how trans care is never good and it's

always harmful, in all this stuff right in garbage. And this sentence spoke directly to those trans healthcare bands, and it made a firm commitment to address them as a whole as they were happening right at the federal government to state level. And if you read the final rule, you will get to see them strike that sentence out

and read their reasoning for striking that out. And so you actually had this language that was very clear and very strong, written very relatively early on in his term, when at the time there were only a handful of trans healthcare bands that had passed, right, And so it didn't And so now I'm just offering conjectures and form conjecture, conjecture informed by reading.

like this in any area of policy before. All of a sudden, if you're holding a card that nuke's health state healthcare bands, when you wrote it, that card was only going to nuke a few two or three trans healthcare bands, right, And if you're the federal government, you know you can expect to steam rolls and just a handful of states like that. But then later on, at this point I forget the exact number, but it's something like twenty twenty to twenty three states have healthcare bands implemented.

And now if you're holding a card that nuke's healthcare bands, you don't really get to pick and choose which healthcare bands you're going to. Now you're going to you have to commit to new call of them if you play that card, and that just was not something that they seemed willing to do when it was going to make the waves that it would make with you know, twenty to twenty three or whatever, states being prete empted and required to make sure that trans people have healthcare access.

And keep in mind that during this period, not just did more states past these healthcare bands, but the kind of national discussion and focus on trends people deteriorated horrifically, right, And so not only were the stakes higher in terms of the kind of policy confidence in projecting your politics, but also there was just I assume those lanyards run horrible polls all the time, right, and saw that we were losing points in terms of how the public views

transpeople because there's a lot of money being poured into this, and just made the horrible unethical and moral calculations that

democrats make decided that trans people weren't worth it. And so you can see them across that strike that part out of the final fifteen to fifty seven room, and it no longer contains any language even approaching that that is written to address states as a whole, and it is mostly what is in there at this point is the same thing that they've been telling us to do for the last over a decade, which is, individual trans people who just happened to encounter discrimination and health care,

you just submit an OCR complaint, an HHSOCR complaint. OCR I stands for Office Civil Rights. So you would think an Office of Civil Rights maybe be proactive and notice that a state that has banned trans healthcare and some places even criminalized it might be ready for some enforcement,

some broad enforcement. And yet they have they have maintained in this final rule that they expect individual trans people to file individual OCR complaints every time and that they will address each one on a case by case basis. They reiterate this at least a dozen times. It is one of the most offensive parts of all this, right because that's the only thing that AJS has ever told us about this.

how their final rule is worse than Obama's final rule. Right, they have and they have to explain it and open One of the things that I'll reference here is that Obama's final rule I believe, involved directing the Office of Al Rights to conduct a disparate impact analysis on you know, marginalized populations to determine if there were discriminatory outcomes in healthcare access, kind of even as a closed system, so they can look in from the outside and be like, oh, okay,

all the transmuble in the state can't access.

I feel I feel like we're kind of running We've run through the cycle of the terrible ads, so I feel like we're about we're on the precipice of there being another bunch of ads they put on the show without telling.

We're not going to sell your health and so I so I actually did several months later, you know, those protections kicked in, and the Obama administration actually did do some kind of proactive work to make sure that those were spread around the country. Like it's not nowhere never has been as guys, good and throw.

my part. I don't mean to use the dragon, but so that when they issue their first draft of a regulation and invite comment in a comment period follows.

first trans president. We love them, stuff like that, right, And so they did not for that title nine in BRM. And then several days later, the Representative Zoe Zephyr, a Translin represent state representative from Montana, organized the out trans state, trans and non binary state legislators from around the country to release an open letter which you know, condemned the title nine NPRM for.

glowing you know, he love trans people. And then you know, the state trans elected is actually said no, this this fucking socks actually right, But that has not really happened for anything else because they're you know, most of the people who do what I do, they're you know, specialized in each and there are many jobs for it, and you could could I could speak at length about how you don't get to speak your mind if you want to continue to stay with kind of movement employment in

this sector. And so in terms of publicly being able to speak about how we're being thrown under the bus currently, there are not many folks with the expertise who are free to do that.

for being like, wait, this sucks. It was enormous. It was this like incredible sort of broad front pr campaign from just so many different and not even just you know, it had filtered down to the point where like it wasn't just like these origs. It was like just like like the random people on Twitter who's supposed to follow policy stuff were only in line. Like everyone was coming in and it was just like absolutely terrifying, Like kind of those people.

organizing around sincere and real and pressing trans needs. Because if you're trying to get a lot of people fired up about trans healthcare is like on fire, and half the like half the trans kids in the country don't have we have to like this is act up shit time. Right, But if everybody that you know is on your email list, if most of them have seen HRC and NCT and all these places put out these blowing press releases, people are like, you're crazy. If things are fine, Jo's moving

things for We're good. And then also I think they have kind of backed themselves into a corner in terms of how a lot of Libs have have backed themselves into a corner at this point. Right, they know that Trump is worse on policy, even if Biden has done barely anything, Trump is obviously worse for trans people, and so they're they're allowing electoral weirdness to control actual kind of policy coms in a way that I find really really frustrating. And then I think is not doing trans people,

especially in the South. It's not treating them with the respect that they deserve from their the organizations that claim to represent them.

And but one of the questions of these movements, and this is something that has just torn apart the m as they're there's sort of like supposedly movement political party, is this question of to what extent should you integrate your social movement with the state. And you know, and this is a long this is a long running debate in Budge social movements. Various movements have picked different directions. Some of them have become very unfolded in the states,

some of them have resisted it. And there are you know, there are benefits and problems with both. But one of the big issues with trying to sort of incorporate yourself into the state is that the state isn't just a kind of neutral body. It will, you know, it's it's

not just that you're working with the state. The state is also working with you, and it will attempt to and in its political parties will attempt to seize control of your organization and turn your organization into just a sort of into you know, into basically a pr outlet for whatever thing it's doing. And this becomes a real problem when you're you know, your your party is trying to screw you.

And so like even Moreles has riot police stormed the offices of one of the of one of the indigenous federations and like replaces them, like replaces their leadership with guys who are loyal to him, who will push this

thing through, right. And you know, I mean the reason I'm talking about this is the kind of social movement stuff I studied in college, right, And it's like and now in the US, we were like kind of starting to get to the point where we have real social movements, right, and we've seen sort of like BLM, you know, we we sort of have something that is a career movement, and we're running into exactly the same thing where yeah, like if you you know, this is the thing you

can talk about more stifically in the US, but it's like, yeah, like these orgs are on are are in in the middle of this sort of state capture process, right, and this has having really really dogshit effects on queer people because is when when these organizations are you know, become becomes sort of media arms or become sort of political arms of these party apparatuses. They're not representing you, They're representing the party and I and.

resource as fuck. I got to delude myself, I think, because you know, Trump is such a uniquely dangerous force that a lot of people alongside me and the movement were had the same shared the values with me, because I could see them being equally strident and vocal on

kind of all the bad things that were happening. And then you know, it's almost it's a tire joke at this point, but you know, Biden took over and the kids were still in cages and everybody else shut up, and I looked around and I'm like, wait, I'm.

buildings that they're being fucking held in. And now, you know, Biden like, well, we'll do a longer thing about this at some point, but like Biden is you know that that fucking bill that they were trying to pass like absolutely unbelievably fascist one saying that the president has the right to close the border. She's trying to just fucking do it anyways.

likes this is the thing you're talking about. It's like, I remember all these people in the streets for this. I was like, I was there, I was fucking helping to organize this stuff. And then like you watch them walk away. Yeah, it's terrible.

it herself at all. And in this analysis I included a dismal assessment of the likelihood that the federal government would use its power to prevent implementation that saw this was a this was a healthcare band, that a novel healthcare band that the estate wanted to quit turn around one and so my boss direct boss forwarded it to the White House, who had asked for analysis on it without

reading it at all. And within an hour of my boss forwarding it to the White House, the White House had called our executive director to complain about me and I got written up for it. That is the fastest turnaround on anything trans that anybody has gotten out of this White House. And it was it was getting me, me disciplined for in a in an analysis that was not for them not being super impressed with their with

their trans policy. And I and I have heard I have you know a lot of colleagues in the movement, the folks I trust completely on trans policy. And I know for a fact that I am not the only person that has had a situation like that occur. And so there they are applying pressure and even in the most direct ways to you know, the advocacy organizations. So it it, it is happening.

policy organs at the state and not actual like fighting

movements that could like effectively resist. You know that that that could do a thing like for example, like you know, if you look at the the the the original coup against Hugo Chavez, right, like, the social movements were so strong that even though the army literally did a coup, they got fucking ran out by like several million uh Venezuelans taking to the streets and just like overturning the coup, right and that I I mean that happens later like

in like that there was you know, there there was there was a second round of barricades that went up that got basically no press attention in twenty twenty. You know that there's a whole comp I'll talk about that one day. And how hilariously after getting bailed out, even Rallies pulled his people off the barricades because they didn't actually want to overthrow the government. They just wanted an election. Obviously, well,

people off to keep the government intact long enough. He's done this in many This is the second time he's done this, by the way, this happened in the water in the.

be defeated in the streets. And you know, we are we are watching our own version of this where, yeah, like I wanted to sort of talk to you about what's been happening the fucking hell escape that's been happening in Louisiana, as you know, partially because of the sort of republican's fascist turn, but also because the resistance to them has been neutered by the fact that they're you know, they have to like defend this Biden policy shit.

by the end of the year. Right, And so what I what I think And I've highlighted kind of before when it was very clear that Jeff Landry was going to become governor after John Bell and actually did drug policy for John Bell for a while, and a lot of trans people were kind of quietly in his administration. I think that my friend Tucker, aside from Rachel Levine, was probably the highest ranked state executive branch transperson in

history as deputy Press secretary for a while. Well yeah, I'm not sure, but yeah, trans people busted asks to

get John Bell elected. And so we had held off a lot of this stuff for a long time, not just through having a nominally democratic governor, but through the organizing in the South that that happens on no resources whatsoever is some of the most broad based and inspiring kind of coalitional organizing that I've ever seen, and I've done work all around the country, and the way that people are able to organize kind of cross issue here is phenomenal. But we are all Jerry manderd to shit.

We get no money, attention resources from national groups off in the media, and especially here in Louisiana and in much of the South, like we are not an attractive place for impact litigation because in the Fifth Circuit and all our state courts are shit, and so we really kind of are on our own here in a all of a sudden Republican super majority legislature with an activist fascist governor and ag so Jeff Jeff Blandery is very much in the model of the disantis or an abbot

in terms of what he is hoping to do in Louisiana and what he's hoping to get out of it in terms of his own personal profile and ambitions. And there's so much we could talk about in terms of what's going on here, but I want to highlight specifically s B two seventy six, which is the bill you may have seen headlines about. It's the bill that adds Mith pristone and muspristalled to the State Schedule for Controlled Substances Act.

also be used for self managed medication abortion. And so this has not been done anywhere else in the in the country where the leading the charge here, No other state has ever added drugs like this to their controlled substances long and and so what that means is that those drugs are now going to be going through the Prescription Monitoring Program the PMP, which has a lot more

controls and surveillance than non controlled substances. Right, So the Board of Medicine, the Board Pharmacy, and I'm trying, I'm trying to do a survey now to figure out which state agency specifically have like automatic inherent access to that PMP database. But it makes it a lot more traceable and trackable, which is which is really scary for anybody trying to access reproductive and abortion healthcare in a place

like Louisiana. And then the other thing it does is it raises the stakes phenomenally for the people doing the kind of and I'm going to speak, I'm going to try to speak very carefully, or the people doing the kind of direct practical support work to work with underserved populations to make sure that they can access healthcare services

that they need. Right, And it is just a it is a fact of life that you know, just like in the harm direction movement, there are a lot of people on the ground busting ass to get people what they need. And you know, for a lot of times for abortion funds, that's organizing money and transportation and hotels to get people out of state. Right since the Florida abortion van, we can't send people there anymore. We have to send people to Illinois, which is more expensive and

further way. And it's those people who are at risk, the people doing the work like the backbone of the on the ground grassroots practical support mutual aid work, that are risking. I think it's you know, five to ten years per pill if they are you know, providing them to someone else. It's it's terrifying, and there's no we don't know what we're going to do about it. Yeah, I'm gonna call last night kind of like, what are

we going to do about this? We don't know because it's it's scary, and then jumping back to kind of the problem with how not problem nonprofit and advocacy funding works in this country, there are a lot of restrictions that come that are you know, that organizations who are funded that way have to live with, Like especially I'll

speak to the harm reduction world. For example, you'll get a grant at your syringe exchange and they're like, here's ten thousand dollars, but you can't spend any of it on needles, and you're like, that's my biggest expense, That's what I was going to you know, And so it's the same kind of thing. The more that this kind of work gets criminalized and pushed to the edge, the fewer resourced organizations are able to work on it, have the money that we're going it, but be just there

legal teams. The chilling effects of this stuff are massive, and so it just falls more and more on the backs of kind of the grassroots folks who have always been making this happen for community to the extent that they can under the harshest of circumstances, and you know, it's people like that are who are going to have to make some really tough decisions going forward.

you know, it's it's our people. It's these people who've been doing it forever.

transfers to transsex workers in Louisiana. We just had some of our first listening sessions with folks and yeah, this is gonna be so kick ass.

that might be important to you too as well. On the tenth of June twenty twenty four, Leonard Peltier, the name rolled member of the Turtle Band of Chippewa of Lakota and Ojibwei Ancestry and the longest serving political prisoner in the United States will be appearing before the US Parole Commission for the first time since two thousand, thousand

and nine. He faces staunch opposition from the FBI and other law enforcement agencies due to having allegedly killed two FBI agents in a firefight on the twenty sixth of June nineteen seventy five, after the agents appeared on reservation

land to execute a pretextural warrant. The initial firefight occurred during the quote reign of terror on Pine Ridge in the wake of the occupation of Wounded Knee, a time of extreme violence when federal law enforcement installed a puppet tribal chair and was arming vigilantes who targeted Indigenous traditionalists every since leading up to these events, as well as subsequent investigation and mister Peltier's tradition, trial, conviction, and sentencing

were characterized by gross misconduct on a part of law enforcement, the prosecution, and the courts. Mister Peltier's co defendants were

separately tried and acquitted on grounds of self defense. Mister Peltier was railroaded, and his case is tainted by discrimination at every level, ranging from the withholding of exculpatory evidence, to the torture and coercion of extradition and trial witnesses, and from the refusal of the judge to dismiss and vowedly racist Dura, to the apologetic gymnastics of the courts affirming his convictions in the face of meritorious legal challenges

and admitted evidence about rageous government misdeeds. Mister Peltier has been in prison for more than forty eight years and he's almost eighty years old. He suffers from chronic and potentially lethal conditions for which he receives insufficient and substandard

medical care. If you want to take action to hashtag free Leonard Peltier, you can call the US Parole Commission at two zero two three four six seven zero zero zero, And if you'd like to find more information on how to support, you can.

Today we're talking about a little of both of those things. I'm joined by Rose, who's a migration activist in the Netherlands, and Mick, who has studied migration. We're going to talk about the EU's border today, and we're going to talk about I think a lot of people, especially the bulk of our listeners in the United States, won't be aware perhaps of how incredibly cruel and fatal the EU's border is, what it does to people, how it does it, where

it does it. So we're going to talk about that today. It's very exciting. There's even more wall than we have in the United States, so I'm looking forward to that. And so HI, Welcome to the show. Both of you.

this border as of June twenty twenty three. This number is almost certainly higher to a number of factors, one of which is that a significant amount of bodies are never recovered, which makes it very hard to verify whether or not someone has died or is lost somewhere in the migration routs. Migration patterns are very hard to keep track of. People travel hundreds of kilometers to simply get to a point where they can get access to boats,

or other means of being transported across the sea. Yeah, I have a picture here that I would like to share with you. Listeners can find it in the notes and sources.

and further to the east. In terms of obstacles and danger, I think it's safe to say that crossing Iraq or Sybia is not without risk.

other reasons. But yeah, I think those those lines would have been fatter if we'd gone back, like, you know, three or four years. Yeah, I mean people in Europe will probably have been familiar with this. I mean, of course, says the When was the photo taken of the the young child who passed away cross That was Alida?

the young girl was very hypothermic. Like at first we didn't notice because we're like, oh, this girl is very quiet, and then we're like, go, okay, this girl is very very quiet, and perhaps, you know, we should be concerned, and like, I don't know how, and no one in their right mind would be like, yeah, this is normal and good and I'm really glad that this child is in a place where, you know, if left for several

more hours, she might die. And everyone in that situation, to include people who were just driving by, were like, oh fuck, we need to help. But sadly, when we abstract it to numbers, which is the way it's always reported on, right, it's not stories, it's not people, it's not little children, it's fifty something thousand people. You know, it's hard to imagine fifty something thousand people dying. It's easier to feel something for one little boy.

Alanchourti despite all the yeah, outraged provoked. It was also used as a to make the Turkey Deal, which was intended to stop people crossing by boat from Turkey to Greece, even though that was actually one of the safest migration routs we had at the time, and it closed up and people started to move to Libya and instead of three kilometers of sea, that meant people had to cross one hundred or more kilometers of sea, which was obviously way more.

EU puts in place and enforces. Definitely, it's just outside of our purview.

centers or who died of medical neglecting camps. But it also includes people who died further from the European border, but still on borders are that are controlled or are influenced by European policies.

didn't make it. So we too have this kind of attempt to I guess when we get government statistics, we have to remember that they come from a government perspective and they will try and minimize the obvious cruelty that's happening.

than the policies being a consequence of migration. To first illustrate this, here is a quote from Government l the English version of the Dutch government websites asylum or a turn. All refugees entering the EU may apply for asylum. They must do this in the country where they enter the EU. Asylum seekers who do not require protection must return to their country of origin or to a save a third country. The EU respects the human rights of refugees, both when

dealing with their applications and with regard to return. So I want you all to keep this in mind when we continue, because this phrasing ignores other policies that make it much harder for migrants and refugees to even enter the EU or to be able to apply for asylum. So, and before we dive deeper into the atrocities that the EU enables, I think it's important to first briefly explain how the border system works and the history behind it.

Europe is no stranger to migration and migrants, and it is something that has been happening in waves over the past three to four decades. In the early nineties, there were multiple waves of migrants from Albania to other European countries. The main cause of this was the isolationist policies that were enforced by the communist regime that was in charge there, the unrest that followed at the end of the regime,

and the crisis of Kosovo. For those unaware, Kosovo had a war with Serbia for independence and Kosovari people are largely ethnic Albanians with the same language, and because of this, it was easier for Albanians to merge with the Kosovari refugees and use that to migrate further and easier into Europe. Other waves are caused by other geopolitical events, such as the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia, which I think Mia and

Roberts covered in their episode on self immolation. Yeah, okay, and much more down to everyone, the wars in Syria and Libya.

and see people from there at our border, and like as people will be aware the asylum system and it will cover it later. The asylum system allows people who are very in danger of persecution for various categories to apply for asylum. It's not functioning. It's not functioning in the EU, it's not functioning in the US. Like I've seen that persecution with my own eyes and the consequences of it, and I've seen people try and get away

from it. Every single time I'm in somewhere like that, people will ask me for help, and it is fucking heartbreaking to be like, yeah, the country that you see flying the F sixteens or the F thirty fives over your head, the planes that cost more than this entire town makes in a year. No, we can't have a functioning,

fucking immigration system. Like in the case of the US, it's this app which doesn't work and you can only use it north of Mexico City, and it's this broken system leads to people they're not like getting in a boat across the Mediterranean, crossing the Daryan Gap, walking across the mountains of northern Mexico because they want to have like a better iPhone. They're doing it because whatever the alternative is seems worse, and it's worth. People are fully

aware that they're risking their lives on these journeys. It's you know, it's not that they live without access to

news and the internet. They know about the death in the Mediterranean, they know about the Daryant Gap when I talk to migrants who haven't crossed the gap, like I was talking to group of Columbian migrants two or three days ago, and they were coming in to the US through It's in an area east of hookumber which is very rugged and very mountainous, and they were coming into an open air attention site where border patrol holds them. And I was talking to them, I say, how many

if you walked, how many if you flew. Most of them flew and then were able to work forward. The ones who walked. Everyone was like, oh shit, that's horrible, Like you must have seen terrible things. Like they're very aware of how dangerous it's journeys are. The reason that they're taking them is because it seems like staying at home would be more dangerous.

At first, yeah, at first I worked in Greece and that was mainly with people of like what are considered like objectively real or good refugees, people from Afghanistan and Iraq and Syria, whereas when I was working in Bosnia it was mainly people from Morocco, Algeria and Pakistan. And a lack of opportunity can be a very good reason to move. I think most white people who moved to America did so because of that.

and decolonization. For example, specifically in the Midlands, Surnam was a Dutch colony, and one of the reasons why the Dutch government agreed with decolonization was because the Dutch society started to get worried about all the black people showing up. So and the same something similar happened with the independence word that.

For US companies to exploit low wage labor Mexico and other countries to the South, but not for those people to come and seek a better way to better way of living in the country that is consuming the products of their labor and so like, this is obviously not new to people, right, this is a thing that's Appatista highlighted in nineteen ninety four and it's been the case

for thirty years. But yeah, we have in the US because the United States colonialism like kind of a in a somewhat less overt way, although often in a pretty

overt way. It's facilitated undemocratic regimes and a low quality of life for people all across specifically the Americas, but also the rest of the world, and it's now seeking to prevent those people from coming here after it destabilized to their countries, right or in the case of climate change, again, like the consumption habits of certain countries have had an impact on people all around the world, to include people in more diaeconomic circumstances. And it shouldn't be any less.

We shouldn't have any less empathy or solidarity with those people because no one's bombing them and they just want a chance to their kids to do the same shit. Like I moved to America and I was twenty one, because they want many jobs for me at home.

Want guy I met the other day his son needed medical care that he couldn't obtain in his country. You know, like that's a perfectly valid reason for coming here. But none of those things count for asylum. So those people are i'd a lumped into quote unquote economic migrants, which is still you know, like people have a right to a living wage and to be able to pay for their family, to have the things that they need to survive and thrive. But you're right, the asylum system is very narrow.

you can't separate that. You can separate the conditions that are happening there right now to things that have been decided in the West years prior.

put up to keep people out. And then we have the post border, and that's about the reception of migrants, migrant shelters and similar constructions that keep migrants and refugees ostracized and isolated even after being allowed access into the EU and having started a asylum process. For those stories, we should turn to Rows when we get there, because she is much more on the ground experience than I have with this, so we'll start with the paper border.

During the mid eighties, the e WHO started to propose and enact a series of treaties and policies that in effect strengthened the external borders and loosened the borders within Europe. I think no one is particularly interested in this series of treaties, so I will name the only one is the Shangan Treaty. This treaty essentially unites the external borders under EU command rather than as a task for individual states. In practice, this also means that EU citizens who have

a proper documentation can move freely between countries. Are who have signed the Shangan Treaty for holidays or work os, You and I we could move to Germany tomorrow if we wanted to, and I have little to know obstacles in terms.

but they're EU migrants. So people have low paying jobs, break their legs, get kicked out of their houses and their jobs, and are not welcoming the homeless shelters because in Endlands says well, you are not economically independent therefore, so this is also part of the migration regime, and this is also part of keeping migrants exploitable. Even if you use citizens have the right to work, they don't. They're only allowed to work. We only want them if

they bring in economic profits. We don't want them when they're sick or.

Countries that are largely non Christian but connected to Europe tend to be excluded. Turkey is partially in Europe but not part of the EU, and Bosnia Herzegovina, which is a majority Muslim country, is also excluded from that. But much like Turkey is being tempted with the whole you can join if you do this and that, but we're not really committing to that. That, however, is a story for another time. Maybe the point that I want to make here is that the visa program for Europe is

based on geographical discrimination. Countries outside the geography of Europe are blacklisted and cannot gain access to the papers that they need to legally enter the EU. This bureaucracy prohibits people from entering the EU before fences or border guards have even entered the equation, hence the paper border, since entering or crossing without a paper visa is nah impossible.

I find that it's in Europe it's considered legal to discriminate based on nationality, even though it is very clearly a very smart way to discriminate actually people based on the color of their skin and their economic status.

to anywhere I want. The borders have always been open to white people who have financial means. What they're saying when they're saying open borders is implicitly borders open to people who are not white, not wealthy, perhaps not Christian.

And what one can infer from that is a great deal of bigotry and a great deal of like unease about living, you know, alongside people who you feel like are not like the same quote unquote as you, which is particularly runic in the United States, right in a country which is a self a settler colony.

bar to view are blacklisted. This means, in practice that most of the citizens of these blacklisted countries cannot acquire the visas they required to legally travel to the EU. The implication is that the paper border of the EU remotely and invisibly cages people in the inequitable or tree of birth end quote. I think it's very much worth highlighting that if you're as we've established, unless you're like

wealthy or white, you cannot legally enter the EU. And even though our politicians keep saying no, no, we're just against the illegals, now, there is for a lot of people, there simply is no way to enter legally. It's impossible, And it's a large part of the conversation that we conveniently ignore because it doesn't fit like the political narratives that people want to spread.

a boat. So these these are policies and the people who are executing them are super crucial in enforcing people onto dangerous.

It is impossible for me to lose my Dutch passport. I commit, I can commit like the worst crimes, and they will not, you know, they will not lead me to lose my passport. Whereas other people who are born in countries where life expectancy is crazy low, or where there's no healthcare or no proper education or jobs, they too did absolutely nothing to be born there or to

be assigned to that nationality. And so somehow this border and this passport is legitimizing the fact that some people just die and we're fine with that, and other people have insane privileges and opportunities, and the nationality is kind of a justification because if you really think about it, there is no reason why the minimum wage in Ethiopia should be lower than in the Netlands, Like there really isn't. The only reason is that they have a different nationality,

and somehow that makes it normal. And if it's just yeah, it's just this injustice. Its structures that are so invisible and that are not questioned or talked about enough. So I'm glad we're talking about it today.

And it's just such when I spent a lot of time in the more remote parts of the US border, and for most of the time that border country to what you might have seen on the news is a one meter high cattle fence with a single strand a bar wire, and it's so obviously just a light like very often cattle will cross the border and like that will have to be herded back, right, like the it's

just a notional line in the sand. When they built the border wall, it really fucked up the migration habits of jaguar bears.

from irregular or illegal immigrant migration. What is more important to highlight, it also makes for very good outrage media for right wing and fascist platforms. Refugees will continue to breach those fences, and the photographs and videos of it made for very good propaganda about how borders need to be strengthed. The fence borders of Europe have increased from three hundred kilometers in twenty fourteen to its shocking two thousand and forty eight kilometers in twenty twenty two.

a ladder and just put it over the fence. You can buy a super simple scissor that you would use in the garden to cut your vegetables and you can cut the fence open with it. People were building tunnels, like of course it takes time to cross it, and it's so in that sense, it's a hindrance. But the entire promise that if a wall holl stop people is indeed, it's just a political game, and the politicians know that it's not true. It's just a way to show how

tough they are and how rough they are. And at the same time, I think this is a good moment to instate on Palestine to the discussion. So most of the European borders are equipped with razor wire, and that is literally like knives wire, you know, like it is like it's razors.

to reach Europe. So the border in one hand is kind of useless, but at the same time, it is really built to be as cruel and as harmful as possible. And I know a lot of people with a lot of scars on their bodies just from those razor wires.

I've seen people climbing it this week. I've seen people go under it, I've seen people go through it, I've seen people go around it. But what it does tend to do is force people into the more remote areas where they didn't build wall, and those areas are where you're more likely to die. And every year that we've

built more wall, we've seen more deaths. And as someone who engages in mutual aid, every year that they build more wall, we have to think about where will people go, how will they get there, what state will they be in, How can we make this journey less deadly, and that becomes harder and higher for us. You know, we did

a water drop on Sunday. It took us five hours to hike a very small section of this trail that people hiked in order to surrender themselves, just as they would if they could come through important entry, but it's a lot more deadly.

be important to you too as well. On the tenth of June twenty twenty four, Lennard Peltier, an enrolled member of the Turtle Band of Chippewa of Lakota and Ajibwei ancestry and the longest serving political prisoner in the United States, will be appearing before the US Parole Commission for the first time since two thousand and nine. He faces staunch opposition from the FBI and other law enforcement agencies due to having allegedly killed two FBI agents in a firefight

on the twenty sixth of June nineteen seventy five. After the agents appeared on reservation land to execute a pretextural warrant. The initial firefight occurred during the quote reign of terror on Pine Ridge in the wake of the occupation of Wounded Kney, a time of extreme violence when federal law enforcement installed a puppet tribal chair and was arming vigilantes

who targeted Indigenous traditionalists. Everything leading up to these events, as well as subsequent investigation and mister Peltier's extradition, trial, conviction, and sentencing, were characterized by gross misconduct on the part of law enforcement, the prosecution, and the courts. Mister Peltier's co defendants were separately tried and acquitted on grounds of

self defense. Mister Peltier was railroaded, and his case is tainted by discrimination at every level, ranging from the withholding of exculpatory evidence to the torture and coercion of extradition and trial witnesses, and from the refusal of the judge to dismiss and vowedly racist Dura to the apologetic gymnastics of the courts affirming his convictions in the face of meritorious legal challenges and admitted evidence of outrageous government misdeeds.

Mister Peltier has been in prison for more than forty eight years and he's almost eighty years old. He suffers from chronic and potentially lethal conditions for which he receives

insufficient and substandard medical care. If you want to take action to hashtag free Lennard Heltier, you can call the US Parole Commission at two zero two three four six seven zero zero zero, And if you'd like to find more information on how to support, you can go to this u r L. It's h t T P colon slash slash n D N C O dot c c slash free Leonard Peltier. That's f R e E L e O n A R d P e L t I E R or you can follow n d N collective on social media for more ways to support him.

More information on Leonard Peltier, listen to Margaret's podcast on the Lakota Nation, a read in the Spirit of the Crazy Horse by Peter Mathewson. Hi, we're back, and just to remind people, if you haven't listened to the episode yesterday, you probably won't pick up what's going on today, So I suggest starting there as we commence on our second part of the discussion about the EUS border. Today we're going to discuss the EU's external border and what that

means for migrants. We'll pick up with Mick and Rose and we'll start off more or less where we left off yesterday. Like you can map, and I'm not the first one to have made these maps, but you can look at humane borders in Arizona, and then you can look at EFF's map of fixed and mobile towers and

you can see people. And again, this is something I'm more familiar with, and I'd like to be people dying in the shade of the surveillance towers, without help, without water, without the very minor things that it would take for them not to have died. And so yeah, this provides justification. It provides a massive outlet for the post War on Terror like military industrial complex to continue to make its money, and to continue to make its money through innocent people dying.

And that's also why the order keeps getting more and more militarized, because this is the one point where they can still sell a lot of things without their having to be a war.

the Middle East Africa. Like Rose said earlier, the Turkey deal is essentially a political deal between the EU and Turkey for Turkey to hold a portion of Syrian refugees over within their border to stop them from coming into Europe. And I think we paid a few billion, more than a few billion probably for Turkey to do that. So the most prominent of these deals are, as i said, Turkey,

but also Tunisia and Libya. We're essentially outsourcing the abuse and human rights violations to countries that are outside the scope of our media, who have regimes that we would declare dictatorships and autocracies. In the case of Libya, it's

even like rebels and warlords being funded with EU taxpayer money. Today, the eupack with Libya has given rise to a full fledged slave market run by cold blooded human traffickers who, incentivized by the EU's crackdown on irregular migration and the resulting business downturn of would be profitable passengers, are now auctioning economic migrants and refugees as slaves. Yeah, we're just

doing slavery with extra steps now. So to make it inescapably clear how bad the situation is, I'm now going to quote from an Amnesty International article from twenty twenty one. Three Police Shadra al Zawia Center is a facility facility which was pretty obviously run by a non affiliated militia and was recently integrated under the DCIM and designated for people in vulnerable situations at DCIM is an acronym for Libya's Directorate for Combat in Illegal Migration. It's essentially a

department of their Interior Ministry. Former detainees from that facility said that guards raped women and some were cohoersed into sex in exchange for their release or for essentials such as clean water grace. A pseudonym said she was heavily beaten for refusing to comply with such a demand. I told the guard no. He used the gun to knock me back. He used a letter soldier's shoe to kick me from my waist. Two young women at the facility attempted to commit suicide as a result of such abuse.

Three women also said that two babies detained with their mothers after an attempted sea crossing had died in early twenty twenty one. Their guards refused to transfer them to a hospital for a critical medical treatment and it's The International report documents similar patterns of human rights violations, including severe beatings, sexual violence, extortion, forced labor, and in human

conditions across seven DCIM centers in Libya. In Abuisa Center in the city of al Zaya, DTNES reported being deprived of nutritious food to the point of starvation end.

the boat of migrants. Previously, the European Union actually had rescue ships, but the European Union, if a boat is near another boat in distress, there's an obligation to rescue, and after the rescue, you have to bring the people

to a safe court. So having a boat at sea meant that the European Border Agency Front Tax was obliged to rescue people at sea, and so they just thought, let's just do away with the boats and let's just have helicopters and drones, so we can still spot boats that are sinking, but we cannot help them, and instead.

back to Libya. The Libyan coast Guard takes the people on the boat, brings them back to Libyan mainland, and actually sells them to the militias running the detention centers. So the Libyan Coast Guard gets paid twice for stopping migrants, first by the European Union and secondly by the militias that will later sell them as slates or use them

for slavery. And this is what we have been funding for years, and there have been extensive documentation about these human rights violations and the very direct link of the EU funding, and it just keeps going.

entering the EU. Proponents of these policies will undoubtedly argue that this saves lives by preventing people from crossing the Mediterranean in overcrowded boats and ginghis personally, I would argue that people will continue to make that crossing if only to escape the EU funded hellholes that these regimes create

in order to get that sweet, sweet EU funding. What is definitely very concerning is that despite criticisms from NGOs such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch Europe will likely continue these practices. Only last year did it sign a deal with Tunisia with the attention of using that as a third country, as they call it, to prevent sea crossings. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen stated that this could be a blueprint for cooperation with other countries.

To the surprise of no one, this will very likely increase the human rights violations and abusance that happen there. And after this, I have two examples of stories that that happens at the EU borders that are I think particularly the heartbreaking. And this was also the hardest part for me to write, because there are so many stories out there that I think deserve to be heard and deserve to have like some lights shone on there just

to show people the reality. But that would be that would turn into a very very long episode.

bribing countries. It is bribing countries to stop migrants. It is bribing countries to take unwanted migrants back through deportation. It is often also forced to take on its own citizens. So it's not only people from Sub Sahara Africa traveling

through Libya, but it's also Libyan people themselves. So they have elected a government, they have an interest themselves as well, maybe in having the ability to move away from Libya, and the you needs to come up with enormous sums of money to force these governments to Yeah, why do they need that money, because that's not in the interest

of the country or its citizens to do this. And especially in the Netherlands, there is this enormous Yeah, there's just this expectation that if we don't like something, other countries should do something about it. So in the Netherlands, Moroccan migrants specifically are filified a lot and and Algerian migrants, and both countries have not been very collaborative with deportations, but like, why the hell should they support the forced return of their own citizens who don't want to go

back to their countries. Yeah, like there's no reason for them to do that, except if Europe is just abusing its power and forcing it these countries to do things that are yeah, not in their interest. I mean a lot of these border guards. I think Libya is an exception because they they actually make money out of the migrants in so many different ways. But if you look at Serbia or Bosnia, they are forced to control their borders,

which is super expensive. And like, these are countries who have other issues to fix, Like, yeah, maybe they should make they want to focus on building up their country and improving living conditions, but instead the EU is just giving them money to yah to protect, to protect borders of people who aren't mainly just walking through their countries,

Like that's not really a big problem for them. And yeah, it's very runic because Europe is like justifying its migration policies with this idea that every country has sovereignty over who it allows access. That's like legally, that's like the fundament of migration deterrence, but it only claims that right for itself. So if other countries say, well, I don't care if there is Serians walking through my country, like maybe they'll spend some money and they'll just leave anyway. Yeah,

other countries don't have the right. I think Belarus is an interesting example as well, because Belarus welcomed migrants and then brought them to the new border with Poland and Lithuania mainly, and Belarus has every right to give freest to people.

but once once legacy media outlets showed up. Then by December, the US had a bilateral meeting with Mexico, and very soon thereafter, we saw Mexican National Guard sitting at those gaps in the border wall. The US is border like if people are leaving Mexico, it's not Mexico's problem. But we saw them with technicals and machine guns policing those

gaps in the border. And the US gives a ton of money to countries to enforce its border right to prevent migration and get extremely The US has even taken actions to prosecute airlines that fly people north so that they can too. Yeah. Yeah, it's.

Think of Spain, Greece, Italy, Bulgaria. They however, are not too afphusiastic at the prospect of taking in huge amounts of migrants.

enough to discourage people from crossing this border. Because again, like Bulgaria doesn't really have that much interest in guarding the borders if people can just if they any way want to go to Western European countries, right, so it's a way to again to I would say, the border externalization already starts from like the main countries of destination, which is like France and Germany, and even Bulgaria would not have much interest in stopping migrants if there were

not all of these rules to make them responsible.

opportunity to apply for asylum. This means that the EU does pushback people that have very legitimate reasons to apply for asylum. Under the EU's own rules, I'm going to quote, pushbacks violate the prohibition of collective expulsion of asylum seekers in Protocol four of the European Convention on Human Rights and often violate the international law prohibiting on non refoulment. No, it's French, yeah, ah, okay, I was never good at French.

countries where they could be like persecuted for that. So again, those rules seem to be very optional So what follows now is two examples of border practices that I think are particularly egregious. So on October third, twenty twenty two, Abdullah Mohammed, aged nineteen, a Syrian refugee, attempted to cross the Bulgarian Turkish border. After being pushed back by border guards, they threw stones at the border about emphasize here at

the border itself, not at the guards. After this, a shot rang and Abdullah fell to the ground with a bullet lodged one centimeter away from his heart. He survived and was interviewed by Lighthouse Reports. He states that there wasn't intent to kill when he was shot. That's his belief. The bullet also pierced this hand, which is now partially paralyzed. There seems to be no justification or reason whatsoever for border guards to have shot, or to have shot with

live ammunition. This was the first time that such an incident was called on video. If you want, you can find it linked on lice Lighthouse Reports attached to the article about this incident. The video is not as bad as you might think, but watch you at your own risk. As far as I'm aware, there have been similar rumors before, but this was the first instant that has entered like the public record, or the first time it was actually documented. Needless to say, no one should be shot for attempting

to cross a border. I don't care about anyone's opinion or bad faith nuances. People have a right to apply for asylum, and as far as I'm concerned, this was a deliberate and calculated attempted murder.

are still kind of rare. The yeah, the pushbacks and the violence and the torture is yeah, the evidence of that is like an enormous pile. There's when I was working in Bosnia, I think that was in twenty eighteen nineteen, there was no video footage of a pushback and there was a journalist who volunteered with us for a while and they were the first one to film it. But in the past years they're been like many many horrible videos of people being beaten up and actual torture.

where they have no connections, no money, and no way of establishing themselves. Right, And this led to massively increased a fatalities at the border because people were trying to avoid border patrol where they coming in and surrendering themselves for asylum as we see now, and massively increase encounters at the border. Encounters don't necessarily represent unique individuals, right, this is my I will beat this fucking drum until I die. But apparently our colleagues at New York Times

haven't worked it out yet. Wall Street Journal, almost every NPR, every big outlet in the United States that likes to commission border reporters who don't live on the border will tell you that that, like the number of migrants went up. An encounter is an encounter. If someone crosses and then gets bounced into Mexico and then crosses again and does that five times, that's five encounters. It's the same person. BP doesn't doesn't keep records of unique individuals under Title

forty two, or didn't keep under Title forty two. We don't know how many people, but we know that more people tried to cross, and we also know that every time you try to cross, you risk your life, and so we certainly know that more lives will put in danger because of this policy, because again, like turning someone back is not going to stop them, especially when you're dropping them in a country where they don't want to

be and where they're not from. Like, the people aren't just going to be like, oh, okay, cool, I'll stay in Mexico like that. That has not historically been the case.

to Austria or Italy. They would get caught in Austria Italy, be pushed back to Slovenia, taken over by Slownia police, brought to the Croatian border, taken off by Creation police often in Croatia, get tortured and then be dumped on the Boston border, which would be the EU border as well. So that's what they call chain pushbacks. And yeah, I yeah, so I worked in the Boston Hetzegovina, which is none you, so we would get the people after they had been

pushed back. Yeah. The things that people have done, like water guards have done to migrants are yeah, I don't know if you actually want to use this footage, right, It's like it's really really gruesome. Like in Bosnia, they would they would be like snow form, like they have very long and very cold winters. They would take away people's shoes and socks and like make them walk for five hours on bare feet. So one of the main tasks of our volunteers or medical volunteers was amputating toes.

People would Yeah, people would come back with broken bones, broken skulls. People would be sent back with just their underwear. That minus twenty degrees celsius.

The same happened with Bulgaria and Romania. So these countries were very very much pressured by countries like the Netherlands and Germany, who like you know, pretend not to have anything to do with these atrocities, but who were very very explicitly saying if you are not, if you don't get your borders in control, you cannot join the economic Yeah, you cannot have the open borders within the U.

We've also seen a young man from Jamaica recently passed away. This was in early probably early for some February and March. From February March. He was on a migrant trail. I know exactly where, about a few hundred yards actually from where my friends have left warm clothes, hand warmers, jackets, food, water, But he wasn't able to make it that far and for whatever reason, you know, like one death of a tragedy and a million statistic or whatever. But that really

impacted me. He was actually on the other side of the border when he died, but like he could have thrown a stone into the US and it's not a fence to border there. But yet we have chosen a policy which made that young man die of hypothermia by himself on the side of a mountain because for some reason, that's what we've decided or our government has decided it's better than having him come here and be able to make his case and live with us and get a

job or what have you. And yeah, that was just a particularly heartbreaking one for me because I knew that, like he was five minutes walk away, ten minutes walk away from potentially being okay, And like that that's why my friends and I like to go out and leave stuff for people. But it shouldn't be a group of anarchists and migrant activists and people of faith like hiking into the desert every weekend with backpacks full of water

and food and warm clothes. That shouldn't be what prevents people from dying coming here.

some crazy volunteers willing to do that. So like it shouldn't be like our you know, are like, yeah, like I don't want to have that power over someone's life, and I think no one should have that power over someone's life. But this system where basically migrants' lives are disposable, also mean that it's like optional to offer super basic things that can save these lives.

the majority of which are women and children. I'll refer back to the Lighthouse Reports, who did a reconstruction of the incident which makes this even worse than it already is. Transcriptions and witness statements obtained by Lighthouse Reports, the Oshpiego Monitors iiraj Lpos report is United and the Times strongly suggests that the Greek coast Guard attempted to conceal their

own involvement in this stragedy. Nine survivors were asked to make statements, none of which appeared to blame the coast guard. Different suggestions were given for the capsizing, blaming it on the edge of the ship or the lack of life jackets. Four of these statements contained near identical phrasing. It was later discovered that one of the translators was a coast guard himself. There were other translators, all of which were sworn in on that very day later in Greek courts.

Six of those nine stated that the coast guard did in fact tow the boat before it went down. Two survivors tot Lighthouse reports that certain parts of their testimony was omitted in the transcription. To clarify that a bit because of what I said earlier that migrants have are obligated to apply for asylum in the country in which they arrive. It's become a habit of like coast Guard and frontect to attrag them to certain areas of of water that are part of for example, Italy or Greece.

This particular one boat may have been an attempt to drag the boat to Italian waters so the Greeks didn't have to take them in. So, to quote the report from Lighthouse sixteen out of the seventeen survivors we spoke to set the coast guard attached the rope to the vessel and tried to tow it shortly before it capsized.

Four also claimed that the coast guard was attempting to tow the boat to Italian waters, while four reported that the coast guard caused more depths by circling around the boat after it capsized, making waves that caused the boat's carcass to sink. End quote not great badtime stories.

you guys, plugging anything you want to. If there are orgs or social media where people can follow both of your work, then I'd love to hear about them.

isn't it's a kind of resistance. It is a kind of We started that episode with talking about passport privilege and the lottery of birth, and I think we should not only look at like the bad border guards and the good people helping or something, but I think we should also acknowledge that the people crossing the borders are doing like taking unbelievable risk, often also to help their families or their friends. Yeah, and I think crossing a

border without permission is a kind of resistance. And I think we as people who yeah, do direct support or direct aid. We are I mean for me, it's also part of the resistance, is like helping people cross the border. I don't mind if yeah, people that want to accuse me of being a smaller or something, or like aiding illegal border crossings. Like the whole point is that people should be able to cross that border.

doing incredible cruelties to them just for political gain. Is exploiting people who do make it, but who are undocumented or on fragile residence status and are still exploited and deprived of basic rights even if they do arrive to their country of destination. Like this system is designed to create an underclass of people that is easily exploitable. There

are companies who are profiting from this. There is absolutely no intention to stop migration, but there is definitely an intention to marginalize and segregate migrants and yeah, and just profit of it.

be important to you too as well. On the tenth of June twenty twenty four, Leonard Peltier, an enrolled member of the Turtle Band of Chippewa of Lakota and Ajibwei Ancestry and the longest serving political prisoner in the United States, will be appearing before the US Parole Commission for the

first time since two thousand and nine. He faces staunch opposition from the FBI and other law enforcement agencies due to having allegedly killed two FBI agents in a firefight on the twenty six of June nineteen seventy five, after the agents appeared on reservation land to execute a pretextural warrant.

The initial firefight occurred during the quote reign of terror on Pine Ridge in the wake of the occupation of Wounded Kney, a time of extreme violence when federal law enforcement installed a puppet tribal chair and was arming vigilantes who targeted Indigenous traditionalists. Every since leading up to these events, as well as subsequent investigation and mister Peltier's extradition, trial, conviction, and sentencing, were characterized by gross misconduct on the part

of law enforcement, the prosecution, and the courts. Mister Peltier's co defendants were separately tried and acquitted on grounds of

self defense. Mister Peltier was railroaded, and his case is tainted by discrimination at every level, ranging from the withholding of exculpatory evidence to the torture and coercion of extradition and trial witnesses, and from the refusal of the judge to dismiss and vowedly racist Dura to the apologetic gymnastics of the courts affirming his convin in the face of meritorious legal challenges at admitted evidence about rageous government misdeeds.

Mister Peltier has been in prison for more than forty eight years, and he's almost eighty years old. He suffers from chronic and potentially lethal conditions for which he receives

insufficient and substandard medical care. If you want to take action to hashtag free Lenard Peltier, you can call the US Parole Commission at two zero two three four six seven zero zero zero, And if you'd like to find more information on how to support, you can go to this r L it's h t t P colon slash slash n d n C dot c C slash free Leonard Peltier. That's fr e E L e O n A R d P E L t I E R, or you can follow n d N collective on social media for more ways to support him. More information on

Daniel Peltier. Listen to Margaret's podcast on the Lakota Nation. I read in the Spirit of the Crazy Horse by Peter Matthewson.

i think up to like twenty five years. Potentially, it could stay in the field without needing to like refuel or anything like that.

of Aiden right now throwing down with the Hoothys. And on the thirty first of last month, there was a series of attacks launched by the Eisenhower along with some of our British allies, striking thirteen Hoothy targets at various locations in Yemen. This was in response to a number of attacks that the Hoothies had launched recently on shipping in the region, including I think they hit a Greek

ship a couple of times. The strikes came also a day after the Hoothy's shot down an m Q nine Reaper drone, which was the third downing of a Reaper drone in May. So the Hoothies have been dropping reefs pretty regularly. So anyway, all of this led to a massive series of strikes that were kind of you know, launched from the Eisenhower on Houthy targets. Houthy rebels said that the air strikes killed at least sixteen people and

wounded thirty five others. I think that death toll has risen since the article, the Washington Post article I'm looking at now, and that you know, we're going to be talking about things that are credible and not credible. If the Hoothies say, given the attacks launched, that death toll seems pretty credible to me, just based on other strikes that I've read about. The Houthis launched a retaliatory strikes on the Enterprise, or at least they claim that they did.

Wait on the on the Eisenhower. We did used to have an aircraft carrier name the Enterprise. I don't I think we've decommissioned it since I'm blaming real fast.

of this whatsoever that's been posted. The story seems to have started percolating out into kind of lefty media when Hoothy Press people made this announcement. I think the first direct statement I found about it outside of like hoothy Press resources was a Twitter account called for an online news magazine calling West Asian geopolitics called The Cradle. I'm

not wildly familiar with The Cradle. They've got something like one hundred and nine thousand followers on Twitter, and they seem to mostly be you could say, like a broadly sort of anti imperialist left. Most of their content lately is very pro Gaza. You know, there's stuff like articles about Israeli organ trafficking networks in Turkey. You know, they've got like video clips of like pro Palestinian protesters getting dunks in on pro israel protesters, a like protests and

stuff like that, very standard stuff. And on the thirty first they posted a They made a post yeah, basically restating what the Houthis had said, although they instead of saying the Houthis made a claim that they had struck the Eisenhower, they claimed it was ye many Armed Forces. It's an easy way to tell that someone is not accurately reporting on what's happening in Yemen because the Houthis are actively at war with YEA many armed forces. Like that is the actual reality of the situation on the

ground over there. So this got picked up by chunks of lefty media, and particularly like American lefty media. I think one of the first big accounts to take this story was a guy named Ashton Forbes. You know Ashton.

launching massive strikes on Gaza. And they primarily exist within the profit ecosystem that Elon established in Twitter right where if you have a verified account and you get a lot of engagements from other verified accounts, you get a chunk of money from Twitter, right, And so all these people figured out that there's a huge appetite for reposted videos from Gaza or videos that you just claim are

reposted videos from Gaza. A huge number of them are from Syria, and if they make people really angry or horrified, they'll get shared and get a ton of engagement, and you will get a check, right, Like, That's that's where Ashton comes out of. That's where all these guys come out of. So Ashton sees. I don't know if he

picked it up directly from the hoothy press people. I don't know if he picked it up from that thing on the cradle, But he posts the next day breaking and he's got of course, of course I'll show you. I'll share screen garrisons. You can see he's got he's got the two little sirens. Yeah, he's got the two little sirens on either side. Oh yeah, no, of course there's a million of this guy. This guy is all over the internet. A source has informed me that the

USS Eisenhower has been sunk all caps. Mainstream media reports from yesterday claim the ship was not hit by Houthy missiles. Social media shows conflicting reports of damage. I'm seeking corroboration on this potentially huge story. So first we see the escalation of the HOUTHI say, we shot at the Eisenhower and we hit it right. They didn't claim they'd sunk it. I think because the Houthis are like, they're not dumb,

and like, that's an easy claim to disprove. Whereas yeah, you can kind of like there's not as much live footage of this, you could kind of get away for a while with making people think maybe you damaged it a little bit, or at least you got close, you know. But a source a source, yes, a source from citizen journalist Ashton Forbes speaking truth to power. Yeah. The evidence that Forbes post, because he says, like social media so there's conflicting reports of damage, is a screen grab of

what looks like an aircraft carrier that's on fire. You can see a water very.

citizen journalists putting out bullshit. But like it's also filled with instances of citizens doing crucial journalism in the absence of credential professionals.

a Pulitzer Prize the next year for her video. However, journalism, while again there's a lot of value in citizen journalism, journalism is also a technical trade and there are in fact some things that random dirts on the Internet should not report on, and an attack on the Eisenhower is maybe one of them. To make a long story short,

the USS Eisenhower was not sunk. It is virtually impossible for non state forces like the Houthies, with the weaponry that they currently enjoy, to sink a vessel like the Eisenhower. And for a little bit of context on why that is the case, I want to talk about another aircraft carrier called the USS Independence. The Independence was one of many many aircraft carriers produced by the United States to curb stomp the Empire of Japan during World War Two.

After that war, we found ourselves with way more aircraft carriers than we needed or could afford to operate indefinitely at peacetime. So we decided to do the smartest thing we could with all these extra aircraft carriers and nuke them.

towed back to San Francisco after being nuked twice. Two nukes could not sink a nineteen forty six aircraft carrier.

stop them from being able to launch aircraft. It can kill crew, but unless you're actually blowing a big hole in it below the water line, you're not going to send one of these fuckers to the bottom of the ocean, right That's just kind of sure.

which is shocking to it is shockingly horny. So I want to note while I'm talking about the impossi ability of the Huthies using their current methods, which are basically when it comes to how they've been attacking the Eisenhower, they've been either flying drones at it, trying to ram it with an explosive drone, or launching cruise missiles at it right, and all of these are basically aiming for the top of this boat, because that's kind of the option that they have.

one point. This French submarine is part of the Op four which is like opposition forces during a war game, and it sinks the Roosevelt and most of its escorts

in like a simulated battle. And this is you know, it's very funny because like the French military posted about this and then had to delete it because it was really embarrassing for the Navy, and it's seen as evidence by people who actually know their shit about naval power and naval warfare is like, oh, US anti sub interdiction tactics and technology really took a hit in the post

Cold War period. We stopped putting money into it because like we thought, well, who's going to send subs after us if the Russians are gone?

realistically be sunk. Right, some bootleg Iranian missiles are not going to sink the most advanced carrier in the world today. Two nukes couldn't do a comparatively shitty carrier in nineteen forty six. Now, this is all pretty obvious to anyone who knows the first thing about modern naval warfare. But it was not obvious to our citizen journalist friend, Ashton Forbes.

When numerous people pointed out to him that his claims were absurd, he replied, yeah, I wanted to hold back on this story in case it's not true, but I trust my source and the media reports stink to me. If this ends up being wrong, I'll retract. But the implications are too huge not to report?

carrier would be massive. And if a story is that big, you have a responsibility not to report on it until you have any reason at all to believe that it's true. So when somebody says the implication or too the implications are too huge not to report on what they mean is I wanted the clout in traffic from getting this out first, and I don't really care if it's true.

Now it happens to be quite easy to prove that the USS Eisenhower is still among the living, because the captain of that boat is a poster.

I think that was kind of his subtle way of being like, we are still making like cinnamon rolls, like every is fine on board this ship. In short order, Internet Salutes discovered that the video clip posted by Forbes that claimed to show the Eisenhower in flames was Garrison. Do you want to guess where this what this was a screenshot from?

sensational and often unverified claims, particularly about Malaysia Airlines. Flight three seventy was a commercial flight that disappeared in twenty fourteen we'll en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, leading to numerous conspiracy theories. Now we don't actually know why MH three seventy went down. I think probably the leading theory was that the pilot committed suicide. But even that,

I don't think that there's like strong. I don't think it's it's very unclear, could have just been a fuck up, something like it's we really don't know, which is why there's so much conspiracy.

You've got people working for Iran, for Israel, for Russia, for the United States, all trying to push their own sundry lines of propaganda using the engines of algorithmic virality. And then, of course there are the legitimately hopeful but ill informed. And these are the people that I have sympathy with and who I'm kind of like focusing on.

These are people who are understandably numb from constant exposure to a barrage of photos and videos of war crimes, and they are desperately ready to believe in some kind of miraculous underdog victory.

fifty thousand views when I came across it. Another account quote tweeted this and got nearly five thousand likes, saying it won't happen, but it would be so fucking funny if Yeman sinks an aircraft carrier, like can you imagine? And I think that guy represents the more common attitude, which is this mix of on we and desperation. Right, nothing is going to stop this massacre. It seems like that. It really feels like that, right, But wouldn't it be

rad if something did? And to be realistic, I don't know that. I think there's a real odds that dropping the Eisenhower somehow would stop netnyahou from what he's doing. I mean maybe it would, like it would certainly reduce the ability of the United States to interdict Iranian messles coming into Israel, But I don't know that. I think that it's realistic that that's going to stop net Yahoo from doing the shit that net Yaho's doing. You can

feel however you want about that. It's not irrational to be like, boy, I don't think this is real, but like I wish it was, right, So you can feel however you want about this guy. Wanting, you know, thousands of US soldiers to get murdered. I get both, Like, I don't think that realistically, anything the hoo thies are doing is going to stop what Israel's doing at this point, But I also understand just desperately wanting some violence to come down on the other side of this thing after

months of watching videos of the slaughter in Gaza. You know, especially as you have you.

irrational feeling, right. You can contrast that to the posts of independent journalists and newsgrifter Richard Medhurst with four hundred and eighteen thousand followers, who posted this on June second, Jim instruct the best ship in the US Navy with ballistic and cruise missiles. The ship is fleeing, and the Captain of the us S Eisenhower, tried to do damage control by posting a video of the deck on Twitter, But it's an old Instagram reel from thirteen weeks ago. Left Yemen never lie, and.

four hundred thousand likes. Medhurst tis one hundred thousand or four thousand likes, sorry, four hundred and eighteen thousand followers, four thousand likes on the post I see four thousand likes is still a mess? Is a sizable super large number? Yeah. Medhurst has leaned hard into repeating claims that the Houthis have sunk or damaged the Eisenhower and another post with six thousand likes in eight hundred and twenty one thousand views.

He describes the IKE as being hit with ballistic and cruise missiles and add, yeomen never lie in their press breathings, so I'm inclined to believe them. In one post, heam, I know it's In one post, he notes that the Houthy's recently shot down an m Q nine Reaper drone, which did happen, and claims the US won't admit to that either, and like, I haven't run into the US

denying that this happened. There's three clear cases of m Q nine's being shot down last month alone, right, Like, we actually know a lot about this, which is part of why I don't believe the Eisenhower shot down, As they the Houthis were able to prove quite readily that they had shot down the MQ nine's. I have seen no proof that the Eisenhower's been hit, right, and this isn't just a case where like the Houthis should be able to provide some actual proof if they'd done this.

The Eisenhower is a floating city with a population of thousands. There's like seven or eight thousand people. I think at least in the whole strike group. I will con see that the military could probably keep a lid on an attack against the Eisenhower, and might even temporarily be able to hide the fact that it had suffered minor damage. But you're not keeping any anything significant secret for the long haul, right, Like you just you can't. You can't

keep secrets like that. There's too many people. They're going to talk to their families. If the boat goes down with thousands of people on board, family members are going to be like, boy, none of us have heard from our loved ones in a while. Right.

who know that perfectly well. It is entirely possible that the Hoothies find themselves low on munitions after months of conflict with the US, and somebody smart realized, like, what if we just say we shot at them, right, It'll have the same propaganda impact and we won't have a waste a missile.

Israel commits war crimes. Now, the reality of the situation is that the Huthis themselves have committed their share of war crimes, some of which are remniscent of the very crimes committed by Israel. In December of twenty fourteen, the Houthis laid siege to Yemen's second city, Ties, leading to a humanitarian catastrophe, as this article from The Guardian lays out.

Quote sincerely April, when the resistance, an alliance of local forces dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, fought off the Houthi's attempt to control the city. The militia retaliated by cutting off roads, preventing food and medical aid from getting in. Access is only allowed through a single checkpoint dubbed the Rapha Crossing by the residents after its more famous namesake

on the Egypt Gaza border. Every morning, long queues form outside the crossing by those wanting to enter the city hoothy malicious search and confiscate medicine, cooking, gas, cigarettes, bottled water or anything more than a small shopping bag of food. In order to survive. The city has for months been relying on groups of young boys and long trains of donkeys to bring its supplies via a long and arduous journey through the mountains, but donkeys alone can hardly fulfill

the needs of the city. Medicine and food have all but disappeared from the market, and the prices of what are left have jumped in the last few months, pushing most of the population below the poverty line. Now the comparison between Tis and Gaza are striking, right, Like the crossing was called Rafa you know.

this conflict was inarguably even worse. The Saudi led coalition, using US weaponry, put the whole country in a state of siege that led to catastrophic famines and situations very similar and in some cases worse than what the Huthi did toties right, like this is the this I mean, it's war right. This is like unspeakable suffering compounding on unspeakable suffering.

yourself to these products. We're back. So people like Medhurst, you know, postliked by these guys, they aren't meant to inform people about the real world. Medhurst's fans, the people who take him seriously, have departed reality in favor of a fantasy, because that fantasy world is the only place

in which victory feels possible. There's a term that you and I talk about a lot garrison, coined by the author Robert Anton Wilson, that I think is useful in dealing with situations like this, and that term is reality tunnel. The concept is complex and explanations of it tend towards long, but the basic idea is that we in the modern world are all constantly flooded by information from our senses and from the different information delivery devices that we filled

our world with. In order to function, we have to triage that information, to pare it away until we get to a reality that we can live inside, the fact that human beings can and perhaps inherently do. This is not necessarily bad, and in fact, I might argue that without the ability to choose and flip between different realities to change the channel, as Wilson put it, positive progress is impossible. I found this explained well in an essay

on Wilson's work by Mikola Bilokonski. Quote, we can slide between reality tunnels by consciously choosing to pay attention to things we might normally ignore. It's hard at first, but as a skill that we can develop with practice. Train yourself to pay more attention to the emotions of the people you're speaking to, for instance, and you'll be surprised at how much richer the world gets. Train yourself to pay attention to your caloric intake and eating fundamentally changes.

Train yourself to hear the voices of minorities, and suddenly you see racism and sexism everywhere. Now, those other reality tunnels like that you can key yourself in on are always there. They always exist, right, You just had to actually learn the filters that you existed within in order to access them.

other realities can find them. I want you to think of one of my favorite recent Trump World grifts, right, is these kind of this company that started putting out these like ads with an obvious AI Donald Trump or Elon Musk voice where they're like, Trump is going to change the monetary system, and if you buy these like trump Bucks debit card things or fake checks, he's going to like when he changes it, they'll be worth a

ten thousand times what you put in. So if you put in two or three thousand dollars worth of this, you'll be rich. He's doing this to reward his loyal fans.

He's going to like he's gonna fix everything and you'll finally be rich, right, you know you deserve to be rich, right, And a bunch of people bought these like fake promisary now and then like went to Bank of America to cash them in, and the bank was like, well, no, that's not this, this isn't real this, this is nothing at all, right, and you know, these people got fleeced. And one way to look at the people who got fleeced is like, well they're dumb, right, These people are stupid.

You know, they did a stupid thing. They believed something that was obviously fake, and you can you can take that out of their story if you want. I don't think that's helpful, though. The reality is that these people represent a cautionary tale. They didn't start out believing that the guy from the Apprentice was their messiah. Their break from consensus reality began years or decades earlier, and it's

going to be different for every individual person. When I think about my own family members who came to believe pretty unhinged things that you know, figures within the Republican Party or Trump himself told them. I tend to trace their break from reality back to well back to the day when the calming, charismatic voice of Ronald Reagan said this about the Iran Contraus scandal, a deal in which his administration gave Iron weapons in exchange for hostages. And

this is Reagan. A few months ago, I told the American people, I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions tell me that's true, but the facts and the evidence tell me.

best intentions. And in that moment, I think that's where a lot of Americans, who are now in an even more unhinged place, started burrowing down and started tunneling away from their friends and family and towards the heart of something dark. As the years went on, the consequences of many Reagan era economic and social policies became impossible to ignore. No wealth trickled down, Mourning did not return to America.

The promise of the Internet boom yielded to the dot com bubble bursting September eleventh sobered us up from the hallucination of permanent victory. After the end of the Cold War, the housing market crashed, the hideous reality of climate change became unavoidable, the promise of a bright future faded, and people buried themselves deeper in fantasies to avoid oblique and

empty horizon. And all throughout this the Left prided itself on a sort of logical sobriety, a willingness to stare into the abyss, to accept the reality of our dire moment, and to propose radical solutions. Yet one by one, the different protest movements put out by the left flopped and fizzled. Promising organizers and ideological leaders were revealed as frauds or

became corrupted by the system. Capitalism failed to fall or reform, and rather than confront the dire complex reality that leaves us in, increasing numbers of leftists found alternative realities, served eagerly by an alliance of conman and paid propagandists. Now, leftists have always been just as vulnerable to vicious fantasy as conservatives. This has proven well in the last century.

There's a case of a Marxist academic named Malcolm Caldwell, who I think is which I think is valuable depending on who you talk to about Caldwell. He's the Scottish academic.

He was a college professor, apparently a pretty good economist, and he also had this weird thing for agrarian communist movements, which he thought were He believed that there was this like massive global famine coming and he believed that these like back to the Land Marxist movements sweeping Southeast Asia where the only way forward for a lot of humanity.

He was this like third worldist. A lot of his belief was kind of centering that, you know, the United States was the source of all evil in the world effectively, but this kind of led him to he became a stan of every communist state, even the ones that were in conflict with each other. He traveled to like North Korea and came back like talking about all of the wonderful accomplishments of Juche ideology. You know, he was in love with Vietnam, and he was also in love with

Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. And that's kind of part of the evidence that like he had entered a reality tunnel that had taken him away from any kind of logical reality because like Cambodia and Vietnam went to war, right, Vietnam invaded Cambodia, Like these these two were not like communist fellow travelers on the same side of a conflict.

Whenever this would get brought up to Caldwell, when he'd argue about, you know, Vietnam and the conflict that Vietnam was having with Cambodia, or he you know, people would try to argue with him about the realities of the Khmer Rouge system, he would just kind of shut down, like he was he was, yeah, he couldn't talk about it right now. Eventually, Caldwell, because he's an academic, he travels to a lot of these countries and you know, it's fine. He travels to the Ubas, he gets a

tour there. He travels to North Korea, he gets a tour there, he gets a tour at Vietnam. That's all fine. All of those states are sane states, right, which is not to say that like they don't do bad things, but they're they're run by people who like, there's no benefit in us to anything bad happening to this guy who's out there in the West writing nice things about our regimes. Right, Polepot was not sane. The Khmer Rouge was not sane.

the people are gone. Something is terribly wrong, and he just couldn't listen to her. So they're there a couple of weeks and he gets invited to have a meeting with Polepot, and you know, he has a meeting with him right after these journalists do, and he comes back from it really excited, being like, we had a great talk. He's such a smart man. You know, we talked about economics. I feel really he's invited me back next year, you know.

And by the way, within like weeks of this, Vietnam invades and forces Polepot out of the capitol, right, Like the state of the Khmer Rouge was deeply precarious at this point. But he comes out super optimistic, and then later that night a gunman shoots him to death and then shoots himself to death. It is really unclear to this day. It's a bit of a mystery what happened.

The most likely explanation is that the Khmer Rouge wanted to pin the murder of a leftist Western academic on Vietnam to try and generate international outrage against Vietnam who was about to invade. It's possible Vietnam killed him for but I don't really see a benefit to Vietnam and doing that again. They invade right after this. It seems like one of the journalists who was there basically was like a pollpot, was out of his fucking mind. Of

course he would do this. There's no like, there's no trying to lay out like the rationality behind this man's actions.

I think what's more interesting is Caldwell had been presented with plenty of evidence that the Khmer Rouge regime was deeply evil and violent, and in fact, he had published right before he went over there, he published an article about like the successes of their agrarian reforms and the Khmer Rouge government official that he cited in that paper that's like the basis of most of his claims about

how well the reforms had worked. With it like a couple of weeks before he arrived in Cambodia was tortured to death in the S twenty one prison. Well, that's not a great sign, not a great sign anyway. I bring this guy up because I think he's maybe the best example of like the damage that you do to yourself when you let yourself fall into these tunnels. Because Caldwell, he's not one of these like gray zone guys. He didn't make a bunch of money being a stand for dictatorships.

He seems to everyone who talked, even the people who thought he was like out of his mind and his opinions on the Khmer Rouge agree he was a really nice man. He was a family man, he was a good teacher. He just completely left reality in this one thing, and it led him to oblivion.

Even if even if someone like net and Yahoo then like like comes out and says like actually, no, this was like quote unquote like terrible accident or whatever, there

will still be people defending it. And like, I don't know if all of these people are literally like bloodthirsty, Like I don't know if they actually really want to see like everyone in Gaza killed I'm sure there's there's maybe some people who are like just bad, but I think the reality tunnel version, I think is a lot more useful for understanding how there's so many otherwise very like normal, normal people who feel totally fine about cheering on the actions of the State of Israel right now

as there you know, as the death told just gets higher and higher and higher every single day. No, it's certainly been something I've I've thought about very often these past few months, as I as I'm sure many other people are, you know, both staring into the abyss on on Twitter dot com wherever everyone has a take. But then also you know, if if you're ever going out to any like if you're ever going into any of these protests, there will probably be like a group of

Zionist counter protesters yelling something. And it's it's a really tricky thing to navigate.

not like reliable that it happens. And I have, you know, as someone who has been in this space of researching cults, of researching disinformation for years now, I'm not aware of any reliable ways to break people out of these now you know, these these tunnels when they get themselves in. And that's that's the scariest thing to me. Right, there's

there's a number of people. I don't think it's huge in an electoral sense, but it's probably thousands or tens of thousands of people who now believe that the Eisenhower is either badly damned or at the bottom of the sea, and they will keep believing that the same way that like a chunk of people believe that when they look up and see clouds, every cloud they see is like poison the US government shot out into the sky using

our secret planes to murder people with fucking whatever. I don't know it's anyway, or the.

you probably don't even realize yourself. People on the outside will point out, oh wow, this is this is uh, this is some interesting beliefs you have suddenly fallen into. Yeah, but it it doesn't, It doesn't happen overnight.

But it's more frustrating when it's like you're on who you like previously like had a good relationship with And yeah, no, I mean this this this kind of reminds me of like, you know, attempts at QAnon and deprogramming back in like twenty nineteen, where you know, we had this influx of influx of older people and boomers and sometimes just like not super old people either also just like like moms in their thirties who started like leaving all this stuff

and cutting them off from you know, contact with you or other people doesn't help obviously, but they can also be really hard to maintain, like a good relationship. And yeah, it's a weird balance of being able to provide a little bit of like compassion to someone and not completely cut them off while also maintaining your own personal boundaries.

It's a really tricky thing. But in a lot of the cases of the QAnon stuff, all the most successful things that I've heard about people getting out of it, it did require a line, like there had to be some connecting thread to the person, and over time that thread could be pulled upon and maybe the person would use that thread as like as like a crutch when the reality so slowly started to crumble around them and it's really tricky and I don't have any good solutions

for this. Nobody does. Anyone who does say they do is also a grifter who's lying and trying to make money.

saying that that that line doesn't exist. Like I had someone reach out about a family member who had started to believe some conspiracy stuff regarding extra terrestrials that was like obviously untrue and it worried them, And I was like, well, look, you know, you don't have to tell them that you

believe them. You can say like, I don't, you know, really feel the same way you do about this, but I'm always down to talk about it, right or like you know, I'm always you know, here to to listen if you want to talk about this and let him know that like they have a connection still if you make sure that there's like still a way they can get out of that tunnel and back up to something that resembles reality. Maybe they will.

the Internet. It originally comes from a two husand through webcomic, but Rule thirty four states that if it exists, there is porn of it, meaning that you can find porn of anything on the Internet, whether that be cooking, bowling or in this case Donald J. Trump. And you know, as someone who is just reviewed basically all of the old J. Trump pornography that I could find on the Internet these past five days, I did try to keep this episode roughly PG thirteen. We kind of cross that

boundary a little bit. So I do think it's you know, probably wise to give some sort of general sexualized content warning here. But again I tried, I try to keep things as tame as I can, you know, all things considered. Anyway, back to the episode, I started my journey by doing the most obvious thing I could think of, which is opening a virtual PC and using Google through the tour browser to search Trump rule thirty four.

So here we go, just straight to the source. I clicked on the link, and as the page loaded, I was shocked by what I saw, or more accurately, what I didn't see. There was far less Trump porn than what I was expecting. That not even like a single full page of results.

any other context of the image. I will actually share the picture of his face across some of these some of these artworks. Okay, so here is here is image number one?

I really don't like it. See yeah, his eyes early squished together. In a lot of these, he's giving a thumbs up. I would say about half the images he's giving you know where that you know where that thumb's about to be right, Like that's part of what makes this unsettling.

donkey's ass. Lastly, the Trump elephant now has an extendable boxing glove trunk and is flying victoriously over the Donkey Democrat with a black eye.

and show creator Rebecca Sugar. He allegedly gave Rebecca Sugar a drawing of having sex with Pearl, which allegedly got him fired from the show among many other reasons, and he's been blacklisted from large parts of the animation industry for sexual harassment and violence.

here of course. Now, however, I believe the superior tennis piece is from an artist named Shad Bass, who might be a Nazi or just pretends to be one online. Cutting in here to do a quick correction. So originally in this episode identified a Shad Bass as a trans woman, which is not the case. The reason why I thought this is because the most recent picture appearing to be Shad based on his Twitter account from like a year ago,

is him as a trans woman talking about getting on estrogen. Now, this was actually part of an ongoing joke that I just didn't have the context for, as he's like a really scummy and deeply problematic artist who I did not feel like doing a whole deep dive on so Apologies

for that and back to the episode. But she has drawn Trump in the same post as the famous photo, but as an anime girl wearing a transparent tennis skirt with the comments underneath saying I'd vote for her and I don't have enough weed for this shit.

death unquote. One plotline has Cherry using her love powers to make all of the riot police at a twenty twenty protest to take off their riot gear and start having gay sex with each other through the power of love. Now, in the main panel, Cherry seduces a very unflattering Trump from the bushes of a golf course. Quote grab some

uh this py word, Pretend I'm your daughter unquote. She gets trumped to chase her naked through a golf course, and when he's about to grab her, she disappears with the accompanying on a monopea twink, which I think is completely unintentional, naked into a face full of mud. I think this comic is actually good natured, but it's still kind of really problematic and very boomer.

a lot anyway. So but I again, I was kind of surprised that tags for Trump only returned like a few a few Trump images. When I started just quote unquote Trump on roll thirty four, most of the results were for a furry Japanese webcomic that's over one hundred and twenty pages. Because I think the artist just goes by the name Trump, He's completely unrelated, and I was really just expecting more stuff. I checked Dvan art and it was largely barren of Trump themed not safe for

work images. Now, just as I was about to give up and I thought maybe there's not enough for an episode, my my primal Zoomer brain activated. It's like it's like something deep in my core knew what had to be done. Rival Zoomer. That's what I logged into the website archive of our own, the most popular fiction website on the Internet. There are over one thousand and seven hundred works titled tagged with Donald Trump.

desolate place in the prison. They may not have freedom, but at least they have each other. During those four years, Ben Shapiro was thrown in prison too. He was very silent at what he had done and therefore distanced himself from everybody. I don't know what he did, but he must have done something to ruin him as a person, Warren Buffett said, and everyone nodded. Is he one of Trump's friends? We have each other at least will be

fine in this jail. Elongated muskrat said, Trump was cuddling with Andrew Tate in the corner.

insurrection together. So that's a fun one. There's a really good one titled Trump poly Relationship with the tags Joe Biden, Brock Obama, Obama, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Sonic the Hedgehog, enemies to lovers see.

because you know, it's not universe exactly. You know, it's not just someone control effing just like a regular sex scene. I wanted to actually like, I want to have lore, I want world building. I need to be connected to what.

Not as the perfect straight, a capable student to friends and family, but what happens when a new student who got kicked out of his old school for fights gets partnered up with him for tutoring. I'm actually gonna skip to chapter two titled what the Sigma?

you at all? Do need help? Is he meeting up with a secret gang or something? Barry uttered under his breath as his wings slightly flapped.

and Trump shows up as like a superhero. There's some like isis jokes, refugee jokes. Anyway, there's some there's some funny lines in here.

my house. Finally, the White House, the only race that should be here unquote. So not off to a great start. Throughout this fick. Trump falls in love with a Mexican architect that he hired to build the wall. That's the whole bit, now, Robert, I know you said you were interested in Jesus Christ.

of Donald Trump. Quote its eyes were almost as lifeless as Donald's himself. That was the true perfection of this creature. He's gorgeous, Trump said, tears sliding down his face. He felt as if he was looking into the mirror. But when he reached to touch his reflection, his his hands met soft clammy skin. Thank you, daddy. Trump eagerly began kissing his clone, pushing his tongue past slack lips until

it learned to respond to him. Each hungrily tried to devour the other, their bodies writhing against each other, tears rolling down their faces in unison as they realized that neither one could ever fill the empty void that they felt inside. So that is my extremely abridged version of my AO three adventure. And unfortunately I do have one more section, but it's a bit shorter that we will

get to after the break. For some of the more kind of I would say mainstream Trump pornography that can be found on the internet.

But there's only about thirty source videos that I could find across the two top porn sites.

There is a really upset anyone titled storby Daniels ex Trump cartoon hen Ti causeplay Milk with eleven thousand views, which has the worst most creepy looking PlayStation.

like a strip teas way. At eleven minutes in she quote unquote rubs one out her words while continuing the half in character, ranting it was it's kind of a weird outlier, but I thought to mention it. Now onto the two major genres of Trump porn, the first one being the debate orgy Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton fucking Bernie Sanders and Megan Kelly parody. This one has a combined total of over of almost eight million.

but just like it is so awkward. About halfway through the twenty minute video, Megan Kelly asks Trump if you would like to improve his personal rating among married women as they start having sex, and then Hillary says, quote, I'd rather fuck the party than the enemy, and calls on Bernie. There is a lot of feel the burn jokes in here, so.

I can't quite tell where they're from, but they all sound there.

something that multiple commenters took great offense to. Not the rest of the video, but the fact that he wipes it off with an American flag seemed to really upset some people.

Trump with again three and a half million views. And this one has President and Obama and the Secret Service breaking into Trump Tower where Trump and Blaney are sleeping in bed, and then a cuck scene unfolds, once again very racist. We're nearing the end, I can I can see the tunnel at the end. We're now going to get to the last debate, one called Donald Tramp in the White House. This is going to be huge. With only a quarter of a million views, pretty low, but

seventy percent up voted, So there you go. Now, in this one, Trump is doing a solo debate by himself, kind of predicting how he would handle the Republican primary in.

ideas like a very special episode of Shark Tank. And then I will tell you how all the other candidates are stupid, idiotic morons, and you'll be left wondering is he trying to get his subrenet band or is everything he's saying really what he means. Now, let's have sex. As I whisper racist comments into your ear unquote this Trump actor. The hair is too orange. The hair is too orange.

getting beaten up, downed, pegged, interrogated, or otherwise humiliated by women. Now, these these have anywhere from like four hundred views to twenty five thousand views, so they're watched less, but the people that are making them seem really passionate. We have titles like Trump gets a Donkey punched by two sexy women, one hundred percent Real, sixty FBS ten.

So I've gone through like these these three different kind of medium series in this in this episode, right, we have we have uh like the drawn art, We have AO three fan fic, and we have this like you know, more classic pornography live action stuff. And each each of these has different aspects that I believe are are clearly tied to the medium, right, like like furry stuff for drawn art, the largely homosexual pairings oft AO three and

the normy hetero misogyny of classic pornography. But I'm more interested in when some of these kind of medium specific aspects intersect and how that might tell us something about what's really going on here. So, based on all the evidence I reviewed the past five days, I'm gonna split the Donald Trump pornographic catalog into two main kind of thematic sections, the two genders, if you will. First, we

have Trump the strong man right. This is either propagated by like people on the right who genuinely admire Trump as like a dominant dictator, thus like displaying sexual submission to him is like a righteous duty, or like a sign of respect or a quest for validation. Alternatively, this strong men framing can also be used, and I would argue more perversely by liberals in some form of like a post irony desire for subjugation stemming from a like

a neoliberal disenfranchisement or like neoliberal nihilism. Having a like a Freudian father figure you deeply despise strengthens the taboo aspect of repressed desire for the inherent domination of authoritarianism.

I think the master slave kink is very common in the Trump AO three fix, presumably mostly written by people on the left, and this type of thing I think can be vulgarly tied to like the Lord Bondsman dialectic at play in this sort of politic, which is like defined by and desiring what you cannot be, So we have that plus all like the fucked up yet very common incest framing strengthens these kind of psychoanalytic links. But enough of that babble to contrast Trump the strong Man.

The other major category is Trump the defiled, which is exceedingly popular on Rule thirty four AO three, and this kind of later category of femdom porn videos. This is like a revenge fantasy. It's uncaring in its embrace of problematic tropes so long as Trump is symbolically stripped of what signals his status of power. This often includes a misogynistic embrace of social norms that reflect authoritarian patriarchy. Trump is feminized mostly through actions to signal that he is

lesser right. He's a masculated, penetrated, dominated, assaulted, and very often impregnated. Even death is no escape for in the eye after life, Jesus Christ continues the holy work of Trump's psychosexual humiliation. The hope is that the Catharsists will be found in putting the image of Trump through the types of things that the actual Trump has done to others, perhaps with some kind of perverse pleasure in this role reversal of now being the one to subject Trump to

such experiences even through fiction. Now, I'm not necessarily saying all this stuff is bad or there are plenty of materials that I've reviewed that I do object to, but this mostly does fall under the guise of play and kink, which can be valid and often useful ways of sorting through psychosexual or psychological affairs. And obviously throughout a lot, if not most of these works, there is a large comedic element, but I think such comedy is still underpinned

by some of these maybe deeper motivations. And to detox from that rant, here's a collection of really uncomfortable Trump mask pictures which, oh my, I have so many, I have so many of these. I have a whole collage, a whole alage of this.

that might be important to you too as well. On the tenth of June twenty twenty four, Leonard Peltier, an enrolled member of the Turtle Band of Chippewa of Lakota and Ajibwei ancestry and the longest serving political prisoner in the United States, will be appearing before the US Parole Commission for the first time since two thousand and nine.

He faces staunch opposition from the FBI and other law enforcement agencies due to having allegedly killed two FBI agents in a firefight on the twenty sixth of June nineteen seventy five, after the agents appeared on reservation land to execute a pretextural warrant. The initial firefight occurred during the quote reign of Terror on Pine Ridge in the wake of the occupation of Wounded Kney, a time of extreme violence when federal law enforcement installed a puppet tribal chair

and was arming vigilantes who targeted and as traditionalists. Every since leading up to these events, as well as subsequent investigation and mister Peltier's extradition, trial, conviction, and sentencing, were characterized by gross misconduct on the part of law enforcement, the prosecution, and the courts. Mister Peltier's co defendants were

separately tried and acquitted on grounds of self defense. Mister Peltier was railroaded and his case is tainted by discrimination at every level, ranging from the withholding of exculpatory evidence to the torture and coercion of extradition and trial witnesses, and from the refusal of the judge to dismiss and vowedly racist Dura, to the apologetic gymnastics of the courts affirming his convictions in the face of meritorious legal challenges

had admitted evidence of outrageous government misdeeds. Mister Peltier has been in prison for more than forty eight years and he's almost eighty years old. He suffers from chronic and potentially lethal conditions for which he receives insufficient and substandard

medical care. If you want to take acttion to hashtag free Lennard Peltier, you can call the US Parole Commission at two zero two three four six seven zero zero zero, and if you'd like to find more information on how to support, you can go to this r L. It's h T T P colon slash slash n d n C O dot c c slash Free Leonard Peltier. That's f ir E E L E O n A R D P E L t I E R, or you can follow n d N Collective on social media for more ways to support him, more information on Lennard Peltier.

Listen to Margaret's podcast on the Lakota Nation, a read in the Spirit of the Crazy Horse by Peter Mathison.