It Could Happen Here Weekly 177

of you. Hi, Hi, Thanks, So we're going to be talking about the recent Teen Vogue special issue cover story on Vivian Wilson, the estranged daughter of Elon musk Ella. You put together a fantastic piece last month, and this is what we're gonna discuss how this article came together. That viral photo shoot in Japan, which is fantastic. All

the styling in that shoot was lovely. But I think this, this particular piece was really relevant for like trans people, and also relevant because of the way like global politics has been shaken up by a few specific people, and focusing in on Vivian I think was really special. So I guess I would first like to hear about, like, yeah, like the broad strokes of how this first came together.

my friends in our various trans subcultures know this. But at Team Vague, we've been covering like transpolitics and trans writes for a long time, like far before I got here, But I've been here for almost four years, and it's been a pretty big part of my beat, in part because of it being like a very unavoidable thing within following like US state legislatures and then obviously like at the federal level, which has only intensified more and more in the last year. And so that's like one aspect

of it. But at the same time, we love young people that shit post, and so Vivian had been on our radar for a while totally. I also think people are maybe more aware of this whole, like Comrade teen Vogue vibe of like, we're really interested in talking to people that have a clear political leaning, that have like a sense of how they see themselves in the world in a political context, and Vivian sort of came right out the gate as someone who was really eager to

share her thoughts on these things. So from last summer, like within like a month of when Vivian was kind of introduced to the world through her father talking about her on Jordan Peterson's podcast, we were trying to get in touch with her and with something I was talking a lot about within the office, and we didn't really know what to do because she was just kind of she just kind of emerged from from nowhere onto the Internet. And so I had been talking about it a lot,

including with Ella because we talk a lot. And so Ella find eventually revealed like, oh that's Umphy, I am.

she has changed her mind. She's told me repeatedly that she regrets saying that to me, that she has decided she actually is funnier than everyone else alive, all of the things that a prolific twenty year old poster might say.

also received a misgendering passport after the Trump admins. So like, I think that if legacy media is unwilling to connect the dots between like profiting off of like the aesthetics of trans people, but not actually like talking about the political underpinnings of like why trans people are even able to be visible at this time and like what the you know trapdoors Termaligne calls it of trans visibility means then it's like why even do this work in the

first place. So Vivian was like a really great opportunity for us to like build on, Like we've done several photoshoots, particularly with trans women because I trans girls at teen Vogue, because we like feel very strong. Only a Allen makes this point in the piece that like the way that transfem people are like objectified and commodified, and also like the target of such extreme bittrial is something it feels

really important to take a stand against. It just felt like doing this with Vivian, who's so high profile but also hadn't had the opportunity yet to take control of her own narrative in the public eye, and with this being her second ever interview for a sever photo shoot, like it just felt like a really big opportunity that was.

And Yeah, like people are very willing to like commodify or or use trans people in certain ways, but to have like trans people writing about other trans people in a way that frames them as a subject matter is so important.

a whole. Yeah, She's incredibly talked about for something that is not her fault and not under her control at all, in the same way that right now on the national stage, like transfemininity and transit is at large, but specifically transfemininity is the like problem to be spoken about, especially conservatives, like Butler calls it a phantasm like gender nonsense.

back against sort of that narrative very strongly. And I think that is the way we've seen her being used both on the left and the right as sort of a this is why he's doing this. It's clearly the fact that he has this twenty year old trans girl, and she's like, actually, that's a crazy thing to say about it about a twenty year old well.

it's like so demeaning. It's also like a very like you know, trans misogyny moment as well, Like, yeah, it is interesting how how much of like Vivian is so relatable, Like like a lot of trans people have, shall I say, challenging relationships with their parents, maybe not to this extreme, but but sometimes frankly right, like there's a lot of people are forced to cut off contact with their family.

the federal level as well. It has already shown up in the rhetoric around transit healthcare, which obviously is going to be used as justification for targeting trans adults access to health care and something that you know, I'm the only transperson on my team. Something that kept coming up in Vivian's story was that it was almost like anyone could relate to this, because anyone can relate to having like a shitty parent, an abusive parent, like a bad dad, whatever.

And so I think there's an extent to which this story has like a lot of value in like forcing CIS people to really be confronted with the fact that like how trans youth are treated like objectively is like abusive. And it's not the access to healthcare that is the abuse. It's like the way that they're dismissed. It's the way they're belittled, It's the way they can't even be like trusting their own parents to be looking out for them, and to the extent that they have to push themselves

out into the world to clarify that point. So like that's one aspect of it. I totally agree with what you were both saying that it is like a microcosm of the trans experience. But I do think there's like this other valance for like allowing her to like control how this is being perceived or received sort of by CIS media and like sis like the CIS political spirit, which is like how trans people are just getting shoved into that over and over and over again with very

little context. Felt like a really valuable thing to be able to do give and how like, frankly, so much of my coverage right now just feels like it's like trying to raise attention to the fact that, like, these are kids, these are young people, Like everyone should be able to relate to a young person saying like I have a bad parent and that sucks and is a formative thing for me, Like that is something that like other children are afforded the ability to do, and like

we just don't let trans kids like have that as something that's part of their truth when it's such a key part of like growing up trans in a hostile household.

from being as bad as what it looks like it's going to be. And Vivian like talked about this at length of the piece, with the restriction of puberty blockers, all this stuff in schools and this complete demonization of not just the healthcare but also like the people they like trans kids as this own demon of America that's that's like invading or is like threatening. So I think it is really cool a Vivian do talk about that at length in this special teen Vogue Cool photo Shoot article.

to be living. And I'm not that old, but like talking to someone who's a few years younger than me and who transitioned at an earlier stage in life gave me like such a beautiful vision of what the future could look like if we if we fix some of the bullshit that's going on these days. All Right, I'm being clowned on in the chat. I'm not that much older than Vivian, is what I meant. And now I'm peaking my microphone and the podcast is going to sound terrible.

Look what you said. I'm not that much older than Vivian, but she started transitioning at a much younger stage of life than me, and to see like what that has done for her, and like the way, I don't know, it was just really beautiful to talk to like a twenty year old girl and be like, oh, you're like trans but it's like it's like not actually that big of a deal, and it.

about so many jokes that did not and just one liner is like she's so quickie and so like so funny. She's extremely funny.

relief like funny and snappy. How fighting with with like like fellow queer teenagers like like prepared you for for that, which has like certainly been like my experience.

which allows Vivian to just speak for herself. And I think having both of those and not just one or the other strengthens the piece entirely, and strengthens like being able to see Vivian as a complete person because like, as I'm as, I'm getting the context like for her life and the political situation in the first half. Then I get to see how much she reminds me of like regular twenty something trans girls, and you know, like half of the friends I have. Though I do disagree

on team Peta. Pete's a bitch boy. It's team Gale all the way.

transcript was, and you know, just like it. There were many aspects of this that like we were like, okay, how do we how do we do this in a way that's going to read well to people, because something we also think about a lot is like accessibility, Like

young people famously hate reading. Now we but we wanted this to actually be something that like a young person could sit down, dash through, still get some like you know, historical political context out of and still come away being like haha, team PETA, team Gail or whatever the hell right and so.

there were more pieces to really tie it together. But I would say, like the reason that was the case is because it was a really hard line to walk to acknowledge that, like people would be clicking on this in part because of Elon, but that we wanted to like trick them into coming for Elon but staying for Vivie and.

is about him. Ultimately, it felt really important, and it was also challenging to make sure that we felt like people were coming away with it from this without like a garbled interpretation of what the stakes were for her to be coming forward like we wanted it to be, especially right now while so much of mainstream media is really fumbling their coverage of like politics at this moment, it felt really important to be like.

I liked to write. But after talking to Vivian, even after our early pre interview, but certainly after the full interview where I sat with her for a very long time over zoom in a fourteen hour time difference, I immediate it was like, no, if I write this out, it's going to be mostly dialogue anyway, because her voice she has, she's so voicy, and it's so fun to keep it in that voice.

to more than double by twenty thirty. Our popular fiction can't even imagine a better future right now. Ninety percent of modern future media takes place during or shortly after an apocalypse. The odd exception today like Bong Juno's recent Mickey seventeen is so rooted in trump'st politics that we only catch occasional glimpses of anything beyond it. In other words,

in our fiction, there's no respite from the news. We watch a slow motion, self inflicted global economic collapse and then relax with shows about mushroom zombies or literal wage slaves created by mind control surgery. In other words, it's bleak out there. Tomorrow could be the day Trump invokes the Insurrection Act or uses the military to occupy Greenland, or like one of a dozen equivalent horrors. We all just know our coming in some form or another, even

if no one can say win. And I'm not here today to tell you how we're gonna get past all of that or fix it, because I don't know. So today I'm just here as a merchant of hope. My job is to convince you that our species will someday get past our bullshit and perhaps even lay claim to the stars. And no Elon Musk isn't going to have anything to do with that. But in order to convince you of all this, I'm going to have to talk

about a movie. It's called Roar, and it is technically a nineteen eighty one comedy adventure film about an American naturalist. This guy lives on a nature preserve in Tanzania filled with big cats. His family comes to visit at the same time as a grant committee shows up to evaluate his project, which has an unclear goal. He's apparently just trying to prove people and giant cats from all over the world can live together, which the movie shows they can't.

It's really immaterial what happens in the plot. All I can tell you is how Wikipedia describes it. I've watched this movie dozens of times, and I have very little idea what it's supposed to be about. This is because in any given scene, the script is only ever a vague suggestion, as each scene starts with actors trying to read lines and evolves into those same actors trying to survive while being mauled by dozens of lions, tigers, and panthers.

I should probably step back a minute to explain some things. Roar is largely the brainchild of Tippy Hedron and her husband Noel Marshall. If you're on the younger side, Tippy Hedron was the female lead in a little movie called The Birds It is a horror film and also an early apocalypse flick by Alfred Hitchcock. It's often credited with inventing modern horror cinema. Hitchcock himself sexually and psychologically harassed Hedron, but his worst actions came during a crucial scene where

Hedron was attacked by a flock of birds. Up to the day of filming, Hitchcock had assured Tippy the birds used in this scene would be animatronic, but when the time came to shoot it, she spent five days having hundreds of live birds hurled at her in huge numbers by the crew. Hedron later described it as brutal, ugly, and relentless. Carrie Grant, her host star, told her she

was the bravest woman he'd ever seen. Now, whatever other impacts this had on Tippy, she has no discernible fear of animals after this point in her life, though she really should. Her husband, Noel is a bit more of a mystery to me. He was an agent, a producer, a film investor, and a serial entrepreneur whose best financial decision was putting money mind what became The Exorcist. In nineteen sixty nine, he and Hedron were in mosam Beaque while she starred in the film Satan's Harvest, about which

less is said the better. This is only relevant because during their time in Africa, they observed a pride of lions lounging about an abandoned home, and this gave them an idea. They wanted to make a movie about poaching and conservation, something that could use the power of film to save these majestic creatures being threatened by humanity. All four of their children agreed to star in it and

to help with production, but there were immediate snags. They wanted the film to be set in a big cat sanctuary, but actual lion tamers warned them that it was flat out impossible to keep so many large fee lines together safely. This would eventually prove to have been very accurate advice.

After a while, one tamer introduced them to their first tame lion, and, for reasons known only to God, he suggested to this traumatized movie star and her family of charmingly deranged Californians that they could just get their own big cats and train them by adopting animals confiscated from their previous owners, generally sketchy zoos and circuses. So a lot of these cats had never known the wild, and they'd often been badly mistreated given them. This was the

nineteen seventies. We must assume that some had been confiscated property of coke dealers. Tippy and Noll had no professional or legal qualifications to care for dozens of big cats when the authorities eventually found out there was trouble, although since Hedrid and Marshall were rich, they bought their way out of said trouble by purchasing a rural compound and having a house built specifically for they and their dozens

of apex predators to live. While lions had inspired the initial vision, the compound in California soon filmed with big adopted cats of every kind. Tippy and her husband took them in and raised them among and around their own children, who came to see the animals as something between pets and family. When they actually started filming the movie that became Roar. Making any kind of movie had become secondary to the act of caring for these many, many giant,

traumatized kiddies. As I noted earlier, the plot to Roar is kind of immaterial. I've never watched it with the sound on. I can tell you, though, that none of these cats were trained in any really meaningful way, which meant that every scene devolved into the same spectacle. The casts, surrounded by dozens of giant cats, stumbled through a few lines before one or all of the cats began to bite and claw them, at which point each scene becomes

about surviving from one moment to the next. Roar took more than five years to film in more than a decade to actually make. No cats were harmed during the production of this movie, but more humans were injured than in any other film production on record. Of the one hundred and twenty or so cast and crew on Roar, more than one hundred suffer significant injury, often more than once. Jan Debaut, the cinematographer, had his scalp ripped off by

a lion, requiring one hundred and twenty stitches. He went on to make Speed and Twister. Melanie Griffith, Tippy's daughter and a future star herself, left production at one point because she was worried a big cat might rip her face off. She ultimately returned and immediately had a large chuntic of her face ripped off. Requiring extensive surgery. This all sounds horrifying and impossible to justify. But before you make a final judgment, I want to remind you of

two things. One, for all its horrors and severe injuries, fewer people were killed on the set of War than in Alec Baldwin's recent film Rust. The second thing that you must remember is that Roar is a work of art on the level of Moby Dick. If you watch it enough, among the right people and in the right headspace, you can come to a deeper understanding of every facet of human existence. I've taken a lot out of it

over the years. Recently it has convinced me that we will one day get over our bullshit and escape the present hell that our species seems mired in. I know that doesn't make much sense now, but give me some time. I'll explain why. But first it's probably time for some ats. We're back, and the first thing I need you to understand about all of these fucking cats is that in every mauling caught on tape, and there are dozens of them, I see no anger or malice in the actions of

these cats. I don't even see hunger. It's clear to me, as a cat owner, that the cats didn't see these people, Tippy and her family and the cast and crew, as prey or as a threat. If anything, they saw them as fellow big cats, cousins and close kin who they extend to kind of familiarity and perhaps even a kind of love that, since they are cats, is expressed primarily by batting at them with claws that hit like bowie knives embedded in the hood of a speeding camri. If

you have cats of your own, you understand now. Given that nearly every person on this film was badly injured, including Tippy who got gang green from infected cat wounds, and all of her children, you might feel inclined to judge who are a knol or both of them for risking their kids lives to make this insane movie. I understand the impulse, but I believe it to be an error.

The first thing you need to see to understand the deeper dynamics going on with War is a picture from a Playboy magazine photoshoot of Tippy's husband and co star, Noel Marshall. He's in his office on his typewriter and this fully grown male lion gets up on his desk because it wants attention again normal cat behavior, And despite the best efforts of this animal, who has to weigh five hundred pounds, Noel Marshall won't stop focusing on his work, and so the cat inches away from his face roars.

The sound of a male lion's roar is deeply imprinted on all of us, an epigenetic memory passed down by the handful of our ancestors who heard the sound up close and lived to tell the tale. It has such a foundational impact on our mind that Metro Goldwyn Meyer the film studio, used it to open every movie they made from nineteen twenty eight on. I believe they did this because the sound is a sort of hack to

compel our attention. It pulls an audience out of whatever state of mind dominates their outside lives and makes them more attentive to the film that is to come. And so the first thing you need to understand about the people who made Roar is that Marshall, upon having a living adult lion inches from his face roar, gives the creature a look that says, hey, man, can you give me a second. I'm like, I'm in the middle of something.

I bring this up so that you will understand that these were not people operating on anything close to the same wavelength as you and I. Their lives and their choices are to outsiders inconceivable. There's another great photo from the set of that Playboy shoot. While the camera people roamed the Heddroom compound, one of them caught a shot

of Tippy's adolescent daughter, Melanie, jumping into a pool. An adult male lion, which he must have considered to be in some way a member of the family, as this girl passing by in the corner of its eye, and that motion ignites an instinct inside it, so like any cat of that size in the same situation, it reaches out to bite her. Afterwards, the Hedron family and the cast and crew had complicated feelings about what happened that extended to the present day. Tippy divorced Marshall almost as

soon as the filming finally wrapped. She is alleged that while Roar was being made, he utterly ignored her well being. She also does not seem to have ever seriously considered leaving. She later wrote that she quote was into it every bit as much as he was, and that production was an obsessive, addictive drama. John Mitchell, Nol's son, who acted in the movie and like everyone else, was mauled repeatedly, came to own the rights to Roar when his dad died in twenty ten. Dad was a fucking asshole to

do that to his family, he said recently. He also said this, it was amazing to live through that. I should have died many times, but I kind of want to do it again. If you have any friends or family who have survived extended periods of every combat, there's a good chance they may have expressed a variation of the same feeling. This is because trauma is sometimes a drug taking. It can be more than just hell. It's often also a high, which is one thing that drives

a lot of people crazy. I need to take a moment away from Rohar to talk about some people that I met in twenty seventeen in Iraq during the desperate and ferocious urban combat against Isis. The closer I drew to the front, the more guys I met who were elite veterans of the Iraqi Special Forces. They did the bulk of the fighting. These were mostly young men ranging from the tail end of their teens to their twenties.

Many had grown up in places like Fallujah fighting from the time they were seven or eight, sometimes younger, they'd been born into the US occupation. In many cases, their earliest memories were as runners, ferrying supplies and information to the older men and teenage boys who did most of the fighting. When the opportunity presented itself, they sometimes dropped grenades or improvised explosive devices on US troops, most of whom were teenagers themselves.

Mustangs and dodged chargers. The trunks fold to bursting with so many machine guns and rocket launchers they could only be closed with bungee cords. The guns and rockets were useful at a distance to soften up enemy positions, and the impossibly dense warrenlike urban environment of Mosl's old city. In every building, on every block, the fighting terminated with door to door, room to room battles, where the most useful weapons were hand grenades, combat knives, and pistols in

that order. I don't know if any of these guys were, at that point that I met them, capable of feeling what Uuri would recognize as fear. These were the men and boys whose bodies formed the cutting edge of the fighting against Isis and Mosl on occasion when they kidnapped Ice. As fighters, some of them committed war crimes with the ease and with as much thought as you and I give to breathing. This is bad, of course, unforgivable, but I've never really given much thought to judging them for it.

Where would I even start. A thing I've come to understand in my travels is that human beings are capable of contorting themselves into the most incredible shapes in order to fit into the times they're forced to live in. This has been the story of our entire long journey on this earth, and if there is one reason our species has survived above all the others, it is our

capacity for infinite variety and infinite contexts. We can make ourselves into anything if we're given the right incentives, and to an extent, you can't judge individual humans without judging the incentives the world we collectively create presents for them.

We evolved, and we still live in a world where trauma and pain are inevitable, and those of us who survive the worst things that life can throw at us tend to become addicted, sometimes to the cause of the trauma, but nearly always to the people we experience it with. This is why the cast and crew of Roar often reported feeling almost addicted to spending time among these gigantic predators, and it's why many kept coming back despite being repeatedly maimed.

Roar happened because the core cast and crew exhibited radical empathy for roughly one hundred and forty large cats and for each other, and almost exercised zero critical judgment beyond that point. Now, I will understand if you still feel that nothing could justify the decision of two parents to

risk their children's lives in such folly. And I know this essay is supposed to be my ultimate enduring optimism about mankind's potential, and I'm going to get to that, but you know, we still live in twenty twenty five. So first, here's ads. So here's my best step at explaining why I find RAR inspirational. There's a scene about

three quarters of the way through this movie. After roughly an hour straight of watching the Hedron, Marshall family and their friends get repeatedly mulled for real by giant cats. And in this scene, John Marshall finds a dirt bike and engineers a scenario that I am certain has never happened before or since in the history of this planet. He rides away from the home where his family is trapped and draw several dozen lions, panthers, and tigers away

by making them chase him. The cats assume this is a game and repeatedly try to murder or maim him, but he continues building up speed in an ever greater tale of the most lethal killing machines to evolve on this planet. You can see from the look in John's eyes in this scene that he has no idea. If he seconds away from death, it would have been physically impossible to stop or control this number of giant cats.

The only reason this number and variety of lions, panthers, and tigers would ever have existed together at any previous point in world history, would have been across a distance

of thousands of miles of rugged wilderness. But thanks to Tippean Knowles's insane dream, and thanks to the deranged and utterly unjustifiable commit of many of the crew and their family, a moment of utter novelty occurs where the singular assortment of big cats watches as a man fleeing in terror from them on a dirt bike does one of the sickest jumps in film history and lands directly into a river, and then keeps riding until he is charged by a

juvenile African elephant, which the Adrons also kept on their property. In its uniqueness, this moment has to rival, if not exceed, the Moon landing. After all, considerably more men have stepped foot on the Moon than have achieved what John Marshall does in this scene, although some of that may be due to the fact that it is extremely illegal for

anyone today to even try. And this is why I encourage you to watch Roar My Dear Friends during the Dark Times, not because it's a good movie, but because it reveals what is best about humanity, What piece of

art could better illustrate the infinite possibilities within us. If a group of human beings can learn to live among lions and tigers, I fight the constant guarantee of severe injury without really understanding why is it's so mad to think that perhaps we two can transcend the barbarities of our age and become something better, or at least something

far stranger than money grubbing fascists. I don't know how we escape the darkness that seems to encroach a bit further with each passing day, but I do know this, If we can make war, we can do anything.

enforcement in general. We have spent a good amount of time covering a bunch of different angles of this, but there is another incredibly distressing angle that we have not covered as much yet, which is their targeting of labor organizers and with me to talk about that is Mark Medina from Portland Jobs with Justice and the Coalition of Independent Unions And yeah, Mark, welcome to the show.

able to take this on head first. We as activists, as organizers, have to look at this and see it as an actual thing in our day to day that we have to combat and incorporate into our organizing. So maybe it might be a little helpful to start off with a little bit of a backstory on if I mean this need us by Lassay. So the union has its origins going back to twenty thirteen. The area in which they organize, the Bellingham or the Washington walkingscadget areas,

has a very particular type of immigrant community there. Lelo himself is of Mextco background. There's a lot of indigenous Mexican populations in the region. It also want to have long routes. A lot of these people go back generations, have been here for quite some time. This area also happens to be very particularly with the non Hispanic population, particularly the white population, a very conservative, particularly conservative for the area. It's one of the very few areas of

Northwest that Donald Trump came to visit. It's an area that has had repeated attacks on then imbric community. And so it's in this context that workers are organizing in twenty thirteen for this first independent union. And two it's important to mention the independent part of it. A lot of the organizers from the start of this of the union came from a tradition of the United farm Workers in California. They some of them worked with such jabas

in the heyday of the United farm Workers. And in the years and decades since then, since the Dolana boycotts and other things, there's been a growing rift of what

the next steps should be. And I think that for a lot of farm workers, because they don't organize under the general labor law that we have for most workers, there is a sort of patchwork system for how farm working organizing happens in the United States that's dependent upon different states and legislatures, and for the most part, with the exception of only two states, farm workers don't have the same kind of protections that regular workers generally in

the society have for union recognition for collective bargaining. Only Washington and New York at the moment, I believe, have laws that allow for elections for farm worker unions, and there's a very particular reason for that being the case.

Farm workers were excluded from the Wagner Act for having general labor rights in the nineteen thirties because precisely it was seen as immigrant labor and immigrants were not seen as meriting the same rights as white Americans in the same way that domestic workers were removed because I was seen at the time as black labor. So it has its roots and racism.

I grew up in Bluid High It's East Los Angeles. Says that Travis and Knight farm worker murals are everywhere. You know, me and my friends would often joke, as said Javis is like the patron Saints. It is Los Angeles, even though it's nowhere near Delano. And there's a reason for that. I think that a lot of us looked up to the United farm Workers. We looked up to the farm worker Union movement, and we saw in them our heroes, our modern day heroes. We saw them. We saw people

who said, be proud to be brown. You know, there's a courage that comes from that history. The union movement that then sprung up in twenty thirteen in the Bellingham Northern Washington area was coming out of that milieu. They understood that background, they understood that history, but they also understood that there was very little organizing in the region. There was a lot of fear in the region. It's very difficult to organize farm workers. To have access to

a lot of these areas. You have to cross just private property for quite some time before you reach the first farm workers, and it becomes very very difficult to

have organizing happen and it's intentional that way. The rise and farmers unions that happened in the sixties and seventies had a massive plummet by the time they begin into the nineteen two thousands, and so these workers had heard these stories, had heard by this legacy, but had been essentially deliver with increasing frustration, racist behavior by bosses, lower and lower pay, and the use of certain types of

immigrants to try to scab their jobs. It be the capitalist class using one type of worker against another type of worker, picking them against each other. It's in this context in twenty thirteen that this union starts to form. They go public at that time period, they call for recognition, and they started taking action directly, and they organized this years and years long boycott campaign to gain recognition, to

get the employer to start bargaining. And after years and years of this and coourt battles and the employer trying to lay everyone off and hire certain types of newer immigrants coming in to replace all of them, putting one worker against another, all these types of maneuvers, by twenty seventeen, these workers win a contract, and the philosophy of the union since then has been not just to grow this union, but also for them to be able to stand on their own two feet. Their idea is that they are

very proud of their independent nature of that union. They're not part of the afl CIO, they're not part of the Nice farm Workers, They're not part of any other organization. You know, when I spoke to some of their leaders last year, one of the things that came to mind was they brought up a quote from Eugene Debts, the notion of like, if we were to lead you into the promised Land, someone else would just lead out. And the notion of their union is we have to be

able to stand on our two feet. We can't rely on anyone else, because if they promise us things today tomorrow, they'll hold something over us. And so the notion that farm workers lead this movement and leave this union is an incredibly powerful statement of what working class people can do. The kinds of workers that everyone else kinds of looks at.

They could never do it. These you know, these workers could never handle this kind of level of struggle and couldn't do this kind of organization have built one of the most powerful independent farm worker unions in the West Coast, Lelo Alfredo Lelo was a founding member of this union.

He was a farm worker studying at the age of twelve, and since then devoted his entire life organizing to helping workers, to being the kind of person who commits himself to the work of making the world a better place than you found it. You know, at twenty five, he is significantly younger than me. And when I think of people who I look up to, who I think as Wow, when I grew up, I want to be someone like that, I think of Lelo.

this entire time. You know, that has been a major focus of everything that they've been doing. And you know, what we're seeing right now seems like a massive sort of escalation in the degree of repression. So, yeah, can we talk about the recent black bagging Alilo and yeah, and sort of what happens and where we go from there.

The Trump administration, however, is now doing this on a level that is, at least to a lot of us unheard of in the modern day, which is to go after specific union leaders in the labor movement, to go after civil rights leaders. You've seen this happen also when it comes to Palistinian rights activists around the country. The idea is pretty simple to silence the loudest voices, to

cut to leadership from the movement. On March twenty fifth, Alfredo Lelo Barres was dropping off his girlfriend at a nearby farm for work and was accosted by ICE agents as he was exercising his rights or what he thought his rights were at the time because of the regime, who knows what your rights are. They broke his window,

they dragged him out of his car. You know, this was obviously very traumatic incident, but also is a real shock to the union to see to see the community group that works with the union, and to the local Hispanic community in the area. Within hours of that, workers organizers community went to move to try to carry a response, knowing that time was of the essence. It was then taken to a local life facility. He's now since been

moved to a detention center in Tacoma, Washington. A large rally of hundreds took place calling for his immediate release. What we know now seemingly is that at the very last minute apologies I forget the exact day, but it was within a couple of days of the kidnapping, Lelo was pulled off. He has an automatic stay of deportation in place at this point, no longer has any legal authority to remove Lelo. If this came at the last minute. He was in line for deportation and was moved at

the very last minute. However, while this is good news, this is not good for someone's personal health and well being. These are massively cramped facilities, underfunded facilities. You know, there's horror stories around the country of the conditions in some of these places. Every day that Lelo is stuck behind these prison walls is an injustice to our movement.

We have gotten the stay of the deportation, but we have not we have not brought down.

this goes on. And I think something critical about you know, one of the first things you were saying here about the fact that they're targeting sort of the loudest voices in the community. And I think a big part of this is that they know that their position isn't as strong as they're making it out to be. Right, Like they have just detonated a nuke across the entire economy.

They are systemically going through and individually fucking over every single group of people who are supposed to be their base. And I think part of what they're doing is they're trying to spread sort of raw terror and spread fear and you know, and and attack the critical infrastructure of organizing because they want to make it look like resisting them as impossible and that's just not true. They can be.

years and years and years. It showed that no matter how powerful some of these companies are, some of the CEOs are that the power of workers overwhelmed and the power solidarity overwhelms. And they know that going after leadership, going after some of the most some of the bravest people in our movement is a way of trying to hit the movement at the knees and trying to convince folks that struggle is impossible. But I think it is important to remember that what we're doing, the struggle now,

the response. This is how we show the population the world, you know, our communities, that they are not inevitable, it is not insurmountable and so and by taking action responding to the kinds of fascistic behaviors of the state. We show how people the state can be at times, even when it seems it's most treacherous and awful.

in the First Hump administration. They absolutely wanted to be doing this kind of shit, and they were able to do a lot of terrible stuff, but they weren't able to sort of go this far because of the kind of mass mobilizations that shut down a lot of the

kinds of things that they wanted to do. And I think that's a kind of victory that is hard to kind of like process because all we see is, you know, the suffering that did happen, and we can never see an image of like all of the people you know, who got to continue living their lives because we stop them, And that I think is another sort of powerful tool here. But also we do have an opportunity to make sure that we can beat them right here, right now in a way that's very very public, and.

their shops and their factories and their unions. But this right here is an attack on the labor movement. Had this been the head of you know, the Electricians Union, the head of the SCIU, Had this been an attack on what a lot of America would view as the

mainstream labor movement, this would be headlines. Yeah. The fact that it isn't shows, and that it has been so much work to try to get attention to a union leader being picked up and kidnapped by the state should be you know, a blaring red light on the labor movement to take action immediately.

of the wages of transphobia. But you know, they've been going to bat for like the turf tariffs, right, And that I think is part of why they've been sort of unable to like respond to this moment, and why they've been unable to respond to the past fucking fifty years of moments, which is that like, if you're sort of like labor politics is rooted in this sort of like American nationalist, like American jobs for American workers stuff, right, and it's not actually based in the power of workers

and the power of workers everywhere, then you're going to lose. It's it's not just sort of reactionary politics also it is it's also bad politics, and we're seeing it right now.

And you compare that to the high of the labor movement in the forties and the fifties when it was in the hundreds, and you've had strike actions all the time, and that is what builds so much at what we call the middle class for some And it was this really historic moment at the time, and we're in a historic moment now where I think the labor movement for

so long from that point, has been trying. Workers from the rank and file have been trying to kind of reshape the labor movement in the thoughts and the ideas of the new But it comes with its own regressive setbacks, and it comes with its own shortcomings of leadership. You know, the teams tours making statements around immigration rights was a very unfortunate thing to be said in the modern day.

In the modern context, I think that you know, other unions seemingly looking to you know, circle the wagons rather than take the risks that need to happen in this current time has really shown a lack of imagination from some of the mainstream unions. And the thing is, I hope for the best for them. I want them to succeed and I want them to get better because the

world is a better place we're having these larger unions. However, if the independent movements, the independent unions like Familias who need this Quo Thesia, like these other unions in the region, that can be the kind of canary in the coal mine, the kind of labs of experimentation that can be the first people out to do some of the most radical

and interesting and worker centric type of movement building and messaging. Like, I think there is the reason why it was the coalition of independent unions here in the Pacific Northwest that came up with the notion of having transity of solidarity, this idea of patterning contracts together to have inclusive and pre for trans workers and having that be a thing

that unions take up together. I think that it's incredibly notable that it's group's life, I mean us who need as Yeah, they carry out this long years long boycott and created a model by which other workers in the region can not just organize themselves, but organize themselves on

a low cost, member led democratic model. I think it's important to see that sometimes the large unions have to start looking at some of the radical pragmatism that comes from the necessities of these smaller independent campaigns.

of them got fucking liquidated anyways. So those are your options, right, You either stand and fight now with the independent unions, or you become part of the regime and eventually get liquidated. When you know, Trump in like fucking two and a half years science executive order that says unions are illegal or whatever.

you give it up for another generation. Then when workers, when people look myself growing up, looking at images of the United farm Workers, there are similar I presume there are similar people in the United States growing up who look that way up to the Unitedado Workers, look that way up to the Teachers' Union. What happens to those children, to those kids, those young people who want to be the next leadership, the next era of the labor movement, they will not look at us as having the moral

high ground. We give that up. We give our role in history, our moral role in history to fight with a working class when we do things like this.

that should stand in solidarity. And when we heard this needs to go down, activists within the CiU asked themselves, we can't stand idly by while a leader in our movement is kidnapped by the state. We need to take action, and so we did. And the point was to move as quickly as possible to try to build a larger voice for Lelo while he is in detention. So there is a good number of activists here in the Portland area. We can be of service to the farm Workers Union.

You know, we have a strong core of independent unions here in the Pacific Northwest, particularly in the Portland area. We can do what other unions are hesitant to do, which is take action immediately. It stands firmly with our

brothers and sisters are monosynas up in northern Washington. So what's happening is the call from the union is workers individually, for people individually to call into the Attorney General in Washington State and call to the release of Lelo, also calling the new governor up in Washington State to call

for the release. Bring a wider attention, making me known that this person is someone who is important to the community, cannot be expirited away to another country where they are not from, where that is not their home, and taking away from their family, the community, from the good work that they do. And the other thing that we're trying to do is we're trying to get local officials to also use their voice to maximize the pressure to give more attention to this issue. So that's the call so far.

This rally that we're having in front of city Hall on Saturday, April twelfth at two pm is the beginning of what we hope is a larger campaign that will not end until Lelo is free and until these raids

stop attacking the labor movement in the Pacific Northwest. You know, just because we in Portland, you know, are not farm workers, because we don't work with farm workers, because a lot of the workers who work here had maybe never met a farm worker, it does not mean that we should not stand shoulders shoulder and arm and arm and support the farm workers Union up in northern Washington to the hilt. And this begins this fight building that kind of level

of solidarity. It begins by showing up for them doing what they can do right now. They don't have the resources to go stay by day in city by city to bring its tension and awareness to one of their leaders being attacked. But we can do it, and if we can do it, we should do it. It's a moral imperative that little be free.

more attention to these causes. And so with that one paving earning contracts together, particularly on this one issue of tresender health care and trans incluencive language and contracts and codifying that between unions and having that a demand of labor movement that they not walk away from this. We want to also do the same thing with this fight for freedom for the farm Workers Union and their leaders

and workers everywhere. And the tax will come soon enough, I suppose, I would imagine from this regime in Washington, if this works, we want workers in other cities to start assisting the farm worker Union take them up the call of action and fighting for so not just let up, but whoever comes afterwards, because there will be lettles in

the future, unfortunate as they may be. So if this works here, if workers here, as they hear more updates, we would hope and we would love if workers elsewhere, if organizing groups elsewhere would want to take up this fight and bring attention to the cause.

That also doesn't mean that whatever kind of organizing that you're doing doesn't overlap with this and doesn't have capacity that they can bring to bear to stop the entire deportation regime that we're facing right now. And that's something that you have to do both on the level of solidarity, on a moral level, and also on a strategic level, because again is going to come for you too.

world better off than we found it. And we also believe in what we're doing because when we look at people who have been attacked by corporations and attacked by the state, we feel in moral compulsion to help. And what I would say to folks who are outside of Portland who are hearing this story who hear the calls to call the Attorney General in Washington State and demand

that they'll be released. To follow up with the union by media Plicia further direction on how they can assist and potentially holding their own rallies and support and solidarity and bring attention to the issue. I would hope that they do this. Imagine if Letlo were your brother, Imagine if Leto were your cousin, your father, your friend, Act as if they were they were them, because it require that level of to have the kind of solidarity that we need in order to fight this fastest regime and

everything that it does. It is easy to say I will wait for someone else to do the work. I will, someone else will come along and it'll get resolved that way. No, if you don't do the work, it just will not

get done. And so we have to go in every day as part of civic engagement and assisting the working class, as part of our daily routines and using the kind of the kind of sense of moral necessity and of immediate action it requires that you would do for someone that was close to you, because this person is you just by another name, This person is your family. Even

if you've never met them. We are all in this together as working class people, and if we start coming up with boundaries and reasons for why we shouldn't stand up for one another, those reasons then become excuses for

everyone else. So I would hope that when people hear this, they look and see the struggle of this person, and they can imagine what would happen to them in the future, and they say, I would want someone there for me in my corner, in my time of me, So I will be there for them and theirs.

away Greece, but surely they will never take you. And you know, I mean, that's the thing that people in the thirties woke up to, right is you know, if you're in this country and this is the thing that you're waking up to now, is that, Yeah, the soldiers are taking people away, and every day they're taking away more and more people and one day you wake up

and they've taken entire countries. And the only way that you can stop this is by making sure that the action that you're taking is not just waking up and going back to sleep. Right, Yep, you have to take a stand. You have to fight because no one is coming. The only person who was coming for these people, the only person who was coming for the people coming next to them, and inevitably the only people who is coming to save you when they come for you is going

to be you. And you know there there are enough of us to stop them, right there always have been. That's that's always been a thing about fascism is that it relies on us not fighting them, but relies on us on our passivity. It relies on us not caring enough about the people that they take first, you know, to sit back and do nothing and think that we can wait, and you can't have You have to start right now, and you have to stop them before they advance any further. And you have to roll back what

they've already done. And this is our opportunity to do that.

the mystery and drudgery of non union workplaces. You can do it too. You can create. You have it in your head, in your own mind and your own ends, the ability to organize, the ability to fight with your coworkers, you have the kind of clever problem solving skills that every worker has in order to come back the boss and create a better world than the one that currently exists.

And also that when it comes to issues like standing up for this struggle now and struggles in the future, I would say you have it now, the creative capacity to in whatever city you're in, to make connections to build inroads with the labor movement, to build inroads with working class people, and to try to create those bonds that happen. We here are trying to build closer bonds

with city workers and farm workers out out in the country. Yeah, it's an important struggle because one it's going to be more and more important in the future. You don't have to wait for anyone else to tell you how to do that. You yourselves can show solidarity and work together to build those kinds of bonds now so that in the future you can create working class movements that whether that takes the form of collective bargaining or something else.

Organizing for the common good is useful no matter in what legal capacity it happens.

good people. Like, they're good people, they're good organizers. They don't know anything that you can learn, Like, a lot of these people are just literally college students right, who are recruited like from college campuses and are thrown with no training into organizing these things, right, And you know, and again these are people who are just like stepping out of classrooms into like into these organizing scenarios with very minimal training, and they've been able to do it.

And if those people can do it, so can you, Like, I know you, I know, I know these organizers and the only difference between them and you is that they spent some time learning some things and then they apply the same tools like they apply in some ways worse versions of the same tools that the independent union organizers use. And they're all tools that you can learn.

defeat this regime one way or another. But I think that we, particularly in the independent union space, provide a unique possibility for how this can happen because since we are not tied to larger established contracts. We're not tied to jurisdictional disputes, We're not tied to a lot of the legacies of some of the larger unions, God bless them. We can create and fashion a labor movement that doesn't

have to live by those rules. You know, if you imagine the idea of what it would look like to refound the CIO in the nineteen thirties, if you could imagine the worst aspects of the labor movement and excising them, and what is the best aspects of labor movement that you would want to see, we can create that together today.

And today it takes the form of standing up in solidarity with LELO and farm Workers Union up northern Washington, not because we get anything from it, not because it's easy, but precisely because it is difficult, and precisely because it is a moral compulsion on us to take action today for it. We don't have to wait for anyone to tell us what to do. As part of an independent labor movement, we get to decide our future and our faith, and we get to decide our struggles.

and focus on yourselves and navel gaze indefinitely. No. No. The way that you find out the kind of person that you are, and the way that you build the kind of future that you want for yourselves or families, for your communities, for the people that you don't even know and never will meet, what you want a good life for them. The way that you do that is you take action. Now, you start organizing, You do what you can, you build what you can. That's how we do this.

Like we said earlier, they want you to believe that the fighter is already over, the history has already been written. They only say that because they know it's not true. Yep, and me and other people who talk like this, who are as optimistic and as hopeful and is fight. Ready. We don't believe this out of nowhere. We believe this because we truly do see that the better world is possible if we fight.

a fascinating and simple project to pick up. I was enamored with the philosophy behind it, so I generally spent a few months on and off trying to learn it. I was probably a decade ago at this point, so I don't remember too much about it, but the connection was there. And it's really because I've been exploring this topic for this episode that I ended up going back

and dabbling in some of it again. I've learned recently this is actually somewhat of a connection between Esperanto and anarchism, so I stayed the time to explore the origins of Esperanto. It's anarchist connections, it's flaws and its future. My name is Andrew Sage, and I'm here once again.

with racial and national conflict. He was trying to promote peace and understanding, and he saw an international language as a ways to do that, with a flag of green and white, the colors of hope and peace. For his efforts, Zamenhoff himself was nominated fourteen times for the Nobel Peace Prize. He genuine believed that if we all shared a common second language, quote, education, ideals, convictions, aims would be the same too, and all nations would be united in a

common brotherhood. End quote. Esperanto was created in a time when modernism was on the rise and the idea of rationality and science was being used to quote un quote optimize the world. When it was featured in Paris's Exposition Universal in nineteen hundred, the language caught on amongst the French intelligensia, who saw it as more optimal than the

messy and the logical realm of natural languages. Because it was so easy, all words and sentences being built from sixteen basic rules that could fit on a paper, and the language lacks the confusing exceptions and special rules of other languages, it was once seen as the language of the future. Esperanto made its full fledged public debut in nineteen oh five when seven Hoff published The Fundamental Esperanto, which laid down the basic principles of languages structure and formation.

Esperanto was designed to be simple, logical, and accessible, drawn from the influence of Romance, Germanic and Slavic languages and its construction. The orthography is phonetic, so all the words are spelled as pronounced, and the grammar is so straightforward. There's a consistent word ending for nouns. Pluralization adjectives and verbs. But although simple, it can couldvey complexity. A lot of suffixes you can add to give degrees of meaning, and

there's room for compound words too. It's European focus to be the target of criticism later on, but it actually ended up being picked up in some unusual places. Anyway, Zamenhoff translated literature and wrote original verse, and after years of effort, there were speakers to be found across Europe, the Americas, China, and Japan.

folks who were raised speaking Esperanto. Oh wow, yeah, it's really really really cool. Yeah, but L two speakers are somewhere between thirty eight thousand l to being you know, second language speakers are somewhere between thirty eight thousand to two million. According to Wilfith's article on Esperanto and anarchism. There are tens of thousands of books in Esperanto and

several hundred, mostly swam periodicals that appear regularly. Yeah Party a day passes about international meetings such as those of specialized organizations, conferences, youth get togethers, seminars, group holidays, and regional meetings. There are several radio stations that broadcast programs in Esperanto, and Esperanto has even been used by couples of different origins as a family language.

many offshoots from Esperanto proper. Even Zamenhoff would try to reform the language at one point in eighteen ninety four, but it was rejected by the Esperanto community and eventually even himself. These reforms would later be used to develop Edo, another attempt at universal language, with far less success. I also learned theo Wikipedia there was an attempt to make Esperanto more complex by introducing Cherokee components called Policepo, created

by a Native American activist named Billy ray Walden. Esperanto speakers continue to play the language in all sorts of ways. To this day. Esperanto is an evolved in language, and Samonhoff himself is honored as part of this global Esperanto culture. They celebrate his birthday the fifteenth of December, statues and streets and plaques remembering him worldwide, and even an asteroid

there's his name. At one point, according to the BBC article, there was an effort to establish an Esperanto speaking land called ami Kejo, which would have been a three point five square kilometer territory between the Netlands, Germany and France. Yeah. Nice, three point five square kilometers.

And I'm not going to do a French accent for this section, but just imagine, like the most French Frenchman reading this, that Finns or Albanians have fevered such a proper ganda is comprehensible. Their dialect has no chance of imposing itself on the universe. They need a second language just as well Esperanto as any other. But that French people or English or Germans could have let themselves be allured by this linguistic bolsheviser that is far more extraordinary.

It is nevertheless a fact that Esperando, which was born twenty five years ago and ought to have died through ridicule, continues to have disciples in Europe. Every year in a different capital they hold a congress at which they are not very numerous, but where they make a great noise. They get so excited that quite recently the Minister of Public Instruction had to address a circular to all the French educational resorts to warn them against the danger of Esperanto.

An article in the Washington Herald on that same day explained the danger, at least according to the Ministry of Public Instruction. The reason for this order, according to Sittin school teachers, is that teaching of a language as easy as Esperanto endangers the existence of the French language and thus the national solidarity of the country. They contend that children will nationally take to an easy language as Esperanto, and in that time French and English would perish, and

that the literary standard of the world would be debased. Furthermore, they argue that a national language plays a predominant part in maintaining national unity, and points to Poland and the Rain as examples. Esperanto is an artificial language of no real merit right to one professor, it has no very definite origin and what it aims to draw the scattered people of the world together, does it doth rather tend to de nationalization? End quote?

still underrepresented in many parts of Africa and Asia. The majority of Esperanto speakers today are in Europe. Those development outside of Europe deserves some attention, as Esperanto managed to levermark in China, Iran, Togo and the Democratic Republic of Congo. But the response to Esperanto historically you should give you an indication as to how anarchists must have felt about Esperanto. As an internationalist or anti nationalist movement. Anarchism was very

supportive of the Esperanto project won. Running through the timeline could to see Wilfirth's Esperanto and Anarchism. One of the earliest anarchist Esperanto groups was founded in Stockholm in nineteen oh five. The same year, the anarchist Paul up with a Lot founded the monthly magazine Esperanto. Similar groups soon emerged in Bulgaria, China and other countries. In nineteen oh six, anarchists anarchist Sinicolis founded an international association Paco Libreco Peace Freedom,

which published the Internacia Socia Review. By nineteen ten, Paco Libreco merged with Esperantista Labarri Staro to form Liberiga Stillo star Liberation, strengthening anarchist Esperanto networks. The nineteen oh seven International Anarchist Congress in Amsterdam formally addressed the role of Esperanto in international communication. Subsequent anarchist congresses continue to pass

resolutions advocating for Esperanto's use within the movement. By nineteen fourteen, these anarchist esperantist organizations had published extensive revolutionary literature, including anarchist texts in Esperanto. Around this time, correspondence between European and Japanese anarchists became more active, facilitated by Esperanto. In Prague, Eugene Adam proposed the formation of Senassa Associo Tutmunda the

SAT or the World in National Association. Unlike other Esperanto associations, SAT rejected nationalism wholesale and sought to create a transnational

class conscious workers movement. To quote why is there an Esperanto Workers Movement by Gary Michel, SAT was not meant to usurp the role of political parties by engaging in political struggles directly, but was to be a cultural association engaged in workers education, one that would help to break down national and ethnic barriers between workers by involving them in practical collective activity, bringing workers into contact, freeing them

from the shackles of nationalism. SAT's idea, and especially the ideas of its a nationalist faction, were an early statement of an idea that has more recently come to be known as globalization from below. So in August nineteen twenty one, seventy nine workers from fifteen countries gathered in Prague to formally established SAT. By nineteen twenty nine to nineteen thirty SAT had grown to six five hundred and twenty four

members across forty two countries, reaching its peak influence. The use of Esperanto flourished in German workers' movements between nineteen twenty and nineteen thirty three. By nineteen thirty two, the German Workers Esperanto League had four thousand members, leading to Esperanto being called the Workers Latin. But as you can imagine, this was not to last. By the time Hitler came

into power. The Scientific Anarchist Library of the International Language or ISAB, was founded in the USSR in nineteen twenty three, published in anarchist works by Kropotkin and Ann Borivoi in Esperanto. This also would not last. The Great Purge The Berlin group of anarchist cyniclist esperantists created the Second Congress of the International Workers Association in Amsterdam in nineteen twenty five and reported that Esperanto had become so integrated into their

movement that an international libertarian Esperantist organization had formed. This likely referred to the TLEs the World League of Steepless Esperantists, which later merged with SAT. Esperanto was also popping off amongst anarchists and socialists in Korea, China, and Japan. Liushifu, a key figure in Chinese anarchism, began publishing La Voucho de la Popolo, The Voice of the People in nineteen thirteen,

the first anarchist periodical in China. His work relied heavily on information from Internacia Socia Review and helped popularize esperanto in China. Japanese anarchists and socialists, as I mentioned, were among the earliest esperantists in the country, but faced heavy persecution and sadly between imperial Japan, Francoist Spain, Nazi Germany, and Stalinist Russia. The rise of tatalitarian regimes lead into

World War II, largely suppressed the anarchist esperanto movement. After the war, the Paris Anarchist Esperanto group was the first to resume organized work, launching the publication sen Santano in nineteen forty six. Most anarchist Esperantists have since been organized within SAT, with an anarchist faction maintaining its autonomy. In nineteen sixty nine, this faction began publishing the Liberal Sana Bultano,

later a day in the Liberate Sana Liguillo. By nineteen ninety seven, SAT membership had dwindled to fewer than fifteen hundred members. The initial radical vision of SAT was weakened by political shifts and the growing dominance of English as a global lingua franca. Daily separation between SAT and mainstream Esperanto organizations was a response to bourgeois political neutrality, but it also contributed to its marginalization, and today the anarchist

esperanto movement exists largely as a niche within SAT. So what can we say about the role of Esperanto today. Well. One of the more interesting currents I found in the esperanto community mentioned by Firth is Raumismo, a philosophy named after the Finnish city of Rauma, where a youth congress in nineteen eighty helped define this approach. Braumismo views Esperanto speakers as a kind of linguistic diaspora, a cultural group bound together by a shared language rather than a national identity.

Instead of focusing on making Esperanto a universal second language, raumistoge embraced it as just one language among many, valuing its use in literature, culture and everyday communication without any grand ideological ambitions. But it's possible Esperanto who can still play a role in facilities in exchange and collaboration between people of different linguistic backgrounds. A German anarchist once lamented

the barrier international understanding quoted in food article. More or less in isolation from one another, we work and fight without engaging in exchange about our victories and defeats, and with thoughts supporting and encouraging one another. Intensifying contact above the regional level with people having similar ideas and aims should be an important component of our work in order to make effective active solidarity possible quote. And that's the trouble.

Even today. Linguistic barriers hinder international cooperation groups struggle to maintain foreign language correspondence, organize multilingual meetings, or find interpreters. Instead, communication tends to rely on chance. You know, someone in a group happens to speak a certain language that determines who they can connect with. But when those key individuals

move on, those connections can have falling apart. So I get the appeal, I mean, wouldn't it be beneficial for these movements and for any interest group working across language barriers, to have a relatively easy to learn, politically neutral means of communication. Major languages like English, Spanish or French don't fully solve the problem, as they come with historical baggage

and imbalances influency levels. Esperanto, on the other hand, provides a more equitable solution because everybody is from this starts and from the same point. Since it isn't tied to any one nation, it avoids the poodynamics that arise when non native speakers must conformed to the linguistic norms of dominant cultures. Unlike English, which often privileges native speakers and places others as perpetual learners, Esperanto fosters a more level

playin field. English is treated like a global lingua franca right now, But a lot of people leave school without ever developing an affluency to navigate an English dominated world, and English is not the easiest language to learn. Esperanto, regardless of weather ever, becomes a global standard, offers an alternative path. It can help people overcome language learning anxieties, as particularly those who feel disempowered by educational systems, and

it can inspire an interest in language itself. If you've ever met an Esperanto speaker, you know that they are very passionate about linguistics. More often than not, many of the speakers go on to study linguistics, language politics, or even lesser known languages. It's also a great way to develop translation skills in a friendly, cooperative environment. For monolingual English speakers, using Esperanto can be an eye open and experience. It puts them the shoes of those who never got

to rely on their native language in international settings. Rather than view an Esperanto as a competitor to other languages, perhaps a more productive approach is to see it as a tool for promoting multi lingualism, cultural exchange, and a more cosmopolitan mindset within the Esperanto speaking in the community. Opinions on its future vary widely, but one thing is clear. The question of how we communicate across linguistic divides is

still very much alive, and Esperanto offers but possible answer. However, as I alluded to Ilia, Esperanto is not without its critiques. As covered by Firth, Let's start with one of the most frequent critiques. Esperanto is an artificial language. Unlike the so called natural languages, which evolved organically over time, Esperanto was deliberately constructed. But here's the thing. Since the rise of the nation state, the line between natural and artificial

languages has become increasingly blurry. Many national languages, like standard German or Standard French, have been shaped by deliberate standardization, legal regulations, and media influence. In that sense, every language is to some degree engineered. Authors, storytellers, and ordinary speakers continuously influenced language development, meaning that Esperanto is not as different.

After all, it does continue to evolve. And here's where I think James Scott had a rather negative characterization of Esperanto as a purely high modess endeavor, as though all esperandos sought to make Esperanto, the official international language in se Meca State. He claims that Esperanto was created to replace the dialects and vernaculars of Europe, but such was never the case. It was always meant to be a

language used to facilitate communication. There was more than one motivation of Esperando's use, and boil in such an exercise and human creativity, and attempted a connection down to just

that status focus to me seems needlessly reductive. He also calls it quote an exceptionally thin language without any of the resonances, connotations, ready metaphors, literatures, oral histories, idioms, and traditions of practical use that any social embedded language already had end quote, which may be true when it began, but it's certainly not true now with over a century of use and evolution.

Eurocentric in the historical and political reach. Esperanto, in contrast, has evolved through influence from non European languages as well, particularly through its development in China and Japan. It's a glassenative word formation, a feature more common in languages like Twokish or Japanese and what some call the Hungarian period of Esperanto's history. So while Esperanto soo has European roots, it's global evolution challenges the idea that it is exclusively

European in character. Another critique is that Esperanto is sexist. The argument goes that because feminine forms are typically created by adding in to a base form like Laboristo worker become a Labristino female worker, the language assumes masculinity as a default, and while this is a valid concern, Esperanto differs from any European languages in a key way. It is not assigned grammatical gender to inanimate objects. A chair

isn't arbitrarily feminine like in French, or masculine like in German. However, in practice, gender bias can still creep in the basic form of noun is often assumed to be masculine, even though Esperanto allows for explicitly male forms as well. Like in any language, reducing linguistic sexism in Esperanto requires conscious effort in how people actually use it.

will on the subreddit if you want to. So, like when I hear in English language media it's referred to as latin x but like that's kind of a word that I struggle to say in Spanish, like it Latin ekie or like is it latiniques?

Like outside critique of the language seems to also ignore an inside movement within people who are Spanish first language speakers to create a organic, like gender neutral form, yeah, which could also happen in any language, right, Like, just because Esperanto has a certain form doesn't mean that people within that language who don't feel represented by them couldn't

create forms within that language better represent them exactly. And it's easier because you don't have like a government telling you you can't use it or whatever exactly exactly.

rise of the Internet changed the game for Esperanto. What was once difficult to learn and use daily has become far more accessible. For example, Esperanto is actually one of the most overrepresented languages on the Internet. The Esperanto Wikipedia has around two hundred and forty thousand articles, putting it in the same league as languages spoken by tens of

millions of people, like Turkish and Korean. Google and Facebook have offered Esperanto versions of their platforms for years, and language learning services like due Lingo have helped introduce it to a new generation of learners like myself. In fact, the people who developed Esperanto courses for due Lingo did so voluntarily, simply because they believed in the languages potential.

Esperanto has fostered a unique online community, and there's even a free hospitality network called Pasporta Servo where Esperanto speakers can stay with each other around the world, no money required, just a shared language and a common philosophy of global connection. Not everyone learns Esperanto for the same reasons. Some people seek intellectual challenge, some want a sense of unique community,

and others are drawn to its political neutrality. As communications lecturer Sara Marino points out in the BBC article, people engage in Esperanto for many different motivations, whether it's personal fulfillment, social inclusion, civic engagement, or just the simple joy of learning a new language. It's important and not to reduce Esperanto learners to a stereotype. Their reasons for participating are as diverse as the language itself. So where does Esperanto

stand today? It may never replace English as the global lingui franca, but perhaps there was never the point. Instead, it serves as a tool for promoting bilingualism, foster and cross cultural connections, and encouraging people to think differently about language itself. And I think that is worthy of its own reward. That's what I have for today, or power to all the people. Peace.

begins to decline again. So it's not a real it's the result of how short selling works that there has to be this thing that makes it temporarily look like it's rallying, but that that's really not what's happening.

it's not about the journey. It's about you know, the people you journey too. And Netanyahoo met with Trump, you know, someone whom he clearly feels very safe, and you know, I dare I say loving with and the two of them shared the most intimate bond that two elderly men who have committed war crimes can share, which is announcing a record budget for the United States military of one trillion dollars. Well, I should say, Trump stated it would

be in the vicinity of one trillion dollars. Now, does that mean possibly that very little is changing about the military budget? Yes, it does, and we'll get to that in a second, hag Seth, our secretary of Defense, made a post on Twitter right after saying Trump is rebuilding our military and fast. He also really bragged about that trillion dollar amount and said, ps, we intend to spend every tax pay dollar wisely on lethality and readiness.

defense programs. But it's actually unclear the way in which he phrased things and the way in which we like talk about the funding for national security, this could mean that basically the military will have pretty much the same, you know, something of an increase but not a mass, not really a significant difference from what it has now, and there will be more money into other defense related programs. So this is not like as massive a thing as

it might necessarily sound like. I think one thing that's sort of significant here is like how this comports with the way a lot of the folks and what we'll call the shit had left had talked about where there was this discussion that Trump's actually going to be you know,

bad for imperialism and the world machine. And you know, there was even talk as of a couple of months ago that they were going to like half the Pentagon budget, like you know, you know all these whatever else happens, you know, it's worth it if the military budget comes down in this you know, imperial juggernaut of hell gets finally neutered. And just all of those people are always wrong. They were always going to just make the army bigger. They were always going to put more money in defense.

They were always going to put more money into the hands of defense contractors. Like anyone who knows anything about these people or about how Republicans have worked, knew that was going to happen. There was never any chance that they were going to cut the actual amount of money.

Now they're probably going to cut the number of people in the military because despite what heck Seth said, there's a lot of evidence that a shitload of this is going to go towards modernization, and in fact, armed services, each branch is being our arm services are all being asked to cut about eight percent of their individual budgets in order to put money into modernization. Efforts, which obviously

any military needs to regularly modernize different systems. But this is also a thing where if your country is run entirely by grifters and conman trying to shotgun money to their political supporters who have a lot of money in different defense companies, what this means to me is you are probably going to see them continue to trim numbers of actual troops and put more money into bullshit that gets a lot of money to contractors. Yeah, that is

my expectation. That is what I see happening. More than anything here, we'll see, but I think a lot of this additional money is going to go towards buying shit that may or may not be useful. But the primary purpose of putting the money into that shit is because somebody who is somebody gets a veig.

doing great. I should also know to hear a big part of the money that they're going to get for modernizations coming from cutting fifty to sixty thousand civilian jobs, many of whom are veterans, but also just in terms of like military readiness, guys like hag Seth, who's primarily a push up dude, and people who don't know anything about the military see it as like, well, you know, the military, you just want as many door kickers as you possibly can, and you actually need very few of

those guys. Would need a lot of is guys that can move things to different places and fix things when they break, and do a lot of the paperwork that's necessary to make both of those things possible, which is why you need those jobs, and cutting a shitload of them is not likely to increase readiness. It's also worth noting that the US Army is looking at a force

reduction of up to ninety thousand active duty soldiers. This is based on an article from April fourth, which is a significant reduction, and again like, we're not.

The government is also soliciting for proposals this week to massively increase migrant detention, which again is not surprising, right, we talked about this last November, but it's also not great. But where I want to focus today is on the IRS and the Abbudegorgatia case we spoke about last week. So well, it's see inter reporting that the IRS has said it will hand over information of people who are subject to criminal investigation to DHS or ICE, right, ICE

being under DHS. They so, they say they What happened here is that if part of court filings, a memorandum of understanding between ICE and the IRS was released in the MoU or in the court filing. Actually they cite an offense of failure to depart the United States after being ordered removed. So essentially anyone who they're saying like, you have to go right, you know that they could

they could then ask for their tax return information. Exactly what the IRS will disclose to ICE is covered by a big black reaction in the court documents, so we don't know that the entiremus submitted, but like there's significant reactions in it, ICE has to hand One thing that's not redacted is that ICE has to hand over the person's name, address, and the crime of which they're for which they're investigating, and it has to be a non tax crime.

vacues from I guess. I'm also aware of ICE having memorandums of understanding with other agencies to include hud housing and urban development. All of this is going to reduce the amount that migrant communities engage with the federal government to any degree. Right, contrary to what you might have heard, undocupateed to people do tend to pay their taxes. It's actually relatively rare for them not to do that, and this might change if the RS starts handing over people's

tax return and information to ICE. Right, Obviously, if HUD starts handing over people's information, that's going to lead to people not being as willing to take housing benefits, more people landing up living on the street.

this is continuing anyway. What's also continuing is our obligation to pivot to acts, which we should do.

Bosberg's Troro. Bosberg being the judge who had initially told the United States government that had to stop sending people to set court right, and then the US had ignored Boseburg and done it anyway, and then they had this whole court case about how they hadn't ignored him and anyway it was a secret. Even though we're tweeting it, you can go back a couple of eds and hear

about that. In this decision, the Court was unanimous in asserting that people removed under the Alien Enemies Act do have a right to due process, but that they have to bring a habeas petition. So like the reason they vacated to tro was that the case shouldn't have gone to Bosburg right, that they should have bought this habeas petition.

In practice, that's going to be very hard given the fact that many migrants, even under the current system, even under Biden, most migrantsh didn't speak English didn't have access to legal representation, so this ruling is still pretty bad. The only thing that people in the court case wanted to stop was their rendition to El Salvador, right. It wasn't even like opposed to other forms of removal. It

was specific to this El Salbador situation. The court also sort of cited criminal cases as precedent, which is a very different thing, and it gives us very narrow ruling of the due process available to migrants rate and it relies on my having access to a legal team, which could be expensive and complicated for them.

Right the Aberigo Garcia case, which is the other case, a Fourth Circuit judge required the US to return Abergogarcia to the US, and then Chief Justice Roberts on his own issued in an administrative stay, so he is effectively telling them that Fourth Circuit judge, you can't order them to have him return right now. We need to take a time out. We need everybody to get their evidence in order and then bring that to us, so that case like remains ongoing.

how they operate. But that case still remains ongoing, so we're still we're still going to hear that one, which presumably will reflect on the constitutionality of sending people to said cod But like the fact that, yeah, they ruled the other case, right, the one that was five to four, It wasn't about whether said cock was legal. It was about where the Bosberg had the right to make a decision on this particular case.

One of the problems with attempting to do this episode is that we are learning the teriff rate from Twitter in real time. So it turns out that the actual tariff rate on China, as as clarified by by Donald Trump today, is one hundred and forty five percent. And also it has become clear that the twenty five percent turf tariffs on both Mexico and Canada are also still in effect. So yay.

last basically a century, so incredibly stable. This is where you put your money that you don't want to gamble. So you have money that is in stocks and stuff that can go up and down, but you also head your bets by having a bunch of this. And you know, generally treasury bonds are hopefully enough to about keep pace with inflation or beat it by a little bit, but usually the rate is not all that high because there's a shitload of demand. People are always buying treasury bonds.

When the treasury bond rate, which is the percentage you get back, raises, that may look good, right, they're like, wow, you get five percent now on if you put money into a into a thirty year T bond. But what that means is that everyone is selling their treasury bonds. So demand is down and the rate is higher, and everyone is selling them because entire countries at a time are pulling their money out. Nations are pulling their money out of the US economy.

be more. He keeps talking about more tariffs, and it's like, who knows where they're gonna happen, like maybe pharmaceuticals, semiconductors. But the Liberation Day tariffs turff tariffs are currently on hold for.

to ten percent, just like everyone else. So we know that Trump is lying about his rationale for the rollback of the turf tariffs, right, and every single fucking media outlet is still just reporting it because nobody fucking knows how to do freaking reporting anymore. We should move to what this is going to do the supply chain, and

to put this in perspective. When I learned about the one hundred and four percent tariff on China, that was before it was one hundred and twenty five percent where it's at now, I was writing an episode called The Old economy is dead, which will probably be still be coming out on Monday. Again, that was the fifty four

percent rate. I was writing a thing called the old Economy is dead at one hundred and four percent, Like things are going to break in the supply chain that only seven people on Earth have ever heard of before, Like entire sectors of the economy are going to be annihilated. We're going to see right now, we're probably going to see everyone attempt to route like all shipping from China. There's going to be a massive effort to try to

reroot it through like literally any other country. But again that's only a solution for like you know, ninety days, and and again it's not even clear that can work. I mean, I'm already seeing a bunch of reports swamp business as being like, yeah, we're fucked because and that was the four percent tariffs, and at one hundred and

twenty five percent, entire industries are non viable. Now it's maybe possible that if it was just these tariffs and such an all Chinese shipping was able to be routed through some other country, maybe we would only have a regular economic collapse like a like you know, like an early two thousands tech bubble collapse and not like a two thousand and eight one. But again that's the same

thing that note moti war tariffs go into effect. Now, the problem is that we went through this with the ninety day pauses on the Mexican tariffs and the Canadian tariffs, and then after ninety days everyone assumed they weren't going to go to efect again. Then they just went to effect. So the odds are of that the absolutely catastrophic turf tariffs from like Liberation Day are going to go into effect in about ninety days, right, that that's probably what's

going to happen. There's probably going to be some attempts to negotiate them down, but like again, those absolutely catastrophic tariffs which are going to just fucking annihilate the entire

world economy, are probably going to go into effect. And you know, part of what's happening here, right is that so the markets are doing this, they're like dead cat bounce, right, And a lot of this is because they haven't actually stopped to think about like how much American manufacturing and con sure, every argument everyone is making about this, there is actually a lot of manufacturing still in the US, but all of it relies on Chinese imports and various

stages of in vadio stage of production, and they're fucked. And I haven't even mentioned yet, by the way, the sort of caps to all of this is that China is doing an eighty four percent retaliatory tariff on all American goods, which is going to just fuck massive portions of American agriculture. We've talked a lot on the show about soybean exports. It's going to be absolutely catastrophic. We're

going to go more into this on Monday. But you know, the thing that's clear from this is that these people don't see the economy as real in the way that you and I do, right, They simply don't. You know, we look at the economy as something where we have to have a fucking job so we can go to work, so we can come home and fucking buy food for our families and pay our rent. And they think it's

a fucking joke, right. They think it's a fucking masculinity signifier, and they think it's like they look at tariff rates and they go, this is just a number on a fucking page. And that's why the tariff rate is now one hundred and twenty five percent China because it doesn't none of this ship is real for them at all. Now do you know what is real? No, the products and services that support this. Yeah, yeah, yep, we are

back now. Okay. One of the things that I've been seeing a lot of is there are a lot of arguments about whether there was some kind of plan here. Trump has claimed that he was going to roll back the terrorists all along, and no, he wasn't. Just no, he's just lying. He's just going by the seat of his pants. And I can prove that there is no plan here by moving on to the second thing that I want to talk about here, which is a speech given by Council of Economic Advisors Chairman Steve Myhren at

the Hudson Institute. So this is this is again the the the Council of Economic Advisors is is a federal agency that is like their their job is to provide economic advice to the president, right, and their chair gave a speech where he argues and this is something that like I I Jesus fucking Christ, we were talking about, Okay, the fact that every fucking country on earth has us Treasury bonds. We were talking about this earlier, right, the status of the US dollar as the global reserve currency.

This guy is arguing that that is actually a public good that other countries should pay US for. He wants to force countries to fucking pay taxes to the United States for holding US Treasury bonds.

fucking US bond. The anthropologist David Graeber called this in his book Debt the First five thousand Years, a tribute system that again, every country in the world is forced to buy US bonds. The US government has just like fairly explicitly, like they did this in the Reagan administration, does this other times, like has just fairly explicitly leaned on countries and been like, you're buying a fucking a fucking bunch of US bonds now, right, Like this is

this system. The status of the dollar of the world reserve currency, is the entire lattice that supports and spreads the American Empire. And these fucking clowns want people to pay taxes on the tribute that they are paying to us. This is not by Trump and Elon Musk, right, this is the guy these people brought in to be their economist to do economic policy. Yeah, there there is no limit to their stupidity. There is no rock of sanity upon which the tide of madness will crash everything we

have seen. We have seen so far is just a prelude to an infinite abyss of stupidity, so mind numbingly incomprehensible, it will shatter our minds like a snowflake and a hurricane. You can no longer think to yourself. They cannot possibly be this stupid. They are thinking thoughts even gods cannot comprehend. They are attempting to drain the sea by shouting at the moon. They are trying to wipe their ass with pine cones. There is no five dimensional pl here. There

was not even a man behind the fucking curtain. There was only an infinite sea of cruelty, malicone, stupidity trying to drown us, all for the crime of attempting to exist in the world we were born in. The reality of the man who ruled the American Empire is this.

It is so terrifying that everyone from the most powerful CEOs on the planet to the fucking day traders running the stock markets to broke left the ship posters recoil in horror and try to construct meaning and some kind of like anything, any kind of strategy, any kind of strategic reason why anyone could possibly be doing this because the existence of a plant, literally, any plan, no matter how evil it is, is preferable to this, which is that the largest economy in the world, the most powerful

empire the world has ever seen, is being run by the dumbest people who have ever fucking lift and they are doing this because they are evil and they're stupid.

woke sgw's. But like before the election, right, it was this idea that that because because of the dem corrupt elite establishment, you know, everyday Americans are are are victims of this, of this hidden cabal of Democrats that that are ruining everything. But but now that these people are in charge of of of the United States, the people who are victimizing US is just the entire world, right, the entire world is ripping off the United States by

using our dollar, by by doing trade with us. They are somehow ripping us off, like we are the victims of this global scheme, and it's hurting you at the average blue collar worker, and it's making women adopt manager surial positions and and this is this is what's actually is the core of of your oppression. And even even even when they win, even when they control the country, they can't let go of this victim status. They have to have someone ripping them off in order to justify

them doing just incomprehensible stupid power grabs. And it is very much linked to like this like masculine signifier. It's very odd, like like the way that people are trying to trying to justify losing so much money in the stock market. It's by re posting a clip of some like Australian women from dancing dancing on TikTok in like an office building, and they're like, well, you know, tariffs are are are much better than having to deal with women in the office.

not sure. We are not sure if there is. It's an idea that he has simply floated and has discussed very publicly, as in the effort of transparency.

six at California State University campuses, with six more at Stanford. Also, as of April eighth, fifty student visas have been revoked at Arizona State University, with multiple students now in iced attention. Lawyers for these students believe that upwards of one thousand

visas have been revoked across the country. A map on inside higher ed dot com shows four hundred and nineteen confirmed instances of student visas or in some cases, green cards, being revoked by Secretary of State Mark Rubio across thirty four states, and as of Wednesday, April ninth, visas for eighteen international students have been revoked at the University of Utah, with these students and recent graduates received letters from the

Trump administration instructing them to quote unquote self deport immediately. At Utah State University, more than thirty students have been in pacted, according to the university administration.

But the UCSD Guardian, in a dub for student Journalism, reported that UCSD convened an emergency meeting before this of faculty and it knew about the revocations or that the service changes, right, they were a vocation of their student status, and it was reluctant to act because it hadn't received guidance from UCOP yet. So we're seeing this from a lot of university administrations, right, they don't know how to respond.

I did see that the University of Arizona was helping fund some of the legal fees of their students, which is more than many universities are doing as of now. There seems to be no pattern of prior rest for the people who have had their status has changed, but in some cases it seems that in so university systems, all of the people who have lost their status are either Chinese, Indian, or from majority Muslim countries.

the twelfth. That'll be tomorrow as you're listening to this, on Friday at Portland City Hall at two pm. Organizers are also asking that you call the Washington Attorney General to demand pressure be put on everyone to release him. Yeah, if you want to hear more about that, there is I have an interview with an organizer works with them, and yeah, it's real fucking bad. The scale of the

repression has been increasing. It's not undefeatable. And this is, you know, is a this is a tangible thing that you can do to try to stop them. But yeah, it requires movement now, and yeah, do this now before it gets worse.

possibly also people applying for citizenship. To quote the DHS Assistant Secretary of Public Affairs, Trisha McLaughlin, quote, there's no room in the United States so for the rest of the world's terrorist sympathizers, and we are under an obligation to admit them or let them stay here. Secretary Nome has made it clear that anyone who thinks they can come to America and hide behind the First Amendment to advocate for anti Semitic violence and terrorism, think again. You

are not welcome here. Unquote. The web page for this new policy states, under this guidance, USCIS will consider social media content that indicates an alien endorsing, espousing, promoting, or supporting anti Semitic terrorism, anti Semitic terrorist organizations, or other antisemitic activity as a negative factor in any discretionary analysis when adjudicating immigration benefit requests. So essentially, this means that if you've posted anything that is in support of Palestine

or criticizes the Israeli government. This will be now used against you if you are applying for visa, if you are applying for a green card, if you're applying for citizenship and already live in this country as a permanent read lawfully, So just a wider net of social media surveillance.

Four h four Media put out a good article on Wednesday about a palanteer system that ICE is using to look for immigrants and people in this country, which allows them to select for specific attributes with a pretty intense filtering system. So yeah, this is ongoing and we will continue to report as such.