It Could Happen Here Weekly 22

look up one party consent laws for recording recording. Um, this is it could happen here a podcast about when you can legally record people without their consent. Hint always in the state of Oregon. Um, I'm Robert Evans. We're talking about bad things, good things, things that are good and bad, all that stuff. Who what do we you know what? You know what we should talk about? You know what no one has talked about ever on the internet lately. Josephine Robinette Rogan. Oh, I've never heard of him.

What does he do well? He has a podcast? If you heard a podcast, Garrison, I'm unfamiliar, but just I'll just go with it. Yeah. Well, it's like the radio, but easier to spread disinformation, um and also sexier for reasons that are hard to explain. Uh. And Joe Rogan gets on his podcast and he says a lot of stuff that people think is bad, and then everybody gets

angry at him, and then he makes more money. And today we're going to talk about how maybe we could handle this problem differently, maybe we could not do the same thing over and over and there's quite a different result. Yeah, and upfront, obviously we're talking about him. We're trying to talk less about specifically what he said and more about kind of the problem he represents in the ways in which there was sponses people have aren't having the results

they desire. We're gonna avoid using his name in the title of the episode or the description because that doesn't feed into the algorithm kind of in the same way. But yeah, Garrison, you want to kick us off here. Yeah, I've been watching the Rogan thing online and be getting kind of frustrated because of the way the discourse is going, and it's just repeating the same loops that we see every few months and nothing really changes. And Regan just gets more popular, so earlier this month or like a

middle of I guess it was closer to like January. UM, there was like a group of like two dred seventy doctors, healthcare workers, UM and scientists who are campaigning for Spotify to adopt a missuformation policy. UM. This was prompted by a few episodes of the Joe Rogan podcast that we've already actually talked about, UM about Dr Robert Malone and

someone else who said some stupid things about the pandemic. UM. So I write when when I when we talked about these eisodes this last time, I tried to actually talk about what these doctors were doing and let not focus on Rogan himself, but specifically what these doctors were doing and their ideology, because I didn't want to add to

the whole Rogan side of the discourse. UM. And you know, for for this, for this, like a letter that that these doctors sent to Spotify, if they were not really advocating for Rogan to be removed from the platform, UM or even for episodes to be removed, just to have Spotify clarify their guidelines regarding medical misinformation, because you know, and it's important to note that Joe Rogan has a

exclusivity contract with Spotify. He does not work for them, but Rogan gets paid a lot of money to get his podcast only published on Spotify's feed. So it's it's not it's it's it's it's like a it's a it's a weird kind of set up, and it can give a lot of like gray area for like, does Spotify count that's as publisher or not. You're like, well, not really, because they could he could also just end that contract and post to this podcast everywhere. Um, I mean I

think it would take there. There's probably some sort of exclusive time limit on the exclusivity agreement, etcetera. Um, because it it is, it is mixed because they did recently when it came out that he said the inn word a whole bunch of times, Spotify removed those episodes. So there's a degree to which they they have acted as

a publisher. Yeah, there's a whole lot of stuff to kind of talk about this on the So the letter gwent kind of viral and it prompted this whole kind of thing in the middle of January, but like deleting your Spotify subscription and then we had musicians, most uh, most popularly, Neil Young decides to remove all their music from the Spotify platform, um as like a performative thing, being like, Okay, if Spotify is gonna host all this

medical misinformation, we're going to remove this as protest. Now. Of course, Neil Young then just signed an exclusivity deal with Amazon, so oh great, cool. We yes, episode the Bastion of moral purity. Yeah, and they're not. I mean, I think they are probably pay a better rate because Spotify is pretty much at the bottom to musicians, but I don't think it's good. Um, I think Napster actually has the best rate, doesn't the best rate, which I mean also, if you want to be actually moral, just

just just use band camp. But I mean I use Spotify because it's really easy, and that's why Spotify works. It's because it's super it is. It is a well made product. That does not mean it's an ethical product, but it does. It does the thing that it's supposed to do quite well. So so yeah, it basically We've had endless discourse since then about Joe Rogan about Spotify is the platform, talking about how bad Spotify is, which yes, it is bad, talking about how you know how bad

Joe Rogan is. And you know the thing is, Joe Rogan already had the most popular podcast in the world his exclusivity deal with Spotify, and he's currently estimated to bring in eleven million listeners per episode of his podcast. Yeah, for for some reference, UM, Behind the Bastards is one of the largest podcasts out there. Um, and he's on average something like ten times our traffic. Uh. Like it's and it's not, He's not. He's not just the most

popular podcast. He helped invent what podcasting podcast? He was one of the first, and like he had a foundational role in how the entire industry works. Since this letter and since he's episodes, there's been a whole lot of discourse around if Spotify should remove Joe Rogan from the platform, Um, if they should cancel his deal. You know, a lot

of people calling on Spotify to do that. A lot of people are calling on Spotify to remove certain episodes, and Spotify has not been teen too so like, but let's and I know, Joe Rogan himself did actually authorize the removal of a certain amount of episodes, which for reasons we'll talk about later. Um, but what's all this discourse and outrage and articles and tweets actually doing to

Spotify into Rogan? Okay? In my opinion, kind of the end result is actually very similar to all of the free advertising that companies get whenever they make awoke statement that infuriate, that infuriates the actionary right, you know, resulting in throwing your kel out your window, flushing your Gillette

blade down the toilet, and burning your nikes. And it's even widely speculated and kind of like a known fact that companies will use progressive statements and policies to drum up this outrage um to give their company and product tons of free advertising and just to get the brand name itself in the side consumers heads. And this is definitely happening. Was was Rogan and Spotify in terms of outrage being used as advertising. It may not be intentional, but that is what the result is. Yeah, And I

mean it's very uh. It's it's both sides like to make fun of the other for doing this, like folks on the left like to make fun of their right when they're when they're breaking their carriggs or whatever. Um, But you know, it happens. It's equally profitable for both sides. You just do the opposite, you know, you have someone come on and talk about how they're a truth teller being canceled, and they get a bunch of attention money

and and it works equally well both ways, pretty much. Yeah, So with Spotify and Rogan in the news every day for the past like three weeks, the the the end is that like the fact that it's just that people are hearing these names in their head more often, and they're probably subconsciously gonna use Spotify more often because you know, despite a few people that might cancel their subscriptions, the net effect will be more listeners who seem to Spotify

because there because the name is in my subconscious it's it's it's in there. And all the effect it's gonna have on Rogan is giving him a way more publicity to attract new listeners, and and it's listeners who themselves are like attracted to unconventional ideas outside the mainstream, and his more passive listeners are gonna like double down on him because there's gonna be like the backfire effect, so they will like feel defensive and then become more of

a fan of his. Because he's seen as a cultural outsider, even though he's not an outsider. He is the mainstream, he's the biggest podcaster in the world, but he's seen as a cultural outsider. So you know, he like brings on guests who say things that they're not supposed to say. You know, so, who's actually going to be convinced by all this outrage to not listen to Rogan via pointing out all the wrong things he's said and all the slurs he's used, Like, is that really going to stop

fans from listening to Joe Rogan. It's the same thing really pointing out that Donald Trump illegally took classified documents. It's like, yeah, I mean that's fucked up and ship, but like he's never going to get charged with crimes and none of his supporters care. You're the only people who are angry about this, and it doesn't matter because the people you vote for aren't going to punish him, So like, just you know, chill out a little bit.

It's like all of the outrage is simply inflating the importance of jo Rogan on like an entire cultural level. It's that he's becoming he's becoming more important to his fans, more important to his haters, and more important to himself and Spotify as an asset because he generates a lot of exclusive listeners and news coverage and buzz around the

Spotify brand. And it's important to talk about like so you have broadly speaking within the field of entertainment, like digital entertainment in particular, you have like two ways that you can grow your audience. One of them is organic growth, which is know, I listened to Garrison's podcast, I like it. I tell a friend about Garrison's podcast. They like it. They tell a friend about Garrett that that's like organic, you know, it's very natural. That's purely the kind of

quality of the content UM reaching people. And then there is in organic growth, which is can be the result of like ad campaigns can be the result of UM an algorithm. Often in today we're talking about like oh, Twitter or Facebook prioritizes this kind of content. So like something article on bright Barred about black on white crime that would have been read ten thousand times ten years ago gets read a million times because it spreads well

on this platform for reasons that aren't organic UM. And with Joe Rogan, one of the reasons why because we can talk about like d platforming, if you want to talk about like Alex Jones for example, or Meloianopolis, good case that d platforming really reduced both of their reaches. Now, Milo uh pretty much wiped out as a person who mattered in terms of the dispoce thank christ. Alex Jones less so. Um, it definitely hurt his busines this and

it reduced his reach. But by the time Facebook and Twitter and whatnot started throttling him, he he had already inorganically increased his reach enough that like he's able to, he had he had a large a large enough audience to stay somewhat relevant and keep going. The thing about Joe Rogan is he did not get famous and popular in organically. I'm sure there was some degree of that on like social media, but most of his growth before that. Like people like him, Like whatever you think of him,

he's a good broadcaster. That's That's the thing. Even though, like you know, for all this research, I don't like him. He says horrible things, But you know, I was watching I watched all of like Rogan's like um, like uh Instagram videos he made like a few ten minute things talking about the outrage, and it's it sucks because when you listen to him, he's like a really good talker.

He's very good at what he does. Yeah, he's very good at like generating sympathy and generating like good card Like It's it sucks because yeah, I wanted to like hate this person, but I'm like listening to him talking about this issue like oh wow, yeah, like you actually have a decent grasp of what's going on here. UM, And that's he is, not he part of he gets some of his money from playing like a dumb, chill stoner dude, but he's not dumb. He's definitely a stoner.

He's not a dumb man. He's very intell. He's very good at what he does. UM. One of the things we don't kind of talk about enough when we talk about media that I think is important to note is that UM being likable in a professional sense is a skill. And it's a skill like any technical skill. It's like knowing how to how to how to farm or weld. UM. It is a thing that you build on over time. It is a thing that UM takes a lot of

trial and error and a lot of education to get right. Uh, it is a thing that Joe Rogan has been doing for longer than a significant chunk of the people on this show, including Garrison, have been alive. Uh. It's like like I've been like this is this is more or less been my job for like thirteen or fourteen years, and it is like a skill that you build and the thing that he is really good at is making

but want to listen to him. And so if you were to say, kick him out of Spotify tomorrow, yeah, it's it's entirely possible that his that that would increase the number of people who when there's there's a case to be made that Spotify has limited his maximum audience, limiting him to Spotify as opposed to if he was just any app he wanted to be on, maybe it'd

be twenty million, you know, listening to every exactly. Yes, Like even if did even a Spotify did drop him because of all these you know, outrage you know, and all the tweets and all of the petitions, even if they did drop him, he would probably not only gain more listeners due to the outrage porn and and free speech advocates, but also with his exclusivity ending help his podcast will just be available and more platforms and more people who will to listen to him, like really easily.

So yeah, he's only going to grow if people get what they want. And like that makes you think, like this, this outrage isn't actually meant to get the Joe Rogan Joe Rogan problem taking care of, Like it's this, This actually isn't about stop being misinformation. It's this, This isn't actually about having they're being less fans of Joe Rogan.

All those outrages about making you feel better because you feel like you're doing something right, Like bad thing is happening in the world, and it's easier to pretend like your actions are hurting it than it is to accept that, like maybe there's nothing I can do about this right now. Yeah, it would be a really nice world if the Cho Rogan problem could be solved so easily by Spotify dropping his exclusivity deal, right, that would that would be great,

But that's not the world we live in. And tricking yourself into thinking that is just kind of delusional. Um, And like yeah, it makes you feel better, but like that's not actually helping because like, yeah, we can obviously compare this to other like D platforming campaigns with people for like Alex Jones. But you know, Jones was way more niche and way more extreme around the time of his like D platforming campaign, and his campaign wasn't about

ending exclusivity deals. It was about getting him off of popular platforms altogether. And that's not happening with Joe Rogan because Joe Logan isn't saying the things that are going to get him booted from platforms. He's smart, he knows what he can and cannot say. He's not He's not dumb enough to get banned from these platforms, right and also, you know he's a giant financial asset, so they wouldn't

bend him anyway. But like he's he's what he's doing is bringing on people who say horrible things to continue a cultural conversation, which gets him in the headlines and gives a platform like Spotify a whole bunch of room to cry free speech and get away with it. Removing Alex Jones could be seen as like a monetary decision in and of itself, because it is actually removing liability. But this is this isn't really the case for Rogan. Yeah,

and he's um, yeah, it's just not. One of the problems is that this kind of does fly in the face of a lot of what people want to think. And I don't want to be making the case that it's as black and white it is, because, for example, I'm not saying that it was bad for someone to go through the effort of finding and pointing out, Hey, there's like seventy episodes where Joe Rogan drops the inn word, um and getting those polls. I don't think that I

think that that was broadly speaking, a productive thing. But keeping Joe Rogan at the forefront of the outrage cycle is doing nothing but printing money for the guy. And that's that's not an easy thing to deal with because it's like, do you want me to just like stay quiet in the face of injustice? And it's like, no, that's not what I want you to do. But I do want you to recognize that there are times in ways of speaking up that are just yes, putting putting

gasoline on an injustice fire. It's it's important to remember that d platform ng is just a tactic, and and single tactics aren't always effective in every situation. That's what makes them a tactic, right, Like, in order for a tactic to work, you need to understand the scenario that's are applying the tactic to and seeing if that tactic achieves the goal. And if it doesn't, great, But if it doesn't, you need to choose other tactic and stop doing the same thing over and over again and expecting

a new result. And this is one of those situations where like when you bring up, hey, maybe nothing might be the best thing, at least for for most people specifically to do. Like the thing that gets brought up is like, well do you not want me to uh? Or like, well, what do you suggest I do? Like you know, you're saying I shouldn't do this, but you're

not telling me what to do. And it's like, well, it's like if somebody gets shot in the leg and one person has a tourniquet and the other person has a bunch of razor blades that they want to throw in their eyes, and it's like, well, what do you want me to do? All I have is these razor blades. This is the only other thing I can do? Then

just stand by and do nothing. And it's like, well, in this case, doing nothing is the best thing to do, because it's it's not that's not going to help the problems.

Boycotts of this scale kind of only tend to benefit brands and businesses, right like, because if if if the brand of business is a person is smaller in more niche like and say like Alex Jones or Richard Spencer, right then yes, these tactics about boycotts can really work to push things out of the cultural like market and also in some cases in terms of businesses like the

literal market. But when you're dealing with things like Target, Nike, and Joe Rogan, that's not the case because those brands are way too big. Any any you know, any conservative boycott against Target isn't going to have that effect. It will probably make weird liberals be like, oh, I'm gonna go to Target now because the conservatives don't want me to. It's so like it's I don't It's not it's it's like, it's the problem is It's like Joe Rogan himself isn't

really the problem either. You know, a lot of the problem can be seen more as like content algorithms that boost and reward misinformation and disinformation and conspiracism, and that's more of like an actual issue at hand here. Joe Rogan is just a business. That's how he hears about a lot of these people. Yeah, I go viral somewhere else. And in a lot of cases it's an inorganic thing

that brings them in front of them. It's some fucking algorithm that and and that is a case where you can target and work on deep exact form and it can be more productive that that. That was, That was what that was what I was getting again, It's like Joe Joe Rogan himself was just a visible outgrowth of the core problem. And the core problem is these things

getting onto his show in the first place. So yeah, we can't stop his show, but maybe we should do more work to prevent to like figure out ways to do you know, start using these tactics to prevent algorithms from boosting these things so that Jojo can sees them and then and then invites them on. And yeah, that's a lot more work than just being angry at Spotify. And yet maybe it will actually do something. And one thing that can do something is with spot and it

won't work if it's just Spotify. But I am one of those people who thinks that maybe it's not the worst thing if things like Spotify are seen as publishers and thus when they spread misinformation that leads to disastrous health consequences, UM, they can be held liable. Right. Uh, that's not the worst possible change, although it is a

problematic one. I don't want to like boil that down to a simple question, but I think that's an avenue that should be explored, because I don't see that there's a lot of difference in Spotify choosing to let something go to air or The New York Times printing misinformation. UM. And in fact, Spotify is going to reach more people because nobody cares what The New York Times says anymore. Yeah,

so Spotify. The Spotify CEO did kind of address the ongoing controversy around the you know, internal publishing stuff and how they view medical misinformation. UM. They did adopt a clarified policy that prohibits content that promotes dangerous, false, or dangerous deceptive medical information which may cause offline harm or

pose a direct threat to public health. UM. And then the post also announced that a Spotify would add content advisories to any content related to COVID on the platform, Twitter and Instagram have Um No, it's not, it's not. It's not. Actually it's not. But if you have the operation, if you can again, if there is like an actual dollar consequence to companies that aired massive disinformation, um, then you're not without sort of making Joe Rogan the focus.

You can make it so that the people that he actually is accountable to, which is the people who make him give him the money that he gets, how a vested interest in tamping down on the worst excesses that he's responsible for, Like that might have an impact. I don't know, Like part of the problem is that. And one thing we should acknowledge here when we're talking about like what would work better than what's being done, This

is a pretty new problem. Versions of it have existed before, but without the Internet and without podcasts being what they are, this is a pretty new thing to be dealing with. And I'm not I don't I'm not saying like this is here's the obvious solution to this, But I think we are trying to point out, like what folks are doing doesn't work. The tactics being applied are not effective, and we should be exploring other opportunities to mitigate this harm.

That are not well, I guess it's time to delete another app and post about it on Twitter. Yeah. I think I think this is especially a thing with like because like one of the other things that that's been popping up as broken's like weapons great transphobia. So yeah, jeesus, and that's that stuff us is horrifying. Like the racism is also like really bad. He's extremely sexist. But it's like I think misogynists racist all there's a lot of

money and being that dude. Yeah, well, and I think this is sort of you know, this, this is you know, this is an inherent problem for the left because fighting it like this this kind of sort of like shock truck information stuff works better like that that rage economy works better for the right thing does for the left. And I think in some ways that means like you have to fight them in other spaces, like you know,

you you can't just like keep throwing yourself. It's the same thing with like so why why why you don't have just like one line where you just run into a bunch of cops over and overget in one spot, right, like, but we have certainly try. Yeah. Yeah, it's like some folks gave the old college, the old college. Yeah, like you know, it's like in some in some sense, yeah, like it's it's it's it's it's hard to be too hard on these on people who doing this, and it's

like I think they're doing the right thing. But it's like you have to you have to pick your battles. And you know, if if you're taking a fight that's fair, like that's a that's a bad fight, that is a bad fight for you. You you you need you need to be fighting them in different spheres. You need to be you know, I mean, working for example, on stuff like tech regulation, like you like working on you know, unionizing these places, right like fighting purely finding them in

information space, we will lose every time. The advantage that we have is that we also do other things. And it's it's you know, we're we're going to keep losing hearing if you know, if we keep fighting them in exactly the same way here, we're going to keep losing. So we have to you know, like we we we

we we have to fight in other places. And that's hard and it sucks because you know, this is such a misspart of just what reality is now is you know, yelling people online, but like, you have to stop doing that because it's not not not. The problem is that we've all gotten fucking caught for quite some time in

this escalating culture war, and it's not. It's not a battleground that can be entirely ignored because when you kind of seed ground them, they create conspiracy theories about trans people attacking kids that lead to them murdering people in the streets, or they spread conspiracy theories about masks that lead to them occupying Ottawa. Um. So it can't. The

culture war battleground cannot be ignored. But at the end of the day, what we should rather than just like seeking new ways to engage with it, because the more you engage with it, and it is sometime necessary to engage with but the more you engage with it, the stronger you make this whole thing and the heavier it

lies on all of us like a cloud. And in the only real way to actually win in the long run is to find a way to get off of that, to get out of this like this fucking treadmill of bullshit that has become everything all consuming, and it's it's in a lot of people best interest for it to stay all consuming um and I there's a there's a lot that's going on here, because it's not I think sometimes when you criticize people for the actions they take

in situations like this, they kind of interpreted as you saying, well, like you're stupid and you fucked up and never should have liked done this, and and the way I think of it as more like this is a we have found ourselves trapped in a really messy situation and no one has figured out how to get out. So it's not a situation of like people are are dumb for

having done something that's not effective. It's a situation of we are all trying to figure out what works in this new world we have kind of somewhat accidentally somewhat purposefully built for ourselves, and it is important to have humility and be willing to accept it, like, you know what, that's not working and we have to stop doing the thing that's not working, rather than you know, treat it as if it's sort of a moral failing that something

we we we tried was not effective. The last thing is it's like, really, it's it's not just the non effectiveness, but also the the idea that the fact that this outrage is said, just a constant is just a constant free bannerad for Spotify every everywhere online is like also not great. So it's not it's not even not not even just not effective. But you're just giving a corporation

tons of free press. And maybe we can reframe the way we approach these things so that we don't do that, because in the end, that's just kind of adding to promoting the misinformation. That's kind of that's all that's kind of really doing. And it's not, that's not nearly as you know, impactful as you know, just Rogan doing it himself, but it's still is it still is a contributing factor and and and it it does contribute to the backfire

effect of people who listen to his podcast. Maybe people who like don't even but they're still gonna get defensive over him because they're seeing this attack on him. And even though he's even though he is a huge figure, he's seen as an outsider. So that that really does contribute to that back backfire fact thing of getting people more and more vested in him as a content creator.

But yeah, it's really dumb, But the thing we need to deal with it it's it's a version of the lesson people still didn't learn with Trump, which is that like, you can't you can't beat these people by dunking on them. It doesn't matter that Joe Rogan said something dumb. It doesn't matter that Joe Rogan is inconsistent, it doesn't matter that like Joe Rogan has tells lies or whatever. That's not going to change anybody's mind about the dude, because

it's not about Joe Rogan. They don't support him because they love They support him as much as anything. The people who are at least engaging, primarily online about it, Most of his fans are just don't think about any of this because they're not as online as the rest of us. But the people who are kind of engaging with this and helping to fuel the culture war side of this thing, they don't care there this This isn't about his inherent characteristics. This is about it's a chance

to dunk on the enemy. Um, So you're not going to convince them of anything ever. That's all I had to say on this. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, because again, I really I really resisted writing this episode for a long time because I didn't want to add to the Rogan discourse. But after a while, the Rogan discourse itself became worth talking about. How we talk so because it is more of a meta angle, like, okay, that is actually worth talking about. But yeah, I am so tired

of hearing, watching, and seeing the words still Rogan. Yeah, I'm exhausted by it. I hate that. Like it's a bigger story in the United States than the gigantic war that might break out in Eastern Europe. Um, it's it's just just a very frustrating time and the only way to win this particular game is not to play. Um. So that's that's why we're doing this. We're not going to stick his name in the description or the episode title.

Um yeah it is. You know. The title we were working with this under that we're not going to use so as to not feed into the algorithm was Joe Rogan the Egregor And that is really how I think about it. If you if you haven't listened to our episode on the book about the Flat Earth, book on Behind the Bastards that talks about as Um and eggs, it's basically a god that is made up by the

kind of directed thoughts of a population of people. Yeah, it's like a costalt deity that exists, like this thought form that if people put energy into it, it almost gains its own it's it's own like um um independence from the people that that like burst it, even though it is just like a thought form and it because it was just an idea or presence, and now it basically is its own god that's self sustaining and it

can impact the world. Yeah, global capital is an egregor And and the more that people kind of feed into the discourse around Joe Rogan, the more he turns into one kind of outside of his own actions, he this idea of him has an influence on everything around us. And boy, we don't need that, do we certainly did not. Just said we just put that one down, right, try something else. Yeah, let's throw a brick at your sheriff instead. This will go better for you. I mean sure, sure, Chris, Yeah, Chris,

Chris said it, not me. Yeah, I mean obviously in Minecraft he said bricks. It's fine. Robert Robert, Robert Robert. It's not Minecraft anymore. It's the roadblocks the Feds cracked in Minecraft. Yeah, you're right, it's going to take weeks for them, for them to their computers to realize what

roadblocks is. The look was a story I think I saw on Twitter about like like some yeah, so some some kids who actually legitimately got arrested in Brushford, like blowing up a building in Minecraft, so like like literally so we live in h yeah and instead again it's roadblocks where nothing bad happens. Nothing bad happens, all right, everybody get on roadblocks, um and don't talk about Joe Royan, and don't talk about Joe Rogan. Hundreds of truckers continue

to rule least and with wards joining the movement. With each passing city, feelings towards vaccine mandates have heightened. Advocate civil war. If people don't want to stand up, we got guns. We'll stand up and we'll bring them off. Sucking a guys, let's get pumped for this. Let's go to fucking Ottawa. Let's I want to see one of those truckers. I wouldn't probably not not known our guys obviously, but I would like to see our own January six event.

See some of those truckers plow right through that sixteen football ye, welcome to It could happen here or in this case, it did happen here, slashes still happening here, and uh the here in this case being Canada in

recent weeks. The idea of only a few thousand people totally choking a major city, holding it hostage to bargain for political demands, while overwhelming and getting a foot up on law enforcement, taking over and shutting down a sizeable portion of a popular metropolitan area and simultaneously blocking off supply lines, trade routes, and multiple international border crossings is exactly the kind of thing this podcast has been talking

about for years as a potential anti government resistance tactic that could become more common as political tensions rise in North America. Specifically, a few weeks ago, when the so called Trucker Convoy was still its planning stages, I wasn't super eager to cover it on the pod. Actually, I assumed it would be a flop and just another dumb anti COVID protest in a long line of anti COVID

protests happening in Canada. Flash forward to me at the end of January, and it became apparent that I was sorely mistaken and this thing was shaping up to be a significant factor in Canada's political ecosystem going forward. In my haste to catch up to the moment, I recorded two episodes with the wonderful journalist Dan Cullen, explaining the situation as it was at the prospective times of recording.

But as the tensions in Ottawa and all across Canada arose and the situation gained more and more complexity, I decided that the convoy and subsequent blockades required a more researched and scripted deep dive. The more I dug into the situation, the more it seems to embody the exact thing I was warning about in my two previous scripted episodes about Canada and the far right, titled Canadian Fascism A. The apologies for the title, but you can find those

if you scroll through the could Happen Here feed. Don't think they came out around November ish. What I wanted to get across in those episodes is that Canada is often seen as an escape from the more divisive, violent, and fascist elements of US politics and culture. But just like climate change, capitalism, or any other enveloping force cough cough, hyper objects cough cough, fascism and the slide towards it

can never be truly escaped right. There is no other, there is no away, and it's especially hard to see it when it's growing on the back of your own head,

primarily through Islamophobia. Far right ethno nationalist tendencies have been bubbling under the surface of Canada for a long while, and since Trudeau has taken office in twenty fifteen, there has been a perfect politically allowed boogeyman to blame every problem onto That can include everything from Trudeau was taking away our oil and gas jobs, or Trudeau is bringing in Muslim terrorists to Canada, uh, or Trudeau is starving

your children through health mandates. Canadian right wing protests has been steadily growing the past five years. There's been multiple flare ups of far right rhetoric with the Canadian Yellow Vests, the Westerns that protesced we Exit or Western Exit movement,

and the pseudo fascist People's Party of Canada. The incorporation of pandemic conspiracies and anti vaccine sentiments into the already disaffected rural Canadian right wingers starting and continuing to the present, has accelerated not only the conspiratorial fall right rhetoric among conservative voters, but also what is seen as a valid

political action in those people's eyes. But before we get into how the convoy started with anger concerning COVID nineteen health man dates and misinformation concerning empty store shelves, we have to first go back in time to even before the COVID nineteen virus was a blip on anyone's radar. In February, the Canadian Yellow Vests organized something called the United We Roll Convoy. The result was around a hundred seventy trucks driving cross country through the more liberal East

to Ottawa. The result was around a hundred seventy trucks driving from the West cross country to the more liberal East and eventually to Ottawa. The goal was to represent the concerns of disenfranchised oil and gas workers in the Western provinces and their opposition to propose environmental and new energy policies. Yellow Vests Canada was largely founded by individuals already associated with Canada's far right, which at the time was primarily united through anti Muslim racism and m phobia.

Inspired by the French Heelovest movement, they copied their aesthetics and adopted new grievances and reactionary matoric and we get them a much larger audience. By the time United We Roll arrived in Ottawa, the media started to catch on to the more problematic elements about their organization, Neo Nazi faith goal each spoke on a stage, many members of hate groups responded in attendance, and with the numbers so low,

it made their more extreme participants stick out. Instead of focusing the message on oil and gas as they claim to represent Western alienation from a distant liberal Ottawa, some of its participants seemed more interested in protesting Ottawa's immigration

policies than arguing for specific fixes for Alberta's oil patch. Plus, if you peeked inside any Canadian yellow vest Facebook group, you would be flooded with hundreds of examples of explicit anti Muslim racism and calls for a Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's arrest and execution, a theme that remains common among

COVID conspiracy demonstrations today. But at the end of it, United We Roll was widely considered a bust, with only a few hundred participants in Ottawa and despite raising almost a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, the organizers failed to exclose how much of that money was actually spent on

convoy expenses like gas and food. Afterwards, the Yellowest Canada movement started to kind and die out, though some holdouts kept smaller demonstrations going for months, particularly in the conservative oil province of Alberta. But to us now United we Rule can be seen as a small test run for

the current situation. In fact, it shares many of the same organizers and even the same promotional materials, except this time they have the added weight of many more people radicalized into conspiracism throughout the pandemic, and much more funding. So with that in mind, let's dive into the components

of the initial organizing effort. On January two, go fund me account was set up for a so called trucker convoy ahead of the January fifteenth adoption of the mandate requiring all cross border transportation drivers to be fully vaccinated

against COVID nineteen. Vaccine mandates in Canada have been in effect since October for ship crews, railways, and airline workers, but effective January, the federal government expanded the requirement to truck drivers returning from the States and those who will remain unvaccinated will not be able to enter Canada without quarantine.

One week later, a reciprocal policy went into effect in the United States for Canadian truckers crossing into their border, which means going forward you cannot really cross the border at all, well remaining unvaccinated. At this point in mid January, a majority of Canadians still broadly supported health mandates aimed at limiting the spread of COVID, but a big part of the early propaganda push for the convoy was photos alleged to have been from current Canadian grocery stores which

they were not, with barren empty shelves. The idea was that COVID restrictions were already severely impacting the supply line, and any additional mandates would begin to start with the population and effectively shut down international trade. Put a note in this idea, by the way, it will come up later. Ideas for another truck convoy like United Wi Roll have been tossed around for a while online, and with this new mandate on truckers andvaccines, a time presented itself to

give the convoy idea another go. In the early convoy organizing they were primarily four familiar far right faces who working together to set things up, none of whom are truck drivers. By the way, the originally listed organizers on the go fund me page were Tomorrow Lich and b. J. Ditcher,

Both have notable experience with far right organizing. Tamaraw Litch was born in my home province of Saskatchewan, but now hails from the town of Medicine Hat, Alberta, where she served as an organizer for Yellow Vests Canada, a regional coordinator for the separatist Western Exit or Wexit movement in Alberta, and now the secretary for the Maverick Party, another far

right extreme acceparatist movement and fringe political party. Litch started attending and boosting yellow Vest events starting in and her social media posts from around the time show in one moment calling out some hateful rhetoric from within the movement, while also posting islamophobe articles of her own and conspiracies

about the Muslim Brotherhood operating in Canada. A few days after the go fund me was created, Benjamin B. J. Ditcher, one time Conservative Party of Canada candidate, People's Party of Canada booster and co founder of a Canadian far right podcast network, appeared as a cool organizer on the go fund me page twenty nineteen, he claimed that Islamist entryism

is rotting away our society like syphilis. Benjamin Ditcher was also one of the first people to give a speech at the first proto Fascist People's Party of Canada conference in Quebec, saying that the Conservative Party of Canada is suffering from the stench of cultural relativism and political Islam and a whole bunch of stuff you know in that general vein. James Botter was another one of the four

key organizers of the Trucker convoy to Ottawa. Botter is an admitted conspiracy theorist who has endorsed Q and on and called COVID the biggest political scam in history. He's also a former activist with the Yellow Vests Canada and United we Roll. Barter's main project, however, is running the Canada Unity website, which is one of the original nexus

points for organizing and spreading word about this convoy. The group contends that vaccine mandates and passports are illegal under Canada's constitution, the Nuremberg Code, and a host of other international conventions. Boter has long been a fringe figure, but his movements started picking up steam and support as announcements and continuations of restrictions aimed at curbing COVID nineteen spread

have continued. The supposed plight of the truckers proved to be a sympathetic cause on Facebook and attracted an array of fellow travelers. The last big major player is Patrick King, another former Yellow vestor one time major figure in the Wexit movement as well as United we Roll. On January two, pet King hosted a live stream for James Botter to promote the Canada Unity website and to announce it as the official page for the Freedom Trucker Convoy, or as

they called it, Operation Bear. Hug King is a conspiracy theorist and popular streamer that attracts the audience farther right than Canada's usual conservatives. Kings made headlines for drumming up fear and then following through with his supporters with violence at rally's put on by BLM and Antifa. King is also known for spreading what are basically neo Nazi talking points. And I'm just going to quote from an article by the Canadian Anti Hate Network here because they did a

great job tracking his past extremism quote. In the past, King has gone on record about his feelings on the Anglo Saxon replacement that plans to quote flood Canada with refugees and subvert the education system, which is a thin rebranding of the Great Replacement theory touted by Ethno nationalists. At other points, King is expressed overtly racist and anti

Semitic statements. In the twenty nineteen stream about the then upcoming federal election, King complained that he had to leave the movement due to their lack of success, saying, quote the election a wo't matter unless you want to change your national language to Chinese or Mandarin or Hebrew. He then went on to compare Chinese names to the sound

of change falling downstairs. He has publicly distorted facts, but the Holocaust of form of Holocaust denial, saying I do know that the Holocaust was reduced to one point five million and not the six million that it was said to be. He then invoked the anti Semitic conspiracy theory that Jewish people are secretly in control of world governance, media, and finances, saying, quote the questions that have been asked several times to the a d L and to the

Jewish government and communities. We have Jewish world bankers who are dictating our government policies and controlling our politicians unquote. So yeah. Considering King's history of saying blatantly fascist things, some organizers and convoy supporters tried to distance King from the Freedom Convoy movement to not damage the initial fundraising effort.

The controversy around King resulted in a statement being released onto the fundraising page saying King is not and has never been affiliate with our movement, nor has he been a part of our great team of volunteers. The update was afterwards deleted, and then King claimed in a video that the statement was a public relations move because he was being attacked online. For a while, King was still listed as the Northern Alberta contact for the Western portion

of the convoy. So those are the four people that laid the organizing groundwork, that spawned this entire thing and

put it into motion. But what made this convoy different from United We Roll One point, oh, is the almost two years of COVID isolation, which has given ample time for groups like the Yellow Vests and extreme Far right groups to completely fold into the rapidly growing anti vax and COVID conspiracy movement in Canada, and along with that, using people's seething hatred of Justin Trudeau to radicalize thousands of thousands of people online to getting them more comfortable

with the idea of participating in political protest. It's really important to mention that the protests are not organized by Canadian trucking unions or really Canadian truckers. The largest trucking unions have come out against the protests and they do not appear to reflect the values of most Canadians or most Canadian truckers. More than of the Canadian public is vaccinated, including almost of truckers, according to Canada's Minister of Transport.

The Canadian Trucking Alliance issued a statement saying it does not support and strongly disapproves of any protests on public roads, highways or bridges. The Canadian Trucking Alliance president said in a joint statement with the Ministers of Labor and Transport that the Government of Canada and the Canadian Trucking Alliance both agree that vaccination, used in combination with preventative health measures, is the most effective tool to reduce the risk of

COVID nineteen for Canadians and to protect public health. According to the Canadian Trucking Alliance, the mandate could impact around twelve to sixteen thousand Canadian commercial drivers, which is just about ten to fifteen percent of the industry's cross border drivers during the pandemic. Repeated polls have shown that a majority of Canadians support public health measures to contain the pandemic, but the number of Canadians who would like to see

restrictions end has risen in recent weeks. With owner crown cases on the decline, some provinces are starting to remove restrictions and requirements. The public sentiment appears to be moving in the direction of opening up communities. Throughout the last two weeks of January, the number of Canadians saying that they would like to see restrictions end has risen by fifteen percentage points to a majority of fifty percent. Demonstrations have found a way to tap into pandemic fatigue among

conservatives across the country. After months of lockdown, more than two thirds of Canadians have said they have very little in common with how the Autaowa protesters see things, but say that they have a lot in common, according to a recent survey connected by a Canadian research firm. Though the idea of vaccine mandates for Canadian truckers kind of prompted what turned into this convoy, very quickly became a general battle cry against pandemic restrictions as a whole and

the leadership of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Unlike twenty nineteen United we Roll, the Freedom Convoy against health mandates was able to successfully capitalize on Western feelings of neglect and isolation from the ruling liberal elite in the East and in the capital of Ottawa. The right ingredients at the right time flung the Trucker Freedom Convoy into the conservative zeitgeist.

The original and go fund me page, set up on January fourteenth to financially support convoy participants, was able to raise ten million dollars in just under three weeks. As the truck convoy idea picked up steam, The first expected wave of attendees were planned to arrive in Ottawa on Saturday, January twenty ninth. Vehicles started rolling in a few days prior, throughout Thursday and the Friday night before the big day.

On the twenty nine, and as Saturday the twenty nine came, the numbers of trucks and protest participants greatly exceeded the initial expected numbers that I and many other people had figured, while obviously falling short of the heavily marked fifty thousand

truckers prediction made by some convoy supporters. While writing these episodes, I talked with Paul, a citizen of Ovadawa who's been living inside the occupied zone since the twenty ninth of January, and this is what he had to say about expectations leading up to the convoys arrival. There was at least a week of lead up where we it was about

all we heard about. So from when they sort of declared their intention to come down to when they started rallying in BC and you know, in the west and coming across Um, there was an anticipation that something was going to happen. And you know, people around here because like where I'm sitting right now is less than a kilometer from Parliament Hill and directly in between two of the streets that they've blocked off sort of on the

way into town. You know, we were nervous, but we kind of were just sort of assuming it was gonna be a one day affair. It was gonna be small at first, but then you heard I mean, nobody believed the fifty trucks and that like that was it. I mean, to put in perspective, the numbers that they were claiming were on their way here, UM are larger than the entire population of the city by like a couple hundred

thousand people, so that that didn't seem likely. But you know, when we were hearing the thirty to forty thousand, when we heard about multiple convoys with you know, a hundred to two hundred trucks like that was when it was like, Okay, this isn't gonna be great. So people started arriving on what Friday, Saturday. The first group started rolling to town on Thursday night. UM. They were they were small in numbers. They didn't really start blocking anything off because they just

weren't enough of them. So, but you could hear the horns starting on Thursday night, UM, and I think a lot of some of them were going into hotels. UM. They were smaller groups too, mostly from sort of local groups. UM. And then around ten or eleven in the morning on Friday, UM, we started hearing reports at Kingston, which is about an hour issue away, an hour and a half um that there was a group moving out of there. So around one o'clock in the afternoon Friday, the first group started

to arrive and started to congregate downtown. And one of the things about Ottawa is um it's a lot, like a lot of big downtowns, it's a lot of one way streets. So the moment you get the trucks starting to get into the intersections or near intersections, you're blocking off all passage in certain directions. So they started blocking off the northbound really quickly, just because that's where how

they were coming in UM. And there's only like three gas stations downtown as well, which is it kind of plays a big factor in the route that they took. So they all passed by, especially the passenger cars that were running mow Um passed by and through that way. And yeah, by about two or three o'clock in the afternoon, every anything south of Summerset, which is about a kilometer and a half from Parliament, was pretty much jammed at

that point. As Saturday night came, much of the group, supporters and truckers alike spent that time partying late into the night as heavily backed up traffic continued to effectively shut down roads and large areas of the city around Parliament Throughout the weekend. Businesses in the surrounding areas that did not close ahead of the protest were swarmed by customers, many refusing to wear masks. A local Homa shelter and soup kitchen was harassed by Convoy participants who were turned

away from restaurants after refusing to wear a mask. A large number of the convoy attendees surrounded the shelter, demanding to be fed by the facility staff. According to the shelters president, convoy participants assaulted a client of the shelter and her old racial slurs at a security guard who attempted to intervene. Workers and volunteers at the shelter noted that parked vehicles blocked the shelter, making it difficult for aliences to reach the facility and for staff to assist

munity members in need. A home in the downtown area was pelted with rocks and snow, as well as vandalized with human feces, all for showing a Pride flag in their window. The operations commander for the Ottawa Paramedic Service said that an ambulance was pelted with rocks and paramedics checking the damage were called racial slurs by convoy participants. Ottawa Paramedics have since requested police escorts, citing safety concerns.

More public backlash was prompted after reports surface of a monument dedicated to commemorating Terry Fox being covered in protest signs and being staged to hold an upside down Canadian flag. No restroom made Saturday night related to the convoy, but as the convoy stuck around even past the weekend, there was this growing feeling of downtown residents that they've been abandoned by the city and law enforcement, with the whole situation and response to the situation making them afraid to

leave their homes. I asked Paul what his experience on the first weekend of the occupation was and the general feeling in the area of downtown Ottawa. And you were living like right in the middle of this. How much has this affected like your day to day life and all, like your neighbors and stuff, like what what what are

you able to do and not do? At this point? Well, it's the weekend was it was especially bad, and we're all kind of bracing for what this weekend is going to be because that's when you had just you know, there were between somewhere between ten and fifteen eighteen thousand people as the estimates I've heard, um all crowding downtown in the streets. So at that point, I mean that was when the police we're telling people not to wear a mask out, um because you know, you're kind of

putting yourself at risk, uh, because it'll be targeted for violence. Yeah. So I mean I was like basically anytime I've left the house. So we have a mask mandate still in effect in Ottawa, so you have to wear them indoors pretty much everywhere. Um. So I have to wear at my building, I have to wear at the convenience store. If I'm gonna go go buy say, you know, pack of cigarettes, I'm not going to take it off. It's

a thirty second walk. And so that was that. The harassment around that started on Friday, UM, and and it just became anyone who was going about that didn't look like they were part of it, UM started getting hassled. UM. Other people I know who live in the area, especially women, UM have been targeted a great deal. Um, anyone who's part of, you know, the LGBTQ community has been it's it's not really just it's just not safe to be out on the streets and it's not really safe to

show that you don't support what they're doing. At points since the convoy started arriving in Ottawa, the extreme elements of the protest have been pretty visible. Among the thousands of attendees were recognizable members of white nationalists, hate groups

you know, not seeing Confederate flags were seen flying. Two and on logos were emblazoned on trucks and sides, and stickers were pasted on telephone pools around the occupied area baring Trudeau's face reading wanted for crimes against humanity, the official line from original convoy organizers minus Pat King, of course, however,

has tried to remain focused. In a Facebook live broadcast, James Under of Canada Unity instructed his supporters to stop talking about the vaccine and instead stick the messages of freedom. The goal of adopting a more restricted and relatable protest cause is to hopefully jump up more widespread support and validity, and it initially worked in some ways and not in others. Numerous members of the Conservative Party have come out to

meet protesters, especially throughout the first few days now. Former Conservative Party leader Eron O'Toole met with convoy participants, albeit away from the main protest site. Both People's Party of Canada leader Maxie and Bernair and Ontario Member of Provincial Parliament and leader of the de facto Ontario arm of the PPC, Randy Healer, who has made many recent and semitic comments, both gave speeches on Saturday the twenty nine

in front of the Parliament building. People like Elon Musk and Donald Trump have both endorsed the convoy, and Fox News has been endlessly broadcasting glowing updates of the convoy since its arrival in Ottawa. According to the convoy participants and organizers, they are vowing to camp out in front of the Parliament until their demands of dropping all COVID

nineteen health measures are met. While stated grievances can be broader and more vast on the ground, the current memorandum of understanding posted on the Canada Unity website, which collected over thirty signatures, served as a sort of bargaining pitch

between the convoy and the Canadian government. The Memorandum of Understanding, or the m o U, calls on Canada's appointing senators and Canada's Governor General, the representative of Queen Elizabeth, the second in Canada's constitutional monarchy, to abolish all COVID nineteen related restrictions and to allow all unvaccinated workers whose employment was terminated because of vaccine mandates to get their jobs back.

James Potter, the guy who runs Canada Unity, insisted to his followers that the m o U would force the government's hand and possibly even trigger fresh elections if enough

people signed. Another Canada Unity organizer went further, saying it would require the Senate to after the Prime Minister for corruption and fascism, which, of course there's no legal basis for any of these claims around the m o you, but you know that doesn't really matter in the end, because people still believe it, so it's going to have an impact on what they do. The more controversial Pat King laid out an alternative, however, a more direct plan

of action to the occupiers. In a January Facebook livestream, King said that what we want to focus on is our politicians, their houses, their locations. If political pressure doesn't work, blocking major supply chains will be later on. So more more on that idea later. After the first weekend of protests kind of turned occupations, go fund me released a reported one million dollars of the total ten million raised

for the convoy. As the end of the weekend approached, many convoy participants who rolled into the nation's capital began heading home and the highways on Sunday night saw no shortage of vehicles heading away from Ottawa with their approtest signs and flags still in tow, but plenty of people

stuck around to continue the fight. Thousands and thousands of people and hundreds of vehicles, including a fleet of semitrucks, commercial vehicles, r V campers, and regular cars were more than enough to keep the roads in a large portion of Ottawa around Parliament effectively shut down. I can't help but draw comparisons to the fear mongering narrative of bus fulls of Antifa, you know, protesters coming from out of town into places they don't live, terrorizing locals, shutting down cities.

You know. The other comparison is to like the chop where the chas in Seattle was taking over a large portion of the city, and how that was so vilified. Except, you know, this is so much bigger and impactful than anything so called Antifa or the Black Lives Matter protests have ever done, especially in Canada, in terms of actually impacting the functionality of a city and restricting the local, national,

and international capitalist trade. The Freedom Convoy has done everything and more its proponents warned that Antifa was going to do to Canada. Obviously, part of the reason the Convoy protest was able to get to this point is not just because of its large size, but also the initial hands off approach by police that allowed the Convoy participants the opportunity to get a strong foothold within the city.

The difference in initial law enforcement reaction to the protest Convoy made up of largely you know, conservative, middle class white Canadians, compared to other protests like you know, the Black Lives Better protests, or say the RCMPS typical response to First Nations protests and blockings defending their land. The

comparisons cannot be over analyzed. You know, the latter two forms of protest I mentioned actually do challenge societal power structures that prop up White Canada, while as this Convoy protest does not and instead plays into those very power structures. That dynamic played a major role into how the police handled or didn't handle the first few days of the protest, in which during those early days the convoy attendees were free to build infrastructure that resulted in the protest escalating

into a full scale occupation. The Monday after the first initial weekend, the city's mayor, Jim Watson, declared a state of emergency, but at that point Attawa Police thought it was already too late for the protest to be ended by sheer force without vastly increasing the likelihood of severe damage and life threatening outcomes to the convoy participants, police officers, and regular citizens of Ottawa. On February twod Ottawa Police Chief Peter Slowly explicitly said that there may not be

a police solution to ending the convoy and occupation. There are similar demonstrations taking place in many other parts of this country, indeed many other parts around this continent in the world. What happens here effects there, What happens there affects here. We have seen in the last twenty four hours attempts by other police and other jurisdictions to do just what you have suggested. They were not effective and they created additional safety issues, potential life threatening safety issues.

I have great compassion for those that have been significantly affected, if not traumatized, and we know criminally victimized. We will do everything we can to hold those who have done that to account. Will continue arresting and charging people as we have been. But any action taken without understanding the totality of the context, the totality of the risk, would be irresponsible. You're trying to be responsible, lawful, ethical, and measured.

My last comment when I wrapped up, I'll share again now. The longer this goes on, the more I am convinced there may not be a police solution to this demonstration. There are police chiefs commissioners across this country that are dealing with demonstrations that are starting underway and significantly advanced. This is a national issue, not an Autawa issue from the start. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been playing down the notion of a military response to the ongoing Ottawa protest.

During the first week, he said that sending in troops is not in the cards. Right now. On the February two, the Automa police chiefs said that all options are on the table, including eventually calling in the military, but one must be very very cautious about deploying troops in Canadian

soil in such cases. Trudeau said that a news conference in in the February that it's not something that anyone should enter into lightly, with police basically leaving the Ottawa residents who live near and within the Convoy occupation to fend for themselves. I was curious what sorts of things the local community might be doing to live around this massive,

conspiracy filled group of reactionary out of town campers. What sort of things have the has the community been doing to kind of help survive this this Like has there been like talide projects in the neighborhood to help support other neighbors, you know that that sort of thing there have Um it's actually been kind of wonderful the way the community has been coming together, especially after two years of pandemic, where we've all been kind of like Ottawa

and Ontario have been one of the more restricted jurisdictions in North America. UM. I mean, and I say this as a restaurant manager, like in my opinion rightly, so, like it's about keeping people safe, and we've done a fairly good job of that by and large. But the thing is that, you know, our community hasn't felt a lot like a community in a while, and this week, I mean one of the few positives has been UM

both individuals and organizations. So I mean, Rose and some of the other organizations that we mentioned on Friday have done a great job. There's also been some really really great organic organizing coming out of UM some activists as well as just people in the community. So there's a a few discord servers set up right now. So there's been a huge issue with people, people with disabilities and the elderly getting groceries because deliveries aren't possible downtown UM.

So it started on Twitter, UM, but there's been an organization set up to help people get those groceries. Whether it's a cost issue or just a physical delivery issue. We're ensured people are ensuring that that's happening UM as of today. UM there's gonna be a safe Walks program. UM. There's well there's two. There's one on discord where it's people offering to you know, make sure that you can

get through the space safe. Today though, um, in a positive and more passive sense, we kind of started taking

the streets back. So um, we had about four or five groups of people ranging from ten to fifty just just walking the streets and not not confronting anybody, not getting getting into any direct engagement, just going out to show that we can still walk on our streets and letting our you know, our our neighbors know that we can actually be together and you know, stand up just to be together, which is something that I think a

lot of people have lost over the last week. I mean, like the fact that that's even a big step is showing how tired the situation is. The fact that just get to that point were walking around in a group where you feel safe is like a big thing that Yeah, that's like a really interesting and horrible indicator of what the mood has been like there for people like living in this area. That is. Yeah, that is a big

part of it. And it's something that was actually talked about a lot today, which was how refreshing it was to be able to do it, but also that it shouldn't feel radical to take a safe walk in your community, but it somehow did um and it speaks a lot to the feelings the lack of safety or the loss of you know, safety in this community and has been

pretty immense. I should mention that another community led efforts to deal with the occupation is the ram Ranch Resistance, a loosely organized counter movement to the Chuck Our Convoy that started with people joining the convoys online communications channels and blasting the homo erotic country song ram Ranch. The song is by a Canadian artist and features some flawless lyrics like eighteen naked cowboys wanting to be fucked, cowboys in the showers at ram Ranch on their knees wanting

to suck cowboy cox. Ram Ranch really rocks. The result is not only making the Convoy folks uncomfortable because gay, but also it is hijacking and making their online communications channels kind of useless for any non cowboy cock sucking political organizing efforts. Disruptive resistance to the Convoys online communications is not just limited to the ram Ranch song, however, other vulgar songs have also been introduced into the chats

as well. I'm gonna just kind of give you a brief look at what it's like inside these chats, right, Yeah, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna role play it. The ram Ranch guys are finally gone. It's about freaking time. I've had to shut that stuff off. One person has heard saying and a clip from a chat, immediately followed by a robotic voice saying, welcome to the come zone. Only come inside anime girls, quivering clip, double jointed pussy fresh balls. Since then, the movement has taken on as

something of a life of its own. The ram Ranch Resistance hashtag has been used as a way for people to share information regarding the convoy, and Welcome to the ram Ranch signs have been popping up at convoy counter

protests around the country. Another ram rancher created the website ram Ranch dot c a linking to downtown organizations that have been impacted by the trucker convoy, as well as charities aiding indigenous people's As the convoy settled in, it appeared at the demonstrators and the government had reached a sort of stalemate. Currently, there are more than four hundred trucks parked downtown and Ottawa Police say that they can't move them because the too operators with city contracts are

refusing to help, making matters only more difficult. Police say that families with children are sleeping in approximately a quarter of those trucks. To get an idea of what some Attawa residents who live within the occupied zone see in terms of a potential end in sight, I posed Paul this question, how do you even see the situation resolving

at this point? Like, do do you think they're like the truckers and the people who are in the city are gonna are gonna back down and leave eventually or like or do you think they have to be forced out? Like what do you see kind of an end to this at this point? Well, it's at this point. Probably one of the hardest things to admit is that I don't. Um, the hardest core that are here are committed, and they

have a significant amount of funding behind them. And the thing is that you know, with an occupation protests, they if you don't nip it in the bud, it's snowballs and gathers momentum for a while. Um, And I mean eventually they either peter out or they have to be removed. And this one is still snowballing. Um, We've seen some

more extreme elements come into the city this week. Um yesterday Romana did Dulo, the human on Queen of Canada arrived in birthday Brent the Canadian flag on Parliament Hill, which whatever you think about the Canadian flag, and it's simple us a similar propression. Um you know, that's not

a great look for them. But the other side of it is is that this is a woman with seventy followers who you know, has called for the mass execution of her enemies, and you know, is currently parked in or Winnebago two and a half blocks from my house right now, um so, and with a bunch of her followers down with her. And so they're committed. They know. They don't know that I did occupy a lot of years ago, and the question that people asked us, and sometimes it was the police, was what gets you out

of the park. And in a weird way, there's a parallel here, which is that the hardest answer with occupy was always kind of like everything is kind of fucked, So how do we fix everything? That's the discussion we should be having. So in this case, to these people, in their worldview, everything is kind of fucked, and there's no answer that you can give those kind of people

in negotiations. The police right now are not looking at removal as a serious option, I don't think, or if they are, they haven't figured out how to get to that place yet. And one of the weird things about Ottawa is is that technically in various spaces because the way it's designated, there's a whole mishmash of jurisdictions between

the various police agencies. So like again with occupy that we picked the park, like the park that was occupied was partially picked because it was on like this weird jurisdictional black hole where it was hard to figure out who the cops were at, who should police it were, um so, And they've ended up in the same park where they now have like fifty five cylinders appropane sitting

about five yards from the Department of National Defense. So it's, uh, it's tricky to figure out how you how you get get out of that because all it's going to take is one of them with something in their cab and it's done. Yep, ye. Well, do you have any hope for anything? Do you have any indicators for how it can turn out? Well? I mean in terms of the occupation. I mean, we'll see how it goes. Um maybe there can become some kind of modus vivendi between them and

the rest of the city. I don't know how that happens, but maybe there can be, but I don't know. It's the only silver lining I see right now is you know, the walk that I was on earlier today and the chat that I was having with other people in the community and the discord server and everywhere else, like, this is a really strong community that cares a great deal about itself and sometimes needed to be needs to be reminded of that. And uh, I think this is an

opportunity for that to happen. Then I think that that's the positive that can come out, is that we will take care of ourselves and we'll take care of each other. And that's you know what, what more can you ask where I guess out of this. Reports of assaults perpetrated by members of the Convoy protest have been steadily ruling in the past few weeks, not to mention the seemingly constant presence of honking in the downtown area that's been

affecting residents every day and even into the night. I will offer you this short sample to help complete the picture of what it's like both indoors and outdoors in downtown Ottawa. So apologies about that. Yeah, that was pretty bad and as annoying and frustrating as it may be. Before I close out part one, I'm going to play some audio from one of the truckers or you know, just convoy participants as he addresses fellow convoy ors on why it's good and in fact revolutionary to hunk horns

late into the night. I think it gives you some valuable insight into how these people frame their actions in their own heads. And you know, it will give you an opportunity to hear some of these convoy people directly. So here we go. Yeah, let's go on. There's quiet when I got here, but now they're starting to bring

this tournament some noise. Now, I get it. I saw some comments saying that you want to go from nine to five and you want to turn your horns off, and you want to you know, be respectful and play the optics war. And you've done You've done all the map, man, I get it. I we've done everything. Every piece of garbage has been picked up. Statistically, there is no crime.

And when I mean statistically, if you have some drunk guy acted, you know, silly on one street quickly gets you know, talk to and then the Patriots taken back to his car and maybe there was some incident of mission. I've heard reports of anti for throwing rocks and trucks, tag and stuff. They're the ones committing the crime. But other than that, this has been the most well to have revolution on earth. And now the big complaint is can you get them to only blow their horns between

nine and five? I'm sorry, what has compliant got you guys so far? What is just little by little? Oh? Just do this? Yeah, just just don't peep your horns between nine and five. That's all we're gonna ask. Then were two masks, then just go right back to square one. How about you put your blame right where it belongs, right in the eye of Sauron And that's who we handle this with and every mandate. We're not allowed to exist in society. I'm not allowed to go to a movie,

I'm not allowed to go to a restaurant. I'm not allowed to leave the country. You can't even leave you can't travel on planes, you can't do anything that Trudeau can get his fingers on to discriminate against us in society. Meanwhile, he'll blame us for side effects of his guinea pigs. It's an insane world, and you've complied long enough, guys, and the madness in the horn stop. But I am in no place to go tell these guys, oh excuse me? Can you turn your horn off? Can you get used

to complying again? We want freedom. We're not asking for anything unreasonable, and we're doing it on your behalf. The least you can do is turn off your televisions and stop letting their horrible objections to this revolution, and they're horrible false flags and whatever else they bring. I'm sorry about the noise complaints. Now, are you sorry about banishing me from society and treating me like I'm some sort of letter because I want to keep my immune system intach. Sorry, guys,

the horns stand. Stuff it up your ass. Anyone that has a problem with loud noises, we have a problem be advanished from society. Apologies for that, But now I hope you have a better understanding of the type of conspiratorial thinking among the people in this convoy and the importance this whole thing means to them. So with this, that wraps up my part one of my deep dive into the Canadian Freedom Convoy. In the next episode, we'll get into the border blockades both in Alberta and the

Ambassador Bridge which is preventing some international trade. We'll get into some of the smaller protests and attempted occupations in other cities across Canada, and how the situation is evolving in Ottawa and what types of long term political ramifications this protest and any attempt to suppress it will have.

So with that, see you on the other side, welcome to it could happen here, And the second part of my little mini series going into the occupation and blockade protests all across Canada that's been happening the past three weeks. For part two, we'll be starting off with a change of scenery. Instead of the loud, cramped streets of Data and Ottawa and the castle like Parliament building, will be taking a detour to the snow covered prairies and oil

fields of rural Alberta. As the convoy officially arrived in Ottawa on January, smaller protests against health mandates were also happening across the entire country. One of these mini protests was happening in the small city of Lethbridge in southern Alberta, but unlike a majority of other non Ottawa protests, the one based around left Bridge didn't turn out to be a simple weekend of fair. With hundreds of vehicles, including some semi trucks, RVs and farm tractors all gathered together.

It was decided to take part in a little mini convoy of their own, but instead of going to a capital building, they rolled towards the international border crossing used

by truckers in the area. I was able to interview gen a left Bridge local who also happens to work near the area of the Alberta border blockade, and they kind of gathered in left Bridge here and took off about four thirty in the morning, and so they made it down to the village of coots Um, which is essentially right on the border, is the last stop before you hit the border at Coots Alberta, sweet Grass, Montana. And they blocked off the highway completely heading both northbound

and southbound, and they've been camped out since. So it's my understanding that at that point in time throughout you know, day one, two and three of their protest, UM, there was no getting in or out out of the village of Coops, which is it is a small village about two d and fifty residents UM. And it was so bad that not even emergency services could get through, UM again blocking both lanes of the highway in either direction in the ditches UM and just weren't letting up. And

so are they even driving anywhere? Or is it are they just like camped there, just camped out there, parked UM. And of course you know there's people that will drive down to the border and participate for a couple hours and you know, turn around and go home kind of thing.

But there is that core group UM, the majority of which are actually farmers bringing down like their tractors, and of course there is UM some semitruck drivers who are all a part of it and just not allowing anyone to get through on either side, so you know, holding up a lot of a lot of our supplies, a

lot of our UM food and things like that. At first, local police and RCMP just waited out the blockade, I guess, hoping to see if the people would just get tired of camping out in the cold and then you know, go home. But after a few days that possibility seemed less and less likely. Then when the RCMP did start to get more actively involved with kind of managing the blockade, albeit you know, with a very gentle hand and extremely start contrast to how our CMP handles blockades, you know,

defending indigenous land. But at that point it was already kind of too late, and the pacified police action only spread the protests efforts. On day four of the blockade at the border um, the RCMP had kind of moved in a little bit to try to break it up. So some of the the protesters had kind of broken

off and decided to blockade's mother areas. So there was a blockade that happened on Highway three just outside of the town of Fort McLeod, on the way to the town of Brockett, which would be on the Blood Reserve here in Alberta. UM. They blockaded the highway and wouldn't let anyone through, and then they set up another blockade um on Highway twenty three, which of course would be the the next north south route. Given that Highway three

was now blocked off, the Highway three going to Highway two. Um. So they've blocked off Highway twenty three. Um at there's a traffic circle or a roundabout kind of in the middle of nowhere in the highway at the village of Nobleford, sorry, town of Nobleford, and they set up a blockade at the roundabout as well. Wouldn't let anyone come in north south east west, didn't matter. Uh So that was Tuesday. Tuesday,

highways to UH four and three. Yeah, effectively shutting down, and they kind of like travel for like food and supplies for like all four directions pretty much exactly. Yeah. Like, there was a lot of chatter on social media. Um, we have a local Facebook group for road conditions, and there was a lot of chatter, you know, where do we go, how do we get around this? What back roads?

Should I take? Secondary highways? That sort of thing. And thankfully, you know, there was still I suppose some ways to get around it. The RCMP we're kind of setting up detours and things like that, but those main routes were blockaded, um on Tuesday, which would have been I guess what days that February one. The static highway blockades preventing traffic in all four directions were mostly a one day affair.

The next Wednesday morning, more effort was put back into the main blockade at the border near Coots, with some folks still participating in the rolling blockades of sorts you know, on the surrounding highways. So instead of just blocking the roads by staying parked people in vehicles kept a slow loop of traffic moving through the highway system to clog

up travel. And then like the contingent at closer to the border has been more consistent, you would say, yeah, definitely, the contingent at the border on highway for like I said, at Coots, Alberta, they've been set up all the way

through since the twenty nine UM. There has been days where the tensions are definitely very high where those protesters are saying we will not leave until UM or we won't even come to the negotiating table until these restrictions are gone, like we won't even attempt and so the RCMP have been kind of in negotiations with them over

the last few days. There's been a couple of times where they they had resolution to open up lanes of travel to get some of these trucks with goods through Um and of course there's been people stuck in their cars as well for quite a few days without food. At that point, UM the protesters originally had come to an agreement with the RCNP to let some people through and then turn around and decided, well, we don't really want to. So that was kind of ongoing from I'm

going to suggest up until about second UM. On the second the RCMP had set up a roadblock at the town of Milk River to uh, I guess, dissuade the the locals from coming out and adding to the congestion

and adding to the problems. And at one point UM there was a group of people and videos are on TikTok, they're on Facebook, they're on Twitter, where people are blasting through the barricades, going through the ditch, going through the median, just bypassing it completely to get down to the convoy protest. As I record this, the border crossing port of entry near the town of Coots has been largely impassable for

over two weeks. It's a major trade hub where millions of dollars worth of agricultural products like meat and feed trade hands each day. The first day had hundreds of vehicles participating in blocking access to the trade route along highway for but after a week of blockading the Alberta, Montana border crossing, around eighty big rigs continued to remain

along the highway for a majority of the time. Since the twenty nine of January, vehicle access has been either completely stopped to and from the border or at least substantially slowed down. The occasional day where vehicles are being let through on one lane of traffic has an estimated seven hours of stall time order to get through just

that tiny area of road. The blockade of that International report of entry at Coots and the only seven commercial land crossing in Alberta is a direct threat to the economic well being of growers, producers, manufacturers, and many other businesses that rely on the movement of both raw materials and finished goods in and out along the can m

X corridor end quote. Lewington has warned that manufacturing plants in the region will be forced to either reduce or cancel production as their supplies run out and they're unable to get their goods to international markets. This is something farmers and food producers are dealing with as well as agricultural experts are one of the region's main economic drivers. In the left Bridge metropolitan area exported nearly one point eight billion dollars worth of goods, around eighty percent of

which went to the United States. A vast majority of these exports went through this Coots border crossing. That means for the city of lefth Bridge alone, they're facing a roughly three million dollar a day impact on the economic damage based on the road and rail travel that must move through that port of entry. The impact is of course four or five times larger than if you consider the movement of other Alberta goods in and out of

that same North South corridor. It's only more ironic and frustrating considering that the idea of shutting down international capitalist trade, you know, costing millions dollars in losses each and every day, is exactly the sort of thing that these same conservatives would complain that BLM or Antifa would do, you know, like, in terms of anti capitalist action, this is actually more successful in causing damage to capital than really anything I've

seen the Canadian left do in recent memory. Now, obviously police response to a left wing protest, you know, doing similar tactics would probably greatly differ, you know, Plus the fact that these people are participating in these blockades are the same types of people that talk about their desire to run down protesters in trucks, you know, whenever there's marching in the street or an indigenous road blockade to

an new oil pipeline. Nevertheless, on top of the police inability, whether by choice or imagination, to handle the situation, and considering both the conspiracy fueled political issues around masks of vaccines and health man dates and the growing economic problems the blockade is causing, it's not super surprising that the Conservative government of Alberta began the process of removing health

mandates as the protests striked on. And unfortunately, it seems like the province is listening and they're taking it seriously. I know. Um last night our premier had gone on Facebook Live and had an ounce that come Monday, the caucus will vote as to whether or not to scrap it um, which would mean that, like I said, now there's no longer that requirement to access some of these these services from private businesses. And then ultimately that would lead us back into our letter rip model that we

had last summer. The Monday vote came in the next day, February eighth. Alberta Premiere and premiers are like the you know equivalent of governors for the states, but Alberta Premiere Jason Kenny announced that the provinces so called COVID nineteen vaccine passport program would end immediately, explaining that the restriction program had served its purpose, but it is no longer needed since Alberta has passed the peak of omercron infections

about three weeks ago. Capacity limits were also next Tuesday night for venues with capacity limits under five hundred, including libraries and places of worship. An effect of this past Sunday, February, the province will also no longer require masking for children and youth in schools and for any Alberton's aged twelve and under in any setting. There is a second phase

for Alberta's COVID restriction removal plan. On March one. The province is set to remove any remaining restrictions, including the indoor mask mandate, work from home requirements, any remaining capacity limits, and limits on social gatherings and screenings for youth activities.

Jason Kenny did deny that the move has has anything to do with the protests from those you know demanding the repeal of vaccine mandates of all types across the country, including the blockade that the government had condemned illegal at the Coots border crossing, saying, quote, none of that has anything to do with a few trucks participating at the

Coots border crossing. Um, who added that keeping previous rules in place would invite widespread non compliance for no purpose, saying why keep this going on for a few days when we know that in many areas were already having non compliance problems. So yeah, Um, of course, the demonstrations have continued despite Alberta dropping multiple health measures and agreeing to a demand made by a lot of the anti mandate protesters, which implies that this protest is about much

more than simple COVID health measures. Right. It points to the movement being more about taking political power and forcing everyone to comply with their own conspiratorial and alienated understanding of the world. As someone who's like living in Alberta, which is, you know, one of the more conservative provinces of Canada, Um, how much do you see this kind of this kind of you know, spontaneous revolt and resistance to be actually tied to the health man dates and

how much do you see it? It's more like a revolt around like Trudeau and Canada's like Canada's like um veneer of liberalism like like like how like how much do you did you see? It's more like a urban rule divide thing that's now just getting pushed into the spotlight because of covid um or do you think it

really is way more about covid itself? Um, I think that the pandemic has definitely had a role to play in sparking a lot of this this fearer and this uh, this disconnect, But the seeds have been sown for many years, through many successive provincial governments and and much rhetoric that um, the West has always been ignored by the East, by our politic institutions in the East, namely Otto our federal government, the seat of our federal government in favor of you know,

Ontario and Quebec and what they want to Alberton's have always seen themselves with a bit of a martyr complex where we are the economic powerhouse of the country, but we are the ugly stepchild and we are ignored in favor of the wonderful children in the East. And so that that disconnect and that divide has always been there,

and the pandemic has been the catalyst. Um. And of course, you know, whenever there is a federal Liberal party that's in in power, the conservatives feel the Conservatives in Alberta and in the West they feel even more disenfranchised. They feel that this this government doesn't hear them, they don't listen to them, they don't you know, follow the whims of you know, the died in the world conservatives. And so that rhetoric has built and built and built over

the years, um. And it's all tied into other things as well. It's tied into the economic policies and the policies of the liberal government with in regards to climate change and carbon tax and how how that's been hitting um Albertan's you know, they our province is very heavily dependent upon the oil and gas sector and it always has been for the last I'm gonna suggest fifty six years.

And so when they see things like in Autumna, where they're talking about climate change and they're talking about you know, green energy, it makes these conservatives angry because this has been our bread and butter for years. This is what's fed our families. They don't recognize that, you know, this is this is the path forward. All they hear is we don't want you, we don't want your jobs, we don't want your products. And they're angry and this has

been the catalyst now where they're just fed up. They're up with with not being heard. Unfortunately, all that built up anger and resentment towards the government and its leadership is ending up being taken out against just any symbol of liberalism, not really the government directly. You know. Within this worldview, homophobic attacks can be then thought up as this weird form of punching up because gainness is associated with liberalism, so it's seen as almost this system of power,

even though it's that's obviously backwards. It's this kind of weird backwards thing where you can view like attacking progressive things as an attack on the system. So that means like being racist or being homophobic, is this rebellion against you know, the system itself, even though it just ties

into all those same systemic issues. Just the other day in edmund And there was a business owner, uh, a hair salon owner, who's been very outspoken about this Freedom Convoy and about how she doesn't agree with their messaging and their their ideas, and she was actually hunted down

on social media, um, hunted down in person. They found her, someone found her her business, went to her business and confronted her and assaulted her UM at her business, all because she uh does not support the convoy, and apparently this individual did. UM. You know, we definitely, we definitely see here that UM. The feeling is is that if you are a liberal in Alberta, this is not the place for you. UM. You know, if you if you believe in you know, equal rights for everyone, this is

not the place for you. If you believe in the rights of marginalized and minority communities, this is not the

place for you. And we I've seen that, you know, and taking part in various protests I suppose that could be branded as liberal protests, like the Black Lives Matter protests and um, the protests and rallies that were held in support of the indigenous communities last summer upon you know, the news that kind of shook the world regarding um graves at residential schools, and you know, you see it with the indigenous communities that protests pipelines on their traditional

lands and they block you know, railways, and the same people that are screaming for jail time and for violence and and police intervention on these various protests are the same people that are taking part in a convoy. Protesters at the Cootes border crossing will now be charged or

mind according to the province and the RCMP. R CMP Deputy Chief Curtis is A Blocky said in a news conference during the start out the second week of the Alberta border blockade that police are actively working to diffuse situation at the most important border crossing in Alberta, but are trying to do so peacefully, saying, make no mistake, there are criminal activities taking place at these protest sites

that violate both criminal code and provincial laws. We've seen activities that are both dangerous and reckless and are having a very negative effect on Alberton's who live in the area. He then pointed to you know, dwindling numbers involving the blockade from a high of around two fifty vehicles to begin with two around fifty vehicles last Tuesday afternoon. As a success of their efforts to this point. But you know this isn't convinced everyone, since the blockade is still happening.

So Acting Justice Minister and Solicitor General Sonia Savage called the blockade intolerable and said that those taking part in the demonstration can be charged under several different federal and provincial laws, including the Federal Criminal Code, the Provincial Traffic Safety Act, and the new Critical Infrastructure Defense Act, which was enacted right in the middle of during the international George Floyd uprising and the certain rail blockades in Canada.

I'm going to go into many tangent here just because of how terrible this bill is. The bill gives law enforcement and the judicial system extra power to dish out significant monetary fines and extra jail time for actions deemed

to interfere with so called essential infrastructure quote unquote. The stated goal of the bill is harsher penalties and charges for quote, damage or interference caused by blockades, protests, or similar activities that can cause significant public safety, social, economic,

and environmental consequences. The Act builds on existing trespassing laws to create offenses for trespassing on destroying, damaging, and obstructing the use or operation of any essential infrastructure, also under the banner of essential infrastructure that includes public and private property.

By the way, the bill was obviously aimed at left wing protest and specifically equal defense and environmental protest and or sabotage, as the first two things defined as essential infrastructure in the bill are quote, pipelines and related infrastructure and oil and gas production and refinery sites. So yeah. There's also been pressure from government officials to include forfeiture property in the commission of crime through the Civil Forfeiture Act.

RCMP Deputy chiefs the blockys that charges will be coming for those taking part in the protest and could be as simple as the way they are illegally parked on the highway. He didn't note that the RCMP has attempted to hire local towing companies to move the trucks and other equipment off the road, but have been unable to do so, with the companies citing concerns over damaged their business long term or just safety issues in general. This has also been a huge factor in attempts to deal

with the auto occupation. Zablocki said that there are concerns over safety and violence in response to the more aggressive approaches to breaking up the blockade. So far, the main action law enforcement has taken to dissuay people from blocking the border is just giving out tickets and fines for

illegal parking. Premier Jason Kenny said that he is supportive of our CMP handling this as they see fit through the means that they already have, and has been supportive of using the you know, pretty horribly authoritarian Critical Infrastructure Defense Act, saying quote, last year we passed the Defense of Critical Infrastructure Act, which gives police enormous powers and

various defines the penalties, including the power of imprisonment. We have made it clear to the RCMP, who is our provincial policing service, that they can and should use all of these powers. They're dealing with a very fluid situation,

and I have respect for their judgment. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau addressed the ongoing blockades and protests across the country this past Friday, encouraging demonstrators to leave, while also passing the buck on any blame, saying quote, I want to remind everybody that politicians don't direct police departments to enforce

the law. Instead, Trudeau made vague threats around revoking licenses and criminal records for those continuing to protest, saying everything is on the table because this unlawful blockade has to end and will end. The blockade at the Cootes border crossing is not the only convoy aligned protest in Alberta. There have been many demonstrations in basically every major city

in Calgary. The Alberta Union of Provincial Employees says that frontline healthcare workers, patients and people living around the Sheldon Camere Health Center have dealt with protests for weeks, but things have only gotten worse since the truck convoy hit the news. The vice president of the Alberta Union for Provincial Employees said that protesters have blocked the ambulance bain, they have harassed workers and patients as they come to

and from the center. They've banged on the windows of the facility and upset people inside, and they have blocked the roads around the center. Moving on to the province of British Columbia, as the second weekend of protest was set to descend on Vancouver the weekend of February five, in preparation fearing attacks would be carried out against healthcare

workers like they have in the past. Vancouver's to health authorities issued internal ms telling health workers to hide indoors as the convoy pass through the city and to quote refrain from wearing scrubs and or your ID badge outside the hospital during the demonstration. If you do encounter any protesters, please do not engage with them or respond to their questions, and please do not ask protesters to put on a

face mask. Similarly, ahead of a protest in Toronto, the Toronto Police sent letters to hospitals advising their workers to not wear any clothing or markings that identified them as working in healthcare, fearing attacks by protesters. As the second wave of the convoy arrived during the second weekend of the occupation in Ottawa, some of the on the ground

organizational structure started to morphin evolves. The police estimated around this time that five thousand people were still protesting in Ottawa and around one thousand vehicles were clogging the streets during the second week of protests. In an effort to improve optics, considering the four original organizers explicit connections to the far right, a new lead organizational, public relations and bargaining team was assembled for the group, calling themselves the

Freedom Convoy. The new pseudo leadership team consists of Daniel Bulford, a former RCMP officer who was on the Prime Minister's security detail. He quit last year after refusing to get the vaccine and is now the convoy's head of security. Tom Quicken, former military intelligence officer who also worked with the RCMP and was considered one of the country's top

counter terrorism experts. And Tom Marazo, an ex military officer who, according to his linked in profile, served in the Canadian Armed Forces for twenty five years and ours as a

freelance software developer. And just side note in terms of you know, police and former military participating in the protests, there was an organization full of retired police that endorsed the convoy a few weeks ago and said that they have people on the ground there and just got announced as as I'm recording this, that two members of Canada's military counter terrorism unit is under investigation for allegedly taking part in the Ottawa Convoy protests. So yeah, that's fun.

The occupation has been getting more and more organized on the ground the past two weeks and has been able to keep one step ahead of any action taken against police against the occupation. Even just what the convoy participants have physically built is impressive. Less than a week after the convoy arrived, you started to see wooden structures being built around the roads and a growing stockp all of

propane and diesel fuel. There is an impressive amount of tents and wind structures used for kitchens that local organizers have set up, and a whole supply chain has sprung up across the city to keep these people fed, working and protesting. I'm now going to quote a good article in the CBC by Judy Trend quote. The group is set up not only near the Parliament in Ottawa, but they have also built two encampment areas where they carry

out logistical and supply work. Recent reporting has painted a picture that these areas are far more organized than widely thought. The group is also trying out new tactics, such as attempting to clog up traffic at the Ottawa Airport. Other tactics like swatting have been reported as well. Ottawa Police say they're aware of a concerned effort to flood our nine one and non emergency police reporting lines, tweeting that

this endangers lives and is completely unacceptable. Determined to not be outdone by their fellow protesters in the West, after the second wave arrived, the members of the Ottawa Convoy organized away for the Convoy occupation to stay, but also put up a border crossing blockade of their own. Starting Sunday, February six, scores of truckers blocked the Ambassador Bridge connecting Windsor, Ontario, to Detroit, Michigan, disrupting the flow of auto parts and

other products between the two countries. While this protest has been conducted more by pickup trucks than big rigs, it has been holding up the lanes. The bridge is the busiest US Canada border crossing and the key cog in both the US and Canadian economies, as it carries around twenty five percent of trade between the two countries. The

effects of the blockade there were felt rapidly. The bridge regularly carries around three hundred sixty million dollars a day in two way cargoes, but traffic is limited by its nineteen nine physical footprint. There's just two lanes each way with no shoulders and antiquated customs boots, with the northern side just emptying out into the city streets. The bumper to bumper demonstration forced auto plants on both sides the

border to shut down or scale back production. The halting of trade has bottlenecked automaker Ford's ability to get parts from the US to its Canadian plants in Windsor and Oaksville. Ford to shut down the doors of its Windsor plan and reduced the work schedule in Oakville. Ford set in a statement, the interruption on the Detroit Windsor Bridge hurts customers, autoworkers, suppliers, communities,

and companies on both sides of the border. We hope the situation is resolved quickly because it could have widespread impact on all automakers in the US and Canada. Automaker Toyota said that it's three D plants in Ontario closed for the rest of the week because of parts shortages, and production has also been curtailed in Georgetown, Kentucky more On the U s side of things, GM, Jeep, and Honda all had hours cut and assembly lines shut down

own at their factories across Michigan and Ohio. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whittemore urged Canadian authorities to quickly resolve the stand off, saying it's hitting paychecks and production lines and that is unacceptable. The federal Public Safety Minister has said that the Royal Canadian amount of police reinforcements are being sent to Windsor, Ottawa and to Coots, Alberta, where the other border blockade

is happening. With political and economic pressure mounting, Windsor Mayor Drew Dilkins announced that the city would seek a court injunction to end the occupation, saying that the economic harm is just not sustainable and it must come to an end. On Thursday, February tenth, the Biden administration urged Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's government on Thursday to use its federal powers to end the truck blockade at the other side of

the Detroit border. Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of products have been held back for days as fifty to sixty vehicles and around a hundred anti mandate protesters camp out on the main road that leads on and off the bridge. And yes, it is ironic that the same people who are trying to sell Canadians fake stories about failing supply lines and empty shelves are now causing those supply lines to fail and causing those shelves to go empty. The irony is not lost on me, but it may

be lost on the convoy participants. Throughout running these episodes, I was fortunate enough to get to talk to multiple people who have been on the ground in downtown Ottawa. One such of these people's is Peter Smith, an investigative journalist for the Canadian Anti Hate Network. We recorded our conversation and I'm going to include some audio clips throughout the rest of the episode. We started off by discussing what made this protest movement pop off in this specific

time and place. I do you think it was maybe capitalizing on a moment, but also a fair amount of luck. You know, since two thousand nine, the same organizers have attempted to put together other convoys, you know, generally never rising to the amount of attention that they had in two thousand nine. Um. You know, this convoy was also planned long before they specifically started focusing on truckers, and

then it was it was a galvanizing issue. It resonated with people who are frustrated with the Trudeau government, um, and just they're they're handling of of health measures as well as just became a like a vehicle for expressing their general dissatisfaction with their own provinises, like most of our health mandates are provincial, like the Alberta government is

handing down what's happening in Alberta. Um, so it's it's not just it's not just a federal issue, but coming down here and occupying the streets of Ottawa and that

now we're seeing occupying most of our major cities. Um. You know, ones like Winnipeg gets significantly less attention, but are incredibly disruptive locally, um and in some cases more kind of inceniary than the one that we have out here, where you know, participants and organizers are desperately trying to clamp down on on any individuals who's engaging and harassment or uh well or is more common blaming it on

liberal plants. Um. Yeah, it just it became this kind of expression of all of the frustration and very quickly drew attention even from people who've been dismissive of it very early on because of some of the organizers. Um. Once it really started to galvanate, galvanized attention and of

course money, Uh, people couldn't couldn't stay away. I mean to the point that we even have mainstream conservative politicians now getting on board with it, including the man who's very likely to be the future leader of the Conservative Party here. I mean, we're in a very unique moment um, you know, are our far right and kind of conspiracy culture in Canada has also been getting better at organizing

over the course of the pandemic. Wants to get like all major cities have and many small towns continue to have anti mandate um anti lockdown protests. We usually refer to them as the COVID conspiracy movement, just because of how and heavily heavily informed it is by conspiratorial thinking. Um. So it's it's like you had a large amount of people kind of spending the past two years and like a on the ground boot camp of how to organize

within these cities and how to get people's attention. And of course, like like a lot of the far right here, it fragmented. There was a lot of infighting, um and then you know, once there became a central point that was was galvanizing a lot of attention, it started receiving international attention. You know, there's been some questions about the source of some of the money, but certainly the initial

totals seemed to be organically Canadian. Yeah. Um, it just became too big to fall apart essentially, at least at this point. Um. There has been some spats of infighting, but mostly you know, the most polarized and figures are either just keeping their head down or in some cases even choosing to stay away from the main events so as not to be a distraction. Um. There's a lot. One of the lines I see a lot is like,

this is the moment, this is for all the marvels. Um. So there's a huge amount of importance being placed on that. What actually happens, like whether they're able to paint what we've the like the actual rolling back of banddates that we were already starting to see before the convoy began, um as some type of victory for them, um, or

if this leads to further disillusionment. You know, we don't really know at this point, but I think this moment is going to be a propaganda tool, um, and kind of a a point of I think it's gonna be a propaganda tool and like a point of motivation for a long time from your like both on the ground

stuff and just from monitoring stuff online. What do you think like the actual actionable intention was once they arrived in Ottawa, Like, do you think they had a clear plan of what to do or was it more like let's go here and then we'll figure things out. Well,

initially there there was a manum. Initially there was a memorandum of understanding which laid out kind of the points of what the inditial organizers were hoping to accomplish, something they call the Operation bay or hug Um, which includes having the Governor General and our Senate, both of whom are unelected, uh dissolved parliament and reform the government immediately

after we had a federal election. Um. Since then, the message has evolved like they're trying to stay very very like on script with this just being about freedom, um, this just being about mandates. You know, initially there was a lot of attempts to even get people to stop mentioning the vaccine. Of those seems to kind of fallen by the wayside, especially when you start looking at the speakers. It is interesting to kind of wonder what the actual

goal is there. They've started meeting with public officials, you know, there is some type of negotiation going on. Um. Obstensively, the goal is just to have these border restrictions lifted on people on truckers who are unvaccinated returning from the US. You know, the obvious thing is the point out that the US still has a very similar policy in reverse again here would have no impact um on their ability

to to avoid this quarantine. But um, it seems like the goals are fairly murky, and that's almost deliberate because then they can declare victory kind of when it suits them. Ambiguity around protest goals, demands, and purpose itself can be a useful tactic. The Crime Think zine slash article titled why we Don't make Demands makes such a case. I don't have time to summarize it here, but I recommend you give the article a look if you're interested in

this train of thought as an intentional tactic. But on the flip side, you know, vague and direction list protest without much of a focus on a specific goal can also cause protests to peter out without having any lasting

impact on the world. A discussion worth having is how the individual people that make up the convay participants have been convinced to take part in an occupation protest, and how what is considered valid political action has broadened in their own heads if they're the ones doing the action, of course, because from their point of view, since they are doing it, the cause must be valid and therefore

the action is justified. In we have the wetsuin rail blockades, um that was put on by various members of our first nations, and then people who supported them, you know, the same politicians they're meeting, um when the truckers embracing them, uh, saying that our current prime ministers demonizing them um by kind of casting them as under desirables. We're we're you know, we're actively calling people sitting on train tracks as terrorists

who are disrupting our economy. Um. Obviously, in the context of the pandemic pandemic that's very different because there has been kind of mass disruption too to our economy. But this kind of picking and choosing, of of suiting the narrative to court far eight voters seems to be popular. You know how Conservatives typically aren't seen as the protesting type.

Right Conservatives are supposed to be the type of people who drive by the protest and yell, get a job, They're not the ones who are out in the streets picketing. But first of all, that's not really true. Historically, in just the past one years, there's always been conservative protests

for you know, regressive and reactionary goals. Also, conservatives have been much better at organizing off the street for their political policies, specifically around like abortion or Christian dominionism, anti queer legislation, or recent stuff around anti CRT and just

the mainstream racism denial that's been propagated through media. But even if there is historical precedent for conservative protest, bridging the gap of what is seen as valid political action in the minds of these convoy attendees did still take place over just the past few years, just the past two years, specifically, there's been so much conservative protests around COVID.

A whole bunch of the people at the Ottawa protest probably five years ago would have never seen themselves going to protest in the Canadian capital, Right Like, if you told them a few years ago that you're gonna drive all these kilometers to the Parliament to camp out in the cold for weeks to protest against the government and its rules for helping not spread the deadliest pandemic in a century. They would have probably laughed out of the room.

So what is the logical agression of conservative people who generally, you know, look down on any type of protest, especially occupy style protests to the point where they are driving all the way to the capital to camp outside the building, to Hong Korn's day and night. A lot of that political change the past few years correlates to the pandemic, to the social isolation and the great opportunity for the

fast spread of conspiratorial politics that it offered. Over the course of the pandemic, there's been this huge blending of rhetoric online and especially in Canada, this kind of villainization of the other side. Increasingly less and less criticism against the current government is less based on its policy and more based on its figurehead and the image of Trudeau as a globalist politics as opposition to whatever Trudeaux and

the Liberals are doing. The result of that is just a whole bunch of escalation, because you have to keep always being antagonistic and always being contrarian no matter what the opposition actually does. The thing is a lot of the people who used to just be kind of more general conservatives. As they get radicalized online and get caught up with farther right and extremest elements, most of them

still view themselves as like the norm. They don't think they've politically changed the past five years, but if you look at their rhetoric and actions, they definitely have kind of substantially, But they still view themselves the same way they would when they were voting. Forced to even harper, Unless you're a self described extremist, you typically view everything that you do and say as normal and reasonable. Like you, you are the actual normal. Everyone else is shifted either

way relative to you. During our talk, I asked investigative journalist Peter Smith on his opinions about what sorts of political and social factors have allowed the occupation and blockades to have enough numbers to last and continue on so long. Um. Kind of having spent a lot of time on the ground at the Ottawa convoy just talking to people as like as a normal guy without my press hat on. Um, it does seem like when there's a lot of owner

operators there, like when it comes to the trucks themselves. Um, these people are the business owners um or like very close, like they're kind of independent contractors exactly. Um. I think there was a report that came out showing a survey that done that like roughly half of the people there were unemployed. UM. So like the financial promise of all the money raised may have been a big draw. Like not to say that these people don't legitimately believe the

reasons absolutely, um, but it created an incentive. UM. But then having roughly half of them, you know, still having jobs, you know, it comes down to a little bit more

than just money, Like it's about actual belief, actual ideology. UM. But it is interesting for a large amount of people who are extremely worried about supply lines about people having enough food initially um to kind of creating this self fulfilling prophecy where where that seems to be the main tactic is just to grind as much to a halt as they can, using as much as many people as

they can muster. And then just the kind of general hands off approach that law enforcement is taking with them, um has allowed them to organize better, to evolve their tactics to be more effective. UM. Like I certainly don't think a policing solution is is what's going to solve this? And you know, there's a lot of calls for that, which is I think just going to result in a

lot of people getting hurt in the street. Um. But but yeah, like it is interesting that how it kind of it came from the West mostly and then landed in Ottawa and then kind of spread out from there once people realized it was effective, once people realized, you know, there was there was safety in these numbers. Um, it's it's drawn, it's drawn so many people to it. It's it's honestly shock. It's it has been shocking, truly how quickly it is spread and how effective it has been.

It's not January six in the sense that like people are running around Parliament and like trying to find you know, every liberal politician, but in the sense that it's a large amount of people motivated by conspiracy. Yeah, and that's where I view the parallel and because they and honestly, the the actual sincerity of it poses more of a

political threat than the animosity of January six. Um, in terms of like long term, like actual social change and using this type of like occupation as a tactic, the more sincere you are the more of an actual political threat you can be in the long term, because yeah, if they start, if they storm Parliament, then I'll get shut down in a day and then they will be demonized and then then the problem is over, um at

least at least in the short term. Right. Um. But if you actually like do this sincerely and actually get people to buckle under pressure, then that's like actual successful politics. Like that is you're you're actually doing politics objectively. Well, um, and that's more interesting to point out. The problem isn't protesting, Like protesting as a concept isn't the issue. The problem isn't even blockade. No, the problem is not blockades either. Yeah,

all these things are just tactics, and tactics are value neutral. Um. Usually you know, it's until you can take a genocide when it's usually that's a kind of kind of kind of a downer generally. Um. But in generally I kind of you put protest tactics as more value neutral. It's about kind of what the underlying cultural motivation is and what they want the results to be. And even still, you know, some of the some of the points they have are not completely invalid um. But once it gets

caught up in a cultural war kind of mindset. It's like you have to oppose it just because they're on the other side. Um So I kind of want to talk about like the reasons why they are actually kind enough bad like like for like on like a very sincere way, but then also kind of point out some things that are like yeah, maybe the scene, these are things we should consider and it shouldn't take this type of occupation to have us reconsider some of these rules

and regulations. Yeah, like completely, Like I think there's no issue with having being uncomfortable with mandates, um like, even if you feel they're necessary, like being uncomfortable with the amount of state power that is being accumulated. Um. You know, in Canada, you know there have been sweeping changes to the way that we live our lives. Like I know that that's been universal. Um but there there is not a province that hasn't really suffered, like hasn't really impacted

people's lives dealing with COVID um. And you know, this is this is one of the biggest issues when trying

to point out disparate responses in policing. Um. Well, it's like, oh, it's like so we should treat the convoy participants like they treated everybody else, and it's it's like no, like like, you know, the the police chief of Ottawa got a lot of ship for saying he doesn't think there's a policing solution, and it's like, I do agree with the criticism of him, because he has attempted to kick responsibility

to just about every other level of government available. Um, but dragging people out, like towing their vehicles and taking away their livelihood and dragging a lot of people out into the street and then into jail is not gonna resolve these issues now, and if anything, it could could bring more support. Like again, there was another report today that I think it's of people who have camped out have children with them, Like, you know, this is gonna

be an incredibly traumatic experience. It's gonna help radicalize more people, and it's gonna lend credence to their cause if they just go in and bust heads. And it's like if the main focus of this convoy had been ento where we have an incredibly aggressive police force when it comes to like homeless encampments for instance, Um, you know, I think the result could have been very different. Yeah, and then because a lot of stuff around the question of

governments and stuff. Yeah, it's it's the type of things I can agree with with like right wing libertarians, is, yeah, you do have a lot of points I can simplize with around the state and around control, but the way you address them don't actually address the underlying power structures

which give the state legitimacy in the first place. Yeah. Absolutely, And the world that you kind of want in the end is still a world full of hierarchies, just hierarchies that make your life easier and skew and your favor just like asking for two unelected bodies to reoplate replace

your democratically elected government. It's like, yeah, we had ten years of Stephen Harper, Like, um, people were unhappy and extremely critical of that government from the center and from the left, But you know, there wasn't this kind of broad support for the idea that that government was illegitimate, which is I think what we see mostly today, which is the most disturbing and kind of anti democratic part

of the whole pot. Yeah, and that's the kind of on the last thing I want to talk about is like, what do you see like eventually people will go home either out of exhaustion, it'll maybe fizzle away, like like the protests in Portland did. Maybe they'll eventually police will kind of clear out small sections of like wh who knows, But like, this is not going knock one here, but this this isn't gonna last like a year, right, It's not.

It's not gonna like that. I don't think they're gonna have thousands of people came out in front of the government forever. Um So what but what are the actual lumb term political ramifications of this, because we already saw the leader of the Conservative Party step down. Um, So like I want to talk but like specifically with the guy who's probably more most likely to take his place.

How this just does kind of play into the more negative aspects of the convoy, is like how they're going to use this as a political symbol and a political tool to push for policies and forms the government and actions that will end up hurting a lot of of and will uphorting a lot of people. Um in terms of you know, how how it's going to be used

in propaganda and rhetoric. Yeah, well, certainly if we have um, you know, strong legal ramifications put in place that make it easier for provinces, the federal government whatever to crackdown on on protests in general, which I think is something that might be very attractive to our card and government. Um. You know that's going to have obviously very far reaching effects.

You know. One of our opposition parties, um, which is you know, generally further to the left than than the Liberals, the n d P UM, their leader was proposing ways to stop foreign funding from coming in to supplied to the protests. Um. You know, once again, we we had protests a couple of years ago by indigenous people and people who support indigenous movements. Um. You know that that raised money using the same platforms and the same methods.

You know. So I worry about like one of the legal ramifications like to just this this idea, like if the government does crack down very hard, this idea of real grievance and alienation that the West has already been

struggling with. Like we've had a real renewed separatist movement, not from Quebec um where it's generally been the most successful, but from the Western provinces, you know, not not really getting close to obtaining any real political power, but you know, kind of steadily gaining support, pulling a showing that, Yeah, there is a real feeling of Western alienation, that they don't feel represented, and you know a lot of the

ways our government are set up actually makes that true. Um. Yeah. Ultimately, as people I think become more and more disenfranchised, Um, when government action begins to kind of justify imagined ideas

of oppression, um, you're gonna have a real hardening. And since the government in power is a progressive one is or at least one that espouses you know, tries tries to reach for progressive values, you know, there's a good chance that those issues are gonna get caught up with what is just like a quote unquote leftist agenda, Whereas up until probably a decade ago, those things were very much seen as kind of inherent Canadian values that were

embraced by both sides. Um. The current candidate for leadership, he hasn't been he hasn't won the seat in the the Conservative Party yet, but Pierre Pouliver has kind of always flirted to some degree with far right talking points like I don't I I specialize in hey groups, I don't want to make too many pronouncements about mainstream conservatism. Um. But even by kind of members of the very far right who often have turned against the Conservative Party over

the course of the pandemic. He's often referred to as the adult in the room. Um. And while still a politician, kind of their best bet for getting someone in office that they would actually like to see in power. Um, which could I mean could be interesting to see how they if they will be continued support for the PPC and two to four years um. But yeah, I just think there there is a real hardening of the right.

And it's not like the Overton window is shifting. It's just like it's getting wider, like more and more is being incorporated, as opposed to be just going in one direction or another. That disenfranchisement is a driving factor. Like they view this populist kind of uprising or up swelling um that they're seeing now as a function of democracy or like part of how democracy is supposed to function.

So again, like if if you talk to them, they will quite earnestly say many of them anyway, we'll quite earnestly say it like this is about freedom, is about having my voice heard. Yeah, but without a lot of thought about how that will actually functioned in a broader scale.

I mean that just plays into like alienation as like a general concepts, right, Like we're so disconnected from everything about our lives, disconnected from you know, the way we work, disconnected from our interactions with other people, between, disconnected from like you know, money, our food, you know, it's all

the stuff, and like disconnected from politics. Is that the only way that you can actually something that feels real, the only thing that actually feels like reality, is going to do this thing in person because everything else is so disjointed. Um, it's the there is so much of that space in between the phenomenon and the actual thing that is. It leaves you wanting something which you don't know quite what. So yeah, you're going to drive to

Ottawa because that feels so much more real. That feels like actual politics, and it kind of it is like that's like that's that's that's always when it feels like when you're when you're like when you're when you're protesting, it's like, yeah, I'm actually doing politics now, because that's how everything gets set up is by that type of like you know, getting people on the ground, and it's it's such a more personal way to engage than you know, putting a no into a box every two to four years,

like yeah, I I imagine it does feel substantive. And then I mean voting power is centered in our urban centers as well, so there is there is a real disconnect with the representation that that rural people again Western the Western provinces received. I now want to specifically talk about police response and the way needs this occupation and blockades being handled will affect the political organizing in the future.

I think initially the majority of police concerns and what they were actually focused on responding to was fears around the convoy storming Parliament or if the convoys were going to do something exceedingly violent, which I don't think was necessarily the convoy's actionable objective from the beginning, if you listen to what they were actually saying, it will it was more about choking out the city and applying pressure

on government officials. But the initial non violence, coupled with the shield of being conservative, white and middle class whom you know, the police are less likely to react as brutally to allowed time for the infrastructure to rise. That let the protests turn into a full scale occupation of

a North American city. The first real action police took against the occupation was on the evening of Sunday, February six, demonstrators were gathering for dinner than dozens of officers in riot gear carrying munitions launchers raided a camp after footage of stockpiles and gas cans went viral days previous, in

an attempt to cut the supply route. Police say they seized around three thousand and seven hundred liters of fuel and two vehicles, including a diesel tank, but within hours of the raid, protesters from the camp broadcast reassurance to their supporters and continue to organize just goodalizing smarter tactics. The day after the police raid, protesters continued to deliver fuel to downtown truckers as they executed a coordinated effort

to exhaust police resources. Hundreds of demonstrators carried fuel cans, some empty, some not, just right past officers who mostly stood watched as hundreds of people trolled them with decoy cans while others smuggled in more fuel within the safety of the large crowd right in the middle of the day. Ottawa Police Deputy Chief Steve Bell said the demonstrators were filling cast cans with water to distract officers attempting to subvert their efforts, and that one officer was swarmed by

the crowd while trying to confiscate fuel. To date, police have made around thirty arrests and issued thousands of tickets, launched more than eighty criminal investigations, and four hundred plus hate incidents are also being investigated. Earlier this week, Peter slowly said that the force would turn up the heat as the police started to crack down on anyone bringing

material aid such as fuel to protesters. Police is mentled a protest camp near the Redeau Canal downtown and a fuel operation on the Coventry Road east of the Core, but some trucks and demonstrators continued to occupy downtown streets and the staging area on Coventry. Police say that they need an additional eighteen hundred more reinforcements from federal and

provincial governments to help end the crisis. The entire Ottawa Police Force numbers only twelve hundred, but it's been supplemented with several hundred officers from the Ontario Provisional Police and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police as well as local police

forces elsewhere in Ontario over the past few weeks. Near the end of the second week of occupation, dug Ford, the Premier of Ontario, declared a state of emergency for the entire province, warning protesters demanding an end to pandemic restrictions that if they do not disband, there will be

consequences and they will be severe. He said that those who continue to impede the movement of people and goods could face fines of up to one hundred thousand Canadian dollars, up to a year in prison, and the revocation of their driver's license. During the cold morning of Sunday, February, police largely cleared the portion of the self styled freedom of Convoy blocking the Ambassador Bridge US Canada border crossing on the road between Windsor, Ontario, and Detroit. The clearing

marked a week since the border blockade had begun. Police made several arrests and towed vehicles in connection to the demonstration that had disrupted traffic and the flow of goods. After law enforcement enforced the injunction enacted two days prior or, ring truckers and our supporters to leave anticketed and towed vehicles.

A defined core of some two dozen protesters had remained on foot as temperatures dropped below freezing, but around nine thirty local time, police had mostly cleared the streets to the bridge and were deployed around the area. It was unclear, however, how large police presidents would remain to prevent vehicles and demonstrators from returning there. Meanwhile, in the capital of Ottawa, police grappled with an influx of anti government and anti

vaccine mandate demonstrators for a third straight weekend. Despite both local and provincial officials declaring states of emergency, law enforcement appeared to be unsuccessful in attempts to get the Freedom Convoy protesters to leave by threatening them with fines, prison time, and loss of their licenses. Police have not made any large effort to asrupt to the convoys in Ottawa, similar

to what they did on Sunday in Windsor, Ontario. Ottawa police say that over four thousand demonstrators were in this city throughout the day. However, on Monday, February fourteenth, police action was taken against the blockade at the Coots border crossing that had shut down cross border travel. For almost three weeks. The RCNP said in a press release early Monday morning that they became aware of a small organized group within the larger protest at Coots, which led to

eleven arrests. They say that they hit information that the group had access to a cash of firearms and ammunition in three trailers. During the raid, officers seized long guns, handguns, multiple sets of body armor, a machete, and a large commantity of ammunition and some high capacity magazines. Later that day, to other arrests were made in connection to the blockade. Following the police raid and the thirteen arrests, some other organizers of the protest said a decision was reached voluntarily

to leave the Coots area. Around Tuesday morning. The organizers made a statement saying, quote, we were infiltrated by an extreme element. Our objective was to be here piece really to keep that message going. We want to peacefully leave Coots and return to our families. As of Tuesday, both the border crossing at the Ambassador Bridge to Detroit and the Coot Sport of entry to Montana are open once again, as the border opened back up in Coots. The previous blockade,

protesters and police embraced each other with hugs and handshakes. Meanwhile, on Monday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked the Emergency's Act for the first time in Canadian history to give the federal government and police extra powers to handle the ongoing blockades and protests against pandemic restrictions. Here's how the measures were taking today will help get the situation under control.

The police will be given more tools to restore order in places where public assemblies can constitute illegal and dangerous activities, such as blockades and occupations as seen in Ottawa, the Ambassador Bridge and elsewhere. These tools include strengthening their ability to impose fines or imprisonment. The government will designate secure and protect places and infrastructure that are critical to our

economy and people's jobs, including border crossings and airports. We cannot and will not allow illegal and dangerous activities to continue. The Emergencies Act will also allow the government to make sure essential services are rendered, for example, in order to tow vehicles blocking roads. In addition, financial institutions will be authorized or directed to render essential services to help address the situation, including by regulating and prohibiting the use of

property to fund or support illegal blockades. Finally, will enable the RCMP to enforce municipal by laws and provincial offenses were required. This is what the Emergencies Act does. The Emergencies Act, which replaced the War Measures Act in the nineteen eighties, defines a national emergency as a temporary, urgent, and critical situation that seriously endangers the lives, health, or safety of Canadians and is of such proportions or nature as to extend the capacity of authority of a province

to deal with it. The unprecedented deployment of the Emergencies Act gives police quote more tools to restore order in places where public assembly is constitute illegal and dangerous activities, such as blockades and occupations. According to Trudeau, but the thing is police already had all the tools they needed. The illegal occupations and blockades were already illegal, They just didn't want to enforce it. You can look at how the coots, protesters and the police are hugging right. This

isn't a matter of having not enough tools. All this does is set a terrible precedent for using this type of extra power in the future to respond to protests. Because the cops are still going to take a very gentle approach if they ever are forced to take physical action against the Ottawa occupation while using the extra powers

of the Emergencies Act. The Finance Minister of Canada also announced on Monday a broadening of the laws regarding financing of crime and terrorism to now include crowdfunding and also extra surveillance measures against people who donate and use crowd funds for criminal acts, including legal protests. As part of

invoking the Emergencies Act, we are announcing the following immediate actions. First, we are broadening the scope of Canada's anti money laudering, laundering and terrorist financing rules so that they cover crowdfunding platforms and the payment service providers they use. These changes cover all forms of transactions, including digital assets such as cryptocurrencies.

The illegal blockades have highlighted the fact that crowdfunding platforms and some of the payment service providers they use are not fully captured under the Proceeds of Crime and Terrorist Financing Act. Our banks and financial institutions are already obligated to report to the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Center

of Canada or FINTRACK. As of today, all crowdfunding platforms and the payment service providers they use must register with fintrack, and they must report large and suspicious transactions to fintrack h This will help mitigate the risk that these platforms receive illicit funds, increase the quality and quantity of intelligence received by fintrack, and make more information available to support

investigations by law enforcement into these illegal blockades. That's kind of all the information I have at the time of recording. So now I'm going to talk more about the potential political effects that this protest could have, not just on Canada,

but also in how we view protest in general. So the actual result of liberal media framing this type of protest as scary terrorism is laying the groundwork for brutal police actions against massive, mostly non violent, and tactically smart protests to be more normalized across Canada, and extremely brutal police response and harsh charges are unlikely to be leveled against a protest made up of these conservatives, but will

absolutely happen to any future progressive social justice cause, especially if they use occupy style tactics. The more powers police obtain and the legal precedents that are set well of long lasting implications with legal consequences that will always come down harder on the left than they do on the right.

Police will do a bare minimum to resolve this conservative so called freedom protest, but then we'll use it as a justification to grab greater resources and power and use this movement to justify severe preventative protest suppression in the future.

If liberals can widely celebrate and thirst for harsh crackdowns of a protest made up of white conservatives and their families, calling the entire movement a criminal enterprise, and cheering on as police steal property of the protesters despite what the majority of these protesters are doing, just being kind of

camping onside of a street. Think of all of the ways that consent it can be manufactured to clamped down on any future large scale protest, especially when the movement isn't made up of a bunch of regular white people and their kids, and instead of actually challenges the underlying power structures that prop up white Canada, instead of just reinforcing it like the Convoy does. I have a similar issue around all of the hubbub around the fundraisers right.

Restricting where crowdfunded resources can come from will only result in future political social justice causes to be negatively impacted, whether that be bail funds or supporting indigenous blockades from out of country. On February ten, the Canadian federal government effectively shut down the Freedom Convoys Gives end Go fundraiser, making it illegal for the funds to be used in any way. Government's setting the precedent for shutting down protest

crowdfunding is not a good thing now. Any future of protest bail funds and crowdfunding for the set In blockade will always be in jeopardy, and by no means saying that action against a generally hateful, anti democratic, and dangerously conspiratorial protest isn't justified, but just when governments start using it as reasons for more power and creating new precedents for years in jail and hundreds of thousands of dollars

and fines for an occupation. Protest like that shouldn't be cheered on because those things will only come back to bite progressive causes a lot harder than they will be used against the conservative convoyers. There has increasingly been attempts at counter protesting the Ottawa Convoy and the various Convoy

inspired protests around the country. Many of which faced harsher police response than any of the convert protests have up until this point, but those community led counterprotesting efforts are vital. The ram Ranch resistance actions are still ongoing. On Sunday night, the u r L for the Gifts Send Go fundraiser was hacked by activists who redirected the page to a video of the frozen song let It Go, accompanying a manifesto condemning the fundraiser and the Convoy. And that's great,

and that is wonderful counter protesting. That is very in terms of effective ways to shut down fundraising efforts for basically pseudo fascist you know, anti anti democratic conspiracy lad movement. That's great, right, And this was hours after it was officially confirmed to via data leaks that around fifty percent of gibsend Go donations for the Convoy came from the United States, around came from Canada, and then two percent

came from the UK. Although I think it's worth mentioning that for the initial ten million dollar go fund me, we only have confirmation that around thirty three thou dollars came from the United States. To understand how the Convoy flash blockade is working. It's useful to get away from painting all the participants themselves as extremists, because the fact that regular Canadian right wingers are what's making this possible has a whole bunch of other implications that people aren't

really talking about. I'm seeing a lot of Canadians who are just really upset about how the convoys affecting cities and the country as a whole, which, you know, reasonable, I am, it is a thing to be upset about. But then just jumping to insist that it must be inorganic, I think is kind of faulty. Focusing instead on theories around foreign influences and ashtarf organizing elements of which have been present, sure, but also the impact in which is

I think kind of been overblown. But even if those things are completely true and major factors, that still overlooks the fact that there are thousands of real Canadians from around the country camped up in Ottawa, and the majority of those Canadians sitting in the streets are not Nazis right or really even extremists, and most of those people are not receiving personal funding from dark money billionaires. They

consider themselves regular, working class, freedom loving Canadians. It's much harder to reconcile a homegrown movement full of participants that have slid further to the right over the past two years due to rampant online misinformation coupled with ineffectual government support during the pandemic. It's easy to point to so called organizers who are definitely more fashion, large scale sketchy donations, and far right media figures who are trying to jump

support for the convoy. But those things alone don't get many of thousands and thousands of people and their kids to drive across country for a cause that they earnestly believe in the years of political alienation and disenfrantisement that caused that to happen is a lot harder to solve than just cracking down on organizers and donations. Watching homegrown reactionary street politics that one day can grow into an actual far right, populist and fascist movement is a lot

more frightening than the idea of overseas astroturft organizing. Not that those things are mutually exclusive always, but I'm just trying to make a good point here. Despite cries to make this, Canada's January six in a way, the convoys more effective than January six in terms of the evolution of valid political action. It's pushed the boundary on what is deemed as acceptable and even possible for large scale

occupations and supply line blockades. In the major North American urban setting, people who would never consider themselves militant are now involved in multiple border crossing blockades. That's cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and to get to this point,

so many things need to happen. COVID isolation offered fertile ground for people's politics to unknowing these slide more to the extreme, the many in person connections that help prevent people from falling prey to conspiratorial thinking ceased to exist.

General frustration at Trudeau and the perceived notion of liberalism and elitism has been steadily growing since, and all that mounted up frustration is now being released, and as a result, the invisible Overton window of acceptable political action has shifted right in regular conservatives. My means, and a movement like this is hard to dissolve. Police actions have the chance of escalating the situation and elongating people's willingness to protest,

and even if more mandates get removed. That doesn't mean the protests will stop either. Removing the Alberta mandates didn't stop the Coots border blockade, for instance, because you know, even if all the mandates in Canada get rescinded, which whish they won't and whish they shouldn't, but even if they did, that would still leave the US's Vaccine Board requirements which are preventing on vaccinated truckers from entering the States anyway. Similar tactics and protests inspired by the Canadian

convoy have broken out overseas in recent weeks. The convoy and blocking inspired protests in New Zealand have led to frequent clashes with police outside New Zealand's Parliament building. For the past two weeks, French protesters formed their own Freedom Convoy against the government's vaccine mandates. The convoy converged on the Shawn's Aliz in Paris on February second, where protesters were met by seven thousand police members and tear gas.

Unlike Canada, where the government failed to stop a blockade at the U S border, French authorities got way ahead of this protest by stopping at least five hundred vehicles before they even got to Paris. Only a few dissent cars made it to the Schanz al Liz and the police ticketed three hundred protesters who were present at the demonstration. Protests against government coronavirus restrictions have cut on in Europe and other parts of the world in recent days, but

they remained more subdued than the Canadian demonstrations. A convoy of about five hundred vehicles, mostly from France, who are borrowed from entering Brussels of just a few days ago, leaving several hundred protesters to gather on foot at a city square instead. Another convoy of several hundred vehicles blocked access to the seat of the Netherlands government in the Hague on February twelve, And of course many political figures in the US are really trying to get a convoy

esque protest kicked off here. In the United States, Tucker Carlson and Fox News in general has covered the convoy NonStop, giving it tons and tons of support. Tucker has said that the Canadian trucker convoy is the single most successful human rights protestant in a generation. Senator Rand Paul So that he hopes the truckers come to America and specifically two clog up cities. At least nine members of Congress, all Republicans, have all publicized their support for the convoy

participants on Twitter. Self appointed organizers for a US based convoy have found quick support from conservative outlets. US convoy organizer Brian Brace has been making the rounds on Fox News sitting Down with Carlson, as well as the networks Fox and Friends Morning Show. Brace says that he hoped to organize a cross country convoy from California to Washington,

d C starting around March fourth. Routes to converge on d C from across the country are being planned, while the group's telegram channel was actively soliciting volunteers and donations of items like tents, generators, and p A systems. I kind of hope people on the left can look at the tactics being used in Canada, some that have worked

and some that have faltered. But in terms of like anti capitalist action, you can't do much better than causing hundreds and millions of dollars and losses to international trade

between two of the biggest countries in the world. Right now, no protest movement can be replicated, But any movement can be analyzed and that can inform how folks approach future movements as they spontaneously arise, and I, at the very least help you have a better idea now of how only a few thousand people can totally choke out a

major city, because we've talked about this possibility before. You know, a group of people overwhelming local law enforcement and taking over and shutting down a sizeable portion of a popular metropolitan area, not to mention simultaneously blocking off supply lines,

trade routes, and international border crossings. The evolution of these medium scale anti government resistance tactics is something we all should be paying attention to as the political tensions continue to rise right outside our doorstep, because it's always too late when you realize the calls coming from inside the house. What's incapable of being racist? People joking about Canadians can't do it to Canada. Can't do it to Canada? Or the Princisi could happen here the French. We can be

racist against the French. Yeah, speaking of speaking that makes Quebec angrier. But like speaking of racism, Chris, what's our topic today? Yeah, today's episode is about why I hate the cops. Hell. Yeah, specifically it is about is about Chicago Police Department and the many, many, many, many many crimes they have committed. Uh, we're gonna talk about well, okay. To lead us in to explain what we're doing here today, I'm going to read a quote from from the late

anthropologist David Grabery from this book The Democracy Project. For my own part. I find what I call the rape torture and Murder test very useful. It's quite simple when presented with the political entity of some kind or another, whether a government, a social movement, a guerilla army, or really any other organized group, and trying to decide whether they deserve condemnation or support. First ask do they commit or do they order others to commit acts of rape,

torture or murder. It seems a self evident question. But again, it's surprising how rarely, or better, how selectively it is applied. Or perhaps it might seem surprising until one starts applying it and discovers conventional wisdom. When many will political issues

instantly turned upside down. In two thousand six, for example, most people in the United States read about the Mexican government sending federal troops to quell a popular revolt initiated by a teachers union against notoriously corrupt governor in the southern state of Wahaka. In the US media, this was universally presented as a good thing, a restoration of order. The rebels, after all, were violent, having thrown rocks and Molotov cocktails, even if they only threw them at heavily

armed police, causing no serious injuries. No one, to my knowledge, has ever suggested that the rebels raped, tortured, or murdered anyone. Neither, as anyone who knows anything about the events in questions seriously contested the fact that forces loyal to the Mexican government had raped, tortured, and murdered quite a number of

people in suppressing the rebellion. Yet somehow such acts, unlike the rebels stone throwing, cannot be described as violent at all, let alone as rape, torture, or murder, but only appear, if at all, as accusations of human rights violations, or

in some similarly bloodless legalistic language. Yeah, and that that's the framework that I want to take the Chicago Police Department so people can understand why and how and just just sort of get people can get a taste of of the sheer horror that anti police organizers and just like regular people in Chicago are fighting every day because Chicago Police Department fails the rape torture murder test again

and again and again and again. And so we are going to tell four stories of torture, rape, and murder by the Chicago Police Department. That seems fun. It's gonna be great. Happy pants on, kids, go for a cruise, you know, take the top down. Um, it's it's time for a good old fest. So our our first story of torture, rape and murder by the CPD is the story of Chicago's infamous torture ring, led by a man

named John Burch. Yeah. Now, John Bird has been a military police sergeant working at a pow camp in Vietnam. So so immediately you have a guy who's not only a troop cop, but he's he's he's a troop cop while he was a troop and then he becomes a cop and you know, nothing, nothing good can possibly come

from that. And the other thing and nothing good can possibly come from is the fact that while Burge was in Vietnam, the US was doing some just really six ships of Viennamese prisoners, including rape, getting rape, rape with hard objects, and rape followed by murder. Uh. The electric shock called the Bell telephone hour rendered by attaching wires to the genitals and keep your keep that one in mind. We have not seen the last of that. Uh. And rape using eels and snakes, as we have talked about

on bastards of it before. Um. They're also like they're also a huge water boarding fans. So this this is, this is the environment that Burge is sort of you know, being trained as a copy in right, He's he's one of those these these PRW camps and he gets the purple heart for his service. Now when when he comes back to the US and he becomes a cop, and within about three years Burge and his white cop buddy

start just absolutely beating the crap out of black suspects. UM. One of these prisoners, a man named Anthony Holmes, was repeatedly tortured with electric shocks and almost suffocated a death of a bag put over his head. Holmes was tortured so badly he literally thought he was going to die, so he confessed to a crime he didn't commit. And spent thirty years in prison. Yeah. I actually interviewed one of the people tortured by Burge who was had his

testicles electrocuted. Yeah. Yeah, we're gonna get into that. But yeah, it's it's it's horrible. It's it's pretty the worst things I've ever read. Uh. Yeah, And Holmes, this case is particularly grim because so he tells his lawyers that he's been tortured, and his lawyers don't believe him, and so you know, he yeah, he he wented to spending thirty years in prison that he didn't do Um those shocks. Yeah yeah, so okay, So that they have this box, right,

it's his box as a handcret generator. Burge calls at the end word box. Uh. And he just attaches people's like it's just attaches it to people. I wonder what, Oh yeah, no, it's he's all of these people are so indescribably racist. It's like, yeah, he he just like he keeps this box like on his desk at at the Chicago Police Department. Like it's just on his desk

at work. Um. Now. The other thing is notable about this is that he he and the people around him would call just electrocuting people by touching alligator lamps of them and putting nine thousand two under vaults into them. They called it the Vietnamese treatment because I guess what

he learned this in Vietnam. Um. Now Burge is so called Midnight Crew, had had an incredibly high rate of solving crimes, and he has an incredibly high rate of quote unquote solving crimes because he's just torturing random black people until they confess um. And you know, it's it's

it's not like people don't know he's doing this. There's there's a detective in the seventies who like walks in on Burde torturing a guy, and he goes through superiors and it's like Burgess, Burgess torturing these people, and that detective gets reprimanded and were reprimanded for like reporting the

torture and transferred to another area. So Burde gets promoted to sergeant in nineteen seventy seven and then again to lieutenant in nineteen eighty, and he gets he gets put in charge of the newly formed violent Crimes unit, and from from from this position, his rate of terror intensifies, and so so in nineteen eight two, someone shoots two white cops. And you know, this is one of one

of the sort of classic police things. Anytime a cop dies the the see the police department just goes fucking ballistic. Yeah yeah. And and in this case with with with Burge in charge, he basically turns the entire South Side into what can only be described as a fascist police state. Um, here's this is. This is from the Chicago police torture scandal, illegal and political history. In in Cuney's Law Review, police

kicked down doors and terrorized scores of African Americans. And what Jesse Jackson of Operation Push Push and Raynald Robinson if the Afro American policely condemned as quote martial law that smacked of Nazi Germany. Thirteen witnesses were smothered with bags and threatened with bolt cutters and Burgeoness detectives took several young men who they wrongly suspected to be the

killers to police headqure horders and tortured them. And I mean they're just like you know that they're buzzing down people's doors or dragging people away out in the middle of the night. They do this for about five days before, they arrest two brothers and who again had nothing to do with this. They just decided that these two were the guys and tortured just the absolute shit out of him. Um. One of the brothers, Andrew Wilson. But before birds even

gets there, because this is the everything about birds. It's not just birds, right, like everyone he's like around him, he is also a torturer. It's just birds sort of, you know, but birds the guy like directing a lot of it. So even before he gets there, yea, like Wilson gets like he's burden with a cigarette lighter. He gets strangled with the bag over his head again, and they just like beat him a bunch of times. And

then it gets even worse. Um Burgs like, you know, but birds, that's the thing where where he likes he straps him to the to the electric box, right, but he also straps him against the radiator. And you know these are like old Chicago steam radiators, right, if you touch, if you like touch them even briefly, you get burned. And so yeah, he straps into a radiator and every time he like gets shocked, he jerks back into the radiator.

It gets burned. Yeah, I have a friend who get a second degree burned dripped from like briefly touching one of those things. Yeah, yeah, I mean it's basically it's basically tying someone to an oven that's turns. Yeah, I mean it's it is breasttaking in humanity on a scale that is yeah, um pop esque. Yeah, yeah, it's it's it's it's real. It's real. Cops shit. Um, it's for sure, real cop shit. Yeah. So here here, here's an interview, uh with Wilson. There's an extractive one from from the

book Writings from the World of Policing. Wilson said that Bird cranked the generator, sending nine thousand, two hundred volts of electricity into his body. He put it on my fingers, Wilson explained, one of the clamps on one finger and one of the other finger, and then he kept cranking it and cranking it. And I was hollering and screaming. I was calling for help. My teeth was grinding, flickering in my head. Pain. It hurts, Wilson continued, But it

stays in your head. Okay, it stays in your head, and it grinds your teeth. It grinds constantly, grinds constantly. The pain just stays in your head and your teeth cut constantly. Grinds and grinds and grinds and grinds and grinds and grinds. Now Wilson, They do this to Wilson

for like a day, and he doesn't confess. He he refuses to confess because he didn't do it, and so he goes to like they bring him in front of a family prosecutor and Wilson tells the prosecutor that he's being tortured, and you know, it's incredibly obvious he's being tortured, like there's just there's marxal Lover's body, like his his face is destroyed. And the prosecutor sends him back to Bird,

who tortures him more. And but by the time the Burge is done with him, Wilson is so visibly fucked up that the police lock up keeper like takes a look at it, like takes one look at him and goes, I'm not going to be a part of this and refuses to put him in lock up cook Cook County Jails, Like Director of Medical Services UM sends a letter going like this man was tortured to the police. We found

a human being. Yeah, yeah, well you know, and it's like every one once every like, I don't know, maybe like a hundred pages of reading about this, you find one person who is a normal human being. Unfortunately, the state's attorney, instead of prosecuting Burge for again attaching attaching a man's balls to a hand create generator and then electrocuting him. Uh, the state prosecutor and the police superintendent

both publicly congratulate Birds for his work. Yeah, and Andrew Wilson, mean while died in prison in two thousand seven, because this world is just the worst. Yeah. Now, you might be asking yourself, how does he get away with this? And the answer is that the CPD is complicit in burges torture at literally every level. Every attempt to stop Burge is derailed directly by the departments. And not only is he not stopped, he's repeatedly praised and promoted for

his actions. And yeah, I mean that's how it goes. Yep, It's it's great, it's it's it's an institutionalized system of torture, rape and murder. That yeah, it's like that we have us a little abbo grade right at home, but yeah, I don't worry. Well, well, I guess we won't actually get to with grades specifically, but I can, I can do, I can I can do an upgrade tie in at

the end of this part. So the CPD has something they call the Code of Silence, and we'll talk about this more later, but basically, the core of the code of Silence is that just no matter what crimes, what atrocities, which is in him in Pig Horrors, you see cops

committing you, stay silent. Now this code you know, it's it's it's a code that everyone sort of knows right in the police, but it's also directly enforced um and and it's enforced by the stuff Burge would you do, like just to other cops, Like he would do things like if there was a cop who was like unhappy with him, he would like walk up behind them when they're opening a file cabinet and point a gun at their head and then go like bang and then do

this like a thing that I can really only describe as a supervillain monologue about how like the projects are a dangerous place, maybe you're gonna turn up dead. It's he also he has these street files that he keeps on like other cops families so that if another cop like goes after him, he can have their family arrested and then plant evidence on them. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, It's it's like, you know, like in a certain like he's doing this to other cops, and it's like, well, okay,

like you know what, like what what possible? Like system of of of accountability quote on court or police reform is like ever going to do anything to a guy who will just do this two cops like and you know, with the CPD actively backing him, there's there's nothing that can stop Burge. And I should mention here that there's persistent rumors that Burge as a klansmen um I I

couldn't find like firm confirmation of it. He's he's certainly racist enough, but but I think, yeah, but like why would he why would he spend like That's that feels like almost he would be like why would I waste my time doing that like talking about being racist when I can go out and torture people because I'm a racist every day? Like the clan already got it going on. Yeah, And I think it's sometimes like, yeah, the question is immaterial.

He is a member of the Chicago Police Department and organization is systematic racial terror, the likes of which the modern clan can only dream of. Yeah that's whatever. Yeah, Yeah, it's like who cares he's he's he's jumped burge. Honestly, if he were spending time at clan matings at least he wouldn't be torturing people during the time. Yeah, it's yeah, love love your police. When if he was a klansman

that might have been slightly better. I mean, that's the big thing with like this type of like liberal response to the type of extremism. It's like they only view it as a problem if you're like explicitly part of this, you know, Like it's like very obvious to everyone white nationalist group. Right, they can watch a cop do all these horrible things. It's fine because that's just a cop. But if he's a clan member, then that's a problem. Like they can excuse all this horrible torture and not

really be concerned about it. But if but if he had a robots closet, then it's suddenly this big issue. It's like, no, like the issue is that he was doing all this torture anyway, and he doesn't like this. You don't need to focus on like just the like just that identity, like that weird identity aspect of it. Yeah, the the clan is old enough, and where's a uniform that is distinct enough that everybody recognizes is it as racist?

And though the Chicago Police Department is actually much more of a threat in terms of racism than the clan today, uh and was at that point in time. But you know, they're the cops. And if you're a suburban white liberal, they're there too, you know, help help keep your lawn safe or whatever. Um, So you don't you don't see them as the same inherently racial organization exactly, even though

they are. Yeah, and even though I mean they're dragging people out of their homes and like just electrocuting them, like this is you know, this is this something also that I was very annoyed about when I was reading this was like you read a lot of this stuff and then and you'll you'll get descriptions of it that are like, ah, this is something that like only happens in the pressure regimes like Kazakhstan, and it's like, have you read anything about picture of the US like this

is like yeah, like we we have the officers over to other countries that often teach their police how to do ship like this that happens. But when you were describing a whole bunch of stuff in the past, like you know, twenty minutes, I was thinking in my head and like, oh, yeah, this is just like stormtrooper ship. But the thing is, it isn't like this just is cops shit, and like, like the thing like the fact that like elevating it in my brain to it being

like something other than cops is incorrect. You know, like this just is police stuff. It's not it's not necessarily stormtrooper ship. It's just is police ship. And the fact that those things are so synonymous that should be the part that's actually like upsetting is that yeah, it's actually there is really no difference and you shouldn't necessarily resort to calling it stormtrooper stuff because it is just what

the police do all the time. There's this whole model you see people talking about it where they talk about like like the police are using unnecessary force and like they're there there there's like a certain threshold where if you go past it, like you know, sort of like like even you know, like I'm Gonna'm gonna read like that Birch has a lot of like when he winds up in court, like the judges look at this and the are like, oh my god, this is unacceptable. How

could this have happened? And you know, you get some good descriptions of it. I'm gonna this is a district judge court describing what Burge is doing. In the early eighties, there existed, in two in the City of Chicago, a de facto policy practice and or customer of Chicago police officers exacting unconstitutional revenge and punishment against persons who they

alleged had killed or injured a fellow officer. This revenge and punishment included beating, kicking, torturing, shooting, and or executing such a person for the purpose of inflicting pain, to injury and punishment on that person, and also for the purpose of forcing that person to make it. Coupled tory statements exculpatory yeahculptor yeah, inculpatory yeah yeah yeah. You know, and you you get stuff like there's there's there's an

FBI report than from the Chagol Tepem. I'm going to read because it's he left one bullet in the center and the cylinder and spun it. A report quoted the inmate is saying about Burge in the nineteen incident. He then said, you talk, will blow your black EXPELTI presumably the end word brains out. Bergs then got up from his desk, walked over to the inmate, put the muzzle of the revolver against the center of the inmate's forehead and pulled the trigger. He spun the cylinder and placed

it back against his forehead and pulled the trigger again. So, yeah, he's just playing Russian Roulette with people. Like he's playing it. I don't I don't think. Yeah, yeah, well he's pulling up one in the sixth chance of murdering them. They are in terror. Uh. There's also a lot of like he does like you sexually abuses people. He like after testicles. Yeah, he he like he electrocuted Like well, I mean he's also like is like like basically like raping people. Um,

he like electrocut is a thirteen year old child. And you know this is like it's it's it's just so bleak that like, I mean, there's so there's a very famous art club about this by Chicago Journalist's called the House of Screams. But you know, like like Burge isn't the only guy doing this, Like one of his loyalists is lieutenant, Like is a guy named Byron. He's like in charge of the midnight shift at that the area

true violent crimes. And they become known internally as burgess ask kickers at the A team because this is just who these people are culturally, and yeah, sure sure, but yeah, um, these guys start uh like putting like guns and prisoners mouths. But they have one thing where they they stick a shotgun in a guy's mouth and they pull the trigger and it's not loaded. But there's like they keep doing

this thing. Yeah, it's it's that is by the way, illegal in international law, like internationally, that is a war crime if you're military to specifically, fake executions are a type of torture and a a war crime under international

law based on treaties the United States is signed. Yeah, and and Byron also so if he does that a lot, and then that same guy, the same guy the shotgun thing too, he apparently didn't have the box, so he stripped the dude and shocked his balls with a cattle prod And this is the guy who Lorry Lightfoot sent her number two lawyer to defend in court by arguing the torture it never happens. Yeah, that's that's that's that's ability. Yep,

that's the mayor of my city now life Lightfoot. Light Foot is on the record as saying that birds tortured over a hundred people. But once it came to you know, actually putting up or shutting up, she just goes to back for the cops. And if this happens in Chicago, just so many times with people who used to be like who you know who who in the moment you're like, oh, bird did torture. We need to reform the police. And it's you know, the when they get into power, they

do this stuff. I mean there there's there's a bunch

of like incredibly weird stuff that happens here. Like so that the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals at one point saul A like they saw a case over whether one and dollar settlement with a torture victim was fair and christ Yeah, in court it's like you read the transcas and it's like it's it's the most brutal demolishing of like a state's argument I've ever seen, Like they're they're, they're just like in court asking them like okay, like we're we're, we're This person's judge is supposed to have

like known in court that he was also torturing other people, and like it's you know, the courts just like you know, they're turning them apart. And then when it comes time to decide the case, uh, the court tosses the case out inside with the state. Wow. Yeah, I don't know what's going on there. It's awful. Yep, this topic. I mean that that is the thing about the way the whole system works, which is that, you know, the police do horrific things. In Chicago, they torture, in Los Angeles,

they have Nazi gangs. You know, there's a bunch of different horrible ship the police do. And then at some point point the FBI and the Justice Department come in and they provide incredibly They send in very talented investigators who produced incredibly detailed lists of all of the things

that are being done. And then the court says, well, but nobody's gonna get punished, or maybe this one guy will get punished and then we'll go on back to doing things and that the system is supposed to work, although we're we're going to read a story about the FBI not doing that in the next episode. So yeah, yeah,

I mean they don't know. We don't always get a report. Yeah, I just I have become increased, Like it's very frustrating because having these FBI reports on police abuses um is useful again for talking to liberals because they tend to trust the FBI. But it's also like, boy, I've read a lot of detailed FBI reports about how bad police departments are, and it seems like nothing ever gets done.

Like it seems like they just write a thing saying yeah, it's bad, and then everything continues forever and it's you know, this this case, Like so the reason we even know any of this is through what I like, what I will say, like the a genuinely heroic, decades long campaign run by the People's Law Office on behalf of birde victims and these people, like they say people's lives like that there are people who birdge tortured, who ended up on death row for it, and you know, like this

stuff is so bad that when it comes out, the Supreme Court does a ruling on it, and it like establishes new precedents for like how people can prove they've

been tortured. Like you know, it's so bad that like Illinois stops running the death pet like we had the death penalty and like we still tend to get ethic have it, but like we just stopped doing it, Like we stopped we stopped executing people because like a Republican governor, like on air, gave a giant thing about how this system was broken and like this is this is John Ryan, right, like this is a man who like he he is like this is a man who was corrupted by the

standards of of of an Illinois politician. And even he like on the air, is like yeah, this is like

you know that this is this is broken. He he pardons some Burge victims and in nine three, faced with just irrefutable evidence of torture and ruling multiple higher ports higher courts, the Police Board finally released a report, although the report also doesn't call it torture and is a disaster that they finally have Burge fired and some of his colleagues who were also torturing people get suspended for fifteen months, but Burge isn't prosecuted for, you know, the

crimes that we have multiple reports of him doing until two after the victims literally go to the United Nations with a campaign and go in front of the United Nations and talk about how they are being systemically tortured by the Chicago Police Department. But of course by two ten, the statute of limitations on his crimes had run out, so uh, he winds up going to jail for three stations on torture. Yeah, that's definitely one of the ones we should have a cap Yeah, definitely. It's great. It's

it's it's a great system. Um. And I'm going to read something from the Chocolate Tribune that was a description of of this. Uh quote. While the jury was out, Burge, still unrepentant, allegedly asked the courtroom reserve or whether you thought the jury would quote believe a bunch of n words. Wow, dye, it's good. Burge Bridge tortured at least a hundred and twenty five people. That's almost certainly an under account. Undred twenty five is the number of people who we have

who have come forward. A lot of those people probably have like people he tortured have probably died by now. Um, yeah, I mean yeah, you'll never will never get an accurate account of all the people who were Yeah, and and Burge died a freeman and has never served a day for his actual crimes. Now, Burge and his crew are the most famous of the eighties and seventies and eighties torturers, but they're by no means the only one. And we're gonna talk about one more in this torture section. Uh

if you did you know Richard Zuli? Mm hmm okay, so yeah, Zuli's Zulie is the one that people tend not to know. M Zuli was also a Vietnam War vet. He becomes a detective in nine. Um, what's interesting about him? Zuli is never part of Burgess Candre Right Burgess Cadres working out Verrea too. They're on the south Side. They're in an overwhelmingly black part of the south Side. Zuli works in areas three and six on the north side.

You know what what what what I want need to mention off the bat is that Zuli is no less racist than Burge is. He wants to rested a black dude for just like having a car and wearing a watch and like like those are both felonies in the city of Chicago. Right, well, if you famously never know what time it is because you're a law abiding citizen. Yeah, well law abidings isn't. And also don't be black while doing this because yeah, he throws him in a cell. Yeah,

well it gets it gets you. Zuli screaming no end word is supposed to live like this? Oh boy, oh boy, it's you know we we people like talk about cops doing stuff for that reason, but it's it's, you know, they're so racist. Just get a direct quote. Yeah, Like I can't emphasize it, Like they're just they're so racist. It's like ingrained into the d like the cop d NA. Yeah, they're just saying the loud part loud. Yeah, like they're

just scribby like that. We're going to do with One of the things in the next episode is the cops will just drive around like blasting the end. We're out of their out of their like cops stereos because Christ. Yeah, now, Zuli in a lot of ways is a more modern torture than birdges. You know, bird is very big on your like overt physical violence, right, you're beating. Your execution is suffocation. The problem with these techniques from a torture

of perspectives that they leave incredibly obvious marks. And you know, this is how birde goes down, right, It's it's too obvious what he's doing. There are people who can just like show up to a court and be like, hey, look at my neck, like here are all these burns. Zuli is much smarter about it. Um, you know she I mean, she does some beatings because cops are literally animals and are incapable of resisting the urge to beat the living share of anyone who falls into their grasp.

But you know, mostly what he does is he does things like he'll just shackle so much to a wall for twenty four hours, and you know, and he'll be like, okay, like I'm gonna shock you to this wall and until you sign this confession, I won't let you leave. And also you can't talk to anyone. You can't talk to you lawyer, you can't talk to h like, you can't talk to your family. And in the next episode we're say this, this this is how modern CPD torture works, except

Zuli is doing this in the eighties. Now, zuli Is is a naval intelligence officer who's he's so he's still technically in the reserves when he joins the cops. And that meant when the CIA's torture is like Autnomo base stalled out, they needed a hero and that hero was zuli Um. Zuli Is was the most active. Like that. The thing is the most active in is the torture of Mohammad o old Sali, who is famously known as the most tortured manic autonomo Um. He's yeah, at least

he gotten a guinness. Yeah, he yeah. They do sleep deprivation. I mean they some of it's like the standards sort of like get most stuff, which is like they don't let you sleep. They blast like sounds until you sell

all the time him. They like beat you. There's molestations and but there's also stuff that's like like you know the tharnt of attack by dogs, but like the wh'll do things like like he'll like soap people like get soaked in ice water or like they stuffed him in this like straight jacket thing that didn't let him breathe properly and then stuffed full of ice and then Zuli also, yeah, yeah, it's it's it's bad. And he also like threatens to kidnap his mother and have recent to Guantanamo to be

braved because these people are again jazz monsters. And yeah, Zuli is still alive today and romes the streets as a freeman, having received literally no consequences whatsoever for being a torturer. So good in the CPD that the CIA was like, we're gonna bring this guy into the torture.

That's great, it's great. It's yep yep ah. And and that that that brings us to our first interlude, which is every year Chicago Police Office go to the grave of the Deputy Chairman of the Black Panther Party, Fred Hampton's, who they assassinated in a police rate after drug the n um. They go to his grave to shoot his fucking tombstone. They do this literally every year. The families they keep getting you tombstones, they shoot them every They

shoot them every year. It just doesn't matter. Uh, the CPD just keeps shooting it. And there's a quote from the Great Trinity Daddy and marchis historian C. L. R. James, And I think about a lot that goes when history is written as it ought to be written. It is the moderation and long patience of the masses at which people will will wonder, not their ferocity. Yep. I really hope there's a moment of people doing things to cops that makes generations in the future marvel at their ferocity. Yeah.

I think I can say that without it legally being incitement. Yes. I'll make one other fun note, which is that five Chicago police officers died last year from COVID. So that's good. Yeah, let's make it fifty officer Dad. Look, they're working on it. They don't they won't wear masks. Back to critical support to the Chicago police who don't wear masks. They're they're they're they're they're they're they're having their police Academy exams

in person. Now, oh that's good, that's good. You know what, critical support spend more time indoors together without masks. Guys, avoid those vaxes. Yeah, yeah, great, will happen. Okay, So story two, which is a shorter one but no less bleak. I think. On October fourteen, officer Jason Van Dyke fired sixteen shots at Lakwon McDonald, who had turned around and was walking away from him. Here's from the people of the state of Illinois. Walking away aggressively, Chris, Yeah, oh boy,

violently exiting. Yeah, I walking away while black, which I guess in the minds of like half of the United States. Is someone at defended legal right to shoot people in the back who are trying to a way. Yeah, it's yeah, great country, We're nailing it. From the Chicago Tribune and analysis of the video. This is this is from the

court case, but in the child Tribune. An analysis of the video establishes that fourteen to fifteen seconds passed from the time the defendant Van Dyke fired his first shot to clear visual confirmation of the final shot. For approximately thirteen of those seconds, McDonald is lying on the ground, so he he fires literally every bullet in he's gone at a man who is, by those like second shot, lying dead, like well it's not quite dead yet, but like lying on the ground. It's just Yeah. From the

cops perspective, like why not like that? That's like that, like like they have the ability to do that. If they get the chance, Oh I get to kill a black person and it doesn't matter, then why like you know, that's like if you if you you have to, you have to think through like what they're actually processing this as. And they don't see them as like a they don't

see them as like an equivalent human life. So it doesn't like it's it's they don't it doesn't like you can't like apply the same rules of civility that like we should all kind of agree upon because cops have such a higher hierarchical viewpoint that with them at the top, that they can never actually exist within any kind of humane society. That's why again unspeakable ferocity of the masses

fingers crossed one day. Yeah, yeah, well you know, and I think that the thing, you know, Okay, so look, if this is the price of a liberal democracy, right, if if you're going to if you're going to live in a society that has like you know that that where laws are enforced by the police, the police are going to murder people like that's that that that's what you're signing on for. And I think that I think that's an absolutely unacceptable price. And but we shouldn't do this.

Um Now. The other aspect of this is because you have to keep all of these just absolutely like just bloodthirsty burderers on the leash. And because also all the people who are actually in the governments are just genuinely the asplicable human beings. Uh. Immediately after I mean, like really before the shots have stopped firing, like, there's a coper up that stretches from like includes everyone from the officers on the scene all the way up to may

Raw Emmanuel. So for example, mysteriously none of the multiple dashboard cameras on the scene we're recording audio for reasons only the discerning listener can guess at yep, Like everyone across the entire chain of command again going right up to the mayor's office immediately goes we we cannot let this video get out because it's it's so bad that even the CPD s like this is gonna look bad for us. Because the thing gets out, then people will want to do bad things to cops and they can't

have that. And you know, so this this, this is this tape is concealed for over a year until the journalist Brandon Smith like literally gets a like sues them and literally gets the judge to like order the state to release it. And while this is going on, that the cops are doing this massive pr blitz featuring this just like incredible pack of racist lies, including that McDonald had lunge for it yet Van Dyke with a knife. No,

he didn't, He was literally walking away from them. That McDonald had a gun, which is initiesting one because not only like they didn't even have time to like plant like they killed him so fast, they didn't have time to plant a gun on him, like there's no gun. But the multiple officers will are are like you can you can find news things of them talking about how this guy, oh, he had a gun. It's like there's

no gun. Um. Yeah. The classic one is that like Van Dyke feared for his life and uh, no he didn't. He probably should now, but he does not. Yeah, he should never. He should never live awaking or sleeping moments where he's not in constant fear of someone cutting his head off, just as like in terms of the horror that should be viewed inside people who do these things, they should never like they shouldn't have been able to

like sit down and be comfortable. The closest we've ever gotten in to justice for one of these guys is when that mob surrounded Uh, Derek Chauvin's house. Yeah, and it would have been actual justice if they had gotten through the door. Yep, yeah, it's yeah, so you know all and you ever like so there's all there's there's this huge coterie of cops. We're all just lying about this. They're lying in the press. They're lying just there lying. They they start they lie like on the stand um.

And you know, the strategy works for a while because this country is just the racist tellhole until the court forces him to release the video. And when it becomes clear of the video is going to come out, the state immediately charges him, like they charged him, and then later that day they released a video. Now, now keep this in mind, they had this video for a fucking year.

It's what it's all. It's all fake and you know, yeah, and they only charged him with the alternative was literally being run into the sea by an entire mob of the totally the entire population of Chicago. Um. So, Van Dyke is suspended without pay, right, but he immediately gets hired by the by the police union. Yeah yeah, yeah, and and Van Dyke Van Dyke eventually, i mean he goes down. Eventually he gets convicted of you know, of

second green murder and sixteen counts of battery. But you know, there's a there's a later report that describes the involvement of sixteen other officers in the cover up. Uh. Four officers were eventually fired for lying about the case, three were tried for the cover up and acquitted, and four officers were given a one week suspension for the mysterious

lack of camera audio. Honestly, more is more than usually happens. Yeah, well, I mean this is like this video is so bad that like this video is so I mean, Raw Emmanuel doesn't really mean he that the consequence he suffers is that he decides not to run again because it will be bad for him. But Raw Emmanuel is currently now that his his consequence is that he's the American ambassador of Japan and death. You know, I I will also say this, the people of Japan do not deserve Raw Emmanual.

The Liberal Democratic Party, on the other hand, are maybe the only people on earth who actually deserve him. Like, if you didn't want us to palm row Mammanuel off on you, you shouldn't have taken all that CIA money in the fifties and sixties and let them run your political campaigns. So Liberal Democratic Party, lie down with dogs, get fleas um. But yeah, Jason van Dyke was released from prison two weeks ago after serving less than half

a sentence. Mcwam McDonald's remains dead. Yeah. I mean the really depressing part is that that is more consequences than usually ever happens, and that that only happened because of, you know, like an incredible amount of organization, and like I think of all of the times where there is no video, Think of all the times where there's nothing and things just happened, no one watches it, and then

dead bodies get kicked into a ditch um. And that's way more common than anything where there's a type of like recordings or even where there needs to be cover ups. You know, you you both are probably too young for this movie. But in one of the Transformers movies, after they beat all the bad Transformers, okay, you know where the navy lifts them all up and drops them into the sea. Yes, what if we did that with the Chicago Police Department. Just drop him in the sea, big old,

big them up, drop him in the sea. Yea, Now we put them in a bag. There's no swimming Okay, that's fair. Look, look they one one, they get one bag individual, each individual against one bag for each bag. They put over someone's head and strangled them with I think that's fair, and then right into the sea and

solves all problems. The blessing, like I do, I do genuinely want to say, is that like if if you read this story over and over and over and over again, you get people who are like you get the governor going like the system is fundamentally broken to must reformat. You get the courts saying the system is fundamentally broken

and blush reformat and it never changes. They just keep killing people, they keep inslaving people, they keep doing like, they keep troaturing people, they keep murdering people, they keep raving people, and this will not end until you abolish the police. Like there is no alternative if you if your car is fun is broken on a fundamental level, you can't you can't reform your car to make it better.

There's a certain point where it's total and you're like, well, I guess that kind It's like Asian block is shattered and you're like, we fixes the tires, so it ought to go now. No, It's like if it's broken on the fundamental level, you can't reform it. Those words like those words don't go together, yea, like throw out, throw out your car and build a train. That's that's what you have to do. Walk to get a bicycle, honestly, Like, yeah, I stuck a bottle onto the rail of my A

R fifteen. So it's not a gun anymore. No, it's it's still is gone. Um. Yeah, this is really really sad um and it's good stuff. Pretty depressing. Um. Anyway, I'm gonna go watch Two Eights The Dark Night and feel feel great about myself. Yeah all right, Well that's gonna do it for us, and it could happen here today until next time. Uh, hope that more Chicago police

officers get COVID there there is that. There's that fun scene in the Dark Knight where the Joker goes into the Chicago Police building and blows up the prison block with all those cops inside. That is that is a fun scene. Yeah anyway, Um, oh my goodness, it's could happen here. All right. Well that's the introduction. I'm Robert Evans and my work's done for today. Chris, Yeah, it's me.

It's Christopher. We are We are back with two more stories of rape, torture, and murder from the Chicago Police Department. Yeah we have Yeah, well you know, okay, this one, this, this one will be more fun than last time because okay, so basically, since since I started showing up on this show, I have made a case. I have been dropping references to the fact that Chicago Police Department is literally a cartel, and today I am finally telling the story of how

this is a little unfair. But yeah, also, also I didn't mention this before we go win. There's also a bonus cartel because while I was doing research on one of the cartels, I realized that I couldn't actually talk about it without talking about the other cartel. So there's two. There are two completely unrelated CPD cartels that are will show up in this story. Uh yeah, it's great. So

all right, this is the story of Ronald Watts. Now, Ronard Wats joined the CPD in nine after serving in the Army, making him yet another example of the fabled troop cop combination that produces the worst people on earth. Um what. Wats was assigned to patrol Chicago's old public housing like projects now wants is from housing himself. Um, there's okay. So some of the people who knew him before he went into the police claimed that, like he was just always like a drug dealer, and that he

went into the police too like drug deal more. I don't know if that's true, because I mean, he's also in the army for a while, so I I don't know. It's sort of unclear. But you know, he's for the projects. He he knows that terign well, and that's why he was an extremely effective agent of terror in a place where officers would regularly drive by blasting the N word and other racial slurs out of their cop car speakers. Uh yeah, here here, here's the intercept describing what like

Chicago cops are just doing at the projects. They were officers who found it amusing to toy with those under their power, arranging the foot race of heroin addics determined who would go to jail, for example, or forcing a woman they had searched on the street to walk home naked from the waist down. It's yeah, people who find joint exerting their power over other people and they think

it's funny. Yeah, why they become cops. Yep. Well, and you know and the other reason to become a cop is is the the second thing that they do constantly, which is they just walk into the lobbies of these buildings just start taking everyone's money. And like they literally call the lobbies of the public housing buildings like quote

their ATM machine. So they're just doing this constantly. There's also cops and this is not every cop that they're specific cops you do this who would show up on the first and the fifteenth of the month, wait for everyone to catch their paychecks and then rob them. And you know, and the thing I think is important about this is that, Okay, so like WATS and like the

specific cartels do this, but this isn't just WATS. This is like, this is everyone who's working at these projects is just walking up like to like the poorest people in Chicago and just robbing them constantly. Um yeah, like this is this is you know, this this is just how regular policing works. And the elite units are even worse. So Cartel number one or I guess, I guess you're trying about choose since we've introduced WATTS. But so there used to be an elite unit in the Chicago Police

Force called the Special Operations Section or s OS. And these guys, these guys are different because they you know, they're they're they're not attached to like an area or certific you know, they're they're just completely their own thing. They're just like they're the Special Response Team. And s OS would just go into projects and just ransacked the entire building like they would go room by room like taking people stuff and just looting it and then just

like walking out. And you know, it's not even like there's not just that they're taking cash, like they're taking TVs. And I mean the thing that the thing the thing you if when you when you read interview some people who lived through this, like they're not just taking like stuff that's like you know, let's use that are expensive there. They'll take people's like lamps, like they're just walk out

with anything like literally anything they can sell um. And you know, I get like these are these are the people living in these projects are like huge, like a lot a lot of these postures literally like segregation era, right, and so they're they're almost entirely black and they're just take like they're just getting robbed, but constantly by both regular cops a special operation section, and there's not even like you know, like cops nowadays have like they have

like civil asset forfature where there's this like pseudo legal framework and no, no no, no, there's like they're not even this is the nights, They're not even doing that. They're just literally walking in and robbing these people at gunpoint. Um. S OS like they eventually get shut down deals and seven after so there's a series of scangles about them. They they steal like hundreds of thousands of dollars and people,

they do shakedowns with drug dealers, they start kidnapping people. Um. At one point in s OS, dude like tried to hire his coworker to do a hit on someone who was like going to report them to the Feds. And yeah, but s OS isn't the main story today because Watts is writing is running an even larger version of this operation. Um,

and you know, well I's proways researching this. I had the realization that, like, so I've talked to people in Chicago about like the CPD Cartel's right, and I had the realization that there are conversations that I've had people where we've been we've both been talking about different ones, and we both we both thought we were talking about this, Like I've had people talking backwards like oh, they were talking about the West. I was like, no, No No, I

met the Watts one. It's it's it's great. It's love love our institutionalized just robbery system. Yeah. So the other thing I want to mention because so the intercepted like really good, like four like huge four part series on on the Watts. H like cartel. But I think it's worth mentioning that, Like even you know that there's like two quote unquote good cops who like go after Watts

and for years and they've met your him down. But like even those cops are doing things that are objectively horrifying. Like most of the actual cop work in this story

is done by is literally just the good cops. Like they know a homeless guy they called Chewbaka who they paid to be an informant in like blankets, sleeping bags and food and like it's like it should be fair Chebaca like genuinely like likes the two of them, But Cheubaca is the guy who does all of the work here, Like what Wastz gets like like he's the guy who's like wearing the wire. He's the guy who knows everything

the cops. The cops don't know anything, and Chibaka has known that everything that was going on from the beginning. They just don't ask him for years. But like in Chiubaca like goes to prison at one point because Wats Okay, so what Watson Wats is just like a drug dealer, right, um so wants and uh so so Cheebaca would like, you know, he he was like he was like a sort of low level like runner. Right, you'd get a bag, he'd like move it sometimes times And one time in

Watchaws these new for informations. So one time, like Watts was like trying to get information on where a drug stash was we could rob it and then like well time so he could do a police raid on it and then take the drugs and sell them. And Chibaka just like didn't know. So Wat's just like through be in prison for two years and it's just like you know,

this this stuff this time happens constantly. That there are so many people who are just you know, like people trying to survive in the city and then oh, hey, you don't have the exact specific information that this cop wants on this drug thing. So we're just gonna send

you to prison for two years. And Chivaca, who like risks his life wearing a wire and brings down one of the biggest cartels in the CPD, as best I can tell, is still living on the street because the society is just broken in ways that like are difficult to comprehend and incredibly bleak. Yeah mm hmm. Yeah. So okay, back to Watch this operation. Watts has this thing called the Watts Tax, and the Watch tex is if you run drugs, you pay the tax to Wats and this

this tax gives you production from the police. If if if you don't pay the Watch tax, the cops show up, they put you in prison, they take all your cash, they raid your drugs, and then Watch resolves your drugs that are profit I mean that is like objectively, that is a decent grift, Like in terms of it's pretty good logistical plans, like yeah, okay, I can I can

see how how this would actually be very profitable. Yeah, it's genius and like and and the other thing about these taxes, like these taxes are enormous amounts of money, Like if if so, if if, if you're running a drug, that's like, okay, so you have a drug that you move and the drugs I've I've ran drugs for thirty years, I know. Yeah, so the tax for the for that single drug can be as high as fifty dollars a week.

So he is he is making a lot of money, so much money, just an incomprehensible amount of money off of this, I guess, I guess you would have to become cops. I have an idea for a pivot. Do it in the car, tell pivot. This is how we give, this is how we get funded by this in a lower care And we've always been a cartel, but that's well, when we moved from podcasting into drugs, we can partner with our friends at the scene, a lower cartel. Yea would be great. Eventually, there's a guy named Big Shorty

who's another like player in the scene. And yeah, all the people in this name of this great names. Yeah it's great. So Big Shorty is like, I'm not paying like fifty k a week per drug to do this anymore.

I'm gonna go to the Feds and so so be short like he threatens to go to the feeds and he goes to the d A and then like a couple of days later, she's gunned down the street by yeah you never yeah no, like yeah, well if you do, you have to make sure they like disappear you because uh, you never threaten it, like that's the yeah, yeah, yeah you don't. These worlds you mentioned like cops and going to in any combination, and everyone around you just like,

all right, well, this person's got to be dead. That's just how that's gotta go. Yeah, it's it's not it's not the best move I've ever seen. It's yeah, so you know, And and this is when this is when the cops, the two cops are gonna bring Watch down, like actually started to take notice because literally for years, I mean they're they're all sorry about this, like people they'd be locking people up and people would say things like why are you going after me for two bags?

And Watts is running the dope and just no one believes them, Like the cops are being told constantly for years like that the cops who aren't in on the on the intel I being told literally for years that that this whole thing is you know that that oh yeah, well why why are you bothering me? Watts is running this operation. They don't believe them, and they don't they

don't believe them basically until Big Shorty gets shot. Because when when Big Shorty goes down like another they get another guy who's like pretty big in the scene, the guy's like, oh, yeah, no, he got shot by Wats, and they're like, wait, hold on now, the cops go to the FBI, and the FBI, it turns out, of has been trying and failing to put again put together a case against Watts for so long that like they're on there like second like agent who they've had in

charge of the case because the first guy, like I just could do it and laugh. And so they had another guy and almost immediately after this, uh there's there's another guy. There's another dealer named Fears who he has this Fierce has this great grift which is like all of his people wear Obama shirts just like just like you do eight but he doesn't know, doesn't seven or something?

But yeah, so like that, all all the people doing this thing, they wear Obama shirts and they call the drugs like Obama and so what everyone they have their lines called Hope. So and like this this this actually works on the FBI, Like the FBI doesn't understand that they're running drugs because they think that they're that Like all the Messa references of Obama are just like they're

talking about like Obama. It's like there's there's so many, there's so many great like FBI weird incompetences to the story like that. There's one point where the cops are going through the documents and they see the word they see Lou, and it's just Lose, a short for lieutenant, right, But the FBI thinks that Lou is like a name, and so they kind of tracked down this guy named Lou, which is just it's it's ah, just baffling, incredible and

coms never thrilled when they have to investigate cops. Yeah, yeah, even though it is literally their job. Yep. But hey, I hate doing my job too, so please continue, Chris. So, so if that fears guy who choose doing the Obama thing, like take seventeen rounds to the chest, and so the FBI number rounds to take to the chest, Yeah, that's a lot. It's it's it's interesting number two right, because

like like it does difficult significance. Guess yeah. What would also like like is did they like reload, Like do they have a gun that has seventeen round man? Yeah? No, no, there's yeah, there's that's not that's not it. Is it like a handgun or is it a rifle? I think it's a gun, yeah, or like Baltimo people with hangdguns block seventeens have seventeen round magazines. That makes sense, yeah, yes.

So so after this, the FBI investigation intensifies, and so the FBI goes to the Internal Affairs Division or i a D, who are like the most hated cops of all cops by other cops, because there're people who are supposed investigate the police and you know, so, so they tell that you guys who are going after watch, they're

going to be protected. And this works for like a year and then the head of a I D changes and it's like a cop cop guy instead of so they had this like they brought an FBI guy who had been had of a D and that he gets kicked out and they bring in like a cop and that cop just immediately tells literally everyone that that the two cops are running an investigation. It gives Watts, and so uh do they die with the next few months

there studdingly no, I espect. I can tell Watts seemed to have thought that like they wouldn't just wouldn't be able to get him see too much protection, which worked for a while. Um yeah, it's yeah, he has a lot of power. Yeah. Well, and also, I mean the other thing about this is she just like his stuff,

starts getting wilder. So he goes after this guy. He tries to go after the drugs of this guy named Monk, and like Muk is carrying a bunch of drugs, he's trying to He's trying to rob bunk Um from the intercept a wild car chase and suit on the Dan Ryan Expressway like Sure Drive, and ultimately into the Hyde Park neighborhood, where Monk lost control of the car and crashed in a park. He fled on foot. Watson his

team seized the dope and cash. They didn't even check on the condition of the women and infant who remained in the car, which is great. And also that's that's standard. That that's that that's like standard CPD procedure. I have literally seen this happen like in Hyde Park, like I

have there. When I was in college, I almost got run over in his seat and like the CPD almost ran me over in this like car chase that went bad and this giant multi car crash and like there's like sixteen cops, right, they all just run past the car crash after the two guys are chasing and like have to go make sure no one died. And I was like, I, this is great. You have just almost murdered me. And then also you're not checking on all of these people in this car even in the wreck.

I Oh, I hate a CPD. I hate them a lot. This took the sound. This sound nice. Yeah, it's great there there. Yeah, this just happens like all the time, like often enough that like literally in the same place, which like all of these big because you've got like a few really big, shitty, big city police departments. You've got your l A p D, You're n Y p D, You've got your Chicago Police Department. By god, you've got St. Louis cops. And they're all they're all shitty and simultaneously

the same in different ways. Like there there, it's the same basic idea. It's brutality, it's violence, it's robbery. Um, but they they find unique ways to do those shitty things, which is fascinating. Yeah, Like I've always like like they n y p DS, like they're big thing is if you get a large number of people together, the NYPD is just going to annihilate you, like l A p D has like the Nazi gangs. CPD thing. CPDS thing

just seems to be crime torture. It's torture and yeah St. Louis Police Department will attack you with dogs if you're not a white person. Like, yeah, they've all got they've they've they've they've chosen their cops subclass. Yeah. Now okay, so but back in the investigation, the two cops in investigating Watts are like even so basically all the researchers

get cut off. It's literally just them to watch. Note like basically knows that he's they're coming from them, and they almost get him anyways, because cops are just not very smart. Um, and you know they're about to get him on a sting for drug running and then right before like look, I think it's like the day of that they're running the sting, they suddenly get like transferred to the police academy, and they basically just like get attained in this police academy for like weeks and it's

it's purely weird. And eventually, like and you know, this is when like everything just completely comes apart with the liaison between the CPD and the FBI literally tells them they can't move on the case because if they move on the case, it's going to reveal that Watts murdered a dude, because well they so they don't have good evidence some big shorty, but they have they have evidence that they have good evidence that he killed Fears and

h And the head of Internal Affairs basically tells them like, yeah, like I won't do anything about Watts because it comes out that another CPD unit had gone rogue after s OS, I'll be done for so I'm just gonna cover for them. The second cartel is too much. Only one cartels It's great, Um, I can excuse one cartel, but I try the line too but once you hit four cartels back too good, which is why I am such a big fan of

the Los Angeles Police Department. It's great, Look you got it, you got you got you just you just gotta get over the cartel hump and once you're over, Yeah, you got. It's like it's like growing out your your hair. Right, there's gonna be that period where it looks really awkward. That's when. That's when you've got two cartels, and then you get hot at four cartels. Then you're fuckable again. Yeah,

it's great. So there's an interesting description from one of the two cops that don't want to read because it gets out how the code of Silence works. Um from the intercept he had, she said, this is about the the A A D. Guy he had, She said, made too many deals, there by neutralizing his ability to act, attributing her understanding of this dynamic largely the conversations with

Rivera himself, conversations she denied ever occurred. She described him as ensnared in a web of mutual blackmail at which bosses have leverage over one another by virtue of their shared knowledge of the deals they've made. She gave an example, I'll make the cr get your guy go away if you promote my guy within your unit. The code of silence and cloud or thus entwined Rivera. She recalled once remarked to her that the bosses quote trade crs for

favors like baseball cards. So yeah, this is this is what the code of silence is. It's it's it's an informal code sort of. That's also called the thin blue line, which is great, uh yeah, but basically it says that costs, you know, it's that cops will protect the road. But but it's more than that. If if if you if you cross the name blue line and you break the code of silence, you will be formally retaliated against by

your commanders. And but when when when I say breaking the code of silence, what that means literally is if you take any action against another cop, like it literally doesn't like they can be torturing people, they could be literally running a cartel. It doesn't matter. If you say anything about them, you will be like formally retaliated against by every other cop. And so the two cops who are investigating wats like, they get arrested by internal affairs.

Internal affairs like tries to like basically make a fake case against them, and they eventually get out, but their you know, their careers are over right because they you know, attempted to like do the thing sort of that cops are nominally supposed to do and they just immediately get arrested. Um, and you know, and they have a lot of other stuff happened to them. Like one of the two cops comes home to a bell box literally full of ship, with a note that says, since you like ship so much,

thought you'd enjoy this amazing. Yeah, you know what I mean, Like that's fun. That's fun. That should happen more often, Just that should happen a lot more off other other scenarios. Yeah, yeah, it's it sucks that these are the cops that this is happening. Like, of all of the this is like the only time I like do not approve of like sending cops ship like this is this is the wrong reason for the wrong reason to sender. You're gone. That's true.

They have probably stuff, they have done stuff. I will make sure it's better. It can be safer if it's If dogshit is used, then d N a K is harder to track anyone. You know what the safest ship of all to use. No, I don't ship, panther ship. Panther ship. See I can Yeah, I think I p I is never going to figure that one out. Yeah, I get the technology, get right on. I'll get right on that. Yeah, we're gonna go to go collect panther ship. We'll be gone for a month. It could be their

unibomber for like fifteen years. They're trying to track down what kind of ship is getting put in people's mailboxes until your brother sends them a letter saying I know someone who has access to a lot of panther Ship and grudge tragic tail as time and then you can get uh an HBO miniseries where they make you like look slightly like you're in a boy band, only slightly. It's like you were in a boy band but aged out. Yeah, yeah, you were in. So the coat of silence also extends

their friendly politicians. Here's some the Interset report. Soon after he came to the confidential section, he was given the assignment of investigating a deputy superintendent. The allegation was at the officer. The official lived outside the city. Mills worked on the case for months and concluded the allegation was true. He produced a thick file. Take months. I'm sorry I have to take months. There cops allowances for the caper of where does this guy who works here? Yeah? Very funny.

The next day the file came back to him. It was mart There was a yellow post with the handwritten message and make it unfounded. So that's fun, awesome, amazing, Yeah, make it cops are cops are a breed of their own poetry. Poetry. Yeah. So actually, there there's a long history of like, yeah, politicians do something cops all the time. Like remember the story, right, like rama, Manuel's like nephew or something killed the guy in a car crash and the CPD he got Manuel got the CPD to just

like that, never investigated it. They just were like, oh, someone died in the car crash and it just went away. It's it's real fun. Um. Yeah. So so eventually shortly after this sort of those two cops get like detained at the police academy. The FBI and the in the

CPT move on wattson his partner Mohammed and no one else. Interestingly, because again, if you think about this for about five seconds, they were an enormous number of people who either know about this operation or are actively involved in running a fucking drug cartel that is one of the biggest players

on the South Side, who are still just cops. And like the CPD goes after exactly two people, there are like dozens of people who were actively involved of them this who are still cops um and and you know, and the only real tradition to this is that the FBI and the CPD are complicit, which is that you know, I mean, so parts of the CPD want to keep doing,

keep keep running the cartel. The FBI is like, both the FBI and the CBD also have an interest in keeping this covered up because they don't want like, you know, oh hey, look at the look at the loss of trust in in in law enforcement. It comes out that there were actually two cartels running in the same place at the same time, parallel to each other, and then we didn't catch them. Like yeah, but it's great because literally nothing happens to these people. They're still out there,

they're still doing cops shit. Uh yeah, only two people went down for that, and yeah, so the cartel is just still there. It's that's good, it's still well. It proves that if you put in the work, you can really build something that lasts. And I think that's a lesson we all should be inspired by. Pull yourself up by your uh jack bootstraps, and oh yeah, that's good stuff. Okay,

so so interlude number two. On May four, six, someone threw a stick of dynamite at some cops and Haymarket Square in Chicago, tree the general strike for the eight hour work day they started. The cops fired wildly into the crowd, and the state rounded up a bunch of completely random anarchists who, by their own admission, had nothing to do with it, and had them executed. Now the cops,

for their part, built a statue for the cops at Haymarket. Now, the first of these statues were destroyed on May fourth by a guy who just right, so he he had he was like, he's a street car driver, right, and he had to like every single day he had to go past the statue of the Haymarket cop. And one day he was just like no, and he he ran his street car off of the on rails, right, He random off of the rails and rammed it into the statue.

This guy rules dope. So the cops build another statue, and that that second statue was blown up by the weather Underground in October nineteen nine. Uh, the costs make another statue. The third statue is also blown up by the weather Underground in October. It was like that was less than a year later. Yep. Yeah, and so the continue they originally they rebuilt it again, right, and originally they have it under like a twenty four hour armed

guard Jesus and then and then and then. But you know, even then they were like, okay, we can't protect it. So they moved it into an enclosed courtyard in the middle of the of Chicago Police Academy because they're too cowardly to show it in public. Awesome, that's good. That's a win. That's a win everyone so much that they have to hide the statue to the assholes who got killed. Yeah, that's great. One day, one day, that fourth statue will follow the first three. One day, one day by the

mere cosmic forces of the universe, by entropy. The force of entropy will one day destroyed the statue. Yes, okay, So onto story number four. Story number four is the Chicago Police Department's black site. So the Chicago Police Department

has a black site called Home and Square. Um. So, so normally, you know, you go to a police station and you get booked, right, they book you, they put you into the system, and you know, because you're in the system, like you know where Um, like people people can find you, right because you can just look someone up. You can look someone up in the system. Uh. At Home and Square, they don't book people if you just if you go there, you just disappear. There's no record

of you. Uh, there's no there's no way to contact a lawyer if you're in there. Uh, your lawyer doesn't know where you are because again there's no records of where you are. You've just been grabbed off the street and taken to a building. Um. Yeah. And and this is a so store storage of people there tends to be pretty short. They don't tend to hold people longer than a couple of days. But what it's therefore is

this is this is a confession machine. This is the way to force confessions have a UM by just you know, literally disappearing them uh and denying them access to lawyers or literally anyone knowing where they are. And they're just holding them until they confess. Uh. And also yeah, so so at Home and Square prisoners are routinely shackled for for hours, like like tens of hours, sometimes twenty four hours, beaten,

denied phone calls, and robbed constantly. This is this is another fun sepety tradition is Yeah, they'll just take you to this black site and then rob you and then maybe they'll release you, but you know they've still robbed you. And yes, you know they do these beatings, and these beatings are incredibly intense, like you know that they're punching people. They're doing like knee strikes and doing elbow strikes. You're

hitting people with batons. Sometimes they're tassering people. Uh. We we have a report that that the cops filed of listening listened as a cop being assaulted. And the thing that they're listening as a non it was like like non like fist assault. Was the guy spat blood? Yeah, well and they listened to as an assault blood on them. Yeah, it's great, it's yeah. They also do things like they put like flex cuffs around people's necks. Torture. Yeah yeah

they Yeah, that's a way for someone to die. But it's almost like that's maybe part of the intention is that someone will quote accidentally die. Oh we'll get to that. Okay, well so not great, Yeah yeah, yeah, it's it's not it's it's bad. There's another guy who Okay, so the cops are completely convinced this guy who was completely innocent. Well, okay, I do want to say, like I'm gonna say a

lot of people are innocent because they are. But also like, even if you're guilty, you no one deserves this, Like maybe the cops doing it deserve it. But even then it's I don't even think they do, Like yeah, you don't, yeah people, yeah, like so this guy, you might knock down a statue or three, but yeah, like you know, like it's yeah, it's it's really grim like yeah. So they hold this guy's mouth open with a pen, right, and then they keep elbowing him in the stomach until

he throws up. Um. And so she tries to get medical attention because he keeps throwing up because he has asthma, I mean also because she just got elbowed in the stomach repeat his mouth yeah um. And instead of giving him medical treatment, even though he like easily could have died, the cops just beat him up for asking. There's another guy who gets uh sexually abused with the barrel of a gun, and when he starts screaming, the guard the gun goes on a ranch about how he needs to

be careful or he might accidentally pull the trigger. Oh boy, it's it's bad. Um. This this is all within that specific yeah, this is this is this is this is all just in Homeland square. Um. He claims that like the cell he's being held in, he doesn't get any food, doesn't get any water. They keep him there for hours and the like the cell just smells like blood and like feces because yeah, they don't let people go to

the bathroom to other individuals. Uh. Stephanie Martinez and Calvin Cofy described relieving themselves will shackled in a Home and Square and interrogation room. Martinez locked up with two thousand and six, was told by a guard that she did not have the key to Martinez has handcuffs and could not take her to the bathroom. Kofi, taken to Home and Square on the sixth of February two fifteen on suspicion of narcotic activity, defecated on the floor after two hours,

fruitlessly requesting for the bathroom. A police officer made Calvin clean it up with his skull cap. The lawsuit alleges

it's these people are sick there. It's it's yeah, yeah, yeah, they hate that it's like yeah, and you know the things they're holding children in here, like they have people as young as fifteen who are being literally everything about this is that when so sometimes sometimes you get sort of like arrested normally, although again I should mention that the Constitution does not exist, like it's it's fake, it's a lie. No one ever gets read the miranda rights.

It doesn't matter because the constitution doesn't exist if you're poor. Yeah, it sort of exists if you're not, but I will guarantee you they're reading their miranda rights to people who look like they got yeah, yeah, yeah, no, these people there's actually a story of these two point rieking guys who got brought in and they like the cops are like trying to get them, give us something, and they just like they start name dropping like civil rights lawyers,

and the cops are like, okay, okay, uh, we're good. We'll we'll we'll drive you back. If you don't talk, we'll we'll drive we'll drive you back to like where you came from. Yeah, it's yeah, it's it's extremely grim. Yeah. They just want to funk with people who can't defend themselves. Yeah. Yeah, and you know and then the way they do this right, like they they do these raids where like everyone's they're they're they're they're not wearing badges. Everyone's just like wearing

matt like like black armor and like black masks. And so people describe getting like dragged out of their house and they don't know if they're getting robbed or like if they're being kidnapped. And then they are being kidnapped by just being kidnapped like by the cops, and they get dragged and then again they're they're dragging like fifteen year olds into into this thing. Uh. There there's one guy who gets found unresponsive in an interrogation room. Um, now,

the police say that they died from heroin overdose. But this makes literally no sense. So the first reason why it doesn't make any sense is that the cops initially lie about where he about where he like had the overdose and died because they don't want to reveal that he uh you know, was in their secret black site, so they like lied and that he was another he

was at another site. Now, the other thing you know that that contradicts the claimed that this guy was had a heroin overdose is that the hospital when he when when the hospital saw him, they wrote that he was sober, So I mean he could have he could have had a heroin overdose in terms of the cops injecting him full of yeah, like yeah, that's the most likely thing, Like it does nothing part of this. So so this guy was selling cocaine right, um, but again he's selling cocaine,

not heroin. And the other and you know, his his partner, like there was another guy he was he was selling cocaine with like his partner, when everyone who knew him was completely insistant that you know he does he doesn't do drugs, right, he sells them because you know, do you sell drugs? But yeah, and and the cops and you know, there are things that the cops do. The comp thing where they they changed their story twice. So originally they said that he like committed suicide by heroin overdosing,

and then they changed their story too. He died by accidents. Um. The The other thing that that indicates that he probably did not in fact die from heroin overdose is that there's bruises all over his face. He has a busted lip, his neck is super red, and none of that shows up in the in the police autopsy and yeah, yeah, and this all reads just like a standard Burge error interrogation, so that like they beat him, they put a bag over set to suffocate him, and then you plant heroin

on him and you know, you you call him. Yeah, that's the day's work. Yeah yeah, and you know, and there's there's another thing that that that I should mention here about the story, which is that, Okay, so this guy is in a Chicago Police Department black site, right, how did he get heroin in? Like everyone in his black site is literally shackled to a wall, Like there's no the old, the oldly place the hair we could

possibly have come from is the cops. So it's like, you know, and independent autopsy says he dies of hissphyxiation. Uh so yeah, I'm gonna read something from the Guardian about the guy who uh, the guy's partner who was in the next cell over. The other partner who requested to be cited as John Dowell. He rebuilds his life post conviction, was in a Home and Square interrogation room

near Galvin's. While Dobe was unable to see inside, he told the Guardian he heard a lot of commotion, then booming and banging, and then a gagging sound coming from his friend's cell his partner. Yeah, so this this guy, uh like his partner, Like he's that guy's also like chained to a wall for like twelve hours. Um here here's he he's with them today. I heard a holler.

I heard officers talking to him. After that, I just heard a lot of commotion like boom boom boom boom and banging boom boom, boom, boom boom, And then I didn't hear nothing after that. My door was kind of cracked and then they shut it. After that, they shut my door all the way before the police shut the door dozed, I heard a gagging sound like he makes a choking noise, like choking, like somebody was choking after the commotion, like choking. Yeah, oh yeah, it's it's very

it's very obviously from the get go. Yeah. Yeah, like they tortured this guy to death and yeah, it's yeah. And and the other fun part about Homelod squares Homeles Square is also used to torture political prisoners. All right, So, Brian Brian Jacob Church is a member of the NATO three, which is a group of anti NATO protesters and twelve who got set up by an incredibly elaborate government entrapment scheme and arrested for it. Um and he was taken

immediately to Homeland Square. He's never read his branda rights. He's cuffed to a bench for seventeen hours, um, and he he asked to call his lawyer because like a good leftist, he has the National Lawyers Field number written on his arm. And you know, this is something that's important. So the Guardian talked to like dozens of people who were held here right Um. Exactly two of them were able to contact a lawyer, and they were both white

and church Church is one of them. And this is actually how uh part of how Home and Score goes public because Brian Jacob Church like talks to the press about it and Spencer Ackerman it's a great journalist, does a bunch of incredible reporting and like brings the black site to light. And so there's there's seven thousand and eighty five people we can prove we're taken to Home and Square. Uh, six thousand of those people are black. Less than one percent of those people had their rest logged,

which means the cops just vanished them. Uh, it's almost certainly more people. Now, I'm going to read something about this from from the book Writings from the World of Policing. This Home and Score revelation seems to me to be an institutionalization of practices that date back more than forty years, said Flint Taylor, the civil rights lawyer and most associated with pursuing area to Commander John Burge. Back when I first started working on torture cases started representing criminal defense

in the early nineteen seventies, Taylor continued. My my clients often told me they've been taken from one police station to another before ending up an area to where they were tortured. That way, the police prevent their families and lawyers from seeing them until they could coerci the torture or other means confession from them. So, yeah, that that's

our fucking police reform. Instead of having a instead of taking the police station to police station, the police have now been reformed so that they have one institutionalized black site instead of multiple ones. Home and Square is still open to this day. That this came out in FI, there have been like over half a decade of protest against it. Um, so supposedly the rules have changed and if you get a rested they have to put you

in the system. But square is still open. There's probably another one like somewhere that they've just they've they've they've they've switched which side they're doing their black sites on. And yeah, well, yeah, I have I have a have

a closing statement. It is it is an inhuman crime that a single one of these fucking demons is allowed to roam our streets with the badge and the authority to rape, torture and murder us and the certainty system will beat us into a pulp if we attempt, even in the smallest way both symbolic way possible, to resist them. The police must be abolished. There is no alternative. For the sake of our survival, for the survival of children, and for the sake of every generation that is bore

its horrors before us. We could only abolish the police, salt the earth upon which it stands, and drive the very concept of policing into a space of such infamy and terror that even the worst among us would not dare to even propose bringing it back. Also, get rid of that last statue. Yeah, that one destroyed. Let's knock

that one out of there too. Yeah, I mean, I feel like everyone who's ever been to that site has should have the the the like universal right to take a hammer and maybe you know, maybe maybe an RPG and just like do whatever they want to that building. Yeah.

I think the men who continued to like in women who continued to work in CPD, like anyone who was ever arrested by them or or otherwise brutalize them should just forever have the right to just give him like a solid shot to the balls, you know, like just just like they get to wear a little sign around their neck and it's like, oh that guy used to that guy was you know, it was one of Burgess dudes. So anybody who sees them can just give him, give him a little haymaker right in the right in the

bread basket. That is a proposal, that is I'm running from the mayor of Chicago. I mean, I I'd look, our bears all suck, so you know, move move over here, and we we we we can propose a solution to this problem that is so unbelievably not proportionately violence to what the police have been doing that it boggles belief, and I'm pretty sure I can still manage to be corrupt. Yeah, yeah, I mean it's Chicago, you can't not. I mean, I guess. I mean life was sort of corrupt. Life's less corrupt

than normal. She's just bad. But yeah, it's Chicago. You'll you'll find corrupt, corruption will be foisted upon you. I'm I'm actually fine with that. Well, another another uplifting episode

of It could happen. Yeah, I will say this, like Garrison named it last yet earlier today, Hi, here's a problem by you know, and I will say any any time, any time someone tells you that, like, no, it's fine, we're going to reform the police, just like remind them that reforming the Chicago Police Department went was that the reform was that we don't have black sites. We do have we don't have consulidated the black We were from

multiple black sites to one black site. And also they probably moved it again just you just have to get rid of that is the essence of police report. Yeah. Anyway, Yep, there's a problem. Okay, bye bye. Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat Death of the Universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com or check us out on the I Heart Radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for it could Happen Here, updated monthly at cool zone Media dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.