It Could Happen Here Weekly 29

can make your own decisions. Welcome to it could happen here a podcast where we talk about things falling apart, and this week we're talking about our ability to have things that that don't get co opted by fascists falling apart. Garrison, Hello, take us, take us away. Yes, So today we're going to talk about kind of why maybe it's great not to see any aesthetic ground to fascists anytime it's uncomfortable

to do. So we've brought on someone who I found on Twitter who wrote a very very great article about some kind of ongoing debate and drama around like anarchists symbols um and fascists trying to use symbols um. But I'm we are talking to a black ram. Hello, Hey, I was I was things I'm I'm I'm actually I'm actually doing okay, I've been I've been looking forward to

this chat for a while. So yes, if, um, if people are unfamiliar, it looks like the past few weeks people have really freaked out about an eight pointed star.

People really really seem concerned about it. Um. Yeah, this has a lot tied in with what's been happening in Ukraine because, as always happens when there's a new story that has anything to do with the far right, um, people got acquainted with some symbols that they had not been aware of before, particularly the san and rad, which is a common symbol that you'll see on members of the as Off Battalion kind of some other far right

organization in Ukraine as well as elsewhere. You know, the christ Church shooter wore a son and rad, and then they started identifying all sorts of things that they felt looked like son and rad's everywhere on the internet, and things kind of spiraled from there. Well, and I think there's actually a little bit more to it than that. Well, we're gonna get into we're gonna get into black Ram's article here shortly. But yeah, I kind of first one

just briefly go through. I think why it's this kind of why this debate happened now, because the debate has happened before, but it's never gotten this like intense. A big part of this his tied to Russia's invasion of Ukraine and everyone wanting to play like where's Waldo with symbols being like can you spot the son and red on the on the pictures of the as Off Battalion UM and I think the other so like so everyone's already kind of looking for symbols as like a fun game.

But the other thing that's kind of happening is because of the Russia Dugan connection. Of Dugan's like a political fascist writer who's a very influential inside Russia. UM. But because of the Russia Dugan connection, some people are now seeing Dugan's symbol, the Uration Square for the first time, right, And now that they've seen the square, they're seeing anarchists

using the Chaos Star, which looks a little similar. They're they're not the same, but they're because they just because they just learned about the Uration Square, now they're seeing the Chaos Star and they've never really noticed the castAR before. Maybe they're they just don't really care about what symbols random people use. But now that they see the uration symbol and they see the chaostar, they're making this connection here and they think this is a new development, right.

They think this is like like they're they're asking themselves like, why are anarchists suddenly using this fascist symbol um, which they either think to themselves or they think out loud on Twitter dot com. Uh, which is really rich because I mean, anarchists have been using the chaost are longer than Dugan has been using his Uration square. And if you have been watching anarchists for any amount of time on the internet, I know you you would have seen

them using the chaos star. Uh. It's not it's not

a new development by any means. But because everyone's trying to like wear's Waldo and oh sent their way through the war, they're they're kind of drawing these false connections, which is kind of unfortunate because because there is actually some interesting things to talk about in terms of how Doogan did kind of base his design off of Michael Moorecox Chaos Star and a whole bunch of stuff around, like why anarchists use the chaos star and you know,

there's a whole there's there's a nice debate to be had there around fascists always in asserting themselves in these subcultures and trying to gain ground, whether it be like the punk scene, the industrial music scene, uh, you know online gaming, right, fascists always trying to do this. Just often we want to we try to push back on that, right,

like Nazia punks fuck off. But it seems specifically with the Chaos Star, a whole bunch of people just want to cave and let them kind of take this symbol, which is I know, I think not not a not a great instinct um, but to to kind of kind of talk about this and other kind of background stuff, like I said, we brought on a black ram Hello to help to help talk about this. So yeah, what

kind of prompted you to write your article? I guess, uh, you know, watching this debate kind of go down, what what kind of actually just like what was what was the straw that broke the camel's back? And being like, Okay, now I need to write like a decently long article on this topic. I think I've said this on like on the on Twitter a little while before writing the actual article, But I think the the spark was a friend from a guy you may or may not have

seen him around. He's like somebody who's like, well demn Stock but but but he has like anarchists leading on his bio, which I guess sort of which I guess sort of communicates the idea that he would probably like anarchism if he did not consider it to be impractical. Sure. Yeah, but anyways, I actually I kind of wavered on the

idea of covering it at all. I thought it would I thought it would only go for like a few days, and it was sort of a Johnny come Lately by maybe a day or so, admittedly, but the figured it would be sort of ephemeral. But there's things I sort of kept seeing. But in the midst of writing it, there was like some tanking who went even fervor and made the link to the Chaos Star and I think it was the logo of the Sith Empire from certain

Star Wars media. We'll talk about that like it's it's like, well, it's like, well, one has six lines and they're not even arrows. They're just like blocks in like a sort of hexagonal shape. But it's like the same guys really like the idea that the logo of the Ukrainian Armed

Forces is actually the iron cross. Yeah. A big chunk of this, I think kind of the prehistory of why this became such a specific problem started with kind of Unite the Right in the period after that, where you had all these new fascist groups on the ground of the United States and they all had their symbols, and you know, I was a part of this to to

to the degree that there's some culpability here. Um, a number of researchers, including myself, we're warning people like, hey, there's some like symbols that people are are taking to right wing gatherings and they're claiming to be normal conservatives, and these are these are symbols of groups like the Phineest Priesthood or groups like different kind of fascist organizations, and you might not be aware of them, and so you should know what kind of these, you know, the

Khakistan flag or whatever means, because people are trying to kind of signpost their sympathy to these extreme groups. And that I think that was important because those people were legitimate problems, and um, they were trying to kind of stealthily hide they're very radical right wing sympathies behind some like obscure images. But the problem is that it got a lot of people looking not just looking for fascist symbols and everything, but also looking for the clout that

comes from like pointing something like that out. And I think that's that's kind of the root of a lot of these these problems. And it's not surprising that it happened with Dugan's symbol that there's no absolutely not um because it does, like, again, if you're just like kind of a casual observer, it does look a lot like the chaos star and it makes its point and star with arrows, yeah, and it makes If you know anything about Dugan's philosophy, Alexander Dugan is a essentially a Russian

political theorist and author. Um. There's a lot that's kind of said about how close he is to Putin. He certainly was at one point closer to Putin. There's a lot of debate as to whether or not Putin kind of saw him as more of like a useful uh person to kind of a useful propaganda Oregan, or whether or not he really bought into what Dugan was saying.

But Dugan is and was a really big advocate of like what he called like multipolar um international politics, multipolarity, which is this idea that like the United States should not be a the hegemonic power in the world right, which it kind of was after the fall of the Soviet units. This idea that there should be a bunch

of equivalent powers um, which is number one. You can see how a lot of folks on the left would be drawn in by that, even if they weren't particularly fans of putin just the idea that like, oh well, yeah, it's it's been a problem that the United States, it's this massive hegemonic power. Perhaps it would be better if

there were a bunch of equivalent powers um. And and it's one of those things where there's a logic to that, but it does kind of require ignoring all of the times in the past when we had a multipolar world and there was tremendous violence. There's a root error in this sort of pathway which sort of like refuses to

deal with imperialism as a global system. Yeah. The reason that's a hang up is because once you once you think of imperialism as a global system, you you then have to move on to the idea that it a

global system that then has to be dismantled globally. Yeah, you can't quite do that with capita because it implicates nations that are supposed to serve as like moments of world historic progress against like hegemonic capitalism, and it is one of those spooks of the mind that people kind of have to do away with well, which the Adicist movement sort of does pretty successfully, because that mostly comes from the fact that it starts off from the position

of like the state as an actual sort of structural presence. It's sort of funny that, like the Marxist argument is usually down to like hyper focus on the state and hierarchy is idealist, which is odd when you consider that hierarchy and the state are very much material in the same way that capitalism itself is. So it's like it's it feels more like a sort of argument that's like, well, my materialism is the materialism, Your materialism is in fact

a form of idealism. I think with with that, we're gonna go on a quick a quick quick head break, and then we're gonna come back. And I think we should probably now talk about like the origins of the Chaos Star and and Michael Moorecock and discordionism um, and then we'll kind of get into the kind of current current debate on it. Uh some more so anyway, here's here's here's some here's some ads for your ears coming in through the ear waves. Oh yeah, yeah, it's time.

It's time to talk about more time for more so. Um, I guess, uh black Crab you you actually did a pretty good insistinct kind of things on how the Chaos Star came into being, initially via Michael Moorecock. Do you want it to just like as brief briefly talk about kind of how he came up with the symbol for his books and stuff. Okay, so full disclosure, I haven't really read books themselves. I've read some Michael Moorecock. A lot of what a lot of my familiarity from him

is pretty secondhand. One of the main things of that is Serifungal being like this, this sort of eighties band that I sort of think back to. Their whole vibe is more Cox works. But but but anyways, the reason why the Chaos Star is the shape that it is is because what it's supposed to represent is meant to extend outward endlessly. Yeah, the counter symbol for order is a single a single upward pointing arrow voted with Funny enough. When I thought about that, I thought about the twas

room or like tear. It doesn't really have to say meaning, but it's like upward pointing arrow in a symbolic context. That's the other example I have. But but that upward pointing arrow significies a straight and narrow expression of where possibility goes, where potential sort of goes, which create structure.

The other the chaos Star, by contrast, has like the eight directions are meant to represent all directions in a circular sort of space, like a compass of sorts, and the energy and the potential and possibility goes out and all of them. We have no set path, no definite limit, no boundaries. It just goes. It just sort of goes out there. It's little wonder why the chaos magic movement

embraced it for a very similar set of reasons. Yes, it's even because even though it is kind of a myth that there's absolutely no rules in chaos magic, what is true is that you can explore very a very very broad and like almost limitless range of like practical possibilities within that movement and that sort of within that sort of frame. It's a it's a very like post structuralist, post modern view of it. But this modern is how

I've heard it described. And kind of getting back to the like what Morecock was in brief, because I do you think we need to kind of give an overview of who he is. Um, he's still alive. Um, last I checked. At least he's alive. I I heard him talking at an anarchist sci fi conference a few weeks ago. If you didn't immediately know who he was, he is the most influential fantasy author you have not heard of? He he he is like a George RR. Martin level

of influence, if not significantly more so. Like he's he some people will say he's the most influential fantasy author since Tolkien. UM. And among his you've you've noted the band Sirith Ungle if you've, if you've been a fan of of any of the Warhammer games. Um, he's a huge influence on that because the thing that he created was kind of the the concept of chaos as a

sort of religious entity. And I'm not going to get into like the depths of the lore in his books, but a lot of it is about kind of the struggle between order and chaos um and so the Chaos Star he he created that specifically like for this kind of theological like conflict that occurs throughout his books, and it became the symbol of like one of the sides in Warhammer, and this very like there's tens of thousands of people who have the Chaos star tattooed on them,

not because of Warhammer, but or not because of any political reason or because of chast Mensic, because they were fans of like Warhammer forty or whatever. And it's interesting because in the same time, when I first got into anarchist political theory before long before I considered calling myself one, it was because I came across a book published by A k press Um I think I bought it in two thousands seven called No Gods, No Masters, and it

was it's a collection. A lot of people have a copy of this book in in their house if they're into anarchist theory. It's like a collection of early anarchists, like people like Prudon essays on like the kind of the first wave of anarchist political theory and it has a chaos star on the cover. UM because number one

Michael Moorecock identify is an anarchist. Um is a is a uh like as a like is both an author and someone who identifies as an anarchistic and yeah politically, and so his books had were particularly popular among anarchists, um, who don't always get a lot of chunks of pop culture to themselves. UM. And so he's he's. It was kind of from the beginning, both this nerdy fantasy symbol that you could see, you could you could put alongside a bunch of different ships from the Lord of the Rings.

Not that I love the Lord of the Rings, but like you could see it as like like like somebody having a tattoo in Elvish. But it also took on almost immediately this dual meaning where it was actually representing aspects of anarchist political theory, and so it was put in printed on like books that were about political theory and had nothing to do with fantasy. So it's I can't actually I cannot actually think of another symbol with a similar pedigree. It's it's a really pretty unique case.

It is. It is because it's it's less of like an anarchist symbol, but more a symbol created and used by anarchists. Like it was like it was, it was, it was, it was invented by an anarchist. It was. It was a symbol invented by an anarchist to represent something in fiction that had such resonance that people adopted

it as an actual political symbol. Yeah. It honestly, it honestly doesn't require that much reach to see why people who would why people who like the idea of there being no hierarchy and no state, even if not total freedom, there's still like the most range that you could get that results in that negation. It doesn't take a lot of elaboration to see why the symbol expressly meant for the symbol of chaos would gain traction. Absolute. Absolutely, Yeah.

I was talking with Margaret Keilnjoy about this a while ago, and she was like, yeah, like if you were in the two thousands and then you were like a traveling crust punk, at least like people would have chaostar tattoos, because that's because that's like it's a yeah, expanding out in all directions, you know, you're those the single arrow is law and order. Instead, we're expanding out every in

every possible way. Yeah, I mean I have a cast tattooed on me and I it's it's it's for primarily ideological reasons, as opposed to the fact that I spent my entire child with playing Warhammer of so, so yeah, it's I think now, so it is worth mentioning. So the cas star was invented in the sixties by Michael Morcock. Of course there is There's been other eight pointed stars over the course of thousands of years of history. Of course it is it is. It is like a broad

like geometrical shape. Every kind of star has meant something, yes, but the specific design was was made by Michael Morcock um. And then because of because of more cocks like anarchist tendencies in fiction, his work was used or at least appreciated by a lot of the Discordians, which is also popular around the sixties a lot of the situationists um.

And then as the Discordian situationist movement kind of morphed and started to kind of intermingle with parts of occultism, we have the chaos magic movement starting in the late seventies, which started also using the the Chaos Star, which makes sense because like what Robert you you were talking about how it's like it's like it's almost like personifying chaos as like a thing to worship um, which is actually a big part of early chaos magic text is is

like like reveling in the idea of like chaos is like a primordial god, which there's there's a lot of primordial gods um in like the actual world, you know, like if you look like through through histories of various cultures,

like chaos is one of the original primordial gods. So it is there's a big part of that in early chaos magic books about kind of looking at chaos as this like this very ancient force that should be kind of respected, and I think that that is of that is a big part of why the chaos magicians started

using uh, the the Star. I mean, obviously there's a lot of crossover between like sci fi writers like Robert Anton Wilson Um and Michael Moorecock who then Robert Anton Wilson was very influential in the chaos magic movement, so you can see how this gets carried over from like anarchist sci fi to chaos magic, and then because it's in chaos magic, it gets way more visibility. So then it starts then he starts seeing it inside more more

like underground anarchist scenes um. And then so around around this time, Dugan was starting his political career, and he was he was u was dabbling in a lot of various like occult circles himself. Right now, he's he's more of like a traditionalist, like a more like a Christian traditionalist. That is kind of his primarily. That is like, is that is his primary kind of a cult interest as

long as it can be called a cult. Yeah, it's it's it's not it's not worth getting too much into the weeds on on doing at this point, I think people, I think it's it's it's worth it. Like like he like he because he obviously did rip the he did take inspiration from the Chaos Star to make his own version of it. He's certainly because he was in those same circles, a cultic leanings and and a degree of knowledge.

I think again, with a lot of things, a lot of things about Dugan are overstated, including his closeness to putin because he's this really easy in part because he's like so prolific, and and there's a lot available on him in English. It's really easy to kind of tie everything happening in Russia to do him to him. Um. Yeah, and I think that's kind of a degree of what's

happening here. There's a website I've forgotten the name of, but I think it had like a bunch of like online reproduction of Dugan's various writings from the nineties, all sorts of weird shit about occultism and Yeah, and yet I do think that there's a very obvious gulf between the Dugan of that weird eccentric, like esoteric Nazi sort of phase of like his relative youth versus today where he frames his entire rationale for multiplorality as a kind

of Christian a Christian crusade against the hegemony that he legitimately believes to be a Satanic fire. Yes, basically said that, and it's not the only thing he considers satanic, like like we should point out that like one of the one of the main forces that were that we're going like against pussy Riot, where Eurasianists at that of that time, and he called them like devils and witches and taught his followers to show up with pitchforks. People in the

West don't really understand them. So you get guys like when you get both Alexander Reid Ross describing him as an adherent of chaos magic and some guy from the National Review referring to him as the leader of a satanic cult somehow. Yeah, and and boy, I mean, there's a long history of people liking to flat liking to flatten um fascist movements with an occultic tradition to just Satanism.

We're not gonna talk about that at length, but it whenever whenever you hear people talking about a problem and like they reduce it to its satanists, you should be a little on edge because usually they're wrong or at least incomplete um and they just have have kind of over Anyway, we don't need to get terribly into that.

The only the only person I wanted to bring that up is because like this is around the same time that people that are fascists, we're trying to enter in a lot of different politicals, like some cultures, whether it be like the punk scene and industrial music, um, including like the the occulture, because that that is like their primary means, right, Like they try to like they are an aesthetic driven movement, they try to cop to any aesthetic and use it for their own gains and to

to kind of overlook the anarchist origins of this thing just because fascists tried to cop it at some point. I think it's very silly, because then, like, what are you going to throw away all punk music like come up or even like or even like crosses like, yeah, a fascist still used variations of Christian crosses that still

have essentially political Christian meanings. But I'd probably still assume that the majority of religious fascists do lean on some kind of Christianity, And to the extent that there's neopagans involved, there's sort of a minority. There's a couple of things

that this is. Like. One of them would be kind of in the United States, fascist co option of of the flag of the United States, which we can talk a lot about like the fact that the United States is an imperialist power um and the genocide is done on under that flag without while still acknowledging that attempts by fascist movements to co opt it as a purely fascist symbol are problematic. In part because that symbol, the United States flag, has a lot of power to a

lot of people. And so if you if the fascists kind of co opted totally, um, that's a harmful thing. That's a thing that can like allow them to get their brain worms into more people. Which doesn't mean like you should take and wave the US flag, but it does mean that, like it's just a matter of don't you don't have to let them take the ground, you know. Um. And I think on a kind of a different angle.

One of the things I think about a lot is, uh, the first time I went to India, seeing especially in a large parts of India, you'll see swastika's hanging over the doors of many, many houses all over the place. You'll see them hanging from cars. They're they're constant things. And it's only unsettling if you have allowed yourself to forget that the swastika is a symbol that the Nazis stole from another culture, co opted and invested with a

new meaning. Jan yeah, yeah, And why should people in other parts of the world, who have been using it for a totally different purpose for thousands of years, why should they be like, well, I guess we don't get this now. It's like in India has had to deal

with their own fashion. Yes, and and and there's I mean again, we're delving into a lot of very deep topics because there's a lot to be said about how the fact that the Nazis took the swastika lead to degrees of sympathy within areas of Indian culture that allowed some fascist ideology to creep in. And like that's also tied to the fact that both the Nazis and a lot of Indian nationalists were fighting against the British Empire.

It's all very complicated, right. They're guys, guys like vds of Our Care did who were founders of the Hinduva movement, Yeah, did openly praise Hitler. Oh yeah, Yeah. It's kind of easy for some people to think of it as entirely motivated by religion, but his whole concept of nationhood is entirely racial. Yeah. It says himself that it has nothing to do with religion. So yeah, and it's it's it's

one of those things. If you actually want to understand things and engage with them in a useful area, you have to understand that history and grapple with it without like looking at a year old Hindu temple and going, well, I guess they were Nazis hash hash hashtag problematic. Yeah, ugly.

The last thing actually want to talk about is how how how the kind of debate around symbols US to symbols has just kind of morphed into just fast jacketing anarchists in general and worrying about like, oh, the fascists are secretly infiltrating the anarchists and they're gonna turn anarchists into fascists. Just pretty silly, because I mean, if you're gonna I you're gonna turn anyone into fascists. Think anarchists are one of the hardest people to do to do

that too. This is this is there's a lot of other people it's way easier to convince to become fascists than when anarchists go fascists they pretty hard well, yeah, but they the type of like fear mongering around it is still it's really frustrating because like I'm looking at all these I'm looking at all these tanky's like fast jacketing anarchists for using us for using a symbol created by anarchists which has been used by anarchists for decades, right, um,

But then you also have like Tanky superstar Kalin Malplin regularly hanging out with like like Melvin regularly hangs out with dougod Of. And then you have someone who's like another like pretty like popular, like like tinky influencer like

Ben Norton who openly uses Dugan's multipolar theory. Right, and so if if if, if you're looking for the most visible example of fascist nationalist rhetoric trying to enter into leftism, you should look at like the growing like patriotic communists, you know, people people like patriotic socialists, but yeah, the

idea is basically the same. But yeah, it's like people like Peter Coffin and this like growing like patriot communist socialist kind of live streamer grifft um, which is like because like the easiest entry on the left for fascism is informs of nationalist authoritarian communism. Right, It's like you know that that's that that is how you get like

national socialism. Right. Uh. It's like they just had this like super cringe e Nauz Bill convention just a few weeks ago with with some of the best moments on until Will Smith slapped that guy. Yeah, but like you know, you have you have like Coffin and Malpin hanging out and like Mopid regularly regularly hangs out with Doo Good.

It's like, if you're gonna lift, if you want to be watching out for like a fascist creep, maybe you should direct it towards the people and just like doing it out in the open and not fast jacketing like queer anarchists who have been doing the thing that they've

been doing for like decades. I guess one of the last things I bele mention is, uh, the hilarious incidents with the Sith Empire thing of people just fully of like fully getting consumed by their own brain worms and trying to insist that a Star Wars symbol uh is secretly uh fascist chaos star um and then doing the same thing to the Warhammer symbol um it is it

is in in. I mean it's funny because like in Star Wars it is a fascist symbol, right, that is, that's not a fascist symbol in the real world, but it is within the world of of Star Wars that is absolutely a fascist. It's also it's also not a chaos star. It's not a chaos star. Uh. And in Warhammer it is a chaos star, but it's not a fascist symbol. It's actually an anti fascist symbol. Within the World War you can basically argue that, yeah, because it is.

It is just frustrating looking at all these people being like trying to play trying to play the Wears Waldo game just to all like dunkan anarchists, and it's just kind of shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the history of anarchists culture um, and the history of like anti fascist anarchists. You know, most of the anti fascists that I know use the chaos star because it's because it's a red symbol.

It looks rad, it looks cool. Um. And Yeah, trying to like in insisting that we must see this ground and let fascists use anything that they think is esthetically cool. I think is is a first of all, like a losing battle to actually just like to just just to to to start that now, I think is you would have some pretty bad implications for fascism and its use of aesthetics. You don't have to give them things just

because they want to take those things. It makes sense that you would see like tankyas do it, because then with your tankie you could basically get into a position where you can basically discard all sorts of symbolisms and just replace everything with like old like Soviet symbology or so which is which is obviously not tied to eddie a trocity stead of happens, right, Oh, oh it's dentally.

Don't ever tell them about Georgia. Yeah, don't don't tell them about Georgia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Ukraine, that giant lake that was like the largest lake in Europe that they turned into a pile of poison. You know. Don't mention a few things, and Trotsky would be proud considering he wanted to turn mountains into like city structure. I mean that that actually is one of the things I think Trotsky was on the right ball about more ministrits, more minisirats.

Let's tear it up some mountains. So any any any final thoughts on our lovely circular the chaos a chaos star. I'm thinking I'm thinking of a quote from like, uh, what was his name, Pablo Freer Day. I hope I've gotten that name right. A quote I've seen going around that I think goes around something to the effect that when the point of education isn't liberation, the goal is to become the oppressor. Um. You could sort of usually that quote is like relevant to like the material processes

of like being inculcated into a capitalist system. So so so you can kind of make the most sense of it as basically like you are educated to become a boss instead of wanting to abolish all bosses vot. But but on but on a micro level, you can sort of apply it to the to the ways in which people, even in like radical spaces sort of to sort of become like self styled cops as it were. That I think is a phenomenon that a lot of the unarcho

nihilist tendency sort of responds to. Anyway, this is coming from a perspective that is sort of flirtatious towards an arco nihilism, but not necessarily. But it's like you could a lot of the interactions with like they like certain people demonstrate that. There are some instances of it where

I think I can't quite tell if it's po or not. Um. Somebody I s s somebody posted like a photo of themselves with like a like a jacket and they had like the upside down cross and the inverted pedogram on board, and somebody someone, somebody with like basically no followers who somehow blew somehow blew up when they posted that photo next to like a Nazi uniform to try and compare to the inverted cross to a swastika or no not, if not a swastika, then like maybe some other part

of the jacket and the pentagram to like the arm band or something like yeah, yeah, And I think I'm still not sure if that was entirely serious. See, that's that's the thing is, like we have to be careful, like I don't like anarchist in fighting. It's rarely useful, um, and we have to be quick to be watchful for like how much of it is just people trolling or people trying to prompt in fighting just for the sake

of infighting. Right, So if if like I tried for a long time to not engage in this debate because I don't like talking about this, like I don't like in fighting with anarchists. I don't like I don't like having these types of debates. So hopefully the next time

this debate starts. We don't need to because we can just we can just point to how this last one went and say, no, look, we clearly demonstrated that this has a this has a long history of use by anarchists and invented by anarchists, and not starting, not starting, and not start the debate again because we we don't we we don't need to do it, and there's no telling if people are doing it sincerely or people doing it ironically, or people just doing it just to get

you know, people upset um. And I mean like if you want to look at anarchists and look at I where where is right wing people whereas fascist trying to kind of blended with anarchists, Like look at like books right, look at and d caps right. These people who try to claim to be anarchists are very bad and actually blending in because they can't help themselves when they start talking about like the validity of anarcho capitalism or the validity of like small nation states like it's it is,

it is. It is hard. It's hard to actually infiltrate anarchists. This is the thing that the FBI has said multiple multiple times. It's hard to actually do so whenever fascists try to blend in whether they're boogloo boys, they can't help but use their old like boogaloo symbols. They can't help, but just like like give hints. It is it is

astonishing how how bad they are at this thing. So also bad at like the protection that they claimed to offer, Like there was a there was an article from like last year going over oh we're going over well, part of it mentioned that they were basically at this like purported protests that they were supposed to offer protection from, and most and most of what they did was get

drunk and like this on the sidewalks. The boogloo boys, I've seen it, actual protests who are like with like with like cops stacking protesters, the bogle of voice of the first ones to run because their cowards. Yeah, all right, well I guess where can where can people bay? Where can people find in you on line? Where can people read your read your article like chaos Nihilism and the

Way of No Surrender WordPress? Basically, um I could I call it a site left the rotical domain, but the but the link goes like my thoughts born from fire dot WordPress dot com. I actually try I actually try changing the U r L once I changed it to a left the radical domain I think in two Bells of thirteen fourteen, but I figured that doing so would funk up all of the stats and whatever, so I

just didn't bother. Well, thank thank you so much for kind of writing, I would say, probably the most definitive stance on this debate at the moment, which we can always point point back to whenever this inevitably comes up again, and like a year or two, because I've seen it. I've seen it come up like every every few years. You see it. So thank you, thank you for that,

and thank you for coming on. Um yeah, if you want to follow follow us, you can do it at the thing, you know, the thing, you know what our Instagram had happened here pod and cool Zone Media. You can look at my unhinged chaos tweets at Hungry bow Tie. Um yeah, nothing is true and everything is permitted. Also at a skatinus is where I go to like sort of ramble about politics and occasionally the occult and other things. We do. We do. We do love a good we

do love a good ramble. All right, that that that doesn't for us today, Uh, funk fascists, Nazi punks, fuck off, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Welcome to it could happen here the only podcast where the hosts asks all listeners and guests to provide their Social Security number and bank account number, routing number, all that good stuff. UM. This is a podcast about how things aren't always great, uh, and maybe are kind of

falling apart a little bit. And and it has also not been, for the most part, a podcast about the expanded war in Ukraine. UM, for a variety of reasons. We have done some coverage of that, but we've focused specifically on stories of individual people and and that's generally where I feel like our strength is as a program. But people have been repeatedly requesting we do a little bit of a bigger picture look at what's gone on in that conflict, and so I have brought Aram Chambanian

into the studio. Aram, how are you doing, buddy? Oh? Not too bad man? How you doing today? Fine and dandy like sour candy. Now, would you describe kind of your your who you are and what you do and why why you're you're someone people should listen to when we're talking about a conflict like this, because you are one of the people who when everyone was like, there's no way Russia will invade, was was saying, well, maybe

it might happen. Yeah, I mean, um well, I think one of the things that that sets me aside from a lot of other analysts out there is that I never thought I would become an analyst, and I never thought that I would do this. Um. I it wasn't set in stone from me. From the beginning. I thought I was going to be like a high school history teacher.

And so I've always studied the world in terms of reading books on different conflicts around the world, and and I've tried to keep appraised on where these books have led to. Right, So if I read a book about the Second Congo War, it makes sense to then follow current events that are related to what happened after the Second Congo War. As a result, I followed things going

on in Ukraine starting with year am I done? Um and elsewhere in the world, But but Ukraine has been one that I've focused on pretty heavily because um there's been a lot of information about Ukraine ever since because of how late the war happened in terms of human history, and in terms of recent conflicts, isn't that long ago? UM and so uh, I started following it back then.

And I think that if you combine modern open source tools, modern technology, some of the stuff that organizations like Belling Cat can do with traditional research and and and knowledge some of the stuff that I've done in school, you have a really powerful tool to combat disinformation. UM. And I think that's one of the best tools we have to combat disinformation is wedding oh sent with traditional research UM.

And Yeah, when it comes to open source intelligence, UM, the Ukrainian War is actually kind of one of the It's not the conflict where that really started to become a thing. That would probably be the Libyan Civil War when when that UM big and to be something people were talking about in a big way. But the Ukrainian the invasion of Ukraine by Russia in particular in two thousand fourteen, UM is really where open source intelligence kind of came into its own in a really widely known way.

That's when Belling Cats reporting on the downing of MH on seven like went out, and that was kind of like the first first really huge international story involving like open source intelligent cracking a case. Um, and now since the expanded invasion of Russia back in February, we've kind of entered and again this isn't really where this period started, but this has been kind of we've seen an explosion of what I think would be fair to call open

source intelligence disinformation. Um. Yeah, you want to talk a little bit about kind of some of the stuff that you've seen, because there's there's a number of accounts claiming to be doing os and on the Ukrainian war, um, and boy howdy, they are not all giving out good information, and it can be difficult for people to tell what they should trust because if you're if you're kind of just scanning over it, bad ocean or even outright fake ocean can look very similar to good ocean, right and

and so I would put a lot of the ocean community into four rough categories. Uh there's uh osan analysts and those are pretty rare. Those are the kind of people who combine what they're seeing in real time on social media with a background of knowledge in the area. So like a Ukraine regional expert combining that with what they're seeing happen in Ukraine. That's an ocean analyst. There's

some Twitter accounts that are more ocean aggregators. They don't really have much analysis that put into what they're what they're producing, but they spit out a lot of information in real time, and so if you follow the right ones that use the right sources, you can get some pretty decent information from them. Then there's more of the misinformation aggregators, which are accounts that just kind of spread whatever they see without regards to whether it's true or not.

Um they'll sensationalized stories. You know, if there's the uh a rare command and control plane takes off somewhere in America that's known as the doomsday plane during the Cold War, they'll tweet out the doomsday plane is in the air. Doesn't mean the clear war right, And they're not doing it to be hurtful, they're doing it for likes. And then there's disinformation aggregators who are deliberately out there trying

to sow discord and so problems. And those are four categories that I've seen all of them develop in their own ways in the last ten years. UM. I think the best best example of that final category, there's an account on Twitter called s MM Syria and If you look at the account, it looks almost identical to the

os CES Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine. It takes the same kind of graphics and it has the same kind of terminology, but it's an assaddist disinformation outlet and so but they've woven their way into if you just like a casual glance at the war in Syria, you might

believe that it's a valid source. And that's the kind of more malicious disinformation that I'm talking about, where like they know what they're doing and they're trying to confuse people, and it's there's you know, I think one of the best examples of something that really struck me recently as problematic in in the war in Ukraine, as you've got a video going around um of that purports to show Ukrainian soldiers shooting captured Russian soldiers um which is a

war crime. And uh, I think credible people within the Ocean community have said this is something that desperately needs to be investigated more seriously. This this like is very has a very good chance of being legitimate and people

should be looking into this. Whereas you've also seen folks who kind of reflectively jumped to defend Ukraine against these allegations putting out what I think is fairly shoddy ocean claiming to show like issues with the video and stuff, and it's like circling blurry sections of the video and saying like this is you know, looks like it could be edited, or this doesn't look credible, and it is

the kind of thing. I think One reason people can get tripped up by that is prior to the invasion of Ukraine, there were some Russian false flag events that involved like cadavers, bodies that had been autopsy and stuff, which was broken down by people like Elliot Higgins at Belling cat Um and one of the things that again if you're just kind of looking at the surface level, you can see like, oh, well that those were videos that were faked, and so these like the o cent

around this people like pointing out different sections of the

video looks the same. Some of the differences are for example, Um, when they were analyzing the bodies and those those false flag footage, they brought in actual you know, corpse cutter ruppers, morticians, yes, to analyze like the cuts in the in the skulls and whatnot, as opposed to again just kind of a guy circling aspects of a video and being like this doesn't seem right, and it's like, um, but you can I can see why people get tripped up by it, and it it is important not to get tripped up

by that kind of stuff because um, war crimes are bad, I think is a general attitude that we we both share um and and should be investigated regardless of like whether or not they're being done by the side who's

also towing Russian tanks away with tractors. That you're you're on the side of right, like right, And I think that that's that's exactly an important distinction to because like, there are certain claims that have come out from the Ukrainian side, certain statements that have come out that as an osan analyst, I could probably look into more and maybe poke holes and stuff like the number of kills that the ghost of keys, right, Okay, maybe it's not

thirty kills or whatever it is that people are saying, maybe he's not really, but that's not harmful as much as did these guys shoot people in the legs? Right? Right? So one of those bears examination just because of the nature of the claim. The other one maybe we can examine it after the war when it's not it doesn't really matter. If there is a Ukrainian ace fighter pilot who's dropped a bunch of a crazy number like obviously in a military sense of Russian jets are being down to,

that doesn't matter. But like from the perspective of people just kind of observing this war as as news consumers, it doesn't really matter, whereas whether or not a country gets away with a war crime absolutely matters, and people are treating it with the same reflective handwave as they do when they accept these ghost of Kiev yes myths. Right, they're saying like, well, no, but I want the Ukrainian side to win this war, so we can't even look into any claims of war crimes. And that's just not

how it's supposed to be. Like you condemn the crimes up front, and you investigate and you try to move forward, and that's how we prove that we're better than the opposing side. Like that's that's been the rule in this war, and it's been the rule in war's past. You know, you you prove that you're better than your opponents by

being more decent. Yeah, and it's it's I have seen some really unsettling logic from some people along the line of like, well, these were artillerymen who have been you know, shelling civilian areas, so why shouldn't they be be shot in the leg? And the answer is because, like that's number one, it is a war crime to shoot captured prisoners. Likely that that is a thing that we as a as a species have attempted to make illegal um and problems and ought to be it is a thing that

like should not be done. And there's actually of a wide variety of like tactical reasons why it's bad for Ukraine. If Russian soldiers believe they will be shot after being captured, it makes, among other things, it makes soldiers less likely

to turn themselves in. UM. One of the wiser decisions that the Ukrainian government has made in this war has been really deliberately pushing um the idea that like, hey, Russians, if you surrender, will pay you, you can get Ukrainian citizenship, Like bring in your tanks, you know, land your planes or whatever, like, well, you know, we'll make it worth your while. Um, which is a lot which is potentially a force multiplier, right, UM, If Russian soldiers think when

I get captured, they will shoot me. Then they will fight to the death, and Ukraine will lose more people in that fight, as opposed to if Russian soldiers think, well, ship, I could actually have a pretty decent life if I just turned myself into these guys and refused to fight. That means less people you have to fight. Um. So it it does. It does really matter whether or not this is happening. Um. And it's also just like on

a moral level, you you shouldn't accept it. And I see some really I think one of the things that I find so unsettling about that logic like these are uh, these are you know, artillerymen who have been targeting civilian areas. Why shouldn't they be shot? Um, it's not that much of a leap to like some other ship we saw people saying in Vietnam, you know, these villages are harboring insurgents.

Why shouldn't we treat them like the enemy? You know, Like all of this logic leads to people getting murdered who don't deserve to get murdered, and that is bad. Right. There's the snowball effect, the slippery slope effect with the moral side of it, and then like you're saying the practical side of it. I mean, if you look at part of the reason members of ISIS fought so hard in places like most of which because once you're in that organization, your options are a bullet or like a

desert cell. If you're lucky, they're not going to treat you well and reintegrate you into society. Come on, like, no, that's not how it works, so you fight like hell, you know that's that's a very basic rule. That's pretty easy to understand, I would think. So that's why this needs to be looked into. And if it's proven false, if it's proven it to not be a correct true video, that just strengthens the Ukrainian side. But if it is proven to be true, it's something that needs to be investigated.

It can't be overlooked. It can't be swept under the under the rug. Just because we we want one side of this war to come out on top doesn't mean that we have to ignore you're committing Like one, A good rule of thumb to approach a war from when you're trying to analyze it is that there there has never been a side in a war who have not committed war crimes. Um. So that should always be on your mind when you're trying to evaluate the reality of a war crame. It doesn't mean every claim of a

war crime is true. That would be a very silly

way to translate that. But it does mean that when there is a claim that the side you support has been responsible for a war crime, your default should be this is not impossible, and I should I should proceed from the area that this could have happened, and and it should be analyzed without reflectively dismissing it, and also without saying that like war crimes committed by a group of soldiers in a single part of a theater necessarily mean that the the war itself is being prosecuted in

a criminal level by that government. Um. Because for example, well, I mean I was about to say U. S. Soldiers committed war crimes in World War Two, but actually the prosecution of that war was criminal in a lot of fundamental ways. But it does. That doesn't mean that like your granddad committed war crimes because other U. S. Soldiers who were in the field executed captured German POW's you know, um, Yeah, which I think is something people have an easier time

understanding and it's not a war. They feel the need to have a series of character or less takes on in Twitter. Yeah, it's That's the weirdest thing about about the social media age and and kind of sent in general, is that while it does make it very accessible and easy for anybody to get involved in investigating these crimes and these events, it also means that everybody thinks they have an opinion that matters on it and uh and

and in that sense, they muddy the waters. They they a lot of people can can imitate the ocent look pretty well. They can circle things in pictures that look similar, or as we saw in Syria, a lot they'd take two pictures of two totally different dudes and say these are the same guy, they're both members of Al Nustra are something like that, and they would compare the eyes and compare the chins and stuff, and it looks kind of like a belling cat image, but it wasn't right.

That's the danger here is that like everybody can can help, but every what he can hurt now too, Yeah, yeah, And it's one of those things, every every aspect of

this cuts both ways, because like the thing people started saying. Rightfully, so after the invasion or the expanded invasion I should say of Ukraine by Russia is like, well, now all of these people who were experts in whatever the last big story was are going to become experts on the Ukrainian conflict, right, which is absolutely a thing that happened.

You get all of these people who I think are pretty bad journalists and reporters who suddenly like rushed to to have their commentary on this thing that they have ignored for the last eight years. Um. But at the same time, it's to talk about Belling Cat. The founder of Belling Cat, my old boss, Elliott Higgins, was like literally an unemployed dude sitting on his couch when he started analyzing war footage um and is now one of the most respected conflict analysts in the world. UM. And

that is a thing the Internet has made possible. UM. I think a great example would be the Caliber Obscura Twitter, which is just like a dude in the UK who has an almost impossible ability to recognize firearms and pieces of firearms and so just analyzes people send him footage from all over the planet and he'll say, like, these are these guns? And this is where they came from.

And this is uh, this one is like looks like this kind of gun, but it's actually, um, a fake one that's being made locally in this country, and it is supposed to look like this. And you can tell because like, um, that's not a person who Caliber did not like go to some sort of fancy gun school.

They just are Uh. I mean, it's definitely not right to call them an amateur because quite frankly, I don't know any people who are working at institutes and better at the thing that Caliber does than Caliber is right, Um, But they did just start as a person on Twitter. You know. Well, that's the thing about this, this is that you get people who were not kind of born with an idea that they were going to become analysts

and in this field. And so you have people like both of both of the people you mentioned, whom I I know personal I don't know Elliott personally, but I remember him for our days are shared days on a comedy website together. It's the website that show remained nameless,

right Um. And then and then you know, uh, Caliber and I have talked on Twitter a bunch, and you know we're friends there and it's just interesting to see that, like both of them are very real people behind like their professional personality and their their expertise, they're also down to earth, real people, which is rare in this field because a lot of people are kind of elitist. Um and and and yeah Gatekeeper and neither of them are

about that. They're both all about like getting as many people doing this as possible because more eyes are better, Like, yeah, Elliott is is uh, I mean, the whole reason my career with Belling Cat existed is because, like I emailed him out of the blue one day and said, hey, I've been noticing this weird thing in videos of fascists talking to cops. Can I write a thing for you? And he was just like okay, And and that was

I mean, like that was how that started. Um And he's I've met him since a couple at times, and yeah, it is a very I think is very informed. Because of the fact that he did not come from sort of this big institutional background. UM has has a humility with which he approaches his investigations that, uh, I think is one of the things you should look for in trying to decide whether or not open source intelligence that you're seeing on Twitter. Whatever is credible is how how

how conclusive are they stating their claims? Are? How many times do they offer only a single possibility for what something is? Like? Um, you know, there's a number of things you can do. I think at this point we should probably move to a separate area of discussion, which

is how's the how's this war going? Who, who's who's winning? What? Um? Well, so, I I made a statement on my Facebook page, my personal Facebook page, three weeks ago, and I still feel confident in that statement, and that is that well, Ukraine has yet to win this war. Sha has already lost. They've already lost their objectives, They've already lost what they what their goals were. And at this point it's a face saving venture on the Russian part. But a raum um.

Russia carried out a cutting faint action to distract while they while they took the East by burning a fifth of their general staff and all of their armored vehicles. It was a cunning fat Yeah I saw someone on Twitter positive actually uh a move to use up all of Ukraine's ammunition. Brilliant, Yeah, just very very zab Brannigan logic. Half of Vladimir Putin. Ukrainians have a preset kill limit and once they hit ten generals, the army will shut down. But no, the war is not going well for Russia.

Um and that's not to say that it's going great for Ukraine either, but no one needs to do less well to succeed here. Yes, it's a I mean because one of the things that is a black box, right. I do think because there was a lot of discussion earlier in the ward, particularly like how credible are these numbers that the Ukrainian government is putting out for for

dead and for destroyed vehicles? And I think the oceans out there, like the verified vehicle casualties and stuff that we can verify, means that like obviously the Ukrainian government is patting their numbers, but not by as much as a lot of people might have, like it's not wildly off. Saw their first casualty account. I think first casual account. I think it was like day two or three, and then like all of the western and held me. Yeah,

actually yeah, it's probably about two Oh my god. Wow. Yeah. In perspective for some people who may not that number may not jump out to them. We lost you know, just shy of three thousand soldiers killed during the Iraq Wars. So yeah, two thousand in a couple of days is

an extraordinary number of losses. Yeah. And of course the black box here we don't have nearly as good an information on is what kind of casualties is the Ukrainian military suffered and what kind of civilian casualties have been suffered? And um, Obviously civilian casualties nearly always take much longer

to get, um to the extent that it's ever. I think we have a better chance of getting objective civilian casualties for this because, unlike a lot of other conflicts, these civilians being killed, our civilians under the ages of a government that is a functional state, as opposed to Syria, for example, where the there's basically the only people with an interest in accurately reporting the death count are a

number of different non governmental organizations. Um, because the people being are being killed by one government or the other, right including like this is this was the same thing like in Iraq. The civilians who died in Mosel were

technically under the Iraqi governments. You know, whatever. Protection seems like the wrong word to say, but I can tell you from my experience there, there was no We still do not have anything that approaches a credible civilian death count for for that conflict, um and probably never will right and and on that note, on the civilian casualties note, we were talking earlier about what how you can identify a credible ostan account versus a one that you probably

shouldn't give too much credence to. And one of the best ways to do that, honestly is is, ah, look at their their morals. I guess if they're ever posting and celebrating the death of civilians anywhere, you should probably disregard them. Like, yeah, I'll never see Elliott Higgins being like, yeah, suck at people of belowgrad like you got hit with a missile, Like it's not it's you know, it's not gonna happen. Yeah, it's not. It's the same thing as like,

I get why people celebrate h, you know, battlefield victories. Obviously, I don't think, especially if you're literally a Ukrainian living, you know, in the area affected, I don't think there's

anything morally wrong with celebrating opposing soldiers being defeated. But I am I continue to be deeply unsettled by footage celebrating things like the destruction of armored personnel carriers full of nineteen year old kids, um, even though a non insignificant number of those nineteen year old kids are accessories to war crimes. Right, Like, it doesn't mean like I'm

broadly okay with it. I do. I do feel a lot better about celebrating losses of special forces units like the vdv UM that have been heavily involved in war crimes around the world, like that I have less kind of an issue with. But and I felt that personally.

You know, I'm Armenian and during the Carback War, it was just day, every day I would wake up to dozens of videos of Armenian conscripts and soldiers being blown up and hunted from the air, and people on Twitter cheering for it because they were, for one reason or another, on the ZERI side. And like, I get it, you know, like you were saying, you want to cheer your battlefield victories, and I understand that from people who live on the

battlefield and live near the battlefield, I get it. It's happening to you, to people thousands of miles away cheerleading on the internet. What the hell is wrong with you? Yeah, maybe don't do that. Maybe don't do that, like you what the hell? Like you know, those are real people in that video that never did anything to you. And this is not like a sporting event where like they go home at the end of the day and they've

just lost, like they're dead even when they do. Like, I've spent a huge amount of my career talking directly face to face with victims of ISIS, Right, I have been to like eight or nine refugee camps in two countries at this point, specifically for that were in addition to days spent on the refugee trail in between Hungary and Serbia talking to two Syrians and talking to um

um people who had like fled the region. Uh. But at the same time, I can't help but like, like I've literally been under fire by ISIS and then had those ISIS guys gotten killed, and I have celebrated and cheered when that's happened. Um, And I'll never forget we were embedded with this mortar team and we were under fire from this sniper and the mortar team. I forget

you can. In the article I wrote on it, I list the exact number of rounds fired, but it was like nine or ten something like that, where they're gradually walking in mortars until they get this guy um. And obviously we like cheered when they fucking killed this dude because he was shooting at us. And I remember, like kind of on our way out away from the front, my fixer Sangar was like, how many rounds did they drop before they got him? And I was like, I don't know. I think it was like nine or ten.

I've got the footage somewhere, and he was like, I wonder what else they hit and and sang sangarsa Uhum like was born and raised in mosle Um, And it was one of those things we spent the very next day. We were like talking to people fleeing their homes and stuff.

And not only did we we like see some of those people who lost family members too misses both by Iraqi forces and by coalition aircraft and stuff, but like we came upon this dead ices fighter in a fighting position where you could he he had been in there with his wife for days, and he had been wounded two or three days before he got killed, and you could see the evidence of the first aide she had done on him, and it was one of those things.

I guess I could try to make the case that like, well, maybe she was a captive and didn't want to do it, but quite frankly, everything I saw in there makes me believe like she cared deeply for him and stayed with him until the bitter end, trying to keep him alive and fighting. Um. And that doesn't mean he's not like a monster, and it doesn't mean he shouldn't have been killed because he's a fucking dashi who was in the

middle of doing enabling a series of terrible things. But he's also like, you can't you can't ignore the humanity of of somebody when you have seen that element of what what happens in the conflict, and that has stayed with me quite a bit ever since. Yeah, and it's

it's one of those things. And you gotta you gotta remember that the majority of young men of fighting age around the world who joined a military or armed organization or an insurgent group, whatever it may be, they do so typically because it's whomever is in charge of the area they're growing up in. Right, You don't join the Russian Army because you wait all the options, and the Brazilian Army offer some good aid, you know, some good healthcare packages. And I looked at the Italian Army, but

really I want to go with the Russian. No, you go with wherever you were born, yeah, whether, And you know, and I was talking to my roommate about this last night. We were watching this footage from the flood of nineties here in Oregon, you know, and it's this National Guard a helicopter where they're pushing bales of hay out of the back of the helicopter down to cows stranded out in your tillamook. And so depending on when you join the National Guard, you either fed cows hey from a

helicopter or deployed to Irock. That's the luck of the draw, right, That's not fair. No, they don't deserve to die any more than the guys dropping the hay out of the helicopter did, right. But people get yeah, they get carried away with like turning it into a sport almost, and they forget that there's people on the other end, and that like, well, some of them are threats and they may need to be dealt with. It's like, you know,

a bear comes at you in the woods. You shoot it, you don't, you don't skin it and make fun of it, like yeah, you know, I go kill its kids. You know, that's not that's not how it works, you know. So like yeah, yeah, don't don't be don't be a piece of ship, Like don't don't don't don't lose your humanity, um, because I mean, one of the things that makes it easy to lose your humanity is that like videos of ship getting blown up looks dope, right like it it does.

It looks cool to watch things get blown up. That's in fact, I suspect how a lot of people who become very good oh since investigators part of what draws them in. It's just like I'm sure that was a part of why Caliber started obsessively researching guns. Is like their neat guns are neat. You know, weapons are interesting. People are inherently interested in in weaponry. Um, which is not a good thing. It's just the thing, you know. It's not a bad thing either. It's just like a

thing human beings will always be interested in. But as

warfare is as natural to us as eating and fucking. Um, well, you're talking about the mortars, right, the mortars walking in And there's this video on YouTube of made by an American Navy attack squadron of them dropping bomb after bomb on targets and muzzle and and and uh rocca places like that, and it's set to the Devil's going to cut you down, And every time there's a beat in the music, and you see a bomb drop, and some of these bombs it's like four bombs dropping at a time,

dropping an eight story building. And so I'm sure there was a guy inside there with a weapon, but like you want to tell me there wasn't anybody else in that eighth story building, And like, okay, yeah, you're celebrating the death of the combatant there, but like also all those other people are being celebrated indirectly, and so like you gotta remember that, like these bombs explode and they take out a large area, and these fights are happening

in cities a lot of the time. Yeah, the weaponry that the United States uses is more precise than something like a barrel bomb, but not by as midy orders of magnitude as you would hope. Um. And and precision doesn't precision matters, Yes, it's not a non important an important thing, but Ultimately, it doesn't matter if your missile went right into that living room full of civilians and blew them all up, or if you leveled the block and maybe you know, killed them indirectly. Like you gotta

know what you're hitting. The target is what really matters, right, So it doesn't matter if you can hit the target, you gotta make sure it's the right target. And that's where we're starting to have issues now, is like we can hit targets really well, we just aren't always sure that it's the right yes, as opposed I mean, and and you are seeing. So let's let's talk about we

we started this chatting about Ukrainian potential Ukrainian war crime. Um, what we have absolute documentation of a tremendous amount of war crimes on behalf of the Russian UH invaders, including a thing that they have done repeatedly in Syria, which is the targeting of hospitals and medical facilities, um with

with terrible civilian casualties as a as a result. And this is something that the New York Times actually published an incredible article based on a mix of O cent and like I'm not entirely sure how they got them, but combat flight recorders, like the audio that these these Russian fighter pilots were sending back and forth to command

as they attacked hospitals in Syria. Um, so we actually have a tremendous amount of detail about like what it looks like inside the cockpit and in like the control room and whatnot, as air strikes are being ordered on medical facilities. I really recommend people check that article out. Um it's it's pretty harrowing. Ship. But UM, yeah, are you are you surprised at all by kind of what you are what you've seen so far in behalf of

the Russian forces in Ukraine. No, no, not even not even the slightest, Because I followed the war and in Syria rather closely. And uh, I mean there was a point when they had to stop marking the hospitals with hospital marketings because the Russians would target them so consistently. The United Nations had to stop giving the Russians the coordinates of the hospitals and in Aleppo because they kept

getting targeted. Um. There was an AID convoy that was struck, I believe by Syrian aircraft, but it was the targeting was given to them by Russian aircraft. Um. It was just an AID convoy coming into Aleppo, a United Nations and Aid convoy, and it was bombed and strafe repeatedly for you know, several hours. Um. Things like that that happened so regularly in Syria to the relative silence of the rest of the world. Um, that led me to believe that when they go into Ukraine, they're not going

to be any gentler. Um. A lot of people suspected early on that, like, well, they it's harder to demonize people who look like you, so they're not going to have as much of an easy time demonizing Ukrainians. And I think there has been some degree of difficulty with that, at least in terms of some of the conscripts on the Russian side. But the other thing we're seeing is that, like a lot of these a lot of people seem

to genuinely believe the mission of denazifying Ukraine. And so if that's what you believe you're doing, then the bombing does surprised, It doesn't become a surprise. Right. If you think that you're going into Ukraine to suppress it and occupy it, then bombing city city is full of Russians, Russians and Russian speakers seems like a bad idea, but if you believe that they're all Nazis, then it makes sense that you might just blow them up because they're

all the enemy. I'm not saying I'm not condoning it. I'm saying no, But I mean that is literally what the US government in the British government did in World War you know exactly. There have been claims made that what Russia is doing in places like mary A Pole amounts to an active genocide. Um, what is your opinion

on that? Genocide is a big word. It's yeah, but you know, it has a lot of meaning behind it, in the sense that like, just because somebody is killing large numbers of people and doing so in heinous ways does not make it a genocide. You have to an attempt to destroy culture and destroy heritage and things of that nature. Um, as it stands, I would say that it looks likely that there are signs of potential genocide

in Mariable. I am not confident enough to come out and say that I conclusively think it's happening, but the way that it looks like the the city is being deliberately targeted to either force the entire population to flee or to radicalize them one way or the other. Is it goes beyond military target you know. I think the thing that were that I that is the most like troubling potential sign of an intention of genocide is the reports that the Russian government has been evacuating civilians that

they have in parts of Mariopole. They have captured two places in Russia, which is this is a misconception. You don't have to just be killing people, as you stated, it's an attempt to destroy a culture, which you can do by killing, but you can also do by things like separating moving people, like forced migration and whatnot. Like there's aspects of that at again, look at like the genocide of the Native Americans in the United States. It

was not all straight up killing. A lot of it was forced migration, um, which is an act of genocide as well. Um. And that's the kind of thing where I'm I'm kind of waiting for more reporting on that to the to see here exactly what's happening in the extent to what's happening, But that really troubles me in terms of potential signs of a genocide. Yeah, and when they when they coined the term genocide after World War Two. It was it was with reference to the Holocaust, but

but what they had in mind was the Armenian genocide. Yeah, when it when they when they drafted these words, and because it was beyond just sheer number of people killed, if we're talking sheer number of people killed, the Nazis also killed six million other people in addition to the six million Jews they killed. The reason we talked about the Jews is one, six million is a lot of people. And two it was a deliberate attempt to destroy their

entire culture. You make them have never existed, and that's very different and very scary. Dying is also very bad, the idea of dying and then all of the people who were like you just don't exist anymore, and all your books and your literature are gone. Like that's that's monstrous. Yeah, And that's why there's a difference between genocide and mass killing. Yeah, And it's it's the difference. Like we talked about US war crimes in World War Two, of which there were many,

including the fire bombing of Dresden. I would argue, but it's not an act of genocide because when they fire bombed Dresden. It was certainly um the killing of civilians without particular regard to the direct military efficacy of the action, But it was not an attempt to destroy German culture or obliterate the German people. And you brought up the

Armenian genocide. Well, we'll talk about this at some point behind the bastards, but you mentioned that that was kind of what the people when the term genocide was invented, that was what people were looking at, even though it was kind of a direct response to the Holocaust. It's also worth noting that like when the Nazis planned the Holocaust,

they to the Armenian genocide as a model. Um Hitler's literal statement was when people when he was asked during like one of his his dinners with a bunch of Nazi officials, like what what about kind of the international reaction to what we're planning to do? He was like, well, who remembers the Armenians? You know? Like that was his That was his attitude, is like, we'll get away with it because nobody did anything during this genocide, right and and and I think while I would hesitate to call

the entire war in Ukraine and genocide. Yes, as of yet. I would say that there's a similarity between the Armenian genocide and and how that led to the Holocaust. There's a similarity between the Russian war crimes committed in Syria and how that led to the war crimes being committed in Ukraine, in the sense that if the world had stood up earlier, we would not be seeing this now. Yeah.

The problem is the world looked the other way when the Russians bombed hospitals in Syria, when they repeatedly bombed hospitals. In fact, the world didn't just look away. A lot of people in the West mocked it. I'm sure you've heard it as often as I have. The last Hospital and Aleppo joke, right where, oh they're bombing the lost

last hospital and Aleppo again. Well, the reason that happened is because when you bomb the hospital, they build a new one, and then it gets bombed again three days later, so they've bombed the last one again. So it wasn't a joke. It was just a tragedy that kept playing out that people couldn't really fathom, so they mocked, right. And so when that's the attitude of a lot of the world, it's no surprise that what's what's happened in Ukraine as has run out of control? M hm, Where

do you think we go from here? What are you what are you expecting to kind of see next within this conflict? You know, the most recent kind of reporting is that Russia's pulling. Russia's framing it is they're pulling back from Kiev to to focus on other fronts. Uh. The Ukrainian side is saying like, well, they've been defeated around Kiev and they're pulling back. What do you think kind of we're seeing next? What is your opinion on

kind of the next stages here? So I think it really depends on Vladimir Prutin's power and how long he remains in a position of unchecked power. I'm not saying necessarily he will fall from power. I'm saying that how long can he go as the only guy calling the shots? Because as it stands right now, it doesn't look like he's the same Vladimir Putin that we were used to dealing with. It seems like something may have changed with him.

And that's a wild card because if if Vladimir Putin wants to continue to escalate here he can continue to do so because he may not be getting the same reporting that we are about the condition of his army. He may think his army is doing better than they're doing and that they actually are just repositioning. So if that's the case, there's a chance to he'll escalate against potentially in NATO country. I find that unlikely, but there's

still a chance for it. I think what's more likely is that we're going to see the Russian military refocused efforts in the east, in in Donetskan Luhansk, with an attempts to create a land bridge to Crimea through the area through Mariopol Melitopa area UM and I think they're going to try to rucify the area as much as possible and remove as many of the Ukrainians as possible

UM one way or the other. And I don't know if they'll be successful in that, but I think simultaneously while they do that, they're going to try to tie down and destroy as much of the Ukrainian military as possible UM, which will be difficult because the units in the east are Ukraine's best equip units. So I don't know how this ends. I don't see a reasonable end to this insight, but that's just because there's too many

variables at the moment. I do think one thing that's kind of worth looking at this war in a historical context.

A number of comparisons have been made to both of the world wars here, um, I think the thing that it most reminds me of is World War One, not in that it's a conflagration on that scale or in that um it's a similar war in terms of the combat, but it is an example of the first big war that utilizes a variety of weapons and tactics that have been battlefield tested in a series of smaller wars, right, um, And I think we are seeing in Ukraine for the first time the actual will. I think one thing that

we have seen is that drones. And I'm not talking about the big ones here. You know, they get a lot of the bay rock tar and stuff like get that gets a lot of attention, but like small the kind of drones anyone listening to this could pick up and buy today, right, Those drones, I think are proving to be a game changer on a tactical level, in a similar manner to the machine gun in in the

turn of the last century. Before the last century. Yeah, with the drones, I've often machine guns are good good comparison. I've often thought of it as like the airplane, and that we had airplanes and we haven't had combat airplanes. Before World War One, we didn't have very many of them because nobody really realized the utility of them in war.

And then as the war got closer and then the war started, countries started to slowly build up these small fleets of aircraft, and then by the end of the war, everybody had an air force. I think we see the same thing with these small consumer drones, is that like, by the end of this war or whatever conflagrations are coming after it, every military in the world is going to have little little you know, phantom phantom threes or whatever,

basically for every infantry squad. One of the things that's so wild is that if if you again, if you're sitting here right now, have not an insignificant amount of money, let's say three to four thousand dollars and the enough mechanical like competence to carry out modest repairs on your own car, you could, with things entirely available over the shelf, build a weapon system capable of disabling a variety of

armored vehicles at night. You know, like you that that is a thing that individual people, You could do that and you can have it up and running in a matter of days. I just I'm imagining the next protest in unnamed city. Yeah, and a consumer drone flies over the police line and drops a little thing on him.

This is bang. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Like there's a lot of people, even even as as influential and meaningful as they've been on the battlefield in Ukraine, I think people still are kind of slow to understand the extent. Like there's one of the wildest stories that's come out of it is that the Ukrainian military has a an outfit of civilian drone operators using hacked and home built

drones to attack Russian forces at night. UM and they have been The documented of efficacy of their raids has been significant, And I can I can remember spending a brief period of time with an Iraqi military unit that was just using d g I phantoms that they had rigged to drop what were since essentially mortar shells with shuttlecocks on them from a height. UM, and they were

very effective at killing people. UM. As isis, drones were effective at sort of spotting, you know, mortars for folks well. And one of the things I saw I SIS used their more their drones for great effect wasn't so much to kill large numbers of enemy soldiers. It was to do the same thing that American predator drones and report drones had done for for decades by that point the terror groups, which is let them know you can't gather in large numbers. Yeah, if you gather in large numbers

of your target. And so you saw a Rocky soldier saying no more than two or three in a group, ye, any more than that will get targeted, you know, And so they flipped the equation basically yep, and don't I mean I one of the reasons why I I have a general policy heavily informed by my time in Mozle that the last place I want to be in a anywhere near a war zone is an armored vehicle. Um. Because that's really unless you are in something that's heavily

up armored, like an im wrap. Little bombs dropped by drones can do significant damage to something like a humpy and that's exactly what you target. You don't target a Toyota Corolla with a drone like that, unless you specifically know an individuals in that Corolla that you want to kill. But you may just behind the lines see a target of opportunity in an armor see an armored lightly armored vehicle, and drop a immunition on it. And that's one of

the things this is done. There's a lot of talk prior to the expanded Russian invasion about how immediately Russia was going to get air superiority, and that's obviously a bigger story than just drones. There's a lot of factors and why Russia. It's probably accurate to say they have superiority in a number of parts of the war, but they don't have supremacy like that. It's not like an absolute matter. And part of that is because, um, it's

not really possible to at this moment. Someday, I suspect there will be more effective ways of stopping drones and at like a theater level. Um, maybe, but it certainly hasn't happened yet. Yeah. Yeah, And and that's the thing. You know, there's there's the drones, and then there's also on the Ukrainian side, they you know, I think they recognize that air force against air force, the Russians have a numerical superiority. So you can deny the Russians air

supremacy by shooting down their planes with man pads. You don't have to have an air force to deny your opponent. You just have to dine them the ability to freely operate in your airspace. And this is one of those things. There's been a lot of talk about a no fly zone, um, which I tend to think would be a bad idea in the traditional sense in terms of like the US and NATO sending in planes to down Russian planes over Ukraine.

There's a number of reasons why that's concerning. But you can effectively establish a no fly zone by shipping in a funckload of man pads exactly. Yeah, And I'm not against that. I think in terms of what kind of what kind of armed arms support is ethical to provide, giving people the ability to stop planes from bombing cities is broadly speaking, one of the most ethical things you can do in terms of shipping munitions around the world, right,

and the other advantages that man pads. I'm sure somebody could turn it into a lethal ground weapon, but they're pretty hard to yeah, use against ground targets, against houses, things like that, not really what they're designed for. So it's not like just handing over, you know, some indiscriminate weapon to the Ukrainians to use against Russian cities. You're you're giving them a weapon that's specifically used against military aircraft.

Like most man pads can't reach the altitude the airliners are out even so yep, so I think that's probably what we want to talk about today. Um, you wanna plug your plug ables, tell people where they can find you in your analysis out in the wild. Yeah, so you can. You can follow me on Twitter. My handle is at Shabanian Rum and uh I work I published occasionally with the New Lines Institute. Uh so you can

see my work there as well. And I have a website that I seldom update, the Folded Gap dot com um hasn't been updated and probably eight months now because I've been tired. But um, yeah, those are the places to find me and uh d m s are open on Twitter. So if you ever have questions or anything like that, let me know. I'm happy to talk with anybody who's got questions on these kind of things. Hell yeah, well that's gonna be us. So you know, enjoy this

analysis of the of the war in Ukraine. Um, before we return you to your regularly scheduled multi part series on Nazi cat girls. Uh. The primary focus of this podcast money money. This is welcome, Dick had happen here? It is me, Christopher Long. Uh, this is a This is a podcast about things falling apart, things putting back together again. And also today it's just about money. Um. And also well, okay, it is not just about money.

It is about money and is about seemingly seemingly esoteric arguments about the nature of money that actually turned out to be extremely important for any post revolutionary society or even just this society. So yeah, and and joining joining me to talk about this are Kyle Flannery and Steve manned where the co editors of Strange Matters magazine, which is a new workers co op that's in the middle of a fundraising drive. So yeah, go Stworth the magazine.

And uh, even Kyle, welcome to the show. It's great to be here, Chris, thanks for having us. The basis of this interview is a piece that is coming out, actually when is it coming out that that's a good question that I should probably have asked of this. Um, let's see, it will come out later this month. Okay, Yeah, there'll be out later this month. That is about the

history of money and what money is. So I guess we can we can start there, which is, yeah, can can you walk us through a bit about the debate over what money is and how sort of various people have gotten parts of it wrong and parts of it right. Sure. I got into this debate as a economics graduate student in eleven and a book that really kind of shaped my initial understanding was David Graeber's Depth the First five

Thousand Years and yeah, it's excellent. Um it's it's very long, and it's a bit scattered, but I love what he put together with it. And um, so he kind of introduced me to ideas of from a school of economic thought called chartile is UM and chartial is M is kind of the theoretical forbear of M M T and m M T is, which is modern monetary theory is kind of in the news now as a theory which is saying, like, okay, if you if you're a government that issues its own money, its own currency, that is

not really backed by anything. It's not backed by any other currency or any other commodity. Then you don't really face a financial limit as far as how much you can produce. You you're the sole source of that money, and you can spend it into existence, spend by buying things the money into existence, and people will accept it to the extent that they either need it or they want it. And that's one theory that's kind of in

the air now. But chartali is Um, over a hundred years before this, is putting out very similar ideas around money that is um created by states in order to martial physical resources. They call it biophysical resources, which is just a fancy word of meaning all of the material, people, techniques, um,

physical processes that are required to create economic activity. So to the extent that people either need or want your money UM, you can use it as a social technology sort of to marshal those resources into action, and you being a state, chartali is Um says, so from Chartalism we got m MT. But David Graverer's book is about a lot more than just Churtleism and MT, So it's about the origins of money, and origins of money, it

turns out, are at least five thousand years ago. As the title says, UM, there are examples of UM early accounting systems that are where people are just UM. Rather than there being a circulating medium of exchange type money like a coin or something or a daughter bill, there were just records of what people own and what people owe and their debts and credits against each other. And

it was in early Mesopotamia there. So we have these early accounting systems that yield more advanced credit systems over time, that are ruled by temples UM, which are sort of proto states in a way in terms of like they administer the flow of goods and services through their territory and between their territory and another temple's territory using their domestic money, but also international money. International money was facilitated

through trade networks. Trade networks use things like UM. They needed to convert between a domestic money and international money. And Gregory goes through these like wonderful examples of UM, silver and other medals being used as like international means of payment. UM. That's sort of our term in our piece basically, which is covering them foreign exchange. But UM. He says, like in order to get from the domestic

money into the international money. UM. You need to have these linkages of experts in the temple and the trade networks to get together and make um credit instruments which knit them together into this trade network. And from there we go into UM. I don't want to spend too much time on the history, but we go from there to situations thousands of years later, we get coins. Coins are being minted by starting in the fulle six hundred BC. I want to say, Carl, yeah, that that sounds about right.

So um the first I someone can correct me if I'm wrong. But I've been doing some homework on this because I've been on a few podcasts and there's like like numismatists in the comments and whatnot. But um, the first okay, the first mixed gold and silver coin was sometime in the seventh century BC, and the first gold coin was not long after. I think it was like they were both Lydian kings, like one after another. Anyway, I just wanted to hit that because someone said I

got wrong earlier. But um uh, these coins were kind of the first widely used sort of retail means of settling debts, like at the point of sale between people. So it wasn't just an accounting system. It was an elaborate credit system with no circulating means of payment. It was a circulating money. Now and it's getting around um based on military conquest. Military conquest in the excellent age spread the use of coins much wider than the domestic

spheres in which they were first minted. Yeah, and I think we should like just just to talk about it about like roughly when this is like you know like if if if you go back, I mean this this is slightly later, but one of the huge sort of like like the periods where like the entire Mediterraneans using coinage, right is you know you're this this is this is when you're dealing with you're sort of like classical Greek like you have you have your gree your Greeks and

your Persians, and you have your sort of like Athens and sparta Um and that those guys are very much uh, they're engaged in this thing that Graver calls the the military industrial coinage slavery complex, the military industrial coinage complex. Yeah, and I yeah, I think he has slavery on the end because it's yeah, it's it's this giant sort of places,

giant warfare system. Right, these are like like Athens is an empire, right, they run around, they steal, they see people's gold, this golden silver byance, and they like have slaves that work in this this whole sort of light like this. Yeah, you get the system of empire that

is like what the actual ages sort of defined by. Yeah. Yeah, And it's like whereas previously, like so precious medals did circulate, but they weren't in coin form, and they were more as like a bulk means of payment stored from one temple to the next, almost as if they are central banks, but central banks don't exist yet, and actual actual age coinage system gave rise to the more much more sophisticated

medieval coinage system. And I'm going breezily through this because um, there's a lot there, but several years, there's several thousands years they're passing in a few minutes here, so um,

bear with me. But there are there now in the Mediva, Medieval and Renaissance times, not only do we have the coin is circulating, but we also have credit instruments um which uh are being submitted, transferred, transmitted rather between banks uh, between banks in different countries and territories that are saying, hey, you don't even need to based on what is written on this piece of paper, I already know you're good

for it. I will dispense with the coins uh that I have in my bank because this paper signifies that they you're good for it, basically, and so that greatly speeds things up in terms of UM settling commerce debts and and uh settling bills between different UM states. So but going through all this history, the point of it is that at every at every sort of step of the way, you see, okay, there's a lot of different

types of money. They're circulating and they're being exchanged against one another, and there also seems to be a domestic sphere and international sphere. The international means of payment, which is a analytic category that um I and my co author John Michael Cloone thought up, is kind of sort of sets the tune as far as what uh, what kind of hierarchy of money, if you will, develops in

each of these ages. So like in the prior to the Axle Age, there were both there was bulk settlements from one temple to the next in terms of silver although it wasn't coins, it was just UM like bullion basically UM, and then and then later it was coins, and then later it was bills of exchange, and then after a while there emerged gold standards UM that existed between nations, and they had central banks eventually, which UM hoarded goal old not because not just because they are

fetishizing it or something something basic like that, but rather because it was the established international means of payment. And if you either you need that or you need something that is easily transferable into that in order to conduct your trade, especially if you're developing country or um A otherwise like an upstart state of some type. Now today we're in a dollarized world. The dollar is the international means of payment from one onwards the M M T story, Yeah,

I mean that's basically true. The E then the for the US government as the issuer the sole issue of the dollar, which is a fiat currency which is not backed by anything UM. Yeah, you can make as much of that as what you want. You could make, you can create and spend into existence as need dollars as the US government wants, and then delete it from existence by taxing it away. And that makes perfect sense totally

acknowledged that. But there's some problems nonetheless in terms of how they apply that into a more general theory, because it's like, can you, okay, you can make as much of your own money, what about other types of money from the perspective of a US state craft interested individual,

Like why would you care about other people's money? Basically, if you're just the full sole source of the of the US dollar, which happens to also be the international means of payment, of course you wouldn't are if you're like, say, to Tunisia. The Tunisian dollar is accepted almost nowhere as payment. Yeah, And and one one of the big things, I mean, it's not the soul driver and people start for emphasize this. I'm going to caveat this immediately because people will yell

at me. But like, one of one of the very important things about the dollar is that the dollar is what you can buy oil in. And this is extremely important because if you are a society in the world, you need oil. Um, this is basically universally true. And and this you know, but and the fact that you need to buy oil, and and the fact that you need to buy a lot of other things that are manufactured in the US means you have to find some way to get U S dollars. Now, again, the US doesn't.

This doesn't matter for the U S because we can just make them. Well okay, a, this is another thing. This stuff gets very weird and convoluted very quickly. Um. But the essentially the US can just sort of make this money technically speaking as a federal reserve. And there's all of this just incredibly convoluted finance stuff. But yeah, the the US like doesn't the US does not have to worry about obtaining U S dollars. You could just

do it. But you know, yeah, if if you're if you're if you're I don't know if true Trenisia, if you're Denmarks an example, Yeah, den Mark. Yeah, like you you you need to find a way to get US dollars because you need to have stuff, you need to use US dollars to buy it. Mhm. Yeah. And so in our national context, this is after all of the history I just went through, since about or so when

we went off the gold standard. Um, we have a system of central banks dominated by the dollar, and the dollar represents about of settlement of all trade and the next five or so currencies are plus the US account for like a d of all trade, so there's really just a few currencies which dominate everything, with the US

being outsized among them. And when you look at the historical record, this is like very similar to other forms of international means of payment, where it's like, okay, I either need to have the one that's at the top, or failing that, one of the other sort of reserve currencies, even though that that that terminology didn't really exists prior

to about eighty years ago. Um. But yeah, so like if you don't if it's not gold, then okay, it's the US dollar, So we need dollars or we either need to be printing dollars because we're the U S or for not them, then we need to get into either U S Dollar or the yen or the euro or one of the major trading currencies. And um, like China, China does a lot of trade with the US and

they sell things to us, We give them dollars. They're rational, they put their dollars into treasuries to gain a little bit of a return instead of just holding the dollars themselves for no return. Do we explain I guess what a treasury is because yeah, sorry, Uh, the treasury bill is if you receive dollars, you can use them to purchase what's called a treasury note or a treasury bill and notes too. So if you ever hear something to talk about tea notes, that that's what this is. Yeah.

So it's a way to learn. It's like moving from your checking to your savings account essentially. So if you have just dollars in a bank, it doesn't earn hardly anything. If you're in a saving if you go into the savings account, which is basically the treasury the treasury bills, you'll learn a little more and you'll learn dollars. You won't earn reminity from them. You'll learn more dollars and dollars for the international means of payments. So that's good. Yeah.

So so like basically like there's the US government puts out a bond and like you buy it and then when when whatever it like expires or there's like a ten year team note that people talk about that's like years you buy it and yeah, it'll give it'll give you like a certain amount of dollars like later on that is more than what you paid for it HM exactly, So you'll learn a little bit of interest over time, and then you may earn like a little lump sum when it matures in in the future. So China has

tons of dollars. It's part of a huge strategy that they have in order to manage their foreign their foreign currency reserves or what's called for X. So for X is the that's the term. We're going to use a lot um. That just is the foreign currency reserves you have on hand in order to pay for things that are only available for sale in currencies that you can't make yourself. Okay. So you know you have this question

of like why do we care about this? Right, Like why do we people who want to make the world better care about this? And the answer is, okay, take take take your hypothetical scenario, your your Your hypothetical scenario is the scenario in which like a a a bunch of workers in alliance with like tribal confederations have taken Vancouver Island, right, and they've set up a new They've they've set up a new government that they have worked

out sovereignty arrangements. Things have happened. You now have a new you have you have a new sort of entity that that is in Vancouver Island. Um. Yeah, so so immediately you have you have both you have both resources and you have problems. Right. You have a certain amount of resources that on Vancouver Island, right, you have you know, you have like you have literally like what what you

have the things that are on the island. Right. You have cars, you have like probably some yaches you've managed to like steal you have you know, you have you have shops, you have production facilities, you have extremely large number of very good Chinese restaurants. Uh you have trees. Trees, yeah, you know restaurants. I mean also it's true like I yeah, my my my family spent a lot of time like

specifically going going to Vancouver Island just to eat Chinese food. Uh. Yeah, you know, and say say like, let' let's say you've taken Vancouver Island and you you expand out and you now have like a swath of Canada, right that that is that is that is now sort of been liberated, and you know, you have you have you have a

lot of resources. You have sort of timber, you have I don't know, maybe you have coal, maybe you have other stuff you have, you have, and you also have a lot of people and yeah, you have a lot of labor and and those people have a lot of skills, they have a lot of education, they have like you know, they have, they have, they have, they have a belief that you can make the world a better place. And I think this is where you know, this is this is the arena in which MMT can sort of explain

what you're doing next. Mhm Yeah. So you have this um, you have a territory, this undergone revolutionary change, and you have biophysical resources that are in it and biophysical resources that could be in it. And you have and you also have the social technology of money. Some of the money you can just make yourself. Other moneys you cannot um M m T in the is applicable in the sense that it says in this scenario. I think the most the way MMT is most acclicable is to say

everyone can be employed. Who wants to be employed, Yeah, there's they're the One of their principal ideas is a job you're in a federal job guarantee. And it could

be applied just as easily conceptually in this situation. It says, UM there's nothing preventing a revolutionary government of some type, um, not necessarily a states, but any any non state type of administration from setting up something sort of like a central bank to make its own money, to martial domestic resources, domestic in terms of within its own territory, and to get everyone everyone who wants to be employed, to be

employed and to be paid for their work. Like not to be too vulgar, but like why why this is stuff is important? This monetary theory in this history is like, people want to be paid for their work. They're not going to go inviter things. They want to get paid. Yeah, And I think this is something that like you know, if if if if you look at sort of like the thing that gets held up was like the classic example of an anarchist revolution, right is is what happens

in Spain necinety six. And if if if you look at what they do right like very almost immediately after the revolution, what happens is you have basically like a union of all of the bank workers, and those guys take over all the banks, um, and you you have you have the individual work like workers in different unions starts seizing, they start seasing the factories that start seizing

like the trains. And once they've done that, they start just pulling all of their resources into you know, like in into like they have they they now have this like they have they have the banking union. The banking union is is that the sort of sexual body that

has resources that can distribute it. And you know what what what MMT is essentially saying is like, yeah, so as long as what you're moving around is the resources that you have in your territory, like you can just create money in order to do that, and you can sort of you know, and you can use this to get people to do certain things. And like you know, the Catalonians, like they they the equals if one's wages, for example, I mean, it would be better if we

equalize everyone's wages. I do agree with that. Yeah, well, you know, I mean they did do with a lot of other stuff that's like okay, so like they get rid of a lot of jobs that are like sort of managerial stuff or like just bullshit jobs they just kind of eliminate and yeah, and you know, and this this frees up people to like do stuff that actually matters and is real instead of sort of dislike this

sort of bureaucratic hierarchy that's above them. And yeah, but and I think the other thing they do that's that's very important for our sort of scenario for us talking about money is that like they they immediately start like they start seizing gold and they start seizing you know, like they start seasing foreign currency. And yeah, and I think that this this is where we can get into where where I guess MP doesn't work because m T

like it's it's it's it doesn't. It doesn't really think much about the fact that like, Okay, you have Vancouver Island, you have a part of like Canada, right, there is a lot of resources that you don't have. Absolutely, Yeah, that's that's that's gonna be a lot of why foreign exchange matters so much as that, you know, you inevitably you think, what if we just made an autartic society. That's sorry, that's a little I probably jump got a

little bit there. What if we just made everything ourselves? What if we made a society that was fully economically independent. Um, that's what autarchy tends to be used to mean. And

the answer to that is because that sucks. The problem with it is that it sucks like you, you don't want to be trying to manage an autartic society on multiple grounds, uh, not least of which is that I mean, we've we've we've seen societies try to do it, and uh, you know, we me, me and Steve could go for hours and hours and hours talking about historical precedents of previous economic systems, many of which did try to be autartic, because that was something that monarchy has liked a lot,

was the idea that their their kingdom could be fully independent. Because the thing is that when you're economically independent, that means that you've got a certain amount of security, of international security. Uh. And there's kind of a trade off where the more stuff that you're reliant on importing, the more vulnerable you are to the people you're importing and screwing you. But it's just so massively difficult to be

a good producer of every possible good. Yeah, and and this and this is this is true even if you have an annoyance amount of resources, like I think, you know, we can talk about one case study of this, which is socialist period China, and you know, social spirit China. They they have they they they're they're getting resources, and especially the early periods, you're getting some resources from like

Hong Kong, they're getting some stuff from the Soviets. But you know they get into like Mao famously does not like markets. Um, this is a this is the thing that is known about Mao, and so Mao is like, Okay, We're like no, we're going to shut off the sort of like ket system that we that we've been running sort of through Hong Kong. And then you know, China have been getting technology transfers and aid from the USSR.

But you know, the US are in China got into a bunch of political fights and the US are like pulls out all of advisors and you know China, China has an enormous amount of resources, right, they have a large population, they have they have just an enormous geographic mass, and so they basically try to you know, build into target society and they try to sort of just okay, well we'll just what does martial our resources and we'll just sort of like, well, we'll plan a way out

of it. And they run into this problem, which is that there is actually things that they need from other countries, which is technology, and they hit this thing I've talked about before, which is, uh, like they basically get this bottle, this production bottleneck where it's like, well, okay, so in order to produce more industrial goods, than need more food.

But the problem is, in order to produce more food to support a large urban population, uh, you need more industrial goods, right, You need your like fertilizers, need your tractors and need stuff like that, and you know, and once they're cut off from sort of the rest of the world from through Hong Kong, and for the U. S. S R. They don't have what they you know, they're they're sort of they're sort of scrambling to figure out

how we do this. And their solution is a greatly forward, which is essentially we're we're we're gonna just bust through this whole thing, and we're gonna do it by forcing everyone to work for like an absolutely enormous like increase in hours. Right Like, We're we're gonna we're gonna have peasants working in the fields literally until they collasse some exhaustion, and it just doesn't work. It is a it is

a epocal failure. There are millions of people die from famines and you know, and the sort of the response to this is that, like is that China eventually ends

up like winds up opening its economy again. Yeah and yeah and yeah, and like you know, and this is the thing, like if if China, which has like just just an astounding breath of natural resources, can't pull this off, like it's probably just not a good idea because it's like, yeah, well, I mean we even have like a very you know, a very contemporary example that you know, makes they will make certainly makes my blood, boy, and I'm sure we

will make some of the listeners blood boil. The vaccines, uh, you know, the realistically, you know, the the coronavirus is fund is a more or less is an incredible threat to basically adding every state on the planet at this point. And the really really chemical and biomedical research is done

in just a handful of places on the planet. Uh. And there have been attempts to create vaccines outside of those places, and they have been somewhat successful, but it has been difficult, and most places are just not in a position to create a to develop their own competing technology. Uh. And even China struggled with creating their own competing vaccination technology. And I'm not at all a bio biology expert, understand

it's a not quite a sufficient vaccine, the sinovac. But at the end of the day, this is like South Africa not developing their own independent vaccine. That's a quite sophisticatedicated economy. All of all the very South American countries could have pulled their resources together in theory, but it's so hard to turn a dime and develop from scratch a primary research industry. Uh, it's so difficult, and it's

so not worth it. It's you know, if you have trade relations with a country that has technology developments in a field that you really care about, it's just not really worth it. Like we don't the United States doesn't really compete with several sort of forms of Japanese technology because it's just not worth the bother. Uh. Just let Korea and Japan handle that for US, and we buy it and they accept our our four x they accept our dollars. But you know, let's say you're the Philippines, Yeah,

how are you going to get those? And uh, this is this is now international trade and international politics. And if we're creating our now independent Vancouver Island, we have now entered into this territory, we have now entered into international politics and international trade. Yeah, and and this this is an arena that's fraud in a lot of ways because it's it's you know, as you've sort of been talking about, right, it's it's not just that you need.

It's not sing that you need for XP. It's like example, like you know, if you have you have your sort of like you know, you you you you have your new society and like Vancouver, right mack you violence, you know you need the thing you need mostly is dollars. And this is this is a real problem because this requires you to have something that you can turn into dollars. And you know, okay, so you're you're going to have some amount of dollars that are just there right from

from when you see society. There's there's assets you can sort of just sell off that like okay, like do we really need this yacht? Like okay, we can, we can we can sell this for some amount of dollars.

But this becomes a real economic problem because you need to produce something that you can exchange for dollars, and you know, there's there's a pretty good chance that like whatever sort of new currency whatever new sort of like MMT currency that's like, oh, it's it's controlled because we're producing. It moves our resources around. We can make a bustment as we want, Like yeah, you have to actually be able to look convert that into dollars. And you know why why does the U? Y is the US going

to want your currency? Yeah, it's a bit dialectical because you have to. Okay, you have your m m T currency, which domestically is accepted because of text receive ability or something uh or or national fervor if you will to um create a new democratic confederalists society um, and that's accepted there. But yeah, you need US sellars. So like you need us sellars. But why do you need them?

Partly because like you eventually want to not need them. Yeah, and so you have what you can You have assets right now that you can just sell, so that's one way, but long term you can't do that. So you need to have cash flow over the long haul that allows you to buy what are called capital goods, which are is a fancy term for machines that make machines or machines that make some sort of like in product, which is a physical thing. It's not like a service or something.

And um, you want to classic like really classic economic development advice that is actually pretty good is you want to move up what's called a value chain and eventually be not producing, um, just like a stable crop or something, but doing really innovative advanced technology things later on. So you like, here's where I am, here's what I have,

Here's what I could have. Though, how do I get there? Um, part of of part of the formula to get there is yes, acquiring for X, but it's other things like saying, how do I cultivate political alliances that will yield trade partners such that I have a stable flow of for X and uh, maybe even technology transfers you know, or something down the line which could be a game changer. Um,

you need to have an education system. Like if you're a fan of the economist Torstin Veblen, he thought like in his mind he thought the economic development was ultimately from the human intellect and like everything was downstream of that. So like you need to have money to um, you can use your m M T money to create a basic education system and you can augment it with buying importing things that you can't yet make and using it to create like a university or something which can do

R and D work. Um, you have to you have to find tools to get enough of the money that you can't just infinitely produce for X in order to augment what your society can produce beyond what initially could and show essentially that you, okay, I can make a better mouse trap like I. I don't need to. I don't need donations from well meaning imperial powers or something.

We're building what we need in order to move up the value chain and then build out our productive capacity in such a way that, um, it doesn't leave anyone behind.

Everyone is everyone's employed because we're doing the classic M M T stuff on the home front, such as a job guarantee, but we're also doing the international economic development stuff of assiduationally monitoring our foreign foreign currency reserves and then using them to import things that we cannot yet make but can make things internally and then have a a snowballing effect as far as being able to sell even higher value things which UM to our trade partners

who are hopefully share our values of like democratic confederalism or whatever you whatever you're chosen guidelines are yeah, and this is something that like, this is something that that

becomes very difficult in like the current market. You know, this is this is to some extent like why the Cold War went the way it did, right, which is that you know, once once you have the Zinosovie explant, and once you have like you have Chinese and Russian troops killing each other on the border um China, it like enters the situation where it's like, well, okay, so we still want to do economic developments, but we've lost the Soviet unions as a typology as a way to

get to knowledgy transfers, and their solution to that was to ally with the U S. And this is like it works out for the Chinese economy. It is an apocal disaster for like literally everyone else on earth because it means that capitalism is the thing that wins the Cold War. And and this means that like you know, I mean like if you look if you look at how you know, like the things that China are doing in order to be able to get technology transfers for

the US. It's like like there's so there there are joints like Chinese CIA like operations inside of China that are like monitoring Soviet missile site. So there's just like CIA app post just like in China that are just you know, doing spying. Like for for the U. S. Government.

There's like they invade Vietnam, which is you know, and it's such as the invade neenomen's like they've made Vietnam and then they fight this like this really you know, the immediate war just last that long, but they fight this like horrible border war that goes on for like a decade that kills enormous numbers of people, and you know, and the end result of this is like yeah, like you know, trying to get the signalogy transfers and they

developed economy, but everyone else on Earth, yeah, because is like everyone who's ever tried to be a labor organizer in like you know, and like how Salvador gets murdered by a bunch of fascists and every development econ is so fucking frustrating because every single step of the way, there's like there's like a really razor thin line between

risk and reward at every step of the way. And so like imperial powers will dangle technology transfers or extended trade agreements on some favorable terms in exchange for allowing them to just like go to war with your neighbors, like or rope you into it, or or extract resources

that would be value for you later in your development phases. Yeah. Actually, uh this leads to me, um, you know, going to our hypothetical here thinking about Vancouver Island, the People's Republic of Vancouver Island, and we can kind of talk about some of development traps because that's kind of what I'm was turning through my head right now because I'm looking

at the Wikipedia page for Vancouver Island. Is that incredibly deep research, and so what they listen under the economy is there's a tech sector, logging, fishing, tourism, and food um. And so you know we're talked first about like you could like sell off like the yachts and the cars and stuff like that. Uh, and that's I don't even know if that counts as a sector of the economy at that level. That's a yeah, you can start sale.

But you know, logging and fishing, those are those are pretty solid primary sector economies, you know, you know, to that describe the terminology, you know, they've got this. This is part of that hierarchy that Steve was talking about that you know, the chain of development, and a primary sector is like a basic extractive element of your economy a mine, uh, logging, phishing, food production, you know, basic goods.

And then you know, you talk about a secondary development, which is like manufacturing in the territiary, which is you know services. Those are kind of your basic Those are usually considered like sectors of the economy, but in a way they kind of correspond to development um and they require different amounts of developments. And you know the thing about primaries that everybody needs those things, Like unless people just stop using wood for construction, which we are very

far from doing. We still use a lot of wood for construction. Uh, your logging industry is going to have buyers um until people stop buying eating fish. Your fishing industry is going to have buyers. Yeah, up to a really ludicrously bottomless reserve. But you're gonna be stopped on that secondary industry until you have capital. Like I don't mean just like the sense of having a lot of money, but you know the right money, and well, you need capital.

Production need capital, you need the machine, you need, you need major factories, you need your need yeah. Uh, and wealthy countries partly in order to maintain their powers they have they they want to be the only seller of capital kids. Yeah, and and they're gonna be very withholding about it. Like a really good example for right now, I like all of the inflation stuff going on, like

the chip shortage. Yeah, so the machines that make the machines that make the chips, Holy sh it, those are like those are they only make like fifty of those a year? Yeah, and it's all two companies. Yeah, you know, the thing with the thing with the chip shortage. Right. It's also like so if you can be like the people who do that, that gives you a lot of

economic power. Like this is this is one of Taiwan's things, right, which is that like you know, it's like, okay, so why hasn't Taiwan just sort of been bowled over by by China? And like, I mean, there's a lot of

sort of geopolitical reasons for them. It's also partly it's just that like, yeah, like Taiwan has this enormous chipmaking industry and it's incredibly advanced, and you know, it has like you know this this is I think and everything that that that's a real problem for sort of revelation society doing this is that like yeah, like Taiwan's chip making economy, like it's not like people like fall in like vats of chemicals like a lot, like there's a lot of there's a lot like just horrible sort of

labor application. And then this comes back to even you're sort of like like you know, if you're talking about your your sort of primary primary sector stuff in the economy, which is that like okay, well yeah, I mean like oils particularly example of this, but like you know, same with timber, and same same with fishes, like these are extractive industries, and this becomes a real problem for a lot of your sort of like newly revolutionary developing societies

because you get this tension between um like and you see this a lot in Latin America's like this is there's a huge tension like this Simplivia for example, he se as an Ecuador two where like you have different factions of do you have different factors of the political movements where you have people who are like okay, yeah, I'm I'm okay with just like you know, building these highways through indigenous land or just like doing massy forestation

or like doing doing open pit mining, and those people will be like, those people will be leftist right there. People are like, Okay, well we need to do this because we need to like you know, this is an antipoverty measure. We have to be at the value chain, we have to increase your production. But then you know you have the indigenous people who's like, homes these are right, Yeah, yeah, you can rationalize, yeah, the intellectual backing. Yeah, and like

and this this happens like in in China too. There's like like a lot of the interstation has been absolutely devastating, like and and and this this becomes a real like the fact that you need for REX becomes this like incredible trap that that you you sink into because it's like, on the one hand, like, yeah, like there are resources that you need in order to have a function anxiety, but it's also that that you can't get in your territory.

But also like the cost of getting that for REX is enormous and and a lot of times it's it's it's it's a it's something that just simply destroys the revolutionary project. Well it hit me when I looked at this list of Vancouver's economic sectors was uh, you know, tourism being listed among the big ones in my mind immediately into Cuba two pre revolution, precastro Cuba, and your

precast Cuba has all these things going for it. Off when you're when you're looking at from like a developmental standpoint, you know, it's got this like very good productive base of primary resources like sugar. Uh. It has great relations with the United States of America, particularly through the mafia. Uh. Yeah, wonderful, right,

it has, Uh, the tourism industry is very successful. It's producing manufactured cigar, so it even has a secondary industry bridge, but is still absolutely failing to develop in a way that is meaningful for the people living in Cuba. You know, pre pre castro Cuba was a nightmare for most people. Uh. And that's you know that, that's like Steve said, you know,

there's this razor thin thing between risk and reward. And during that, you know, during the fourties and fifties in Cuba, it was just it just made so much sense to just stick with this impoverty, extractive tourists, heavy mafia friendly economy.

And yeah they were friends with the US. They could have gone technology transfers in principle, but were they actually going to h And I's something we have to think about with our our people's republic of Vancouver Island, is you know, yeah, like people are going to want our logs, people are gonna want our fishing. American tourists are going to come here and go whale watching and that's gonna bring in forex. But are we gonna be able to

like leverage that and how leg Yeah? Yeah, And I kind of want to move the conversation to like I think people might be listening and saying like, Okay, yeah, I can see why far actually be important, but like, what are the specific ways in which we can acquire it but also manage it? And it's like, okay, well without which we want without tell being socialists who want democracy? Um, okay, So I think if we're I'm I'm picturing some sort of a sim Belie structure taking shape because I'm a

lipsock Libertrian socialist. Um and uh it could be something else, but any case, Uh, I think they should appoint fifty or so people, some of them experts, some of them not two examine. They should do a thorough economic analysis of the entire island, and you should do it on the basis of here are the assets we have, Here's where we want to go in terms of assets, how

do we get from here to there? And one of the assets that you have is, okay, we have so many U S dollars, we have so many Canadian dollars, we have reserve balances. So we need to import things. We can make some of it ourselves. We need to buy the rest of it. We can't buy all of it now. We need to cash flow some of this. We need to We need to do export led growth.

As the developed the classic development ECON people would say, where we say, we have some industries where we can gradually and consistently ramp up to the point that they give They give us the types of money which we need in order to input capital goods. The machines that build machines two, buy them, learn how to use them and maintain them, and then build more ourselves. Ideally and over the course of say, basically, I'm basically suggesting that

Vancouver Island should have a ten year plan. They should have a ten year plan for further economic development, and it should be as democratically decided upon as possible within the limits of like Okay, there's some experts which will obviously be needed and not everyone can do that. But um, whatever assembly structure you have should be given oversight ultimately and you should say, um, just be really frank with it,

Like we have these are biophysical resources. Now in ten years they should be this in order to get there, each year, these things need to happen. We have to have this much foreign currency, we have to have this

many workers involved in this industry. Um, we can change things along the way, but we're constrained by these factors where like we need trade partners, we need uh two reverse engineers, some technology that we've acquired or something in order to to educate ourselves on how to create chips

or something in the future. UM yeah, there's like there should be like an extremely vigorous discussion of what assets do we have, what do we need, what's our goal and then thread together a development plan from there and then use your m m T money to marshal the resources that you currently have and that you need for like the next year, say domestically, while monitoring and augmenting your foreign currency reserves and um, using the tools of

monetary policy to safeguard those reserves and economize on them in order to import what you can't yet make so that you can make it in the future. I think the thing that we should learn from the fact that like a lot of these projects haven't worked is well,

I think it's twofold. One is that you have okay, there there there's constant sort of like there's traps you have to avoid that have to do with like, for example, like who actually has access to the forex because this is what this is a way that like you know, and also like because it's it's very very easy to like access to sort of like incidentally redeveloped ruling classes when you're trying to do playing technology stuff and when

you're trying when you're dealing with enormous amounts of foreign currency, and this is a problem and you know. And in the second problem has to do with sort of like how how how do you make sure that your economy essentially doesn't end up as a resource colony and this has this has other components and you know, and I think I think this is something that like like there is a lot that can be done if you control like a regid of territory but there's there's political limits

on it. And the political limits have to do with you know, who actually controls the sort of like vast majority of resources and technology. And the only way to really deal with that is that like, you know, you can't you can't sort of have like you if if if you want to actually have sort of long term stability, you can't just have your sort of like your your

like libertary and social counsels in one country. I guess it's a it's a thing that has to like keep moving and keep spreading because otherwise it becomes it becomes just increasingly difficult, and you come under increasing pressures, you know, for you know, in order to do things that you be that you need to do in order to make sure people don't starve, in order to make sure that people have educations, to make sure that people you know, are able to sort of live with their lives, and

also like in order to make sure that you don't just annihilate the annihilate the entire environment doing this, because that's something that happens a lot when in these developmental estates is that like, you know, you get you you know you you you get groups who are like come in the power and are like, well, okay, we're like we're gonna be an ecological regime, and then you know, they wind up having to they wind up doing oil extraction and like well prepit mining, because that's you know,

that that's the easiest way to to get money. And I think I think, like I I think it's it's valuable that like, these are things that if you're serious about taking power, you have to think about. But I also think it's it's important to keep in mind just the the inherent limits that you have if you're just sort of if you're if you're completely isolated, like if you're a completely isolated referee street movement in one place, it doesn't have people where that you can you know,

give stuff to and move stuff around between. Yeah, I mean, it's it's it's always been kind. I mean, that's that's been like a kind of inevitable thing that like, you know, there are there are communes in my extended family. You know, I've got members of my family who live on you know, those little farm communes, and they're not fully economically independent. Um, and I'm sure that we could find people who would be willing to say, oh, you know this is like,

this is totally fake. This is not a real commune because they you know sell uh, you know, sell sunflower seeds at the farmers market and stuff. Uh. And that's kind of the unfortunate. That's kind of like the tough reality that unless you managed to create a truly global revolution, as I said, unlet's until you've got like two thirds of the population under your umbrella. Uh, you're going to have foreign relations and you're going to have foreign trade, which is going to uh, it's going to be it's

going to be difficult to manage. You know, you're going to have to be both. You're going to have to have like a you know, a diplomatic core. That's something we're barely mentioning here, but like we're gonna need to have diplomats coming out of this council if we're talking about them having relations with the US and Canada. Uh, and you're negotiating these trade deals. You know, these trade

deals don't happen out of nowhere. Um. And you know, we kind of brushed this aside, but it's a it's a bit of as a bit of a misperception that people tend to have that the United States is pro free trade in like an extreme sense that like any trade of the United States is done without any tariffs.

Oh dead, No, I don't think that you if you believe that without having done a lot of research, I do not think that that is an absurd thing to believe, because that is the propaganda that is passed along in common knowledge. A very quick examination of how trade works between international actors will reveal that there are thousands and thousands and thousands of tariffs active all the time in every trade to Yeah, and like the like the big one with the US agricultural subsidies, which are just it

is it is it is illegal to have them. We have like just in just like billions and billions of billions of dollars agricultural subsidies that have producing cheap food. That's like we're not even good at making it. Like it's it's a complete disaster. It Let mean this like this, this is just single handedly annihilated the economies of like enormous swass of the globe because because no one can

compete with withoth American agri culture subsidies. And it's you know, and and but like when when you join the free trade system, like that's one of the carve outs. That was that's that's that's in the w t O is you can't have uh subsidies for for your culture programs except for the US and it's it's great and I mean food one dies. Well, there's all sorts of like weird technical ways that you can create pseudo subsidies, you know. Uh.

You know, Italy very famously has a price floor on wine. Uh. And this means that you know, if you if you make a bottle of wine that nobody would buy for the minimum price, the government will buy it off of you for that price. And so there there are wineries in Italy that just produced wine at such a this so bad nobody would buy nobody you would have to

pay people to drink it. But the government just buys it at this minimum set price and then throws it enough in a giant Olympic swimming pool that uh to go rot uh And like there are yeah, there there there. The trade is, you know, there's a lot more complex. The free trade is kind of a meth at the international level. Uh. It is at it's at the most cynical.

Free trade as a doctrine is a cudgel used by more powerful countries that they impose that you have to do free trade with um and that they get to do protract and trade with you. Well, it's a it's well, firstly,

like you mentioned, it's a myth. And historically speaking, we had like, we had infant industries in this country that we're highly protected from the verily earliest days through most of the nineteenth century and into this one century, and we had uh, we had expert lead growth from infant lead for infant industries in the US. And that's precisely the opposite advice we now turn around and give via our imperial like apparatus from the I m F and

the World Bank to developing counts and like countries. Countries that that examined what the US was telling them to do and did the opposite. Are the ones that succeeded. Yes, like South Korea said no, funk that, and there they went up the value chain and they did all of the things that we said Vancouver Island should do basically, yeah, except except not being evil. They did not do that.

They were evil. They were evil for a time, and they were dictatorial, but in terms of their economic development plan divorced from political reality, which is probably naive of me to say, um, they took the opposite advice of

the I m F in terms of that narrow scope. Well, yeah, I think the other thing that's kind of important here that I haven't really touched on yet, is it, like so part part of part of what was going on with with South Korea's economy is that South Korea's economy was was a war economy, and it was a war economy designed to build I mean, originally just it was it was war economy because they were finding a war, right, But then it became this i mean ess central access

of sort of the corruction of the Korean War, and that it became this access that like it became a huge part of the American sort of arms industry in in Vietnam. And this is the sending that Japan has this too, where both these economies are like a huge part of the reason why they're able to develop is because they get enormous amounts of just money and the guaranteed contract and stuff like that from American military development.

And this is a this is another really big problem for like you're sort of free state that like you've created like whatever you're sort of like Council Republic, you're

like if on the zone, you're like indigenous confederation. Is that like you need weapons and the people who make guns are like the US and Russia And this is a really you know and and you know, we've we've been talking on this show about about producing like three D point weapons, but I mean, you know, in terms of things like you know, you're like artillery, right, like k of your mortars and like things like that, were like,

you know, you you can't. You can't three D prints the best of my knowledge, And I'm like ent sure about this that like unless you had extremely advanced facilities, and even then it's not clear. Like I I like, I don't think anyone on Earth has ever pred three D printed like an anti aircraft rocket, like you can you can you know, you can't make you can't make stingers, you can't make man pads. You can't make like anti

tank anti aircraft weapons. Not to get too much into it, but like the way in which Ukraine is fighting like Russian tanks and it's very specifics is kind of encouraging. Actually, yeah, but like because you feel like the like specific yeah, I mean there's only a few companies for making the components for these things. Yeah, it's a problem. And that's

that's like the personnel launched the in law or whatever things. Yeah, like the anti taking and takers like if you can get them, they're effective and they do they do stuffing from by the US or the UK. Yeah, yeah, and that's that's that's a huge problem if you're you know, not trying to like be a political colony of these

two things. And and this this is another trap that you see, like you see did Cares especially falling into, which is that that they you know, Okay, so like on the one hand, yeah, you do need weapons, right, like you you need you need some kind of military complex, and you need arms order to make sure that like you know, you're not like the US doesn't rull tanks

across the border. But simultaneously, like there's there's a thing that happens a lot with this is happticularly with Petro States, where you know, okay, so the the the the US is like, okay, so we need this oil, right, and how how do you how do you deal with the sort of balance payments ephas And the answer is we just sell them like a hundred billion tanks and we just like we just like dump f thirty fives on them, and you can get into these scenarios where like you

get these like because I mean, the problem with weapons, right it is like okay, so you need them to survive, but they also they don't produce anything, right, in fact that they're sort of they're sort of net economic negatives because the only thing you could do with a gun is I mean, I guess you could technically hunt, but like you know that the thing you're doing with the weapon is destroying value. Yeah yeah. And I mean and then they were crying maintenance. Yeah yeah, Like these things

are substantial net negatives. Yeah, and and and you know, and and countries get sucked into these traps. Were like you know, okay, we're just gonna keep buying American weapons because of security or like uh we we we want

to invade some other country. You're like, well, you know, and you see this so hew weaponry to like back back when that was the thing and today modern Russian trap wheny where it's like you can you can get funneled into these traps were like the ruling class of your society just decides it's the thing that it wants to spend his four X on his weapons, and you have to be very very like you have to be you know, and this is the thing that happens like

like Evner Hoax for example, famously like makes just a bunch of bunkers, right and like militarized society and it's like, well, you know, part of this is just Hoax being extremely weird, but like, yeah, you have to be very careful when your society that is genuinely under threat that you're not sort of like just throwing all of your resources into into stuff like that where you know, it doesn't it doesn't pre us anything, but you know, and yeah, also I mean this is it is a need like like

whatever the Vancouver Economic Planning whatever group should like one of one of the objectives would frank would be military of course, Yeah, um you need to. I don't know if you could get your hands on in laws or man pads or anything like that, but you, um, I think you would be foolish frankly not too distribute and

train on weapons and stuff like that. Yeah, and that yeah, yeah, like I think I think like, yeah, it's like you have to use some of it for that and it sucks because this is something that like this, this sucks you into the arms complex, right, Yeah, Rose is using its oil revenues um to fund its expenditure almost is at least like in the last time I checked, was to defense forces. Yeah, and like and a lot of that, a lot of that came from dollars, euros and turkishly

right that they required to oil. Yeah, and like this and this is the thing that like, yeah, this, this is this is a problem if you're into your revolution society surrounding people who just literally want to murder you, or it's like stuff like this winds up happening and you wind it like I don't blame them, Yeah, it's

like it's obviously it's like reality. Yeah, And I think that's a you know that that that's a good example of like what happens if the revolution doesn't spread and if you get sort of like you get isolated, contained by imperial powers who just want to murder to you, is that you wind up, like you basically you want, you wind up fighting an endless war against both the proxy forces and the real forces of RBS that are

significantly large and more powerful than you. And yeah, and there's a lot of times there's not much you can do about it. But it's like I think, you know, in terms of like like in the school of high principle, like this is why internationalism is important. I mean yeah, And of course obviously the other answer is, you know, selling out on the revolution and you know, we we we. You know that there's the example that people didn't think

about of Serritza. You know, Sursa gets elected on all these like radical promises for Greece and then just doesn't do any of them. Um. And then you can look at say Nepal, and you know, the communist one in Nepal, and then they establish a government that's functionally you know, it's a liberal government. My my, my, my. My favorite Nepal fact is that, Okay, so Nepol has like seventeen different like Maoist factions, but the guy ahead of of the of the largest Maoist faction, uh yeah, I think

it's him. Is he's the one who now lives in the mansion of the guy who used to be the Nepalese head of security. And it's like, uh, we've well this is this, this has gone great. We've we've changed the person in the mansion kind of yeah. And I mean the and you know, uh, not too surprisingly. You know, the second leader a couple about a year ago, Karen was on the verge of declaring a new people's war against the Maoist faction. Yeah, Maoist war against the malice.

Like yeah, I mean that's you know, you you you end up. It's yeah, it's it's tricky to try to like game it out, so to speak, because you know, my I maybe I'm just squeamish. I am hoping for things to not happen with the river of blood. Yeah, in life, I hope that, uh, I hope that we don't get rivers of blood. Um oh, plan plan for war so you get you get peace. Yeah. Yeah, but you like, like like Chris has said, you know, you

can get trapped into like that that escalating security dilemma. Uh. And of course, you know, investing in security doesn't actually necessarily to security. We have you know, over a century of looking at Latin American countries that investments in the military is just investments in the next civil war. Yeah,

or you get cooled, and then that's that's another problem. Like, like I mean, it's weird because it's like it's a double edged strey because like the twenty century, like there's all there's a lot of like socialistic governments that come into power just from military coups, but also like probably more of those governments like get overthrown by their own coups.

And it's yeah, there's there was one lesson I learned from playing Tropical It's good if you've tried to invest more in your No matter how much you invest in your military, it only will ever get you up to surviving a coup. Yeah, don't have colonels and don't have generals. Yeah, then then you get captain's cups. It's always colonels. Yeah, there's always colonels. It's because they're like passed up for

general ship by the next administration or something. Yeah. Again again, sometimes sometimes you do get like stumes as you get like your pinochet, and so sometimes you do get your captain's cups, and it's like this is a that goes that's ambition right there when the cap is the government. Yeah. Well, once your captains of hit fucket mode, it's a bad Yeah,

that's indicative of like bigger, deeper problems. Yeah. Well, I think like the baths are an interesting example of this because like, okay, like the Baptists were never like good, but like, you know, the Bathists like originally like we're kind of a mass movement, but then and increasingly, like over time, as as they consult their power to the military sort of revolutions, like it becomes increasingly just the Baptists are powerful because they have control of like various

portions of the military, and you know, and like the the the end result of this is like instead of having revolutions like you just get you just get all political power has nothing to do with whatever is happening in the street. You get these giant protests that are like we want to go back to being part of the United the the United Republic, and it just doesn't matter because the actual political power is just what happens

when the army fights itself. And yeah, I think like there's no easy solution to that other than just like don't have an armed body that's separate from just the masses of people, which is difficult to do, but also like or just armed the people somewhat. Yeah, and and

you know, it's means of violence should be more evenly distributed. Yeah, I will say that was I guess part of why the scenario we had started off with like you've declared that people's republic, because the question how you get that

people's republic feels like that's of your podcast podcast episodes. Yeah, yeah, you know, we've done, we've done, we've done, just like a miracle has occurred, but like a revolution has occurred and then I don't know, they like or something like as I like to say, it's good to have a

plan for it if you win. Yeah, well, and I like to win and then fumble once you've already gotten Yeah, and this this this is something that like that actually does happen a lot, which is like you get into that, you get into these revolutionary like moments, but then there's just sort of like no like no one has any idea what to do next, and so they sort of bungle it or you know, you get into scenarios, yeah, or you get too revolution scenarios where like nobody's thought

about what happens next, and that that's that's another way that like, yeah, these things class at the time, and that's another way you get like you know, this this isn't somethings like the whole of the sort of like the trial and error of the point of the twentieth century, which most of which is sort of and in an error is that, you know, a bunch of people were experimenting and a lot of stuff they tried didn't work,

and there are lots of reasons for that. But you like, you have to in order to win, you have to actually be serious about taking power, and you have to be you know, you have to be thinking strategically and have a like, have at least a vision of what you're going to do before you like you know, like before things happen, because otherwise there's just sort of like you know, because you just you just get sort of mass confusion and yeah, and say what say what you

all about the fascists they know what they're gonna do when they see its power. They're not confused about it. There. Their problems are what you do after. Yeah, they're not confused about that those first like hours when things start out the way. I hope that nothing we've said. I hope that nothing we've said on this podcast kind of makes people think like, oh, they so they have like one weird trick basically to like secure secure your power, um and like and that and that we aren't like

singularly focused on acquiring for X or something. Also, it's just like it's an important lever too to have at your disposal. Like, well, number one, you should know that it's important. Number two, you should have tools in place, such as like running a running a fixed extra fixed exchange rate or something to make it a bit easier to acquire for X on the whole, or doing capital

controls or doing price controls or something like that. And you should have these tools in mind in order to get from year one to year ten in terms of your biophysical resources, like here's what we have, here's what we need, and you know, some of that could be military, some of that could be economic, and some of that could be political. And um, no, one like I don't

know the answers. We don't know the answers, but um, at each step of the way, you need to find groups of people who can come together and think objectively about them. Yeah, I I want. Yeah, it's not that I think that there is an answer. I'm kind of thinking about almost a little bit parallel to like, we know that if we create our you know, if if socialist managed to sees any amount of power they're going

to reform whatever health care system they're currently existing in. Uh. We know this is going to be better, because it would be hard for it to be worse. Uh. But you know that's making a good hospital system is not the entire thing that makes a revolution happen. It is just one of those things that you need to do and you need to think about it. And my objective here, and it's a lot of my objective with you know, making this whole magazine project, is that my socialism means

that we all we have say over our lives. You know, that's fundamental to me, that we have say over what we do with our lives. And I want to make sure that the people who are in this with me, which is hopefully everybody. I am an optimist. I'm hoping that everybody is with me on creating a better socialist world, that all of us are at least somewhat informed about the decisions we're making. I'm not actually economically trained, you know, I'm I I've learned this stuff as I've gone. It's

not insurmountable. Ah, and uh, it's you know, I would want the decision about how do we make a socialist economy you know, the core of socialism worker control of the means of production that the people involved. Again, hopefully everybody uh has you know, at least has an inkling of what's going on. I don't want people to be confused and baffled by the decisions being made on their behalf. That's,

you know, a fundamental evil of a capitalist system. We don't know what the fun decisions are being made for us by powerful people. Well, part of the part of the problem comes back to education, because like people are

um the rois of hogged. They've hearted the knowledge of how to plan in certain respects, and I think socialists socialists will sometimes look at the body of knowledge in terms of planning and economy and say, like, well, because they are the only ones who know how to do that, the knowledge itself is tainted, and like, I don't need to learn this because it's evil. Basically, I don't need to learn how to manage a currency board or do

forex management because that's money and that's evil stuff. Yeah, I hope, I hope. What we've described so far says like I don't know if it's evil or not, but it's important and it should be. I think I honestly think you're going to probably probably fail if you don't

consider these things at each step of the way. Yeah, and and even in your like one of the things that that you see a lot with socialist countries is they have basically have like a firewall, right where they try to keep a separation between the parts of their economy that like are planned and the parts of their

economy that like are about moving forwards around. And I think, like, okay, like there are varying degrees of effectiveness of this, but like this is like even even if you're like, okay, like we want to get rid of the economy, right, like we want to get rid of labor, We want to get rid of all the stuff as a concept, like you're gonna have to deal like until until you like win, right like until until you've like until you've raised a flag over like New York, Berlin, Shanghai, like

a New Delhi at the same time, right like you're you're gonna be you're gonna have to be dealing with this stuff. And how how you do that and how quickly you're able to figure this out, how quickly you're you're able to implement, and how quickly you're able to sort of like seize control of and use the resources that you have in order to advanta your political object use. You know that that that that's going to be one of the things that tourms whether or not your revolution

survives no matter what it's fighting for. Mm hmm. Like in addition to all the military stuff, um, military and economic, I think you have to just say, like you have to get to a point economically and militarily and all their other stuff to where you can just say to international powers like I don't need to make some moral claim to you, I've built a better mouse trap. I'm

going to let the people decide. And it's like it just shows people living freely together, uh and enjoying a good standard of living and they don't need to exploit each other to get it. And like for not everyone, but many people, that will be really appealing. And you have to have like, uh, well more than just a diplomatic corps, you have to have like an entire like a full court international push to say like it's just

a better mass trap. It's like it's, um, I don't need to focus on moral claims about like well it's better because you should just care about people because of like, you should care about people more than capitalism permits because it's just morally right. Um, that may be the case. But also people want to get paid and they want to be treated well and have a decent standard of living at the same time, and we can do it.

So here's so here's how like you've you've shown them specific steps you've taken, and you've shown them the material standard of living that is shared democratically, and um, it's not just like a state giving handing things out to people.

It's like a a um, true industrial democracy where it's like you you get plugged in, you make decisions along the way, and um, yeah, basically that Yeah, I think I think I think that's a pretty good note to to end on as a a a thing that we want and things that are going to have to be

components of it. And also I guess thinking about you know, like rejecting theories about money as incomplete that don't deal with the fact that you don't have all the resources in your country and you in fact indeed other things to acquire them that you cannot simply create into existence. Yeah, do you too have anything else you want to say

before I guess you move into plugs. I mean, like like I said, I mean, I you know, we we This might have sounded like a whole bunch of you know, high minded, theoretical egghead crap, but again I am I'm not formally educated on this stuff. This is stuff that I have learned and participated in as a socialist first and foremost. And it's been driven uh from the get go, at least for me, from um, a really fundamental desire for ecal for egalitarianism, and for people having a say

in their own lives. And I hope that the people, uh who have stuck with us through this, who didn't know these concepts before, feel a little bit more equipped to participate in a discussion about, um, how you would handle these things. And as as I kind of alluded to, this scale is all the way down to you know, twelve hippies on a farm. Uh, you know this, This the scales all the way up until you've got a

total total global communism pretty much anything below that. This this this principal scale, and I I hope that people feel um more able and more willing to engage both first of all, you know, to to tell liberals to you know, shut the funk up that I should have a say over how I participate in the economy, even when that's things like for X that seemed very abstract and far away. I am, I'm a person who's affected by this. Therefore I've got a stake there for my

opinion matters. Uh, and that you you can get there, you can learn, and you should be allowed to participate in that. And yeah, this is what I'm trying to create, is you know that socialists do not feel like they can. Those are just get brow beaten out of the room of a discussion because some liberal nerd pushed up their glasses a whole bunch and spun their bow tie and then sense of bullshit, like you know, you it is your life, and ah, you have a right to have

an opinion on it. And this is not an insurmountable thing too, It's it's hard. I want to be clear here. This is hard, and I want but I want you in the discussion. Well so, yeah, so I guess speaking speaking of things that people are involved in, I can. I can do transitions like this because I'm a professional. Um, yeah, do you do, you too? Want to talk a bit about your magazine. Sure. Like we mentioned at up top,

we're uh. Kyle and I are both co editors of Strange Matters magazine, and we're in the middle of a fundraiser right now, and you can find the fundraiser at the r L tiny url dot com slash Strange Matters no no dashes or anything um. You can also follow us on Twitter at Strange Underscore Matters. And the magazine itself is going to be a We're a literary magazine, and each issue we're publishing in both prints and digital.

And the print issue one is about three pages, and it's split in a half between the front pages which is um topics like economics, philosophy, politics, um more technical fields, and then the back pages is art um uh like

culture reviews, um apology, anthropology like uh more, sir. We we kind of attached it to the word meaning like meaning development, and and there's a middle resting spot which is actually called the phuton, which is a play on the word fujutan, which is like kind of a resting spot between those two halves where there's going to be short pieces of usually humorous nature, and overall it's going to cover a wide range of topics and you can

find out more of us. You can find out more about us on our fundraiser on our website Strange Managers dot co op. We've got a couple of articles already off on Strange Matters dot co op. We have a Steve wrote an amazing piece explaining of some very uh in very layman's terms of arguments about what inflation is and why we should care about it. You know they're

quite good, yeah, very relevant. Right now, we have a truly delightful review of very contemporary, very recently made cyberpunk works by Elizabeth Sanderford, author of Neo Reaction of Bassilisk, which anybody who listens to this podcast needs to read New Reaction of bass Lisk uh, and she did as the wonderful favor of doing a pop culture review for us.

We've yeah, we've also got a work by the editors Words for Our Present Reality about what how how can we discuss what actually exists in the world and what are the shortcomings with our current just like the basic levels of our discourse, and how can we advance beyond beyond this difficulty? And it's you know, it's something that sounds like it's supposed to be this very high level philosophy, but we've been I think, uh, I don't want to take too much credit for this, because I was not

the main writer on it. Uh. I think that we've successfully managed to bring it down to a to a lower brow level, uh, you know, to a to a level that doesn't require you to have eighteen letter after your name of various college degrees. We also managed to publish a piece by a Russian dissidents, And I'm very excited for the works that people are going to see in the future from us. We've got a history of black cooperative movements. We've I wrote a nice little diddy

about colonialism in modern board games. Uh. I'm I'm very excited for people to get the chance to read these and uh you know, it's all kind of in the service of I was creating a more almost democratizing the socialist world and making it, making it meaningful, making it useful, and also making it pleasurable for people to be socialists and to fight for a freer and more equitable world. Yeah, do you two? Do you two want people to find you on social media? And if so, where, Okay you

can say no to this. People do sometimes because first hell sight. Okay, well I don't have social media, so your is not really on social media. I am on some social media, so you can find You can find me at at kept him in Whackham and I'll spell that out because it's kind of confusing at C A p M in w A C c M spelling your own nat name. Um. Yeah, so strange matters is our our campaign will run through this month and it's going

pretty good so far. But we can use uh, every little bit of support goes a long way, so yeah, find find us at our website and also the fundraiser. Yeah, we're not getting paid. Just to be clear, this is the we We need to pay the authors, we need to pay for the printers. But you know this is not us trying to make a quick book. This is us trying to make sure we we are not willing

to accept paying our writer's substandard. We're going to pay our writers higher than market rate as on principle, because we think the market rate is just too low. It really is. Yeah. And um oh and by the way, we're I think I mentioned it, but we're our workers cooperative, so we're a d percent worker own in control. There's no there are no levels of employment or ownership. We're all horizontal. Yeah yeah, so yeah, go go check our change matters. Um. Yeah, thank thank you too, both for

thank you both for joining us. It was a wonderful time. Chris, thank you, thank you for having us. Yeah, and if you want to find more of us, Uh, we're at Happens your pod on Twitter, Instagram. I keep saying Instagram. I've never actually I'm not on Instagram. So I've been told we have one. I've never interacted with it. Uh yeah, and uh, cools and media. It has our other shows. Go listen to them. Uh, they're good and we work

a lot on them. By Oh, it could happen here, and it's currently happening there there being Ukraine, which is in the midst of an invasion by the Russian government. I'm Robert Evans. This is a podcast about bad things and how to make them better, joined as often by Garrison and Chris, my co hosts, and we are talking about some of the advice, good and bad, that's been going around on social media about how to disable and

destroy armored vehicles. This is something we've kind of waited to do until the conflict was a little bit more of a mature state. But in brief, if you have been following what's been happening in Russia through the lens of social media or what's pepping at Ukraine through the lens of social media, one thing that has happened is in the early stages of the invasion, a whole bunch of people flocked, particularly to Twitter, but also not this

did not just stay on Twitter. There were a large number of mainstreams news articles published on the subject of the things people were saying to talk about different ways civilians could disable Russian armored vehicles or otherwise stymy and

thwart the progress of Russian military units through their cities. Um. And this has been accompanied by things like the Ukrainian government giving out information on how to make molotov cocktails we talked about this in our Molotov Cocktail episode, and putting out really neat infographics on where to throw molotov

cocktails to disable armored vehicles. Um. But it's also come with a lot of bad advice that I don't want people who are maybe looking at the potential of urban combat happening in their future to take away from this conflict, because there's also a lot of disinfos, So that's what

we're talking about today. Yes, and I guess one of the first places to probably discuss this urban combat idea is they probably the guy who's tried to make kind of a career and of talking about urban combat, which would be who wrote a relatively viral Twitter thread on this topic, and it's been writing about this thing for the past few years. Um, he's a he's the the chair of Urban Warfare Studies at West Points Modern War Institute and served for like a quarter of a century

as an infantry soldier, including two deployments into Iraq. And yeah, the past few years, he's tried to kind of make a name for himself as the guy who writes about urban combat. And obviously since this was happening largely when Russian started invading Kiev, John Spetzer put put together some of his thoughts that went pretty viral on this on

this said topic. Yeah, and it's it's frustrating. You've got a quote in here from one of the articles about he was giving out that says some of his advice, which is preparing simple Molotov cocktails. It's already being seen on the streets of Kiev, which is kind of framing it as if Spin Sir advised the Ukrainians. Absolutely not true. Before he made that thread, the government was urging people

to rest. And also, like Molotov cocktails got their name from people in Finland not super far from Ukraine resisting the Russian military in a very similar way to add they're being used by Ukrainian civilians. Now, um what I I believe what John Spencer did. He's a guy with some qualifications. Um, certainly like not a random person. We'll talk about random people giving advice to on Twitter. But he's also all None of his advice is new, none of it is from him, none of it is counter intuitive.

A good deal of it is bad, And most of what he said that is good is just him pulling things from US military combat manuals and from Ukrainian military combat manuals and then putting it up in social media in order to go viral and try to get another book deal by making it look as if he is giving advice that is being adopted in real time, which is not what is happening. I mean, Like a good, good instance of this is yeah claiming that they're making

Mulotov cocktails due to his advice. I mean, there's a picture in that very article that was taken before he even posted that thread. So it's like, no, they're they're people know how to make Multov cocktails. That's not hard to find out. In a lot of cases, the Ukrainian Ukrainian government was giving out instructions on how to do it. And I mean, and if you if you look at this picture, um, it looks very similar to a lot of a lot of like the the almost like small

defensive weapons factories that we saw across the States. We would often see just collections of bottles, uh, just ready to be thrown, all kind of laid out in in in in milk crates, very similar to this photo. Now there was there was less actual Mulotov cocktails, but the way that this is whole, the way this all set up looks looks very similar to any kind of insurgency tactics of being like, yeah, there's gonna be spontaneous on the ground organizing because people are just kind of naturally

gifted at that. And on a on an object ti level, Molotov cocktails have a place on an urban battlefield. They can be useful weapons for disabling armored vehicles, for causing distractions, for injuring and even sometimes killing soldiers. They are they are capable of doing that, and they that's part of why the Ukrainian government put out these guides showing like where to huck the sons of bitches in order to

disable you know, transports and armored vehicles and whatnot. Now that said, attempting to attack a military column with a molotov cocktail in most circumstances is very close to suicidal, and I've watched a number of videos of Ukrainians do it.

In the times that seemed to be most successful is when you have areas where the Russians are attempting to establish control, You have small groups of vehicles that are moving down residential streets, you have a significant amount of traffic, of civilian traffic occurring alongside those military convoys, and as they passed the convoy, a civilian hucks a molotov, or as they pass of building, a civilian hucks a molotov um And those seem to be, broadly speaking, the situations

in which people have kind of gotten away with it. We don't have any kind of I'm not aware of any kind of solid UH overarching analysis of all of the use of molotovs in this but that is broadly speaking, a potentially effective way to use a molotov cocktail UH in order to degrade military capacity of an occupier. What doesn't work and what Spencer and a number of other people suggested is HU can paint at tanks or other armored vehicles. And that may be surprising to a lot

of people. I think there's a lot of folks who want to believe this UH, want to believe that that that could really work, because it's like you walk ship right, it feels like the kind of thing in surgeon should be doing. Yes, But here is the thing. When you have police officers who are tear gassing an area and you huck a bunch of paint and you get it over their face masks and they cannot see, it reduces

their ability to tear gas you for a while. It makes them uncomfortable, it makes them have less fun, and it damages gear. When you huck a bunch of paint at an armored vehicle, the armored vehicle will return fire with a fifty caliber mounted Dashka or some other similar gun which fires bullets. That are large enough to take chunks the size of your head out of concrete, and you will be torn apart in your organs, liquefied in

a hail of metal. Um. Meanwhile, the paint that you are attempting to throw at that vehicle is almost certain to have no impact on it. Um. Not only are you unlikely to get close enough to use the paint, because you have to be considerably closer to do that than you have to with a molotov in most situations, but also tanks are built with the understanding that it is possible that one or more of the ways in which they see will be obstructed. Tank drivers are trained

to drive blind. There are ways of utilizing tanks when vision is obstructed, because in the kinds of fights that tanks are built to get into, they are often in situations where there was so much smoke around the exactly that there is effectively zero visibility, which is why when Spencer started talking about people throwing paint at tanks, a number of tank drivers came out and said, that's actually horrible advice, like, they don't work that way, And I

was I was chatting with a couple of people. Um, there was one fellow former Green brand name Mike Nelson, who was posting about Spencer and very angry that he was basically copying material directly from stuff published by the Ukrainian government, and then like getting up anytime journalists or media figures would comment about Ukraine, would like there's a nasty post here where Anne Cabrera, who I think is some sort of reporter, was like, I feel heartsick upon

the latest news out of Mariopol. My god, just like expressing hard and human terry and tragedy. And Spencer posts a link to his personal website and says me too, not sure if you saw my MANI manual for the Urban Defender, but it is available in English and Ukrainian. Yeah,

it's it's so like anyway grifty ship like that. But because that it is all that's very different than also like throwing paint at like a squad car or like a riot like a riot truck that's coming through because if obscure their vision, the worst that they can do is crash into a wall. They're not going to start firing uh massive explosion rounds from a central Uh. Yeah, so they they do not like for one thing, the

like the police as bad as they can be. Their default when they come under any kind of like attack is not to start firing machine guns wildly in all directions, which Russian not yet at least um. But you know, the other thing, I was chatting with Matthew Mora, who's a is has been one of the guys who's biling ailing get Spencer on Twitter. Matthew was a Marine Corps tank commander and was blown up in Afghanistan. So he was in a tank that was attacked several times and

eventually destroyed. UM, So he's he has some firsthand knowledge about what works and does not work a against tanks. And one of the things he pointed out is that the people who destroyed his tank put together I don't know, hundred two hundred dollars worth of various accelerants and random scrap metal and made a bomb that destroyed an Abrams

tank that works a lot better than paint. And it's it's the kind of thing where I think one of the things that's frustrating here is you've got a lot of these like American kind of military academic guys and I know Spencer served, but that doesn't necessarily mean much that doesn't mean just being deployed to Iraq doesn't mean you did anything. But they were deployed and maybe they

did see urban combat. But I have watched United States soldiers in an intense urban combat environment UH, and most of what they did was be inside of m wraps because it's very hard to blow those up. While the Iraqi military did a great deal of the fighting, and when US soldiers did engage in fighting, they did so

with absolute air supremacy and with artillery supremacy UM. Which isn't to say that it wasn't dangerous, but it is a profoundly different situation than engaging in urban combat when the airspace is contested and when you do not have artillery supremacy. So what does that mean in terms of like what can people actually take away that's useful from this um? Well, on an individual level, something have been

extremely effective. Ukrainian territorial defense militias have been very effective at doing things like picking up small arms, going out in small patrols into UH rural environments around the area where Russian troops are moving in small convoys, and oftentimes, because of the way the advance went, you would have a single or a couple of Russian munition trucks essentially

alone and unsupported, trying to find their way around. Um. You had civilians doing stuff like turning signs around, like removing signs, which they were instructed to by the areas creating officials as well. Yes, yes, and which I'm sure some people just started doing because it seemed like a good idea. UM. But that sort of ship causes them to burn fuel, causes them to abandon vehicles. You had these kind of independent groups of farmers towing away abandoned vehicles.

You had small raiding parties attacking convoys and attacking isolated units. You had cases where you know, Russian military units early in the fight would get into Kiev uh kind of on accident and be ambushed by territorial defense units and wiped out. And those are all very effective examples of of decentralized kind of ground up resistance against a major

military force. Now, one thing we don't know that is important if you think about the potential that you might have to endure something like this, is we have no

idea what the casualties were like among those kids. It is a total black box, and it's it's probable that part of why Russian forces did the war crime they did in Bucca Um was because they had an attitude that all civilians were insurgents, which is, you know what happens when you have kind of a people's war, which doesn't justify an active genocide, um, but it is something

people should keep aware of. When you start fucking with the signs and ambushing the convoys and throwing molotovs, one of the things that will happen is it will accelerate the violence that is being done. Yeah, and it makes to the civilian justified target in some you know propaganda lens, Yeah, exactly. And that doesn't mean like it's you should resist if

you are invaded, um. But these are things that also should be noted is this is what happens when you resist, right that This is what a modern war of this type looks like. Other things that I'm not sure if they've been effective, but they're certainly not bad strategies is the construction of a lot of vehicle barriers tank traps.

Next is the barricade thing, both than what we've been kind of seeing or speculated about in the East and then how we've seen you know, barricade set ups a lot in the past few years in various resistance movements to you know, a variety of success levels and non success levels. Yeah, and and and these are like you know, barriers, tank traps of a very long history and in warfare. So they absolutely can be and have been effective many many times on the battlefield. So this is not an

area of does this thing work? But it is a question of like and and this is something we just don't seem to have perfect data on did it Did it particularly play a role in what's happening here? And Um, that's harder to tell. Um. And it's probably going to be different, you know, depending on the tactical in an area you're talking about, which kind of like theater you're

talking about. But um, you know one thing that's like the way in which these kind of barriers, hedgehawgs and like whatnot work, is there there an area denial tool. It's like an area denial tool four vehicles, um. And it makes military units slow down, it makes them take more time in clearing area. Um they have to tow things away or blow them up. Um. And they also can provide, depending on the type of thing, cover for infantry and in urban combat situations, which obviously can cut

both ways a little bit. But there's a reason why you see these kinds of things in every conflict and also a reason why p will put them up in protests. It can be very useful to deny the vehicles of the enemy access to an area temporarily, and a big pile of metal always does that of the time. It

requires something to deal with it. Yeah, that was something that was very kind of considered when there was an increase in like vehicular attacks, uh during like a lot of vehicles running into a massive, massive marches, there was definitely a concerted effort to try to block off streets where stuff is happening, whether that be like you know, corkers for marches of people who specifically block off the sides of streets with their own cars to follow the

march around, or you know, less less effective arricades like throwing a chain like fence in the middle of the street, which is I guess better than nothing sometimes but also maybe not the most effective thing. Yeah, in terms of trying to like build layered barricades, that's not just you know, one flimsy wall, but it's a series of things that can compress down. And when you're talking about barricades in a kind of militant situation, there's there's broadly speaking, going

to be two purposes. One of those purposes is to create a to add to the friction that you are attempting to create for the enemy. And that's that's all insurg All insurgent warfare is about creating friction, right, because friction degrades assets. It's over time. It it called basically like, okay, so say you've blocked off a bunch of roads and you've added fifteen twenty miles to the transport distance that

this convoy has to go. Well, generally speaking, in the case of war, when you're talking about war, it's assumed that about one mile is in terms of wear and tear like tins plus miles um. Because of how much more difficult the strain on vehicles is in those situations. So you've added a great deal more strain on the vehicles.

That increases the chance that one of them is gonna blow a tire, one of them gonna crack an axle, one of them is going to have an engine block go like blow or whatever, um, Which means over time, if you're doing this a bunch. If you're setting up barricades and you're effectively increasing or all the amount of travel time or at least the amount of idoling time that forces have to go in by a significant amount. Your guaranteeing a certain number of those vehicles are going

to break or be rendered inoperable in that time. And you're also the other thing that they do is they allow you to deny area and funnel the enemy into a specific into a place more advantageous for you, right, And this can be advantageous if you're trying to set up an ambush, if you're just trying to buy time for forces to move back to a better position. Um, it can you know, there's a number of uses for it.

But if you set up a series of obstacles like this and guarantee that they're going to have to find an alternate route, and you know, broadly speaking, because it's your terrain, what kind of route they're going to take, um, then you could do stuff like drop throw a drone at them, or if because of the damage you've done to the roads and the difficulty of how difficult you made it to advance, they wind up just parked for

a long time. That's also a great situation to bomb people with a drone, which is by far the most effective weapons unit that we have seen built civilians in this war. By the way, UH, it's not molotovs, it's certainly not paint. It is UH civilian volunteers who put together combat drones using generally d j I drones that they have upgraded with thermal imaging cameras in order to

see at night. And they have used three D printed parts in order to drop bombs from UM and they have done carried out for weeks now hundreds of extremely successful night time raids on Russian positions. This has been effective for a couple of reasons. One of them is

that the Russian military does not widespread half effective night vision. UM. We don't need to get The reasons for this are complicated, based in a mix of like appropriations, corruption, issues with the technologies they do have, YadA, YadA, YadA, but they do not have the capacity in large scale to carry

out operations at night to the extent that the Ukrainians do. UM. And so you get when nighttime comes these forces that were advancing in places like Kiev clustering up and huddling for the night, and then these hunter killer drones would sneak in at night and they are impossible to fucking see in daytime. I can tell you from experience. At night, their ghosts just dropping bombs on on armored vehicles and

on groups of soldiers. Um and these you know what you have seen with these units which have been integrated. They are like started out as civilian volunteer groups. They have been integrated into the military to a significant extent. And I think what you do have Some of this is conjecture on my part, but you've had a lot of Russian officers in generals killed generally because they have

been communicating over open phone lines. And I suspect some of what's been going on is when they figure out where one of these guys is, they send some of these fucking drone units and to blow them up, because it's not hard if you know where someone is to

kill them with the drone. In this way, I think the other thing to talk about in terms of you know, building obstacles, building barricades is the whole cover versus concealment thing where a lot of people think that if they hide behind a barricade, there now impervious, which obviously isn't true if a drone is gonna get you, and obviously isn't true for a large a large number of the

ammunitions that get fired, whether they be bullets or tank grounds. Yeah, yeah, I mean it's and I think that's something In videos I have watched of Russian soldiers responding to contact, you have seen a lot of people in ambushes that they lost hiding behind vehicles, UM, which if it's an armored vehicle, definitely can protect you from small arm fire. But if somebody shoots that vehicle with a with a javelin, you

may find yourself next to a cooking off tank. UM. And I have seen it like people hiding behind fucking fences, which is terrible to hide behind, UM, failing to go to ground, which is always your best bet is to kind of get behind a burm or something, get loaded the fucking ground. And it's It's interesting to me a lot of the worst videos of responding to contact that I've seen on the Russian side have been there. The

Ross Guardia units. I'm not great at pronouncing Russian, but they are essentially police special forces units that actually makes sense. They have every video I've seen of these guys handle being ambushed very poorly because they're not trained for that. They're trained to go bust into a house and arrest somebody, you know, like this is not where they're what they're

supposed to be doing. The other thing that Spencer really focuses on is this whole like um sniper idea of of being afraid of someone, of someone just cutting you down from above, which obviously kind of is you know, more of a thing with the drone stuff as well, but this idea of not even being good at firearms, but just having the threat of taking fire from somewhere as you can't see in terms of like knowing your terrain better than whatever invading force does and knowing how

to set up spots where it's it's less you're less likely to get shelled. Um, I mean yeah, and that's that's very I mean, this is very basic and old

military doctrine. But this is like, you know, the ways a sniper can work in a deservein environment is you have a large number of guys and they are trying to move to a specific area and if they take fire, um, that limits their options from forward movement unless they're willing to just risk getting hit, and generally they're not, and then you find yourself kind of holding up for time to take out the sniper, which can be uninvolved in difficult process for just a single sniper. And yeah, that's

definitely a thing like that. You don't have to be the fucking of Chris Kyle in order to effectively work in that kind of situation. Now, what makes that effective Because if you just have a sniper attacking police officers or soldiers in an urban environment, generally speaking, there exists

the ability to deal with that pretty fucking quickly. But if you have small units of snipers kind of oftentimes just like civilians with hunting rifles who are doing that within the context of soldiers also being resisted by other soldiers and dealing with like an active combat environment, then yeah, a handful of people with rifles can be a significant

force multiplier. It's a lot extra to deal with, and I suspect ship like that has been part of why you have seen cities like Mariopold resists so long under overwhelming forces that there's a pretty wide, comprehensive amount of resistance going on in those areas um And yeah, a single person if they're not like the only person engaging with the enemy in that in that area, UM, can make it a lot harder for them to effectively respond

to contact. I think the last thing I wanted to kind of get into today is the whole I mean, this kind of ties into the weaponized on reality aspect of being like all of these people who are giving you know, I just listened advice on Twitter dot com, whether they be John Spencer, whether they be you know, the wife of a former marine, whether they be tank mechanics whatever, like everyone's everyone's doing this now, and it's

all seen as like completely valid. Right, We're giving instructions on how to do urban insurgency online, um, and this is totally fine. Yet when you know, when information from Hong Kong gets used in protest kind of uh propaganda for urban insurgency instructions, then it's like international like organized like terrorism. Yeah. Yeah, if you're telling people had to use fucking laser pointers, yeah, it's like the selective thing.

How but you're like, Okay, we're allowed to tell people how to do urban insurgency right now, but when this is over or in the past, it's it's it's not allowed. Right, you have John Spencer, who I doubt would be giving I doubt was a big fan of any Black Lives Matter demonstration just but but I mean, I certainly doubt was giving people instructions and how to disable bearcats. Yeah, I don't think he was giving instructions and how to

ambush police officers or anything like that. So you have this whole coalition of people on Twitter dot com giving

all this advice out how to do urban insurgency and whatever. Well, also, you know, when ever something is happening like that where they live, it is that that is obviously bad and obviously not a good thing, whether you know, for you know, you could talk about whatever like ideological drive people have, but I think this is just an interesting thing worth talking about in terms of how we will offer we will view. You know, this type of discussion of urban

insurgency is always like a bad thing, all right. It's always this thing that like terrorists do you're helping, you know, you're you're always you're mooting for the destruction of civilization or whatever, um. And then it just takes a few things for you get you know, an instructor at West Point to start, you know, posting threads to help sell

his new book on these very same topics. Yeah, I mean there's I think a little degree to which I might push back on some of that, not necessarily, Spencer, But I can't remember during like the Fed War in Portland, which was the probably the part of Portland that like most people are aware of, when you had a bunch of federal agents snatching people, it was the most warlike part of the you you had for this brief period of time a lot of folks because I took part

giving out advice on Twitter to respond to and handle police munitions. Um that when I think that certainly went more viral than it would have gone in a different sort of situation. Um And I think you do have.

I think part of what you're seeing in Ukraine, and this is just sort of a general thing that happens online is when something a news moment, blows up in a way that is like big enough it disrupts the norms and suddenly for a while you can talk about things like how to disable government armored vehicles and fight like you know, the reality suddenly becomes so much bigger, and what is what is acceptable discourse suddenly expands out much bigger than what it usually tells. It becomes a

lot more permeable. And I do think broadly, Like we're shooting on Spencer here because he's frustrating to me. Um, but I do think that, like, really really broadly. Um, it's good when stuff like it's good for people to think about. Even if I don't, I certainly don't. I certainly do not want there to be I don't want anyone listening to this who has not experienced urban warfare to experienced urban warfare. I will absolutely I will. I

will say that right now. But it is not bad for people to be thinking about and talking about the ways in which a civilian population can do damage to an invading organized military force. That's not a bad discourse to exist, and it's not bad for people to be thinking in this way. And it's not bad for the people who are potentially in power to have that in

the back of their heads, you know. Yeah, I mean, like, the one of the first things you sent me when I started working for it could happen here was the was the city is not neutral peace? Um on Urban combat is hard. Um. Yeah, it's definitely. It's the thing that, Yeah, it's it's always it's it's worth thinking about, but you don't want to. We're not trying to wish on anybody.

And I think you can. You can look at all of like the weirdos on the internet who have like you know this, you know this is some degree of like not sees who have done this, but also just like random other people who have flown to Ukraine to help join fight off the Russians because they think it's going to be cool and they'll be able to work with the Azov Batalion or something, who then get stationed to basically be cannon fodder because they're this like twenty

year old from America who's never actually held a gun before. I hope that one's true. It is just like a post because if it's true, then it means that someone in the Ukrainian government is consciously making the choice to use one of the Azov veterans as cannon fodder, which is funny, funny, extremely funny. If it's happening, right, we don't,

that's not that's not confirmed. Certainly, a percentage, probably not an insignificant percentage of dudes who have done shown up to do this have like been like, oh my God, what the fuck? Um, some of them I'm sure just didn't have much experience. I'm sure some of them were dudes who had experience being on the side with overwhelming air power. Um, and we're like, oh fuck, but you also do It's fair to note like the stories of

people like having like freaking out go viral. Um. There's plenty of videos of like mixed foreign or units in heavy combat, including a bunch where you can hear US and British dudes. Finally, like, because a lot there's a lot of people who have legitimate, like hard combat experience

who have have volunteered to go do this. Yeah. The one thing I also do find kind of uncomfortable is, I mean, no, it's not super unlike what what what we're doing now that we're trying to come at it from a more uh like critical standpoint, but like Americans who maybe have gone to a protest or two but no real experience, just going on Twitter dot com and talking about how they think beating an army is best done,

how that works. Yeah. Well, and like you know, if if you look at like the okay, like the times that like the US has actually attempted to fight its own Army, right, Like the last time this happened was the L L A. Riot and ninety two and they got their ship pushed in like it it went really really badly for the people on This was really ugly.

There was a lot of bodies. Yeah, and like and you know, and part part of what you know, and I will say, like part of what's I guess you still about this is like yeah, this is I mean, this is the thing that is I mean I wasn't alive for it, but like at like Robert, you were alive for that, like like that that that is a thing like in living memory. The Army has been deployed on American soil and one of the things that went wrong is that the people on the ground had basically

no time. And this is something you can read from from like the Army's accounts of this, is that like the people that they were dealing with had no tactical experience what wherever they did it, they had no conception of tactics, and the Army was able to very quickly crush them. And you know, if if you don't want that to happen to you, yeah, like that there there there is a way which is stuff is important to be thinking about. But also like dear God, that is

the worst ship, Like yeah you that here. Here's what's what's important to understand about that anytime you are dealing with any kind of conflict, like physical conflict that involves violence and and that can be as narrow as like a protest, you know, where people are squaring off with the cops, or an actual like full on military conflict, the winner is the person who is most disruptive to the enemies. Ode loop, right, um, observe, orient, decide act.

That's the loop that you go through when you are trying to decide how to act in any kind of a kinetic situation UM on the streets and a protest. One of the things where I where we have all seen people be the most successful against cops is when

you change the rules on them. Is when they are in a situation they did not anticipate being in, because they tend to freak out and they tend to respond and effectively, right, you do not want to if you see them preparing to act in a certain way because they believe you were doing a specific thing, you ideally do not then do the thing they are preparing for because that is a situation which you're gonna wind a

battering yourself against a riot line. Right. Um, that's what the that's the core of the move be like water thing from Hong Kong, is the idea that do not engage them in a way they are prepared for, and that that that is a that is a piece of advice. Broadly speaking, that's just as true in a war as it is in a protest situation. On their own terms. What this also means is that you don't want to be playing by a set of rules that are ineffective

in the situation you're getting into. So like when you had protesters in in l A engaging with the military, they were playing by the rules of how do you deal with cops and suddenly they were dealing with soldiers and boy, howdy are the rules different? You know? Um? And likewise, the Russian military was trained and blooded to a large extent in conflicts in places like Syria, where again they had air supremacy, Um, they had artillery supremacy.

They were backing the state that was fighting against these insurgents, and so they're soldiers gained the combat experience they had

with every advantage in their pocket. Um. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian military, if you're talking really about like because we've talked about a lot of little things that have maybe had an impact on the conflict here, and they're one of the things that's had the biggest impact on how the Ukrainian military has responded and and comported itself in this war so far versus the Russian is for years eight years since this conflict started, the Ukrainian military has developed a

posture of having soldiers sign up for these brief contracts, sending and rotating them through the battleground and the dawn boss so that when this war started, they had a huge number, more than anyone else in Europe, of combat veterans who got their experience fighting against a peer adversary when they did not have supremacy and artillery or air support when they engaged them um. And then the Ukrainian military very intelligently spread these guys out amongst their their

their units, which is what you want to do. Any military is going to want to spread out your veterans among units, because you're not everyone's not going to be a combat veteran, but you want some guys who know what it's like to be shot at and every kind of unit that might get shot at because they stiff

in the back of everybody else. And this is what So again, when when the war started, to get back to what I'm saying, the Russian military entered preparing for a police action like the ones they carried out in Czechnia, um like what they did have done for Assad in Syria, and they got a war, and the Ukrainians came into

that fight prepared for a war. So you you, I think one of the things that is important when you look at consider any kind of possibility of being involved in a conflict is you want to know what are the rules your opponent is going in ready to abide by, right, what are the things they are expecting to happen, What is kind of the rubric with which they are looking at,

what they expect to occur in this conflict? And by god, you want to be going in there with a different one, you know, um And that again, depending on how you do it, that can go badly or that can go really well, because like I said, if you're if you're going and prepared to fight cops and you wind up dealing with soldiers, that's not great. Um. But if you have prepared, if you are able to kind of lock your enemy into the kind of conflict that they're not

ready to face, um, then generally speaking you'll win. We have twenty years of experience in the War on Terror of more or less that going down. Yeah, there's a there's a there's a good example of this also with the like with the i d F s a war against hes Blo in two thousand and six, where it's like the IDEF is a really good army, but they'd spent like I don't know, like they spent like forty years basically just sort of like, yeah, they've been about

forty years doing police actions. Yeah, and then they run into Hesbla and they expect Hesbah is going to just you know, they've made Lebanon jails and six and their expectations that Hesblah is going to go to ground, They're gonna do a guerrilla war and instead has blood like when they go into bunkers. But they stand in fight and the id F gets smashed and like you know, they pull out and they spend a bunch of time just like murdering people from the air. But like they

don't win the war. And like like that that happens a lot, especially with these armies that are used to dealing, used to doing these sort of police action things, and they losed enemies that like the fact that the I d F Lost Award has blood is like by like balance of forces. It's like this is inconceivable, Like how

on earth did they possibly lose this? But it's like, yeah, this stuff happens because they weren't like, yeah, they they were they were doing they were doing this police action thing, and they weren't used to They hadn't fought an enemy that was actually going to stick in and fight them since like the seventies. Yeah, I mean a lot of the great defeats in military history because a force came into a situation expecting a different kind of fight than

what they got. That was a part of what happened to Napoleon when he invaded Russia, right, and the Russians did not respond the way that he expected a state to respond to having their capital occupied, um, and effectively kind of starved him out. There was other ship going on there. Attrician had really depleted the French military before

it got there. But but yeah, um, yeah, how how I went on how I would want to wrap up this is basically saying like and all of that stuff regarding how this war has really prompted a lot of things that were seemingly more unexpected and seemingly thought to

be previously more impossible. UM in terms of how fast both rhetoric around these these types of conflicts can spread and more and the role in which like disinformation and misformation is used for you know, both both sides to to to gain digging ground on the other and how you know, relating back to it could happen here is MS in terms of like the urban crumbles or like you know, the small small like urban collapses, um, and you know, escalating escalating like inter inter country conflict in

various places around the world. How fast certain things can happen that we once thought are kind of more impossible or improbable at the very least. You know, how how fast you can get people giving advice on how to take out armored vehicles on Twitter dot com. How fast you can get you know, people like people who are you know, seemingly are part you know, seemingly not not tied to certain just certain like ideas or theologies giving out you know, information on types of types of ways

to resist invading or oppressing forces. It is it is an interesting kind of It's like case studies the wrong word because it is it's it's obviously having horrible effects with you know, thousands and thousands of people being slaughtered um, but it is it is intriguing to watch, how, you know, in terms of like the microcos of macrocosm idea of of eventually you know, conflict, if conflict breaks out in other places around the world, and next in the next

few years, how are current like social media landscape, How are kind of rules around like urban conflict, like urban conflict and all of these things kind of interact with each other and how we view Yeah, what is what is likely and what we you know, who who you're going to predict is gonna do X thing based on people invading a city that it's not theirs? Yeah, um, I mean I think in terms of stuff that that people can take out of this, you know, without necessarily

needing to prepare to fight in an urban insurgency. One of them is that anytime big ship happens and and more big ship is going to keep happening for us, you have a window of opportunity through which you can get things across to people that they would not normally listen to. UM. And that is a really important time, and it helps to think about the kind of situations that might occur in the kind of things that you

want to push out into the world. UM. Because this is this is is true with climate change as it is with war. Right, We're going to have more disasters, and when those disasters hit, it will be easier to get people to talk about radical solutions to things like climate change, and it will be easier to do things like get out in the fucking streets and get large

groups of people agitated. You know, we're we're at some point, fucking God willing, we will have of the climate change equivalent to what happened in where something so terrible and fucked up happens that a lot of people take to the streets, and hopefully we will succeed to a greater extent in forcing actual change than maybe we did in But but that's that's something like that could very well happen.

And so that's one of the lessons I think you can take out of this again without sort of obsessing over military technology or getting into gunfights with fucking soldiers is Ukraine is hard evidence that that is the way the media environment works. You get these moments where you

can really push some wild ship to people. That's that's why I like the whole uprising or insurrection model more than the revolution model, because the uprising model posits that basically, you have you know, base base society based reality, you know, always at like the base side level, then uprising happens. It's like it's like shooting up onto a graph. Suddenly, so many things that are outside the normal way that we view you know, systems, the governance systems of you know,

social control. So many things become so much more possible in this like heightened place. Um. And that's what the uprising does. It gets things that were suddenly that were once so far away and once just only in the imagination. It almost it makes them so much closer. Right. There's this feeling in like July during the height of the fed war, being like so many things feel possible in this one moment, nothing is true and all is permitted,

Like you can you can get away with some ship. Yeah, And so using the uprising model, yeah, it can really and or or the or the instruction model like it can really it can really make things feel so much more possible than what they usually feel like. And that there's you know, brief moments in time where massive social change can happen, and you know you have to learn how to recognize when this moment are happening and then organize effectively when they do happen. Yeah, yep, well I

believe that does it for us today. Um yeah, we when we've been wanting to talk about this topic for a while in terms of you know, one of the very first things that's not happening was various governments giving guides out on where to attack armored vehicles with ball tops. We're like, oh wow, this is this is intriguing to have a government giving out instructions. Um, this is probably has some implications on how we view you know, uh,

collapse in the in a in a general concept. So yeah, Ever, since that's not happening, we wanted to talk about it. So yeah, it certainly leaves us with a lot to think about. And I didn't get to go on my rant about the structure of the Russian military visa VI their lack of an n c O COREP. But maybe we'll talk about that in the future. I'm sure we'll have enough time to talk about this in the future. Uh. Well, everyone, h I don't know, do do something productive? Yeah, do

do something productive. I don't charge armored vehicles. Don't charge armored vehicles with paint. Maybe think about the different things you would like to get a bunch of people suddenly radicalized on Twitter to do in the immediate wake of a horrible climate disaster in which large numbers of folks are suddenly willing to take to the streets seemingly overnight.

Maybe thinking about that and and trying to talking with your buddies about it, and being like, hey, if everybody gets out in the streets again, what kind of information do I want to spread? What would be good to get people talking about in that instance when they're suddenly listening for I don't know about two weeks. It feels like you get about two weeks to honestly, Yeah, Well, in the wake of the new I PCC report, we have what we should certainly have a lot to think about.

All right, Bye bye, it's goblin mode. Welcome to Happen here a podcast that is today in goblin mode. Uh, you know what it's about you've her to say it like about twenty million times. But yeah, I'm your host, Christopher Wong and uh with me today we have Juniper, who is a really twitter ship post extraordinary extraordinaire, on to discuss language, media, culture, of the nature of reality, and Goblin Mode. Junifer, Welcome to the show. Hiy, how's

it gone. It's going good. It's going much better. Since Goblin rode ceased control of the world, we are now living in the age of Mode. And Drew mar Show said this morning, apparently it's quite a time. I didn't realize just posting would like just posting would influence so much around me. I guess it's been an interesting time for sure. Yeah. So, so I wanted to talk to

you about sort of the absurdity that is Goblin Mode. Um, and I want to hold off on talking about what Goblin Mode like is isn't for a bit because I think that's actually, weirdly the less interesting part. And I want to start with instead the story of how Goblin Mode became like a thing and why I am reading. Uh. I keep I keep like, every every time I look for more Goblin Mode headlines, there's more goblin mode headlines like the I think my favorite so far is from Bloomberg.

It's a dieselent. Diesel prices have gone goblin mode. Forget crude oil. This could be the real energy emergency. Yeah, that that is by far one of my favorites to uh the full headline too, if you search for that one is it's what you said, but then it adds on thanks to the Ukraine War. An official Bloilberg headline with goblin mode and the Ukraine word. I gotta that's

just by part of my favorite one amazing. The other part of three that's extremely funny is that so the people who are doing these articles, I keep getting asked, so someone someone's asking like an intern to find a picture of a goblin, and they keep posting pictures of orcs, which is like enormously funny to me. Okay, so I'm not sure what they're searching to get those. I don't know. It's really incredible, Okay, So yeah, I guess I should.

So we should start from the beginning of this story, which is, yeah, can you talk about your ship post and uh, what you were thinking at the time when you made a ship post that randomly like has has had months long ripple effects on the world. Sure, I think you were right though, like the post itself, and that's like the least interesting part of all of goblin mode in my opinion as well, Like just seeing the ripple effect is what's been super interesting and really funny

to me. But um sure yeah the post. Um basically, I think it was like the day that um what Kanye West and Julia Fox, which there's a quick note, I've never heard of Julia Fox before any of this. So I like sometimes if like you know, Twitter is all talking about one thing, the most recent thing being like the Will Smith slap, like everyone's talking about that.

So whenever like some like big event like that is happening and everyone's posting about it, I try to like think of some creative different posts I can do, you know, just to get in on the the discourse or whatever you wanna call it. So I just I really don't know what compelled me to make a fake headline, But basically,

I just I just decided to search. I think I was driving home from work and I just decided to search like Kanye West, Julia Fox, and I just found the first headline and I just edited it to say, um, Kanye West doesn't like it when Julia Fox goes goneling basically, and that's why they broke up. That was that was

the whole lessons of the of the post itself. Um, and I really didn't think too deeply about it beyond just making the post, and it just it caught fire with like I guess what we would probably all normally normally Twitter like people that aren't even like necessarily leftists or anything like us. Um, it just really caught a hold with the whole of Twitter and pretty much like most of the people that saw it. You can you

can go back and check the replies. Most people think it's real at the time and replying about all things it's real, and no one, like hardly anyone verified it. It was like kind of insane to see yeah and just just cost yeah, I think it's funny because again, like you could very you could you could just google this right, Like you can just google it and it'd

be like, oh, wait, hol on, this isn't real. But like no one did that, and it was like, yeah, like you could have just easily searched the main part of the headline, like Kanye West to Julia Fox. It was literally the second or third headlines you can have found the same website, same author, but seeing that it

wasn't the correct headline. Although that does remind me when there was the initial article about my post um, I forget who wrote it at this point, I think I was, Yes, that's right, it was the focus they they they for some reason, it made the assumption when they decided when they decided to talk about my tweet that the website, like the headline that I made made up the original website like edited that part out. So they thought that my headline was real, but it was just and taken away.

And so that also affected what some people thought about it too, Like they thought a lot of people thought it was really real. That's that's what's insane to me about this. Yeah, and like you and like like Vogue like picked this up. This was just like a thing

that that like everyone believes us real. Everyone was just reporting on it as news and there's so much like there's so much like incredible stuff about this, like part of it, you know, so what if the articles that that gets published about this after so like there's this initial period where everyone is running around going like oh my god, it was goblin Mode, and then Julia Fox has to make a statement that's like, no, there was

no goblin Mode. No one said this. Yeah, yeah, that's That's the interesting about the evolution of goblin Mode, like stemming from my post specifically, is at first the coverage was talking about whether my post was real or fake and talking about that aspect of it. But as time has gone on, it's kind of evolved away from that. Like you you won't see any goblin Mode article talk about the original like Julia Fox tweet that jump started

this whole thing anymore. It's kind of like shifted away from that initial that initial post, which I found really interesting that that's what sustaining this. I feel like, yeah, I wanted to read a uh, I wanted to read a passage from one of the art I don't know why I'm calling it a passage. It's just like a sentence, but read part of one of the art goals that that came from up from the the initial search, which is from the streetwear company called high Snobby. Don't tell

me if I'm like pronouncing that wrong. Uh well, okay, that's not not to Twitter. If I'm pronouncing that wrong. My Twitter is at I right, okay, yell there, Um yeah, but I want I want to read this quote because

I think it's interesting. So the article, they have this whole thing that's like, Okay, they get to the denial, they post your tweet about like, oh my god, I can't believe Julia Fox had to respond to this, and then they say, I'm not saying Fox was lying, but wearing a borderline not suited for work dress, a purse trimmed and human DNA and d I y I make up to an Oscar's after party? Is goblin mode to

a t? And I think this brings up an interesting question, which is to what extent was goblin mode real in the first place before You're sort of mean to went went viral? So like the phrase itself, you mean yeah, yeah, like I want part of the phrase existed before my post. Yeah, And I think it was also like what were you thinking, Like, did you have like a conception of what goblin mode like was before he made the post? So so the

only thing I had in my mind at that point. Um, it's it stems from specifically, Um, do you do you know the user on Twitter hottie pants? Do you happen to know that guy, I don't think so now he goes by I think his ad is like punished Pants or something like that. But anyways, he around that time, he was posting a lot about like goblins. He was He would post a lot about like goblin time and like it's oh, it's goblin time, and he would just make like a bunch of just like posts like that.

So goblins were on my mind at that point. And then I forget his user name, but his um I think his user name is um uncontrolled. I for I forget his user I'll have to tell you afterwards or something. I I don't remember off the top of my head, but he he may a post that went viral, uh, something to the effect of like um, your honor UM. I was going goblin mode at that time, you know that format that's like you're in the court, but excuses like, oh,

I'm going goblin mode. It really in my head. That's really the only reference I had, So I didn't make up the phrase. A lot of people think I made up the phrase goblin mode, which I definitely did not. Um, but I think just there was a lot of people posting about about goblins around that time, like early in mid March, and I just in my mind, I was like, oh, you know, I'm just gonna say Goblin Mode on this this ship post Aboulia Fox. I don't. I really don't

know why. It's just the first thing that popped in my head. And whenever something pops in my head, like a tweet idea, and I laughed myself. I'm like, okay, I should post it. I don't know, and it seemed to work. Did you end up so one of these things? What are these things? I think is really interesting? Is that right? So okay, so you have you have your first wave of like it's the goblin Mode thing, and then you have your second wave articles that are trying

to blaine what goblin Mode is. And I was I was wondering if if you'd see if you'd actually even seen the post. I just like I linked to the chat um. There was like like the thing I'd seen from goblin Mode before thislike all started, was just like Reddit. It was someone on Twitter had a tweet that went viral about goblin Mode and it was about just like someone It was about this Reddit post of like someone

creeping around their house and pretending acting like a goblin. Yes, yes, So I didn't see that until I made my post, like in my initial because I think someone linked it under my post and I was like, oh, Ship, this is just like a thing, Like this is actually like a thing. And then I started popping off more because people saw that reply. I'm real like, oh, Ship, this is like actually a thing. And to my surprise, that like totally worked out for me, like everything kind of

just came together and it really insane fashion. Oh that's another tweet to the one that you linked the That's when I was going, that's when I was in goblin mode. That came before my tweet too. Had you had you seen that one before you made it? I followed her, I followed Telgore. I might have seen it. I don't remember. I remember the other one I was referencing before. Um, I might have seen that one now, yeah, like I

I think like that. That was what was interesting to me about this was that, like the moment it went viral, there was this whole sort of like attempt because there was an attempt to figure out what it is, and then there was an attempt to like back project a history on it, and so you get a lot of these articles and you get a lot of people like I don't know, like I would talk to people about this and they would like, you know, okay, so they do this thing or it's like okay, so they go

to know your meme, they look at the Google trends, and then like the people sort of like, you know, okay, Like there was an urban Dictionary thing from like two thousand nine that was like a completely like a weird sex thing. It was like completely unrelated to this, but it was interesting to me the way that people like, Okay, so you have this thing that goes viral, right, and like you're just sucking around like there's no act, Like

it's just sounds cool. But then like yeah, there's an extent which it becomes this like you know, it gets into the sort of like viralty machine, and so you have all these journalists who like have to cover it right because like, you know, the the way the journalism bottle works is okay, so you have this trend, right,

people can see it trending. You see something on Twitter, you do like four sets of Googles, and you write an article about it, and it's like, well, okay, because they're trying to you're trying to capitalize on on the clicks as fast as possible. So when someone googles what is goblin mode, it's like, okay, your thing comes up. But it's interesting because it's like it's like they have

to fill the content in because there isn't any Yeah. Yeah, that's what what was interesting about the specific that first one, the focus article, it was just a lot of like filling in where there was really nothing. Yeah, and that's

what's interesting about that. Yeah. And then and then like after that, like all the other articles are like you get to see this proliferation sort of of how the media works where it's okay, so you have the initial article, the initial article google some stuff and it's basically just making it up because they're they're trying to like give coherence or like give am meeting to an empty signifier.

And then after that, it's like all of the other articles are just copying off of the first article, and you get this like Ora boris of like everyone just is repeating the same thing over and over again, and none of them seem to understand that, like it was not that the thing that they originally talking about was just kind of like that's really all it was, and it's it is interesting to see how it is just able to proliferate off of as you as you were saying,

they just google search urban, they find an urban dictionary, and it's like my article urban dictionary is is a good source. Yeah, and like I think this this is I mean, I think there's there's like a few interesting things here, one of which is about how yeah, like I had this before, Like I'm not sure if I

actually talked about this on the show. So the day of the Atlantis shooting, Garrison and I spent a lot of time trying to like track down the shooter, and there was there was this like fake Facebook post that was going around and you know, Garrison I has spent like a lot of time looking for this guy and we okay, well we realized that this guy just doesn't have a Facebook, right, and so we were like so like I was like look at this, Like I saw his fake Facebook post and I was like, oh, this

is fake. And then like a bunch of a bunch of like a bunch of like actual journalists like found you know people because journalists have been passing around the fake Facebook post as like this is a suppost alleged to be a thing, and then and then suddenly they

were like, oh, hey this is fake. Hey you can see all these things like oh look, it's like uh, you know, like there was like the it was pretty clear of it, like his face had been copied and pasted into like a thing that's it was supposed to look like a Facebook post because there was all these like minor details about that, which is wrong, and it

was like, okay, so this isn't real. But the media cycle of it was like all of these people saw my Twitter post that was like this is fake, and then they just wrote a story off of it and like never mentioned that that that they literally got it from like me fucking around on Twitter. Like it's like and it's like and it's like you look at this stuff and the extent to which these people are just like these people who are journalist, who are you know,

supposed to people journalists are just like woefully unprepared. Even people even who people who are extremely online like wind up being woefully unprepared to deal with like anything, like they're woefully unprepared to deal with anything of any complexity or deal or like figure out that they're being like hoaxed. Yeah, yeah, no,

you're you're you're really right about that. I mean, I mean I think this it's I don't know what I would call this phenomena, but there's definitely something there where it's like they we'll see something like I don't know, and I don't know what it is about specifically Twitter that like I feel like it's where a lot of people get news just in general, but I feel like a lot of journalists just assume anything that they see.

Maybe I'm over generalizing, but if they see something on Twitter, even if it's like a joke, like they'll just assume it's real or something I'm not. I'm not entirely sure. Like it's super easy to make a fake post. I do it all the time. I make all sorts of like fake fake things. Most of them are more obvious than Goblin But I guess, but I don't know that

they're I don't want to say journalists are too trusting. Yeah, well, and but I will say, like there are times where there's genuine Like when when you first started posting the headlines of like the actual Twitter articles that were about Goblin mode, I like I didn't do about it looking

up because I just assumed they were fake. Yeah, it was like a lot of people told me, Like I think specifically, the the one that like most of my followers realized that they weren't fake anymore was the one that was like, um as a disabled uh them in goblin mode. This goblin mode trend is really problematic, and people people decided to look that one up and we're like, oh, it's real. And then everyone was like, wait, we're all these other ones that you were posting real And I'm

like they were all real, Julia Foxlan real. It was agencies have been all these news organizations. I've been writing all this insane shit about nothing. Yeah, and there's there's you know, I mean, I think that this one is funny just because like yeah, I mean like it's goblin mode right, like it's it's it's it's just funny, like

there's no like you know. But but I mean, I think that there's an interesting thing that happens with with the specifically the disabilities one, because the disabilities one isn't like it's basically about something completely different that the Goblin mode things spawned, which is that like, like the the other thing that happened with Goblin Mode. Was that Okay, So people saw Goblin Mode and then physicularly on like

TikTok Um. I don't I don't know if they knew where it came from, but like people like people turn just gobblin mode into an actual thing where like it became this thing about like I like, I I think I think this is also influenced by like some of the like ship post answers that you gave the media people that were like gobblin Boe could be whatever you want. It's when you aren't awake of the padel or like you're not doing your makeup in the pandemic or whatever.

Like yeah, but but but it's interesting that field like that. I really don't know if the TikTok's thing came before or after. I think it's after. Yeah, from what I've seen, it's it seems like it actually became a thing after.

And that was really interesting to me too, because it was like it's this way in which, like you know, okay, so you start running into these sort of like fundamental problems about the nature of reality where it's like, okay, so we made this thing that is fake, right, but then it became real because enough enough people believed it was real that it turned into a thing that people

actually use to describe stuff. And then you know that that's how you get to like you get a bunch of people complaining about how like there was an article that was like the Great resignation and going Goblin mode or like the two great threats to employers as they try to force people back to work. Like yeah, it's it's like the goblin mode, like self manifested into reality.

Like I feel like a lot of journalists are saying, like people being lazy and like, you know how the whole meme of like, oh, no one wants to work anymore. I feel like a lot of people are trying to like attributing like oh, not wanting to work and being lazy to goblin mode, and it's it's self manifested through the media or TikTok or whatever whatever it might be. I actually don't know, but it's it's become a thing

now and in a really strange way. Yeah, yeah, And I think I think this is like this is an interesting way of looking like, you know, like this was the whole sort of like like in in terms of like okay, in so far as posting can actually affect reality, which it can, but not as much as people seem to think, like there are there are there are people who like seem to think that like the three letter agencies care what they post on Twitter, which is like it's like no, no, no, hold on, hold on if

if we post correctly interventions, it won't happen. It's like if you've seen the c I A like like like there's there's this whole thing where it's like you know, I mean this, it's okay, this this is gonna be the like someone's gonna pull this out of context and be like, hey, look at Don Chris is but like you know, like this is this is kind of what happened with Trump, which like this is this isn't like what the meme magic was like if if you just

meme something long enough, you can kind of turn it into reality by just sort of convincing enough people that it's real, that it and and you know and once you've done that, like you you have effectively made the

thing real. Right. It was interesting about this one is it's just like it's like a lot of people like do that on purpose, right, Like this is how this is like there's a lot of propaganda stuff that works like this or like, you know, this is like what the meme before jan Trump bullshit was, Like you just this like completely like as a joke on accidents. Yeah, I didn't. I didn't intend this. I just mean I just wanted to make a one off joke. Yeah, I

didn't think that would happen. But if you're you're you're totally right about the whole, Like I don't. I don't know how much like the Trump magic was really a self manifestation of him kind of just winning the election and keep becoming popular with a certain people. But it definitely feels like like that self manifestation of like posting to a certain extent really can become real if it just like hits a certain ziteguist of some sort and

like they just didn't. I think a crucial part of it is it needs to get picked up by the media and taken seriously by journalists specifically, because the thing that really, uh, I feel like broke the camel's back for Goblin about specifically was the first journalist that reached out to me because she she wanted to interview me

about the whole. The whole experience, like and and her coverage of it was about the whole fake mame thing and then how it became sort of a thing in that aspect um, and then um from there, they all a lot of different journalists and websites referred back to that article, and now it seems to be the one that everyone's referring to now is the Guardian article about it that seems to be like the media's favorite piece about it, which is the one that talks more about

it being like a lifestyle trend. And I think that's where it really went off, is when like some people took in the TikTok aspect of it and kind of manifested it that way. I think it's a couple of interesting political consequences of this, one of which is that like, like Twitter as a platform isn't really I mean, since Trump got banned, it's kind of like it hasn't really been where most like stuff is happening, like TikTok is exploding.

I mean, you still have like the boomers on Facebook, Like it hasn't like it hasn't been the sort of like driving force of politics that normally is. But the one thing that it has is that all of the journalists are still on there, and that means that yeah, like there's all these weird political consequences. Were like, yeah, you can sort of like like you can just sort of will things into existence by convincing journalists that it's real.

And that's I think really scary in a lot of ways, because you know, like the people who are really really good at the sort of manipulation are right wingers, and right wingers could have sort of like like I don't know, like I people are probably mad about me for this, but like one of the things that I remember from

like God was just two dozen sixteen. It was like there was this whole discourse about like, uh, like there's a bunch of like all a bunch of people are really mad about like there being a black stonone trooper and Star Wars, yeah, the whole Yeah, it's interesting about it. Was like yeah, I think I think that was just yeah, yeah,

there there. There's the thing that was interesting about it was like so I know people who like who like looked into it beforehand, and it was like the only people who were talking about this it was like people who were confused because they thought that Star Troopers were

all clones and we're like wait, why wait? And then and the other thing there are other group of people who were mad about this was storm Front, and store Front was able to like turn this into like like a discourse, like they able to they were able to convince journalists like this was a real thing that like a significant number people are mad about, and then it like actually turned into a thing that a stnificant number

of people are were mad about. Because you can sort of just like like you you can start these like panics and like this is one of the things we're talking about in our trans episodes where like, you know, a fairly small network of well funded people can cause like enormous swass of the US to just lose their ship and get extremely violence and get like you know, and and the specific thing they're mad about changes like

pretty frequently. But you can just sort of like if if you're able to manipulate the media well enough and you you know that there's other ways to do this, Like you know, you could do it by like weird memes.

You can do it by you know, being the cops are just like having press releases that you send out, you can have you can do it through like these sort of like astro turf, Like I don't know you have like an astro turf intellectual, like what's his name, Margaret Upo, But it's it's it's interesting to me that like they all seem to work, like the pathway through

it all seems to be very similar. Which is what you do is you convince aboutch of media people or something is real, and then once once they start taking

it seriously, it sort of manifests itself into reality. Yeah, I know that, that is what I realized what was happening, Like I one of my initial points that I was trying to make after um, the whole goblin thing, after the first article came out, I was like, it really made me realized, like how potent fake I hate saying this phrase just because it's become such like a nothing sort of phrase, but like fake news is how how easy it is to just like instead of goblin mode.

I decided like maybe let's say I'm like a crazy right winger and I had this weird digeist moment causing a panic about like trans people, and I made like a fake tweet like that you would we see that happened all the time, like trans people people, A lot of people hate us, um, and it would be super easy put it in the right community. UM, make this fake tweet or a fake headline, and people right wing or specifically will go wild and it'll really influence the discourse.

I mean, look at the current I mean it's it's kind of over now. But the last it it was last week, the swimmer, the trans swimmer, that one, the women's competition. I mean, the amount of vitriol that was able to be created over that. Just imagine what, like, as you said, like a well funded height network of um but I don't know, but for lack of a better phrase, like fake news creators, just all they would need to do is put something out on Facebook, the

boomers see it, and then it's over. Yea, what what? What? What are the things I learned about? Like, well, I was doing research for Weirdly an episode about Reverend Moon. Was that like people figured so this is sort of like this is like how Republicans came to power, Like that they figured out you could do shoot like this, and like Rubber Fiugieri like in like in like the sixties figured out that like if you just if you sent like you could just send letters to like they work.

I guess they weren't even boomers that if you just send letters to old people that would say stuff like planned parenthood is harvesting baby fetuses, you could just get the really mad and it's like and it's funny because you know in the citties like he's he's doing this like by mail, right, like he is mailing you a

chain letter. It's just stuff. Yeah, it became just like yeah, yeah, it's like he's just like it's it's weird because you can watch them invent this and then it's like, oh, yeah, this guy was funded by like a weird cult guy who was trying to take over the world, who was being backed by the Korean CIA, and it's like, I don't know, it gets into this, Yeah, it all sort of comes back into this weird thing where yeah, I mean I like one of one of the what the

political transformations I've had since I started working here was like I didn't take like it's sort of a similar to what you were saying, Like I didn't take the like weaponized unreality like fake new stuff like that seriously.

And then it was like you cover it every day and it's like, oh my god like the like the weird, like like watching like four Chan like invents the I actoually don't know if it's portunately was one of watching like just weird right wing like message boards invent like the Ukrainian biolab thing, which like grand Mean Wall now tweets about and like like like the like the official state media of Russia and China are like talking about these bio labs and it's like it's turned into this

weird like like thing where like yeah, like like actual countries with like nuclear weapons are like basically using ship posters as like as like a way to do propaganda, and it's it's just like really the weird. I don't know, it's this really weird and incredibly disturbing media space to

live in. Yeah, it's it's like a it's a weird synthesis of ship posters just posting online to like whatever audience, and I guess like media of some sort and not maybe not like um in the in the case with the biolot I don't know too much about that, especially cause I'm black by gun Greenwald, so I don't see a lot of stuff. But you know, it's it's interesting

how how kind of interlocked there. And and to your point about the earlier about the whole Trump me magic thing, like I didn't take that too seriously at the time, Like in I was like, Oh, all these silly right wingers making these means like this isn't gonna do anything, Like I I don't. I really don't know if it really had an effect, but I mean it's we can't really ignore the power of that. Just simply manifesting something, even if it's artificial, can actually have a hole about

certain people. Um as we were saying with the mailing letters. I mean, if you just say enough, if you say something enough to the right type of person, they'll just believe it. I mean, it's it's not hard to lie to people as horrible as those to say. It's really not that hard to lie to people. Yeah, Like I mean that's the whole sort of like everyone yelling groomer like constantly about trans people. It's like, yeah, they just lied over and over again. And like half the people

who were like saying this stuff are actually pedophiles. And it doesn't matter because you know, if you just like do this ship over and over again, you get these you get just get these like hate bobs and it's yeah, no, the right wing, right wing or specifically are phenomenal at creating hate mobs. Yeah, it's kind of incredible to witness. It's it's really scary, but it's it's an incredible thing

to see. There's not really an equivalent, i would say, on the left in the way that um even maybe in liberals there's an equivalent, but like on the on the left, there's not really like an equivalent to like

some like mob in that way. Yeah, yeah, I mean I think that's you know, like, Okay, there's always an extent to which like these stuff the stuff has like material constraints, Like you know, I thought to talk about like constantly on this show, the fact that like this is like this is the stuff that the DEO cons believed and then they ran into the material constraints of

the Iraq War and their entire project imploded. And like, I mean, I think one of the reasons why this is easier for the right is that like there's the there there's a there's a there's there's a there's always a political base for them that is there that they can access fairly easily, which is okay, they they they have access to like you know that they have access to like a vast swath the petit boars. Well, they have access to a bunch of of white business owners.

They have access to like this sort of like this like white professional class. They have access to this sort of like white gentry e class, and like those people can very easily be of like whipped into a frothing rage. And like part of it is because like that that's essentially that's just what they're That's what their class interest is, that's what they're sort of like like their status, the

racial hierarchy like brings them to do already. And you could sort of like you know, if you just shovel a bit of coal on it, you can you can you can make the fire go absolutely. And I mean it's talked about a lot, I'm sure, but like the one thing that is really powerful is Fox News. Fox News will pick up literally anything like I saw I saw a post on Twitter just the other day, screenshot or just just a picture of Fox News and they they cited the lives of TikTok Twitter account talking about

school classrooms. It's like, what is that like not like the right wingers will just take the source of a random Twitter user that has a take that takes messages from random people that message them and then that's their news. Like that is just insane to to to to to be fair to Fox News, which is not a thing I will ever say a and uh, it wouldn't It wouldn't surprise me if that whole thing like because so the I don't know if you saw this the lives of TikTok person is like, is that that thing is

run by an old Bush administration person? I did not know that. Yeah, so it wouldn't. I mean, Okay, like the there there there's probably a three and four chance that they just saw someone who's like trying to own the libs on TikTok. But there's like a one in four chance that like all the old like Bush network people like know each other and that's why they're promoting it.

That's that's a good point. That's a good point. I mean that, well maybe I don't know, like it's it's it's one of those things where it's like it becomes I don't know, it becomes really difficult to to know the extent to which the beliefs. Yeah, well how organized they are into the extent to which they believe what they're saying, because part of that, like that becomes like you know, if if, if you know who's behind that, it becomes easier to sort of be like, oh yeah,

we're just sort of playing a game. But it could also just be like, no, this is this is content that we like, uh, we were all too lazy to go or just message the person to see who they are, Like I mean, they had the specifically in this case, the lives of TikTok Lady. They had her like on TALX news once talking oh yeah yeah, referenced her multiple times, so they have to know her. Yeah yeah, yeah, that's that.

That's another technique that they do a lot, which that they take someone who is like you know, like a like an old part like who's literally a Republican operative, right,

and just laundered them as an actress. Actually, the funny part is you see like like the New York Times and Ship like all the main street outlets do the same thing too, where it's like yeah, well, well, like any time you see an article that is like I was a Democratic voter, but I'm going to vote for the Republicans nine times out of ten that person is a Republican operative and if you google their name and

look hard enough, you can just find it. And it's like, and that's the only thing that other thing was like I don't know whether they whether they're just lazy and don't check, or whether they're just sort of like doing this kind of like I don't know that what what

what whe whether they're doing this on purpose? Because I mean that you know, That's that's the thing with journalism, Like it's it's difficult to like, when someone screws something up, it's it's difficult to determine a lot of times whether it's malice or whether it's they're just the only research they did was they googled something. Yeah, I feel like in the realblem that we're talking about right now, it's like right wingers, I think a lot of it. Obviously

it's pretty malicious a lot of the times. But in terms of like the whole goblin mode situation where that that stemmed off just from like random like Guardian whatever articles, I think I think that was just more of like, oh, let's kind of trying to explain this thing that is apparently now a trend and we're manifesting it in real time. Yeah,

I do think there's like this distinct in between. Next, I feel there's no like like with God, there's there's no nefarious aspect of it, but that like technique can be used in a very nefarious way, and I think that manifests in the most easy to waste, the easiest to see ways in right wing media. Yeah, I do want to also mention that, like the Yeah, I I think I said briefly, like the people who do this

the most often are cops, Like the cops. And if if you see a story about the police in a manship newspaper and you see the same story in another paper, it's because they're basically printing a press release. And you know, I mean this this gets used to like launder just straight up police lies about shootings they manufactured, like the entire crime wave thing, like the whole thing about people

taking boxes off of trains. It's like, yeah, you look into it and it's like, yeah, there's these like the there's the sort of like shadowy police networks of people who are basically running I mean they have enormous budgets to do this too, Like they have these enormous um like departmental like public outreach budgets, and those public outreach budgets are basically them running information ops on us, which is incredibly fun. You know that that is absolutely like

a real phenomena. I I don't know too much about it specifically in cops, but I know, I know the White House does that all the time, where it's like, oh, there's a White House leap and it's like, oh, no, they wanted people to see this. This is entirely intentional. Yeah, they try a balloon stuff a lot, and that's I don't know, and like that this is this is goblin mode. Is like the fun version of looking at how all this stuff works. But this stuff happens with stuff that

is extremely deadly and has real world consequences. And yeah, it's it's some It's something we need to be thinking about and trying to I don't know if used for good is the right thing, but like it's something that we need to be really conscious of as we're dealing with,

you know, a bunch of fascists trying to murder everyone. Absolutely, I mean that that's been the most interesting thing about this to me is watching Like I hate calling it this, but just for lack of a better word, kind of like goblin mode is like being manufactured, like manufacturing consent in real time, like from the genesis of my post, watching it in real time, seeing all these articles come out and kind of all tie into each other and

refer back to each other. It's been it's been kind of eye opening about this topic that I think a lot of leftists kind of know a lot about, like in terms of like medium manipulation and you're it's you're right when you said it's like the fun version of that. Yeah,

and it has been the fun version of it. But deep down it's like, oh, this is kind of like watching like how they did like they this might be dramatic, but like how they did the Iraq War in real time, Like this is on some level that's very similar media strategy. And I think, I mean, I think I think there's

specifically gobler mode. I think there's because because like the Iraq War, there's a lot of malice there and but but in this one, it's like, yeah, like that, you know, not all of the media, like all of them, like okay, in order for something that's completely fake to get traction,

it doesn't require everyone involved being malicious. What it requires is one person saying a thing and then a bunch of journalists being too lazy to actually look into something, and that just you know, basically reprinting the article, but like rewriting a few things, which happens constantly, and yeah, and and that, like you know, the thing I think that's scary about that is it reduces the number of actors who actually have to be involved in a thing

for it to just sort of like take off like this, which yeah, because like I think like there's there's an extent to which okay, like it rocks, Like something on that scale is pretty rare because it requires, like in an enormous amount of buying from a lot of people. But there's lots of small examples of this stuff that just happened sort of constantly and that stuff like yeah, I mean, you know, as we've been talking about like that, that that kind of thing with small numbers actors and

then people just sort of lazily reprinting articles like that stuff. Right. I mean, I think the best example of this is currently, at least just in my mind, because I am trans, the the whole trans panic that's happening right now. I think that's a really good example of it is just where like some website will print this certain thing and then it becomes a hysterical panic talking about it. Yeah,

Like I think that the best. The most recent example that was that spa where it was like some person claimed like made it made a bunch of claims where they were like they might have seen a trans person maybe, and it turned into just like literally mobs showing up at this spa, like anti trans bobs, like a bunch of fascists showing up, a bunch of like like yeah, and that kind of stuff. Yeah, that's that affects reality. Yeah,

that really affects people. Yeah. And and like the the the other one, the other one that that we've talked about in the trans episodes is people to people are starting to do this kind of stuff with ginger clinics, and it's you know, yeah, it's like yeah, like that that's only a matter of time before they start killing people, Like yeah, yeah. The media can easily whip someone into

frenzy to do that. I mean we've seen that in the past with I think, as you referenced before, like the whole like abortion whole, like in the nineties and early two thousands, the whole abortion panic. Yeah, I mean we saw we saw people die over stuff like that. It's yeah, bombings like and you know. And the other thing is that like they're winning, like they are on the verge of after this like half a century long battle, like they are on the verge of over turning ro

he weighed. Yeah, yeah, like you know that. And that's I think a really grim thing for the left where it's like, like, what one of the asymmetries here is that like if a leftist like assassinated the head of Ice right like they were, like I would be in prison in like a day and a half. There'd be like fifteen people who be shot in police raids. Like yeah, but you know, but like when when the right wing just like it does terrorism, like just murders abortion right

as it works, And that's a really grim asymmetry. But it's sort of the reality of the situation that Brian right, And yeah, that reminds me of the This is a while ago. This was during the Black Lives Matter protests. I don't even remember why he was on the fed's radar, but there was the dude I think in Portland, and there was like a there was like a raid and they just shot the dude in the remember that. Yeah, yeah, I mean it happened again in Uh. Yeah, they just

murdered him. And then like it happened again with Winston Smith in uh in Minneapolis where like the like the cops were mad at him because he was like he was one of the leaders of what's happening in Minneapolis and they just walked up and shot him. Yeah and yeah, and it's it's it is a really bleak look at you know, how this country actually works, which is not really what I expected this episode to be. Ending up.

I just like, we'll do a fun episode about Goblin Bode and now it's like, yeah, he was the state just assassinating people and they're gonna keep doing it. And also they're gonna like to start bombing abortion not well, I mean to keep bombing abortion clinics and start bombing gender clinics, and it's like that doesn't actually happen, but but yeah, I think it was our point was that

it was like we've seen that happen in the past. Yeah, of the reactionary media feeling the hysteria through it doesn't even matter if it's real or fake stories that's that's the main issue is it can be totally fake and it'll it'll just fuel hysterics against anyone, any any target. Yeah, that's just like yeah, like what the we should probably

close out. But like the one that's been fun for me, and by fun, I mean dear God, has been the fucking the Wuhuan biolab ship, which was like literally like like literally this this was this like literally this whole thing was a psi oup by Steve Bannett who was like, this is how we can have Trump win the election by by by uniting everyone in like anti Asian hate,

and like it worked. Like well, I mean, okay, he he lost the election, but like you know, all like eventually this is this just like completely crank, like absolutely batship. All the people who are advocating for it are like like they like they're like mushroom scientists or they're like people who like you know, like like they're they're like weird.

I ever met In Truthers, Like all these people, you know, like were were legitim mice by the media and like that had that had an enormous impact on the last sort of two years of anti ation violence. Like that's like that that's the thing that way to get as bad as it did. And again, it is just completely fake. There's nothing, it's it's there. They're just they're just you know, like a bunch of fascists made up a lie about a plague so that they could try to win an

election by like burdering Asian people. And yeah, yeah, and it's it's that. That's the interesting thing is that if you look at um, like poles about like, oh, how do you feel about China, Like you go back even just four years ago, most people were like, I don't have exact numbers on my head, um, but most people it was like maybe split like oh, like China is kind of scary, or like China, China is okay. But like most Americans at this point, even like a lot

of liberals do not like China. Like it's like even the rest like China. It's like it was just manifested through the whole maybe not all through the whole Buhanu lab but just the last few years and years of both by the government and Trump's government ratcheting hard against China, and just like anti China or even anti Chinese like

people sentiments. Yeah, and there's an interesting thing there too, where it's like, okay, so for the first about so that this pivot starts when which when Trump starts a trade war, right, and there's this interesting thing where it's like for the first about two years of it, it was like the views about China were changing, but the

actual level of anti Asian violence wasn't doing much. But then when COVID hit, it was like you know it was it was it was kind of like an abstract thing, right, it was like, okay, well we don't like China, but like there was nothing that there wasn't like a super strong like the thing you could point to to directly

tie it to Asian people. And then the moment the moment the pandemic started and then the moment that like Wuhan shit started, it was like suddenly there was like a concrete thing that you could point to, and it was that was like, hey, look it's the Chinese people. The they're they're they're they're spreading the plague, they benefactured the played a lab is because they're dirty. Like the moments became that was when everything just like all the

tax skyrockety like that. That's that's that's when like everything just sort of like really like kicked off, and that was like hysterics. That was like the targeted hysteria of I would say, yeah, yeah, and it's well, you know, the fun thing I'm bracing for is like, yeah, this looks like it's gonna be the Democrat strategy two as well as Republican strategy, and it's like, oh, hey, more of us are gonna die. This is gonna be fun. So yeah, yeah, yeah, it's kind of scary. Yeah, this

just started out as a fun episode. But yeah, it's how kind that was fun, So I guess it was still a lot of fun. Yeah, yeah. Do you have anything else that you want to say or do you want to tell people where to find you? Um? I don't really have anything to say necessarily. All I really do on the internet, at least like my my whole internet in that prevate presence right now is just on Twitter. UM.

If you want to follow me, it's um at meAll meu. UM. I don't know if you'll have like that link or anything. It's kind of hard to spell with the last the whole MEU it's i'm eu w. But that's really all I have is just my Twitter. Yeah, that's all. That's all I really do online. I mean, it is extremely funny, and every once in a while you create Goblin Mode as an actual thing, which is Yeah, it's fun. Yeah, I have a good time on Twitter people. People complain

about that website a lot. But yeah, since I joined the like twenty nineteen or whatever, I haven't looked back. It's it's a lot of fun about a lot of cool people. Yeah, I've known of you for a while, but it's nice to actually talk to you. You too, Yeah, yeah, it was. It was a good time. Yeah, So go Goblin Mode. Don't let the fascist murder trans people. H Yeah. Yeah, this is manning. It happen here. You can find us

on Twitter, Instagram at happen here pod. Uh. Yeah, have fun, find cool trinkets suppressed the turfs gotta you gotta have the trinkets. You gotta find the that's what Goblin knows all about getting trinkets. That's right, all right, by folks. 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.