It Could Happen Here Weekly 47

can make your own decisions. Welcome back to it could Happen here, the podcast about things happening that are bad and occasionally good, but all have to do with the fact that we're living in a society whose norms are crumbling as the environment also crumbles, and political violence and a bunch of other horrible things become more normalized, trying to figure out how to not die ideally um and

occasionally how to thrive. And to that end, I have a guest today who has been kind of working with the working lately on how not to die in the face of things getting increasingly violent and aggressive out there. I want to welcome Jessica Keckler to the program. Jessica,

how are you doing today? Doing great? So, Jessica, um, you know we are as listeners to the show and observers of just basic reality in the outside are aware we're kind of going under a or living through a period of like panic and concerted aggressive attack on the rights and ability to exist of transgender people. That's um hasn't like has never not been a problem as long as there's been you know, Western civilization, but has increasingly

been a problem the last year or so. Yeah, it's it's really Um, it's really wild because, um, when you take estrogen, you're When I start taking estrogen, it took like ten years off of my face as far as age goes, But then in this past year, I think it's put back by now. Um. Yeah, I mean that makes sense. Like it's it's it's stressful as hell out there. Um, there has been a surge in violence, UM, not just

against trands people, obviously we've talked about in other episodes. UM, there's been a surgeon violence against Asian Americans, UM, against LGBT Americans, but transgender people are much more likely than almost any other group in the United States to be attacked. Uh, And that has been increasingly reality for a lot of people. And you are one of a number of folks in that position, who have been increasingly talking or who have find yourself thinking about the necessity and value of being

armed in order to defend yourself from that. I want to talk a little bit about your background there and kind of what, um, how how you kind of came to deciding that that was something that you wanted to not just do personally, but advocate for other people to do. Yeah. I went through well llient libertarian spaces. It was it was many years, but you know, and I collected a bunch of guns, and you know, I was like, oh,

that's you know, cool. But then, um, after I sort of worked through my childhood traump and stuff, I you know, I sort of feel a lot less threatened about about things, and I just sort of, you know, it, just sort of lost interest in them for a while. But then, um, a friend of mine, Kendall Stevens, was telling me about a time when she was attacked in her home by a group of transpos and just beaten almost to death. And that next morning, I, um, I I have reapplied

for my Harry permit. Yeah, and this is I mean, this is a story I was not aware of. I was aware. Broadly speaking, there have been a number of attacks, including number of fatal attacks in the last couple of years on particularly trans women. There was the murder of West Philadelphia woman Alicias Simmons um in November of um, Chanta Tucker in Hunting Park in the fall of two thousand eighteen, uh, and may have two thousand nineteen, Michelle Tamika Washington was shot to death in North Philly and

this is all like local to you. Um. And also Dominique Remay Fells was was murdered in June, if I think, um, And yeah, if people want to look this up, there's

a couple of different articles. I'm looking at one on Billy Pin with the title after surviving a brutal attack, Kendall Stevens wants to help trans people citywide And yeah, it's a it's a fucking harrowing story, you know, after surviving a number of different attacks from from like people just kind of targeting her because she's trans. She was attacked in her home by six of her neighbors while her god daughter, who was twelve years old. Watch it's

a fucking horrifying story. So you, like, did you find out about what had happened, like directly from her like, how does this kind of information? I was. I was at, um, there's a local trans group where we just you know,

get on zoom and talk. And yeah, it was one of my first meetings, and actually I think it was the very first, and she just told this whole story, and I was just you know, it's like I always had the feeling of safety, but then it's just like realized, like, oh that's you know, like being white, I'm a little safer. But it's just like it's we're all you know, it's really yeah, it's it's a it's a matter of like

a small number of degrees. It's not. Um. So you're you're you're trying to deal with this and you're you're communicating. You've got this group where you're all sort of like chatting about I'm guessing just kind of like safety stuff, like hey here, you know, we we should all be kind of keeping each other informed and trying to talk about what's going on. Right, Yeah, I mean we mostly just shoot the ship and just you know, talk things

over and stuff like that. But she was, um, yeah, something had come up, and she recounted this whole story, and it was just it just really made me go like, oh my god. Yeah, so you kind of are in this position where you own firearms, You're you're comfortable with them, you've been using them for a while, and number one, you get your permit, right, Like that's kind of the

first thing you do. And then I'm guessing you start to think like, well, there's not a lot of other people that are in this kind of group I'm in that have this experience that kind of like where the yeah right? Because um, you know, because when I would talk to people before that, they would just to sort of say like, yeah, I can see where you're coming with that. And but once the attack started, I'm I heard a lot I've heard a lot more people going like, yes,

I need to do that too, you know. Yeah, So I kind of want to know because I mean, what we're kind of building too is you've been you've been putting together a class for trans folks in Philly to go to to learn about how firearms function, the legality and legal concerns about being armed, and like the steps they might need to go to if they decide to do that themselves. Um, how does that idea kind of come together for you to actually like put this this

class together? Okay, well, um, I remember of the s R right, the Socialist Rifle Association, and they have classes they call Gundamentals and it's just sort of an uproad a review, um to sort of sort of every if you've never picked up a gun before, it's it will tell you, um, you know, it'll give you just information on you know, everything you need to to before you

use it. And um, I thought it would be a good idea to just have a trans just a class with just my trans friends, and they were of course open to it, and it went really well, and I planted more in the future. Yeah, um, so you kind of you're going through both sort of the basics of here's and this is kind of a thing I think about a lot. I recently carried out a class for I don't want to be too specific, but at risk

individuals in my local area. That was a mix of and I was not the one doing to stop the bleed portion, primarily we have people who are medical professionals. But it was a mix of a stop the bleed class and like a firearms familiarization class. And it was not from the perspective of like, hey, people need to be strapping up so here's how to get a gun.

But it was from the perspective of, hey, there's four million firearms in the United States, whether regardless of what you think about the legality, you should have a basic understanding of how they function and how to since you're all adults, render a weapon safe, right, So we did. We have these fake bullet snap caps, so I would explain how an a are and a handgun works, and then we would have everyone take turns, kind of like we had with the stop the bleed portion, you know,

where you teach people to use a tourniquet. Would everyone take turns arriving to the weapon, putting the weapon in their hands without like flagging everybody or putting their finger on the trigger and then dropping the magazine and clearing it. And a lot of folks the thing they expressed was like as people who didn't necessarily want to be armed

themselves felt like I was. I had never got I never knew how to, like asked to have this experience because normally, when you're in the room with a firearm, it's because like maybe you're gonna go shooting with somebody or something. So if you're not seeking out that experience to actually go to a range. It's kind of hard to sit with a gun and just understand the base because of how this thing functions and how to render

it safe. And so there were a lot of folks who particularly were like it seemed to be grateful for just that experience to kind of like reduce the mystery around it and gain kind of a functional understanding of just the mechanics. Yeah, it was. Yeah, the class was

really good. I haven't taken it before, but it's, um, you know, it shows like you went through like the the anatomy of football, at the anatomy of a gun, how it works, how to how to do it safely, how to you know, like the four rules of gun safety, um, legal things, and it was just it was really good course. Now, so you take this course, you know, you're you're in communication with these friends, you're dealing with like this constant drumbeat of attacks. Um, you decide it's time to put

together a course for people. How do you kind of work out what the syllabus is going to be for this? Um, well, if they're all they have the whole class set up already. I just sort of yeah, I had just had a version just for my transfriends. Yeah, so what what in like what did you kind of add to that or alter to that in order to like prepare it for this. Not much. I just it was just I just thought they would be more comfortable in a class with just us. Yeah,

I mean that makes sense. And it also do you think it helped that, Like this isn't because you know the Socialist Rifle Association. You're attending that class. You're kind of like attending a class put on by an organization that has being both armed and political kind of in its name, which maybe infers a little bit more commitment to something than the class kind of you put together on like a political level. Yeah, it's it's not as hardcore as as you might think from the name. It's

just it's mostly they have the gundamental class. They have to stoppable courses kind of you know this kind of thing, and I think they there's very discussions too. I haven't gone telling them. Yeah, and and so you've you put

this thing together. And the thing that you mentioned earlier when we were talking about this is kind of a discussion on like um like the the particularly legal concerns that trans people seeking to arm themselves might have in your area, and I wanted to talk to you a little bit about that because obviously, when we talk about gun legalities, it varies wildly from state to state. UM, So nothings that either of us say. And this should be construed as legal advice for what you should do

in your own area. You're gonna have to check that out yourself. But yeah, I'm interested in what you saw

is kind of worth putting in that. UM well, the I mean, the big addition to bring up is that if you're not UM, if you if you don't present as your assigned gender at birth, they could the person who's running the check could say that, hey, this person is coming to me in a disguise you know, UM, and you could UM in future if you're trying to get a gun in the future, that could be on your record and people could use that it's now you really I now, I had never heard about that, So

that's like an actual I mean obviously, like when you file the form four four seven three. One of the problems I know from just talking to friends that you encounter is that like if you're if your your gender does not match, like it's on your legal documents and stuff, you have to write what's on your legal documents on

the form because it's a government form. Um. Although the four four seven three, which is the background check form, does now allow you to put in non binary if that is, like, but you still have to have it on your legal documents. Um, And we're we're mostly used to that for everything else. But it's just the fact

that they could specifically target you. Yeah, I was actually unaware of that as a specific problem, like that you could be accused of like showing up in disguise to do what's called a straw purchase, you know, which is when you illegally buy a gun for somebody else. I didn't realize that was a Yeah, So we're there kind of other things to like keep in mind there, Like because I'm particularly I'm sure we have a lot of folks listening who are in this same headspace right now. Um,

because again, things aren't getting a lot less scary out there. Um. I mean I can say just within the last couple of years, probably around half of the people that I shoot with on a regular basis are trans just because like it's the of the you're the folks who are being kind of most directly targeted and have the least institutional support obviously, yea. And we have like people in Congress openly calling for our executions, and it's just, yes,

that's a feeling, you know. It's like, yeah, that's something I've ever experienced before. But it's like, yeah, you have like nationally famous politicians just saying like, yes, we need to kill every one of them, and it's like, good lord. Yeah.

And that's the thing, Like, you know, I think we talk a lot on the show when we do talk about being armed, and I've just talked a lot of my personal life about like sort of where what the left should be doing in terms of like a gun culture and like the kind of pitfalls that need to be avoided, because obviously the solution to like the discrepancy of arms in the left and the right in this country is not to recreate what the right wing has,

because what the right wing has is like vicious and insane. Yeah,

I mean it's it's bad. We don't we you don't want that, um but uh and and and so obviously, like one of the things that I tend to think of as as silly is like the the folks who are and I don't think this is a particularly large jump, but you do get people who are kind of look at being armed from like and then we're you know, um, this is so that we can you know, be the new red army insurgent type thing, which I think is a less realistic use case of firearms on the left

than the police are not going to protect our community. Um, there are a shipload of people with guns who hate us, and you know, honestly, like one of the when I think about, like, what are the threats that are realistic and what are the threats when we talk obviously this show that we're on the way, they're the way the way they're doing the you know, you have um like Tucker Carlson saying like, oh another week in buy mar and you know, making all these things and they they're

sort of like all these trans people. It's like someone should do something wink wink, Yeah exactly. And that's the when we're on a show right now that started out as me talking about, Hey, I think people who are I think the threat of massive civil conflict in the United States is higher than people guess, and that broadly speaking, is mainstream. Now there is a strong mainstream understand like

standing that some sort of civil conflict is possible. It's still when people talk about it primarily in the terms of like this big civil war type thing, which I think is broadly speaking, probably pretty silly. What's not silly is the breakdown of expectations of social morays and things like you can't show up in a big armed group and start killing people that you have on a list, who are are folks that you have decided because their

trans because whatever are are your enemy. And like one of the things that I'm kind of concerned we're going to see at some point in the future is a fucking mob gets spun up and go and take out some people on their list. And I'm not sure what that list is going to be, but you know, there's a couple of people who pay attention, there's a couple of broad possibilities as to who would be targeted. And then local law enforcements say, we're not going to choose

to do anything about this. We're not going to and again this hat I'm not coming up with this because this is like a bleak. I know you are well aware of this, but like, we had an abortion clinic burnt down earlier this year, and I think it was Kentucky and the police refused to investigate it, right, like this kind of ship already happens, you know. Um, yeah,

it was. For a while I was like, okay, well they're not really going to and then it's like then they started coming after our kids, and just like I almost didn't survive my adolescent so I know just how much pain those kids are in. And yeah, and then it's like okay, then they got rid of rovers way and it's like, okay, they're not They're not just posturing anymore. No, they're santastic. Final it's like, you know, hey, someone should do something was bad enough. But then it's like, okay,

they're really they're on a tear hair. So you're you're put together. This asked for folks who I'm going to guess most of them had not Number one, didn't have much experience with weapons firearms prior to this, and probably also had not prior to you know, the last year or two I thought that they would ever be someone

considering purchasing armaments. I mean, some of them said that you know, they grew up you know, in rural places and grew up with guns and stuff, but touched them since they were kids, So, right, you were there any kind of like specific questions that you got that you

you found were interesting or kind of like surprising. Like I'm kind of interested in sort of what sort of things people had to ask, not in particular, I think everyone was just sort of just trying to learn everything and just like that, Yeah, where there is there kind of a has there been sort of like, um, any

further discussions about like well what comes next? Right like after the sort of basic class of people decided to start purchasing like firearms, step two is like train in order to use them like functionally, right, Like it's not a kind of thing you can just have. Yeah, the next up, the next step from the group of friends that I have, Um, I'm planning to you know, go to a range with them, and I mean we have

to sort of find what ranges are most friendly. But yeah, so we're probably gonna do that and just see how it goes with everyone. I mean I know that where I am. One thing that people will do is you know, you'll you'll have folks who will kind of go out and be uh kind of a little guinea pigs for like, is this gun's store a friendly place like right, like is this a place we can go and buy weapons and not and and have people like respond, well, is

this range a friendly place? And then kind of will spread that to the rest of the community that like, hey, this is a safe place to shoot too, this is a safe place to buy Do you have you guys been kind of like setting stuff up like that or what No, not yet, but that's that is the next step, trying to figure it out. Yeah, and when it when it comes to like just organizing for the increasing hostility

that that people are facing. Um. Has it has it kind of pushed you to do anything more formal with like the communications groups you have in terms of like you know, I need I might need I'm going on a walk at night, I need somebody to be able to like call or something like that, I'm worried I'm being followed, Like is there Has this been the kind of thing that you've been like setting up more in the way of precautions around so much because most of us just live in the city and we're we're usually

pretty okay with that, um or we'll have you know, friends nearby, you know, well nothing so um formal? Yeah? UM, I mean, which is yeah, I think how most people kind of do it. Um, what do you sort of like watching out right now? Um? What is kind of I don't know the thing you're you like, like, do you have anything sort of on the horizon that you're sort of looking at as you know, if this happens, then I'm going to expect this to happen, and like maybe we need to do this time for some kind

of more formal plans. It's hard to say. I'm I've just been sort of just watching all of this horrible stuff unfold. Everything happens so fast. I mean, you know, like I said, I didn't think they're going to get rid of Row, So it was just I just I don't know what's coming next. Um, I'm just realizing it's

like it's so serious. It's actually getting to the point where I'm just sort of seeing myself just trying to make amends with people in my past, and it's like you just you just take a step back and look at yourself, like, oh wow, it really is getting bad that it's just subconsciously I'm just thinking I should make

peace with some of these people. That's pretty bleak. Um. I I'm struggling for like something more positive to say, um, which I'm not sure is that is kind of the right impulse, but it is sort of like we're all kind of like grappling for because one of the problems is that the scale of the threat, I think is or the reality of the threat is very clear to people, right, whether you're kind of a centrist dim and you just see like, oh, ship, there's actually like a lot of

like militia type folks with guns talking about a civil war and they almost took over Congress. This is a real threat. Or whether you're you know, a transperson or um, you know, an indigenous person or a migrant or something somebody who's you know, here in the country in a less than legal fashion and you're stay seeing like, oh, they're specific threats against groups people like me, and they're

being more organized and more att actually being carried out. Um, the reality of the threat is I think clear in differing degrees to everybody. What's not clear is the the scope in the shape of it. Right, So we know there's a lot of like armed right wing assholes talking about violent ship. We don't know is are they going to get their shipped together right, like enough to do something like unto what extent and in what areas right

that is? I think that you know, it's like the enemy is strong and weak at the same time, of course, but I think with us, really they really don't expect any resistance. And I think that if you know, if they start meeting resistance or're seeing us with that like, hey, we have shame rightful to you, do you know? Yeah, well, and I think that might you know, hold them off

a little bit at least. I think that's generally like a if you're kind of like, I don't know, uh, thinking about it from that from the perspective of like and kind of a soulless, like, uh, top down view of this is just a strategic thing, like what are the what are the best ways to oppose this kind

of like right wing and surgean force. Well, like obviously one of them is not to like hand them ground, right, like don't don't don't don't do the thing that you see a lot of people in the left doing, which is, oh,

they're coming for you know, trans people. Well that's not you know, you there's been a lot of like very ugly talk on certains of liberals and left of like well, you know, if we defend these people, that's going to be bad for us in an electoral sense, you know, and like, this isn't something that gets you votes in small exact exactly. Hillary Clinton just fucking came out and said this, right, and it's Um. I I feel like

I think historically as a bad strategy. You know, if you're just looking at what happened in history, obviously I think it's immoral. Um. And I also, yeah, I think that you are right in that the only reason that they're this scary right now is because for the better part of twenty years a little less than that, but

this really started to accelerate after Obama got elected. Every time the far right has like pushed for something and like made a stink or started making threats, people have backed off right and even outside of you know, threats specific communities, they were ship like the Mayac report, which is in like the mid of Obama's term, the Homeland Security put out a report warning about the growth of the domestic militia movement, and they like made a big

they flipped out about it, and we're like, look, they're saying that if you have a Gadsden flag, you're a domestic terrorist and all this stuff, and the bomb backed off and fired. All of the people in in the federal government who are like watching this ship. Um, which we can talk about the degree to which it's ever reasonable to hope that the Feds are going to do anything about this, but it's it's an example of this.

You get scared that opposing these people is going to be bad for you politically, and so you make a craven political decision to seed ground to them, and then they get more dangerous. Right the Democrats have just been

doing lately, I mean least several decades. Really, it's such like a mine field to talk about being armed and being armed responsibly in the context of twenty one century United States, because there's so much to juggle, including the fact that we have basically nearly weekly uh, massacres and stuff being committed by people who go and pick up a gun from you know, a sporting goods store whatever. Um. But fascists, yeah, and they're almost all fascists with the

history of violence towards women. Um. But it it is like I think, when we are talking about what it is, the actual importance on both an individual level of being the importance on an individual level of people who are in threatened communities being armed is that they cannot trust the police or the state to take any actions to protect them. And we see that because they get thrown under the fucking bus every time somebody comes from after her attack, that the place just sort of dismissed her.

They just sort of like, oh, you know, it was just you know, they like stender to her, just like just complete you know, dis interest, and yeah, and obviously like this is this is the thing you don't have to There's a bunch of numerous other stories of that. Um. And then on the other end of things, you have

like most of these people. One of the things as we have in our corners like scary as the insurgent, right, is as most of them are fucking cowards, and when they get opposed, when somebody shows up and throws down usually they fucking It's one thing if it's like a street fight, right, because people don't tend to get killed in street fights, and you can make a lot of money filming videos of it. When fucking when when people start pulling straps, you know, like it gets really different,

really fucking quickly. Um. And in general, we've seen in Portland. There have been a couple of these folks shot in defensive shootings, and it's part of why that's kind of stuff doesn't happen as much as it was in two thousand eighteen. Um, you saw that ship happen in Denver and it had an effect on the intensity of of rallies there. When these people are it would be irresponsible to say that it's like good when this happens, but when they suffer consequences for trying to hurt people, it

scares some of them. Classically, Yeah, if you stand up to them, they'll really yeah. Yeah, I don't know. I this is just kind of turned into us sort of talking about the ethics of community self defense. But I think it's something I think it's important to talk about.

And I think it's also important to kind of reclaim from this kind of masturbatory fantasy of becoming a minuteman or whatever, and also this masturbatory fantasy of like this is something this is a thing I do as like part of my identity, um, as opposed to like this is a thing that I do in order to defend my ability to continue to be who I am. Right, I'm not I'm not a radical. I just want to be alive, you know, and if I'm not, if I have to de transition, I will not want to be alive.

And that's that. Yeah, yeah, and yeah, Well did you have anything else you wanted to get into where we're talking to digestica? All right, Well, do you have anything you wanted to plug any place you wanted to kind of direct? Um? Well, there's yea all right, um, because that's uh. If someone wanted to at home, wanted to uh to do their own thing, the s R would

probably be great receptive. I'm sure there's other organizations. Um yeah, there's John Brown, gun clubs and stuff, and other organizations that don't have names. And on a personal level, I well, I I make bondage collars and paddles. It's called bondage Robot. It's any store. It's a Bondage hyphen robot dot com. Excellent do do? Yeah? Um so bondage robot dot com. Um check that out. You're also on Twitter? Do you

want to direct people? It's that's where I Yeah, Jessic Lashnikov just figured out you'll say it, all right, that is gonna be our episode for the day. Everybody uh, stay safe and um, you know, think about the ethics of community self defense. It's important. Oh boy, it could happen here, and it seems to be happening more after the last couple of days. This is a podcast about how everything's looking pretty bad these days. Um, and in

particular right now we're we're here. We've got the whole team, not the whole team. We've got the team here to do a round table discussion about the thing, you know, the thing, the thing that happened this last week that is still the main thing happening, which is the FBI rated former President Trump's house. Um, and now all of his fans are declaring war on the FBI, which has so far been let's all be honest here, pretty funny. Um. But everybody's also a lot there's a lot of worry

going on. There's a lot the some folks of documented if we'll talk about this, that like discussion online of civil war and civil conflict has like exploded to new heights over the last like four days or so. UM. So yeah, we're gonna talk about all of that. But but here's here's here's the team. We've got Garrison Davis, James Stout and we've got Christopher Wong and of course me, Sylvie.

How's everybody doing today? I'm doing great, magnificently. M Yeah, So where's where's where's everybody's new civil war counters at? Who here feels we're like we're we're closer and who he feels like we've gotten further away? Well, it's definitely gone up. It's definitely gone up a little bit. Um. Yeah, temperature is a little higher for sure. I mean we're still not really around the averages around J six, but it's it is, it's it's it's the highest it's been

around like the Biden administration. Um, yeah, I just made some ceramic armor purchases. Is where my when when my current civil war counter is at? Yes? I did just get another set of rifle plates, got some side prates, like you know, you know who had body armor is the guy who single handedly attacked that FBI field office in Ohio with a nail gun and then died in

a field. Okay, before we get into that, Ricky, she can we what the funk is going on with that guy who like lit himself on fire in his car and rammed into the capital barrier and like I forgot about that. Yeah, like that might adjust been a suicide because we don't seem to have any clear evidence that

it was political. It's just it's just like a really weird, like I don't know that that that's that's a kind of thing that feels like if it was happening five years ago, would have been like a major news story. And when I was trying to find new stories about it, so the first thing I did was, Okay, I googled a DC car attack and I found a different DC car attack. And then I go DC shooting and I found a different DC shooting, and like if we combining to do She's like, oh, this is We're living in

a great time. This isn't even the first, not even the first person to drive their car into a Capitol police barrier and then get out and start shooting, right like, this is this is the United States. It's just something we do here is incredible, approved marked the method. I mean, it just it does kind of seem like it was just a suicide, like that one was just that's what the Capitol Police are saying. It was twenty nine years old, didn't appear to be targeting any members of Congress fired

shots into the air before taking his own life. Um, no officers shot their weapons. It was very it was

very quick. Mm hmm. Okay, yeah, it is interesting because he is he is no Ricky Schiffer at that that the DC stories seeks the Shipper stories, Yes, much more funny having So this is obviously you have Donald Trump get rated by the FBI, and then less than two days later you have this guy show up outside of an FBI field office, try to force his way through or try to break through the bulletproof glass with a nail gun and then winds up in an hour's long

standoff before being shot to death by the FBI. Which is very funny because he so. I guess the thing about this that's unsettling. Um, that that colleague of ours, Jason Wilson pointed out on Twitter, and that I think is worth noting, is that while this kind of thing

is is extremely American and very common. Um, the thing that is kind of unsettling about shiff is that he's not he's he's just he's he's straight up normal maga right, Like he's not from any of the There's no evidence that he was kind of like dipping into these other subcultures that are more explicitly like terroristic in their Nameforceman says that he may have ties to Proud Boys, but yeah, well we'll see. He was at J six, you know,

so I'm sure. But I mean it's what it is, is a a guy who is a normal Trump supporter um u in the Yeah, I mean, I mean he was ultra to the extent of what he did a few days ago, and he was on true social and like he he was. Yeah, but I feel like that's not that a regular Like if you watch the most recent Jordan Clipper video, there's people doing like like regular asked people saying things that are way more absurdan than

what they were saying two years ago. Like the real reality has become so detached for a certain sect of like Trump lifers, and it's just impossible to pry them away to the point where they ineffectually attack an FBI office with an l gun, yeah, and die in a

shootout hours later. And and Shiffer, I mean, one of the things that you might compare a little bit to Shiffer is you know, there have been particularly during the Trump years, there were a couple of attacks on ice facilities UM that were kind of like acts of desperation from people who were politically radicalized by the things happening UM, but also felt like there was kind of no hope of of taking any sort of useful action other than

being an individual going out and attacking ice. And I think this is a lot more similar to that in terms of the headspace of the guy that it's similar to, for example, like the Nazis shooting up like an Al Paso fucking Walmart because they stopped by genocide, Like this is this is a guy who was like purely radicalized by mainstream conservative media UM and and the president's social

media network. He was directly radicalized by President Trump, as opposed to like finding Trump funny and then like winding up and some some funked up places online that radicalize him. And that is unsettling, even though it's again pretty funny what happened to him. UM. I think both of those things can be true, and I think we have to take joy in the times when individual maga dudes use

nailguns to try and attack the entire FBI. Really, he really thought that that you can use that that bulletproof glass can't be broken by bullets, but you can use nail guns to just really well. He thought that this gets to what the communities that he was kind of radicalized.

And he thought that because there's a lot of like normal gun YouTube videos where people will, like, because the thing on like gun YouTube is people will take different kinds of firearms or other weapons and different kinds of materials and see how the to interact together, right, Like, do what happens when you shoot a bullet at this? How hard it is it to get through bulletproof glass?

What are ways? And like he certainly figured that out because of because there are some specific videos people pointing out that are likely the ones he watched, where like there are ways that you can kind of damage and take the you can gradually like make bulletproof glass fail by using a nail Then there are ways in which you can do that. It just doesn't happen to be a way. It's something you can do while you are standing in front of an FBI field office without getting

shot to death by the FBI. Before before he before he died, he posted a few messages onto truth saying, well, I thought I had a way and I didn't. If you don't hear from me, It's true, I tried tacking the FBI, and and it'll mean I was either taken off the internet, the FBI got me, or they sent to the regular cops. To be fair to this guy, he did successfully manage to shoot a nail gun at the FBI office, and the FBI weren't the ones who killed him. Like he actually got away from that, which

is highway patrol, wasn't. Yeah. He also called for people to prepare themselves for combat in the days after the FBI search and that we must not tolerate this one along other posts around people urging to kill FBI agents on site and be ready to take down other active enemies of the people and those who try to prevent you from doing it. All all that kind of rhetoric.

And there's like, sorry, I like the on site thing, Like we all have this kind of joke about like people dressing like Feds, right, but it's very funny that he thinks that maybe they're coming out like men in black or something. Yeah, he's not going to be looking for like like Feds and Patagonia, which which is what

they actually wear of. Yes, Yeah, if you see if you see a Patagonia vest that is either a federal agent or an Amazon executive, and either way you should be frightened either way on site stand by just such a generous interpretation that they take him off the internet for the crime trying to shoot up an FBI office. They did, James, he's not online, although like kind of bluntly posting about the terroristic attack, you carry it out on the FBI like as you are actively dying, I know,

as he's doing it. You have to say, the man had the soul of a poster. He had the poster. Well. I think it's also like it's an interesting because this isn't like because like there's lots of like mass shooters who sort of who kind of have poster brain, right, but like this is like this isn't like like he's he's not doing it for the post just has poster brain.

It is like this is sort of like it is it is separate from someone doing a specific like memetic attack, like an attack to entice memetic violence in the future. This was just this was just his form of communication

as in his regular life. And it was and it was the Ohio State troopers that pursued the vehicle yeah, but I think that that at this point is something that's kind of bleak about this right, which is like the extent to which, like the extent to which the way this kind of politics functions is by having like you know, social media becomes your entire like social sphere to the point where it's like, well, what are you doing in your last moments is you're like running away

from the cops are about the shoot, was like, well we're gonna post, Yeah, gotta gotta sit down at truth. It's it's that scene from Love actually, but it's not true anymore, right where they're like talking about what people did at nine eleven when they were stuck in the towers and they like quote loved ones and told them they love them. Not this guy you have to do on true social this this guy, this guy didn't have

people Ricky schefferd no, um. I mean, so there is One of the things that people have been asking again is in the wake of this massive surge in the right wing people talking about how it's time to have a civil war. And one of the things you didn't see is like as soon as Trump got rated, fairly like mainstream mega figures who tend to be more careful in terms of their language than like the radicals talking

about like it's war. You know, now we're at war with a cold civil war, and most of them, like Stephen Crowder, we're doing it to sell T shirts. But that that's still that is an escalation in danger, right because with that the rhetoric that becomes common again, you're

gonna have more Ricky shippers. And I'm sure that was part of like what was going on in this guy's head is Okay, well, if we are in a cold civil war, then I'm not going to just sit back and let the FBI destroy the only hope for Western civilization. I've got to fight back. Yeah, that's that's that's what happened. And and if you're people are asking kind of like

what is about to happen? What is coming next? Um, I don't think the thing to worry about is like, you know, two sides taking up arms and suddenly fighting a big civil war. That is that is not I think the realistic threat model. But I also disagree with the folks who are like, look, it's just gonna it's it's not gonna be a problem. You're gonna get a couple of like lunatics, carriyat attacks. But it's all going

to be fine. Now. What is happening is, Um, we are normalizing the language of political violence and normalizing that violence is the only resolution to our political problems. And that has gotten normalized for roughly thirty percent of the voting population of this country. UM. That's that's where they are, and that is intensely dangerous. UM. It is not. I don't I don't think, and I think partly you could. There's it's not entirely bad stuff that's come out as

a result of Trump getting rated. Some of it is is positive because we are seeing that a significant number of like the media people are UM scared of that to a degree, UM and peeling back. There's an interesting thing that happened just today. The article came out that apparently Trump reached out to Merrick Garland and asked him how he could lower the temperature. UM. And it's it's interesting. It's it's Garland is who for the listeners, who doesn't

do not keep up with the attorney general? So the president of the FBI effectively, UM, that's not how politics works. But let's just say that and make the people online who pay attention to the way the government works, very angry. But so basically what it seems like Trump is doing is saying, hey, I recognize that, like things are bad and scary, and the political temperature is like at a boiling point. I want to try to use that as leverage to work things out with the d o J.

So you could see this as a complement. You can see it one as potentially Trump being just actually concerned about the rhetoric because they're shooting more would not be

a good thing for him. You could see it as Trump being kind of manipulative and trying to use like, oh, well, this is now the fact that my supporters are scary and carrying out terrorist attacks as a way in which I can utilize leverage and like um exercise power over the government, and and it's it's kind of a bargaining chip that I have in my fight with the FBI.

Or you could even see it as potentially evidence that he actually is scared of potential prosecution, because maybe this is him kind of that maybe this is a show of desperation. It's really unclear at the moment what it is. I can tell you I've read a couple of right wing. The New York Times is the one that broke this story, and they're they're reporting on it is pretty straightforward and mostly focuses on the uh like claims made by Trump's legal team about like, you know, how they attempted to

comply with the requests to bring in classified information. But um, the right wing media coverage of this has been really different and has shown it as like Trump is just sort of desperately, you know, trying to trying to be reasonable, and the you know, the Justice Department, um just isn't willing to talk to him. It isn't willing to work with them at all. And that's kind of the way

it's being spun right now. There was that pro Trump protest in d C, which got no one to show up because it was either canceled or a whole bunch of like forums or image boards or for blogs told people not to go because they thought it could be

a trap. And I think stuff like that happening in d C might still take a long time to recover after j six, But stuff that's happening in other capitals and other places and other now FBI offices is much more concerning, and I think more localized shows of support for President Trump or support for just whatever the current thing is is probably gonna it's gonna continue going with some image of militancy and right, whether that's people in

Hawaiian shirts showing up with guns outside the FBI office you've seen in Arizona just in the last couple of days, yeah,

literally yesterday. As you record this, um, when it comes to actual like, so, one of the reasons people have been concerned about out civil war stuff is and this is not unreasonable, is the fact that you have had Republican officials, including some state level elected officials, particularly in Florida, saying some pretty wild shit, um, including like a state congressional candidate talking about, um, we need to basically kick

the FBI out of the entire state. Governor de Santis needs to exercise uh like the basically saying that De Santis needs to use Florida state law enforcement to stop the FBI from investigating the former president and where that to happen, that would be a big deal, that would be um like, that is the kind of thing that could lead to a massive civil conflict, right because vaguely speaking stuff like that is what causes what started the actual shooting in the last Civil War is state saying

we are not recognizing the authority of the federal government. We're not doing a thing that the federal government tells us we have to UM, and this is some thing like there's a lot of support from MAGA folks for this.

Ben Collins Um, who does I think for NBC, was posting the other day UM a lot of like different Trump queue forum sort of posts where people are saying, hey, don jr Um, we know you lurk on the site, you should cross the rubicon and you know, somehow get to santist to use Florida law enforcement to attack the FBI. And there's some pretty gnarly stuff in those posts. Now, I don't think that that means there's actually I haven't

seen evidence that there's much political world for that. And in fact, one of the things people are saying is that it looks like there's a decent chance to Santis um cooperated and helped because just wants to be president, because the Santis wants to be president, that he's actually like on board with this because he wants to funk

over Trump. Ye. Now, that is scary, and that is I think a more realistic threat model than the idea that, um, the Santis might have the Florida State trooper start shooting against the sis as funny as it maybe to watch Florida law enforcement shoot at the FBI, that would be pretty funny, don't pretty funny? I know, I know. Um, I don't think the sand just will do that because De Santis really wants to be president, um, which is just another scary possibility, and that would want us to

be less funny to watch. Um. It's it's like, it's not great overall. It's a it's too great, it's too not great sets of choices here. Yeah. And I think if we're looking at like with the actual kind of mass civil threat is as opposed to De Santis declaring a secession or something and the Trump States trying to declare their independence. I think the actual threat is that this could damage Trump enough that he doesn't run into Santis. Maybe is and this is very unclear by the way

you look at the polling. It's extremely unclear as to whether or not to Santis would do better than Trump in a in a national election right now. Um, But some of the polling does suggest that even as unpopular as Biden is right now, um, he still has a sizeable lead over Trump in any headaway because that people

fucking hate Donald Trump. Right if you are not one of the people who was on the verge of attacking an FBI building right now, you don't like him, even if Biden has not done anything to help you, at least in your mind, um, you know, than than And so that that is kind of the bet that the

Santis is making. And I think what scares me most about the rhetoric we're seeing right now, less than the fact the idea that like Florida is going to declare war on the fucking d C government, is the threat that the rhetoric will stay at this heightened level and

you're already seeing. The thing that scares me more than talk about like we should succeed, is talk about like, well, when we're back in power, we're just going to send the FBI after everybody that is that we considered it to me, let's let's let's raid them all, you know. And that's the thing that scares me. And that's the thing that I think could actually lead to the high

It's loss of life. There's there's that part, and then obviously, like in terms of like bringing it back to what we to stuff we talked about on the show, a de Santist like presidency would be extremely hostile to queer people, way way, way more so than Trump um, and that would be varying on some very dangerous and very unshaky ground.

And I think in the short term too, there's there's another danger there, which is that like we see this kind of militancy from the right like spreading more and more into just the other campaigns that they're doing, and so you know, we start getting attacks of gender clinics, we start seeing more attacks and abortion clinics, and I think that's as possible. And I think also like another thing to be thinking about is looking what what happened

to where specifically around the anti lockdown stuff. You know, you just we just had a whole bunch of armed people like occupying capital buildings and it worked. It was it was incredibly effective. Right, Like there is like the the net result of that and the sort of like resulting political campaign from it is that like the entire Democratic Party has decided that it just doesn't like it's

not even gonna talk about COVID anymore. And like the CDC is just like pretending it doesn't exist, and so like like that that that strategy like that there's just the things again like that stuff was the actual policies like stuff like like like like vaccine mandates for teachers. It's like a sixty four percent approve of reading, right, Like the actual like everyone doesn't die from COVID policies

are popular. It's just that like this sort of you know, getting getting getting getting a bunch of guys with guns to go into a capital building and then yell about it is enough of a political threat that that they can they can force the Democrats to back down. And yeah, there's I think there's I think there's an anzero chance they start trying to do this other things I start trying to do this with like hey, if you're gonna have gender clinics in your state, we're going to start

occupying capitals again. And you could see the fact that and one of the things that is unclear that makes it hard to tell if so, it is unclear as to whether or not the Biden White House knew that this rate was happening, like and who knew. There are definitely reports that some staffers found out about it on fucking Twitter. I have to I have to assume that the president was aware of it, and like it was

probably hint that he to some extent pushed for it. Um. I would have trouble believing that he did not, because it's the FBI rating a former president, Right, The FBI has a lot of power. But I don't think that's a thing that the Feds just do because right, like I think, yeah, you have to have Garland on your side. And if Garland is, you know, directing this to some extent, and like I'm sure Biden is aware and that might be. And the idea rector that Trump appointed, Yeah, yeah, Chris

ray Um, who sucks. They I mean, obviously they all suck. Everybody involved in this sucks. There's a great post someone made right after the raid that says, look, I want to make it really clear, the FBI cannot do good things, but they can do funny things. And this is extremely funny. And I just like that specifically, some of the some of the crimes around key being classified documents and this specific FBI director are both things that either Trump signed

into into law or he appointed himself. Yeah, it is very funny. I have been talking to people who have had UH security clearances and understand some of that, and um, like the ship that they got from his house and those eleven boxes or whatever is the kind of thing that like does not get fucked with and the way that Trump would like fucked with it. Like it's I mean, the fact that the Espionage Act is in play is

pretty shocking. Um as is the fact that brand Paul is now calling for the Espionage Act to be dissolved, which like based absolutely incredibly based Randall. I mean, it is, yeah, it is, really, it is. Really it is a thing to watch everyone go like, you know, a defund FBI, abolish FBI just because power gets used against one person one's time, and you're like, oh, this power only exists to hurt minorities. Why is it being used to hurt me or someone who I who I look up to.

There's a discourse on the left right now that is like, should we be working with the right to defund the FBI or whatever? And here's the thing, in my opinion, no, you should not work with the right on any of this stuff because they don't want to get rid of the FBI. They want to take the weapon re empower that the FBI has and they want to like deploy it differently, but they still want that power to exist, right, Um,

So no, you can't work with them on that. However, if they start actually trying to remove the spion Age Act, then absolutely we should vote to remove the SPIO. That's that's fine. Like just like if they actually vote to reduce funding to federal law enforcement, that's fine. But that doesn't mean, like you you act as if they're legitimately

fighting against any of this stuff. But um, when it comes to so, I think that there's some potential evidence just the fact that this rate happened that shows that maybe there are folks in the Biden administration who understand the stakes of the fight and are taking it seriously. Because this is potential, I mean, and we'll see how it shakes out. It's all still too early to know if like anything more serious than his house being disrupted

is going to happen. But like, if they really throw down legally against Trump in this way to try to stop him from being able to hold office again and to try to actually punish him for his abuses of power, um, that's potentially a pretty smart move. If they have the stones, right, That's a big question is like are they going to

back down because the right starts threatening to shoot things up? So, like the scary thing potential here is that the right wing starts howling about how they're going to do a bunch of murders over this, and so the d o J backs off and the right is like, well, what if we just threatened to commit mass murder anytime something

we don't like happens, Maybe that's how we win politics. Now, the positive with this is that, like the way fascists succeed historically is because people who are not fascists are not really willing to fight them, and so the fascists go for it and everybody else backs off because they're scared of having a fight. Right, So if this shows that there's actually some teeth within the Democratic Party to throw down, that's potentially a sign that like they've started

to recognize where the stakes are. Um, that shouldn't be taken as too high of a possibility. I'm looking at a post from David froome Um, famed centrist idiot, who's talking about how he thinks of De Santis nomination represented a much better outcome for the whole country than a Trump return. Maybe you don't like his manner or record, but he's a recognizably normal US politician. Oh no, if defeated,

he'd go peacefully. Like first off, great, incredible that that's where we are right now that you're like, well, he's a fine He would be a fine candidate for the Republicans to run because he wouldn't try to overthrow the country if he lost. Number one, not certain about that, but number were two. Um, yikes. Again, if David fruit is saying something, he's wrong, right, that is that is the rule of the rule of David Frum. He's one of those kind of like thinkers in American politics or

whatever he's saying is not right. Yeah, And like in the Santis like right now, is like very openly like getting his people in position to take control of the Florida like to take control of Florida's like election procedures. Like he has this guy assault attorney general. It's like he's like very openly trying to do a what was the guy's name, help who rigged the election in Georgia a few years ago. Yeah, Yeah, he's like very obviously prepping to do that and it's like, I'm sure it'll

be fine. He seems like a normal enough guy. Yeah, well, free, I do want to just read before we close out. Read a few things that how how the FBI and how the DHS have been talking about the threats that they've been seeing, because how the kind of institutions of power talking about these same things is worth noting. Um. Yes, they released a memos saying that there are threats quote occurring primarily online and across multiple platforms, including social media sites,

web forms, video sharing platforms, and image boards. The FBI and DHS have observed an increase and violent threats post on social media against federal officials and facilities, including a threat to places so called dirty bomb in front of the FBI headquarters and issuing general calls for civil war and armed rebellion. Um. So yeah, they said that they're they're they're looking at their looking at threats through like

uh specifically and identifying proposed targets, tactics and weaponry. Um. And you know it goes it goes on to talk about the targeted for people in like the judicial system, law enforcement, government officials associated with the Palm Beach search, the targeting the federal judge who who who approved the search warrant UM, and the FBI has also observed the personal identifying information of possible targets of violence, such as

the home addresses and identification of family members, disseminated online as additional targets. So in terms of like what like the attack surfaces on these types of you know, image boards and social media sites. Uh even UM. But before before Schifferd did his attack, he posted when they come for you kill them being American not a steer, And I think other kind of things that could be at play and things that are worrying me as stuff develops.

Not they're worrying me, not because they're convincing. They're worrying me because they don't need to be convincing. UM. Deceptively edited photos and videos have gone viral across social media over the past week following the search UM. While guest hosting Tucker Carlson tonight on Fox News, Brian Clemide showed a fake image of the judge who signed off on this on the search warrant, sitting beside uh Is Glyssie and Maxwell. How do how do you say her name?

Jis Lane? Jis Lane? You know it's it's gilling gill Gillen Backwell, so you know, showing this, you know, quote unquote meme while not saying it's a meme, just showing the picture. On Friday, a fake video reporting to show another Fox host, Sean Hannity arguing with Florida Governor run De Sante's over the definition of what an FBI rate is. But that discussion never happened. This was spliced together footage

from years apart in different interview segments. Um hours after the video went viral on Twitter, the platform did play the manipulated media label, um uh and yeah, it's it's it's this kind of stuff that is going to be, you know, in terms of like you know, trying to prospect, trying to like prospect what the next few years could be, depending on who the who the president is, what types of like media is gonna be popular, How this is going to kind of impact the temperature politically and how

people take in information and how people are willing to turn information into action in terms of taking out of violence. How often these little small things are happening. Is it's it's this, It's could be the start of a of

a thing that becomes a much bigger problem very soon. Yeah. Um, I think maybe like in terms of the temperature rising, we should discuss just really briefly these other sort of um more or less baseless or sort of wildly off based conspiracies around law enforcement that we've seen on the right, like in the last few weeks. Um, we do we want to talk about those? Do we want to talk about those separately? I'm not sure what you're referring to.

So there's there's a couple of things that have happened that have sent like the right pretty sort of crazy in the last few weeks. One is the in the inflation reduction. There's there's this part where they say they're going to hire eighty seven thousand new I R S agents right, yes, Yes, A large part of that is replacing the massive amount of virus people who are about to retire. UM, and the rest of it is getting them back up to sort of where they were a

few years ago. It's not like they're going to actually hid three pandemic levels. Yeah. Yeah, so there are like seventy thousand I think half of them I supposed to retire in the next five years. They want to hire eighty seven thousand over the next ten years, so that will get them up like twenty thirty two to to

where they were in nineteen or whatever. So it's not what it's betrayed airs, but that combined I think with UM, the A t F visiting a guy's house, which I know Garrison and I saw memes about in him, this crazy little conservative newspaper that were that we came across when we're reporting on a story. UM and the A t F reclassifying some think as the things that are called A R pistols, which we probably don't need to explain an the saying that they're a workaround for federal

firearms or is that fair. Yeah, there's a bunch of different there's a bunch of kinds of guns that you're not supposed to be allowed to have without a special tax stamp, which is like a whole additional legal process in order to basically make sure that poor people can't

own certain types of specific firearms. And there's workarounds where things function the same way as those guns that are normally illegal, but they aren't technically that in the FBI or not in the A t F is about to crack down on some of that um and so yeah, yeah, at the sort of combination of these things has led a lot of figures on the right. You'll see it

in that thread. I think Rubbert shared it and I shared it of like these dozens of tiktoks talking about civil war that came out the day after Trump with raided.

They talk a lot about I R S raids and about people coming for their for their guns and their short barrowed rifles specifically, which I think is the combination of these things leading to this sort of again like it's if you misunderstand each of those three things completely, you get to the conclusion that the the I R S has hired eighty seven thousand arms shock troops and they're coming after a R pistol, which it's not true, but that narrative has definitely been sort of spread around.

And again it's not exactly decreasing the temperature, no, I mean just I think today Trump was on Fox News Digital and he said, people are so angry at what's taking place. Whatever we can do to help, because the temperature has to be brought down in the country. If it isn't, terrible, things are going to happen. The people of this the people of this country are not going to stand for another scam. So huh. I wonder what

he meant by that. Oh boy boy, Yeah, I guess like the others thing that I mean we kind of touched on. But I think it is important to understand is the extent to which like Trump is kind of a singular figure in his ability to actually get a

bunch of people to do a thing. And like I think that, like that that power I think is reduced sense, you know, I'm like he's like he's not president anymore, right, because it's reduced since j six, Yeah, since six, But like, you know, he still has the ability to mobilize, like ability to mobilize parts of the right that like you're sort of like weird neo Nazi guy like can't and he like you know, and like he he seems to be aware of this, and he seems to be aware that,

like you know, he can use he uses as a bargaining chip or uses to sort of like threaten people. But yeah, like that that's a real thing. Like it is a real thing that there's an incredibly large part of the country who like if Donald Trump told them to like go die for him a normity beach or

something like they probably would. Yeah. Yeah. The FBI and Dachs in their moment, also warrant that midterm elections in November could be seen as an additional flashpoint in which will continue to escalate threats against perceived ideological opponents, including federal lawenforce and personnel. So stay tuned. Yeah, it should if people I haven't realized. By the way, it was bright Bot who named the FBI agents obtained a warrant.

Ye didn't bother to google what their jobs were. They were like what is what is the sacronym stand for? No one knows. It's very secret pop journalism there. Yeah, well good, we seem to be in a nice place then mm hmm. It's going well yeah yeah, start organizing now. The best time to start this was yesterday. The second best time is now, the third best time is tomorrow. And don't don't let them take how funny this is

as well? There is an a lessons here, which is that like, there is an enormous amount you can get away with politically as long as it's funny. And like, frankly, we we we have we have not been utilizing that towards the potential the left end, like anarchists in general, have forgotten how to do good funny ship for the past ten years, and we have to bring it back. Yeah, it is. This is We've been given a precious gift

and how funny this is. And we have a couple of responsibilities, and one of them, of course, is to organize in order to be prepared to counter increasing like attempts to impose an authoritarian violence on us. But another thing that it is response that we have a responsibility to do is laugh at how funny this is and make sure that other people don't forget how funny this is.

So go out into the world and remind somebody that a fucking trump nerd tried to take on the FBI with a nail gun in an a R fifteen and died in a fucking field in Ohio. Because that's pretty funny. It's pretty funny. Welcome, that's what could happen here. I'm Andrew of the YouTube channel Andreism, and I'm here with Oh it's me, it's Christopher. Yeah, we're doing what we're doing another episode of Bead and Andrew. We've sees the

pod once again. It is too early in the morning for anyone else to be here, which gives us ultimate power. But you early in the morning, by the way, it's it's eleven Pacific time. But yeah, there's there. There is no prayer of anyone else being around for this. So we are now in control here. Ha ha ha. Yes, we good. We're We're doing We're We're doing the Maniacal Lives. We're doing the podcast. We're doing the podcast. Welcome, Welcome. We want to finish the story, the soldiers story that

is Quasi Bo Lagoon's life and legacy. UM. When we last left off as part of the New York's City Panther twenty one trials, Kuasi was put in jail um.

At the same time, he was also developing his political UM identity in a way and recognizing some of the issues he was having with the Black Panther Party and particularly after the East Coast West Coast split that I could Quasi as we as we covered last time, was born Donald Reams, but took on the identity of Quasi Po Lagoon due to his recognition of his African nous

of himself Um through his experience in the army. Through his experience in London, connecting with the black diaspora and through his connections with the Uruba Temple and so Blagoon alongside that that personal recognition and political recognition of his antitheater in politics, also comes to see himself as someone who is at war with the state, and as such, once in jail, he sees himself as a political prisoner,

as a prisoner of war. While in prison, the Panther twenty one were incarcerated in a variety of jails in different boroughs of New York City, but by Lagoon, Blumon, Busheker, and another defendant, Kinshasa, they were all incarcerated the Queen's Housed attention and they organize an uprising that took seven hostages, including a captain, five correctional officers, and a black cook,

pulling them from October one to fifth nine. The slogan of the multi ethnic takeover, which by the way, it's pretty unheard of in prisons where black, Latino and white inmates come together. Um their slogan was all power to the people, free all oppressed people, and so their primary demand was for speedier trials, and in this process Balgoon, again developing his antithrogarian politics solely you know, crewing towards

what he would come to define himself as. Decided not to play a vanguard rule in this decision making process in this uprising, even before he formally declared his commitment to anti authoritarian politics, his primary concern was consensus for all inmates and decision making, including access to food being brought from the outside, and so that sort of consensus

process also helped build his identity. The prisoners, they formed committees to coordinate their uprisings and they agreed to release two hostages, the black cook and one of the prison guards as a sign of good faith. Eventually they had to release all of the hostages, and they also suffered abuse and charges from the uprising. It was sort of a failure, but of course he didn't see that way.

While he was disappointed by the outcome, he believed that the power the inmates felt by holding the state to be for that you know, limited moment was a valuable experience. It was a learning experience as an organizing So the uprising as growing pains to those who believe that oppressed people would rise up and seek justice, because we can see that even with losses their lessons to be learned. And this isn't unique to just this one moment in history.

In fact, we can apply it to more recent events, such as with the George Floyd uprising. It's easy to be nihilistic. Nihilistic probably isn't best used to say cynical and say that, oh, well, the uprisings Ophelia, millions of people got up and protested and nothing came out. It's of it, really, And yet that, in combination with the coronavirus pandemic, brought people together two establish programs of mutual aid, to get involved in organizations in their local situation, to

connect with people, to radicalize themselves and radicalize others. It was not a loss, you know. Yeah, I mean, I think there's there's an extent to which, even if it's extremely hard to tell in the moment, there's there's this way in which like participating something like that just sort of permanently changes you. And and main thing I think also in the sort of context of the prison uprisings, right like this is like this is by no means like the last prison of pricing that's going to happen

in this era. And so I think, like I don't know, it seems like one of those moments where it's like in the moment, it's like, oh, we failed. Things look bad, but like when in this sort of like broader historical sweep, it's like, no, this was like an early uprising in a period that is going to be sort of like an early yeah. Yeah, And I think that's something that can be really hard to like, like, especially in the moment.

It can be really hard to sort of like see that because it's really easy to sort of like look narrowly at what you're one struggle is doing and then you know, but yeah, if you have this sort of like you know, if if you have the ability to sort of like see back through history, you can watch how stuff like this just sort of like has this massive effect on consciousness in a way that the people in it even have a lot of a hard time seeing. Yeah.

So that's why, like I'm emphasizing the first part, it's really important to develop this perspective and to study our history, you know, a radical history, so we could learn, um, we could both you know, put things into focus into the perspective and also look at the specifics of all

things played out. So after Bagoon's experience in the Panther Party and the oppression of the New York Chapter, he realized that the party was being turned away from its grassroots organizing of the black masses and the issues that affect the most, the daily survival, the housing, the education, police abuse. You realize the state was using it's in coostural system as a tactic by rounding up these organizers, by infiltrating the party, by charging people these high bills

and such. It turned the party focus away from liberation to fundraies and for legal defense. And so he realized he could not continue the fight, could not continue on this front, that he needed to survive and contribute underground to build a Black liberation army as a clandestine freedom fighter.

As a miracle from the previous episode, Balgoon was severed from the case of thirteen of those who have been arrested originally to face charges in New Jersey, and after the acquittal of most of his comrades, Balagun Queen pleaded guilty to the charge that he, an unidentified person, did attempt to shoot police officers, making him the only one of the twenty one original defendants to be convicted However, in September twelve nine three, Balagon would escape from the

New Jersey's Railway prison, shortly after his conviction for arm robbery in New Jersey. And then eight months after his escape, on May fifth, he was again captured trying to assist a fellow Panther Party member and defend done Richard Harris from escaping custody. They were both apprehended after being wounded in a gun battle with correctional and police officers. And so what I find interesting about that he risked being recaptured so he could free Harris. And that's solidarity right there.

He was so willing to sacrifice himself to help his comrades. That's admirable levels of commitment. And even though he was imprisoned and was disillusion with the Panther Party and that discourages involvement or commitment to revolution. While incostrate, he began to explore anarchist politics. He received and studied literature from solidarity groups like the Anarchist Black Cross, which is an anti authority and organization that provides material and legal supports

political prisoners. And I and I was reading this, I recognized that name Anarchist Black Cross the ABC. I know that because they also helped Lorenz combo Van to be released from jail. They all provided him materials when he was incarcerated, and so kudos to them for that, you know, helping to connect these people and connect these ideas. Yeah.

And then in the Interos Black Cross, if I'm remembering my history right, like has a really really long history of doing this, going back to like I mean, I I know, I know they were negotiating like the releases of like political prisoners in the Bolsheviks went down. I didn't know they went that about that fount Yeah, I'm pretty sure. Yeah, if I'm if I'm remembering, And that just goes to show you might not see yourself as

doing anything that meaningful. Well, I'm just sending books to prisoners. In reality, your building foundations, you and you know, the people who you influence can go on to influence so many more, so many others. So anarchism ended up providing Balagoon with a great analytical lens to star up his critique of his experiences in the Panther Party. When he looked at you know the works of like Emma Goldman and others and apply them to the Black liberations struggle.

He began to ask questions about how his comrades to going about revolution. How by allowing these hierarchies to develop in their organizations, they weakened their resolve in their fights and capacity. It's like, as he says, um the cauldrire accepted their command regardless of what their intellect had or had not made clear to them. The true democratic process, which they were willing to die for for the sake

of their children, they would not claim for themselves. And so what Balagud wanted was a democratic process that would be established from today, not that you would have a sitting system now and then you would wait until after the revolution to set up a different system. It's like that whole connection of means and ends that you know anarchists keep going on about. He realized that the neediest democratic process to unleash the revolutionary potentially masses and not

make them pray to new oppressors. The only way to make a dictatorship of the proletariat is to elevate everyone to defleet all the advantages of power, and already an anarchist revolution has that on this agenda, one of his inspirations was a fellow clandestine freedom fighter, that being Italian anarchists Eric Mala Testa, who exhorted that revolutionary struggle consists

more of deeds than roods. You had a lot of different political figures and radical anarchists, but especially those involved in insurrection, especially those like Errico Manchester, who's also one of my personal favorites. When reading that, I found that to be a fun connection. Yeah he's so cool. Yeah, yeah, he really is. I see why why Zoe Baker likes

him so much. Yeah. Another influence of his first Spanish revolutionary, Jose Rutimage, organized the anarchist grilling movement Los Gesterros the avenger Once like their names Cereus, we're thought to be involved in political assassinations against you know, repression and driller

raids on the military forces of the Spanish dictatorship. So people like Italian exiles Severan Severino di Giovanni and other anarchists like Sacco and Vincenti So Di Giovanni was known for his campaign of bombing as armed propaganda and soldarity with executed anarchists Sacco and Vancetti, and Giovanni engaged in ex appropriation of capitalist institutions, as a means of supporting the revolutionary movement and keep that point point in mind

expropriation of capitalist institutions. To quote Mickey most, it's a surprise, too little help us later, all right. Another influence was, of course, I'm a Goldman, who was another advocate of revolutionary armed struggle, who supported her comrade Alexander Berkman's assassinated wealthy industrialist who believed in free love, which really resonated

with Ballagoon. Because I'm not sure if I mentioned it in the previous part or not, but Ballagoon was an openly bisexual man in the nineteen seventies, nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies, and so that equipment of free love that Emma Goldman had really resonates with him. Balagun also recognized and continues to recognize, that black people in the United States were an into colony of the US, and so the Black liberation struggled as a national liberation movement, so

began to identify with the New African independence movement. The Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa the PGRNA, was founded in nineteen sixty eight March nineteen sixty eight at a conference of five hundred Black nationalists who declared that independence from the US and demanded five states in the Deep South South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana as reparations for the enslavement and racial oppression of black people.

New Africa was designated the name of this new free nation, and at this time Balagun began to ideologically unite the political objective of the PGRNA for Independence um and and took on New African as his national identity. As he says, the US has no right to confine in New African people to read lined reservations, and we have a right to live on our own terms, on our common land, and to govern ourselves free of occupational forces such as the police, national Guard or gis that have invaded our

colonies from time to time. We have a right to control our own economy, print our own money, trade and other nations trade with other nations. We have a right to control our education institutions and systems where children will not be indoctrinated by aliens to suffer the destructive designs

of the US government. His position for black self determination was also combined with an anti capitalist perspective, the New Africans would enter workforce within our excluded by design, and we have the wages are not controlled by the ruling class and their wealth. And so I think this distinct self expression is very important because it was a key aspect of his political journey and how he saw himself.

UM the AFROC futurest Abolitionists to the Americas, which is a black an archaic radical collective based in the US. UM they coined the term I believe Black an archaic radical in order to group and account for the different an archaic identity is that that black people have have identified us. So you have Anakata's, you have Black anarchists, you have New African anarchists, and then people who just go by bars and so at this time I think

UM as a New African anarchist. Blaguna was definitely ideologically set apart from the black Marxist Leninists and revolutionary nationalists of the time, who wants to see state power for the from the white power structure of the US. And he still desired, you know, a land for black people to achieve self determination. Even as an anarchist, you wanted a space for black people to build a society based on antithoritarianism and freedom. I believe he was really unique

at that time and not for God. Like other bars. He also recognized the importance of national liberation. Like Ashanti Alliston, he began to recruit soldiers for the Black Liberation Army

and converts of anti authoritarian a New African politics. While in Trenton State Prison and New Jersey, he formed a political study group with Black Liberation Army members and Black Panther Party members and started to shift their perspectives on antithithoritarian politics and so that political education behind bars became the main vehicle of recruitment into the b l A. Another member of the b l A was a jury until another fairly, I would say somewhat obscure. We're still

like conic black anarchists. And when he was providing his testimony concerning Blagoon's influence and his transition from Marxist Leninism to anti authoritarian thinking, he said, I became disillusioned with Marxism and became an anarchist thanks to Quasi bo Lagoon. Due to the inactiveness and ineffectiveness is Marxist Leninism in community in our communities along with the repressive bureaucracy that

came with it. People are not going to commit themselves to a life and death struggle just because of grand ideas someone might have fluts around their heads. A few people commit themselves to a struggle if they can see progress being made, similar to the progress of anarchist collectors in Spain during the era of the Fascists. Like his teacher and comrade Jor Lutalo identified himself as a New

African anarchist. Prison of war, Balagon would escape again from Railway State Prison, New Jersey and Maine and rejoined a clandestine network of the l A Soldiers in alliance with white radicals in solarities of Black Liberation movement. This ideologically diverse network of insurgent militants were known as the revolution Armed Task Force or r A t F. And so it's a strategic alliance under leadership of the Black Liberation Army that consists of people of all sorts of different identities.

You had Muslims and revolutionary nationalists and anti imperialists and communists, and b. Lagoon was one of the few, if not the only, anarchists in this whole organization and so even though he was critical of Marxism and nationalism, he decided to join the comrades he loved and trusted in a common front against white supremacy, capitalism and imperialism. Me personally, um, and I have a video of my YouTube channel about it.

I am not a left unity advocate, never have been. However, like I said in the video, um, you know there's still solidarity to be had on some topics, and sidness use and an important aspect, an important component of solidarity. His trust and to Bilagon clearly had trust in these comrades in order to work with them. You know, it can't just be this broad sweeping thing and say, oh, well's unity solidarity, unity solidarity, and there's nothing to back

it up. There's new sort of connections or bonds to show for it. And of course he did have you know, political friction while in the R T R A T F his comrades. He saw his commerades is a bit rigid,

a bit too rigid in their views. While he considered himself a free spirit and his comrades, despite the ideological differences and its sexual orientation, still respected him because of his commitment revolutionary struggle, because his history of sacrifices, and so the Black Liberation Army and the r A t F continue to carry out the condis signed work of armed propaganda, of expropriations of resources for capitalists, financial institutions

for assisting comrades, and escape and from incarceration. At this time, there was an increase in white supremacist parlam military activity, including the goo klux Klan, including the KKK, and so the r A t F as an alliance helped to the whites in that organization, helped to gather intelligence on these right wing white terms its activities and their connections

with the U. S. Military. While they also engaged in expropriations to obtain resources, they could build a capacity to resist the white supremacist groups because these vold acts that the KKK and these other riping groups are doing in the late Land in seventies in early nineties, they were murdering black children, black youth in Atlanta, black women in Boston and an Alabama, and so they were committed and organized and doing something about it. Militant commit month to

doing something about it. The r t F also um we're involved with the escape of a Stata Shaker one of the most iconic of the Panthers and also the

attempted Brings expropriation in Nyack, New York. Shaker was wounded and paralyzed from a shootout that they had with the New Jersey State Troopers and had to escape the scene, and as a someone considered the soul of the b l A by the FBI, her capture was seen as a very significant event, and even though she never fired a gun, even though she was paralyzed, she was convicted for the murder of two state troopers who were killed in the shootout, and so she was sentenced to life

plus sixty five years. However, odinga Blagoon and two White Allies as a armed group facility the escape of Shaker from Clinton Correctional Institution Wooman in New Jersey on November two, n and I believe she's still in Cuba to this day.

At the same time, the Vactorbriation Army was also trying to expropriate one point six a million dollars from a Brinx armed truck in New York City in October, and in the exchange of fire that resulted from that attempt, one Brings security and two police officers were killed and three white radicals and one black man we're also captured eventually, although he was laying loo in New York City in the Manhattan apartment, the Joint Terrorist Task Force did eventually

apprehend Baldagoon and so once again he found himself in prison. But they did managed to successfully expropriate some fronts from financial institutions going back to nine and those funds that they were able to take were usually as to support the development of an underground infrastructure, to support families to political prisoners, to support political activities institutions for the Black liberation movement and general freedom struggles on the African continent,

that is solidarity. After his capture as a New African anarchist prisoner of war for the the Good Time who as he spoke out to the movement for the first time again identify himself as a New African anarchist, he spoke to the public about his politics and I wanted to make his attentions clear. He acted as his own attorney in the Rockland County trial where he was charged with the armed robbery and the murders of the brins

Garden police officers. And so you want to make an opening statement, and so it went as follows, I am a prisoner of war. I retract the crap about me being a defendant, and I don't recognize legitimacy of this court. The term defendant applies to someone involved in a criminal matter. It is clear that I've been a part of the Black liberation movement all of my adult life, and I've been involved in a war against the American imperialist You know,

it's a free New African people from its yoke. He wanted it acknowledged that his armed actions are politically motivated to win national liberation, to eliminate capitalism, imperialism and ultimately authoritarian forms of government. And of course he was sentenced to life imprisonments. Yeah. He continued to speak to New African and Black liberation forces and two anarchists gathering through

public skate statements. He advocated continuously for the building of an insurgent movement of building over tournaments communities at a hall and rally for imprison New African freedom writers. The statement was read that we must build a revolutionary political

platform and a universal network of survival programs. In another statement, he said, where we live and work, we must organize on the ground level the landlords once we contested through round strikes, and rather than develop strategies to pay rent, we should develop strategies to take the buildings, set up communes and abandoned buildings to vacant lots into gardens. When our children grow out of clothes, we should have places we can take them, clearly marked anarchists clothing exchanges. We

must learn construction and waste take back our lives. He wanted to challenge people to move from a theory into practice, to define in anarchy in the real will, to show the masses models of delivering water oppressors and of building a better way of life. Unfortunately, although he struggled long in prison and continuously advocated for the Black liberation movement for the anarchist movement, he died in prison on December

thwote due to complications related to AIDS. So, although he's not a main extreme discourse, he's still recognized and respected in some blaque New African anarchists and queer anarchist spaces um because of his efforts in that time, because of his self identity in that time. I spoke about him briefly in my video and Black anarchism. The research five

videos how it is covered in the first place. And I was surprised that he wasn't spoken about so much, considering his influence and his efforts and his She was almost like, and I hate to do this to history, to do this kind of great man things history. But the fan was like a main character. Yeah, Like he was there for the New York Plant, the twenty one Trials, he was like dropping rats and Congress. He was facility in the escape of a Sata sacre for crying out loud.

He did so much in his short boost of freedom. Um, and I can't help but respect that he stood out most places he went, and I can't help but admire that. In two thousand five, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, which is a new African activist organization, declared its annual Black Orcus Celebration dedicated to Quasi par Lagoon, and they in that celebration they also iighlighted the needful awareness of the

AIDS virus and Africa and among the African aspiral. A couple of radical hip hop artists, such as Dead Prayers Inside Malik, have also mentioned bo Lagoon's name, but his name is still not commonly used enough, not as much as other Black revolutionaries like Hue and Shaker and Mutulu Shaker. Anarchist collectives have also recognized him, have republished his works um have you know, but his his his writings and newsletters and his trial statements and tributes, and yet he's

still not well recognized. The Quebec collective Solarity is you have collected works of Lagoon's trial statements, essays, poetry and acknowledgements from Comrades titled A Soldier's Story, which you can find on the Anarchist Library, And in fact, that soldiers story is where I drew from for uh the script

for this two part podcast episode. I think that his efforts and not even to mention his actual identity, being a vehicle to challenge homophobia within the broader black liberation movement, because he showed himself to be committed to the cause and he exposed people who may not have otherwise been exposed to it, you know, the validity and the humanity in Aquare Comrades. He will forever remain remembered and saluted

by certain revolutionary nationalists around cilanarchists and qualiberation forces. He will forever be seen to me as an iconic roun and I don't only who hope that this podcast helps his legacy to live on and encourages and motivates and strengthens the resolve of people too, Wogan and suppressed people to build a revolutionary program to challenge capitalism, to challenge racism, wherever they find themselves the master their circumstances. And that's

about it. This has been a soldier's story, the life and legacy of Quasi Ba Lagoon. I'm your guest toes for this episode. If it could happen here Andrew of the YouTube channel Andreism. You can find your on YouTube dot com slash Andurism, on theatre dot com Slash sat Drew and onter com slash Underscore. Same true. Yeah, this this has been It can happen here. You can find us that happened here, pot on Twitter, Instagram, there's other

close and stuff you can find that too. And yeah, I dedicate your life to over throwing capitalism and imperialism. Well power to all the people. It's it's it's it could happen here the podcast. The thing that's happening here is that once again, like a bunch of random American politicians are going in Taiwan, and this time they didn't announced they were going, apparently because announcing they were going

last time went great. So yeah, this is this is, this is what we're talking about today, and with with me is James. Hello, James, how you How you doing all right? I'm wonderful and I'm splendid. Oh okay, So we have to talk about Taiwan. And I think like people who've listened to me on this show for a while know that, like, so like, okay, a lot of my family some Taiwan I don't like talking about Taiwan

very much. Um I I think I've talked about Taiwanese politics and detail exactly once on this show when I was forced to for the Iguana Woods shooting, and like, I would really prefer not to, Like, it's not something I particularly enjoy talking about, which is you know, a big part about what we haven't, But unfortunately I can't continue not to talk about it because the American left, and and this is true of not just the American institutes, the British sloft, this is true of the left kind

of writ large is being systematically lied to about Taiwan by a group of incredibly malicious nationalists who are attempting to rally support for their like incredibly violent and bizarre

imperial delusions, and unfortunately it's working. So I'm and instead of that, I'm going to give what I'm gonna call Taiwan one oh one, and I'm calling it tai Wan one on one, even though this is going to be like an hour long, because this is as far as I could cut this whole thing down, Like, Taiwanese politics is genuinely complicated, as part of the reason I don't like talking about at it and at people who are giving you simple answers to what's happening in Taiwan are

lying to you. This is the best I can do, and it this is this is like the length of a Battels episode. So nice, I'm excited. Yeah, So well, welcome to tai Won one on one. Um. The beginning of Tie one one on one is that Taiwan is a series of islands off the coast of China. And yes, there are a bunch of islands. Nobody talks about this like because again, the people who talk about Taiwan like couldn't find their own ass on a map, so you know,

there there, there, there's a bunch of islands. There's one big one that there's several like a lot of smaller ones. Um. Now, one of the sort of fundamental principles of not just being on the left, but like being a decent person

is self determination. And you know, self determination on on a very basic level is that people have the right to choose how they want to live, and in a more immediate political context, they have the right to choose how they want to organize their governments and who they do and don't want to be ruled by. So okay, well,

what are the actual numbers in Taiwan? Say, well, okay, we we we have recent pulling from the National Chung Chi University's elect Election Studies Center which says that a grand total of six point six percent of Taiwan's population wants unification with China. The overwhelming majority of people in Taiwan eight want to just maintain the status quo, which, yeah, I guess I said. So the status quo right now is that like China claims that it is the sole

legitimate government of Taiwan. UM, Taiwan like technically legally claims that they are the sole legitimate government China. Nobody actually believes that anymore. Like, if if you scoured the entirety of Taiwan, you might find six dudes in a bunker who still believe that, like they're the real government of Tchina. Like, the actual status quo is that Taiwan is basically de fact is like this, Taiwan is de factoway self governing policy that has elections and stuff, And yeah, everyone gets

incredibly mad about this. Most people want to preserve the status quo. Um inside of the people who want to maintain the status quo, you have, you know, it's like like basically for for three different options. Basically, so there's very similar numbers of people who either want to like decide the formal status of Taiwan, like is an independent country as a part of China that if you want to kick it down the road. Some of them want to keep the status quo indefinitely, and some of them

want to move towards full independence like later on. But overwhelmingly what people want in Taiwan is for nothing to happen. Now, if this were a saying in rational world, that would be the end of the episode, right, Taiwan doesn't want to be ruled by China, Like okay, well that's okay, that's the right, they have the right self determination. That's it,

case closed, end of story. It literally doesn't matter what the Chinese government thinks about whether it's should control Taiwan because again, Taiwan doesn't want to be rolled by China. And because a British person, I maybe I maybe you

ought to like not contribute further to that discussion. Yeah, you know, I mean, and I mean, you know, there's there's there's this whole thing that exists right where when when you when you force your role on another population, it is called imperialism considered to be bad and anyway and everything is it's still bad even if everyone inside

the imperial power thinks that it's good. Like if every person in the US suddenly decided tomorrow but they wanted to invade Cuba, like, it wouldn't make it morally right because people in Cuba don't want to people by the US, which we've done before. But it's true. Yeah, this is partially why I picked Cuba as example, because we really we did this, We we really did like kill an enormous number of people trying did yeah, based on both ship that people made up and portrayed as news, that

was the best speculation. Yeah. But you know, as we can tell by the fact that the U. S Has invaded Cuba, we do not live in a saying irrational. We live in hell. And this means that I have a talk about a bunch of just absolutely bullshit arguments that a bunch of nationalist dip ships made up justify imperialism. So all right, this is where we start going into Taiwanese history. Um So, the starting point of any actual history of Taiwan that's worth a single ship is Taiwan's

indigenous population. And it is incredibly important to understand from the outset. The indigenous population of Taiwan is not Chinese. They are not ethnically Chinese, they are not linguistically Chinese, they are not culturally Chinese. They are not any of these things. But literally any definition of the word Chinese, you can imagine they are not Chinese. Um this, this population,

this indigenous population is austron Nesian. It's it's an Austronesian people are population stretches basically from like it's it's an enormous screw of people across specific stretches from like Madagascar all the way to like Hawaii, and that that that those are the people who who who who live on Taiwan and have lived on Taiwan for six thousand years.

And you know, if if you read like CCP accounts of Taiwanese history, right, you'll see them they they won't talk about the fact that there again there's been an indigenous population that has lived in Taiwan for six thousand years. Um, what you'll see references to you are like in like the Suiti and like Sung dynasties, people like sent troops to Taiwan, and then the people will be like, oh yeah, no they they they they they governed Taiwan and they ruled it. It was a part of China and like

ancient times, like this is all bullshit. Like basically what would happen is periodically, every like a few hundred years, some Chinese leader would be like we should send some people to that island and they went there and we're like this sucks, and they all left, but you know, yeah, and and and and you know, like okay, so like these guys they're like okay, this thing, this thing sucks.

They leave and the indigenous population continues going like you know, goes back to dude, like their normal thing, right, Like this is the the the actual history of who has controlled Taiwan for almost this entire history is that it was controlled by sutigenous population. But in in sixteen twenty four, colonial powers start getting more involved and the Dutch sees control of Taiwan. Well, okay, so the Dutch taking most

of Taiwan. There's a part of Taiwan in the north that's ruled about the Spanish, and they do like a bunch of just like horrible, like unspeakable crimes to the indigenous population before they ran out by like basically like

a fragment of the dying like Chinese Ming dynasty. And so yeah, so in two this guy whose name okay, so, she has like a name that he's known by in the West that I genuinely have no idea how to pronounce, because this the name that he's known by in the West, I think is a Dutch translation of his title and not like his name his baffling I okay, Like, I think the Mandarin version of his title is something like shingy h. The Dutch somehow turned that into what I'm

going to interpret as coachinga like it's baffling, it's a make any sense. Their transliteration is is nonsense. But yeah, So there's this guy. You'll you'll see you'll see his name written as like coaching u um, and he's described alternately as sort of like you know, You'll see some descriptions of him, which will be like he is a loyalist ming general um and that's kind of true, like sort of. You will also see descriptions of him that call him a pirate warlord, which is like also true.

And you will also see nationalists like Chinese nationalist celebrate him as like an anti colonial hero and call him like running out the Dutchess like the liberation of Taiwan and like that's not true, um, like, which this is not true, Like I've I've I've seen people like from Taiwan like who do stuff with the digenospopulation like I've I've seen them call I've seen them call him by

Taiwan's Christopher Columbus. So this is how this is going. Um. Wait, so we're saying that changing from one colonial power to another it is not liberation. No, it turns out and fascinating. Yeah, you can tell it's not that not liberation because you know, like a lot of people like actually, like you know, do believe that, like, hey, it's gonna be less bad for us under this guy than it is going to be on for the Dutch. It is kind of less bad.

Like there are a bunch of indigenous people who go who fight with uh coaching gun like you know, and he he helps they helped him defeat the Dutch. But what what he does instead of like you know, freeing the people there is he maintains the Dutch colonial system while basically just seizing Taiwan to run his court from and you know, like Dutch colonial rule. Okay, so like Dutch colonial rule is over, but what if we're placed by is the rule of an independent pirate warlord state.

It sounds fun, I mean, it kind of is, like I mean, there's this whole so okay. So the kind of background of this is that, like the Hunters, the Mean Dynasty is falling apart. The Mean Dynasty had ruled China since they ever threw the Mongols basically, and but like they're they're imploding. There's a bunch of revolutions going on. There they are in the process of getting eventually getting knocked off by um the Ching dynasty, who a group of people from Manchuria who we will be getting to

in a second. Yeah, this guy is like technically a main general, but he's sort of not and he's he's doing this sort of pilot warlord stuff. But then he like he sets up like his own dynasty, like very

short lived dynasty there. And this is the first time that there's been like actual political control of Taiwan by any kind of Chinese entity, right like the like the weird dipshit armies that like China was sending in like the Song dynasty, Like they don't they don't actually like set up a government, right, Like they're just kind of there forbid they leave. This is the first time like they actually conquered the island and rule it as like

a political enger. And even then it's kind of a half as conquest, like there's a lot of places they kind of just like they're just like, yeah, okay, we're just not gonna bother with this. But yeah, and you know, again, like this is the first time this has happened, and it's not like the Chinese state, right it's a pirate, wal Mart and his descendants get like knocked off by the Chain dynasty in sixteen three, and this is the first time like a real Chinese government has controlled Taiwan

um because bye bye bye bye bye. Sixteen eighty three, the dynasty has finished taking overall of China or all all of what used to be like the main dynasty in China. And this is the period that Chinese nationals appoint to and say like no, no, no, really really hold on, hold on, uh, Taiwan actually is part of China because we conquered it in like sixteen eighty three, which you know, okay, yeah, yeah, this is this is

a part of Taiwan's China's ancient times. Yeah that this place we conquered in sixteen eighty three, which ignores also again the previous five thousand, four hundred years where Taiwan was rule by the insdigenous people. It's it's baffling nationalist brain words stuff, yep. That has worked historically for other countries not to be this one and the one I'm from. But make it right. Yeah, well, and then you'll you'll get people arguing this is like well, how like like

how how is this different? From the U S. It's like, well, here's the thing. I am a leftist and I am capable of understanding the multiple things can be bad at the same time, especially when they're bad in the same way. Like wow, hey, maybe these are all settler qualities. We should destroy them, Okay, But we should actually talk about the Chin dynasty a bit, because a lot of what Chinese nationalism draws from is the sort of imperial expansion of the Chin Chinese. Even though the Ching are the

Ching are not like a Han Chinese dynasty. Um, they're like ethnically they're from a different ethnic group. But yeah, I mean it's said, it's it's the like the the Ching dynasty is a Manchou dynasty ruled by the people

like the Manchin cendamnentaria. But I think like insofar as people think about the Chin dynasty, they tend to think about like the Late Chain dynasty Like this is like, you know, like the eight hundred Chang dynasty is a disaster, right, Like they lose the Opium Wars, they could beat by Japan. This is the whole sort of century humiliation thing has

a lot to do with like Ching imperial decline. But you know that that's like the eighteen hundreds Chin, the seventeen hundreds change actually in the sixty cent unders Chang is an incredibly dynamic and you know, incredibly militant and expansionist empire. Um here, here's I'm gonna I'm gonna read

a passage from the book Taiwan's Imagine Geographies. Having annexed Taiwan in sixteen eighty four, the Ching turned its attention to Central Asia, pacifying quote quote unquote pacifying the Mongols, and bringing eastern Turkistan and lass of the capital of Tibet under Chin rule. The Ching further expanded its control in south and southwest China, subjugating various non Chinese peoples.

Of this reason to Ching domination at its height in the eighteenth century, Ching influence extended into Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, Burman, Nepal, all of which came under the suicerenity of the Empire. By eighteen sixty, the Ching had achieved the incredible feat of doubling the size of the empire's territory, bringing various

non Chinese frontier people under its rule. The impact of changing expansionism was thus was thus tremendous as the chain not only redefined the territorial boundaries of China, but also refashioned China as a multi ethnic realm as a multi ethnic realm, shifting the traditional border between Chinese Hua and Barbarian Ye. In doing so, the Ching created an image of China that is vastly different from that of the Ming.

And I think I think it's really important to understand what kinds of empire this is, which is to say that the Change dynasty is an incredibly brutal colonial power even like by the standards of like that's like, you know, okay, like all of all, like the all the the okay, Chinese dynastic history is not pretty right, like this is you know, it's an empire, right, it's an empire. It's ruled by an emperor. It kind of sucks, like it's

not it's not good per se. But like even by the standards of Chinaina Qing are incredibly militants, an incredibly

expansionist um. For example, like shing Jong, which which is a province that the Ching conquered, so it used to be inhabited by a Mongol speaking people until the Ching just exterterminated them all and settled the entire land with with Han and weaker like I think groups, and you know, this history points to something that's important to understand what we talk about China, Taiwan in the U S. Which is that what we're talking about is three settler qualities.

And I think people, you know, might be like, wait, what do you mean China's settler colony? And I'm just gonna read this passage from the book Sovereignty, Frontiers the Possibility, which is by Julia Evans, Anna Genevis, Alexander Riley, and Patrick Wolf. And and yes, that is that Patrick Wolf, who was like was basically the godfather of settler colonial studies and one of the most important like academics are trying of like in terms of like advancity, annalysis of cetera, colonialism,

like the Palestinian conflict. Here's here here, here's what he has to say about China. And this is kind of a long passage, but like, I want to include an explanation of what settler colonialism is because I've kind of just been tossing it around analytically. The case of Palestine reveals that the relationship between the external and internal dimensions

of sovereignty is not a priori but contingent. Settler colonization converts external into internal, rendering indigenous sovereignties either non existent or domesticated. Annexation does the same thing, only it is illegal. The difference again is sovereignty. To annex is to practice settler colonialism in sovereign territory. Thus, the frontier is aligned in time as well as in space. Spatially, the frontier two limits unconquered native territory. Temporally, it marks the conversion

of outside into inside. It renders externality a thing of the past in the global conquest of settler colonialism. Therefore, the internal and external dimensions represent the state of play, quote unquote. The ultimate prize is state formation with internationally recognized territorial sovereignty. Once the settler takeover as complete, the native realm becomes a thing of the past, superseded and detoxified,

reduced to persisting in the settler's terms. Since in the case of Palestine, this process remains incomplete, the situation can still go either or potentially any way. At the international a level. This uncertainty is reflected in the ambivalent status of Palace Indian sovereignty, which remains simultaneously both acknowledged and questioned locally, The stage involved in the resolution of such international uncertainties could not be higher. Tibet represents a case

in point. Despite significant informal deference to Tibet's national separateness, its incorporation into the People's Republic of China is not seriously questioned. At the diplomatic level, Tibetan representation at the

United Nations remains unimaginable. Yet even Tibetans might count their blessings when they compare their situation to that of Weakers, who, like them, are being officially colonized by Han settlers in the so called autonomous region called shing Jong, a Chinese appellation that could have been scripted in sixteenth century Europe. It means new land, being so much more firmly domesticated within the Chinese state. However, weaker sovereignty remains in vote

from global concern. Now. Now obviously, okay, this is written before like shing Jong became like a global news store. And also I I I question wolves translation of the word a little bit, like I think, I think new

Frontier is probably a slightly better translation. But yeah, like you can see what's at work here, right, Like wolves argument is that like yeah, like like China is running two settler qualities, like the internal status of which is like even more internationally fucked than like most other settler colonies, which is incredibly grim. Like yeah, I think we don't. I don't know why we were so we've been so

slow to see selling colonialism and these contiguous empires like here. Yeah, I mean I think part of what's happening here, like you know, okay, Like I think there's sort of a different dynamic with looking at this with Russia, but I think with China, it's like people are just like it's really really hard to get people to understand that colonialism and imperialism are things that like not that like non white people can do, yes, and especially especially like this,

you know. And I think it goes back to the sort of like Chan dynasy discussion, right, which is that like, yeah, you know, the like the way that people on the left understand the Ching dynasty is do the sort of nationalist lens looking at like and so they miss the whole part where they're doing all the settler colony stuff. But like what happens to them basically is that, like, you know, it's like they're there. It's kind of like the Ottomans, right, We're like their empire suddenly runs into

like newer, better, more violence and more efficient empires. But like it doesn't mean that like they worked also empires.

Like it's yeah, and then when people do work that out sometimes, like people and when we talk about like settler clonism in the US, sometimes like when folks have forced to retreat from the first position and that like that the US is not a settler quality, they will then fall back on, well, they're indigenous empires beforehand, as if that somehow justifies Yeah, it's like it does not right, and like you know, like and and I think it's the thing that tibet to where it's like, yeah, the

pre existing Tibetan government was not good, Like I'm not I'm not going to defend like that government. It sucks. I I would also point out that the whole we're going to stop the slave trade thing is one of the things explicitly in in the in the Tree that

Decide of the Conference of Berlin. That was the thing that they claimed that that like that that was the thing that the European powers claimed they were doing when they invaded Africa, so like when they split Africa, but between the Clune of Powers, so like you know, okay, I mean also it's you know this this is getting slightly off topic, but it's also worth noting that like there wasn't there was actually a communist movement like in Tibet that wasn't the CCP, and the CCP killed them all.

So that's great and fun. That's never happened before with ttalitarian communist pass Yeah, it's it's gonna happen again. The sort of I think the stakes of what's happening here, I think become more clear when you understand that, like you like the US and trying to to like two different extents, right, like I don't know, like China has parts there, like there are parts of China where it's like very hard, like it's not a settler state. It's just like their states, but there are part of definitely

are a settlers state. And there's the U S which is like entirely a settler state, and then Taiwan is also to a settler state, although it's like post independence Taiwan is at least violence of them, which is like not like a, I don't know, you're not winning much of a price by being less violent than China in

the US, but like good count between those two. Yeah, but you know, but but but I think that this brings us back to like the Chin the Ching coccupation of Taiwan, which is that the Ching occupation of Taiwan is China's first like first new settler colony. The Ching administrators they divide the indigenous population into quote cooked and raw savages. Um that those are their words. That literally

that's what they call them. Like it is why because they're really racist like this, this is like this, this is like a very old thing and sort of like sort of Chinese imperial discourse. Right, It's like you have the difference between like barbarians and like Chinese people and like savages and non savages like this this is like this is how these people think, right, and it's not good.

Like I don't know, I don' don't know, like how many more ways I can like try to explain to people who are like who have been like like people have been like telling the Chinese nationalist stuff for so long that it's like this this also was not good, Like guys, and again it's something the US has done the UK. There's classic imperialism right now. We took about tribes in the US, racist in the British Empire. Yeah,

I'm going to read a passage from Taiwan's imagine geography. Indeed, as ching writers began to construct the Taiwan indigenous as two distinct groups. Negative traits that have been formally associated with quote the Taiwan savages as a whole began to be mapped on the wild or raw savages. We're Earlier text claimed, for example, that the savages quote by nature like to kill or quote were or were quote stubborn and stupid. Now writers attributed these characteristics to the raw

savages alone. Head Hunting, a notorious practice that the earlier the earliest sources had associated with the natives of Taiwan and other Pacific islands, also became also came to be seen as a raw savage practice. By the early eighteenth century travel writing, travel writers increasingly emphasized the violent and

murderous behavior of the raw savages. The expansion of the Han Chinese population at this time caused an exhalation of conflict between Chinese settlers and the indigenous over land and other resources. Hostile indigitees were thus becoming a real threat to the safety of Han Chinese settlers. Although some writers blamed inter ethnic conflict on trouble making Han Chinese settlers, many Ching literati attributed the belligerous of the raw savages

to the inherent bloodthirsty nature. So, yeah, it's it's real. It's real, it's real, classic empire ship like textbook shit. Yeah, and you know, and you can see that there's this whole nationalist myth that like you'll read if you read modern people like talking about this, or they'll be like, oh, the indigenous population that Chinese government got along so great.

It is completely bullshit. This is an incredibly racist settler state, and it stays an incredibly racist settler state when when the Japanese take over Taiwan and the Japanese occupation is even worse than the chain occupation of indigenous people in a lot of ways to real ship show there's a huge massacre that they do in the thirties. Um, yeah, and and okay, we' just also mentioned at this point.

So I've been focusing a lot on the the indigenous population because almost everyone who tells the story from all sides doesn't talk about them ever, because it's it's incredibly inconvenient to like everyone's narrative that there were people here

for literally six thousand years, um. But you know, while basically since the Dutch showed up in the in the mid sixteen hundreds, UM, there have been like increasing numbers of Chinese settlers, and as as the Chin occupation sort of wears on, the number of Chinese settlers increases and increases increases, and it gets to the point where, you know, kind of close to like what we have today, where like the the indigenous population of Taiwan is like two

percent of the population, and it's which is which is pretty close to what the indigenous population presenting the population of the US is for example. Yeah, and would make sorry, I'm not going to It's okay, Yeah, I'm going to

talk about Elizabeth Warren. But god, you know, actually fucking I will talk about Elizabeth Warren in the middle of this, because yeah, because her her whole thing of like pretending to be indigenous was also fun because like she has a cookbook, and the cookbook yeah, yeah, that claims both her and her husband or indigenous. And then in that he's like maybe the most incomprehensible, awful like example of Chinese cooking every scene in my life, which apparently stole

from like another cookbook. And it's really like just cascading levels of racism all the way down. It's oh god, it's fine, it's all fine. All the settler colonies are bad. Their politics are all also always bad because again, like being a settler colony inherently makes your politics awful because yeah, and representing yourself as an indigenous person to gain personal advantage in a settler colony when you are not one is ongoing active colonialism. Yeah, genuinely terrific stuff Like, yeah,

don't do it. So having said that, so okay, we have to talk about the Han population. There's like different like subgroups of the Han population who are have different ethnicities, to speak different rates, like speak different languages because Han is like a very large sort of category, and like inside of Han Chinese there's like people who are Hawka.

There's there's a whole bunch of different groups. Um, And I guess the one thing that's worth mentioning is that a lot of the like you'll hear people talk about Taiwanese as like its own language, and like that's like there there are a bunch of people who were Hanbu who don't speak Mandarin, and so like a lot of people in Taiwan speak Taiwanese, which is sort of like

Hakka h ish Lang. Well, okay, what's what what's what's the most technically accurate with sagas it is a language that has developed on Taiwan, like in Taiwan by people

who speak Kaka, and it's basically pretty close to that. Yeah, um, And we're not gonna get into super gradular detail about these ways of immigration, um, but basically, like one of the things that happens is that among these sort of han settlers, there becomes this sort of like Taiwanese identity of like them being Taiwanese, like specifically as a thing. And when when the Japanese lose World War Two, the

Nationalist Party or the CAMT just like occupies Taiwan. But this is a real problem because again, most of the people don't want to be ruled by the CAMT because the KMT like absolutely suck. Um. If you want me to hear me, like go deeper into them, go listen to my bastard's episode in the World Anti Communist League. Uh. The short version is that the KMT is a genocidal like anti communist des squad party run by an organized crime outfit that's led by Shankai Check and you know,

like they suck like really like absolutely horrible people. Um. And as the CAMT starts to lose a civil word of MAO like born more CAMT supporters not some people just like running from the war start fleeing in Taiwan, and this develops a mass like you get these massive tension between then people who had already been there and the KMT and they're sort of new supporters and their new sort of like settler immigrant population, and this boils over into what's called the February incident or the two

eight incident. UM. Basically what happens so a CAMT cop like attacks a woman who was like selling cigarettes on the street illegally because the KMT, like I really also kept like they're so unbelievably corrupt and so like that they have all these like monopolies where it's like okay, like there's a guy who has like the opium monopoly or like a guy who has like the cigarette monopoly, right, and unless you're running through that monopoly, you can't sell

like cigarettes. Yeah, and so in something that I think will be familiar to people who like, like have followed the number of people in the US who have been killed for uh. Yeah, so the cops start like beating this woman over the head with it with his pistol, and everyone around them gets incredibly piste off. And there's these giant protests, um, and the camp to your response

to the protests by shooting into the crowd. And yeah, I mean so there's another side of this I should mention like briefly, which is that, like part of what's happening here is like there's a there's a kind of ugly like basically race riot that starts happening at the beginning of this where like people like the sort of like Cantonese population like starts just like attacking like any random like any random people from like the campt generation,

just like they found on the street and start attacking

LNG and like that sucks. Um. It is also just unbelievably less violent than what happens next, which is at the KMT Like well, okay, so so there there there's sort of this race, right I think, and then there's there's like there's a full scale revolution and the Taiwanese population like seizes control of base of like almost the entire island, like the entirety of the main island, and they start demanding like democratic rights and stuff like you know,

a free press and free assembly and like the protection of the digitus population. Although I should also mention that like like nobody really inti one like treating digitus population will like it was bad enough, Like my seven year old mom was like, oh my god, why is everyone treating these people so badly? Like it's but you know, okay, So they do this thing, they have this revolution and then the KMT like just sends the army to the island and they killed something like twenty people in a week.

Um like they are like they're they're cutting people's face like later like cutting parts of people's faces off with like nive Like it is unbelievably brutal. And this begins

thirty eight years of martial law. UM. The subsequent CAMPTI police state tortures like tens of thousands of people in rules Taiwan with like an with an iron fist until like the late eighties and this is where things get really messy, right because up until nineteen forty two, like nobody in China like and and and this included both the CAMT and the CCP. Until actually forty two, neither of them actually claimed that Taiwan was part of China. But then in two both of them start claiming that

that one is part of China. Yeah, and so when when when the KMT flees to Taiwan, both the CCP and the CAMT both claimed to be a legitimate government of China and be to be the legitimate government of Taiwan. And it's a disaster. Like the cam T is nuts, Like my again, like they made my like seven year old mom sing songs about how would they there? One day?

They were going to reclaim the mother land? Like these people suck some of them still in myanma or maybe perhaps not now, but like I've heard from them from friends who are older who were there, that there are a bunch of cam TE like living in parts of me and Mari and tourist would go pay to visit them. Yeah, like that's that's the thing, Like yeah, they're like they

most of the people flee that flee to Taiwan. But like they break in a number of different directions, and there's like a bunch of weird rump states they set up, they get knocked off. Eventually, it's a it's a whole mess. But in Taiwan, like they have this problem, which is that, like, okay, so there's like water in between China and Taiwan, and if you want to get troops over it, you have to have those troops across the water. And this is

a real problem for like an invasion. So what ends up happening is a series so like okay, so you have the cam T in the CCP like staring each other down across these islands, and the product of this is what's called the Three Taiwan Straits christ these so basically in the CCP starts sell shelling Taiwan between in the five starts shelling like Taiwan, and then they do it again at fifty eight and like the CAMT shelves them back, and you know, and there's a couple of

points where it looks like they're going to invade, but then the US like move supplies to the KMT to like keep the c from invading, and you know the result of this is just like I think, incredibly psychologically revealing move after like the crisis, which crisis ends with the KMT and the CCP agreeing to shell each other on opposite days because and I cannot emphasize this enough, this entire conflict is profoundly bullshit and was foisted upon

Taiwan by a bunch of pedley squabbling Chinese nationalists. How big is that distance we're talking about, Like they're sending shells over there in the fifties, so it's probably not vast. Well, part of what's happening is so it's it's a hundred miles, hundred ten miles. But what's happening year is like they're

they're there. They basically like have set up on outposts in different islands in between, like the Big Island and uh, the shore, so that they're they're like they're on these islands shelling each other, like they drafted My grandpa and sent him to one of these places and that's and then he came back and was like, funk this, we're out and so like that that's where my family's in the US because he was like, we're not doing this

ship again. This sucks. Yeah, It's like, I'm not gonna be I'm not gonna be cannon fodder for these like weird nationalist psychos. So okay, So what the sort of result of this, though, is that the KMT gets the backing of the US, and the KMT becomes in Taiwan is the like the legitimately internationally recognized government, um like of all of China from the end of the Civil War until like the seventies. Yeah right, yeah, yeah, how's the UN seat I actually we get we'll get into that,

and you know what we were doing here. So one of the things that happens here is that, okay, so, like the US really really does not want the CCP to have the u n C. And what are the things they try to do is that they offer neighbors India like the seat on like what's it called, am I blanking on the name of the thing? National Security Counsel? Yeah, yeah, you and Security Council. They offer India Sea the Security Council and neighbor is like, no, I'm not gonna take this.

I'm not gonna take this. This this is China seat on the Council, Like, I'm not gonna take this. And then Mao repays him by invading India. Three in ways, Um, this this is not in my script? I am I am off, yeah, I am off script? Oh two sorry yeah yeah, So like this a this, this goes great for neighbor Mao just like invades and the Indians lose

the war very badly. To understand why eventually trying to gets recognied, you have to have talked about it about like what was going on inside of the PRC, inside of the people's probably in China. So the CCP fights a war with the Soviets in nineteen sixty nine, which and this war gets called the Sino Soviet Border conflicts. But like this is like pretty much a real war, Like there are like Chinese and Soviet division shelling each other,

like a lot of people die. Um, like I I don't know if I've told the story on this podcast before. My my my favorite part of this whole thing is that the Soviets start like wargaming, can can they defeat China and nuclear war? And they figure out that they can't because the Chinese population is so just is so dispersed that even even if they knuke all of China, they can't kill everyone they'll and they'll lose the war

in human wave attacks. So the Soviets started developing, developing the strategy of like having like a line of nuclear land mines across the Soviet Chinese borders so that the human wave attacks can't get through, because they like this is this conflict is nuts, Like both China and the USS are are trying to get the US to ally with them to like do do do a preemptive nuclear strike on on the other side, Like it's crazy and and this like completes the Sino Soviet split, and the

US like really really wants to make sure that the Sino Soviets but sticks, and so the US starts negotiating with China basically to bring China to the well, Okay, there's two ways of looking at it. One is that they just want to separate, like, you know, the Chinese from the Soviets. The other way of looking at it is that they want to like bring China fully over

to the American side of the Cold War. And I think the latter approach actually works, right um, So in in in nine, the US recognizes the CCP as the legitimate government of China. UH. Several months later, China invades Vietnam in defense of the Khmer rouge, which the US was also backing. So yeah, um, and and this is where we get into some more diplomatic bullshit. Uh okay. So China maintain something called the One China principle. The One China principle holds that the CCP is the only

government mint of China and then it rules Taiwan. The US has something called the One China Policy, and the One China Policy is it does not take a stance either way on who the government of Taiwan is. What it does is it acknowledges that China claims that it rules Taiwan. And you will see nationalists lie about this constantly. They will say things like the US recognizes Taiwan as part of China under the One Child Policy, blah blah blah. Action is a violation of the One China Policy. And

that's not true, right. What actually happened is that the US, the US technical term for this is called strategic ambiguity. And you know, so they have this thing like, they don't they don't formally recognize either side as legimate government of Taiwan. They recognize that this is what China says about Taiwan, they don't actually recognize, but they have no formal position on whether this is the actually rules Taiwan. What they have is a recognition that China believes this.

And again this is all diplomatic bullshit. It's part of why I hate like talking about this because like, again, the lives of literally tens of billions of people are being governed by like diplomats saying doing like that kind of ship because it sucks. Yeah, So that's that's that's that's the one Child policy thing, which is not Jesus the one China policy, which is not the same thing as the one China principle. Um, yeah and so and

so like. All the while, while this is going on, the CCP and the KMT yere in this massive race to see you can kill the most communists like that. The CCP kills about a million commination the Cultural Revolution and then invades Vietnam to kill even more communists. The KMT like not not to be outdone by by by by by their former comrades across the border. The KMT is training desk squalls in Honduras and like helping the

Guatemalan government do the Guatemalan genocide. It's it's really grim stuff.

And you know, the product of this ideolog the product of this whole thing is the audio complete audiological collapse of the Chinese Comunist Party as like a party that does communism, and then the political military collapse with the KMT so the but by I mean it's kind of it sort of has already stopped at the eighties, but by the nineties nineties, the CCP substantively has stopped being a communist party by the sense of the word, like

they're just capitalists and they're not they're you know, they're out there making money. And by by by the late two thousands, even like you know, there had been a faction of what's called sure of the Chinese New Left, but had thought that like they could you know, they they could, you know, this is still a communist party

and we can still change China from the inside. Those guys are like liquidated completely, like they're just gone, um and you know, and so but you know, by by like now right, like it's just it's just it's just capitalists. And meanwhile, in Taiwan in the eighties and nineties, there's there's increasing resistance the CAMT s like one party like dest squad, like one party state and their whole dest squad like reclaimed them motherland politics. Everyone like starts to

hate them. And this is where things get really weird because on the one hand, the CAMPT is incredibly anti communists, but on the other hand, uh, they're the political faction that wants to tie type one the China. And this means that like, you know, as they're sort of like ruthlessly suppressing communists and leftists, they're also like vehemently independence and so like they kill a bunch of anti independence organizers, um, which is like not not not not how anyone like

talks about this conflict because it's too weird. So in there's all the sort of weird political things going on in the seven. The KMT ends the martial law that they had been in force since the February incidents, and the KMT like disarms, right they disarm. They're not as in like, Okay, the KMT used to be a party that would like assassinate people for writing an author right, like assassinate Americans on American soil for writing on authorized

biography biographies of like Shankai check. And they kind of stopped being that, like they disarm, they're not really in the drug trade anymore, caveats. Don't quote me on that, but like the they're they're they're they're not the party they were in the eighties, right, That's that's what the important thing like that they they lose is the one party dictatorship, and you get the sort of transition to democracy that ends in the first free presidential elections in

Taiwani's history. In and this like the right right before this, you get the third Taiwan Straits Crisis, where the president of Taiwan like goes to the US and China react to this by having an enormous ture tempera tantrum and like starts doing military exercises, like they start like simulating an invasion of Taipwe. They start like shooting rockets like at the coast, like jet the the leve these rockets

that will land like just off the coast, and it's edgy. Yeah, And the event this ends when the US moves like two carrier groups into into the Pacific and the crisis ends. But like, okay, there's a feelings I would say here. One is that like okay, so on the one hand,

this is the CCP having a temperate tensium. Right on the other hand, like it really and this is the thing that I think most Americans have ever experienced, right, because the US is not a country that like gets attacked, right, having another country firing missiles at you fucking sucks, like

psychologically it is awful. Like we saw how insane the U S went, like the like the first time it had actually been attacked since like World War Two when I eleven happened, Like you know, you saw just absolutely batshitt the U S goes, right, Like, Okay, if you are a person in Taiwan, right, which like a lot of my family is, and you are constantly having another country shooting rockets at you, like, it sucks like and and I want people to like like sort of like

think about that for a second, because like I think a lot of what how, how this crisis and how this whole thing has talked about on the left is as a sort of like abstract thing that's like you know, it's it's it's instead of abstract principles, right, and not stuff that's happening to real people who are like watching missiles fucking fall into the ocean, and you know, like and what we're watching another country like preparing to kill

them and this sucks. UM. One of the other things that were not noting here is that like part of what's going on in terms of the hardening of China Taiwan relations is gentlemen square happened. Um. And the reason that this matters is that, so one of the things that like stabilizes I guess relations between Taiwan and China in part is the fact that they're both incredibly economic

closely economically connected to the US. UM. And this is because all of the all China, Taiwan and UH and China are all capitalist countries and so they're ruling classes are all completely independence like people. People talk a lot about Pelosi like investing in a bunch of like chip manufacturing companies in Taiwan, and that's true, but she also has a bunch of investments in China, because again, capitalists, single ruling class, they all there. They all all of

your logistics lines run through each other. Blah blah blah blah bla uh. I will insert and note here that is not in the script that anytime you should someone talk about like the U S decoupling with their economy from China. They're they're full of ship. Do not like everything they're saying, everything they're about to say is a lie. It does not happen, It has not happened, it will not happen, like they're lying. Um yeah, this is important. Um,

even for the height of Trump's bullshit. Yeah. Yeah, Like, like there was kind of an attempt when it didn't work because like you know, you could, Okay, like there are some things you can offer to Mexico, right, but like most like China, China has a unique combination of a like a really good energy grid for the most part of those I mean, okay, there have been times where's gotten over tax but like it can compared to most other development countries that has a really good energy grid.

It has a population in which actually doing union organizing is illegal, and it has a population that you know, like gets forced to work incredibly long hours, right, And the combination of those three things makes it makes it you know, a place where if you're an American capitalist,

if're Taiwanese capitalist. And that's actually part of this too, is that like part part of the reason there's so much like hatred for Taiwan sort of China among people who you wouldn't expect it to be is that like there's a there's a lot of people in China whose only experience of Taiwan is working for like fucking Fox Cohn and like working just in hell conditions for a like for a Taiwanese capitalist, and you know, and that that's very easy to transformant a national sentiment and it sucks.

But yeah, you know, but you know, like okay, so like there, the U s has an incentive just to stabilize US Chinese relations in part because it's economically like

tied to both of these countries. But when something goes really wrong in US China relations, like for example, after Tianna Man where you know, and I think it's also worth noting like from from the period like basically from when China invades Vietnam and even before that from but from when China invades Vietnam in up until Tienamen, the

US China relations are really good. Like the the US is seen as like an ally against the evil at Soviet evil Empire like all this, and you know, but gentlemen makes things go really badly because like the the only thing in American ally can possibly do that will sour the American press on them is to shoot a bunch of students in front of the American press corps like that. That's literally the only thing you could possibly do, Like you can, you can do actual genocides and the

US press corps won't care. But if you shoot a bunch of students right in front of you, they will get very mad. And you know, okay times we've we've avoided doing that in minima. Yeah, yeah, I mean, yeah, it's it's it's grim, lots lots of lots of yeah.

But you know the consequence of this is like, yeah, when something goes really wrong in US China relations, you get China starts doing stabler rattling at Taiwan and the effects of this on Taiwan ease politics and also just sort of what's been happening inside of Taiwan is really weird. So the CAMT, who have been again like the militantly anti communist party for half essentially for half a century, are suddenly the fashion that once closer ties with this ECP.

And the product of this is that the KMT and the smaller like hardcore pro Utification Party has become known as the Pan Blues. And the Pan Blues are the people who like want closer relationship with China and don't want closer relations with like the West. It's like the U s et etcetera. UM. And their opposition group is this reposition progressive opposition groups, which are just composed of

the groups that opposed the camptis military dictatorship. And these groups form well, okay, they form a couple of parties. The big party. The first party they form, which is the biggest one by far, is called the Democratic Progressive Party or the d p P. And the DP panis allies which include some leftist parties I think, like the green parties in this coalition. Uh, there's also these like smaller like radical pro independent parties. UM. They become known

as the Pan Greens. And this is like to this day, this is like the main dividing line in Taiwanese politics. You have the conservative Pan Blues you favor closer relations with China, and the Pan Green progressives you favor like

closer relations with democracies. And also I think importantly, the the Pan Greens had this kind of like are the people who are in favor of like there being a distinct Taiwanese national identity, and the Pan Blues are kind of more suspect of that because again, like you know, their basis the KMT right, they want closer sizes with China, and closer sizes with China means not having like a

distinct Twani's identity that's separate from China. And Okay, I'm enormously oversimplifying this, and people who are experts in this will like this part of it, will be like it's more complicated than that, and it is this is This is the simples explanation I could give you that people will understand. Like I I was, like, I was debating whether I even wanted to talk about like the Pan Blue like closer ties with China versus paying Green like closer ties with the West thing at all, because it's

confusing and people probably won't remember it. But yeah, I mean, you know, if you want to understand tiwan these politics at all, like this is the line you have to take. No, I think it's important to at least throw out the people are gonna hear if they're going to engage in any discussion beyond like what has his tweeting and I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm gonna also like I'm gonna like lay my cards on the table so people don't understand my political position

on this um. And my political position is one that pisces off literally everyone, which is that like, I'm not like a DPP supporter, Like I'm not one of the sort of like progressive like groups. I'm not in this sort of like I'm not really kind of like in this sort of like I wanted dependance camp. I'm not really like a DVP person. I I don't know, like, but I'm also not a KMT person, like because the

KMT are capitalist reactionaries. Um. But I also like, okay, like I'm i'm, I'm, I'm gonna do my critique of the DPP and then I'm gonna sort of walk it back a little bit. I think that Taiwanese progressives in general are waged you close to the American security state for me to want anything to do with them. And the ones who aren't, like, okay, the Taiwanese left, like Jesus Christ, get your ship together. Taiwan's most famous anarchist

is literally a government minister. Like this, This is how funny the Taiwanes's left is like like like like these people, God, I'm enormously frustrated by Like people couldn't develop, like a left to the people, couldn't develop a national class analysis. You beat them over the head with a copy of

capital Um. And okay, like I think, like Taiwanese progressives will point out, and I think this is fair that it's very easy to criticize like allying with the U S when it's not your ass in the firing line of Chinese rockets, which is true. It is much easier to criticize the US when the when the rifles being pointed in your face are American rifles, then when it's you know, Chinese soldiers pointing Chinese rifles. And this is a big part of what Chwanese politics are so fucked um.

Things get reduced at this sort of like democracy versus authoritarian US versus China, like taiwanies and entity versus Chinese identity to less extent like binary. But it's like okay, like my family is Taiwanese, but like I was born here, I grew up here, and you know, I know, I know what American democracy looks like. It's the Army hiring Eric Prince to slaughter Rockey civilians in Baghdad. And you know, I also know what you know. I have a bunch

of family in China too. I know what Chinese ratarianism looks like. It's the CCP hiring Eric Prince ability trading basis for mass and tonament camp guards John like you know, okay, And the only actual like political solution that will ever get anywhere is to fight both of them, a position

that is extremely unpopular literally everywhere. And like you know, I I think they're like the progressives have a good argument that that you know, this isn't this isn't a line they have the luxury of taking right because they they they have they have an immediate enemy, and they they're going to do whatever they have to not get invaded. And that means allying with people who like I want to overthrow and see liquidated as a class. And like I I understand why they think that I also am

not them. So yeah, this is this is this is me laying my cards on the table. And I think also like this goes back to the whole sort of like Settler state question, right, which is the sort of unresolved political question in the U s, Taiwan and China, Like no actual major political force has like committed itself

to destroying the settler state and returning indigenous sovereignty. Uh, like two indigenous people, and you can't have like any kind of liberatory politics in a settler state without that. But on the other hands, like okay, the actual politics of Timani's diigenous people is really complicated, Like it doesn't work in the same way that like indigenous politics in the US does for example, like different true, I mean, and this is also true in the US, like different

tribes and different relations to sort of indigenous nationalism. Like and another thing that that's true about um the that that that that that's true about Timany's indigenous people is that a lot of them vote for the KMT. And they do this for a couple of reasons, one of which is because the KMT has this like really really powerful and eccentric patronage network that they've been running for

literally like basically since they got into the island. They've been running this patriots network and this allowed them to do like real incredibly intense and powerful based building in indigenous communities. Right, Like they're like the GDP are the people who like distribute like okay that they have like a center and right, and you go there and they get they give you food, right like they this this this is the place where you get your like sesame oil. Right.

And then also there's there's the second layer of the Pictures network, right, is like if you want to get a job, you join the KMT, and so they have these they have these really deep sort of political roots

in that sense. And then also, um, the CAMT does this thing where they're like, hey, look, the DPP is doing settler nationalism, like hey, these are the people who colonized you, like fuck them, like you should alley with us instead, which is true, Like like it is true, and like I think, I don't know, like Taiwanese progressives kind of like tap dance around this, but like yeah, like it is true that the sort of like Han

Taiwanese identity is less sort of settler nationalism. But like also this is true with the KMT as well, Like the CAMT are also was settler nationalism, like you know, like they conquered the island and ruled as you know, okay, and and you'll you'll you'll try you'll also see people who will take this argument and try to argue that indigenous people voting for the KMT means that indigenous people support China invading Taiwan. And this is just comically wrong,

Like they're just they are lying to you. Indigenous people in Taiwan, like literally everyone else in Taiwan do not support being ruled by China, and the argument that a Chinese occupation of Taiwan is somehow less of a settler state than the current system is just like comically propaganda

bullshit and yeah, China, Yeah that's not being kind. Yeah, I'm gonna get into like this a little bit too, right, which is okay, So like I've been trying to be fair and balanced here, right, like I have been giving you mi critique of taiwee Chiwanese progressivism. This is going to piss off a lot of people. But like having said all of this, China invading Taiwan would be really really really bad, Like I cannot emphasize enough how bad

this would be. Like okay, so Taiwan is like a regular regular settler borgead democracy with like all of the sort of good and bad things about Bushwa democracies, which we're all familiar with, right, like we understand what is a learned democracy is um, to be fair, the modern Taiwanese government is like infinitely less violent than the modern

American government. Like like the I I looked like the prison population in like relative population in Taiwan is like I think it's like an eighth of the of what the American prison population is, right, Like, it's it's not like, you know, okay, it's it's like Taiwan is not like a sort of like it's like Taiwan is not a socialist state, right, but it's also like, you know, better in the U s which is an incredibly low bar that like you could trip and fall over it, but like,

you know, okay, it's it's better in the US. Um. Yeah, you know, it's closer to like Sweden or something in terms of violence. But I think is also a good comparison because Sweden also has an indigenous population called the Sami, and I all Swedish leftists will studiously never admit that they exist or talk about them at all. So okay, again, this is not a stateless class society. But it's also like like since since since the CAMT has been disarmed, Like this is not one of like the world's great

purveyors of violence, right, Like it's not the US. UM. China, on the other hand, is a ferociously reactionary, capitalist settler dictatorship, and this is something that Americans have very little experience with. UM For a long time, people argue that, okay, like if if if China, like if Taiwan became a part of China, Taiwan would get some kind of relationship similar to what Hong Kong has were like they were free elections and union organizing and free speech is legal. But

you know, twenty nteing happens. Yeah right, you know, I mean even in Taiwan, like the I'm sorry, not even even in Hong Kong, right, the extent to which like you know, like union organizing and free association and free press existed. We're like and again like Hong Kong also, and I want to point this out, like the CCP has been strengthening this the entire time they were there.

Hong Kong is the only place on earth for corporations have the right to vote and they vote for the ccpeach Like it's so okay, this is this is great, but you know twenty en happens, right, And guess what now, Hong Kong has National Security Law, which allows the government to rescue literally for posting on Twitter that you don't

think that China should control Hong Kong. UM Secretary Secretary for Security in Hong Kong, Chris Tang said earlier this week that criticizing the government with the intention to provoke quote pretention to provoke hatred quote between the classes was a violation of the National Security Law. A position that if actually like that, that if actually like like this, if you take this position, this would outlaw in its entirety all socialist organizing in Hong Kong, because again, anything

that attempts to provoke hatred between the classes ISA is illegal. Yeah, and yes, some pana era of liberal Democrats existence within. Yeah, and this is this is the moneth and like you know, I mean again, like people people talk about this lot like Hong Kong is one of the world's most neoliberal cities and this is top has taken it over. And oh hey, guess what they're They're they're living out the neoliberal dream of making it illegal to try to do

any like try to do like class war stuff. Um, one of the things that happens immediately after national security laws that it's used to destroy China's China's Independent Trade Union Federation. And this brings us to like the sort of class perspective on this um independent union organizing and China is illegal. And when I say it's illegal, I don't mean illegal in the sense of like jaywalking. We're like, okay, if someone if if like a cops sees you jaywalking,

they might arrest you. Like if you try to do independent union organizing in China, men will show up to your house in the middle of the night and you will disappear for three months until a video of you with two very large men standing just out of camera range appears in which you recan't you're organizing and apologize for your crimes, like to to to get a sense of the level of oppression we're dealing with here to Chinese leftists named Louis You You and Leading You recorded

and published a series of protests like the they basically they had they on the Chinese social media, like they posted this like record basically of strikes and protests that were happening in the country every day. So like literally all they're doing is they are documenting the strikes and protests that are happening and collecting data about them and posting it. Um in the police showed up to lose house, put a bag over his head and dragged him away to a dragging away to a jail cell. Lou spent

four years in prison. Lee got two years, and the two of them never saw each other again. So again, this this is what happens. If you literally just report on the wildcat strikes that are happening, someone will put a bag over your head and you will go to prison for four years. Like it is. It is like the situation for organized labor of any kind of anyone trying to do. Union organizing in China is unbelievably dire. UM. Now, China, and this is when I'm talking about, here's the independent

union organizing. China has an official trade union federation. Um, the trade Unifederation China has such a fucking joke. That is literally a matter of academic debates, Like there are academic papers arguing about whether or not it even actually

counts as a union. And this has been true since the late nineteen fifties, when the CCP decided that oh hey, this trade union is there to represent the party and not workers, and its roles to mediate between the you know, to mediate between the party and workers, not actually to you know, like represent them when they like when they have disputed with their bosses. So yeah, like they don't

like they they don't. They don't go on strike like ever, like they they they they they they They exist as like another part of the party state, the goal of which is to make sure that bosses keep making money. If you try to work outside, if they will arrest you. Now, Taiwan is not like a shining workers paradise, right that the sort of vaunted semiconductor industry that everyone talks about is run by a bunch of workers getting the ship burned out of them by vats of acid. But conditions

for the Chinese working class are even worse. Counties wages are higher China, Taiwan is better workplace protections. Again, you can legally organize unions. Uh. Meanwhile, in China there are famously suicide nets around Chinese factories because working for these places is so fucking awful that people would literally rather

kill themselves and live in it. And you know, you can ask why is this happening, And the reason it's happening is that a lot of the stuff that is literally the worst fucking nightmare of the American left, things like your boss owning your apartment is just standard practice in China. This is this is just this is just what it's like to be a worker in China. Your

boss owner apartments. You have literally hundreds of millions of people who live in these time any like they're called workers dormitories, which again often literally owned by like the owner of the factory they're in. You get like when when I say like the workers dormitories, right, it's not even like it's not even like an American dorm building right where like you you know you have like your

own room. It's like it is yeah, like it's it's a bunch of people sleeping in cots, like like sleeping in bunk beds with like a fucking bucket next to them to go to the bathroom. Like it is. It is horrible. Um, you have like like the the I talked about this lot in this show. But again like literally there are paid a loans integrated into delivery apps like this. This is the level of capitalism that that China is, and like I'm not gonna like, I'm not gonna like argue that it's worse than the US. I

think they're bad in different ways. Like they're there, there are there are third like the the U s IS incarceration system is like you know, like one of the great human evils in the entirety of human history. Right there, there are things that like the US is worse at like the Chinese police are a lot less likely just fucking murder you like you know, but like yes, but like China, it sucks to be a worker in China,

Like it really sucks. And I can't emphasize this enough because I don't because people don't really understand this, like they they like people do not understand that. Again, like the normal Chinese schedule is called you work nine am to nine pm, six days a week. This is the normal schedule. Mostly a lot of workers like that. That that again that that that's like an average schedule. Most people work more than this seventy hours a week, right like it is it is it is a ship show.

And yeah, if if Taiwan, if China invades Taiwan, that you addition to the Taiwanese working class are going to get worse. That is just a fact. Try like imposing Chinese law on Taiwan, which strengthened the power of the capitalist class a week in the proletariat um from from an indigenous respective, which we we've talked about this at length about you know, we talked about at length how the Taiwan system is not that good. But you know,

it's not like it's a settler colony. There's some representation, but you know, it's not great. It is much better over the CCP system. The CCPs line on ethnic minorities is that if you're an ethnic minority in China, you're going to work in a Han factory, You're going to pick crops from Han owed fields. You're going to dance and smile for hon tourists. If you step out of line, you will be dragged out of your bed in the middle of the night and sent to a fucking camp.

There are you know, like this is the thing that Americans sort of have similar experiences with. It's like, you know, you have immigration raids, you have raids on homeless encampments, but it's not that's and that that's like you know that that's a kind of experience that is somewhat similar to what it's like to live and change on but like it's not exactly the same. Like I I know people whose families are just fucking gone, Like the police showed up in the middle of the night, and their

families are just gone. They've never seen them again, Like they're they're just gone. No no one knows where they are, no one knows who they're even alife. They're just finished. And if and if you think that this isn't going to happen to Taiwan's indigenous population, the moment they start talking about self determination, you are incredibly bafflingly, hopelessly naive.

And you know, like like that there there's a lot of other ship that you can point to, right like for example, Taiwan has game marriage and China doesn't like the degree of press censorship, just like social media censorship in China that doesn't need some Taiwan is like absolutely absurd, Like you know, I I think like most like some people talking about press censorship in the US are like almost always right wing ship heads who were complaining about

like they yelled a bunch of slurs, like in China, a very common thing that happens, like someone will be posting about a corrupt local official and then every single post about it will get to lead and if you try to post the guy's name of your post won't

go up. And then any emoji that people were using in association with the corrupt local official like get blocked and you can't use the emotis anymore, and like you know and like and I it's it's almost like the level of censorship is almost comical to the extent where like people don't believe like in the US, like don't like you know when people people talk about like like oh, the the Chinese government isn't really banning get guys who look too feminine and gay guys from appearing in medians

Like no, they are like they're they're, they're they're. I think I think it was a Beyonce concept that they're there. Or there was a very famous, like very funny thing that happens like a few months ago where there was this concert. I think it was a Beyonce concert, must be.

I can't remember who it was, but like so there was a stream of it in China and there was a guy there was a censor who was like putting like one of those gray out censored bars, like over over the singers closed because they were they were considered

too explicit. And she's just like moving this like dot of like censorship thing across the stage, trying to fall Like this is the level of bullshit that happens here, Like it's it's not a thing that like the US really has much reference for because like we don't experience, like this is not a thing that you don't experience

you experience in the US. Like, Yeah, sometimes I like to think about these things in terms of like like like all people talk about oh Well and Huxley as these dystopian novels, right, and imparhaps people don't read those novels, but they love to quote them. And like in all we else, we have like a system which like keeps you quiet by pushing you down, right, and in Huxley's we have a system which keeps you quiet by keeping you happy with with drugs and such, and like it.

Then it's important to recognize it that it both things can be bad, but the material conditions in the day to the life of people, especially marginalized people in one society, can be markedly better. Yeah, well and I think also, like yeah, like I think it's we're not like the ways in which the American like there there are similarities, but like yeah, like there are lots of ways in which the sort of Chinese system and the American system

are differently bad. And that breaks people's brains because you get a lot of like you get you get a lot of Americans who are convinced to become convinced that

like China as a socialist paradise. There's a Chinese version of this where like you get international students who come to the US for the first time and see an election, and they like lose their minds and are like absolutely convinced that like American democracy is like the only table political system and they read Hyak and they like lose They just like they become the Chinese version of tank You's,

which are like weird near liberal people. And it's like, no, like I know, actually, in fact, none of these things

are good. Both of these societies are just like not good to live in in any way, and like, you know, and I think that there's nothing I should mention here, like why all of this sort of like bullshit posturing is happening between the US and China right now, which is that like on on the American side, like Biden is trying to distract from the fact that the country is falling apart and there's a bunch of fascists trying to take over, and like, you know, like all of

this bullshit is happening. China is trying to distract from the fact that they have nineteen percent youth unemployment right now and that like there are there are like cops dispersing people doing runs on banks because the it finally looks like the Chinese housing bubble is about to crack, Like it's you know, this sort of nationalist stuff is like for for for China in the US, it is this sort of game that they play that has a lot to do basically with pacifying their own internal populations.

But you know, for everyone in Taiwan, like it's not a game. And that's that's the thing I think I want to close on, which is like the single most important thing here is that there is no way for China to take control of Taiwan except by war. Of the population does not want to be ruled by China.

Of the population of Taiwan wants to status quo. If you try to force Chinese rule of Taiwan, the only way to do it is by war and season and controlling season, control of and occupying a place with twenty three and a half million people is going to be

a blood bath. There's no other way to do it, even if you are I don't want to leave this as sort of a message to people who like who don't agree with me on this, which is that if you've gotten to the end of this and you genuinely believe that Taiwan is part of China, are you willing to watch your family get burned alive for that principle? Because that that that is what you are asking us to do. You are asking us to watch our families

die for your belief about lines in a map. And if if you are not willing to accept the consequences of your belief personally, if you are not willing to see your family get obliterated by a fucking rocket, then don't push for it to happen to us. And yeah, that is that. That is type one one on one. Um, Please, for the love of God, stop doing this bullshit. I

don't want my family to die. I yeah, yeah, I think that's very well said mate, I think a lot of people are so detached from the underground consequences so they're like theoretical on Twitter dot compositions that it can be very easy to be incredibly callous to people who have loved one skin in the game. Yeah, and I think I think this is a part of it. Like no, like people on Twitter posting about this that there have no stake in this whatsoever. It doesn't matter to them.

If everyone on top, if everyone who lives and I one died tomorrow, it would have no material effected them whatsoever, right, Like the worst thing that would maybe happen to them, it was it would be harder for them to get graphics cards. Yeah, you entire family, like this is this is this is twenty three million people, an enormous number of whom are going to die if this thing happens.

So yeah, like on like, unless you are committed enough to this to kill your own family, then fucking stop posting about it, because that that that like, if you were not willing to materially accept the consequences of your own position on yourself, then you shouldn't have it. Yeah, especially when you're pretending to be left is Yeah, Yeah, that's this is this is gonna make it happen Here's yeah, don't don't have a Chinese invasion of Taiwan happened here? Yeah,

overthrow your local settler quality. Yeah it settling clonings is bad. That's the official stunt of Yeah. Actually, I don't. I'm not sure if we can legally. I think I think we cantally say this the official stance of cools of cool Zign Media. I'm pretty sure we can't legally say it's the official stance. Yeah, if you cut that down. Yeah, yeah, here are cool Zone Media. We don't endors set like colonialism. Yeah, don't do it. War is bad, don't rocket cities. Welcome

to dig it happened here a podcaster. We occasionally have introductions and mostly we have this and yeah that it's it's the podcast. Things fall apart, Things come back together again, they fall apart again, we put them back together again. Yeah, you know, you know the drill um. Yeah. And with

me is James Glow. James, Hello, and speaking of things falling apart, we're talking today about the what what what it looks like when this sort of the interconnectivity of the American judicial system comes apart under the weight of dueling abortion laws, and with us to talk about that is a lot of people who have written a lot of very good stuff about this. So with us is Ali Handra car Baio, who is a clinical instructor at Harvard Law School Cyberlaw Clinic where she works on the

intersection of gender and technology. Hello, welcome to the show. Um. We also have Michelle McGrath who is a public defender in New York City for like almost a decade and specializes in bail and parole litigation. Michelle, Welcome to the showy, happy to be here. And finally we have Evka Pierre who's a senior litigation counselor where she works at the intersection of reproductive and criminal law, and she is on cases where folks are criminalized for their pregnancy lass. So

if you welcome, welcome to the show as well. So y'all have written, Actually, I don't it occurs to me that it's been long enough. This is still not published yet, right, Yes, it's so. It's basically we submitted it to Cuney Law Review and we're waiting for edits. We expect our Law Review article to be published in December um, so, but you know, we've we've basically created a t L d R that we we collaborated for Slate, so we you know,

there's a word article on Slate. You can read that kind of condenses down our article from like words as much as we can. I we were we were graciously provided the long one, and so we read the long one.

We're gonna really talk about it because yeah, it's it's it's a it's a really interesting look at I don't know, there's a lot of sort of points of Okay, so I guess we should rerun and talk about what this actually is, which is that one of the things that's been happening in the last I mean basically, since jobs is a series of questions about what Okay, so it's a series is about what happens if you are in a state where abortions are illegal and you go to

another state and you get an abortion there, and yeah, and there there's lots of jurisdictional questions here and yeah, and this article is a very very sort of in depth and really interesting look at it. And I guess, okay, I want to jump into this at a kind of

weird place, but I wanted to start with. One of the things that one of the things that's in this article that's I haven't really seen much discussion of is about the way that the sort of safe harbor laws that states have been setting up are being like if well, okay, the way that they can potentially be in the way that previous safe harbor laws for immigration stuff were sabotaged by the fact that like all of the cops are

sending like all of their stuff to each other. So, yeah, I was wondering if you could talk a bit about that. I guess it's like a lead into it. Yeah, I mean I with respect to specifically, like how all the law enforcement is talking to each other. I think Alejandro might know a little more with respect to that. But when it comes to the way these laws are being written there, they really don't have the kind of teeth that sort of the politicians are spinning to the public.

They're sort of letting folks think that, well, we would never we in New York would never send you to Texas for anything related to the criminalization of a pregnancy laws. Um. And because of the way the law of extradition works in the United States, which is actually a constitutional law Um, it's going to be hard in a lot of ways for them to resist that. And so we have our article does talk about a little bit um in actually great detail about how they could actually craft the craft

laws that would be a little bit different. Yeah. I think one of the things that you know, this just this past week, there was the story that came out of Nebraska where Facebook provided the d MS of someone who's uh, you know, being charged with you know, it wasn't even charged with like like there wasn't a formal charge of like committing an abortion, like the person that was being charged it was like disposing of a body,

like and uh they say hiding a body. And so Facebook like released a statement and was saying like, well, we weren't told that this had anything to do with an abortion, and like that's the exact problem, right, is that when states are going to seek extradition, they're going to bring charges that have probably nothing to do with it in the immediate like on its face, to do

with abortion. It could just be like, you know, they can repurpose all kinds of laws like endangerment of a minor, right, Like they can do all these things that like would ordinarily like never reply in a pregnancy, but they can just kind of do it just to bring charges. Um. And so you know, um, my colleague who's fortune out here said their countant cook has has written about the

successively about like the criminalization aspect. But in terms of like how you know these these safe harbor states, you know, these laws like are going to be very difficult. I think it is just really what we're dealing with their effects of surveillance capitalism. Right, So, like Facebook turned over these d ms. Facebook has been in the process of moving to end to end encryption, which basically would have made this impossible to do in the first place because

it would have been similar to signal. But what Facebook did is because they realized that they would have lost access to data around people's messages and what they're talking about,

they made it optional instead of by default. And suppose people who are not very tech savvy are very familiar or understanding of you know, who has access to the messages and whether the government can get access, they might not know that they can set this to end end to end encryption, and so essentially, like in pursuit of profit,

Facebook doesn't enable this privacy feature. But this is the exact same kind of stuff, right, So, like Facebook has access to this data, but there's also this whole shady system of data brokers that gets access to all kinds of data. And that's exactly how I think were you alluded to when you ask this question about ICE having access to basically all this information on immigrants that states had swore they would never share with better immigration officials.

Like ICE is basically built this entire shadow system where they're purchasing data about driver's licenses and all this stuff basically by the purchasing it on the open market, and that bypasses all kinds of formal data requisition requests, warrants, subpoenas, all those things that would normally be required because it's just freely available. So, you know, suffices to say, as much as these states may want to protect things on that end in terms of data, it's going to be

incredibly hard to do so. And I think they're the previous efforts around UH, Safe Harvard for Immigrants UM and asylum states and things like that. UM, it's just gonna be really hard to enforce. Some practice, however, on the extradition side, when when like criminal charges are actually brought that there there is some things that states can actually do to help protect the folks who are caught up

with any kind of abortion related charges in their states. Um. I just also want to jump into say that the system works the way that it works because nobody's monitoring it.

So when we're talking about law enforcement officials that are talking to one another and getting information through very informal means, right, things that probably by the book, would take a warrant to go from one place to the other just takes Marcy calling over Janice that works that the other system and getting something faxed over, even if they're not doing it out of malice, it's just, oh, this is out of convenience. It makes life a lot easier to get

information from this place to that place. And folks have these informal systems that are set up that even when the law says that they cannot do it, if we don't have safeguards that I hate to say go after people because it seems so carceral, but like that protects what the intent of the law is. It has no teeth. Right, if your law doesn't stop Marcy from calling Janice and getting information on someone that they're not supposed to have

in your law doesn't matter. It's kind of in a nothing sandwich, right, Um, and I have plenty of thoughts and stuff to say about the criminalization when we get there later, because that's a lot of my work. But I think that gets to what Michelle and Alejandra and what um Conti who's not here, have found. It's just you gotta have something more than nothing sandwich. Is something more than something that seems good on the surface and doesn't actually help the people that we want to help.

And I want to sort of help folks sort of understand how this plays out on the grounds. When the article, we we give an example, right, So, maybe I've got a New Yorker who gets prescribed a medication that would induce a war Osian and you know, they bring it to their friend in a state where that's criminalized, and they give their friend the medication, the pregnancy ends, Maybe

the person is concerned and they go to the hospital. Um. Quite often nurses and doctors are part of the criminalization process, and so you know, maybe they call law enforcement official based on this information. They get a subpoena for that person's phone. So now they're in the phone and they can find out, Wow, they got this medicine from the New Yorker. Well, now now the person who took the medication,

perhaps it's charged with homicide. Right. I think what's key here is that they're not necessarily going to be charged with abortion. Maybe they're charged with homicide. They're charged within fanticide. And guess what, the person who came from New York is now probably going to be charged as an accomplice. So now we have a warrant for for a homicide

for the person in New York. Because of all the national databases that we have have, the NYPD, the any of the law enforcement in New York is going to see, oh that New Yorkers wanted for homicide, Let me go

get that person. Um. And so when then that person comes in front of a judge, even though New York is saying or Connecticut is saying, you know, we're not going to give any resources to extradite someone related to the termination of pregnancy, Well they're just being brought before law enforcement in front of a judge who sees that there wanted for homicide, right, and so on the ground these laws don't have anything to stop them, and and

so we've sort of suggested things that involve immediate rights to counsel people need to be released for extradition UM. And we can talk about some of those more, but I think it helps to sort of give that example to see how it's happening, how it would happen in

real life. There's something else I wanted to sort of talk about this because one of the things that that on the sort of surveillance front has been the way in which like what we're seeing now is sort of the culmination of like a bunch of the types of surveillance that have been inflicted on a bunch of different

groups of people. Do you have the antisex worker stuff, you have the deservation, the surveillance stuff that's music as immigrants, you have uh, the sort of post nine eleven like I mean, this is where the sort of fusion centers UM come from. Is the sort of like post nine eleven security state build up. And then you have the

stuff that's been used to go after activists. And I think that's been really interesting to me to sort of, I mean incredibly like depressing too to watch has been Yeah, like I don't know, like I remember like the few like one of the things if you these fusion centers were like all of these sort of like law enforcement agencies like share information with each other, like I don't know, like I remember in like they were like sending one of my friends tweets around because that was one of

the things they were doing to like go after people change their protests, and like, I don't know, I was interested in in this question of of these fusion centers because it's it's this I don't know, it's this real sort of like like it really seems like the sort of like the the next step of where all of this stuff goes is, you know, the fusion centers becomes becomes this place where it's really really easy to bypass the law because you know, all of this stuff is

just getting shared anyways. And it brings up this other problem which I was interested in, which is about like to what extent can the state even control law enforcement because like, okay, like law enforcement are those like cops

in general, very reactionary. There there's you know, if if you you know, if if if you go back into the history of the anti bustion movement, there's a lot of them being like aided to better it by the cops, and I was wondering, I don't know what what you think about, like, like what what what do you even do if the cops just decide they don't want follow the law at all, and they're just you know, they're gonna they're just gonna keep passing information on no matter

what you do. I think Alejandra and I probably uh different on views about where things are going next, probably just because of the nature of our our work in the things that we're dealing with the most. So this is gonna be fun. So I I actually think so, well, yesterday, two days ago, whenever this airs, However, many days ago, one of our colleagues at if When how my colleague Laura Huss, who's brilliant UM has been working on this research project for like the last two years, tracking cases

of when folks are criminalized for self managed abortion. Why self managed abortion, because that is the abortions that were happening outside of clinical spaces right that we're There were always questions about who can be criminalized for self managing their care. There weren't as many protections in the law for a lot of helpers and things like that in self managed care. So when her and her team looked

at this data. UM. What they found was that the biggest risk of criminalization didn't actually necessarily come from UM external forces looking at big data, right, but was actually cut like the hell is other people. Because what they were finding was that nearly the majority of cases of folks coming to the attention of law enforcement was coming from medical professionals. So I want to say, I have

the numbers in front of me somewhere it's UM. Well, so it's something like of folks that were reported to the police were reported by some sort of medical professional, whether that's a doctor, a social work, or a nurse or whoever, that was at a hospital when they were seeking care or they were getting prenatal care at some point when they found out they were pregnant. That's how

they came to the attention of law enforcement. Another of those folks that came to the attention of law enforcement came to people that they told information to that they entrusted, whether that was a family member, a partner, a former partner,

whoever the heck right. So, what we're finding is that the vast majority of people that came to the attention of law andforcement was because of folks, like actual people that had the information, and then that turned into them being individually targeted by police, and then that turned into their data being mined on their actual physical devices. Not

like big brother down but small brother up right. So uh, When I certainly think about kind of how big data can be used and manipulated and like absolutely messed up to do a dragnet of folks, that's always kind of a possibility that's swimming. But I think the immediate possibility is like, how do you protect your individual data on your individual devices? What safety plan do you have in

place about how you use the internet wholesale? Because I'm a lawyer, I can't tell people to commit crimes, but I can tell people to be very careful about how you manage your devices and how you manage information. Who do you tell your business to full stop? Right, because that's how folks are coming to the attention of law enforcement. Can the laws control cops? I think what we generally see is like, probably not um, but will the courts

respond to cops that work outside of the law? I think the loyally awful answer is it depends on the jurisdiction that you managed to find yourself in Yeah, I think I think Keith guys just hit it right on the head. Um, you know, it's cybersecurity or weakest like as always a human element, So like that's always going to be the biggest concern, right, Like who are you telling about any of this? Like who knows about it? Um?

Like you know, you know on a tangential as you're like with genderforming care in Texas, like one of the one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit against Texas, like one of the trans boys like that that was like you know, found out about you know, Governor Abbott's letter to like basically equate gender firming care as child abuse attempted suicide and then when was taken to the hospital, the hospital staff then made a report to like the Department of Yeah, so I mean this was all in

in the A. C. L Use lawsuit and it's like it's just insane, right, So like that that's exactly the thing, Like the biggest risk is always gonna be the human element, Like you're like the doctors, the nurses, your friends, like family members, you know it, and it might even be people like you deeply trust. You just never know, And

so that's always going to be an aspect. But I think one of the biggest risks as well is is that the amount of data that we have now, like even if that can't be used like in a proactive way to like target people on the back ends, like once you do have that kind of friend turning you into like all of a sudden, they have intent. They have like all of these things from messages, they have location data. They show exactly where you were at what time.

Like it's it's just like the perfect surveillance system that basically makes like any kind of reasonable defense nearly impossible, right, Like they can show where you were, who you talked to um. And so I think that the best tweet that I saw about this is from from someone who works at Digital Defense Fund, and they're basically like there um actually might not have been them. I just remember it was just like there there is no conversation about

criminal activity. There is only conspiracy. Like basically it's like any time you're chatting about any of this stuff, Like it's basically like that that in itself can be potentially considered like criminal conduct, and like that can be used like as intent and like all these things and like

um in prosecution. So like there's all of those aspects, and I think just to answer your your question like more broadly on on what police can be done, like like to be honest, I guess an attorney, it's been very very frustrating seeing qualified immunity just being like increased, right like, so so basically there's been no appetite by the courts to like like remove this doctrine or whittle it away actually like being rapidly expanded, especially in aspect

around um federal agents. Right and now like there's some can you explain, sorry briefly just what that is for people who don't know. So, qualified immunity basically means that you can't bring a civil rights lawsuit, particularly what it call like a nineteen eighty three lawsuit, which is like the federal statute that allows you to bring civil rights lawsuits against state and federal individuals for um, any kind

of civil rights abuses. And it's everything from like discrimination on basis of race to basically you know, the cop beating someone you know within an inch of their life though so basically any any kind of civilis violations. It's called like a nineteen eight three case, which is like the citation is the actual law that like dates back to the nineteenth century, Like it's part of um like the ku klux Klient Acts, which like so this is a long running like civil rights statute that really gained

prominence in the last sixty years. But you know, so basically what qualified immunity does is it basically says it, well, if it wasn't a clearly established right when this abuse or violation of your civil rights happened, the officer or the government of show it can't be held liable for it. So basically like and the way that they do it is very strictly interpreted. It was like clearly established right.

So it's like, well, I wasn't clearly established right that you weren't supposed to be able to be beaten with a baton like and it's just like what like it's some of these cases get really crazy. I'm not an expert on this by any means, but like I've I've you know, come across a few, and it's it's absolutely insane. Like how how like narrowly they'll they'll oftentimes like define what like clearly like it's not like you know, broadly

defined right of like maybe police officers shouldn't beating people. Um, but you know, and I think it was. It was'ce even crazier is that this law or there's an upcoming lar of the article by this professor that I was just came across the other day and like, apparently there is a whole provision of nineteen eight of the section that has been omitted from the Federal Register for a

hundred and like forty years. Basically like a clerk omitted a section and this large like this this um like the Farriarca basically uncovered this omission that should have been in it passed in Congress. I'm like, but hey, if you we didn't. It wasn't a clearly established right Alejandra,

So does it really apply? The one that I'm like haunted by that that I read about that was that was one of the qualified beauty cases was like there was a guy who got lit on fire by a cop with the taser, and the courts ruled that because because there hadn't been a prior instance of someone's like that, you don't have clearly established right for a cop. Don't you on fire with the taser? Yeah? And you know

you can. Guy burned it death because again you got lit on fire with a taser, like because because there wasn't a clearly everything. It's like this is like this is like the worst, Like yeah, the secret is it's never it's never clearly established like like mostly folks lose

these lawsuits. And I mean this is where you know, I think folks need to recognize and I say this very much as a lawyer, that the law is not at the end of the day, what's going to save us like collective organizing and working together to keep each other safe. Is because the law is not designed to hold police accountable. It is not designed to keep people

out of jail. In fact, it's designed to do the opposite, right, And I think we're going to see a whole lot of folks start to understand how criminalization works in a way that they may not have realized before. And to your question, like as a public defender in New York City who spent many of those years in the Bronx, like, no, the police are not accountable to anyone and they continually do unlawful things all day. And this is part part

of one of the solutions. And again, all of these are stopgap measures so that people have time to plan and plot and organize and and and do what they need to do. But is that in these states that are saying, oh, we're not you know, we're going to keep state resources away. No, no one shall use state resources to move someone for any of these you know, criminalization of pregnancy. UM. But we imagine that law enforcement is generally a rather conservative group of people will simply

disagree with that law and probably at times do things anyway. Right, And sure we can file a lawsuit later, but that's not really preventing the harm in the interim, right, like someone's going to be incarcerated. All of these things are going to happen. And so one of our proposals is that it should be crystal clear that any any state actor who does participate in such extradition can be sued individually. They will have none of this qualified immunity. It will

not exist. Now, Listen, this seems very reasonable to me and to us, But do I think it's something that the legislature will actually pass. I'm not particularly optimistic about most of our proposals on this because it will mean a lot of other folks who will not be criminalized. In addition to UM, folks whore criminalized for abortion. But so so I do think that that that does police. You have a problem with rampant police impunity uh in this country. UM, and it will show up here just

like it does in many other sectors. I think sometimes when we talk about criminalization of abortion wholesale, for folks that have not been working in and about repro it feels very new, like this is something that we need to kind of like gird our loins and prepare for. But folks that have been working in the RHRJ movements reproductive rights, health and justice movements, UM, we have been

talking about criminalization for a long time. And the reason that we've been talking about criminalizations because it's been happening for a long time. So I was talking about my colleagues research that, um, the preliminary and folk just came out.

So when she was combing through all of these like different clerks offices all over the country, she unearthed like sixty one cases of folks being criminalized with self managed aboard and in twenty states now we only have three states that have laws criminalizing self managed abortion left on

the books. So holy crap. The fact that there have been prosecutions in twenty states when only I think at the time that some of these cases were about only like five or six states had these laws on the books. Tell us that prosecutors are very, very creative in the ways that they go after people. So the likelihood of always seeing abortion written at the top of the warrant

is going to be low. And then in some states we are going to start seeing it because they are going to if they haven't already criminalized abortion wholesale, any kind of abortion right, all abortions are going to become self managed because their folks are not able to get

clinical care. So it's it's not new, and I think that's one of the things that I want to make sure that folks understand that there like criminal defense attorneys can and can deal with this because it's just the same messed up ways that they charge people in a

variety of other cases. But I think the shock and awe um that's hitting some folks who the criminal legal system doesn't move within their lives is I need folks to get out of shock and all quick and get into work mode because some of the things that I'm seeing on the internet. While we're talking about how hell is other people and how we can protect ourselves in

our communities. Um, some of the ways that folks are talking about this on the Internet shows that they're not people that have had the impact of the criminal legal system necessarily touched their lives, right, Like folks that think they're doing op set on Twitter. But like, if you want to get a manicure, you can come to my state and I'll pick you up for your manicure. And that's when we talk about how cases get put together

on the back end. And I think, um Michelle can probably speak to this too, like as a public defender, when you're seeing how when you have a very motivated prosecutor a cop that actually knows how to do their job in the information that they're able to gather when

they investigate. Yes, they will pull your tweets. Yes, even if it's not your case, they will pull your tweets and connect that person that got their abortion to the tweets that you put online to show that they intended to go to your place to go and get an abortion, and then try to use those things to prosecute them

over here. So even if you're willing to take the risk with your own life, if you're trying to help people, don't put them in a position that they can be harmed by some of the things that we say out loud. Because if you're living in a state where you're not afraid of criminalization, but the person you aren't trying to help is in a state that and they have to go back to somewhere they can be criminalized, you gotta think about how you're protecting them. That's my soapbox rant.

I think that's really valuable. Actually this like we start letting the Trump administration to this like legal constitutional magic that like like they steth Abramson, the the Twitter thread guy right like it's it's yeah, it distracts from useful organizing a mutual aid because people are just like, well if this and this and this and this and this, and then like I understand this and no one else

does and this is a special secret. And then if we do this and turn around three times and go through the wardrobe and Donald Trump will be impeached or you know, I can give you it a safe a safe of safe access to reproductive healthcare rather than just

doing the work. And I think another part of what was going on here and this has been something that like, you know, if you if you talk to people who've been doing this, like okay, if if if this is the thing you genuinely want to do, there are people who have been doing this kind of work for decades and decades and decades of decades, and they know largely what is safe and what isn't and more stuff is a factor for not And the way that this sort of like like the kind of sort of like, hey,

I'm going to go do this on my own. I have I've never done this before. I don't know what I'm doing, but here I'm going to sort of signal that I can do this thing. Like, go talk if you want to do those go talk to the people who have been doing it for ages, and go support them because, like you know, again, like the reason the reason we're here in the first place is because that this whole, like the entire right to abortion has for literally decades, been supported by just a really tiny number

of incredibly underfunded and understaffed people in organizations. So like, go help them, don't like strike out on your own to boldly get you and everyone you're working with arrested. Yeah, I think you know some of that is you know, I think some people have some good intentions, but my god, like that energy can be spent in so much more

productive ways, and it's it's kind of unfortunate. I think that the worst aspect of it, though, is like the tech bros coming in and being like, I'm going to save this space with We're going to create a dow and like distribute funds, and I'm like, oh my god, Like I'm just sitting here, like, you know, because this is something like you know, I've looked into is students like this earlier this year, like you know, how payment transactions could be used, um and basically how there's basically

almost no security with with payment transactions, right, like like if you're using Venmo, which which in and of itself has like a social media function, so like you know, you can see when you're your friend, you know, Joe is like getting brunch on Sunday, and like, you know, they could you know, if you're not sending that to private by default, like that that's already a problem. But basically, like you know, they can get access to those records

pretty easily, um, in a much easier way. And you know, one of the things we we we started to look at like towards the end was like, oh you know has you know had some some students being like, well, can you can you use krypto? Can you use like bitcoin? It's like you still have to interact at some point with a financial institution and they can tie these things back. It is not that exceptionally hard, especially like now it's been shown that like coin bases like cooperating with the

FEDS and basically acting like a giant honey pot. So like I just I finally wish that people would just like realize that like technology is not going to save us here, Like it can help if used wisely and creatively, but don't think that like you're just gonna like do this one little neat trick, like as James was saying, and then suddenly we're gonna fix this because it's not right, Like this is going to take a million different solutions with a million different people doing all the little things

that they can to push back. And like that's one of the things I think we we tried to be very hopble about in our papers, like look, none of this is a silver bullet. We're just trying to provide some concrete solutions that states can take and some stuff that they can take, but we realize that nothing is ever going to be perfect to solve this kind of Pandora's box. It's been opened by a Lido and all

these like right wing reactionaries on the court. So like, I guess speaking of things that are not silver bullets

and will not save us. Um, Yeah, I guess could we get a bit more into looking at what the sort of like It's like a lot of the article is talking about I guess, the the the history of extradition, uh, and how how that sort of been understood and interpreted, And so I guess I was wondering, Yeah, can we go into talking about what the sort of legal stuff is going to look like when it's like, you know, if if we start getting these large showdowns between like

states with like actually sort of like you know, if states actually start trying to have sanctuary laws that are like have teeth and are good, what what what is that sort of what is that going to look like? Yeah, So this is a kind of part that I focused on in the article. And so basically a lot of people aren't aware about this because it's not really a

contested area of the Constitution. But basically when the Constitution was drafted um and ratified, it contained what was called the extradition Clause, and basically what it said is that, you know, all the states have a duty to turn over fugitives from other states that have been charged with

the crime and have fled into those states. Is the United States kind of where it's a federal system, so like every state is still considered kind of its own sovereign in some ways, in a very quasi sovereign way. And so there was a question about, you know, since all criminal prosecutions, basically especially the inception of the United States, were done at the state level, you know, what what happens when somebody crosses and across state lines? Like how

are we going to handle that? And so basically this was you know, one of the drafts. And initially they tried to set it at a higher bar, like to be like high crimes and misdemeanors, similar to kind of the impeachment clause, and you know, they whittled it down to and basically made it very applicable as at all crimes, um.

But it really did not get much play until basically in the eighteen forties when obviously, the tension around slavery picked up, right, So you had enslaved people escaping to the north and the South being very angry about that and wanting the North to to return. Um then escaped enslave folks and the North being like no. And Congress tried to figure out a way to like thread some kind of needle, but made it ten times worse and put us on an accelerating path towards Civil war by

passing the Fugitive Slave Act of eighteen fifty. And a bunch of radical abolitionists in the Northeast were like, we don't ever want to comply with this, right, So like Vermont passed this bill called the Habeas Corpus Act, which basically created all kinds of legal procedures so that Southern bounty hunters wouldn't just come into the state and just kidnap, you know, the first black person they saw, because they assumed that they were been an escaped and slave person

rather than a free person. And you know, and it was trying to stop that kind of issue of kidnappings and also just not to comply with this, you know, the institution of slavery, because there were people who had escaped slavery and were in the North, and so it

was causing all kinds of tension. And while like the Vermont Law was never fully tested, it did create a lot of incendiary back and force between the North and the South and then the press, and it was really interesting like reading some of these old newspaper articles from the eighteen like from eighteen fifty, because it was like basically the press and Richmond and the press in Boston

like taking stabs at each other. And it was like the eighteen fifty version of ship posting, because they were like one person was just like this is nullification made easy, and like basically with like it's just it was. It was the surreal thing like if you know, if you get a chance when when our full article comes out in December, there'll be some some highlights from that and the notes um. But basically what it really got tested

was in eighteen sixty one. The case started in eighteen fifty nine, though it's called Kentucky be Dennisent and so what what essentially happened is there was someone who aided Um and it's like person escape Kentucky and get to Ohio and basically the governor of Ohio was an abolitionist and was like, I don't want to comply with this right and I do not want to I don't believe like this is a crime because this is not a

crime in our state. And the Attorney General of Ohio basically wrote a long legal memo stating that this this is a crime not known to the laws of civilization or man. So basically, yeah, they thought they want to read to the Supreme Court. And Chief Justice Taney also notable for dread Scott decisions, so like absolutely just terrible court like they were. This came I think about like

three weeks before the Civil Wars. This is like I think it's in in like March of eighteen six one, so basically like three weeks before Fort Sumter got like sacked by by the south Um. But basically what it did was is that it said states actually can't utilize any discretion in extradition. So like the like the governor of Ohio can't say, like, I have concerns about human rights and that this isn't a crime in our state. Right, there's not this dual criminality analysis, and we're concerned about

human rights and all these things. So the Supreme court basically said no, states don't have that discretion, which you know, but they essentially split the baby by by then saying federal courts can't issue a rid of and NamUs, which is basically an order for a government official to do something. Um. They said that federal courts couldn't do that to a state governor an extradition. So basically it means that like, states don't have discretion, but federal courts can enforce it.

So therefore it's just a non issue. Right. Fast forward a hundred and twenty years and we get to a case called Perdorico v. Brand's Dad, which basically, somebody committed murder in Perto Rico, fled back to Iowa, and then was sought for extradition back to Pertorico. And there's a huge element of racism here because you know, they were concerned that a white man couldn't get a fair trial in Puerto Rico, which is just deeply offensive. Um. And so they were. And there was also a question of

like territoriality, right because Perdorico is a territory. I wasn't sure if they had to comply with the extradition clause. And so essentially the Supreme Court said, yes, federal courts can comply with or can't issue a rid of mandamus to to ensure extradition. So essentially what it did was it partially overturned the Kentucky be dens In case, but upheld the central ruling. The basics, states have no discretion.

So what does that mean? Basically that states can't really stop the extradition of someone in their in their um jurisdiction, even if they have extreme concerns. Right, So if you have, like, let's say, going back to Michelle's example earlier, someone who sends their friends like abortion pills from New York to let's say Texas, right, and Texas is seeking extradition in New York's like, well, that's not a crime here, so we don't want to extradite um. You know, the states

would typically be hard pressed. But there's kind of two kind of or there's one major issue with like the extradition part right, actually has to apply to someone who's quote unquote an actual fugitive, meaning that they had to actually be present in the state when the crime occurred, and the commission of the crime can't in itself create what's called constructive presence. You have to be corporeally present in the state, meaning you have to be physically present.

You can't just like the commission of the crime doesn't constitute that. So in this instance, um, you know, the person who says a pill in York technically like constitutionally does not have to be extradited, right, Like they can contest that. The problem is, as Michelle pointed out, is that you know, the extradition causes it exist today is pretty much almost entirely just a formality that is waived

basically almost every single time. And so the courts, the like the state attorneys, the district attorneys, even defense attorneys might not be familiar with that and might not know that that's something that they can potentially contest or it's even something that they can um that that is a potential constitutional issue, right And so that's one of the things that we focused on is our potential solution, um is to ensure that people who were not present in

the state where the actor occurred are able to mount a challenge to the extradition. Um. You know, it creates all kinds of other problems because there's still federal extradition, meaning like if you leave this the country and come back in like border patrol could potentially get you. We still don't have a clear understanding of how that necessarily would work, um, you know, because that's never been a

question that's like fully resolved. So you know, basically, you know, at the end of the day, like we want to make sure that like folks are aware of that. But like the folks that like leave Texas, right, so, like if you commit an abortion, you were charged in Texas and you go to New York, Like New York is not going to have very many options to protect you from being extradited back to Texas. UM. And so you know, one of the things that you know, I fundamentally believe

Kentucky be Dennison was wrong. Was wrongly decided on the sense that state shouldn't be able to have a concern around human rights because it essentially acts as a one way ratchet where the states with the most regressive anti human rights criminal justice laws get to have like get

to dictate that over all of the other states. Similar to how um slavery, like the southern states were trying to enforce the institutional slavery on northern states that had that had abolished slavery decades ago, so it's a very

complicated issue. And again I reached back to that slavery analysis because not because I think that, you know, the slavery and abortions should be compared directly, but because this is like, this is fun eventually the last time where you have criminal laws that are so different between states, Like one state's human right is another state's capital crime. Like if you can't get further apart than that. Yeah,

And I wanted to just clarify for folks. If I drove the pill to Texas, then I would have committed the crime in Texas, and New York could extradite me um and I what I also think I'm sort of here is the what happens on the ground, right, So if you to be clear, while as Alejanda correctly points, if I just mailed it to Texas and they have the warrant while we're sorting out this extradition warrant, I am very likely incarcerated and the sorting out of the

extradition warrant will probably take ninety days. So just because I think folks get confused with this a lot, just because something is illegal doesn't mean or your lawyers arguing it's illegal doesn't mean it just magically stops um or

the process ends. And so this is something where we think that, um, really there should be a basis to contest your extradition on a human rights ground on two grounds, Either there is no dual criminality, that is, this is not actually a crime, and the other state Interestingly, here, handing someone a person scription pill in New York is actually a felony, whether or not you get money for it. Most folks don't know that he's smiling because she also

has a public defender in New York City. Um, because it blows your mind. You're like, wait, they just handed it to them. There's no money exchange. Yeah, that's a felony drug sale, So we might have dual criminality. New York might actually say, um, you did do a crime, so I will extradite you, Which is why we think

there also needs to be a human rights defense. And this may also extend to, well, we're not going to extradite them to Texas because they have the death penalty and we think that is a clear contravention of human rights. Maybe we can extend it to prison conditions. I don't know how that far that goes again, these are things

I don't know they'd be likely to be codified. But if we're actually dreaming up the world that we think where this could work, like I, as your attorney, should be able to come in and say there's no dual criminality, this isn't contravention of human rights. And once I mount that defense, then the court is bound to release you while we sort that out. Um and and that is

sort of our vision. Another thing that that Alejandro mentioned the ver the Vermont law in the eighteen hundreds, and one of the things that it said was you could get a jury of your peers in a situation like this. There's no jury in an extradition case. But the idea, of course, is that a jury is going to say this is morally wrong. I don't care what the law says,

We're not sending this person back to enslavement. And the idea here is if you put a jury in and you assert of human rights defense, perhaps the jury will say, no, we're not sending you. So these are these are a lot of ideas that we've been coming up with. So we're doing the plan. There was jury nullification, yes, it absolutely was. It absolutely was jury nullification of love love

love love love love jury nullification. I anybody with the law review that's listening to this, let me write about jury nullification for you and feel like, but but we we we. I feel like I have been wanting to explain jury nalification on this show. Literally sense the like I asked the first week coming back for the next one. So there's something that I don't want to be lost.

And that's the idea of like, people don't necessarily know what they're being charged with in the state that's asking for them to go back, because there's not really a requirement that that. So for an extradition, like thinking through what you actually need, like the bare bones of an extradition. It needs to be like a piece of paper that's signed by the governor, but not necessarily the governor of the state, but somebody with authority to ask for you

to return back. And that's in essence it right, just like a piece of paper signed by somebody that says x y Z birthdate, x y Z did a crime in our state. Give them back to us. Right, they don't have to say what crime. Not really a requirement it usually says it, but it doesn't. It doesn't require a probable cause, Affid David, I think is really the more important part. It doesn't require you to prove that there is enough to charge them with a crime in

the sending state. Right, So we're saying that's a bare minimum change that we can make two laws to make the state that's asking for you to use your resources to put somebody in a cage and then put them in a traveling cage to bring them to our cages. Um. And I keep saying the word cage because I don't want us to move away from what like prisons and

jails actually are. It's like bars and cages and boxes. Right, So it doesn't really harm the system, doesn't really tear yall apart to say, and here's what they're being charged within the reason why because that would be the bare minimum for someone to be charged for a crime in New York. You would need to have probable cause for the arrest, and then a judge that's sitting on the bench gets to say, Yep, there's enough probable cause for this person to be charged next court date, you know.

And but we don't have that with extradition. We just trust that the wheels of bureaucracy are turning the way that they need to. Holy crap, that can harm so many people. So we're just saying, hey, make them write it down. So maybe a judge that's sitting in Illinois can look at this warrant from Missouri that says we want X y Z back here because of a self managed abortion, and then they can see whether or not Illinois's new fancy extradition law, which they haven't written up

and I'm sure they will, applies, right. I think that's a bare minimum that we can do. And as much as I crave shaking systems and tearing them apart, I don't think that's going to be a thing that does it. But it might. You know, have y'all ever played Mario Kart, You know, when you're driving and you're able to throw like the turtle shell or the banana, that might be the banana that might slow down the process of somebody

kind of getting dragged along on this course. Well, and I think I think there's like there's another thing that that would do too, which is that that vice time for a community response, because like you know, if we go back to sort of the ice stuff, it was like, well, yeah, Okay, like ice raids weren't stopped by the sanctuary laws. The thing that like did slow them down was massive community response. Yeah, I think I think that's very Uh it's certainly I've

seen that happen here. Like in San Diego, it wasn't any of our performative Democrats laws. It was people getting out into the street. Now I was gonna say, there's It's also like in the UK in the last couple of months, there's been a lot of really really impressive community defense things and like cops showing up and like just entire communities and neighborhoods showing up the cops just like running away. And it's been it's been incredible to watch.

And you two can also do this. But performative Democrats keep giving us good laws, like give us something, give anything like a nub of a thing that folks can hang their hats on. Um. I just don't want any politician out there to think that they're absolved from the job of protecting people. Yeah. Well, and I think I think again to think with these laws, right, it's like you you actually like with this e tradition stuff like

I don't know how like I don't. I don't know how you would even like try to stop it unless like because like you don't know, like I mean, I like unless unless youre going to commit to try to stop trying to stop every person who gets arrested, which I think is like a noble goal, but like there's no, we don't have a capacity for that. Like if we lived in a world where we could do that, like the world will be much better and the state would

be running for its life. But yeah, it's like like it seems like a thing that like it gives like it gives time for the law to act. More importantly, it's like it gives time for us to act. And that seems sure. Absolutely one of the most important thing is that it's buying time for people to organize and

be able to be able to push back. It also creates a lot of higher barrier right like at the end of the day, like these systems are still made up people, and people are incredibly lazy and oftentimes like the police and other folks like don't want to have to deal with like engaging and going with like an extradition request because of the actual process for dealing with

that is actually very onerous. Like, um, they have physically go to the state to pick them up, and they have to do all these things, right, and so what we're doing is like we're suggesting make it even harder, like make it absolutely hard for them to go through this and actually have to litigate in courts and like bring all this stuff, um and just basically like so down the process and raise that kind of buried entry

on it. But you know, I thinks, like I think that's you know, very important to say, is like you know, the commune defense aspect cannot be able to stated because at the end of the day, like laws are just words on paper, right, Like it's it's the people that give them the effect and the power. So really what we need is like people say like this is morally wrong, right, Like we're not going to prosecute people for for exercising

their bodily autonomy engaging in a fundamental human right. And so you know, when one of the things I have but heartened byas ums like um for John Brown gun Club in Dallas, like what they've been doing like protecting houseless folks like under the over passes, like they show up and like you know, in Texas they can open carry and like the police don't want to deal with them, so they're like buying a few more days so that the Dallas police doesn't um come in and sweep you know,

the only belongings that these people have. And like that in and of itself brought so much attention that like brought so much scrutiny to Dallas p D's actions. So like it is that kind of community defense. And I think it also harks back to how these extradition issues like prior to like the Civil War worked out. It wasn't necessarily like these formal systems in Vermont that like stopped you know, escaped as like persons from being returned

back to the South. It was like entire mods of people coming and like being like, you're not taking this person out of our town, and if you try to, you're not gonna leave here. Like I as a whole person, I guess it's probably the best way to put that,

um shoot your local bounty hunters. Yeah, And so like essentially like that that's how it worked, right, And like you know, at the end of the day, I feel like, you know, I don't want to du something kind of violence, but like like what really what it means is like when people show up and they physically put themselves in the way, it makes it so much harder for the like this kind of wheel of injustice to continue. And

so that's really what it's going to take. And like you were mentioning with like the with the ice raids and everything like that, like it took people it's sometimes physically putting their bodies in front of ice fans to stop them from driving away and like chaining themselves to stuff, and like that's the kind of like non violent like direct action that I think is like going to be

like needed. Yeah, And I think folks seem to have figured out that their district attorneys are elected and the person bringing the fugitive case, which I don't think I've been crystal clear about, is the district attorney. So then the police officer is going to go to the district attorneys of it, and that is the person who's going to bring the court case to help facilitate sending the

person um. And I know New York recently has seen a number of successes of folks organizing around individual people would be saying you need to drop these charges. This conviction got overturned you should not be continuing with the case. This person is a for whatever reason, folks are organizing around, right, and so if we can create some delays whereby the person is free, right, because this is the key thing. We don't want people incarcerated. Incarceration in of itself is

extreme violence. Right, So if the person is not incarcerated, then we can sort of delay this process and organize around pressuring whoever needs to be pressured, particularly the two Democratic politicians who say there against all of this stuff. But then at the end of the day, are they going to ignore the homicide extradition warrant? Like that's where the rubber meets the road. Are you going to do

it or not? Right? And and and I think that's a much harder question when it comes down to that for them, because they're like, well, it's a homicide warrant, right, and and so that's where they need the pressure because um, all the wild ideas go out the door in that moment. Yeah, I think, like, I think that's the thing with with these people. It's like ideologically like they don't care enough

to deal with do it. But if you but you can force them to care about having a job, Yeah, well, it's not not even just so much that, like there there are long established ways of putting pressure on people and systems that can force them to do things they don't want to do, and yeah, go do that because

we're going to need it. Frankly, I think part of this is also destigmatizing work right, um, Because when we have kind of these big divergent ideas, when we find ourselves at the split of like good versus evil, right, like slavery versus not slavery, bodily autonomy versus not bodily autonomy, um, sometimes the good guys compromise to the point that we get ourselves to this position later on down the line, and what we can do is kind of galvanized community

response and also civic engagement by forcing folks to take a look at the laws that we so rely on and questioning why does this thing exist this way? Why is this process moving that way? Someone that didn't know that. Folks facing an extradition warrant like often have to make the decision at an arrayment. Am I going to waive my right to extradition and wait for them to couldn't get me because they said that takes thirty days for

them to come and get you. But if you don't wait, if it's going to take ninety days to them to come and get you, so you'll be sitting there longer, and that's a decision that you need to make. Kind of like in that moment, if we're talking about extradition in normal conversation, we're moving forward to a place where we're destigmatizing and frankly demystifying what the criminal legal system

really looks like. In an and bolts. It might end up with better conversations and better output for folks in the future. It might end up with you being able to talk about jury nullification and having like and not having it be kind of like a shaking the table conversation, because frankly, these are all like civics. Civics, it's rights, it's things that are written in the constitution that governs us, where the cops don't need to know the law, but

we're all expected to write. So it takes all kinds, it takes all responses for us to just get to the place that's better than the stop gap that Row had been giving us for the last forties some odd years. And I'll say, like the one thing that does terrify me in this end is like or I guess like really concerns me is like what Bonda Santist just did in Florida in Hillsboro County. Like I grew up in

Hillsboro County, so I'm from there. So it's like like the twice elected UH state attorney there was just suspended because he said he would refuse to um prosecute crimes related to abortion and gender for carry, like also refused to prosecute trans people using the bathroom right, So like these kinds of things and the santis just like sacked him. Right, an elected person that reflects the values of that county, and so like that that's the other thing to be

aware of. It's you know, like even when you do exercise that power and like say like this is our as a community, these are our values on like who we should be prioritizing um in the criminal justice system. There are still people out there that will will try to circumvent that in a very authoritarian and autocratic way, and so um, you know, I think it's not just who you're voting for your local das, who are you

running for? A governor? Who are you running for? Like, you know, these people that have broader powers over this. I wanted to briefly talk about this because I know like it was proposed at least by my representative the and I think it's being bandied about as a solution, and uh, it doesn't seem like it is. But this My Body, My Data Act, which I was trying to read through it a little earlier. It seems like it allows people to like sue tech companies for selling their

data that leads to their prosecution. I don't know if you are familiar with it, but maybe we could just discuss a little bit what No, okay, all right, I mean so I'm not familiar, but based on what you just said, right, I think there's this and I really think it goes back to what EVCO is saying about folks just like not not fully understanding precisely how the

criminal legal system just like runs over people. Okay, great, so I can sue the tech company after the police have put me in a cage and and convicted me based on the day like like, okay, I mean great, maybe I'll have a lot of money on my commissary, my family will have enough um like funds to come drive and visit me at whatever state prison they've got me locked up in, right, Like, like, this is where we have to step back and think, are is this

is this thing actually preventing the harm? Because I think a lot of times folks are just like, we can do them, or we could get back at them. And I also want folks to remember that just making something

illegal does not prevent harm. Right, and and a whole another conversation about criminalization as a solution to anything, which I think it is not, um, but but just on on the face of what you've said to me, that doesn't sound like a solution that if I it wouldn't feel adequate to me if if I were in that And also thinking about how cases become cases from what we know, it's not again, it's not coming from big

data down right for the most part. It certainly can happen, but really what's happening is violations of people's Fourth Amendment rights. Cops being able to access things on people's actual devices, oftentimes without warrants, oftentimes by not fully explaining that people have the right to they know. Um And I'm sure Michelle has had clients that were like, oh, they just took my phone. How many times have we heard that? Right? They just took my phone and started going through it.

A police officer that does that is not going to write in their report. And I just took his phone without any permission. It's always permission was granted. It was in plane view. I saw it from the street. I

smelled it as he was walking by. Like, if the laws that are being created are not actually responsive to the harm that folks are experiencing in a way that actually prevents it, then we need to kind of push back at our legislators and say, Okay, this is great, but is it responding to the thing that you're saying it's responding to? Because yeah, shout out to people being able to sue big tech for selling our data without our permission. Bet, But is that gonna prevent prosecutors from

going after folks that have abortions? Probably not, Because even in the Nebraska case that Alejandra mentioned at the top of the hour, that was a warrant that was signed by judge, it was a search warrant that was provided to Facebook that didn't say the words abortion on it, that didn't say that we're going after someone for abortion. Had I think the words like abuse of a corpse or something of that nature on there, and for them it was wrote what they normally do, bureaucracy, search warrants,

stamp here's the data that you're looking for. A law that prevents folks from selling your data doesn't prevent that from happening. Something I think a lot about those. One of my sort of like former political experiences was back in like I think, I think it's something which isn't twelve doesn't thirteen um. Right after the revolution in Bahrain. So okay, so the revolution in Bahrain, Saudi tanks roll in, they crush it, they kill a bunch of people, and

the government starts doing this crackdown. The way the government does to crackdown is they go they go to Facebook and they takes off those on people's public accounts, and then they go to Facebook and they asked them for information and Facebook turns go over, and you know, the government just goes to and finds everyone who's at a

protest and starts to ressing them. And you know, Facebook is just like m HM and like that, if if if if if if if they if they will comply with a literal monarchy who has had a second monarchy send an army across the border in order to crush a bunch of protests. Like they're going to comply with the US and they're gonna keep doing this stuff to you.

And so yeah, I was like, I like, even if you can sue them, they're still going to cooperate with the U. S. Government because yeah, they have a greater financial interest in doing big tech doesn't give a funk about you. Yeah, I think folks, again, as he was saying, like ea saying, it was just so like this is wrope. This is what they do every day. This is not

that serious or that deep to them. And I think we need to start asking bigger questions about why do we have a system we're so easy for the government to just like come in and um, have a subpoena signed, Like the subpoenas are easy to get, like we have these mechanisms are all in place. And that's what I was sort of saying earlier is that I think folks who haven't been paying attention to this, who are all

of a sudden like, wow, how is this happening? Oh my goodness, Well, these are the machines of massim corceration that we have spent a few decades really building up, and so now when the person the people you're sympathetic with start to get criminalized all of a sudden, we're very shocked. And listen, however, you got here, great welcome. I'm glad folks are here and saying like, wow, this

is a problem. And I want folks to think the If the abortion context and the self managed abortion is your entry point, I hope it is not the end point. I hope that you are thinking bigger about how did all these systems get here? Who do they serve? And and and I hope how do we dismantle them? Because it's it's not just this select few people group of people that we should care about, I think is all all the people who are who are exposed to this

on the daily. Um. So yeah, that's my soapbox. I always wonder how many judges, um have refused to sign a search warrant. That's like a big wonder of mine. I don't judges don't hang out with me, obviously for a lot of obvious reasons. But if I were to like just whisper in my ear real quick, how many times have you ever said no to a police officer that comes to ask to swear a warrant in front of you. How many times have you found there is no probable cause? Dude? Like to to be fair, there

there there are. There have to there have to be a certain number of times where they're trying to go after another. Judge es I don't know, it's good to have happened once like that. There has to have been one time where it was like this judge piste me off, I'm going to go raid his car or something. Never Never that I can like that, I can think about

never happening. But I just wonder how many times has somebody said we are going to go search for drugs and X y Z house in this specific neighborhood that that a judges says, you don't have enough here. Try again. It doesn't happen. Yeah, at least told in federal court maybe maybe you know they turned down one out of but in state court. My experience is it's it's it's again,

it's routine. It's just how things go. I mean, one of the one of the things that I came across when I was you know, I was not dealing with particularly judges issuing warrants. But one of the things I did when when I was looking into the payment app issue this past spring, um is, you know, I talked to a former prosecutor and was like, you know, what is it like to get documents from or or data from like Facebook and you know, Instagram or Meta whatnot,

or like Twitter or any of these other places. And they were just like, Oh, we just send a request, like we don't even like basically an administrative subpoena, and they just like hand over everything like, um, it's basically they're just like so routine oftentimes, especially if it's coming

from a district attorney's office or law enforcement. But like often times these companies just like casually handover stuff all the time, especially when it's like dealing with low level drug stuff um or any kind of like issues like that. You know, they like to say, oh, we're we're big on on civil rights and stuff like that and making

sure your data is protective. In reality, like there's so many requests around this stuff, and it's just you know, the only time they ever maybe make a standards when a case is higher profile and it may damage their brands, right, and that's that's the only time they actually ever care. On the defense attorney side, it's hard as heck to get your client's records for things like so hard, so

so hard. You're looking for information on a Facebook for somebody that's incarcerated that might get them out of jail, and they don't remember their password, you don't know how to get into their stuff, and it need to be not a screenshot because that you might not be able to get that authenticated and admissible in court. And it is so hard when you're working on the other side and not in law enforcement to get data and information.

But on the flip side when it comes to like people's medical information, which comes into play in a lot of these cases because we're at this intersection of bodily autonomy and health in the criminal legal system. We've certainly seen in cases where folks are having a medical emergency and cops are able to just go and do a bedside interview with somebody that's coming out of surgery still

drugged up. Right, They're able to just go up to a charge nurse something like, so, how's he doing, and they're getting information that's wild because I have had request for my clients medical records with signed HIPPA authorizations returned because I signed with blue ink instead of black ink. It's not wrote. It's not wrote when it's not coming from law enforcements sometimes, and that's kind of the wild thing.

There's this assumption that folks and law enforcement have a right to all information at all times forever, and that's where things get rubber stamped, and that's the stuff that we're not really looking at that have large impact on

how people access their rights. I was just as we were talking about like Facebook doing everything about you and loving the cops, I was like reminded of Fouko's Panopticon and like this idea that you'll start to internal life discipline because you never know when you're being watched, right, um, And so I wondered, like obviously, like when talks about it, the idea is that you will do you act like you think the state is watching, because the state could

always be watching. Therefore you have to act like it is watching. Uh, And like it's if we're not there yet, right like that, Tally there, have you not heard the FBI and your phone joke? The FBI on my computer? Like I hope he likes my makeup today we're totally there, Like I think there's an assumption that we're all being watched.

Don't know. Even sometimes I wish our clients I thought they were being watched more because sometimes people put too much on Facebook do Well, yeah, you're right, let me

not keep myself from that because I am very much included. Yeah, but yeah, so like that's what I wanted to ask, right, Like how do we not you know, we don't want people to listen to some do crimes, but like how should people act in their interactions like in in a way that is like I guess I don't know that it makes them less vulnerable to like these very obvious upsets fails. I guess, Um, I have some resources, so if one how we have this thing called the repro

Legal Helpline. It's repro legal helpline dot org. It's also a warm line with the phone number that people can call and ask questions like what are my rights when it comes to my abortion my self managed abortion? And on that website we have did atal tips about how do you protect yourself and sanitize your digital space just for safety as a whole, not to hide information from everyone, but how do you move and prevent and minimize your risks.

What does harm reduction look like to you? We also have the repro Legal Defense Fund, and that exists for folks when they are actually being criminalized to pay for things like bail, help out with attorneys fees, help out with expert fees. So there are folks that are working on this stuff that exists as resources, and there are resources out there. But I would tell folks to really think about who are you telling your business to? UM?

When you share information, is that information that's necessary for treatment that you're being asked? UM? Just because we're used to being in spaces where there is a power and balance about sharing all of the information that's asked of us, and I think when it comes to spaces and times where we're more vulnerable UM to state actors causing harm to us, being mindful about what questions are you being asked? And it's that question necessary for you to be able

to receive care or services X Y Z UM. And it sucks to have to put work on the back of folks that are already being oppressed by systems. It's absolute trash. And I fully recognize that's it's it's messed up, But UM, when we're thinking when we're thinking about what does harm reduction look like. I think that's one of those things that we have to keep in mind. UM. And harm reduction also looks like folks knowing generally what the law is and being able to advocate for themselves

in those spaces. Yeah. I'll just add from my side from like kind of just you know, from from a cyber perspective, it's, you know, just in general ways, like there's nothing that's gonna be bullet proof or a silver bullet in terms of always protecting your privacy, but like the quicker ways that you can kind of at least make yourself generally safers. Use applex signal for for chatting. UM.

Also use like auto delete features. UM, you know, don't don't keep like years worth of text messages and stuff like that. UM. Additionally, UM, you know, don't use biometrics because you don't have a Fifth Amendment right for yourself subcrimination for for biometrics. Right SOS so long long reason why that is in the courts, use a password, don't use a short pin. Use a password. I know it's annoying.

I know it's like, you know, if a finger prayer in our face, like unlock is like much more convenient. But you know, if you are at high risk or you worry about this stuff and you're concerned about your privacy, like use those things because they can't compel you to do that generally. UM. You know. The other things is UM the UK app e u k I UM, which is a UM sexual health app that has a lot

of information about UM, you know, reproductive issues UM. It also is like a menstrual tracker, but it's all encrypted client side, they get no data UM and it has it prompts you for a password and pin to open it UM. And it also has uh resources for self managed abortion UM and and how to safely handle those UM.

And yeah, you know, just generally, you know, anything you put out there on social media also like be careful like what you you put out there, like stay to end and end to end encryption, use VPNs if you can. You know that these are just kind of like general stuff like nothing is again ever gonna be full proof, but yeah, there are some small stuff you can take at least increase some of your protections. And on my end,

you know, you have a right to remain silent. You should use it, uh and thanks to the Supreme Court, you have to say I want to be silent in order to invoke your right to be silent. You cannot just be silent. Um. So you I would advise people to say, I want to be silent and I want

a lawyer. Those are the magic words. I also want to hold that being captured by police officer is a violent experience and a scary experience, and sometimes asserting your rights can provoke more violence, and so people do what they need to do to stay safe in that moment um. From all the law of perspective, saying I would I want to be silent and I want a lawyer, um

are the things that invoke all of your constitutional protections. Um. And the police may lie about whether or not you said that later, so you know, say it as many times as you need to. But those are really the only things you should say, which is a lot um easier said than done. But that that is the thing that folks should do if they do find themselves in

the custody of law enforcement. And also if you're on the street, ask if you're free to go, and if you're free to go, please walk, do not run away. There's also a case about that God hate the cops. Well, thank you a so much for joining us. Um this this has been really great, and yeah, don't talk to cops yep. Would you like to plug anything before we leave with don't coote the cops? Yeah, I can just

throw my personal side. You can follow me on ALLSO shows on Twitter and stuff at Square underscores like Portmanteau of Esquire and Queer s E s q U E R Underscore UM and also have a podcast called Queering the Law um or talk about a lot of these issues as well. UM, so if you want to give

that a listen. UM, don't follow me on social media because all my stuff is closed, but I would recommend that folks follow at IF when how on all socials because we're always uh providing up to date information on what's actually going on with carminalization of self managed abortion and resources from you know, community partners that are on the ground, local that are doing the work. So if lks are looking to get connected, I would say reach out to IF one how and we can usually point

you in the right direction. You could follow me on Twitter, but I don't really remember what my handle is, so what I would suggest that you do. Uh, pre trials, attention and bail litigation is really my heart. You got folks locked up and they haven't even been found guilty. Not that anyone should be locked up. So donate to your local bail fund if you don't know who that is. There's a lot of organs, National Bailout, the Bail Project,

there's a lot of places you can find that. But growing five, ten, fifteen dollars at your local bail fund, we'll get someone free because you can purchase your freedom here in America. So um do that. M Yeah, thank you so much that this has been They can happen here. Uh, you can find us in places don't talk to cops, and yeah, if there weren't any cops, you couldn't make things legal. H 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.