It Could Happen Here Weekly 81

you can make your own decisions. Ah, it's it could happen here a podcast about things falling apart, and today I'm I'm happy that we're we're recording this right now, James and Garrison, because we all just got a historic example of something falling apart Elon Musk's Big Silly rocket. We're recording this about a day or so after it exploded in mid air for the Gulf Coast, showering a turtle sanctuary with toxic waste. It's such a such a

fun news that's comically perfect. Is really it is pretty cool?

how much detail to go into. But when we brought this up, like this is something that gare James and I is like a major thing in our bubble for the last like week, so we've all been following it. But when we brought this up in the work chat. Daniel had no idea that this had gone on. So we're going to start with a pretty basic overview of what people are calling the largest leak of top secret US military and defense data since you know Snowden. So we're we're going to go over all of that right now.

I think I want to start by talking about out an MMO RPG called war Thunder.

Right so, and it's it's it's like it's it's a game for war nerds, right Like there's you you utilize like radar in a way that's broadly realistic, Like if you shoot, you know, if one tank shoots in another, the tank's weaponry works the way it's supposed to in the real world. The armor is vulnerable where it's vulnerable

in the real world. And this is like the appeal to the kind of nerds who play this game, and as you might guess, from a bunch of people who really want to, like, in the most realistic way possible,

render and fight each other with modern military vehicles. A significant number of these dudes are members of various different like defense departments right, or at least are employed in some degree of various different national military forces several different As a result, like when arguments happen, you know, with any MMLRPG, if you're playing like World of Warcraft, right, and like something gets nerved or something isn't working as well as it's opposed to, you'll get these like massive

threads in the forums where people are like arguing about how something needs to be changed or changed back, or

how there's a glitch or whatever. And because war Thunder is so based in realism, when you have these arguments online, it's often like, well, you know, the F fifteen shouldn't work this way, it should work this way, and people will get into arguments about that, and then someone will as happened like a couple of weeks ago, I think someone will post sensitive and information about the F fifteen Strike Eagle in order to prove that it would function

the way that they are arguing it should function in this forum debate. That happened earlier this year, and I think with the F fifteen, it wasn't technically top secret information. It was information that US citizens were allowed to have but not allowed to post online because that's a violation of something called ITAR, which is a thing that governs

the export, essentially of military information and technology. But on another situation, I think, like a year or so ago, information of it, I believe the F twenty two was posted that was extremely sensitive. It was like top secret. And these are again like some dude who's got some sort of military job and has a clearance and thinks that the right way to use it is arguing about the video game war Thunder. These are not just Americans.

I want to be clear about that. In July of twenty twenty one, there was a player arguing about a Challenger two tank who claimed to have been a former tank commander with the British Army, and he shared information from the Army Equipment Support publication. The information had been labeled unclassified, but it was actually classified, and other lakes

has been a little more galling. A French Army soldier leaked information on the Clerk main battle tank that was top secret, and a Chinese user leaked capabilities at the Chinese Army's DTC ten one hundred and twenty five millimeters anti tank round that should not have been leaked. So thisat shit keeps happening in war Thunder. It's like a joke, like the war Thunder account when these discord leaks happened

a week or so ago, like joked about it. But like the thing that the game is known for, Yeah, is these like different people in different national defense apparati can't stop themselves from like leaking stop secret info about vehicles.

Abrams like models as leaked. That's not like the same as I don't know, Chelsea Manning leaking information about like war crimes by the US military in Iraq, or Edward Snowden leaking info about like the NSA. Like it's a

little less relevant to most people. What we started seeing a couple of weeks ago is documents top secret label documents, like actual pictures of straight up, unredacted, top secret US Defense Department documents just kind of filtering out over various discords, and they were kind of appearing in random little bits.

You'd see one that was like an update on the war in Ukraine that was kind of showing concerns that the US military had about the ability of the Ukrainian military to carry out the counter offensive that everybody's expecting in the near future. You have like casualty estimates from the US military. Another document that was leak had like

a bunch of information inside the Russian General Staff. So these are number one, very serious leaks, right you're talking about, especially with the leaks from inside Putin's kind of inner circle. You're talking about leaks that could potentially expose a major US source inside the Russian government. And you're also talking about leaks that just kind of revealed the degree to which the CIA has an enormous amount of information apparently at least about what's happening inside the Kremlin.

up in different discords. So this is, you know, a mystery, and it's the kind of mystery that, like a certain kind of person who is extremely online is not going to be able to get out of their head and is going to kind of try to trace back to its origin. And in the case of this specific mystery, the nerd who could not get it out of their head and decided to trace it back to its origin was my former boss at Bellingcat, Eric Tohler. Eric is a very nice guy, probably the most talented and skilled

researcher that I've ever met in my life. And you know, Eric started seeing these, like everyone else, these top secret documents, and was like, where the fuck are these coming from? And this is one of those things we'll talk about. It's become extremely controversial among a certain set of people

in the day since. But when this kind of started, Number one, you can't really deny there was an intense public interest in figuring out what the origin point of these was because that was the only way to figure

out are the these actual leaks. When you see something that's just like listed as a top secret document randomly on the internet, if you call up the US government and you say, hey, is this real top secret impot, They're not gonna say yes, right like, you don't get that response from them, I mean.

Russian side in the war. Obviously, it showed more Russian casualties than Ukrainian casualties, which is consistent with all previous reporting, but the edit of it showed something like many times as many Ukrainian dead as Russian dead, which is something that was valuable for the people who are trying to argue that this war is unwinnable on behalf of the Ukrainians. Guys like Tucker Carlson who covered the leaks on his show and knowingly used the fake edit of the leak,

I can't imagine. I have to assume it was knowingly because he had been very well exposed by that point, so there's really no other explanation, I think. But anyway, the fact that there were edits of these documents that were not legitimate going around, it's just kind of part of why there was a legitimate public interest in trying to figure out where the fuck are these things coming from.

Eric is again an extremely good researcher, and through a mix of open source intelligence and eventually just kind of like calling up people and talking to them, he found what appeared to be the source of these leaks, which was an invitation only clubhouse on scored of like thirty ish people, most of whom were teenagers. Over time, it kind of became clear that this group was a bunch of kind of young people who had gotten together during the pandemic to talk about you know, games. These guys

are all gamers. Most of them were like kids in high school, they kind of were cut off from their friends, so they wanted a place to be social. They would share memes, including like extremely racist, you know, borderline Nazi shit. They would like watch movies over and like chat over kind of the voice app. They were all what you call tradcats, which is like basically weirdo Catholic fundamentalists, like I think a lot of them deny Vatican two, that

sort of shit. It's like a whole thing. A lot of them were that at least, so there was a lot of like praying and anyway, a bunch of weirdos. And the head of this group of weirdos was the oldest of them, a guy who was known on like in the discord as og and Og. He's a was you know, in the Land of the Teenagers, the person in the early twenties who can buy an AR fifteen is king. And so this this guy is in his early twenties. He's in the military, which he talks about.

He posts videos of himself like shooting guns and like you know, saying racial slurs and like signposting to these like you know, weird memes and stuff that they're all into, which to them like makes him seem extremely cool.

name that they've worked under. You get, like the overall point of this, it's a bunch of like kids who are fans of games. They're fans of like this YouTuber Oxide.

It's like a little group of dudes who got together via fandom and the pandemic and over the course of years developed like a shared culture, and part of the shared culture is this guy og who's the older one of them, you know, trying to keep them aware of what he thought was important about kind of global politics, and that particularly included aspects of battlefield conditions in Ukraine, information about North Korean ballistic missiles, all of this kind

of stuf ugh that he had access to because spoilers he was in an Air National Guard wing as an intelligence and like it was in the intelligence sector of like an Air National Guard ring, and he had a security classification, right, And once this all got revealed, people are like, why the fuck is a twenty one year old because that's this guy's age have access to top secret data, And everyone who knows anything about the way our government classifies information was like most of the people

have access are like twenty Yeah, it fits our wars fifty year olds.

going to be in this age. And see, it's not at all weird that this guy had access to this shit.

What is weird is that so he starts off kind of like arguing, you know, sometimes he'll bring up stuff that he knows that's from classified documents while he's arguing, you know, about the war in Ukraine or whatever with these friends online, and then he starts doing like a series of regular updates where he'll basically he'll type out details from like a bunch of different top secret documents and he's massive, long and apparently kind of hard to

read posts, and he'll just like post them into the chat to kind of keep his friends abreast of what he thinks is you know, important, But he gets frustrated over time that like they're not reading this shit because it's really boring and like kind of weird to just info up top secret info, and they don't. These kids don't again, like these other folks are like in high school. They don't really realize where he's getting the info or

what he has, but they do. The folks who do pay attention recognize over time that like stuff will happen in the real world that corresponds to something he posted a couple of weeks ago, and they're like, wow, he seems to have like actually really good information. Eventually, Og gets frustrated because he's not no one's paying attention to his posts, so he starts taking photos of just the top secret documents themselves and posting them in the discord day.

that's what a whistleblower is. This guy was telling his friends and this thirty person discord, do not post these anywhere else. This is not stuff that you're allowed to share. This is just for your eyes because we're friends, right. He does not intend for this to get out. But here's the thing. All of his friends in this group are like dumb kids, and just like those people on war Thunder, they start getting into arguments with people outside

of the discords yet and other discords discords. One of them is a fan discord for some other YouTuber, one of them is the discord is a Minecraft discord, and they get into arguments with random other users about like the war in Ukraine and stuff. And when they're having those arguments, they'll hear someone make a point and they'll think back to a top secret document that OGPO and they'll be like, well, I know you're wrong because I've seen like some CIA like satellite footage that like shows

that this isn't accurate. And rather than being like, well, I guess I can't prove this person wrong on the internet without exposing my friend in our private discord to being imprisoned for the decade, they just grab top secret documents that he posted and they post them in these other discords. And that's how this shit breaks containment. Right now, It's one of those things I do want to note that, like,

these are not generally speaking, super pleasant people. OG is the kind of guy who, like one of his big arguments that he tries to like make to these kids, he like claims that based on the top secret info he has, which he posts, nothing that proves this, the mass shooting in Buffalo, New York by that Nazi at that majority you know, black frequented grocery store, that that was like a government plot to institute gun control, and shit, it was a false flag. So he's not just posting good.

He's like lying here too, because obviously there's no intelligence to post backing that up. He just he's just kind of trying to It's a mix of he's trying to like prove that, you know, he's trying to make arguments about like what's happening, you know, in various overseas conflicts using at US intel, but he's also just like spreading different kind of conspiracy theories that he has to these kids who are by and large looking up to him.

There's a couple like the Washington Post has done some really deep reporting where they talk to some of these kids who they're like, yeah, man, we loved him, Like when he realized this shit had broken containment, he like called us and we were all crying because we knew he was going to go to prison. Like there they seem legitimately distraught. Yeah, there's like lines like he said something had happened, and he prayed to God that this event would not happen, but now it's in God's hands.

Like these are like weirdo ashy. I hesitate to like condemn like the literal children too much because they're very vulnerable. This guy is like by This guy is a bad person who is deeply like in a very fucked up way, influencing this group of like thirty ish teenagers on the internet in his like weird politics. It's not great. Now that's separate from the question of like is there a value to these leagues, which we can talk about in

a little bit. But so as we've talked about Eric Tohler tracks down where this is happening, tracks down like

the name Og publishes a piece on Belling Cat. It's sort of ripped off by like I don't know it does like every other newspaper in the world, and then additional reporting is done Belling Cat and The New York Times team up and they eventually like track down and publish an article on who this guy is, an airman named Jack Tik Sarah, And they publish an article about that about a day before this guy gets arrested by

the FBI. And it's one of those things, one of the if you if you look at the FBI Affid David, it kind of makes clear how the FBI cracked this guy down and found him because they did so, you know, using the resources they had before the Times did online. People have been going after The Times and Eric for like revealing this guy to the government, which is not

the case. Basically, once it became clear what had gotten leaked, the FBI, because they had access to you know, the systems by which people utilize and get access to sensitive compartmented information, found out who had most recently like on the days that kind of corresponded to the leaks, pulled up information about that and narrowed it down to this

guy Jack. They like it, and they were they had access to Like one of the things they did is they called Discord and talked to Discord, and Discord helped them track down where the leaks were originating. From. And then because they could see that the account that had posted you know, the top secret data originally was a paid account, they were able to like provide the FBI with this guy's home address and the shit. This is exactly what you'd expect for the f.

and no he wasn't. He was like trying to fucking groom some teenagers and they posted it without his permission.

into a whole bunch of right wing talking points we've seen around Russia. You know, We've seen this type of

stuff get talked about by Tucker Carlson quite often. There's there's a there's a whole bunch of like little nodes that this that that this touches on, and we even we even see stuff like that among like you know, people who are authoritarian communists, right who are who are still pro Russia despite Russia not being a communist country, but still like being like, oh, there, you know, this is something he's trying to expose the things that are people are doing wrong to Russia, and it's like okay,

all right.

figure out if they were accurate. But for like another thing, I don't know, man, you can argue about like what point you know, the digging, whether or not, like the it's ethical to dig this shit back to its source. I would argue that like people also have a right to know if there's some sort of fucking like like if the documents were fake or altered in some way, there was a reason to be trying to figure out

the providence of this shit. But more to the point, like I think it's good to have access to like data from inside of our military. I think that's that's

broadly positive. And when I look at these data, or when I look at what's been leaked, I don't think most of it's you know, one of the concerns that's always that always exist when you're talking about a leak of data is like, is this going to expose like potentially innocent people to any kind of arm And there is a potential for that with some of this, because some of it dealt with Ukrainian military readiness for the upcoming offensive, and like, well, like I don't really care

if some guy inside the Kremlin who's like a member of the Russian General Staff and a double I don't care if that guy, like something bad happens to him. He's probably not a great dude. But but I do care about like a bunch of random Ukrainian soldier potentially getting harmed. Now, I will say, from what I can tell from this, I think the odds of that are

pretty low. It looks like this has impacted kind of the timetable for the counter offensive, but I don't know that it's I haven't seen any evidence that it's exposed things in a way that's like going to cause loss of life, although it's a little bit unclear as to

whether that not that might happen. But also, while I think it's accurate to say, I'm not saying evidence that like a lot of people's safety have been harmed by these leaks, it's also not you know, what we're It's not anything like what Snowden did or what Manning did.

Right again, Manning revealed, you know, videos like the collateral murder video, evidence of like breakdowns of order and things that I think are accurate to call war crimes that were being kind of hidden by our government, whereas Snowden revealed intense details about an n Essay spying program. All

of that's extremely relevant to the average American. Most of this is just kind of like wonky inside base fall military stuff, which again I'm not like sad that it's gotten out, but it's also not It really does seem like a bunch of shit that like a guy pulled out based on his own kind of like weird interests. It's not there's not like a strong unifying theme around them. And again, most of it's most of it's shit that's

not going to be interesting to the average person. One of the documents I just read an article about, because like, we don't entirely know everything that was leaked right now, right there's been there's like the Post in the time seem to have a pretty complete archive of what was leaked, but they haven't published anything because you know, they're reading

through it and you know, actually reporting it out. One of the articles that just came out was about the fact that the Ukrainians made some overtures to the Kurdish led self administration in in northern northeast Syria, to Rojava, to the SDF in order to talk about the potential

for them attacking Russian assets in elsewhere in Syria. When and this has kind of gotten out over like Twitter, it's often been like described as, oh, the Ukrainians were going to team up with the Courage to attacked Russia in Syria, like like this was an actual, like serious plan. Would you actually see the document? It seems a lot

less inciting than that. Basically, what happened was some folks on the Ukrainian General staff or whatever were like looking into the possibility, Hey, you know, is there any way that we could kind of anything we could pay the Kurds over in Syria to carry out an attack on the Russians, and apparently they had access to somebody who claimed to be in the SDF at least, and that person was like, we might be able to do something if you can get us some anti air defenses, right,

which I don't know how Ukraine could possibly ship meaningful anti air defenses to northeast Syria. It's kind of bordered on all sides. There is some stuff if you're a walk in the region. There's some interesting stuff about this, which is that the SDF basically responded, like we could potentially do this, we couldn't attack Russian assets that are within the borders of the self administration. Russians are acting as peacekeepers there between Turkey and you know, it's kind

of desire to invade the entire region. They're not great as peacekeepers. The Armenians will tell you that Russian soldiers are not great, great givers. But the SDF didn't want to like ship where they were eating, right, so there was some like debate about where they might be able

to attack. One of the things that is really interesting about this week is that apparently Ukraine like talk to Turkey about this because obviously the Turks consider the core of the SDF the YPG to be a terrorist organization. But when Ukraine was talking to them, they're like, hey, we might basically bribe these people to carry out an attack on Russian assets elsewhere in Syria. Turkey was like, okay, well don't do it here here here, because that's kind

of close to some our guys might like that. That party is interesting. But again, none of this matters all that much because nothing happened as far as we know. In December, Zelenski was like, no, don't proceed with looking into this. This is the kind of thing like the US military has, like plans for what happens if you have to fight Canada. This is the kind of thing

defense departments do. And as far as I can tell, there's no evidence that went much for them, like a series of phone calls right which, by the way, the SDF denies ever happened. I don't know what exactly occurred. I don't know if it's hard for me to tell.

Did the Ukrainians were they talking to someone who was actually a representative of the sdf's like military hierarchy, or was this like some guy that they thought was because maybe Ukraine doesn't have great context into the air like or did the US, And it's it's not kind of clear. Did the US maybe like hook them up with somebody, but it doesn't like at the at the end of the day, you can argue, as someone who follows the region,

I find this kind of interesting. It's not exactly like groundbreaking, you know, in its importance, because nothing happened, no one did anything. This is like some guys in Ukraine thought about doing a thing and then decided not to, which is you know, potentially interesting context. But we're not talking about the manning or the snowed in lakes here.

the Saudi government. There's definitely some like slightly some somewhat shady shit from the US and there, but at the end of the day, it didn't derail the peace negotiations. It's just like, yeah, they were like like like and a lot of it's like that where it's kind of like this is useful context. I'm glad historians or journalists

reporting it out will have that. But at the end of the day, like the fact that like, oh hey, at one point in these peace negotiations the US was like, you know, being being kind of a kind of a dick isn't exactly like shocking. You know, It's not going to like change your overall concept of what's happening over there. It's not stuff that like is most of it's not

stuff that's like massively important important. It is really interesting that the detail that are our defense establishment apparently has from within the Russian government I do think it's worth noting because we're talking like when we talk about sort of the the provenance of these and the reliability of

these leaks. As they regard the war in Ukraine, there's been a lot of talk about like, oh, this reveals that like the Ukraine doesn't have the capacity to carry out a counter offensive, or that the war has gone much worse for them than they think. It is kind of worth noting that, like, prior to the expanded Russian invasion, all US military intelligence suggested that the Ukrainian government was going to fold in a matter of days. So even though a lot of this is top secret info, that

doesn't mean it's like one hundred percent accurate. Right Like our guys, like think back to the Iraq War. Our dudes get shipped right und constantly. It is. Again, this is all really interesting, And I will say two things. I think it's very funny that this this guy nuked his entire life basically to impress children on a discord. I think it's extremely funny. I have laughed many a time at this. I also think it's like, like, as someone who is interested in this stuff, interesting that and

good that we have this context. I don't think any of this is like massively surprising or shocking. Like the shit that's in that defense industry or intelligence agency analysis of the Ukrainian position right now is like stuff that you would know if you were paying attention to the good ocent aggregators who have been covering the war, and if you've been like just reading good reporting on what's

going on over there. I'll read a little bit of a summary from an article that's kind of going over some of the other stuff that appears to have been leaked. One details information apparently obtained through US eavesdropping on Russia's Foreign intelligence service and suggests that China approved the provision of lethal aid to Russia and its war in Ukraine early this year and planned to disguise its military equipment

as civilian items. Another includes details of a test conducted by Beijing on one of its advanced experimental missiles, the DF twenty seven Hypersonic light vehicle, on February twenty fifth. It says the vehicle flew for twelve minutes across thirteen hundred miles and that it possessed a high probability of

penetrating US ballistic missile defense systems. The documents contain new details about a Chinese spy balloon dubbed Killeen twenty three by US intelligence agencies, that earlier this year flew over the UNI United States. They detail sophisticated surveillance equipment. US intelligence agencies were aware of up to four additional Chinese by balloons. The documents a and another previously unreported revelation,

and so let's kind of break that down. One thing we have here is basically an argument through from the US that based on their intercepts, they believe that China has approved provisioning weaponry, selling weaponry to Russia and disguising it as civilian items. That doesn't mean they have done this. It means that, like there's sigent that someone in our government has that says that they were. That could be

disinformation from them. It could be out of date. It could be something like with this Ukraine and Syria thing that they talked about doing and then didn't do. It's interesting, I would say, if you are a defense industry reporter, it's something that woul could should definitely spur you to further reporting, because like that's really relevant if that's occurring. But it's not the final word on the matter. Meanwhile, you've got this thing on like, Yeah, this hypersonic missile

the Chinese had is good at shoot and shit. Theoretically, this is you know, the kind of thing that's interesting and I think is probably more accurate than you know, talking about the China providing lethal aid because you can kind of you know, theoretically you're looking at actual like data on how the missile has performed. It just seems like it's something that you've got more fidelity on. But this is again to kind of contrast it with like the snowed and Manning leaks. Well, what do you do

if like the NSSAY is spying on people? Well, you could at least attempt to pass laws that restrict their ability to do that. Right, What do you do if there have been like war crimes committed by your military that were then cover it up, Well, you can at least attempt to prosecute people. What do you do if

some other countries got a better missile? Well, there's not a whole lot for you to do sitting at home and like New York City or you know, fucking Austin, Texas, Right, Like, like, what are we to do about China's hyper I don't know. My assumption, generally speaking, not that this is an interesting but my assumption generally speaking is that when you're talking about Russia, China, the United States, we can all murder each other if we wanted to write, like we've all

got real nice missiles at this point. And it's this, you know, the Chinese by balloon stuff is like interesting. I don't think anyone's surprised by this. Like we knew there was a spy balloon. I assumed it had sophisticated surveillance technique. It's again, it's interesting that there were four other spy balloons in the area. But we simply know from older reporting that this happened like three or four times while Trump was in office too, So like, yeah,

this is something we've known about. There's been reporting about. This is corroboration. That's interesting. Again, none of this is really like a sea change in our understanding of any of these conflicts. It is interesting context. Some of it's being blown up, you know, into stuff that it isn't. There's reporting and like the number of US servicemen in Ukraine that's being like spun is like we've got boots on the ground there, and it's like, well, they're like

embassy guards and stuff. There's like twenty nine dudes that this like confirmed. Michael, Yeah, yeah, this confirms there's not a lot of US guys on the ground there.

If there were like like secret massive formations of US troops or even large like forces of US specops guys carrying out operations in Ukraine. How good do you think they'd be at keeping that shit secret? Right? For one thing?

Like Special Forces guys get killed all the fucking time, Like they get killed, they get overrun, like like's it's a terrible risk for US to just like send Seal Team six in to fight the Russians when spoilers, the Ukrainians have really good Special Forces guys every bit as good as ours actually with in a lot of cases more experience fighting this kind of war. And we're given And it's like, if you want to talk about US involvement,

we're giving them their weapons. Like we're involved fucking plenty. There's just not much of a point in US like sending the green fucking Berets into Bakamut, right, Like why that doesn't That doesn't help us at all, That doesn't like help our government. That's not like good for the military. It would be stupid anyway, whatever, anything else to talk about here?

from reporting on it. At least senior leaders of the Mossad spy Service advocated for Mossad officials and Israeli citizens to protest the new Israeli governments, proposed judicial reforms, including several explicit calls to action that decried the Israeli government.

According to Singet Signals Intelligence, the Infamy, So actually Netanyahu himself has been asked about this, and it's worth he appointed the Mossad director, a guy called David I think it's Baynya, and he has also he's on the record previously in news media before this saying that he had clarified to Mosad personnel who could attend protests and who could not attend, like because at a certain point in any of these things, that you're not allowed to be

explicitly political, right folks, even at a very low point in the US military, Like you're not supposed to say and do certain things. So there was a petition that went out earlier, and again this has already been reported. They that were sent by intelligence offices basically saying like, we'll go on strike. And there had been again like widely reported instances other Israeli military people saying that they would go on strike or not shot up for work

if these judicial reforms went ahead. So I think again it's been kind of we've really stretched. What was interesting I thought was that it had a Feiser label on FI series to Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and if people aren't familiar, basically it allows US intelligence to wire tap things, which they can do it without warrant if it doesn't

include a US person. So a US person is not just a citizen, but also maybe a permanent resident something like that, right, like like a person who has more rights than others in the United States. But in this case they seem to have got a fis a warrant, which it's very easy to get, right. It's like a closed courtroom procedure where they go to a judge and like it's not like an adversarial argument. Now there's no one who argues that you should get the warrant, and

so in practice they nearly always get these warrants. But what it showed they have to just prove it its intelligence asset of a foreign power. And so it showed that at some point they went for a judge and said, like, hey, you know, we need to wiretap some kind of some kind of communications or I'm using wiretap in the broad

sense or specific sense. But it's interesting I think that that they have some intelligence asset in the United States and said, hey, we know this an Israeli intelligence asset. And to be clear that this could just be shits going in and out of the embassy that they've decided that they needed to wyattap that and keep an eye on that now, given given that like it's Rael's foreign policies has been talking terrible for decades, but net and Yahoo is a new degree of crazy. Uh it is.

It's unsurprising that like anyone concerned with I guess international relations would would want to know more about what is going on.

on this kid would not exist. But he made this decision knowing full well what happened when you leak top secretly, Like it's one of those things where it's like just just within the context of shit that's fucked up in our country. The thing I'm going to be upset about is not a kid leaking top secret info to win an online argument and then having it blow up on him, right, Like, especially not a kid who's a fucking Nazi. At the end of the day, he did something that was obviously done.

It's like if some guy hops on Twitter under his real name and starts posting pictures of heroin and saying, hey, guys, this is my name and address. I'm selling hella heroin. Here's photos of a felony quantity of heroin and guns. Well, I think heroin should be legal, but I'm not gonna, like, I'm not gonna like make a crusade out of that guy's arrest because that's stupid. Like, like, you know what happens if you post, hey, here is my at home

address and name. Here is all of the heroin I'm selling. Yeah, you'll probably get in trouble because you have posted online a serious crime. Obviously that could be a problem for you. That's not my primary concern in the world when people do really stupid shit and it blows up on them and it's like again, leakers, you look at the way Manning proceeded, You look at the way Snowden proceeded. They were aware of the danger of what they were doing.

I mean, you know, Chelsea did years in fucking prison. Snowden fled the country. That's because because they were whistleblowers, they under they under they understood this is a serious like this is very illegal, and I have to try to take steps to protect myself because the government's going to come after me. The thing about Jack is like just the level of like arrogance that like I can post this shit all day long and nothing will happen.

It was like, well, for one thing, this is never going like it's information you're posting online, Like I don't care. There's no way to keep stuff completely contained within a thirty person discord. It's going to leak out, and when it is, the government's gonna want to know who the fuck is leaking this ship. And you took like took pictures of this shit inside his home, Like it's just dumb.

I'm not gonna like I don't at the end of the day, I have no room in my sympathy for like a fucking fascy kid who committed the dumbest crime possible and got in trouble, Like I don't know. There's there's people who I don't know. For example, we're camping in a forest and are getting charged with terrorism and facing longer penalties, Right, Jack might do fifteen years at

the most, which is like fucked up, I guess. But you know, there's people facing a lot worse for a lot less, and I just, you know, whatever, I don't care what happens to this kid. He seems like he sucks. I think the leaks are interesting. There's nothing in here that's like fundamentally changed my understanding of geopolitics though. Yeah, that's where I am.

who are accused criminal offenses. For people accused of criminal offenses, I want to make sure that anyone in that position really understands what you have a right to expect from that relationship and to feel really confident asking for it.

For people who are representing individuals who are politically radical or people who are facing politically motivated prosecutions, I want those attorneys to feel safe and ethically empowered to practice criminal defense in a way that honors the goals of clients who may define their legal interests not with respect to only their own personal liability, but with respect to a larger set of principles or a larger community.

And I think some of the community knowledge that was cultivated and held twenty or thirty years ago maybe outdated, or it might be inaccessible to folks who weren't involved back then, or maybe who weren't involved in things that were like subject to this level of state repression twenty

or thirty years ago. So that includes activists, but it also includes even very experienced criminal defense attorneys who maybe haven't interacted with these kinds of pressingcutions, you know, for whatever reason, because they were doing a different area of practice, maybe because this what was happening to the people they were representing in the geographic area where they practice, or like it wasn't happening at the time that they were practicing.

So I think that people on both sides of the attorney client relationship could benefit from considering that there are some maybe important and time tested methods of working to mount a collaborative defense in the context of a politically motivated prosecution.

Often we do have to learn things like the institutional memory of movements can be quite short, and a lot of people have come to the protest movement now who were not, like in my own case, like involved in sort of the campaign against neoliberal globalization in the early two thousands, where we screwed up a lot and learned a lot, and some of us are still around, and some of us are not sadly yet because part of the screw ups that that happened, and like a lot

of people understandably right have been radicalized by having their bodily autonomy attacked by seeing the cops continue to murder people after we all got in the streets and got shot with robb bullets to ask them to stop murdering people.

Like all these things that have understandably made people realize that the institutional the institutions haven't really responded to their demands for basic human decency, and so yeah, they might find themselves out in the streets and government doesn't generally yield power willingly, and certainly government right now is doing everything to kind of take what little liberty and autonomy folk have slice into that. So it's very reasonable to

consider these things. So if in this attorney client relationship, what would be some areas of friction or of maybe I'm phrasing that wrong, but like places where people might want to advocate for themselves in order to get an outcome that they desire.

really useful here. So I think like one thing that's happening is that attorneys are very much educated to be confident unto the point of arrogance, and clients often either don't feel authorized to push back on their attorney's ideas, or they do and attorneys to then just maybe steamroll them. And this is not entirely because attorneys are assholes. I think it is because criminal defense attorneys are very often taught to minimize their clients' legal liability by any means necessary, well,

by any lawful means. I guess that is what I

should say. So for criminal defense attorneys who do not primarily work with movement aligned clients, this often means negotiating deals with the prosecution that involve cooperating with the state's investigation, handing over information on your confederates, putting the client in an isolated or adversarial position with their co defendants or co arrestees, or doing things that require a person to renounce or disparage the people or the communities that they've

been involved with that they come from. And I think it's true that using these kinds of tactics to minimize your own legal risk is very often what people charged with criminal offenses want, But that sort of approach is often at odds with movement values, and it's often totally inconsistent with what activists want. Activists want when they are

facing charges. So, you know, trying to minimize legal consequences is, you know, certainly always a part of our job, and it's often a totally valid thing for lawyers to be doing. But the idea that an attorney's job is solely to mitigate legal fallout is not actually entirely accurate. What lawyers are supposed to do is work with the client to help the client articulate their goals, and then the attorney should use their expertise and their experience to help the

client lawfully pursue those goals. And that's what attorneys are supposed to do in every case. But I think it often becomes most salient when the client's goals are less focused on minimizing legal consequences and more focused on, for example, highlighting movement messages or acting in solidarity with other people

who are facing similar charges. So you know, again, I'm talking about this right now in the context of explicitly politically motivated prosecution, but frankly, the goals of the client have to lead in all cases.

more of the others. When we're talking about something like a mass arrest or an arrest that takes place in the context of a social movement where there are multiple defendants, very often those people do not see their interests at being an odds with each other. Very often they see their interests as being unified, and so they want to act in solidarity with each other. And there are a bunch of reasons for this that are legal, and they're also political and social reasons, right, just in terms of

people you know, having carrying social relationships. They often have commitments to each other and to community. But politically, people often feel that their individual legal interests are less the important thing that's at stake, and that the thing that's at stake is actually the health and welfare of their social movement, right, and that if they did do something like cooperate with the state's investigation, they would actually be

undermining their larger social movement goals. Legally, and this is really important legally, having a joint defense agreement or using a joint defense approach allows all of those people to work together in a privileged context, right because they share a unity of interest, and so they and their attorneys are able to work on legal strategy together, are able to do things like negotiate for non cooperating plea agreements as a block, are able to just have you know,

more eyes on the problem, more people doing legal research, more people drafting motions, right, and so in a very material sense, this is often a legal strategy. Working together actually leads to better legal outcomes for every body involved.

So I want to be clear that this approach, both you know, using joint defense agreements and using that approach, but also just in terms of an individual attorney client relationship, acting in a way that's more collaborative is not just cosmetic, and it's not just something that makes you feel good

if you're someone who's committed to anti authoritarian principles. In a material way, approaching the attorney client relationship in a way that is calculated to more fully incorporate the goals and expertise of the client or of many clients leads to better legal outcomes, less punitive outcomes. It leads to outcomes that are more closely aligned with client values, and it leads to outcomes that are better understood by the client, even if those outcomes are.

led to the favorable resolution of those cases. The other thing that they did is that they really all refused to cooperate with the state's investigation, which limited the harm that was done to larger social movements because it meant that people were not just rolling over on each other and giving the state information to which it was not entitled, right, like you know, information about people's relationships or interpersonal conflicts,

or you know, different kinds of First Amendment protected information that the state always wants to have about activists but which they actually are not entitled to, but which they often end up getting because people who are facing criminal charges. You know, sometimes will will offer that up in exchange for you know, what they hope will be some lenience.

on the line. The accused is the person whose goals matter. The accused is the person who needs to be able to make decisions about things like whether or not to accept a plea offer, whether or not to cooperate with the state, whether or not to go to trial and whether or not to testify a trial. The attorney is presumably the person who has a lot of expertise with the law and a lot of experience with the legal system,

and that is valuable and important. But you know it, really I want people who are facing criminal charges to understand how much power they ought to feel comfortable exercising in this relationship. You know, it is up to the accused whether they want their attorney to take part in a joint defense strategy. Now we are seeing some stuff.

I have recently seen some bond conditions imposed on people facing criminal charges that appear to me to make it very difficult for attorneys to engage in a joint defense strategy because sometimes it looks like these co defendants are being forbidden from communicating with each other, and so, you know, that is an interesting wrinkle. But one of the things that can mean is that it's up to the accused whether they need their attorney to go and argue to have that bond condition removed.

in any way connected to a co defendant or co arrest. Now, this is not to say that your attorney has to do everything you want and they're just a yes man, and that if they decline to do everything you instruct them to do, that you should fire them. You know, attorneys do have to operate under certain constraints, and this ranges from things like, you know, some law is not relevant to this case. Right. I've occasionally had clients ask me to use the uniform commercial Code to defend their

criminal cases, which is not a thing. And you know, I've also had clients ask me to like hold have a hearing or vile emotion at a time when like procedurally that's not permissible, right, So you know, you can't just do everything that the client says. But look, typically the attorney has control over legal strategy because you know, as I said, presumably they have expertise with the law.

But like, even if you have decided that you're just going to defer to your attorney entirely in matters of strategy, or even if you have an attorney who's like not super comfortable involving you in strategy to the degree that like I might be, at a minimum, the attorney needs to be able to explain their strategy to you and justify it right. So you know, again there needs to be mutual trust and respect for each other. So expertise,

they're not just a mouthpiece. But if you feel like they're genuinely not listening to your goals or not helping you to understand what's happening, or they're actively disrespectful, it's really important for you to know you can fire your attorney.

and classist, particularly around things like transportation and childcare. So you know, if you have an attorney who's just straight rude or being disrespectful or like being oppressive in some way, I would say, you know, the first step I suppose would be to bring it to their attention, and if they don't, if they are not responsive, you know, you should know that you do have a right to choose

your own attorney. Now, I do understand that there are you know, financial issues with just choosing your own attorney, but particularly in the context of you know, movement related prosecutions. They're often not always, but often resources available to you where people will either work to find you someone who can represent you pro bono or you know, will raise money.

And the other thing is that if you have a public defender, you can almost always have appointed counsel from another office if you have some kind of irretrievable conflict with your attorney.

They go into it because they care about defending people and keeping people out of jail, and very often, you know, the people who are in those positions care very much and are really really well trained, and they are not dummies, and they will work really hard for you. And I do want to push back against the widespread perception that public defenders are not good attorneys. They very often are

the best available option are often in very very good hands. No, this isn't to say that you're never going to come across a public defender who is rude or incompetent in some way some way, but I would really really caution you against assuming that the public defender is not a super qualified, committed attorney. The other thing is that the offices of the public defender often have resources available to

them that private counsel do not. You know, they have investigators, they have social workers, they have vouchers for public transportation, and all of those things are resources that I think can be very useful in supporting someone who's facing criminal charges. So again, you know, certainly, if you're having some kind of interpersonal problem with your defender or any attorney, I want you to feel really really empowered to address it and hopefully they're able to, you know, respond in a

way that's appropriate. And explain what's going on and you know why things are happening in whatever way they are. But I think it would be a mistake to dismiss the public defender as a good option.

likely outcomes of each of those paths. Right, an attorney has an obligation to give you the best possible legal advice based on your articulated goals, their understanding of the law, their experience, and their clinical judgment, and their clients have no corresponding obligation to follow that advice, which can be frustrating from where I sit, but it is nevertheless a critical attribute of my work that I do not get

to make big decisions for other people. They get to make decisions that I would not make if I were allowed to make them, But I'm not. I think that you know, I try to be really transparent with my clients about what my ethical commitments are, what I will do for them, what I'm not allowed to do for them. You know, I try to have those conversations in an ongoing way. I don't know that that's common practice. I think people are really busy and that's a hard practice

to maintain. But I want to encourage people who are in an attorney client relationship to initiate those conversations, right.

to do it. Yeah, right, So yeah, I mean, I guess, I just I just wanted to tell anyone who's listening that if you are in a situation where you have to have a relationship with an attorney, you know, it's already probably kind of a bad situation, and you should be in a relationship where you feel like your lawyer is taking all of your goals seriously, which includes not just your straightforward legal goals, but movement support and solidarity.

And if your lawyer is disrespecting your goals, or disrespecting your identities, or disrespecting other kinds of ethical commitments you have, you can choose to find a different attorney and are resources available, and ultimately these decisions are yours. And then I had some resources that I wanted to be great. So for people who may be accused of criminal offenses, there's a really great book called The Tilted Guide to Being a Defendant, and if you google that you can

find a free pdf of it. I would also encourage people to reach out to and to become non lawyer legal workers, So people who have, you know, experience with jail support, people who have experience with court support, and with providing sort of community support to people who are

facing charges. If you are somebody who has an ongoing case, having a support committee that includes at least one legal worker can be just so critical in maintaining morale and in feeling supported and in having the wherewithal to be an active participant in your own defense. And we do know that when people are active participants in their own defense, they have better legal outcomes.

why things are happening in the way that they are. So, even if you end up in a situation that involves, you know, for example, spending time in carceroal confinement, you will at least understand how you got there, and you will understand what the other possible options were. Right, you know, somebody might choose to endure punishment rather than cooperate with the state. And even if that is not what most

people would understand, as a better legal outcome. It is an outcome that at least was more intentionally pursued than the alternative.

are actively facing charges. That number is two one two six seven nine two eight one one, and we can try to connect with you with appropriate legal resources in your community. That is one way that I would encourage people to reach out if you are facing charges and you're having a hard time connecting with legal resources. That hotline is mostly for federal federal cases and for federal repression, but if you call it, we will do our best

to connect you with appropriate resources wherever you are. And there are also some resources for lawyers that I wanted to hy appear, which are first of all the National Lawyer's Guild, which is a bar association for people who value human rights over property rights.

my goal is to have fewer clients. So if anyone is interested in helping me to achieve that goal, either by going to law school or by taking some of my clients or taking some of the people who might otherwise be my clients, please I would be delighted to shepherd you into movement defense.

speak to police officers. And if they ask you, if they are trying to interrogate you or ask you questions, you can say I am going to remain silent and I want to speak to a lawyer. And if the FEDS show up at your house or call you on the phone, or come to your office or your place of work, you can say, I am represented by counsel. Please leave your name at number, and my lawyer will call you.

that this is an amicable split. The Brian Kilmead, who replaced him the next episode with Fox News tonight, was like, Tucker and I are still good friends. He's just decided mutually to take a leave from the company. This is definitely not true. We'll talk a little bit about all of this, but the gist of I think it's kind

of worth talking about, like why this happened. As far as we know, there's not, you know, objective kind of confirmation about why specifically he got fired, but the broad speculation. Some articles have like quoted a Fox News insider who says that it was due to something either he said in a recorded but unaired episode of the show, or that it was something that was found in the emails that were revealed during discovery that was profoundly anti semitic.

I've heard out like in one source at least said that it was anti semitic enough that it might have been legally actionable. That's obviously like what the fuck? I would love to know what that's civically means. But what we do know is that a former producer for The Tucker Carlson Show who was a booking for him, is currently suing the network both for a hostile work environment. She claims that she was exposed to intense anti Semitism while working there, and she alleges that she was basically

threatened into changing her deposition. So the lawsuit came alongside her like issuing a correction to her deposition and saying that she had basically lied in order like because she was being threatened by people at Fox, which is like, so there's a lot going on here. So that's kind of the gist of what we know right now as to like why he got shit canned. Yeah, that's that's that's the basics.

end up with that job. But in terms of where he's going, there's there's a few interesting options. Now it kind of does come down to who's going to be willing to pay the probably pretty high price, or if he's just going to try to stay independent. But I think something like Newsmax isn't isn't out of the question. I think I think this that this is this is just like a guess, but I think there's a decent chance that The Daily Wire is going to go after him really hard.

web traffic. They don't have like cable, but they get a lot of like other other ways to to to spread their work.

One of the things to kind of keep in mind is that Tucker was going to get out three and a half million viewers a night somewhere around there, which made him the most popular uh host on cable news, but also is minuscule based on historical number one, minuscule based on the kind of audiences that like you can get on streaming platforms today, which are much larger than cable audiences, And is minuscule based on like I mean, it was like ten years ago that three and a

half million viewers on a night ten fifteen years ago would have been like an unsuccessful show on ANBC, right, uh for for some for some perspective, the most successful TV finale of all time was the Mash finale, which had like one hundred and five million viewers. Like cable, cable don't or you know, television period does not get the kind of viewership that it does anymore. And I think when you're looking at Tucker, he is the the

main draw for him has to be the audience. He's not and he's the heir to the Campbell or to the Swanson, you know, dinner of Fortune. He cannot be motivated primarily by the paycheck. Right that that that there's he's simply like it. Just that can't be the reason he's doing it. It has to be the the fame, you know, And so Daily Wire I think is a likely place for him as a result of that.

he has represented like Megan Kelly before. Like, when you hear of a famous person getting let go by network, it's probably this guy who's representing them. I thought it was utterly hilarious that, yeah, both of them retained the same guy on the same day having been fired. But thinking about lawyering up, it made me think about like Sophie mentioned it that like Carlson defames people, he lies

on an almost daily basis. Right, We recently spoke about how he took the statistics of Russian deaths from those league's documents, that he used the blatantly altered version of those documents long after everyone knew they'd been altered. Right, he needs serious legal clout to defend him from the fact that he lies into fames people every single day.

So like going even though he has a sizable fortune, going out on his own would be costly in the sense of like he would almost have to be permanently defending himself.

like defending people. And so yeah, it'll be it'll be interesting to see, like how how long Tucker can last on his own before he gets into a giant court battle with someone, and whether he is I don't know, attempts to be slightly more careful.

in these ridiculous conclusions that he comes to. So like, I don't know with that, maybe the daily why I can suderstain that I don't really have a good sense of sort of their clout if people aren't familiar. Should we summarize the dominion case? I know you've spoken about it on.

gist of it is that Tucker knowingly and knowingly. We know that he knew because the discovery process revealed a bunch of his text messages and emails where he talked about knowing that the election fraud conspiracy theory was bullshit, and he propagated it and attacks against Dominion and another company, Smartmatic, in order to keep his audience on board, which is a criminal you know, defamation or not criminal, but at least like legally actionable you can sue as as Dominion

did and one like eight hundred million bucks. And I do think that's really worth That is kind of pertinent when we're talking about who's going to take him next, because like, obviously the Daily Wire would want a guy like Tucker except for the fact that he could cost them another eight hundred million dollars, which has to be has to be part of the calculus of any company looking at taking him on, And I think is something none of us, nobody really knows what's going to happen

with this, but I think there is a good chance he is permanently marginalized in terms of audience just because of how much like eight hundred million dollars is not enough to sink Fox on its own, but it is enough to make anybody looking at bringing Tucker on board.

is kind of the most likely thing. If you look at what leaked recently during their drama with Stephen Krawt, the contract they were offering Crowder was somewhere around thirty million dollars, which, from everything people have said, is a big deal for them. That's one of the biggest, bigger offerings they're capable of doing. That is, you know, probably the most Tucker is realistically going to be able to get.

as like community guideline strikes. But yeah, I mean just I think I think, like last week Matt Walsh's show got demonetized on YouTube, which if his contract is anything like Crowters, means that he is gonna be suffering up like a personal financial hit.

money or is so far out there that like it's you know, it's it's either directly losing us money from lawsuits, or or it's losing us elections, or it's losing us like business. And now I'm never gonna claim that like

Murdoch is not the far right, because he is. But it's interesting that we've gotten to a point where people like Murdoch are getting more gun shy about what they can put on air because it's finally like the money is finally starting to see actual consequences, and they're starting to pull back from the stuff a little bit.

semitic work environment. Is that he like when she got hired, he clustered swimsuit photos of Nancy Pelosi over her office, And that's what we've heard, like the ship that Like, I think it's possible, uh that what actually got Murdoch to make the call to can him is that he Murdoch himself found out through discovery that he was saying shit in emails that would sink the company, Like if

he's saying full on Nazi shit. Yeah, and there's there's documentation of that, which I don't think is unlikely he had on it, like yeah.

surprise me. It's either that or he said something personal about one of the Murdochs, and.

it's it's kind of unclear exactly what happened. I think it's probably worth talking about in the last portion of this what impact, because it is likely that whatever happens, he's he's going to have less reach and at least less reach in like a practical way, because if Tucker starts a podcast, even if the podcast has kind of more you know, through Daily Wire or whatever, even if it's got on paper more listeners than Fox, I think

there's something about cable news where you're reaching an audience that's that's different with the ideas that he was When he was on Fox, he was hitting people who would never have encountered some of this like fascist shit, this great replacement stuff, whereas if he's saying the same thing on a Daily Wire podcast, he's probably talking more to people who are already pilled, so to speak. So I do think there's a good chance that overall this kind of tanks his ability to.

because he's a fucking internet weirdo. And my dad doesn't you know, he knows Ben Shapiro because Ben breaks through to the mainstream, but he knows Ben Shapiro from like catching clips of him randomly being shared on Facebook by other people in his age group, as opposed to like seeking this shit out. And that's kind of the power

of Tucker. And I think one of the things you've seen Gear that you were kind of talking at, which is the thing that is maybe most hopeful to me, is how scared people like Andy know Glenn Greenwald flipped the fuck out when this gun announced because they see this is a major threat to their reach into their

earning potential. Yeah, Tucker can't host them anymore. That's potentially disastrous for them, and the fact that that's happening right as we're gearing up for twenty twenty four is something I'm hopeful about. At least I'll say.

interesting is that Tucker. Tucker basically has this sort of media ecosystem that revolves around him, and you know, there's a very established pathway for how you can become a sort of like a successful and profitable right wing grifter which goes through you know, you sort of go viral on Twitter, you go viral on TikTok, and then you go on a Tucker and you know, and like like people like lives a TikTok, right, Like, I think I think there's there's a certific kind of media campaign that

even with whoever, like whatever absolute asshole that like Fox puts in that slot after Tucker's you know, when whatever they sort of figure out who that's going to be, Like, there's still I think going to be sort of a hole there. Yeah, where I think it gets harder to run the kinds the very the very very specific kinds of campaigns like liber tich talk, like the sort of mods for liberty shit that that's been just making the country unfathomably awful for the past few years.

the like if the Fox people will create someone else, but until they fill that spot, A, there's a gap, and B it really remains to be seen whether seeing whether they're going to sort of pick someone who is as embedded in like that part of the sort of fascists right as Tucker is, or if they're going to find someone who's like, i mean still really really right wing and sucks but isn't like having ye on.

will be worse than Tucker. I do have trouble imagining what that could be, because my god, he really he went. He went right up to the edge of putting on a fucking swastik arm band.

But I think the loss of this position at this point in time will probably affect that decision because it's something he's certainly been thinking about, considering he's one of the most influential conservative people on the Yeah, like on the planet.

after John Stewart kind of destroyed his Crossfire career. He moved to a situation where he was he had unprecedented control over his show. It was almost entirely recorded and stuff out of a studio in Maine that he set up. He built everything he was doing around being able to totally control how he was seen, what was shown, what of his was like put out to the public. And

you simply can't do that as a presidential candidate. You have to accept and be able to make work for you the fact that every eye is on you and you do not have total control over what about you is put out and published, among other things. You're going to be repeatedly questioned in situations where you can't edit the footage or stop things from going out afterwards. And I don't know that Tucker has what it takes to succeed in that kind of environment.

train tracks. Welcome to it could happen here. The escalation from protest to uprising is in part a product of how Macron forced the retirement age increase through a national assembly he no longer controls without the ability to win a vote. Macron's Prime Minister, Elizabeth Bourne, suddenly invoked Article forty nine of the French Constitution, which allows the ruling government to force a bill into law without a vote.

Macron argues that because circumventing Parliament to force legislation through is legal, the move is democratic across France. Disagree. We spoke to two French protesters, Mael, a student in Leone, and a Gat, a union railway worker at a state owned rail company, about the movement. The two met through a struggle committee designed to bring people from different backgrounds and movements together to fight against mccron's reforms and four,

as Mael put it, victories for our class. A Gat had this to say about Macron's anti democratic sleight of hand.

It's a fallacious reasoning. It is not true. It's the forty nine point three is an anti constitution. It is an anti democratic article of the constitution. And this is what they have been trying to do lately, to say to make us believe that everything that's been happening is absolutely normal and implies with the democratic standards of France, which is not true. Also, what they are trying to do to disqualify any opposition from the left wing is to say that the left wing party is actually an

extreme left hardly, which it is not. And it's kind of they are trying to induce the kind of history in all this and to radicalize what is not. What we are asking for is simply for them to to listen to what we for once can call the people. Generally, when you have a protest, it's only a part of the population that disagrees with the policy of the government. But this time, honestly, uh, there are seven seven people out of ten who are who disagree with this and uh,

nine workers out of ten who disagree with this reform. Honestly, I think we can call ourselves the people.

That's literally what they're saying right now, which is kind of worrying.

He remained in a coma fighting for his life for an entire month. Earlier today, his parents' release a statement saying that he has begun to wake up, but is not fully conscious and his life remains in danger. The day before, a special police motorcycle unit called Brav M, created in twenty nineteen to suppress the Genejean with the yellow vest protests, was recorded threatening a group of random people that had arrested for sitting in front of a

building from The Washington Post. The cop says, quote, You're lucky to be sitting there, and now that we've arrested you, I swear I'd have broken your leg literally. I can tell you We've broken elbows and faces, but you I'd have broken your legs, one officer says. In the recording. Limone reported two slapping sounds can be heard, the report says, along with an officer saying, wipe that smile off your face. Later in the clip, a police officer warns the young

people they have detained. Quote, next time we come, you won't be getting in the car to go to the police station. You'll be getting in another thing called an ambulance to go to the hospital. Paris Police chief Laurette Nuez said on Friday he was quote very shocked by the audio clip Mayel and a gat We're less shocked.

And uh, but I must say that we we have had issues of police murders on the street like and police violence, wanting violence, and unfortunately that now it's not new and there is a newspaper media parts who managed to to find a excerpt of I think it's a group on WhatsApp or whatever of policemen talking about race, war and uh and all these kinds of things. And unfortunately we know that there are such people in our police.

So that's the police unions. And for a little bit of history on the police, we have, for example, one of the very violent units that you see arresting people all over friends, which are called brigadotic Huminality or back

for fort. And these people come from some sort of colonial units who were in Algeria during the war and when there was a need to repress populations who previously lived in colonies and then moved to France to the main country, they created a lot of very violent units and recruited through people who were in the Algerian War to basically break down people's house things like this, beat them up.

but they're really making up reasons to arrest people. Police violence is not new at all, And yeah, basically it's easier need to train all year long against poor, non white people, and then during protests they come against people who have come to protests which are generally different people, but not entirely different people.

and so the cops cannot charge us. Every time they charge, people get around them, and there are rocks which happen to hit their heads.

that they hate the black block. It's pretty simple. I mean, not of course, as everyone who's in a union, but the unions who organize the protest, they don't want anyone in front of them. They want people to go behind them and follow whatever they want to do. So they've been really aggressive. But even if there are conflicts right now, I would say the fact that the people in front of the union are more and more numerous, I think

there's somewhat less tensions the unions. I don't think they feel like they can really push against even the black bloc or radicals who break stuff.

of them. But what I observed in these over the last few demonstrations is that what we call the cortege, which is really the very head of the demonstration, even in front of the unions, the official union group, where there are the black blocks and the yellow vests, there are more and more people I was I was like, I was going to say, like me, but I'm a bit of a still a bit cowardly, and I'm still

afraid of of getting in this kind of place. But there are more and more unionized workers who mingle with the black blogs and et cetera. And I you know, we also have what we call manifestations sauvage the wild and and not organized protests that are not organized by unions but are kind of spontaneous.

directly linked to economics. And as I saw them many very often, and when we saw them in protests in Lyon, they were kind of weird. But I don't know them very well. What I saw was that the government repressed them really, really hard, much harder than the usual protests that we do, because they were really scared of them.

just saying and it's not an attack at all. At first, I must say I hated this movement because well, just long story short, it began in twenty eighteen, and in twenty eighteen there was a big movement in the SENCF where I work in the Railway Public Company because the current it's very funny because it's the current Prime Minister who was the Transport Minister at the time.

and it really started in Lyons. I was there and suddenly these people whom I did not see by our side a few months before, started to invade the streets and sing our songs. I was really outraged. I was furious, and then I fortunately I spent time with the people who are more intelligent than me and who said that it was worth going to see these people and see what was on their minds and what they were thinking, especially because there were people who had never before protested.

They had never been on the street to demonstrate about anything, and they were right to do that. And it all started with the price of oil and of gasolina. And I found that really really insignificant, and in fact it really opened my mind about the reality of other people, because I do not have a car, but some people have a car, and they needed to live together, to make a live in And not only that, but the motives of the protest. They roaded and roaded these people.

They got politicized at such a speed, a high speed. This is incredible because quite rapidly what they were demanding was not simply the lowering of the oil price. It was also more democracy, it was more social justice. It was against the cancelation of attacks, unfortune, of the great fortune of people, on break wealth, and and on climate.

Also it merged with the with a lot of climate demonstrations, and it broad it really it was about really a social model and what world we want to live in tomorrow. And so this is why I say this, This movement was really incredible. It was also incredible because it was taking place without the unions. It depends on the regions. In France. In Lyons, for example, there there is no love lost between the Yellow Vest and the unions, the direction of the unions. But in other regions, like in

southern France or in the north, it's very different. And soon they began to protest together and the Yellow Vest they they they gave us a new a fresh new breath. It was really a fresher breath of fresh air. There was such spontaneous, they were so spontaneous and so angry. Also, you know, they remind they reminded us what it was to be angry and to have the right to be angry and not to be helpless in front of an

unjust policy. And it really changed changes. And as just like I said that earlier that in this very movement, the movement we live in now, there are there are unionized workers who mingle with the black dog for example, well there were a lot of us unionized workers in the Yellow vese two and so yeah, it influenced us a lot.

that it definitely changed things. Also personally, I think that if I say wrong things about the yellow vests, why I don't know the importug is because yes, the concerns about oil gas price was not what of Pine because I live in the city and I don't have a car, So I think it affected more the country, the countryside of friends, which is more concerned with gas prices, yeah, than big cities. Also because we already have have lots of political movements here, so like it's it's kinven different.

they all right wing? And it's interesting that the way in which kind of all of these different sort of eras of protest movements in France have melded together for this this most recent kind of uprising like you've got you know, the the the You've got these trade unions, you've got le Jon's, you've got the Black Bloc, all sort of working as different pieces of this uprising, you know, based on kind of the different tactics of their eras. That's fascinating to me.

But gradually the movement is radicalizing a lot, it seems to me, the people who are in it, and the fact that it tends to mobilize everyone at first, even if it's not very radical, when it created this sort of mingling of everybody, the Yellow ass the Union, the Black Block, everybody except the political party there useless books.

movements on what's happening in France right now. Is it having an impact directly or is it just sort of like noise.

unions there is international solidarity as well. But maybe I got you U should say something about this.

are international solidarities. We have been in our inter professional assembly, because we have a local inter professional assembly, and we have been expressing our gratitude to the people in Greece, in Argentina, in Spain, in Germany who expressed their support openly and personally. I was really surprised to see how many people actually were being attention to what was happening

in our country. And it gives us, well, it gave strength to many people, and it also gives hope because I realized that, well, you know, the main leverage we have on our liliticians is the economical beverage. And so when when the bosses of big companies and investors and everything start to say, well, guy, your reform of pensions in France is starting to make a mess in Germany, in Spain, in Greece, please stop your madness, Well this

is a leverage I was not expecting. We are trying to use the leverage of the big wealth and UH and the big companies in France, which is already something quite hard to move, and that was really an unexpected support and we really hope that it's going to have because Macaron is very He's a narcissistic guy and he loves his own image. So if his image is starting to suffer internationally, I think this is going to be a big problem for him, and his image at the time is really a catastrophe.

seven am, I don't remember. But when people arrived there were cups everywhere and they were pushed away and circulation and capitalism could work normally and everything was fine. So we were very frustrated. So reorganized completely and through the Struggle Committee, we assembled people from general assemblies all over the city and also various groups, and we managed to organize is a blockade last Thursday and it worked pretty well.

It was not exceptional, but for first trip. People were very happy about it, and it led to many people from all over in the movement working together on a project and meeting together in assembly and then being together on blockages. And I think it's moments like this which

are very important for the movement to develop. I'm not sure if the blockage in itself is the most interesting action in terms of economic damage, especially if we don't stay very long, but the different social relations it can create, and I think it can have a lot of influence in the movement, especially when we're thinking about the unions and sort of leaders of the unions who don't want to mobilize too much, we don't want to go too far.

What can we do outside of that. Well, I think that's part of the answer, at least.

Now as a student, I've met basically Lisians from all universities in my town. I now have free access to all publications in French and I'll never pay for anything it's really really great in terms of blockage. There is just south of Leon there is an oil refinery which is not on strike. It's among the only ones. So it's really important because in France there's a special system because they wanted to stay independent from old producers, so they import the oil and then they refine it in France.

So basically, if we stop all the refinery, there is no more gas for cars. And right down it's becoming a real problem because of the strikes, and this one stays open, and so people have started to try and block the entry. So right now there's like something like fifty union workers and like fifty radical militants who come there every morning. Well not this week, but last week they were doing it because this week we haven't said,

but everyone is on holiday kind of somewhat. The students are on holiday, so many people take their paid leave right now as well. It's kind of a special time. But next week probably the blockages are going to start again. And it's great to see union workers meeting with more radical people to try and get an action together. And I think when there is story diarity exists, great things can happen.

never enough everywhere to to to stop us. And that makes that can make that can make the day a real success because you have a lot of things happening at the very same time, but there is only so many cops. So yeah, it works pretty well.

from just kettling one large block of protesters. I guess I think I was interested in is that I think one of the things that happens in the US a lot is you'll get a national day of action, but all of the actions, like there'll just be one giant action in a city and you don't get the kind of like diffusion that's been helpful with spreading out cop numbers.

And I was wondering, like, is this something like the unions are specifically planning to have multiple events all over the place or is that something that's been happening like outside that.

is local autonomy. And what happens is workers in very mobilized sectors like the railways, the energy workers, they were organized through their union actions on that day, for example. And on top of this, for example, you have students in a certain high school or a certain university who

decide to block something and for example, they need support. Recently, there was a notably right wing campus who was blocked by students, and so a lot of us came to help them because we've had never seen this campus blocked ever. And of course what happened was some fascists attacked them, but we were much much more numerous than them, so

it was no problem. But the next time they had a blockage planned at this campus, they ended up not having enough numbers, so they canceled, but the fascists didn't know that it was canceled, and so they all came really armed with metal bars and all of that. You know.

continue to find new ways of being free. Beneath the cobblestones, the beach sat another generation of French protesters in May of nineteen sixty eight. All you have to do is pick it up and throw it. Welcome to Dick It Happened Here a podcast about things falling apart and sometimes about how to put them back together again. I'm your host, Via Wong. This is a We are once again talking about Wizards of the Coast. Now this time is not

about Dungeon Gent Daggs. It is about their other property, Magic the Gathering, which if you don't know, is Wizards of the Coasts trading card game. That's at the forefront of some truly wild stuff right now. Now, you could ask Mia, why are we even talking about this about Magic the Gathering on this show, And you know, there's

multiple answers. One of them is that as industrial profit rates have been decreasing in the last half a century, capital has increasingly turned towards entertainment as a way to make money. Magic is now a billion dollar brand, partnering with everything from Fortnite to The Walking Dead to and this is not a joke, being in the process of releasing an entire set of Lord of the Rings cards.

As capital is flooded into the entertainment industry and Magic in particular, our silly little hobbies are suddenly the front lines of class struggle. Workers at TCG Player this year, given the job of sorting through literally tens of thousands of cards that TCG player processes, finally won their second attempt to form a union after two devastating union busting campaigns. And this is where things get very very weird. Now

bear with me here, dear listeners. We have to talk about a little bit of magic minutia to understand what has happened in this incident, and then we will get back to what the show is usually about, which is corporations killing enormous numbers of people. So a few days ago, Dan Cannon, a man who runs a very small Magic YouTube channel called Old School EMPTG, bought what he thought were cards in the latest Magic the Gathering set called

March of the Machine. Now Magic releases new cards periodically and what are called sets. These sets have plots and characters, they have written stories. They are enormous sort of lower events, They have enormous hype behind them. And March of the Machine story wise, is basically the version of an Avengers movie giant apocalyptic threats. All the heroes crossing over people, hopping through, multi versus, etc.

don't know why they decided to do this. They've never done anything like this if they've never printed just a tiny set they release a bit after the regular set before. And you know, the names are very very confusing, right, one is called March of the Machine and the other one is Marching the Machine Aftermath. How is a regular person supposed to keep track of this? The mind boggles,

et cetera, et cetera. Either way, So Dan Cannon tries to buy cards from the regular March of the Machine set when he gets in sent instead are by accident March of the Machine Aftermath cards. Now these cards are still secret. They have not been revealed yet. No no one, no one knows what they are. No one's supposed to know what they are before every set. There's an incredibly elaborate process where Wizards gives cards to influencers to you know,

reveal them to the public. And on a certain date, everyone reveals, you know, your influencer reveals what their card is, and there's this whole hype cycle on Reddit, and everyone argues about how good the cards are, and i'll call the art is and what it means for the story. It's sort of it's sort of similar to the the sort of hype cycles that would happen around trailers from Marvel movies, where people would be analyzing every detail of it,

et cetera, et cetera. And these are these spoiler seasons, as they're called, are a huge deal for Wizards. Date Wizards tries to heavily control the entire process, but sometimes cards leak out. Now, Dan Cannon suddenly has been handed a bunch of cards no one has ever seen before, so he does what, you know, every person who just suddenly has magic cards that haven't been revealed yet do and have been doing for years and years and years. He makes a video showing off the cards. Now, importantly,

this is not a lead. I need to stress this because of what's going to happen, what is going to happen next, You know, it's it's it's very very easy to look at the at the sort of severity of what's going to happen to this guy and assume that he broke a law. But no, he did not. He

did not break a law. Nothing he has done he's illegal. Literally, what he's done is he bought some magic cards from someone who screwed up and accidentally broke the street date for selling cards because he confused March of the Machine with March of the Machine. Aftermath, Wow, how can anyone make that mistake? Right? The genius of Wizards of the Coast marketing is unmatched. Everything they do is incredibly clear,

et cetera, et cetera. Now, in the process, because of how many cards he bought and how small the set is, he reveals most of the cars that are in the set, and then the Pinkertons show up to his house, forced their way through his door, make his wife cry, threaten to arrest him, and threaten to put him in prison for ten years with two hundred thousand do finds for copyright infringement on the grounds of him having stolen material.

The Pinkertons also harass his elderly neighbors. Literally, just today, as I'm recording this, a story broken gizmoto that revealed that Wizards of the Coast have used the Pinkertons before to go after stolen goods. Now, some of you may be asking who are the Pinkertons, And you know, I think some of you probably know in very broad outlines

who the Pinkertons are. But in order to really get at the core of what this organization is and why they look the way they do today as compared to how they've looked in the past, we need to ask another question, which is how has the balance of military power between the state and corporations changed over time? And this seems like a very weird question, but the Pinkertons emerge in a very weird period of time in this balance.

They are what fills in the gap between corporations directly having army East could concre nations and modern corporations who, instead of having their own personal armies, have intelligence, you know, vast intelligence agencies, but also rely on the police and the governments as the people who do violence for them. So let's go back and tell the story from the beginning by taking a look a brief look at the most infamous corporate army of them all, the army of

the East India Trading Company. The East India Trading Company was formed in sixteen hundred and it was given a vast state monopoly over trade in what they called East India, which is an area we would broadly call Southeast Asia and the South Pacific today. And at the start, these guys are optimistically they are half trading group, half pirate. The level of piracy is really high, especially in the

early days. They you know, trade for spices. They steal a lot of other people's spices from places like Java and they bring them back to England. They make a lot of money now over the course of theirs. And again it is worth noting that these people are kind of the descendants of the British privateers, people like Thomas Drake, who'd been you know, just pirates who have been hired by the government to only go after like Spanish ships

instead of English ships. So they are you know, from the beginning, the East India Company has this sort of DNA of army in it and over the course of about two centuries, they are going to conquer with their own army most of what is now India and Pakistan, and that territory is either going to indirectly or directly come under the rule of the East India Company. And the East India Company is fighting wars everywhere again. They seize India and Pakistan by force. They are fighting wars

in Afghanistan. They kill unfathomable numbers of people. The worst of these events is the Great bengalf Femin'. There's a Behind the Bastard's episode about this that you can listen to if you want a really sort of long thing about the East India Company and the famine. But I want to talk about the famine a little bit because so the Great Bengal Famine of seventeen seventy kills ten million people. And I knew this intellectually, right, I studied

a bit in college. But what I had never actually looked up somehow, what I'd never seen was the percentage of the population of this famine kills. And this famine is directly the fault of the East India Company. This is something that all historians who have look at this agree is that this is directly the fault of these India Company and the combination of their agricultural policies and their tax extraction. This sort of put into perspective how

bad this gets. The highest serious estimates for the number of people who die in the Great Leap Forward stands at about thirty million dead. This is an unfathomable atrocity. It is a scale of death at which the human mind breaks down and loses the ability to process. Some of my family lived through it. It is horrific in ways that are difficult to even begin to was to describe.

The Great killed about five percent of China's population. The Great Bengal Famine killed thirty percent of the population of India that the East India Trading Company controlled thirty percent. That's not just sort of small populations statistics either. Right, It's not like they killed thirty percent of a country with thirty people in it, right, They killed ten million people. This isn't you know? This is an unbelievable force of human evil. Are they are capable of killing people in

numbers that defy comprehension. They're able to do this because they have an army that is the size of a great power nation state. The East India Trading Company's army in eighteen hundred had two hundred thousand soldiers. That is a massive army. Today, that is like the size of the Act of Ukrainian Army in twenty twenty two. It is more than twice the size of the British army

eighteen hundred. And you know, in eighteen hundred it's not like the British aren't fighting wars, right they are in eighteen hundred are fighting the war the Second Coalition, so.

the East India Company's army. At the same time and at the height of the East India Trading Company there are army swells to again two hundred and fifty thousand, which is again the size of the regular British Army at in the most desperate war that the British had fought to that point. The trading company is a full on military great power. Right But and this is this is this is something that is going to shape an enormous amount of the sort of arc of the relationship

between corporate and Billie story power. It is unbelievably expensive to maintain an army like this, the the the British Stadia Company, even though they're they you know, they are looting entire nations, right they have they have there there are entire states where they fully taken over the tax services. They're just walking into temples and taking stuff. But even with all of that profit, right they you know, they have the ability to mint their own coins in a

lot of these areas, but they still lose money. And they still lose money again because they're maintaining this two hundred and fifty thousand strong army. And you know, so you have this problem, right, which is that you have this item on your balance sheet that is unfathomably expensive. And then you have a second problem, which is that if you have an army, there's always a danger. But

the army goes into revolts, and that's what happens. In eighteen fifty seven, the British managed to piss off their own army, which is almost all composed of Indian troops, and they fight an incredibly bloody worn. It is either the boy mutiny to suppoy uprising and the British win, and they after victory they strap a bunch of prisoners bodies to canons and shoot them so they can't be

properly buried. But the consequence of this sort of horrifying war, and particularly the sort of fear it invokes in the minds of you know, the British populace of like, oh my god, these non white people can actually fight us, is that they directly seize control of India from the East India Trading Company. And for all your nationalization fans out there, the British assuming direct control of India was

actually a nationalization. It's not actually inherently socialist, guys. You have to be a bit smarter than this, But that aside, right, this marks an enormous shift in the sort of political economy of violence. What is happening here is that states are assuming direct military control over their colonies. Instead of operating through corporations. And this means that what you see is a shift from direct corporate armies to corporations using

the state to do violence for them. And this doesn't mean that corporations don't use force directly today, and it also doesn't mean that the governments you know, weren't acting as the armies of corporations and like the eighteen hundreds, but what's happening here, and specifically the direct seizure of India from the East India, the direct seizure of India from the East India Company, marks a dramatic shift in the balance of forces away from corporations with armies doing

violence towards states doing violence on their behalf. And this is one of the things, alongside sort of slave catchers in the US, that leads to the formation of the police. You see this but both both both in Britain and in sort of France, right, you start to get police agencies that are you know, largely tasked with putting down their own working class. And this is one of the things, one of the sort of inexorable marches that happens over

the course of the twentieth century. And it's also happening in nineteenth century too. There is a sort of mass centralization of state and police power, and particularly that's an

expansion of the bureaucracy. Right the Orican state in eighteen forty is barely a functional state by today's standards, right, Like, they have an incredibly difficult time even figuring out how many people there are in the country, that their provisioning of services as a joke, nobody has like geek cars, Like people don't even have birth certificates for the most part. And that's something, you know, and that's something that changes right over the course of sort of the eighteen and

nineteen hundreds, is that you get a massive bureaucracy. The bureaucracy is built on the model of the police, and they get bigger and more powerful, and by the time you're you know, you're halfway through the twentieth century, get you get a modern standing army. And that's something that

is very, very weird. The Founders, who you know, suck ass in enormous numbers of ways, are also fundamentally and deeply opposed to standing armies because you know, they are students of Roman history and they know that standing armies have this you know, this sort of way of seizing power, but we've lented in a situation where you know, they don't really need to.

reductions in troop size in between wars. And you know that doesn't happen anymore, right, But the product of this was that, you know, there weren't that many like armed agents of the state running around with guns. And that's the thing that is completely and utterly ubiquitous in modern

American life. I mean, modern American life has reached a point where people literally you can't even imagine what it would be like if there weren't cops literally everywhere, and if you didn't have the ability to call the police about anything. And that was just the sort of the state of affairs for a lot of the eighteen hundreds in the US. Is that just you know, they're really

weren't police. And you know, there's kind of midpoints in the level of sort of bureaucratic development and the level of sort of the bureaucracy of violence, that is the police happens after a bit after the Civil War, where there are not enough police to develop the kind of sort of to deploy against the kind of violence that companies need to stop unions informing. And you know there's a secondary problem, right, which is okay, so you know there are armed troops in a state, but the armed

troops are the militia. And you know a lot of the times the militia can be relied upon to choose striking workers and break them, but there's always a chance that you ordered the militia in and the militia are people from the towns where you know where the striking workers are from. And this is a real problem with sheriffs too, is that in this period, you get it, you get a lot of sheriffs who just won't prosecute workers because the entire town and the sheriff are all

pro union. And this is where we come to the Pinkertons but first, and this is something that the Pinkertons would have approved of. Some ads, and we're back. So who are the Pinkertons. The Pinkertons are founded by a guy named Alan Pinkerton. Alan Pinkerton's an interesting guy. He's he's kind of a radical when he's young, he's like

he's a hardcore abolitionist who like funds John Brown. Right, there's a whole debate about the extent to which she was involved in a sort of British workers reform movement called the chartlists. Every source I've read disagrees about how much he was involved in it. It's I mean, one's disagreements are basically penning the radiology. I don't know if I ever get to get a good answer about how involved in it he is. But Pinkerton briefly and kind

of by accident, becomes a bounty hunter. But he just like walks across it, just runs into a camp of people who seem to clearly be counterfeitters. And he eventually becomes a detective around Michigan and then in Chicago, and then he becomes a postal cop. And in the process of being a postal cop, he figures out something that is more lucrative. He figured out a more lucrative way to de detective work than just working for the state,

which is working for the railways. So by eighteen fifty he has a full detective agency going that he renames the Pinkertons. Now, you know this is the eighteen fifties, right, you are rapidly coproaching the Civil War. Durating the Civil War. He is hired by George McClellan, just the worst union general. He runs a spy network in the Confederacy that absolutely sucks, Like all the spies get caught. His intelligence being awful.

It's one of the things that leads McClellan to suspect, you know, that there's like secret way more Confederate troops that there actually are. So he just never does anything for the entire worlds Like he's like the worst union general until he gets replaced. Yeah, when McClellan is asked, Pinkerton is also out, but you know the agency is still around and the detectives are initially known as Sidered

as cinder Dicks for complicated railroading reasons. I yeah, I don't know about that one, but it's very funny and what they sort of do, right is in this early phases, they have this massive network of sort of informants and

spies that they sell to the highest bidder. They're not sort of when you know, they are detectives, right and sometimes, but they're not detectives in the Sherlock sense where you have a guy who sees a bunch of evidence and then uses logic and uses investigation to deduce like who did the crime. Pinkerton detectives are operatives. They do infiltrations.

This is basically their one trick, right is they send a guy under cover and then he gets people to talk to him, and then they catch the guy because someone talked. Right now. The other thing that the Pinkertons are really really good at is spinning mythology around them. Pinkerton claims that he saved Lincoln from an assassination plot, and you know, he successfully convinces Lincoln to flee a building in a disguise.

So sorians disagree about this, but he's able to milk this for incredible pr right, He's you know, he's like, I'm the guy who saved the president, and he does this whole sort of like.

There's a gang of people who there is a gang that sort of bandits who they very successfully break up, but they also go after Jesse James. Okay, we need to tell the story of Jesse James briefly here because it's it's an important thing to get an understanding of what the sort of conflict that's going on in the West is at this point. And the thing that's incredibly important to understand about the story of Jesse James versus

the Pinkerton's is that there are no heroes here. Every single person involved in all sides is just an absolutely terrible person. So Jesse James is an ex Confederate terrorists who somehow managed to make robbing trains uncool by doing it dress and a KKK rope with the aim of like restoring the honor of the Confederacy. So this sucks.

And this is where part of the sort of like rebel flag like that part of the sort of like lost cause myth those comes from right there are you know, there are these sort of frontier outlaws who are like ex Confederates whose thing is like, yeah, we're like against the man and like the maand is like you know, the north Right. But these people suck right. These are these are these are these are people who fought and

died for slavery. I Jesse James in particular, like again, he's in this group of like gorillas who are fighting in Kansas and Missouri. They they do things that are genuinely unspeakable. So these people suck right. But the problem is the people going after them are the Pinkertons. And we're gonna learn a lot about the Pinkertons by what they managed to accomplish by going after again ex Confederate terrorists who are like some of the worst people who've

ever lived. So the Pinkertons take this case in eighteen seventy one. He sends in a bunch of agents try to infiltrate the gang, and Jesse James like smokes them all. So, in a very sort of modern cop move, the Pinkertons do a raid on Jesse James's house. So they throw in this weird pseudo it's a very weird kind of explosive device thing that I don't know. They claim that they were just trying to scare like the family out

of the house so they could arrest them. But the family sees this thing that looks like a bomb and they throw it into their fireplace and it blows up, and instead of smoking the family out, they have now blown up Jesse James's nine year old step brother and maimed a mom. So the Piggertons absolutely suck right like so far in there at the catch Jesse James, they have managed to blow up a child.

they get Jesse James. No, No, they don't. They never get him, because that's what happens when you know, you have an ex Confederate in places where with a bunch of ex Confederates, with a bunch of people who support the Confederacy right, they won't turn over their own people, and you know, and when the people they're going up against are the Piggertons, who are like the hired guns of Northern Capital, a bunch of people, you know, what happens is a bunch of grand people end up dead.

And yeah, but both sides of this are incredibly deeply evil. Jesse James is later shot by one of his own men, and yeah, that is the famous story of Jesse James versus the Pinkertons, which I think is useful in establishing that, like God, like, the South are obviously the bad guys in the Civil War, but a lot of the people in the Union are sort of genuinely awful hired gun

for capital people. And you know that's not so much of a big deal dreamed the war, but after the war, you know, you got these battles just like, oh God, everyone here is like everyone here should simply die now. Ellen Pinkerton dies in eighteen eighty six, and he is replaced by his even worse sons. And at this point the Pinkertons cease even sort of the pretense of being a detective agency, and they devote themselves full time to

being strike breakers. Now they have spies everywhere. They have you know, over a thousand of them at their peak, spread across the dozens and dozens and dozens of Union, and they are spying on meetings or appointed with the pinkertons. And this allows corporations. For example, if you know who's in a union meeting, right, you can just fire all

of them. And this is especially easy. And you know in this sort of pre nineteen thirties period where like there is no protected right to strike, right, like you if you stop working, that is illegal. The other thing they do is provide quote unquote security for corporations training strikes. What this looks like in practice is shooting people. And you know, sometimes those people are striking workers, like the three strikers they killed in the Pennsylvania close strike of

eighteen ninety. Sometimes they just shoot random bystanders, like the random guy they shot in eighteen sixty six, while providing security. And you know, again when you're shooting in random bysanta, you have to ask.

bad reputation among workers at this point. And you know there's a point where they're they're going by on a train and people yelled the train and the Pinkertons just bomb by, taking out the rifles and shooting four people out the window. So you know these are good people, TM, right. The other thing they do is they start getting into breaking strikes by being a company you can hire to import scabs, and this culminates in the Homestead strike. Again,

there's another thing. There's like a giant Bastard's episode on, but we'll do we'll do a short version of the Homestead strike. So the Homestet strike is this giant confrontation between steel workers and the forces of Andrew Carnagie and Henry Frick. Carnagian Frick like locked the union out of the factory and they call a Pinkerton army to seize control of the town of Homestead. This is from the

book Inventing the Pinkertons quote. By the end of June, he had built around the mills of protective twelve foot fence that included rifle holes, waterman's capable of blasting strikers with boiling water, and wires attached to a generator which could be electrified. In response, workers dubbed the mills Fort Frick.

Now striking steel workers and other residents of Homestead. Here the Pinkertons are coming and they, you know, they the Pinkertons are trying to land on these like invasion barges that they've modified, and so the homestead people go try to stop the barges, and the Pinkertons start shooting at them. And this is the thing that's very interesting about this whole story is that, Okay, every account at the time agrees that the first person the people who started shooting

first with pinkertons. Later accounts suddenly, like mysteriously later on it suddenly start to claim it like, well, nobody really knows she started the shooting in these fights, like maybe it was a worker, but like again everyone at the time cause it was the pinkertons. So I and give, given what we know about the track record of pinkertons are shooting children and shooting random people yelling at them outside of a train of shooting, just literally random people

on the streets. We can be pretty sure that Pinkertons started this, and but you know, the workers in Homestead are heavily armed, and this starts a massive gun battle. I'm gonna read from inventing the Pinkertons again. This serious battle would last the next fourteen hours. After an initial shurge, the Pinkertons were pinned down in their barges. After several hours, the crowd attempted to sink the barges by cannon fire.

Residents borrowed the cannon that had been that the city used for commemorations and by the way, that that's a Civil war cannon that they're using it in eighteen ninety to try to sink these boats. The crowd also set burning railcars rolling towards the barges and sprayed oil lunch the river was they attempted a light on fire in hopes of burning the Pinkertons out of their barges. The lubricating oil thrown onto the water proved impossible to set a flame.

So the Pickertons like try to surrender, But by this one people hate them so much that every they threw this four times, and each time someone will hold up a white flag and a sniper will shoot the flag and refuse to let them surrender. On try five, the Pickertons are finally allowed to surrender and the Pickersons are crushed, but unfortunately, the state militia is brought in to sort of break the strike and the union movement in Pennsylvania

is essentially destroyed. But pr White this is terrible from the Pinkertons, and they start trying to do like a giant pr OP to sort of recover the reputation, and a lot of what the sort of popular image of the Pinkertons right comes from the pr op the agency does, like after the Homes District that gets reproduced by like TV producers later on. So fast forwarding a little bit

to some other stuff that they were involved in. In late nineteen oh five, someone blew up the notoriously anti union governor of Idaho who'd sent troops to kill striking

workers a few years ago. Now Idaho hires a Pinkerton detective to just torture a guy into confessing to the murder and then also claiming that like basically every instance of violence in the last five years in in in that part of the US was committed by the i w W, who are the WW are a very very radical union whose thing basically was that society should be run by like confederations of direct democratic unions like run you know, in all all of society, all the production

should be run by workers in these in you know, in in in the form of like one giant direct democratic union. And people hate this, and by people, I mean like bosses absolutely hate this EW. Very IWW very popular with workers. Bosses are going to spend the next

rest of theirs just murdering them, you know. But having having tortured this guy into saying into fingering the industrial workers of the world in this conspiracy, they get Big Bill Haywood, who is one of the most famous and like successful organizers of the AWW, and several other IWW leaders kidnapped and taken into Idaho to stand trial for murder,

which again they had nothing to do with. Haywood is defended by Clarence Darrow of the infamous Scopes Monkey trial, and Haywood gets off, but the case the serious damage to the WW. If you want to learn more about this whole story, go listen to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff there's two episodes about the IWW in this period called the IWW and the Hoboes. You saved free speech.

It's good stuff, you know. I should also briefly mention, right, another thing that the Pinkertons do is Okay, so if someone someone's wanted in one state, right, instead of having to like make you know, the government having to like the state government have to making requests, have to be having to make request to another state in order to get them to extradite someone, they would just have the Pingertions kidnap them. This is this is one of the

sort of big services they provide. They also seemed it's very unclear. I don't know, this historical record is a bit muddled. They seem also to have been people you could hire if so if like your spouse was trying to divorce you, which sucks. Is deeply evil.

There are like forty more stories of a guy with the Pinkerton walks in and shoots a bunch of people that I could put here. I had to find the limit at some point to how many stories about Pinkerton's murdering people that I could I could sort of put But you know, there's an interesting shift that starts to happen in the in sort of as the nineteen hundred,

you know, the nineteen hundreds turned into nineteen tens. The Pinkertons start to figure out that it's more effective to form mobs of vigilantes than it is to fight unions directly. And there's a few benefits here, right, There's less danger to detectives themselves. It's easier to deploy large numbers of people.

Instead of having to sort of like pay an enormous amount of money for a bunch of like eight hundred detectives and weapons and logistics, you can just sort of whip up a mob and get them to do the shooting, right. The Pinkertons also get plausible deniability, which is very helpful. For their reputation, and you know, the Pinkertons are are

very much ahead of the curve here. The government, you know, who is going to displace the Pinkertons is sort of the main force opposing the IWW in later sort of like cio union organizing that you know, turn into the

two Red Scares. They're going to start taking pages from the Pinkerton's book, and eventually they are going to you know, instead of like sending the US Army to invade Nicarago, which is what they would have done in the eighteen hundreds, by you know, by the time you gets to the nineteen eighties, right, they are sending people to train Nicaraguan desk squads. And so we can track the shift here.

Right as the nineteenth century comes to a close and we get to sort of the October Revolution of the height of the Red Scare, we're in a place where they're starting to be enough cops and enough federal agents to do the job the Pinkertons had done in previous generations. And you know, there's sort of robust arguments in the the sort of historiography about to what extent j Edgar

Hoover and the FBI were influenced by the Pinkertons. I think there's decent evidence that they that they were influenced by them. But the FBI kind of turns into what the Pinkertons are. You know, they're the people who suddenly are like showing up and shooting people, showing up and arresting union organizers, deporting union organizers from the country. But this puts the Pinkertons in kind of a weird spot

right there. The Pinkerton name has become synonymous with sort of this this kind of like they're called sort of like feudal retainers, right, these sort of lawless private armies that are you know, not supposed to exist in a democracy. And so you know in the nineteen thirties when the Wagnerak like makes strikes legal, right. I talked about the Wagner Acts a long time ago, an episode called The

Eden Makes Its Strong. But after this they tried Robert Pinkerton the second who's the new sort of owner of the Pinkerton tries to do a rebrand and he has this great quote. That's quote he's talking about union busting. That is a phase of our business that we are not particularly delighted or proud of and we're out of it. However,

there was nothing illegal about it at the time. Now, okay, you could say a lot about what was or wasn't illegal in a period when you know, you could order a drink that was cocaine mixed with wine and you know, you could just get like opium prescribed to your baby,

But torturing and murdering people was still legal back then. Now, I guess if you're you know, if you really wanted to have fun, you can get into an argument that like, nowhere in the constitution is murdered specifically banned, but like, you know, how fun with that. But FDR and the New Dealers go after the Pinkerton's very hard. And this is a lot of interesting effects. What it means is, on the one hand, you can't have some guy with a detective badge who works for a corporation walked into

a union meeting and start the killing. But it also means that when you need someone to smash a union by force, it's going to be the state doing it. And the aposteosis of this sort of one of the internal contradictions that destroys a new Deal is that it's reliance on the state to contain the worst exis of capitalism means that you know, they have in turn directly

enormously empowered the state and the state's military capacity. And this means that in the nineteen eighties unions are going to be destroyed by the state that the New Deal had built. The Pickertons are replaced by Hoover and the g Men, and the g Men are eventually sort of become known as the dreaded modern fat who you know, lurks at every doorstep eating babies and is the terror of every sort of political movement in the US.

government organizations. And this reflects a kind of larger shift in what kinds of military operations the corporations run, which is that instead of directly running armies or hiring groups like the Pinkertons to do violence for them, now what they're in the business office intelligence operations. And this changes the way that corporations kill people enormously. You know, when Coca Cola now needs to kill union organizers, right, they

have paramilitaries for this. Now, some of these guys are contractors, some of them are paid under the table, some of them are in it for ideology, some of it for money.

be they you know, sort of semi clandestinely arm paramilitary. Now, there are limited exceptions where sort of like oil companies will have private armies and places where civil wars are going on, but that's usually a thing that happens when they're in a place that doesn't have state capacity. When they're in a place that does have state capacity, like for example, Nigeria, you get a very very different story.

So Nigeria is a major oil producer, and this has a number of consequences on the places where that oil is extracted. A huge amount of it comes from the Niger Delta, where the government faces an almost perennial insurgency. So okay, why is there an insurgency there?

you know. Another part of the reason this turns into an insurgency is that people try nonviolence with disobedience in the Niger Delta to protest the sort of horrific environmental consequences of companies like Shell doing oil extraction, you know. And they have these marches that will draw out three hundred thousand people in places where this is half of the population, half the total population of the ethnic group

being affected. The Nigerian government responds by publicly executing one of the movement's leaders, the famous activist Ken Sarrowewa, by hanging him and then dissolving his body and limes we couldn't be buried, which is a real British Empire. Shit And okay, so at this point you've come to the sort of crossroad of a nonviolent movement, right where the government's answer to non violence we will publicly hang you and you get you get to this question do you

take up arms? And the answer is yeah, a lot of people do.

Now they came, and we defeat them. He says. We are civilized people, educated people, and we do not want our children to be deprived as we have been deprived so other people can get rich from what is under our feet. The oil companies have had many years to treat us rights. They have never done that. Now we are making them think. Now if this is you know eighteen twenty right, and shell is dealing with people taking up arms and cutting off their ability to sort of

like extract profits of oil. They would form an army of semi literate Belgian and British barbarians, arm they with cannons and conquer the region and place the entire area under direct corporate rule. You know, if this was say, like the eighteen nineties, right, they would hire the pinker Chance and the Pinkertons, nego shoot these people before them.

But this is the nineteen nineties, in the two thousands, so instead, what Shell does is literally pay the salaries of Nigerian cops who go slaughter protesters in the streets, and eventually they move to spending hundreds of millions of dollars just just between two thousand and seven two thousand and nine alone directly funding equipping an army, the Nigerian Army, and a special like war crimes task force called the Joint Task Force the JFT, which is this like it's

this sort of incredible thing where the army, the navy and the police do a fusion dance to massacre civilians. And you know, I say this hundreds of millions of dollars, right, that's an underestimate that's just three years. That's just what we know about. The actual total that they sunk into

sort of like literally funding the Nigerian Army is enormous. Now, what's interesting here is that Shell does have its own security guards, but the ratio of what they spend in the Nigerian Army versus what they spend on their own

security guards just two to one. And this goes to demonstrate the point that I've sort of been making this episode, right, which is that there's been a shift in you know, if you are a company like Shell, right who has a need, you know, who are horrifically exploiting a bunch of people to the point where you need to shoot them in order to keep them in line. Instead of going to like a private detective agency or having your

own army, they are increasingly simply funding the state. And you know this means that right again again, instead of the Pinkertons, the actual trigger pullers are cops. They are the police, There are the military, they're weird special forces groups. And you know where that sort of leaves space for groups like the Pinkertons now is the area that's left for them is in corporate intelligence. And this seems to be most of what the Pinkertons have been up to recently.

Amazon hired them in the last few years to work and to work with their intelligence division, the Global Security Operations Center, which they use to try to stomp out union organizing in their warehouses. And Amazon isn't just sort of spying on union organizers. 're spying on basically every social roupment they can get their hands on. Here's from WECE.

In twenty nineteen, Amazon monitored the yellowfst movement known as the jele Jean, a grassroots uprising for economic justice spread across France, and solidarity movements in Vienna and protest against state repression in Iran. They've been deployed deployed against strikes of communication workers in West Virginia, Google and Facebook deploys them against their own employees to redout leakers. Now, this is all in line with the pivot of sort of

corporate repression towards mass surveillance. Interestingly, the Pikersons have been planting stories in the press about going back to their roots as mercenaries, pitching themselves as you know, the force that could stop climate chaos with ex military forces. The company claims to have been deployed by corporations in Puerto Rico after the hurricane and after Hurricane ria antoin seventeen.

I don't know if that's true. This is possible, but again it's something that they have to be very careful with the Pinkertons is that they are very, very brand obsessed, even though they're now owned by a different sort of Swedish security company, and they lie constantly, so it's very difficult to sort up sort of the myth from the fact when myth making has been such a vital part of their branding from the beginning. For another example, here's

from a New York Times magazine. Among their most popular news services is the Pinkerton Dedicated Professional, in which agents join a client's company like any other new hire, allowing them to provide intel employees. By twenty eighteen, the agency said it could count among its clients about eighty percent of Fortune one thousand companies. Are these numbers correct? Who knows?

They absolutely could be lying right. On the other hand, here's Gizmoto talking about the current reach of the Pinkertons in matchic together ring. There are other connections between Wizards of the Coast and the Pinkerton Agency. Robert M. Klemmick, who has been the director of Security Risk Management at Hasbro, Inc. Which is the parent company Wizards of the Coast for twelve years, was previously the director of supply chain Security

Practice at Pinkerton Consulting in Investigations. The current manager of Global Investigations is also a form of Pinkerton Agents. So what we saw in the fact that you know, Wizards of the Coast said the Pinkertons after a guy who made a YouTube video showing some cards that he bought from someone else, is you know, you can see in that the arc of the arc of of what the Pinkers are trying to do. Right, You have, on the one hand, the Pinkertons falling back into their sort of

intelligence role. You also have them specifically trading on their reputation to intimidate people. And you know, the reputation they acquired by killing unfathomable numbers of people between the eighteen hundreds, which they used the sort of intimidate people by just sort of the power of the reputation. You can see something very interesting, which is that the Pinkertons don't arrest Dan Cannon directly, right, they're able to leave with the

sort of goods. But what they threatened Dan Cannon with is the regular police. And that is I think a very important aspect of what the story actually is, which is it's a story about the modern division of labor, of violence against people who corporations don't like, and that division of labor runs through security. You know, you have your major, you have a major corporation. That corporation has its own security division. That security division is connected to

the Pinkertons. They use the Pinkertons as an intelligence network, and they have done several times now and then you know, when it comes time to you know, you can use the Pinkertons as like the people will stop you booth. But when it comes time to actually do violence against someone, when it comes time to arrest someone, that's the state's job.

And that, I think is the thing that's that you know, that that's very important to understand about the way all of this stuff works is that the thing that is true now about the year twenty twenty three that was not true about the year like eighteen seventy three, is that the the sort of primary driver of corporate violence in you know, in in in the US and abroad is not necessarily private security companies. It is the state, and it is the police. And yeah, this has been naked.

Happened here. The police suck acab get rid of them.