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Robert Evans here and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode so every episode of the week that. Just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. What's up? All right, the show started. Garrison. Hey, we're going to be talking about Canada again, so yeah, and to discuss Canada and politics and the happenings here, we have another journalist who writes for I believe, Anti Hate Canada and like the The the Canadian I Hate Network and also vice. I believe, right? Yeah. I've written for Vice. I'm currently researching full time and extremism researcher for it's a new initiative called the Online Hate Research and Education Project. It's actually partnered with the Canadian FDA network and it's it's under the Neuberger Holocaust Education Center, which might be renaming very soon. I'm very excited for you guys to get into a Twitter fight with James Lindsay. Can't wait. So yes, Dan here has joined us to talk about Canada because I've gotten a few messages about this thing that's happening. My mother, who's in Alberta, called me a few days ago to talk about this thing that's happening. So it's been it's it's I'm getting a lot of things and it's definitely worth discussing specifically on some of the rhetoric that people are using around this. So I'm actually, I'm going to, I'm going to hand it to Dan. To talk about what like how did this thing like what is it and how did it kind of get started? Yeah, well, so Garrison's not alone, by the way. For anyone not in Canada, every single person's mother in the entire country is called and asked them about it. I just got another message, literally right now. Like literally this second, it's got another moms of Canada have been activated. The Moms of Canada have been activated, but not in exactly the same way that they're being perceived to be. Not all the ways. So the quote UN quote trucker convoy, which I might get into a little bit later, but I'm kind of like against even calling it a trucker convoy. Yeah, it was started on January 14th. And by a former Wizzit party now called the Maverick Party member Tamara Lynch and a group of, like very active, far right, grassroots protesters who do a lot of of organizing like this. And most of them, most of their activities kind of go back to like 2018. Yeah, they go back a decent, a decent amount. Yeah, like this. I mean, there's links to people that have been doing it in the 90s in Canada's movement right now, but. A non binding motion against, I think it's a M183 a few years ago really mobilized people and it's kind of been more consistent since then of the same groups of people. Yeah, that's what we talked about in our first candidate episodes about kind of how we got to that point. And now like those same people are still kind of behind what's going on right now. So yeah, there's this alleged caravan of truckers of all the truckers in Canada going, going to Ottawa and physically all the truckers in Canada, all the truckers. And so this thing was kind of virtually organized by some like known far right figures and the people associated with like the Canadian yellow vest which kind of died down, but it didn't die down, it just morphed right, morphed into a very strong anti VAX presence in Canada right now the anti VAX movement is getting a lot of popularity in Canada and it's run by these guys who are doing legit, which is like W exit but for like it's like for Alberta NBC to go away from Canada because the rest of Canada is too liberal. So what exit and the yellow vests have really. Change all of their focuses into this anti VAX thing as a way to do recruiting. And they've prompted this kind of movement of truckers going to Ottawa for a few specific reasons, which I think Dan probably knows a little bit more about than I do. Like. I I know the gist of it, but you you've been focused on on this slightly more than I have. Yeah, I guess the main reason is it works. They just from the perspective of of getting attention and being able to get a message out, there's been a lot of traction on this that these groups don't normally get, I think the last trucker convoy. That was done under this sort of umbrella. It had like 9 I think was the total amount of like trucks that made it to Ottawa. The last time this was trying to be done. It was basically the same demands in the same reason. So this one was started on on January 14th and it didn't get that much buzz the first couple days. The original goal was set at $100,000. I don't remember the exact time, but once it hit that pretty fast and it hit the first million pretty fast in ways that like these fundraisers really, really don't. Like the last big one we saw in Canada, that was quite alarming and that fast capped out at under $400,000 and that was. For a BBQ. For a BBQ that got defied protests last year and ended up getting like all its its pad door shut down. So there's a lot more money now in this one. Yeah, because this this fundraiser which was supposed to go like hand in hand with these truckers protesting the vaccine mandates because they're upset that they're not allowed to truck into these states because they're not vaccinated. So they have decided to all truck into Ottawa as like a pseudo strike slash like blockade type thing because they're saying that we're not going to do our jobs and we're going to kind of block off access to these roads. Until this mandate is is removed. Now of course the, The funny thing here is that the mandate that to enter to not being allowed to enter the states to do your trucking routes, that's not a mandate by Canada. That's done by that like that's the rule in the United States because you're entering the United States. They're the states actually the ones doing the blockage of the Canadian government has no control over this. It's not actually the thing the the the way to get the message out and support is incredibly effective because something I think like 28% of there is a survey recently of Canadians are against the mandate which is like really huge for like Canada's anti VAX movement to kind of get that like support. And and like a lot of people are mobilized to by there's a trend of posting it starts from 14 in 2018 but it's getting revived a lot again now of people posting like empty grocery stores. Even a Conservative Member of Parliament recently posted an empty grocery store and asked for people's emails to try to like change the laws. It turned out to be from the UK. It was a stock photo. And there's been like even like the stories themselves have to catch like come out and make statements being like, no, we're not, we're not empty. We have, we have like we are in the process if we restocking, that's happened in the US too, where it's like we were literally emptying that shelf to move stuff to another shelf items like to the pictures. Bad snowstorms. Yeah, Ontario for a lot of the the real photos of, like, empty shelves. And it's just like, Oh no, the salad tap out and the store would just make a statement. It's like, yeah, we had two snowstorms a day in a row and our truck arrived today. But like, the narrative that they're trying to push is like these. These mandates are causing these shortages. And the the propaganda is working even though it's on a false premise because first of all it's not like that that those aren't that's not causing that. And second of all complaining to Canada that's not Canada's not the one who's making the restrictions in the states is the one that's that blocking from doing that. But but it's it's not actually about these issues it's that's not the reason why you're getting all these people driving to Ottawa because there is a lot of people there's not many trucks but but there is there is a decent amount of people you know it's that that are that are doing this because it's not. Actually about these specific issues, it's this general like seething hatred of Trudeau and like a generalized grievance that it's gotten this broad support. It's gotten enough financial backing the fundraiser as well, like like like over $6 million now. And it's it's not like it's just what it actually is is an incoherent kind of intention just to go to the capital and cause problems. Right that that's what they're actually that's what like the the underlying thing is for a lot of a lot of the. Of like, explaining why it's gotten so picked up some some official demands like have been put out and they would be even more confusing like to read than like some of them are there. A couple of the most recent ones are just very general, like stop this divisive nature that our government is imposing kind of thing like, I'm paraphrasing, but it's it's really quite bland. Some demands from tangential groups involved, one they say they won't leave until Trudeau steps down. Others say at one point said until every politician stepped down. Step down. I think that was when before someone kind of pushed in more realistic goals into the movement. But like in terms of like what they're talking about for like the rhetoric surrounding it, we're seeing a lot of rhetoric around the the sentence being like, we this can be our version of January 6th. But like they're saying that like in a good way like that's that's the thing that's at least some of the organizers and then it's being carried out into like the generalized rhetoric is that this this should be our own version of this, which is, which is interesting on on a few ways, but like also like. This would not have been said like seven months ago. But it's being said now, which means, like, there's been a shift in how January 6 is being viewed. There was this initial, like, really distancing. And now it's like it's becoming almost like more acceptable to acknowledge that it was maybe a good thing in your eyes. And it's like, that's an interesting rhetorical shift that that's been going on. But then it's also concerning, just like a regular level to be like, yeah, these people wanted, these people are saying they want to do their own January 6th. That has obvious, like, physical implications for all these people trying to drive to Ottawa, do either blocking off roads or just like making the government. Operable. Yeah, a A Co streamer or well streamer in what's called the plat army. And now that's sometimes kind of just being rebranded as like diagonal on network quote UN quote, which we can get into more, but it's it's going to be sillier. They're they're kind of their own. They're their own issue for later. Yeah, they're their own issue, but it was. One of their streamers, who is very tangentially connected to, like a lot of the. The far right people that are involved in this protest movement leading up to and in fact Pat King, who was officially one of the organizers of the convoy until he wasn't and then he was again. That was a whole dramatic thing for a day like he streamed alongside plat army guys before. So someone on flat army said, and I would quote, I would like to see our own January 6th event, see some of those truckers plow right through that 16 foot wall. And on January 24th that was put up on CTV News made alive and it's kind of scared a lot of people. I think at that point, former Conservative leader Andrew Scheer had already voiced support for the convoy and there's been a lot of other like Members of Parliament stuff voicing support for the convoy, some of whom really didn't seem to know like what was involved and really just kind of heard. And like, in passing, oh, it's against these mandates. And I oppose these mandates, too. And it's like, if it's against Trudeau, you might as well sign on. It's going to help you. You're gonna help your political career. Yeah, it's completely true. So have they actually started like blocking roads or is it just a bunch of random people driving down to like driving? So there's there's a few different like converging points of the convoy, I think I would say probably the biggest one, but it's hard to kind of keep track started in British Columbia and it's going so for this I'm sure not everyone knows like map of Canada. So like British Columbia is like our West Coast, that's our our California and Ottawa is as close to the West and it's in Ontario, but it's. On the border of Quebec and Ontario, and that's where our Parliament is, that's our capital city, so it's coming from every which way. But I think the largest contingent comes from British Columbia and it just basically goes eastward to Ottawa, picking up people along the way. Yeah, yeah, it's it's, it's, it's it's heading in that direction. How do we know about, I know some people have kind of already, some people have kind of already sort of arrived in Ottawa, but most mostly people are expected to more arrive in the next like. Well, we're recording this Thursday night, so this episode will probably come out on Monday. People are expected to arrive on Saturday. Is is the day that the people expecting like everybody to be there. At least that's my understanding of it. The convoy itself arrives Saturday. There are people like coming from further E who are like staying overnight in town and and kind of just showing up for the Parliament event. So like by by all accounts, the Parliament show will probably be a lot bigger than that so far, which I guess. We haven't mentioned numbers yet, sorry, numbers nor like what what they actually really plan on doing once they get there because it's been so much talking about like why this got started and what's the like driving motivational factors. But yeah, like their goal is to get to a place and do a thing and that's the, that's The thing is unclear. There's still unclear. I have seen discussions about like blocking out, like doing like a trying to assemble, like a trucking strike, and then like blocking off access so that the government is forced to obey their demands, or else, like the country will shut down. Then some people maybe are just kind of doing it as they go one day protest. It's it's it again. It is, it is it is pretty unclear but people are headed to there and what what is the, what is the numbers at least from where we can see like online and stuff so. Their numbers have been the number. 50,000 people, 50,000 trucks. Yeah, 50,000. Fifty thousand people became 50,000 trucks. Yeah, very quickly. And that same number. I think Rogan repeated it. I know Joe. Joe Rogan said it. Yeah, yeah, Joe Rogan said it. Theo Fleury went on Laura Ingraham and repeated the 50,000 number. He said 50,000 truckers, not trucks specifically. As far as I know, Theo Fleury has no official involvement with the convoy and is just a fan and is just repeating some numbers. They're like organizers themselves have kind of echoed. Complicated for me because this is very troubling in a lot of ways, but also I'm a huge fan of the song convoy. So this is really devastating. Please continue. It's all right. Yeah, so Canada's far right protest movement has kind of habit of doing this. In February of 2021, Kellyanne Farkas, who's like a mainstay of the anti mask, anti VAX movement and in between what I'm talking about and right now actually dated Pat King for a while, who's kind of the most outspoken person organizing the current convoy, claimed that 100,000 people were coming to Parliament for what was then like. Anti mask demonstration uh before the event that outlook changed to 50,000. And I was actually there. It looked closer to like 200 people. I had friends that had counted like 170 people, so not quite 50,000. For all intents and purposes, the current one will be longer. Reporters doing great journalism along the way have estimated up to like 400 people so far, including I think 15 trucks outside the bass pro shops in Toronto this afternoon was counted. Side note, if nothing else, got to give them points for stopping at Bass Pro and Toronto is a pretty sweet bass pro. Do love a good bass pro shops. My favorite is the one they built into the giant pyramid. Obvious Nashville, baby. So the the the Bass Pro in Toronto. If you're ever in town, Robert. It's the only place around that I've been told that sells subsonic 22 rounds. So if you're like in the woods, right, so if you're like in the woods, but you don't wanna scare your neighbors because the woods aren't that big. Some friends and I used to go shooting at a suburban neighborhood. 22 because it's technical. Don't, don't do. You can definitely. It was weird. There was a was legal. Oh right, Canada doesn't. I do not, I don't endorse. Might have to cut this part out for for regional sharing. No, leave this all in just a bunch of words. Make it nonsense with bleeping. Please continue. Yeah, so only 15 trucks were counted by CBC at at that point. And like videos and stuff have been short. Yeah, there might be a couple dozen slightly short, but I think by the time by Saturday, I think there's a decent chance that there might be maybe around 50 trucks to 100 trucks. If there's anything more than like 500, all of the media footage will look like there's 50,000. That's enough trucks. Absolutely nobody's cameras going to be able to show the extent of them. Realistically and then yeah once they're there it's unclear what they want to do. Some people just want to do the function up thing. Some people want to carry on the tradition of like what the most of the anti like VAX anti mask protests in Canada have been which have been pretty big but it's been it's been mostly standing with science. So it is it is it, it is really unclear because again most of the truckers in Canada probably are not going to be there nor to necessarily endorse this idea of nor is like. Right, it's because they're pressing the their their whole initial issue is not even based on an actual like thing. So it's it is. I'm not sure how many people are going to show up. I don't know even how specific it is to an issue 11, just really interesting, funny, interesting thing. That I thought about is like with with some of these people, you know, talking about, you know, going to Ottawa and not leaving until the mandates are dropped or the entire government resigns. Like these people who are talking about like blockage and shortage and stuff are also like the same people who get very angry at indigenous people for block blocking off roads and trails for like oil and like, pipeline protests. A lot of them, yeah, some of them, some of them are indulged in pretending and stuff like Pat King back in September. Kind of went on like a a kick where he just let a lot of people believe he was indigenous and claimed someone not correct them. That is, that is weird. And a family member of him went on Facebook and like bombarded people with information that he was not in fact indigenous. And it was all very weird and a lot of people held them to comments in the past where he talked about Anglo Saxons having the strongest bloodlines. Yeah, that is I think Pat. Pat King probably deserves his own little deep dive on one of the pods, but but yeah, like it is, it is like with all the people talking about blockades and stuff, all you most of them coming from like the western side of Canada. It is. It is. Uh, yeah. Like you're you're talking about all these things and like, there's really big pro oil sentiments in all of the, in all of this crowd. Yeah. Because a lot of it is connected to financial and political stuff, not necessarily even this vaccine issue. It's been more like a symbol to represent their general kind of upsetted edness at, at the at the way things are going for them. It's interesting to me. So, so when I first heard about this my, I was, I was like, oh, OK, so this is going to be like the Chilean. Rockers and I was like, OK, well, this is really bad, but it's like, it's interesting to me. Like, how few people they've been able to mobilize, like, that's like, not a large number of truckers like it's happening. They actually get, yeah, looks like a lot of like vehicles when you when you see like, footage, photos and videos like, like, and I'm going to like a lot of like Telegram and Facebook. Groups of just people just like sharing pictures and photos of the rally of the convoy passing through their town and like it. It's like what Robert said, like it's when it fills up both sides of the camera. You have a wide depth of field, it looks huge and it's it's really hard to count. The money is preposterous. Also side note on on the money it the funds were frozen a few days ago on the 25th, but today $1,000,000 was released back to them because they they gave go fund me a pretty clear plan allegedly according to GO fund me for for how they're going to distribute it. The rest of the it's, I think it's like 6.7 million now. So the rest of the 5.7 million I think is still frozen. OK. It is, it is. So it is so much money. Yeah, we should do something like that. They could. They could actually buy truck nuts for 150,000 truckers, which is the most I've seen them. Guest truckers are coming. They could buy $20 truck nuts off Amazon for all of them and still have the vast majority of their funds left over. Yeah. But see, that would be an active actual heroism, and they're not going to do that. So yeah, the reason why I wanted to talk about this is 1 to, like, acknowledge that it's happening, right. It acknowledge the tactics that they're using in terms of trying to go into an urban area and block off like, trade routes, essentially. And then I wanted to talk about like, first of all, it doesn't matter that like the fact that this is happening is divorced from any kind of direct cause, right, because they're their actual grievance is false and the grievance doesn't really actually matter. It it it just needs they there needed to be some kind of cultural or propaganda push in order for this physical action to happen and that's been done. It doesn't even need to be like coherent and then escalation, people driving here doing this thing. And then I know there was this one. Interview. I forgot on what news channel, but they interviewed this one trucker guy part of a part of this part of this convey in my hometown of Saskatoon, SK. And he is, he said. I advocate civil war. If people don't want to step up, we have guns, will have some, we'll stand up and we'll bring them out. But like, so that's the quote, like in the fact that you just openly saying I advocate Civil War in relation to this movement is like my goals. My goal here is being like, people fantasize about Canada as being a place to escape. You know, family like Canada is like the other from the States and like, no, it's the same. Like we are like, you cannot escape away from fascism. There is no really, there's no real way right now in terms of like safe ground. There's no safe ground. It can spread to where you are. And for people living in Canada, when you have people on the new on like global News saying, I advocate civil war within the context of this, of this, like, you know, convoy movement, it is, it is an actionable thing worth paying attention to. It is an actual problem. It's it's huge and earlier today uh and I might pronounce his name wrong, but Del Manuk doc from CBC Toronto tweeted a story because he, on behalf of CBC, contacted an actual organizer of the convoy. They have different regional organizers and their website list them all and it had pad funny. Side note, it had packing listed as an organizer while their GO fund me had a statement saying they had no connection to him, which was very funny. But yeah, so CBC Toronto. I contacted them and and the guy responded enough lies you quote slave blooded trader. Evil will get its due in the end and after a little yeah after, yeah after back yeah after a back and forth, very brief back and forth and just like a couple of questions the organizer ended with, you know, you toe the line for the global corporate coup taking place under the guise of public health. You can't be that dumb. Traders will swing in time. Oh, boy, yeah. I do think Americans don't fully understand how much the anti VAX movement is tied to far right politics within Canada, and it's like been like the driving force of far right politics for the past two years and it's gotten so much larger. It is like it is. It is. It is a thing like when when you have, when you have people on camera saying we want to January 6th, I advocate a civil war, talking about not leaving until the government either resigns or mandates are dropped and then threatening physical violence on top of that. Yeah, like it's it is it is a thing that could happen there. And that's kind of why I wanted to talk about it is like, yeah, when I have my mother's calling me dozens of messages from random people talk, like, worried about this. And yeah, it's it is an issue like I've. It's it's, it's not. It's not not a thing. No, it it is. And indeed, the rhetoric is so universal against. Anyone they perceive to be leftist to that it is really dangerous. Like there's been a little bit of talk of like counters in in Ottawa. When the numbers are this big, like, there's no safe way. For people to to stop that sort of thing, especially when all all the vehicles are on that side like. It's, uh, it's dangerous. There's a lot of violent stuff. Even like I was looking today, the People's Party of Canada, they got like 5% of votes in our last election. They had a little bit of a scandal during our election, which is the end of last year. Where a writing director for a. It's the great area of London it is. Elgin, Middlesex, London. So they're they're writing directors and not their member of Parliament. Writing was revealed to post like Skull Mask Nazi memes and memes comparing Bernier, the leader of his own party, to Hitler. So, like probably not a negative comparison and he was not fired for it. But he was fired after it came out that he was being charged for throwing rocks at our Prime Minister on the campaign trail. That's fine. Yeah. He actually, he recently said on a live stream. That he was asked if he was currently on trial and he said, yeah, I mean, as far as I know, like, he's been posting images of like trucks running people over. And that's just like one connection to, to the legitimacy of it all. Like, I mean, the the platter army guys, the ones who talked about driving the truck 16 feet, they're also connected with the Bernier. They've had Randy Hillier on their podcast before who's a sitting politician and member of Provincial Parliament, which is kind of like our state. Equivalent over here. Umm. They've they've had him on, and like there, there's some like legitimacy to it getting on. And when you just talk about the broad movement in general, a former Conservative party of Canada's leader Andrew Scheer, who had kind of a rocky departure from the party because he allegedly used campaign funds to pay for his kids to private school. Sidenote like he'd already signed on and endorsed and and been interviewed. Erin O'Toole, the current leader of the of the. Conservative party. Just today actually said he was going to engage with them. Earlier this evening, Sergeant at Arms package McDonald sent an e-mail to our parliamentarians ahead of Saturday's trucker convoy protest and quoting Justin Links Twitter here, there have been attempts to collect MP's home addresses. As such, the Sergeant at Arms is advising to avoid the rally and go somewhere safe. That apparently wasn't listened to, Erin O'Toole, who said I'm going to do it anyways and it's Justin Link, tweeted later. Tomorrow I will be meeting with Truckers, O2 announces right after parliamentary security warned MP's to avoid the protests entirely. So it's not great. Yeah, I mean, again, this will probably come out after Saturday, so if we don't talk about this again, then that means it's probably, it's good. I mean, they they they showed up, they protested and they kind of dissipated if we're following this up. A few days with another episode, then that means something bad happened. Yeah. But again, even even at this point, it is still worth talking about in terms of like the generally like, this is like, this is the kind of like the the nut of why this is so important for everybody is what you were saying about like when you've got this many people, this many trucks coming from an outside and moving into a city, there's very little that can be done against them. Like there's not, there's not really much of an effective counter other than trying to get another massive. People in cars to confront them and that's. You know, a potentially dicey situation, so this remains a very powerful tactic. We've seen it used all over the United States, too, like, and it's this idea of like blockading a city. Even though this is kind of the earliest step in taking that is, is this going to be the last time people try to extend this logic? Yeah. So that that's kind of the surrounding cultural reasons and shifts in rhetoric and like applicable Ness as like an act of like an act of like protest or like like revolt or insurgency, whatever. Whatever they want to use is there's like a lot of these other interesting thing about the States and compared to Canada is like in the states we have like we have like an actual like far right movement, like we have like we have like conservatives when we have like the far right movement in Canada that that distinction is not much of a thing. A lot of, a lot of there is, there is some far right figures trying to push stuff forward, absolutely. But a lot of like the the, the space in between conservative and far right is kind of a little bit more fluid. Like a lot of these people who are showing up are not like far right protesters. They are kind of regular conservatives, but they're still getting sucked into saying, I advocate a civil war like that is just to go regular conservative dude. He's not a member of any kind of political thing. He's like, it's that. Is just that is just kind of what this culture on the western side of Canada really really like a kind of defaults to almost when you start going into this kind of like anti Trudeau territory because that's the the their their their main their main politics is anti Trudeau like that is that is what they are. So anything that gets to that point is allowed whether that is conservative or that is like more far right. As long as it's anti Trudeau then it's it is a valid politic and that's another distinction in the state that there's a thing in the Canada. But I don't really see as much in the states. It's very familiar to me when you talk about how anti clintonism fed into Trumpism like that. That is, I think, a worthwhile comparison to make because there were a lot of American conservatives who could get in bed with anybody if they were staying against Hillary or Bill. Umm. Cool stuff. Well, this is all fun. I hope to not talk with you about this again, Dan. Yeah, but there is a chance. There is a chance people have conversations if if you wouldn't want to after episode airs, if people want to see what happened, right? Because this area is probably Monday and the convoys set to arrive on Saturday. Where can they find work talking about that? So that be like your Twitter feed or if you know, if any you know articles are planned. Yeah. So I'm planning on live tweeting. I can't make any promises because safety is always a thing and I I won't know what it looks like until Saturday happens, but I'm planning on live tweeting. My Twitter is at spineless elf. That's the word, spineless, and then just the letter L. So yeah, you can check in on his account to see if he has a thread by the time this episodes out. UM and yeah, that's that's how you can kind of figure out what happened if you're just listening to this now and then in the meantime, there'll be a lot of auto and media covering it if you just want to see the fallout. I imagine the Canadian idea now work my talk about it more. They put out an article today on it so that that covers more of the the kind of problems that the far right that we talked about today than the most other media will go into. That was a very good article. And then also today I, Elon Musk tweeted in support of the Canadian truckers. So just in terms of let's just as as a good example, I think this situation is a really great way to start thinking about politics and culture. And how they relate to each other and how this type of thing succeeds and how it succeeds and why this rhetoric is so successful in bringing in so many people in Canada and raising $6 million, almost $7 million. But anyway, that is, that is the show. One more plugged in so people know where to find you. I only really am active on Twitter, so again, it's at spineless L as the word, spineless as an I don't have a spine and then the letter L on Twitter. Thank you Dan. Plug your Gitter account. You're getter. Wow. Yeah, real, real get her. You survives coming off of Dan. You know the only social media platform that Joe Rogan looked at and said, yeah. I was just trying to get me to plug my sock puppet accounts. Yeah, yeah, everyone this is always talks. This is a ******* off. You could follow all my sock puppets at fascistwizard.ca of anyway, that is that. That does it for our show. Thank you for listening. And yeah, convoys Canada can't can't escape. Excellent. Thank you for having me. It's the New Year's again. Woo yeah. Welcome. Welcome to the year of the Tiger. This is a special. Special Lunar New Year's edition of it could happen here, a podcast that is today just about, well, it's still about sort of things falling apart and things being rebuilt. But I wanted to specifically, you know, do do it, do it, do a special New Year's episode and spend some time, I think talking about chineseness and how what sort of being a part of the Chinese diaspora in sort of in the US and Canada is like and. You know how that how that influences how we organize, how like what we're afraid of, what we're sort of proud of? And with me to talk about this we have JN who I think first time ever returning guest. Yeah, who is it? Works with lauson. Hello, jenn. Oh, what an honor. Thanks. Thanks for inviting me back. Yeah, thank you for coming. And we also have Jane. She who is a. Queer Chinese settler living in unseated traditional and ancestral territories and musquin, Sasquatch and. Slave with two nations in what is falsely and Fakely considered Canada. She is a poet, writer, editor, and an organizer and does many other cool things. Hello, Jane. Welcome. Welcome to the show. Hello. Thank you for having me. Just wanted to share that it's Musqueam. Squamish. And sleep with tooth. Yeah. Sorry, I. I do not live up north, and so my my pronunciations of of tribal names are even worse than they are for the tribal daves that are around me, so my apologies. There is no one, yeah. O. Alright before we get into a bunch of extremely grim stuff I wanted to because this is the this if you you will be listening to. Well OK unless you're listening to this on Monday night in which case I congratulations on beating time but most of the Republican listening listening to this on on lunar New Years and so I wanted to before yeah before everything is completely dark what you know what you choose favorite Chinese New Year's food is because this is like really my favorite holiday and what it's Macy my favorite holiday because. In in in Grand Chinese tradition, it's just an excuse to eat a lot. So yeah, opening the floor up. Yeah. I think you're the expert here, Jane, so feel free to. I am not lay down the knowledge. I am not an expert just because. I've pulled dumplings does not mean I'm an expert, but I I mean I haven't spent like. Lunar New Year's with really that many other people in a very long time. So my sense of like breadth of food has really, really narrowed to what is available to me. And. I also have been really struggling with the dumplings that I've been making because of like carpal tunnel issues. But I've been thinking a lot about Jellyfish lately. Like, I keep thinking about jellyfish and I keep thinking about like the sesame. Anything with sesame in it. Yeah. And like, just boil dumplings I feel like are really great for me at this particular moment. Yeah, yeah. My favorite is in Cantonese. It's called mean go, which is it's. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah. And the way my mom used to make it all the time was like dipping it in an egg first. Oh cool. And so it it has this kind of like eggy crust on it, which is really, really awesome. And I've been making that for the past couple years myself where I am. And I can't wait to go to the grocery store and grab some because it's only available around this time. I guess they don't really produce it any other time. And last time I went to visit my mom, she like loaded my suitcase full of them and that was. Able to eat them fast enough, unfortunately. And some of them went fast like, Oh no, we have a, we have one in our refrigerator. I think it's, I think it's it was in the freezer. It's now, I think in the refrigerator and we're all incredibly excited to cut into it on New Year's. Yeah, do you do you guys do the because I know. So we we normally have red bean ones. I know there's like brown sugar ones or something that are like plain wait, I just wanted to check like is it Nangal? Yeah, or at least, you know, like so like the the sort of like flower thing that is like. Shaped like a semicircle. Yeah. Wait, yeah. I feel like there's different, like an entire circle that, yeah, we usually cut them into like, like square strips, but I think that's just like a cooking ease of cooking thing. Yeah, and usually comes with like a date or something on top, yeah. Yeah. When it's packaged, that's so interesting because I feel like the nangal that I grew up with doesn't usually have a lot of things on it. It's kind of like. Sticky and kind of plain and I'm just this is this is a new thing for me, yeah. Yeah, the the one we usually get just has red beans in it and then there's like the one date on the top. Oh, I don't know if you're thinking of like toning go, which is like a different type of dish where it's like white rice cakes and then you, you can like, it's like saucy. And then, yeah, like different ingredients in it. Yeah, things are different. Ours are just that. They're like, they're pretty close to the. Yeah, I think, I think I'm just talking about the just regular angolite. They're just like. Like they're, they're, they're, they're basically playing, but there's some red bean like certain to the dough and then it's just like. The flat brown thing that you like fry. Yeah, that's what I'm thinking, yeah. Alright, this is this. We've now done dessert chat, which is a. Honest. Honestly, much, much less grim time than most of the stuff that happens on here, and you have all been now subjected to it. I go eat Chinese New Year's food. It's great. Yeah, so onto things that are. Somewhat more grim. I think there's there's two big. Things I want to talk about. That sort of related to like. I guess. Chinese diaspora. Ness, I guess we can start with. Talking a bit about. Anti Asian violence and police violence because I mean, it's like so. My sort of into this is that my my someone? OK, so. One of the things that's happened in the past about two years was this the huge sort of spike in anti Asian violence. But then, you know, part of what happens. Politically around that was there was this huge attempt to essentially turn anti Asian violence into I guess like the anti BLM like especially in the US. But I think I think this happened elsewhere too. Where there was it didn't, I don't know it it it worked in some places and didn't work in other places. So I went to the rest of Chicago and a few is it. A few months ago now, maybe a couple a month or two ago, a Asian Chinese international student like got shot on campus and this turned into a huge. Sort of like. Bring more cops on campus, they there was a huge petition that got signed. It was the people were like asking for security cameras and asking for cops and like the CPD, like. A couple weeks later, just like shot a dude. And so that there there's been, I've been seeing this tension a lot. I was wondering if you two had also sort of run into similar stuff and what your thoughts? We're on it. I mean, I feel like unfortunately with Canada there is like this dynamic where we look to the states. For news and validation in this weird way that I find really delegitimizes the unique struggles that are here that are different. Umm, there are. There's a different kind of police system. There is like the. Local police like Vancouver. Police Department. But then there's also the RCMP, the Royal Mounted Canadian Police, which are in other municipalities, and the RCMP was created specifically. As a tool of settler colonialism to enforce the Indian Act, which is I guess the most succinctly way I can put it, is segregation. Indigenous peoples from settlers and. There is a lot of displacement of black communities across Canada, but and there was also slavery in Canada, even though we like to pretend that there wasn't. And so against this background, I guess and ongoing like. Police brutality, whether it's in what's written in territories or just the police killing people, there's a lot of. Mainstream Asian Canadian and Chinese Canadian institutions that are very, very much complicit in. The system like there is an organization, an immigrant Chinese Canadian organization in Vancouver, who one of the board members is a cop who is married to a A. City councillor. And a lot of the discourse that institutions, not people themselves necessarily, but institutions, create around, for example, the revitalization of Chinatown or the preservation of culture is around. Oh, there's graffiti in the neighborhood. Chinatown and Vancouver is in the Downtown Eastside, which is considered the poorest. Post is considered the poorest. Post a cold in Canada and it's like a tight knit community with a lot of indigenous peoples, black people, people in poverty struggling against the poisoning massacre wherein the government is not providing. Safe supply and where the police just kind of like are everywhere, pointing guns to everyone, displacing the tent cities and so. When there is an easy, not an easy, but just like a demonized group of people that the general public doesn't know enough about. If you walk through the Downtown Eastside and talk to people, you would talk to people about their experiences with residential school, their experiences with missing family members, experiences with poverty. And in the in the broadest terms, it's like. The way that Chinatown is being gentrified, people tend to blame the poor. And there's like this divide and conquer mentality within the Asian diaspora. Within the Chinese diaspora specifically, and so similar to what happened with Michelle go similar to her, there was a South Asian elderly woman who a group of. People who lived in latent city had killed pretending to be cops. When they knock on her door and the Council, one of the city councillors in Vancouver, was like this, we need to stop indulging in these tent cities. Meanwhile, there's a lot of, like, marginalized people in these tent cities. Who, who, who can't. Who need to live there because it's COVID times and society has abandoned them so it's like. Anti Asian racism and violence. Has also the hate, the so-called hate crime thing has so apparently increased. And I don't think that it's hasn't increased. It's just that like the way that the media, the way that the institutions within. Canada is also jumping on to the police wagon, the police, the hate crime angle, rather than learn from abolitionists. Rather, yeah. This is a long way of putting it. It's like similar. It's similar. And I know a lot of details, yes. Yeah, I mean I think that, yeah, I think that tracks, I mean the the targets are slightly different just based on sort of news, but on the sort of local context. But I think that does, yeah, that tracks a lot with. What we've been seeing here as I think there there's there's another thing that. I don't know. So I I really don't like the term like because the the. Is it the Twitter hashtag to stop Asian hate? Like I hate that framing of it. A sort of hatred. Not racism, but even the sort of the anti Asian violence framing which I've been using a lot, I think. Has problems because. You know, I mean, this is one of the things you're talking about. One of the things that I've seen a lot is just. You know, anytime, like, you know there are genuine sort of racism attacks, right? But then there's also just like. I mean one of the sort of scary things that happened here was it was like a bunch of people's like a bunch of restaurants, Chinese restaurants got broken into and robbed and everyone was like, well this is anti Asian violence is like, well no, like this is just theft. And and there's there's there's been this sort of like collapsing of something bad happens to an Asian person. With specifically sort of like targeted racist attacks. And I think that's been well, I mean, that's been a problem. And there's also the secondary problem of. You know who who even gets included in this in the 1st place? Like, one of the biggest things I've been frustrated about is, you know, the sort of the selective inclusion of South Asian people like I. There, there, there was a shooting at a FedEx. Facility last year by a guy who was like. Very much very far right. Kind of like pilled online guy and it killed a bunch of seek workers and there was never, there was just nothing even like no one talked about as anti Asian violence. But then you know selectively you get inclusions in Southeast Asian people when it's. Like it's it's like. People get folded into being Asian when it's like useful to call for more police, but then when it's, you know, not useful for that or when it's, you know, especially when it's working class people getting killed. There's just sort of nothing. And I've been, I don't know, I've been. Really frustrated by this dynamic a lot. Yeah, Jay, I want to know what you think about this too, because I have now talked long enough about this. Yeah, I mean, you know what wasn't there? There was a hate crime bill that was passed in Congress, right. And it was supposedly quote UN quote supposed to be addressing all this quote UN quote, anti Asian hate stuff. And, you know, the only thing that accomplished was it created like some, some government organ to like oversee these efforts to address hate crimes and then more funding for the police. Right. So I think it was, it was a very kind of direct impact. We could just see how this discourse transformed. Into exactly what a lot of, you know, organizers had said would happen, which is more funding for the police and not making communities safer, right? So I, I think the real conundrum for me and the thing that really kind of. You know, I spent a lot of time thinking about this and I get I get kind of frustrated as. Umm. You know whenever these these attacks happen on you know, Asian cartage or Asian identified people. The response, I mean it's it's a good-natured and it's well meaning and I agree with it. But you know, the response is always like the telling folks who have been victimized or those who know them. That more police is not the answer, right? And, you know, I think that's true. But then I I think what I'm struggling with is how to make this message resonate with those folks, right? Because I think. There's a way that in some ways that can alienate them even more and make them even more reaction, right? Because that's, you know, the media has often spun that argument they use further instances of violence to. Spin that argument of like when when people say the answer is not more cause it doesn't make us safer. The media is able to spin that to say look, this isn't working right. It's the things are actually getting more dangerous. All the kind of like scaremongering tactics with crime statistics and all that stuff which are usually false anyway. So I think that's what I'm trying to figure out now is like. You know, because in in Chinatown, LA, where, you know, where I've done some work, there was community meetings with CCD, the Chinatown Committee for Equitable. What's what's the D stand for? I always forget develop. They had some meetings with community folks to kind of like, you know, hear what, hear what they wanted to do to address this. And they they kind of like a lot of those organizers had, you know, they're coming from that viewpoint that. Calling for more cops is not the answer. And so some of the male, they're from the community, but they're not, they weren't part of the kind of like senior population of Chinatown, which is, you know, it's like low income seniors is is kind of like are the folks that are being pushed out and by developers and all the gentrification happening as well, some of some men were were kind of like, OK, well, we should start kind of like orange neighborhood watch. And you know, I think. In in some way that taps into this kind of like we protect us type of ethos, right. It's it's not relying on a state or government or whatever police, paramilitary force. But then I think the question that some folks had I heard the second hand was that, you know, are are these people actually from the Community and and are they actually doing this to address the needs of the folks who are most affected by it, right. And so I think some folks were uncomfortable with the idea that there should be these kind of like street patrols. And so there's there's just so many different ways to approach this and I haven't, you know, I'm not laying blame on anyone, but I just haven't seen an effective way to counteract that call for more police yet. That's a really good point because I feel like in when. Especially. Asian women people who experience like. Various forms of sexual violence or street harassment. That sense of unsafety is. Amplified where we witness other people getting murdered in public spaces. And so I think in a way it's like understandable why people want to grasp for any kind of solution. And. And also why that kind of trauma can be weaponized or like taken advantage of immediately. Like, just because I'm like, who asked for you to be St patrols of Chinatown? Who decided that you make? At the community safer, have you consulted the seniors? Have you, have you talked with all of the seniors, all of the elders to ask them like? How would you feel if I did that? Like where is that suggestion coming from? And. I think that, like the other argument is that, like mental health resources is an alternative to policing, even though policing and mental health systems are very, very, very connected. Edward Wong has an article about that in upping the ante. And I don't know, I just think that, like there has to be like a way to talk about this without. And validating each other's trauma and invalidating people survival instincts as well, because I feel like for years as someone who's done work in the anti violence sector. It's not that I I wanted there to be more policing. It's just that, like, a lot of survivors might be like, hey, actually do want to use the court system because this person is dangerous? Like, that's like, as somebody supporting a survivor, I can't just go up. No, you're wrong. Less cops, right? Like, that's that's not a compassionate response. And it's also not a compassionate response to go, hey, you're making this like. All about yourself and you should like be talking about like black and indigenous people like, like, like, that's that's also really insensitive. So it's like, I feel like there is a way that. There there is like a way to talk about abolition that. Really needs to respect every survivor or every like communities like. Trauma and it's not an easy thing because it's not like. Our communities have had a good way to respond to trauma like we haven't really, like we're still breaking the cycles of intergenerational trauma. Yeah. And I think this, this kind of comes back to another sort of difficulty of this whole project because, you know a lot of the sort of. The abolitionist framework is about. Like transitioning things towards. Community solutions, but like, what is that you know? Like, what does that even mean when you're dealing with? You know this is this is part of the problem with. Well, OK, you have armed self-defense groups, but. You know what happens when inevitably, and this is just something that happens, just, you know, this is, this is, this is the nature of security forces, right is eventually you're going to get abused and it's like, OK, well, what happens then and what happens when? You know, like the abuses of people inside the community and and this is compounded I think by this problem of. Like what? Like what even? You know, the, the I I think, I think there's, there's, there's there's a broader problem of like what asianness is, and there's a broader and this is this is also sort of localized problem of like, what even. Like, is the Chinese community at all? Because you're dealing with something that's incredibly fragmented. You're dealing people speak different languages. You're dealing with people who've been in these places for, you know, people have been here for centuries. People have been here like two months. And I think that makes it. Really difficult in a lot of ways to sort of. Like? Even even just bring together something that could be a community and I know I know what happens and I know, you know, there's, there's there's lots of different sort of like fragmented. Communities, but but I think it makes. This is harder because. There isn't a sort of. Like? Ready made thing you can turn to and go, OK, well this is how we're going like this is the group of people and this is the sort of. Like social sphere and this is the community that we're going to turn to, sort of. Deal with this stuff. There's just this kind of. A bunch of amorphous. Different groups and then also you have the problem that. Like, you know, if you're gonna talk about like political forces, Nation communities like the business associations are extremely powerful and. You know, we have different objectives and they do, but they're also like extremely well organized in a way that most others sort of like Chinese groups aren't. I don't know that that's that's that's been one of my thinking has been going on this. Yeah, I think this there's some resonance with what you're saying and the kind of dynamics that you're identifying and what I've kind of witnessed and experienced and like Hong Kong diaspora organizing. And which I think you know there's a lot of overlap with that same type of like you know small business organization type of thing that usually dominates Chinatowns across North America which is the case in LA and actually CCD spends a lot of time fighting the the small business organizations because they are very friendly with developers and they're usually pro you know, pro securitization and. Anti port folks and all that kind of stuff, so there is that that element right where a lot of the times. You know, you are fighting against people who might have to like stem heritages, for example. And you know, for me personally that's that's very much the case with Hong Kong diaspora groups, right, because, you know, many of them. Are very conservative, our right wing and not only just kind of held personal beliefs, but advocate a lot for these kind of, you know, these these policies and politicians and all these different things that I really can't stand and I'm aligned against. And you know, I think it's a lot of folks want to take the kind of pragmatist route of, like, we'll work with you on things that we where we have points of unity, otherwise we don't. Whereas, you know, I I guess some people see me as as a little bit more rigid in the sense that like I don't want to work with these folks at all because. I see them as kind of themselves, as as a force that is causing more harm than good, especially if with these Hong Kong diaspora groups that the usual mantra is like Hong Kong first. Like everything that we do is is serving Hong Kong. And that you in the diaspora, that usually means kind of like nonpartisanship lobbying Congress, all those different things and then kind of like completely ignoring or being agnostic of local and domestic issues. To oversimplify a little bit, so. You know, I think that's been on my mind a lot. I know your question was about Chinese news, but I guess for me that that kind of filters a little bit further down to like what is being a Hong Konger, right? Really difficult to organize with your specific quote UN quote ethnic or diaspora community when the. The meaning of diaspora is not a cohesive community, but people's memories of home. It's like a difficult thing to. Kind of, but but your head against because it's like you have your diversity, equity, inclusion framework of organizing and then you have the everyday like what, what, what these frameworks can't simplify, which is the tensions between your communities. Like I didn't grow up experiencing overt. Racist violence when I grew up in Richmond. Richmond is an extremely East Asian and Chinese suburb. That saw first, not first, but just like at some point a wave of Hong Kong diaspora because of 1997, and then afterwards more like mainlanders. And so on the playground somebody was like, are you from Taiwan mainland or or Hong Kong? And that was when I was like 7 and that was my introduction to what it means to be in diaspora in this particular kind of way. And being like just right. Like in that and in that and and figuring yourself out within that and seeing how there is just. And absence of community because of how like these different geopolitical experiences have like separated us and made it more difficult. Like when we filter our parents political beliefs onto each other. It's kind of like this awkward thing, but. But I think that like. In in trying to contend with that, and the and the present it's sort of like. Umm. We have these older institutions, the other people that that the older generations have builds. What new things can we build? What things can we? Because I I feel like I'm, I'm really rigid, too. I'm like really not great at talking across the aisle. And when I do, it's not it's not really about anything substantive. It's like, hey, like, hi, it's good to see, you know, like when you live in a place you you don't want to make like make enemies, but like it's it's a really hard thing. And it's even more heartbreaking when you find out slowly that people are just taking advantage of you, right? Like, and I I don't know, it's it's a it's a really difficult thing to organize against when you're like, you all hate me, great, love it. This has been naked happened here. Join us for Part 2 of this discussion tomorrow. We'll go into more detail on the save the left. In the meantime, you can find us what happened here pod on Twitter, Instagram, and check out the cold zone for other shows that we use. Welcome dear could happen here podcast that recognizes the Lunar New Year's is not in fact just one day. And in that spirit or special New Year's episode is going on for a second day. So here's rest of our conversation with Jane and Jan you know, the other thing I wanted to script touch on like this is I think kind of defeating off the topic. I think it's also something that I've been running into a lot, which is that like. You know, you have this kind of like, you know you have this kind of bind, right? Because on the one hand, you're stuck between, you know, like a lot a lot of the organizing insert of in Asian communities has. All of these problems and then you know, OK, well, you know, the the other thing that's happening is, is the sort of mainstream American left. And the mainstream American left? I think the Canadian left has probably similar problems with this. Is that like? It's a bunch of just like it's a bunch of tankies. It's a bunch of people who love the CCP. It's a bunch of just. We are genocide deniers and like people who think that every Asian person who like doesn't like the government is ACA siop and. I don't know. This is something that I've like. I mean, I've I ran into a lot trying to, I mean, help people doing Hong Kong organizing, something I've run into. Just in like every organ like I've run into this. An anarchist space is too. Like it's it's just. I don't know. It it it it feels really bad because it's like, like you're you're just sort of caught between. And I guess this is sort of this is 3 way triangulation right? Because on the one hand you have this sort of like. You you have the the the local dynamics with you know the sort of you sentence of these sort of reactionary small business owners. You have this you know the the Chinese community also being sort of split in between like pro and anti CCP factions, both of whom have. Like, are absolutely chock full of just fanatical right wingers. It's like, well, OK, it's like the CCP versus epoch times, and it's like, I don't want any of them to win. And then you zoom out and you're caught in the middle of this, sort of. You're calling the middle of this, sort of. I I don't know. I think it's sort of like a fox geopolitical struggle, but like one one of the big sort of ideological conflicts being between both the CCP and the US, sort of like using the specter of each other to sort of like disrupt their bases and. I don't know. I'm incredibly frustrated by it. I'm incredibly frustrated by the way that. These groups have explicitly anti CCP like the the the Pro CCP groups are sort of selectively been using. It's like selectively been using anti Asian violence, as you know, to basically make the argument. The importance of anti Asian violence is that while this only happens because people say mean things about the CCP, and if no one didn't like the CCP, then there wouldn't be any violence. Even though, like anti Asian violence here predates the existence of a Communist Party in China by centuries. Like we we like the we we invaded, we invaded China. Like, how many times? At least twice. Maybe 3? I think at least twice and maybe three times like before there was a Communist Party. And so. I don't know. I I I feel trapped a lot between these dynamics in ways that are very frustrating and. Yeah, I just want to open the floor to talk about that. I guess I see it as like cooptation. Partly. But I will, I guess I also see it as. How power it works? Like I there was like this local paper and I was researching, sort of. The history of Chinese diaspora organizing locally and. There was a spat in the paper between two people who. One of whom is from. A newer Hong Kong diaspora. There was like a whole spat. In the paper about his history and there's. The history of like, those tensions are like written in the community itself, like it's it's it's not a new thing that people argue about what happened on June 4th. It's not new that people are really mistrustful of each other, and that there are actual, like, government forces that infiltrate and create a like. Basically deny other people struggles like when that that government is themselves perpetuating it. And I guess it just is really hard when fellow organizers that you otherwise really. Like, want to get along with our our, like, uncritical of the state that has oppressed your family because you're just kind of like, you're kind of like, wait, so are we. Have we had a conversation about this? Like, we clearly haven't talked enough if this is what you believe in and it's just a little bit hard because it's like community building is not. Assuming that we're in solidarity, Community building is actually, like, doing that hard work. Like, what is your community experiencing and what is my community experiencing? How are we being, like, weaponized against each other? Like, yeah, how are these governments, like manipulating like communities? But that's like really hard when trust has been probably broken like immediately. I think you're so right that it's it's really about cooptation and a lot of it, like what I've witnessed is really so much about. And this is like like you're saying, Jane, this is a much older dynamic than. You know, just the past couple of years is like states being able to use this kind of home and diaspora framework to demand loyalty through like targeting diaspora people's guilt. And so there's so many like guilty Jasper people I know who are like. You know, usually from usually from a class perspective, right, because they had the reason their family had the resources to leave or they were not born in the home country or whatever because of their family background, that type of thing. And they want to subsume that by taking this radical, you know, anti US, Anti Canada stance. Which is fine. Like obviously being anti US and anti Canada is a good thing. But the thing that's really kind of frustrated me the most is seeing these kind of like. Radical folks in North America, especially queer folks who are like. They'll take the most reactionary positions against women and queer and you know, LGBT folks in China, for example, by supporting a state that is repressing them, right? So it's it's such cognitive dissonance to me. Like, I don't understand why these folks can't see. That they're kind of perpetuating this violence in in the service of this kind of overarching imperative of not ever saying anything bad about China because it'll help. It'll it'll bolster the US propaganda war machine, which is like there's absolutely a way that I mean that that absolutely happens if you do that uncared fully, right. If you just kind of repeat U.S. media narratives and stuff like that. But. I think there is absolutely a way to do both right? And to me the way to do that is to not. Support the state discourses that demand loyalty from the diaspora. But to actually, you know, it's the grassroots thing, right? It's just kind of like we support queer folks around the world who are struggling under oppression from their governments and that type of thing, and being able to very carefully say that with nuance. To be against both at the same time, for example. But that's really, really difficult, right? And people have very kind of vitriolic reactions when you try and do that as you know, he's set up top Chris. So I don't know this, this is still the conundrum for me because I I tend to take the more rigid stance against against these folks, but I know people who are very kind of. They take a more compassionate stance, which is like these. These are newly placed politicized youth. They're just coming to a lot of these politics and positions. And you know, being anti US is better than not being anti us is what a lot of folks say. And you know, I, I agree to a certain extent, but then it's also like. If they're being miseducated in these histories, that's OK to a certain point when you're exploring and discovering these things and becoming radicalized. But you know, like Jane said, there's also these kind of material, direct impacts that you have on people that you work with, that you organize with that, that are your friends or loved ones that, you know, that kind of explanation of like, oh, they're just learning is like, it's insufficient in that kind of individual way because you're still hurting people and threatening people around you. OK, so I think there has to be a balance in like being able to steer folks in into these like non Stalinist, non statist directions even while they're discovering how we're. Even having to be like steering people into a nonsense. Perspective, I'm just like I I'm not ***** for Stalin. I like the thing that ****** me off about this is just like like they're not even Stalinists. Like, this is the thing that's frustrating. Like if if if if they were merely 20th century Stalinists we wouldn't be having this argument because you know, 20th century Stalinism is like, well yeah, OK like 20 century Stalinists are anti market economy. And it's like, no, they've they've somehow found a way to take literally the worst aspects of Stalinism and then be like, OK, but what is, what if, what if Stalinism, but also capitalism good at the same time? And it's just like, how how did you do this? Like how how did you come up with an ideology that like. I don't know. I mean, I I think I think also I think that's been frustrating to me about this. It's like. It's a way of sort of. Of of it becomes this way of channeling. You know, you have the diaspora guilt on the one hand that you have just random sort of like white leftists sort of white guilt and and it becomes this way of like. Channeling that into this sort of fall anti racism where you know you get, you get people who are like actual professional like hacks right? Like Roger Day for example being like. You know, doing things like, well, if you, if you, if you, if you criticize. This time you said it all, it's sinophobia and like you're directly leading to people getting killed and it's like, no. That's not how this works. And and there's this kind of. It's it's, it's. It's this problem of. They they have this this fundamental inability to see Chinese people as people and not a sort of undifferentiated mass that can be sort of rallied behind an ideology. And. I don't know that's been. I think weird to deal with because, you know, like, yeah, like you, you're always just in, in in trans communities, like you're always you're just, you're just going to have like, you know, there's going to be a few people who are just sort of like Pro, CCP, right wingers, right. That's just a sort of default political position. But. There's there's this way in which. You, you get this, you know, people adopting. I mean, just. Things that like if you said this about any, like white American, for example, if you if you argued that and you like a white American making $1000 a year wasn't in poverty, right, like you just couldn't do it. You like, you know, it's it's it's literally impossible. You like you, you'd be laughed out of the room or you know like you're you, you would you would you be like ratioed until the cows come home. But you can just put everyone and people just say this constantly. Like, this is just the thing that was like, well, if you look at poverty reduction, it's like, well, Chinese China has eliminated absolute poverty. It's like, yeah, OK, $1000 a year is outside of this now. And I think. That there's these ways in which it becomes hard to to intervene in this stuff because. Like every every Asian person, specifically Chinese person just becomes a sort of token. That, like, you know, you just sort of like throw at each other. As it's like, Oh well, yeah, here's a Chinese person who says the CCP is good. It's like, well, here's another Chinese person who says that it's bad and it's like, you never. Looks like even on both sides, whether whether the process people realize it or not, it's their agencies being sort of stripped by them and they've been turned into this sort of instrumentalized. Like? You know, in the in the same thing they're also doing to us. They're trying to sort of these instruments that you can use to like. Back your own. Sort of writing political agenda and this. I don't know. I like this has gotten me to just. I I just don't work with these people anymore. Like, we tried it. It was a disaster. They screwed us over. And so I don't know but but but I think that's that's that's a lonely stance in a lot of ways like you know if if you take this kind of like hardline position you're not gonna. Most people, even other people who don't support it probably won't follow you there. I don't know. It's weird because. I find a lot of organizing is really lonely. It's like. It's it's not like. Like, I wanna post around being, like, why aren't you all donating to this? But that's not that's also guilt, right? That's like projecting guilt onto other people. And that's not an effective tool and I think that like. Like, you're so right in addressing both the white guilt, but also the diaspora guilt, and also just how frustrating it is to. Organize against the state when it's like two people, like three people doing it in a little group project, for lack of a better word. But it's sort of like, how do we make this sustainable when it's so lonely? And how do we use the resources that are available to us to. Not replicate these systems yet again. And I guess when it comes to the left or progressives in Canada, it's like so frustrating because it's like. There isn't actually a lot of community outreach to like. Racialized communities? Yeah. There's no translation. There's a lot of, like, nonprofit work that is frankly very draining and Co optive themselves like it's it's a a bunch of social service organizations and a trench coat and a bunch of political organizations that don't. Work together or talk to each other in a trench coat. And so I understand why youth would join, like leftist, like radical organizing, but it it's just really heartbreaking when it's you're they end up reading in reading groups where they're reading historical or so-called historical texts that erase your histories. Like it. It's just such a. Like? Like reading is great. Like political education is incredible. But I'm like, it's hard not to grow resentful when the guy at the top is a university educated white dude and they're reading texts that literally erase your entire family. And it's that like, yeah, for me, it's like just really personal that way. It's like. There are people who are suffering in the present, and you're reading a text by a white sociologist from the 80s. Like like, not like, I'm like, it's not that. Like I. Don't think that we should do that. Political education. It's just that, like. Out of Reading Group, will you listen to me when I call you out? Yeah I I definitely you know both of you saying that this work is really lonely especially if you take if you stand up for yourself or you you really kind of stand by your principles. It's I think that's so true and. Umm, you know, not to speak for everyone in lesson, but just my experience has been like. You know, everyone just everyone hates us. Yeah like it's you know, we we got hit from the right we got hate from the left and from Hong Kong to asper from Hong Kong. Locals like it's it's just sometimes it's really hard to see, you know, because we're we're trying to stay true to our principles but. It's hard to see sometimes whether there is an impact or whether we're just kind of like in a little echo chamber with twenty other people, you know what I mean? And it's hard to find that balance because I don't want to become more and more pragmatist where I'm just like, all right, well. You know, I work with these people, but I don't agree with them on these fundamental issues, just on this one campaign or whatever happens to be. I don't know. I I know that's a part of like building power, quote UN quote like that a lot of certain socialist groups like to do or they they really focus on that kind of thing. But. I don't know if it's too much of an academic view to to be like. If you're going to do it that way, you're you're you're changing the outcome already, right? Because you're not addressing these kind of fundamental issues from the start. And I think that view can sometimes lead to like a lot of non starters where you're just like things don't ever get off the ground because you insist on whatever fundamental principle that you that you want to stick to like anti nationalism for example. So yeah just just kind of reiterating and and commiserating with you all and the the loneliness of that. People think that like. Not working in these sort of united front things is is this like sort of pure ideological position, but like. You know, I mean so. When when occupy ice was happening right, occupy ice wound up being a kind of big friend thing, and one of the groups involved with it was the was the party for socialism and liberation. Who are this sort of like? Very much sort of like. The, the base, the tanky cult like, there's not a lot of other horrible stuff that we'll talk about at some point. But I mean one of the things that happens, you know, occupy ice is that they, you know, in in Philadelphia, they they destroy the encampment like they they they convince enough people. To just leave and do this completely pointless. Like March, they can do a photo op of like people in front of the mayor's office and they do it and the camp collapses because suddenly there's not enough people. You know, they don't even get a majority of people, but it doesn't matter because they pulled enough people out that you know that the camp couldn't be held against the cops anymore. And I think that in some sense is this is kind of a microcosm of what the of what these people actually do, which is that, you know, these people will never have any actual institutional power, right. You know, they're never going to create their lifestyle and estate or whatever. Like they're never going to get this. They're never going to hold any power. What they can do is there are enough of them they can they can siphon off enough people from actual leftist movements into this sort of just like Lightroom pro capitalist stuff that they can they can cause problems to collapse. And I mean they've done this. They they did a lot of this. Green, the uprising in 2020, there is a lot of them, you know, intentionally leading people on pointless marches. There's a lot of cooperating with the police and stuff like that. And and I think that. You know it. It's, it's, it's. Like having seen that like multiple times, right I? You know, I'm I, you know, for me, like not working with him as a practical is an incredibly pragmatic position because we tried it and they they blew it up. But it's it's this problem especially, you know, you have people who are radicalized in like 2020 and it's like, well, yeah, I mean, I don't know, like a lot of them never saw this stuff, right? Don't know who these people are. And their first introduction to the left is just like incredibly well financed. I like media blitz. And I think that has. You know, I think that has consequences both for us as sort of like. People on the left doing. Like Chinese people on the left doing our own diaspora organizing, it has consequences for it. The broader left and like you, you can see other sort of versions of this right where. You know, you have a sort of right wing women infiltrating leftist spaces and destroying them like they're they're like there, there was a thing. Like decree resistance basically blew up a like an anti lithium protest in the US by just like going there and just hammering transphobia constantly. And so I don't know, I I think there's there's this sort of dilemma because. Funded, like they will say a lot of the same things we do, but we have fundamentally different goals. And that manifests itself at, you know, on the level of, of of organizing the individual campaigns. But it's something that's really hard to get people to see. I think we've lost a lot of movements because of it. Yeah, not to be, you know, not to power on the cynicism or anything, but I think I, I honestly do think. You know, as all those new Cold War stuff ramps up, which is like completely independent of what a lot of folks like grassroots folks are even thinking or advocating. It's all just kind of up to the the the two, you know, Chinese and US governments as they ramp up their own tensions, I think it's really going to start like people are going to start. These people who are, you know, tankies or whatever are going to start narrowing our choices further and further. Right, like. You know, soon it's going to be anathema to to not. You know, take the anti US position and that's it. You know what I mean? And I think that's really scary. To me, I don't. I. Last year I thought there was still room for intervention, but. Things are closing so quickly. And, you know, my personal opinion is that a lot of these kind of bigger groups like no Cold War and others like code panker are definitely being, you know, that they have much more funding than a lot of other groups who are forwarding more nuanced positions. And so, like you're saying, it's just like these media blitzes, these shiny events and all those different things are very appealing to to newly radicalized folks, right? They think that this this is where the power is, and this is where we can actually make a difference. And yeah things to me, things look pretty bleak and in the near future, I mean it just takes one. Yeah, I will say I think, I think they, they, they made one major decision mistake which is they tried to do the new the, the push the giant like new Cold War with China thing at the exact moment that the US and Russia were like heating up in action. And this left them like kind of off balance because they've been for the last two years. The whole thing has been the US is going to accelerate tensions with China, US going to China and then it turns out that they're not doing that and in fact. Like they're gearing up for just more proxy war stuff with Russia, which is the they've been doing for the past decade. So I think like, I don't know like I think they their problem. Essentially is that they run into reality and there are certain points at which, like you know you, you can lie a lot. Right, but when when when the lie that you're pushing is about what the mainstream media is going to say and the mainstream media just pivots and is just completely about something that's entirely unrelated like I think, I think that hurts. I think everything that the other problem they have that that makes me hopeful is that the way they're their base is getting split by just the anti VAX grifters because so, so many of their media people just. You know are, are, are just are just full on grifters and you know and you're you're seeing splits right now in Gray zone about like basically between pro and anti VAX factions and I think that also. Will help us in the long run because. You know, sit, say, say what you want about most leftists and even most tankies like. Anti VAX is like a bit far even for them and because you know and the other things like the. It's it's hard to do anti VAX without beginning to take positions that. Just. Like? It's been baked into just sort of anti Chinese racism in in in so many ways that like you can't really like. You know, like you, you can't simultaneously be pro incredibly CCP and then also be talking about how the US is trying to implement social credit, right. You know, these, these are these, these positions are just contradictory and I think. That's something that plays to our advantage and I think is weakening them to some extent because. They've. They they tried to have their cake and eat it too, and now they're sort of. I don't know where their conspiracy theory base is is interfering with their like. Left base in in ways I think are helpful for us. It's just so interesting how? Like the anti VAX position is literally rooted in racism and ableism. Like there's an article in the conversation called the inherent racism of the undo VAX movement that has like really good history around. Oh wait, settlers being afraid of African medicine? And then there there's also just the abelism of assuming that your kid will get autism if you get vaccinated. That was that. That's been a huge thing before the pandemic, and that was part of how this was effective in the 1st place and. Yeah, and. Obviously the anti Chinese like. Anti Asian like scapegoating as well but. I guess that also ties into, like, just how broadly ableist the left is and how like disability justice is not. Something that a lot of people know about or care about and. It's. Yeah, I don't know. It's a huge problem for me as a disabled person. Yeah, I wanted to add really quickly too. I mean I totally agree with you. And you know, I think one of the pernicious things that I've noticed though is like these kind of big, you know, quote UN quote anti imperialist accounts like on Instagram for example, they they take this anti VAX position precisely by saying that it's anti racist to take that position. Which is like, it sounds. That sounds very counterintuitive. It's not. That does not reflect reality. But they will point to instances of, you know, anti black US US medicine, for example, you know, like the Tuskegee experiments and then say This is why we shouldn't trust the US government on any of this, right? Because look what they've done in the past and it's like that logic makes a lot of sense in in a lot of ways, right? But you know, they they obviously ignore. The impacts that you know anti VAX and COVID has had on you know black and other POC populations, right? So I think. I don't know if it's exactly like, I don't know if it is appearing as hypocrisy to those people and then their audiences too, right? Because I think they're able to spin it in this in this way. Yeah. But I, I think, I think my, my, my argument here is I don't think those are the same. I don't think those are the same bases like, I I don't, I don't think that. The majority of the tanky base are people who are anti factors and you know you, you you can see a line of this, right of of you know like one of the big things that like they're obsessed with sort of like with the Cuban healthcare system, right. And like Cuba, Cuba's vaccines, you see this stuff from them a lot and you know, they also talk about like, yeah like China's doing really well, getting COVID and I don't think those positions. Are like, I I don't think those people are the same people who are also turning around and then talking about how, like, you know, talk, doing the CPU experiments, the vaccines are actually like racism. Thing I think. I think there's some overlap between them, but but I don't think that those bases line up enough for it to. You know, not have the effect of just kind of. Like? Tearing them apart as their media people flip into into one of the sort of camps and and I I think the other thing like. You know, if if you look at what's happening with like like Max Blumenthal right now is like he's just like full on. Like like he's just full on touring with like just straight up right wingers to an extent that even like even people who are habituated by the sort of like Syria false flag stuff into sort of working with right wingers like you can't look at. These people. That, you know, it's just these actually just like Republican operatives and be like, well, OK, we're we're on the side of these people and also like support Cuba. I just, I don't know. I, I, I I have I have some faith. In these groups being separate and they're being they're being a point of cognitive dissonance where the system breaks, I guess. I I've seen people who have gotten out of tankie ISM by having to interact with the actual CP. And and that that that that gives me hope that there is there, there's there's a point of cognitive dissonance at which it falls apart. And I don't know, maybe, maybe maybe I'm just sort of like, hope yuming here, but. I feel like it's so interesting. How like. There are a lot of people for whom politics is a parlor game and not their everyday like lived experience. Like I would not be like I like. If I see my communities struggling and when people are dying or people are really, like, struggling with intergenerational trauma, I'm not going to sit here and pontificate and theorize about like. Things that don't impact my communities. And yeah like the the the angle about class is so. Important here because it's like. A lot of people can't insulate themselves from like, the broader communities around them. Like if you're going around saying untruths in the media and your communities are like, hey, that, that makes no sense. Like, if you're actually connected to people, like, like, you would hopefully, unless you're just a big ******* you you would hopefully take some accountability for what you're saying. And I yeah, I just, I just worry because this pandemic has also like really isolated people, like they people are not, like talking to each other. And that makes it. More easy for people to to be like, oh I'm I'm just right like this is my perspective and I just yeah I think about that. The conditions in which we come to certain conclusions, like the conditions under which we become more vulnerable to culty type things or like oversimplified like understandings of history because like I feel like the the anti VAX. Like not taking the vaccine being. Anti racist is a very like. Manipulative like? Argument because. It ignores the fact that these experiments on black and indigenous people in North America and beyond are like about. Neglect and are about deliberately deliberate, ongoing genocide and how like it's completely understandable for for people to not trust the government, but. But like when the vaccine is actually a tool of protecting people like. There's not a lot of like campaigns other than people who are rooted in disability justice saying, hey, vaccines are like here to protect us and how can we make, how can we make like a like. How can we resist the medical industrial complex enough such that we can make people feel safer taking them at vaccine? How can we bring people in as opposed to? Fear mongering because I think that fear is so powerful. It's like once you're afraid, you're you're not going to, you're not going to even look into the research, right? So I don't know, it's for me, I just think of all of this as like manipulation and human psychology on a on a like broad social basis because it's like. The stage is a big cult and these little groups are little cults, yeah? Yeah. Do you have any other things you want to say before we head out? Happy New Year, yeah. You're the tiger. I'm looking forward to retweeting art. Like, actually. OK. I guess we're not January 1st. I think my. OK. OK, close. close. Closing. Less depressing question. Yeah what? What what do you think is the etiquette on retweeting? Like, yeah, retweeting like you're the tiger art before the actual before, like lunar New Years. I've I've been torn on it because I just I I like the art, but also I'm like, it's not the years yet. I haven't seen any. I guess. I guess I'm lucky. I have been either guilty or just not guilty, depending on how you see it. Like, I have retweeted all of the tiger art on January 1st because I did not care. I wanted to see the Tigers. But I hope that I see more tigers like in the coming days, because if the Tigers aren't coming, or if we aren't retweeting it, that that is an issue. Like there needs to be like a second like a like a like a like, like an like a second wave of the tiger art. Yeah, no pressure to all of the artists. Well. All right, so if if people want to find you or work that you have, that you want people to find, where, where, where can they do that, or if you also do not want them to find you, that is completely also valid. The Internet is terrible and a mistake. Yeah, I'm mostly in do not perceive me mode, but completely valid. Wanna check out loud sound stuff? Feel free last song collective.com. It's a good work. My social media is peapack all poetry. Instagram I. I have this graphic. That. I've turned into a sticker and it's. Raises funds for families who were affected by the fires and floods. It's a sticker that says immunocompromised people are worth protecting. And it went viral multiple times. So I guess I cannot help but be perceived at this point. So yeah, I don't know. Yeah. If I got all poetry. Yeah. This this is what happens when you create things that are both incredibly politically powerful and also gorgeous. So yeah. That be be cursed with the reward for good work, which is. Also being perceived. Yeah. Yeah, well you can find you can find us at happen here pod on Twitter and Instagram. There's the cool zone. You can find it. Yeah. Go, go, go, go retweet tiger arts. Go throw a brick at your sheriff. Non actionable and yeah, destroy the American and Chinese states. Happy New Years. It could happen. Here is the podcast that this is about. The things falling apart and how to how to, how to maybe unfollow apart. I'm Robert Evans. Your your your host and your other hosts are Christopher and Garrison and our producer Sophie. How's everybody doing today? Great. How's everybody has everybody feel about war? Ohh. Yeah. Now, if you were to guess, based on your knowledge of history, what generation of war we're in right now, what would you what would you guess? I feel like war isn't. It's it's it's newer in relation to like human beings, like the idea of war, I'm guessing. Like there's been like battles, but like the idea of like war, I feel like. Isn't super old compared to how long there's been humans walking around, so I don't know. This is maybe. I mean, I I know the answer, but like, it's it's like, I don't know like it's it's definitely we definitely passed through like at least a couple of stages and we're at least a couple. Yeah, Chris, like, gotta be at least 12 at 12. OK, at least 12. You are way ahead of William S Lind, who spoilers is the guy who came up with the concept of 4th generation war, which is what this episode is about, right? One of the things when we talk about things falling apart is the the the unsettling growth of a number of different. Hybrid conflicts. Ukraine being the most like, uh, blatant modern example, Syria being the deadliest example in our lifetimes. But like these weird hybrid conflicts that are a mix of **** happening on the Internet and like disinformation going out all over the world. You could even think to like what was happening in Bolivia a year or so back. And like all those weird accounts that were like based around Langley, Virginia claiming to support the military coup. And you can look at, like from the same this disinformation brought out by, like, the Russian state. It is usually as part of like a conflict either, you know, they have disinfo operations in Syria, disinfo operations around the conflict in Ukraine that are kind of designed to muddy the issues and to detract international support and also to like drum up support within for like in the case of Ukraine, you had like this media blitz against the legitimacy of the Ukrainian state in favor of like a more like traditionally Russian style of government in the east and like that led to this. Breakaway Republic that was supported by the Russian government and like so these are like hybrid conflicts as kind of how these are referred to. And there was a guy named William S Lind, who in 1989 wrote a book with a couple of U.S. military analysts like he was an analyst for the military. He was not serving in the military. The other guys who wrote this, this thing with were serving at the time and they wrote this, this book kind of trying to basically what Lind was doing. He was very influenced by our loss in Vietnam. That when I say are here like the loss of the the American state in Vietnam and he was trying to determine like #1 kind of like find a way to codify and explain the changes that were happening to warfare in this. Was also influenced by what was happening in Afghanistan with the Russians were experiencing and find a way to like move forward and allow the United States to win wars again. Right. Like that was William S Linde goal and so he he came up with this concept of four or he and some other guys came up with what they called 4th generation. Warfare and 1st generation warfare is like Napoleonic era warfare. So, like, as Garrison was saying, you may note that he kind of starts his. That's pretty late. That's pretty late. We had a lot of wars 16 or the 1800s. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff that leads up to like, yeah, I if I was going to try to categorize different types of warfare, that would not be the one I start with. Well, and like, the reality, of course, is we'll talk about, like when you start looking at different kinds of warfares, there's wars that look remarkably like the ****. Going on in Afghanistan and Ukraine that are occurring like several thousand years ago, like something like in the same places too. Like, yeah, just like if you wanted to, if you wanted to talk about like kind of the modern style of wars that we saw in that we've seen really in the last like 150 years. They're not all that dissimilar in a lot of ways from like the kind of conflict you saw between Rome and Carthage, which are these really like Big Nation state style conflicts and and have a lot of similarities, but but William S Lynn described the first generation of warfare as beginning. To the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 that ended the 30 years war. And it's the kind of warfare where you have these like big tightly ordered groups of men marching towards each other and like firing very inaccurate weapons and mass together, right. This is ended by the era of the machine gun and the semi automatic rifle or in on the bolt action rifle I should say. And that leads us to 2nd generation warfare, which is linear fire and movement with heavy reliance on indirect fire. So that's still huge groups of guys charging, but they're not marching in close order. They're not like firing. And volleys, and they're supported by heavy artillery, like by World War One kind of **** right? Really. We we start to see this in like, 1870. And then World War One is kind of the height of this kind of warfare. And over the course of World War One, we more merge. And again, this is William S Lynnway. We merge from second generation to 3rd generation warfare, which is where you've got infiltration tactics to bypass enemy defensive lines and collapse it, which kind of the Germans and their outrage tactic and Stormtrooper tactics are really kind of pioneering. That you've got the idea of defense in depth and so this need to bypass the enemy and like this leads to blitzkrieg and leads to all sorts of ****. And then that kind of starts to collapse and Lynn's estimation around Vietnam and you get what's called 4th generation warfare. 4th generation. I'm actually going to read a quote from a military history wiki that I thought had a pretty good description of all of this. 4th generation warfare is normally characterized by a violent non state actor fighting a state. This fighting can be. Physically done, such as by modern examples, Hezbollah or the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. In this realm, the VA, NSA, these violent non state actors use all three levels of 4th generation warfare. These are the physical, actual combat which is considered the least important mental, the will to fight, belief in victory, etcetera. And the moral which is the most important, Lynn says and includes cultural norms, etcetera. So obviously I think that this is kind of nonsense. There's a lot of people, so there's a lot of folks, the the people who buy into this and it's very popular. On the right, well, we'll look at like what's happening in Ukraine. It's a perfect example of 4th generation warfare, because you have Russia flooding the zone, using Sputnik and a bunch of other kind of media organizations to drum up discord and like anger between East and West and Ukraine and support for potential Russian action. At the same time as you have them backing this dictator and then you have like the West sort of supporting the the people protesting against those dictators. And like, so you've got like this, this digital conflict, this information conflict that eventually leads to fighting. On the ground, one of the areas in which I think Linda is really off is is talking about like the physical as the least important. Especially if you're going to consider Ukraine an example of 4th generation warfare. Because if the Russian military had not intervened, there would not still be a conflict in Ukraine, the separatists would not still hold land. And in fact the separatists were on the edge of getting completely wiped out by the Ukrainian military because they were a bunch of non state actors with minimal support and minimal weaponry before the Russians moved in brigades of active duty combat troops and armor. Including like gigantic ******* missile launchers which they used to shoot down that Malaysian Airlines flight. Like that it it's it's just not I I don't think that that what what Linda's saying is very. Very well describes what's actually going on in the world. But it is important to understand the concept of 4th generation warfare and 5th generation warfare, which we'll talk about in a bit because it is so useful in the way in which particularly guys like Steve Bannon conceive of conflict. Because they you you'll hear the term 4th generation warfare constantly, and it's also something that is used a lot within our military establishment now. A lot of people hate it, and within you can find a lot of papers by dudes writing like. Analysts who are working for the Defense Department for the Army actively like ******** on land and talking about how he's at at best is kind of like reinvented ideas that have existed in warfare for thousands of years. And he's kind of summarized things in a way that that is needlessly flattening. And like some people will say, you basically like, ripped up, like added the Internet to clauswitz and pretended that you'd invented a new style of or that you defined a new style of conflict. Anyway. That's like an introduction to the idea of 4th generation. Warfare, right? And there's a lot of things that he gets again, like if you're, if you're a history, a military history wonk, which Lind pretends to be a lot of **** that he gets wrong. So one of the things that he says, like one of his famous phrases that every military eventually craps in its own mess kit. The idea that, like every military that that is great, eventually like, has a gigantic **** ** because they get too used to doing the same thing. Which is true. And he describes it as like the Russians did it in 1806, after which they designed and put into service. Much more improved model mesh kit, mess kit through the Shrine horse military reforms. The French did it in 1870, after which they took down from the shelf and old model mesquit the mass draft army of the First Republic and put it back into service. The Japanese did it in 1945, after which they threw their mess kit away, swearing there would never eat again. And we did it in Korea, in Vietnam, and now when four new wars so far we've only, we've had the only military that's just kept on eating. And that's a really dumb statement. That's all really historically inaccurate. So, for example, it's true that like the Prussians. Had a great military, which then got its **** kicked by Napoleon, and they had to completely redesign it, and by the time 1870 came around they were extremely dominant on the battlefield against the French #1. He's crediting the military reforms of like tactics and strategy and ignoring things like Krupp inventing an entirely new kind of cannon that was utterly dominant on the battlefield. He's also ignoring the fact that this Prussian army, he's saying, like the US, is the only army that does the same thing over and over again and fails and keeps on eating. Well. The Prussian army is the army the Germans took into battle. World War One and two and spoilers. They didn't learn enough from either of those wars. He also talks about how like, the French had their, you know, crapping in the mess kit moment in 1870 after the Franco Prussian War and they changed their army and it was much better like, well, they didn't win World War One, like they were on the side that won. But if it had been them against Germany, they would have gotten ******* steamrolled. Like it was not going well for them for quite a while and they lost a whole generation of young men. So maybe and and again, this is like what what he's saying is basically we because we're losing so constantly. The reason that we're losing is not because we are picking bad conflicts. It's not because we're picking to engage in conflicts when we shouldn't at all be engaging in conflicts. It's not because we use military force and like a fundamentally venal and corrupt way in order to benefit a small cabal of military industrial corporations. It's because we we don't have good battle doctrine. And that's why we're not winning in these conflicts, which ignores everything about the reality of the conflicts that like he's talking about, like the the problem is not a lack of combat dominance, which is is what you were saying. Like the Prussians fighting Napoleon. It's what you were seeing with the French fighting the Germans in 1870, right? Like in those cases, the Prussians had a massive failure of combat dominance against the French, and the the French had a massive failure in combat against the Germans. Their doctrine was just worse. U.S. soldiers are great at getting into gunfights and great at winning gun fights. The problem is not a lack of combat ability. The problem is that there's no way to win the conflicts that we're getting into. They are unwinnable wars that were never things that like. No amount of change in doctrine would have made Afghanistan a success because it was a stupid war. Yeah. Like it like, if if if that were true, like, coin would have worked. Hmm. And coin. Yeah. No. Like coin counter inserts. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Just complete, total and utter failure. Like, enormous numbers of people dead. Enormous numbers of, like, people traumatized for generations. And the US still just lost both wars. Yeah. Just and and and and if you really dig into Linda. Others like him, what they're actually saying when they say that, like we need to reform, like the way the military works with new battle doctors, we need to be killing even more people. We just didn't kill enough in Vietnam, like the five million we bombed or so. That wasn't enough. People like that. That's the reform that he's really talking about. Is Lynn one of those people who like rants about the like the the the El Salvadorian option? I'm sure he does. I don't know exactly what he said about El Salvador. He's a fascinating kind of fascist. He is absolutely a fascist. He was the director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism at the Free Congress Foundation. He wrote a or he helped to to popularize a declaration of cultural independence by cultural conservatives, which is like these. There's a lot of the seeds of the ship. That we're seeing today, right? That like, American culture institutions are being collapsed because of, like, liberal decadence, and conservatives, cultural conservatives should separate themselves and, like, set up parallel institutions. Oh, so that is where Bannon comes in and that's where Bannon comes in there. Like, ******* Andrew Torba and Gab come in. They all advocate this ****. Yeah. Because they're all, they all adhere to that kind of. Yeah. But like, politics has culture, and there's downstream. Yeah. And there's some weird differences with Lynn. Like, he's a huge mass. Transit and Urban rail advocate, which I guess I agree with him on, like, fine. Every once in a while a bad person does have a good opinion. He loves he loves him some ******* city trains and stuff, but he's also, he was a major factor. He was one of the earliest, like, prominent conservatives who was like yelling about cultural Marxism and kind of the modern political. I mean that makes sense because he was real intimate. He sounds like he's real into meta politics. So yeah, that's super in the metropolitan. Yeah. So like all of this stuff makes a whole lot of sense if you're. Yeah, if you're. If you know what, if you know what meta politics are, it's also kind of explains how he developed the different generations of warfare, using it through a framework. Metal politics actually really makes that fit if you believe, like Breitbart famously stated that, like, politics is downstream from culture. And if you also believe what, Klaus, I think it was Klaus. What's that said that, like, war is politics by other means, then, like, you can make cultural changes that can cause wars. And like, yeah, like, that's a lot like kind of, I think the thought process behind Lynn. Yeah. Because this, this really defines. What he means by 4th generation warfare of war being handed out specifically by the culture instead of having it be abstracted, to be like people marching towards each other with guns. Because he's, he's, he's, he's he's putting the he's putting the culture kind of back into it. Yeah, and he and he's and he's and and obviously culture was never not a factor, and of course not every single war it's been a major factor. Like, all of this **** he talks about is being characteristic of 4th generation warfare has been happening in one way or another for thousands of years. It's not that these things are done in like temporal succession. It's like because like a lot of the stuff that makes up 4th generation warfare, like the more like guerrilla warfare aspects come way before people with guns marching towards each other, ******* Afghans doing that. To Alexander the ***. **** great, like for the birth of Christ. A lot of, a lot of this stuff is actually like kind of more similar to what original warfare probably would have been like. Yeah, which I I think, yeah, I think to to his credit, I think he does. Actually, recognize that at some point in his writing, no. And the thing about this is, well, we can pick at it. And I think there is a lot that's ridiculous in his attitude. It's it's close enough to the way that reality works that if you're going, if you're thinking about conflict in this framework, you can be very successful. It's not like an it's inaccurate in some ways because he's, he is wrongly describing why certain things work, I think is a lot of what he's doing and he's wrong about winning wars, I'll say that. If if the American military were to make the ******* Lind the the Secretary of Defense and give him total power like he would keep on losing wars as hard as we've been losing wars for everyone listening to this as lifetime. But in a cultural sense, the kind of culture jamming, which is a term we'll talk about more in the future. And but the kind of like the the propaganda arms and stuff in order to the the the the media warfare in order to either incite or justify real conflict or or and this is one of the areas in which they have been really effective. Alter the dimension to alter how internationally a conflict is responded to. So one of the big successes of people like this has been effectively eliminating any kind of left wing support for liberatory movements in the Middle East, for liberatory movements, or for like just like what's happening in Ukraine, this kind of like reflexive. Well, if there's if there's a a movement for liberation among the people of a country, it's probably the CIA. Like, like carrying out some sort of op. That's Linden. His people and people influenced by him have been a big part of pushing that. It's why Steve Bannon is in and **** is so friendly with like some guys on, like chunks of they call themselves the left and whatnot. It's because there's, there's a lot of, there's a lot of ties there. And that is an area in which they've been successful because international support really matters. You know, it's it's it's and and I think, like the death of internationalism is one of the bigger. Successes that like these these thinkers have kind of had, but yeah, I don't know. That's that's that's that's a chunk of what I had to say. You guys want to know more about William S Lind because he's. I certainly want to learn more about William S and William S Lind, cultural conservative, right big on the the traditional Christian values of America. You you want to guess who he considers his ideal leader? JFK? No. The House of Hohenzollern. He's a Prussian monarchist. Wait, no. Haggle guy. Oh yeah, yeah. I mean, I think, you know, everything's clicking into politics. He's certainly into Hagel. And he thinks that the Prussian, the Prussian monarchy was the best government there ever was and was, like, unfairly crushed by the rest of the world and, like, should have won World War One and everything would and like, he's, he's and so he's, he's very much like. A conservative monarchist? Kinda weird kind because like, my God, dude, if you're looking at like, monarchs who are like the the Hohenzollerns had, like, in the modern era, like the first Kaiser Wilhelm was broadly competent, but like it went to **** as soon as you held the 2nd and he blames all of World War One on the ******* zars. Like it's yeah, it's very silly. Like his ideas of history are like very stupid. I have an incredibly silly theory of history. Based on Hegel, which is that like every every in Hegel broadly for the listeners, I no do not hate. This is this is the thing, OK, this, this is this is, this is my crank theory of history based on Hegel, which is that every about 40 years someone attempts to apply Hegel. Someone like takes charge of an incredibly large state and tries to use Hagel to run it. And every single time they don't understand the dialectic, it doesn't work. So this, for example, like if if you take this as a very sort of granular level, right, you have Mao. Mao has no idea what a dialectic is. You you can read Mao's work. He has no clue, like he just doesn't he. But he doesn't. He doesn't get it. He thinks that a dialectic is when one person with a bat hits the other, hits the other side, and then you destroy the other side of the dialectic is resolved, right? Like that. That's not what it is right now. Because of this, the entire Chinese revolution just implodes. Everyone dies. It returns to capitalism is a complete failure, right? You know, and and like a lot of the Nazis are very much into Hagel. They have a, again, incredibly similar failures. The other group, people like Linda, I think is, is part of this is that all of the people who planned the Iraq war were like enormous anglians, right. But they they they they've gotten to haggle through this weird, like they they they've been doing this, they're doing this kind of energy stuff. And so they're energy stuff. Was they red Mao? And, you know, so they're reading Hegel, but then they're also reading Hegel through Mao, and Mao doesn't understand what's going on either. And so when they tried to apply the Hegelian dialectic and they're like, OK, well, the end of the end of the end of history, the end of the Hegelian dialectic is the United States. We were just going to impose this on Iraq and it catastrophic failure. So the world is do not attempt to apply Hagel. You will completely annihilate your entire political movement like every, every everything, everything you love and dream of, everything, like every ideology you've ever had. It will. It will crumble beneath you and yeah, you will watch your cities and you watch your cities and armies burn. That's that's fine because when I start my resistance movement, we're just gonna be post Canty and object oriented on ontologist. Do you guys, you guys are just going through a bunch of names and I'm going to get like 80% of people are just what the. Why the **** am I hearing about these dead people? The thing I actually wanted to to bring up on this is like. How 4th and 5th Gen the ideas of 4th and 5th Gen Get applied onto like more insurrection based like a revolts or groups right you can see like groups like the Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front kind of pick and choose elements of the 4th and 5th generation warfare to kind of to to see how their groups formed or were operated and even you could argue that like 10 Kaczynski was like a a fifth generation warfare because he was completely autonomous and. The actions. OK, let's let's introduce the idea of fifth generation because we just talked about 4th generation warfare, which was Lynn's idea. 5th generation warfare is a concept that was come up. I believe Daniel Abbott is his name and the idea was that like it. It's a new type of warfare that like characterizes a lot of conflicts in the modern era where almost everything is non kinetic, but it is still military action. So military, social engineering, misinformation, sorry, or attacks not just like decentralized but like states. Actually using organized and often fighting non state actors who are using kind of the same are doing the same thing. Yeah, yeah, and this and a lot of this would involve artificial intelligence, fully autonomous systems systems. Not just bot Nets, but like algorithms that can like handle a lot of the quote UN quote fighting. William S Lind hates the idea of 4th generation, 5th generation warfare because he's a narcissist and he doesn't like anyone using other ideas that his own seeking the shepherd head of the dialectic it keeps going so. What I was what what I was thinking is like is like a lot of you can apply 5th generation warfare to like these types of groups who are mostly like they they they do some, they do some 4th Gen tactics in terms of like terrorism, right. Like they they they they try to make political statements through terrorism and have terrorism being influential thing. But their demand like you rarely like fifth generation stuff has not been around a long enough and no one's really been super successful at it. In the past, enough time for us like right to like, recognize that right? Because you can look at a lot of, a lot of like insurrectionary type stuff around like the again, I'm just going to use the Earth Liberation Front as an example of like a group that attempted kind of these types of tactics and they may have succeeded in the physical sense, but they did not succeed in like the cultural sense really. So trying to like look at these types of things and how they relate to like specific, you know, if you're gonna use like the tyski example, same thing, except he's not a group, he's just one person, which is kind of more of 1/5 Gen thinks he is like fully autonomous. Whereas I think, you know stuff like the ELF tried to have that kind of militant group dynamic that is more similar to 4th generation warfare. So it's like this picking and choosing of like trying to trying to do physical action, then trying to do cultural action and it's it's not like the things that have succeeded. Let's take for instance the, the, the defend the Cascadian forest thing who just got just got this, this, this specific action they were working on to protect a specific chunk of the forest. The judge approved their approved their motion because they were, they actually were successful because they did not form this militant thing right now. They were just doing the cultural and it actually succeeded as opposed to just you know, burning down buildings and stuff to try to get your action forward. So just trying to look at like examples of when when like the goal is kind of the same and certain types succeed, certain certain types don't, how that might influence like organizing and how to selectively use like insurrection. But have it not be like a default mode for like always, your group is better if it's insurrectionary. Yeah, and I, I one of the things that does characterize that I think is useful if we're, because again I I have my criticisms of, of the value of any of these like phrases as kind of discrete concepts. But one of the things that I think is useful about the concept of fifth generation warfare that does talk about something that is legitimately new to conflict, that has not really existed before before the Internet, is omnipresence. That that the conflicts are not limited in geographical space or in time and in fact is like a constant factor all around you at all. Times, because of the way the information sphere kind of actually functions it. You know, you can look at kind of like the the the mix of street fights and information warfare, doxing and and whatnot between fascists and anti fascists for the last few years. It's omnipresent, it's always going on, and the battle space is kind of potentially everywhere, even though it's fairly rarely kinetic or physical. And and I do think that that's an area in which it is really worth having a new term and kind of defining a new term, because that's one of the few things I think that has legitimately changed. The internet's made all of this stuff that's been happening for thousands of years faster, but the thing that it's really created that was not present before is this the this omnipresence. So I do think that that's really useful. When we like, I would like to know how conflict is different. Would like to kind of like think about like January 6th within these frameworks. Right of how of how disinformation and information was used relatively successfully to get a lot of people to actually move towards the more, you know, kind of backed by half the state backed, you know, not backed by well, the larger majority and yeah how like. It's a, it's like a synthesis of the 4th generation of fifth generation ideas, which is why, you know, there's a lot of overlap with these terms specifically. But seeing how like one leads to another and it's not, they're not necessarily occlusion exclusionary. Yeah. I guess like the result is whether they win or lose, right? Yeah, that's that's like that's what makes it a war. Is, is the is the is like you decide afterwards based on the results. Yeah. I mean it kind of, yeah. That's certainly like how more modern wars happen, like with Afghanistan. It wasn't so much like a clear, like World War One. There's an Armistice and like you negotiated end of the war and at a certain date it all ends. It was a lot. We have a seer it we haven't done that since we haven't done that for the state. Like, you know, I've never known the states to do that for me. No. Because if you don't do that, you don't have to admit you lost. Yeah exactly right. If you just kind of like leave and **** gets real ****** ** you can just be like, for one thing you can say like if we'd stayed and spent more money on that war, we could have we could have pulled it out. Which is one of my like there's a lot of great criticisms of how the Biden. Administration handled things in Afghanistan last year, 1000 of them. But at the end of the day, it's like it was never kind of be good. Like it was always, it was this horrible war. We were killing way too many people. We weren't achieving anything. And that fact was made really clear by the fact that as soon as we pulled out our guns, everything collapsed. And that was always going to happen. And you can needle around the edges of how we could have, you know, better taken care of people who we'd made promises to or whatever. But at the end of the day, it was always going to be ******. Because it was a thing we never should have done and that's it like this idea that Linda has that like, no, if we fix our doctrine, we have better tactical doctrine, we have better like we have. The one of his big ideas is he, he came up with this concept called Movement Warfare that's been hugely influential in the way the Marine Corps functions. And the idea behind movement warfare is like, you should always have a bias towards action. And Linda is very consciously trying to make this, basically the evolution of of a German tactic called off drugs talk talk, which is like. Individual unit tactics, basically. So it like midway through World War One, the Germans start to realize like all these mass wave human charges aren't working great and we should probably, like figure out a way to get around these defenses so they start training. What are kind of the prototype of special forces? These, like Stormtroopers whose job is to like sneak in and not be seen and jump into the trenches and like, you know, ******* axes and clubs and and automatic handguns and fight in a way that like soldiers had not really fought in a long time. A lot of it was like, melee was this really. And there were a lot of technical things had to get around barbed wire, had to not be seen how to like, deal with machine gun nests. And one of the keys to it was like the German started to retrain their soldiers to where, like, you have to have like, these individual units of five and 10 men have to have, like, total autonomy, and then unit commanders have to have autonomy and they need to be able to like, we'll tell them we need you to be in this, this place at this point in time, but it's up to you to figure out how to do that. Because if you're, if you've got this one guy who's 3 miles. Back giving the commands, everyone just gonna get mowed down by machine gunfire and needs to be more nimble. And that's part of why in World War One and World War Two. Because the rest of the the, the people fighting the Germans like even the US had not caught up to this kind of battle doctrine by the time World War Two was over to the extent that the Germans had. And it's part of why there's such a lopsided casualty ratio in favor of the Germans in that war is they had what is very close to because all modern combat tactics are based on what the Germans started doing at the end of World War One and had really like nailed down to a science. World War Two, and Linda is saying that, like, we need to extend that and like, that's the thing we've gotten too far away from and we need to have, you need to have like this bias towards movement and this the like officers need to be super aggressive and like always pursuing these kind of kinetic options. And again, as the Marine Corps battle record will show, this is very effective when you were getting into gun fights. But when was the last time the Marine Corps was on the side of a winning war? Like, again, it doesn't. We can all needle about how to make our troops better at, like, killing people, but at the end of the day, we're losing wars because we're getting into wars that are not winnable, and that's not something you're going to fix with battle doctrine. And and Lynn doesn't understand that because he's a fascist. This is just like this. This is the real, like weakness of their politics, which is that looks like, yeah. Well, like it's it's they're they're they're trying. It's like they they can't tell the difference between war and, like, they they don't think there's a difference between war and politics, right. Yeah. And that means that they think that there's a military solution to every political problem. And it's like, no, there's not. And like, this is this is how, this is how they keep destroying themselves, right. Is that they they they. You know, like, like, this is what happened to the Neo Cons. I mean, the neocons sort of held on in this kind of rump shell, but it's like neoconservatism and how they're just project. Yeah, but it's like, you know, like they don't they don't have like, like, even the people who used to be their base, like, aren't their base anymore. No, like those those people are all moved. That **** doesn't work. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's it's it's it's like maybe they could have maintained it if they hadn't just, like, literally blown it apart, like trying to conquer a rock. And it's like, they they they all do this. They all eventually are like, well, OK, well. We'll find a military solution to this and it blows up in their face because it turns out that no, you can't actually do this. I mean, I think all this indicates a general progression into the more meta politics idea and and cultures politics ideas that we're trying to solve all these political problems at least, like locally within us, you know, we're trying to trying to do them culturally and choose for them and selectively in other countries, right. Because the more kind of the idea of like, let's just keep entering wars, which we're also doing the same time only for. Very, very like, like very specific regions. But I mean the the trend of like first, you know, like Trump's not necessarily like Trump's not really a neo con. He preferred the cultural jamming like that was that was his preferred method. And I got him relatively far in four years. And there there's an argument that Lind is a big person who that he learned a lot from Linda, even though I don't think he ever read his books. All the people he surrounded him with were fans of Lynn. There's a picture of Trump and Linde together and like a copy of or at least Trump together with a copy of his book. Which is titled the next conservatism, and I'm going to read a quote at this point from the American Conservative, which Lind has written for that describes this book because it it's it's a useful the next conservatism offers a comprehensive agenda of what Lyndon Weyrich, who's his co-author on this call, a culture call, cultural conservatism. While the book aims higher than mere policy, the specifics mentioned are Trumpian reductions in legal and illegal immigration and America first trade policy, and robust investments in domestic infrastructure. Particularly street cars and trains. In a less Trumpian vain, it also promotes home schooling and incorporates some ideas of from the New Urbanism as part of a broader program called Retro culture of its connection with Trump. Lynn says the book runs parallel to what he has been saying, but he doubts the billionaires familiarity with its more philosophical ideas. Now here's the part that is going to be really unsettling. And this, I think, is what Lind may actually be going for, rather than any kind of reform in the military to improve its ability to win foreign wars. Quote in 1994. An article appeared in the Marine Corps Gazette by Lynd and two of the authors of the 1989 piece where he introduced the concept of 4th generation warfare. It ended on a dire note. The point is not merely that America's armed forces will find themselves facing non nation state conflicts and forces overseas. The point is that the same conflicts are coming here. The next real war we fight is likely to be on American soil. So that's what's going on here. Like, and that's the thing where bias towards action and increased killing power. If all you're really trying to do is murder everyone who disagrees with you using the military very quickly, well, that might work for you. People should know about this. He has a ******* fiction book called Victoria, which actually if you go to like TV tropes. The uh, there's a TV. It's not just TV trips anymore, but like, there's a trope page for my book after the Revolution, and it's directly compared to Victoria as like, they're the opposites of each other because Victoria is like a book about a civil war in the US that these, like, weird fascist. Of. Like monarchists win and like it, it's uh, it's pretty ****** **. Like, the problem is that like, like, like, all of these, like, the Northwest is controlled by like environmentalists, like leaders who get, like, eaten by these animals, like wolves that they reintroduced to the to the society. And like, California is so feminist that it's illegal to have sex and make babies and the South fails because it's it's too multicultural. And yeah, like it's it's all so crunchy. So the person who wins. The war is like the Governor of Maine, who's a retro culture practitioner and considers himself a subject of the Kaiser. No, I gotta say, I may be getting a couple of details wrong, but not that part. I know, like it's it's a ******* nuts nuts. So I've only read like little bits of it. Maybe one day I'll get through the whole thing, but. **** that's that's the thing with all with all of these, like, cultural jammers, like they try to put on, like, war aesthetics. But all of them are the nerdiest ******* he'll ever be so stupid. And I like, he's so stupid to be something Wizards. All of these guys are so they're so nerdy. All of them. Yeah. And like Lind, everything about him makes sense when you understand that his primary guiding directive is anger over the fact that there's no longer a Kaiser. He's he's a little. But also like again he was not lying about there's a picture of like Trump with this ******* book. He's not lying that like *******. Everybody who was like piled in that White House knew about Lynn's ideas and have been. He's been hugely influential and not just among like the American right. His books have been found in like al Qaeda hideouts and **** like he's it makes sense though that yeah that that that like all of all of that really tracks is because, yeah like the the barrier between like terrorist action. As a part of 4th generation and in some ways 5th generation warfare and then the type of like culture jamming, those things go hand in hand like that is like that is the goal of it is, is to make it work that way. So that doesn't surprise me that those types of terrorist groups would be reading his books for advice or for like to like figure out how the other side thinks. Alright, well that's probably enough. Talking about William S Lind for today, and and cultural and the 4th generation, we'll talk there. There's a lot to dig into about how these ideas have influenced chunks of the right and how they're currently still being used for, like these omnipresent conflicts that are going on right now. And again, I do think particularly the idea of omnipresence is really useful for understanding modern conflict. I would, I would go so far as to say like crucial. So this is necessary background information to people that have for people to have for like some of the other **** we're going to be continuing to talk in this about in this series as we you know as we talk more about kind of kinetic conflicts or at least building towards kinetic conflicts. But yeah I think this is this is a useful kind of grounding. And now I'm going to send Chris and Garrison off to write an episode explaining who Hagel is and everything he believed. I yeah it's going to be great. You're going to hear. You you will watch me go mad in real time. It's gonna be great. Yeah. The other option is I can just read the Wikipedia page for Hagel with like a really offensive German accent that would that's better than it actually sounds better. I'm going to go to I I promise you one thing, which is that I will wind up either Russian or Australian by the end. I can't stop that drift when I whenever I start doing, you know, I am a good German. Yeah. My name is Mr Hagel. I believe in. Absolutely not happening here. Yeah. And follow it cools on media. We're gonna stop that right now. I'll probably should. Oh, macrone. Great timing. I love omicron. I'm Robert Evans. This is it could happen. Here a podcast about. Greek numbering schemas. Garrison, what do you what do you? How do you? How do you feel about Omicron? This has nothing to do with the topic we're talking about. So this is this is an update a few of probably last week we or earlier this week we discussed the the the Trucker trucker convoy scheduled our episode recorded before the truck convoy for after the truck convoy had already done a bunch of things which was really good. So we recorded to talk about the 50,000 trucks that were that we're going to show up at Ottawa and. Think things did happen? Maybe not that you did. I did not because like I've been listening to some of their claims are like in Alex Jones's parenting there now that it was like 800,000 to 1,000,000 truckers and there's 300,000 truckers in all of Canada like. But it was like, it was like it was a lot of people like not to not to downplay what happened. So where did it give an update on what happened there and kind of discuss maybe any ramifications that stuff like this could have going forward. But to help with that, we have, uh, Dan, who came on last time to help discuss. Hello, thank you for coming on again to talk about the same thing. Telling me we last left off with you saying that you hope I don't come back on again because that would be a good thing and it would mean that the bad things did not happen. So sorry to be here under such circumstances. Yeah. You want to go over the bad? Yeah. So let's briefly do a, like a recap of what this thing was like. Like, why? Why was it happening? And like, what was the idea when we last left Canada? Have a bunch of truckers were angry that they had to. Was it evaluations? Evidence of vaccination? This spiraled into, as I'm understanding it, at some point them rejecting all public health measures. Yes, actually. The the exact demands are for the federal and provincial governments to, quote, terminate the vaccine passports and all other obligatory obligatory vaccine contact tracing programs to terminate COVID vaccine mandates, and quote respect the rights of those who wish to remain unvaccinated. And here's where it gets weird. Price of rhetoric attacking Canadians who disagree with government mandates? Kind of hard to say when that one's fulfilled and finally cease to limit debate through coercive measures with the goal of censoring those who have varying or incorrect opinions. That's what the convoy is for. I mean, do you all know what a government is? Evidently. I was at some debates in 2020 with the state that went a lot uglier than it looks like this one went. Oh yeah, yeah. We, we, we we could talk about that, this, this. The standoff has been, well, there's been just that. It's been a standoff in that regard. So it seems like they've kind of hooligan around a bunch of towns and threatened a homeless shelter if they didn't give them food and they left trash everywhere and set up a checkpoint on the border or just a blockade on the border, I think is probably more accurate. There's been blockades going on and off the border. The most noteworthy is, uh, you know, Berta and Cutright now, but I might be pronouncing that wrong. And what was the police? It was something along the lines of we don't think there's like a policing solution to this problem. Oh yeah, so you're totally up to date that that happened today. Yeah, so a little after 2:30 PM today. 2:30 PM today, the Ottawa Police chief, Peter slowly, said in a press conference that quote there may not be a policing solution to this demonstration. Is it really that easy? Incidentally, it's that easy if you wait till kind of like the media has had a few days and most of the coverage is just like. Breaking Bad things still happening. So it's it's not great. So what, what was the lead up on the set? Right, because they were, they were all, all the trucks and caravans and stuff were supposed to arrive on Saturday. What was the lead up on Saturday? Like and like, what, what, what happened on like the actual, like first day? Yeah. So. Saturday was technically the first day, actually Friday throughout the day, a lot of people started arriving, so the occupations been we're recording now Wednesday. It started on Friday, and the main, like the largest contingent of the convoy, was staying overnight Friday night in a nearby town called ARM Fire West of Ottawa, and they moved in from Arnprior to Ottawa on Saturday morning. At the same time, people converged from other parts of Canada. Two auto is east is Quebec and two Quebec's east at the maritime provinces. And 3000 people at least came from Quebec and met so with the convoy 2 on Saturday kind of coming in from different parts of the day between Friday night and Saturday afternoon and Saturday was kind of the big day, the big party. The main point of contention, and the main thing that happened, was some major streets are gridlocked by vehicles moving into the city, into the very crowded core of Ottawa, my hometown, and staying stationary on busy roads. Both commercial and residential roads are part of this. Driveways for both businesses and residences were blocked off fire, roads were blocked off, ambulance routes are blocked off. Local businesses that stayed open had to close throughout the day Saturday, largely, some managed to. Not. And many who just stayed closed already because they knew what was going to happen and this happened. Closures that happened on Saturday are mostly still going on today as I'm speaking to you Wednesday night. Closures followed patterns of harassment and some alleged assaults, which Robert mentioned before also happened at a homeless shelter. In downtown Ottawa and pretty much everyone I've spoken to, I've I've been in Ottawa visiting, it's my hometown, and pretty much everyone I've spoken to who lives in the downtown core is that a slew of stories since Saturday of either harassment at work or just harassment walking through the streets. And the worst part of it all is that right now there's not a clear ending insight. What is it like on the ground there in terms of, I know there's like kind of like a blockade around the border, but they're like, what else is like around Ottawa? What's like? What, like, what? What is? What's it like to walk around in these places and like, how big is the area that these people are staying at? Like, where are they staying? Are they all sleeping in their trucks, staying at hotels? What's like, what's like the. It's an excellent question. There's a there's a mix of hotels were booked up the week leading up to the weekend. As as the new cycle kind of exploded, more and more people called into hotels in Ottawa. A lot of people actually brought tractors. People are also sleeping in their trucks. Of course, if people have like family and stuff staying in Ottawa, sometimes they're staying with them. Umm. It's a mix of everything, actually. I I know a guy who even his car was like blocked off in the parking lot he has to park in because it's downtown. He doesn't have street parking or or driveway parking like it's in a public lot. And he couldn't get his car out for over a full day because an RV camper set up near him and just blocked him off. So it's a mix of everything starting on Saturday. There's like a lot of partying, a lot of music, a lot of kids. It's gotten a little bit more chaotic. And less condensed since then. And also the area is hard to gauge because streets are actually constantly as vehicles move out. For one reason or another, streets are kind of being retaken back organically by the city, but then sometimes throughout the day getting retaken again back by the conflict. So the occupation's been a little fluid on some of the outside streets. Wellington St, which is the street outside of parliament in Ottawa, has been consistently occupied to my knowledge. Blocking off kind of not. Actually blocking off, but you have to walk past them as a pedestrian to get onto Parliament Hill. So that's where the kind of the core is, the action of the action is, and everything else spreads out from that. And near hotels there's a little more action because that's generally where people are staying. How has Members of Parliament and like local politicians been reacting since Saturday? I, I know there was, there was some videos of like, I think one of the MP's from Alberta was giving an interview that gained some traction online. But yeah, just kind of curious like how the like different government officials are talking about this. I'm actually so glad you asked that because as of today the divide in Members of Parliament has actually led to some pretty incredible. Political ramifications. So last time we spoke, I think Erin O'Toole had just earlier in the day, uh endorsed the conveyance, that he'd be coming down everyone. O'Toole, for those unaware, is the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada. Look real O'Toole. Wow. Whoa, whoa, mind blown. No, no one could have seen that joke coming. Every every Canadian listener, just like collectively rolled their eyes. Yeah, so Erin O'Toole and just uh. Endorsed the convoy. Had been getting some tough questions about it following. Everything we just talked about and more Arano tool walked that back and said, you know, he didn't approve of of the way that the company was acting in Ottawa. This led to a swift referendum on his leadership in earlier today Iran O'Toole was voted out as the Conservative Party leader in Canada. And that does have pretty big ramifications. I know I talked about Erin O'Toole a decent amount in my previous Canada episodes for kidnapping here. So yeah, that'll be really interesting to see. Who what's do we have any idea of when the new person's going to try to get voted it like when when do you think that process is going to happen to fill that spot? I'm actually not sure. I haven't looked up when it's going to happen. It feels like there's been months before where there's an leaders of the. Conservative Party the main concern right now for those outside of conservative politics is because Erin O'Toole is considered relatively moderate. I think you talked about in the fascism Canada episode how Erin O'Toole kicked out there and Sloan from the party for being pretty coy on donations from neo-Nazi Paul Front on his campaign. Overall, like, that's a pretty great thing that Erin O'Toole kicked him out of the caucus like, regardless of other elements of, yeah, that leadership there's worrying that that kind of. There will be continued forward, especially because Sloan was also in the leadership race and Sloan has only gotten further right since then. Yeah, it is this despite Erno tools not great aspects, which there are lots of. He did. He did. He did take it. He did kind of hold back some of the more problematic conservative like elements, whether that be, you know, people from, you know, from his own party, like like Derek. And then also keeping kind of the People's Party stuff at Bay. Yeah, and that will be an interesting kind of power struggle now that. Will be something to observe. I think the thing that concerns me most about all of this is the implication of the implications for this is a tactic. We saw a version of this that was more limited in scope and time in Portland in 2020 when this huge Trump caravan rolled through downtown, blocked off big chunks of downtown, and like just maced and shot people with paintball guns at random. And it was kind of like, I think everyone there was surprised at how many folks they got for it. This is a much more evolved. Version of the same tactic, and it's kind of stuff we talked about in the season. One of it could happen here. This idea of like people coming from these conservative majority areas in a place where the vast majority of people are liberal but centralized in the cities. And blocking those cities off or otherwise disrupting their ability to transit, potentially their ability to get things shipped in like food, like their ability to use free movement. And we've seen pieces of this again in a bunch of places. In in Oregon during the wildfires you had these rural communities setting up checkpoints and stuff, looking for people from the cities that they could bill as Antifa. And it's this it's this world worrying trend for a couple of reasons. Number one when you get. Ten, 20,000 people to do something like this. Even if the city has hundreds of thousands of people, that's effectively too large a group to police, and the police don't want to police it anyway, so there's not even really an attempt to stop them. And it's a way in which the vast majority of Canada, at least based on the polling I'm aware of, is is not in support of the causes these guys are backing. Was it like 76% of the country supports some level of like vaccine mandates, if I'm remembering correctly? Last one I read. So this is not a popular movement. It's not even super popular among the truckers like the actual no the most truckers in Canada either. It doesn't matter how many people in the cities you can get, if you can get fifty 60,000 people to do something like this, the police won't will not take action and you can negatively impact the lives of a huge number of millions of people before it gets radical right. That's when these guys are not coming in with guns with the express plan to eliminate people or trying to specifically block up food. They're just kind of ******* around now. But it's this kind of, it's this thing we've talked about where you have this is a thing in Canada and the United States. You had liberals kind of outsourcing the protection of society to this group of increasingly heavily armed and radicalized people who are now, in a lot of cases, fascists. And that means that when there's a problem with a large chunk of people who hate everything you stand for, the people that you have completely outsourced protection to are all in favor of ******* with you because they hate you. And it's it's a problem in Oregon. It's going to be a problem in ******* New York City or whatever. At some point it's a problem in. Ottawa? I don't know. Am I? Am I off base here am I am I am you're not off base at all and like there isn't there isn't anything to to really elaborate on past what you said the last time we spoke. I think Robert you said there's not a whole lot was what you said that could be really really be done with the vehicle off occupation tactic and this could be unless a lot of people are willing to meet them with an equal force. Which unfortunately Ottawa didn't have, like it's the Ottawa. Ottawa is a relatively large city in Canada. It's there's over 1,000,000 people that live here. It's also by landmass, I think the largest city in Canada, like east to West, it's it's very spread out, so it's a low population density. So even the affected area downtown is actually like pretty small in relation to the city itself, which is pretty unfortunate and like it's not a particularly packed downtown for a large city downtown. Curious kind of on the violence aspect had has like, I know there's been like. Of increasing like death threats to Members of Parliament, like specifically liberal members of Parliament, specifically liberal Members of Parliament who are women who are maybe not white. Though I would have curious to see if if you have anymore kind of information on that side of things and then how how violence has popped up in a few places throughout the past, like a week basically. Yeah, there's been a lot. So I mean even if you going by what's reported like right now, there is by most estimates under 1000, maybe at most a few thousand, very far spread out people as part of the convoy. As of yesterday there's 13 active police investigations, the police of the city, the city of Ottawa said in the in a presser. We obviously know when there's like 13 active investigations and anything this big, there's way more that's not being reported, not being investigated. Like they took, you know, like these things. Are going to 13 is going to be resentful something bad. So some of the things that happened Robert mentioned before the alleged assaults on a a houseless person inside of shepherds of Good Hope, in which a security guard was also called a racial slur. There was a house that displayed displayed a rainbow flag outside of it that had harassment and poop thrown at it. They've been we need to get 100,000 people together to throw their own poop back at these people. It's the only way they'll learn. Yeah, fighting fire with fire is that that expression I'm sure, just emerged from just tossing poop at each other's strategy. This is meant for this. There have been suggestions all over social media channels on like, here's how you can poop in snow banks without getting caught. Businesses have been harassed, there's been violence. So like what? I think maybe some context that doesn't always known in Ottawa on Saturday and until recently, dining in and restaurants wasn't allowed. We were actually in a relatively strict lockdown following around with Conway. And a lot of people even coming, like, didn't know that. Like, I spoke to people on Saturday who were like, hey, do you know, like when the restaurants around here open so we can like, sit down for a meal. And I was like, there's no sitting down on auto. So what people are doing, they're going inside cafes like Tim horton's and stuff, and they were just refusing to leave and eating their food there anyways. And if there was no seats, they were just like eating in line. It was also minus 28 degrees in Ottawa on Saturday and very, very cold on Sunday. There was an extreme cold weather warning. So especially when people brought their kids, there wasn't any other options other than like. Form the malls and swarm restaurants, and even then the mall. The main mall downtown radio center, was closed partway throughout the day because it was not a safe place. So I already talked before about routes getting blocked. Also not physical violence, but honking has been keeping people awake. There's been endless honking if you watch video footage from it, and even in the background. Right now I'm coming from Ottawa like I can hear honking in my background. Some people allegedly parked and then urinated on the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Which is yeah, it's. I mean, a lot of this isn't political is even the wrong way to describe a lot of the what's fun about this for these people is that they suck. Absolutely. It's just ******* hooliganism. And that's yeah, it's it's ******* hooliganism. There's going to be a lot more stories coming out, for sure, as things progress up, stories of harassment, like I've talked to people who have gotten catcalled in the night, people getting violent altercations, street fights I'm sure are going to break out. It's kind of at a very tense point right now in Ottawa. We're at that point, we're like, OK, we're seeing some signs, like poops getting thrown at the houses. What's going to happen next? Because the police are saying they don't have a plan and the truckers are saying they're not leaving? What's it like outside of Ottawa, across, across all the other places where there's like similar activity happening? They're all looking to us and being concerned. From what I'm talking to, anti fascists and Alberta are are particularly concerned right now. Uh with the coup protest there's ongoing to. We keep seeing popping up like US Canada border. Activities in the same there's a few attempted convoys by Americans, and even before in Europe there was a few attempts. Some got turned away, some Americans got turned away at the Canadian borders. They weren't vaccinated. Yeah, which is, you know, like, it's like you think because that's the reason they're saying they're protesting. They would have remembered that and thought maybe that's going to like come into play. But I don't know, because there is a certain point where if you get enough people going, it would be interesting to see people really do just try to like drive through the border. Yeah. I mean, there's been people like, you look at social media channels, a lot of them saying, like, the borders are blocked right now with thousands of truckers supporting our cause. So if you saw that and you believed it, and then you went to the board and you turned away from any vaccine and you thought, well, I thought I had, you know, 900 people with the same causes me and we were ready to use force. Which begs the question, well, what happens when you do exactly? I want to find out. Yeah, that's yeah. That's The thing is like if if if they do, if they did have what they say they had, would they just start doing those things and not even think about it and not even think about, like, the politics of it, they're just doing it to do it. Yeah, I I should also mention too, we talked last time about uh. It played army slash Diagon member comments that were broadcast on the news about doing another quote January 6th and it came out in the news today was first reported by Frank Magazine and I think by the Canadian 98 network that he was arrested on firearms charges no Scotia before coming here. Worth noting he was reporting live on Infowars on the Alex Jones Stones on Saturday before this came out and Derek's good coverage. Yeah, Derek Sloan and Ezra Levant. We're also on the same program, so I mentioned Infowars before. That's that's great. That's what's going on there. Can you see any, like, beyond the Conservative leadership, what other kind of political implications are people thinking about? In Canada, it's really tense, seeing what's gonna come for other cities. Also, auto is expecting a second wave. Some other people in other places that kind of didn't think the first one was going to be huge success or saying, well, now that it's an occupation, we're coming and police are even saying there's a second wave. It's a very tense place right now. We don't really know what to do. Community places are taking direct. Community members are talking about taking direct action because it's been so long. This isn't something that the city of Ottawa is particularly used to, unfortunately, in my lifetime, and so the ramifications of the future are pretty jarring. But what's alarming is how successful this occupation was with a relatively small number. I think the highest estimate it was 18,000 people into a city of over a million, which isn't really that many when you think about it, but the strategy was very, very effective. You think about how many fighters it took for dosh to take control of Mosul. It it if people, if there's not resistance, like there's only really a few areas of a city that you need to occupy in order to have a great deal of control over what can be done. Yeah, that's the tough part is they have a lot of control over that small area and residents lives they don't have a lot of control over. Parliament which. Yes. What they're protesting for. Yeah. I'm also interested to see, has the Canadian military said anything about these protests and the situation? So the Ottawa police chief in his press today was asked a lot about that and he's still shying away. He's still saying he doesn't think military is the only option. Which if you're an activist on the other side of things, I'm worried about police escalation hurting you in the future. That might be a good thing to hear. Yeah. Yeah. And I see you have ****** news. I'm not convinced that the military would fix the problem. I'm not either. And also Ottawa had other police forces coming to. They said they spending $800,000 a day initially to just on cost of policing. Yeah, yeah. They also said they've only like bylaws only had 150 tickets since this whole thing started in the occupied zone. So it's it's unclear what a lot of them did other than, you know, keep up appearances. Like I was walking around. I saw your. Region police officers walking around with their patches. That's hundreds of kilometers away from Ottawa, so the police presence, especially on the weekend, was not low. We we had plenty. They either didn't know what to do, thought it would die later, or a mixture of all the above. And there's been talk to mixtures of some police officers have not been happy with it, but there hasn't been really anything in the news yet because no one's come forward a lot of like tweets of like. From reporters saying I have an anonymous source in the auto police that says they wish more actions were taken. Something otherwise it's not really united right now and. Yeah, it's scary is is there any counter protests being planned for Ottawa? If I knew, I'd say so, because by the time this airs, it would have happened. So I think it'd be safe to talk about. But fortunately, I'm not really in sure. I'm not actually sure, but I might not be the best person to ask. OK, yeah, we're keeping an eye out. Well, the good news is that. All men die, and so long as men die, Liberty will never perish, right? That's good. It's an upside that is an upside that's an up. That's the positive shot. All right, well. That's going to do it for us. We'll keep an eye on this and what what results from it, because it's all pretty concerning and worth having. Having an eye and I'm particularly curious as to just like what kind of direct community responses to this develop because I think that's going to wind up being the only long term solution. You know, it's kind of what people saw in Portland that you there's a, there's a degree to which, like the only thing that really works as a response is is outnumbering them. Yeah. On that note, it might be maybe not the smoothest transition, but there are actually some auto and mutual aid funds and then advocacy, yes. They are doing some some cool stuff and there's there's up with that. There's too many to list for everyone, but others have compiled lists and I'm gonna point to you there. So Rose Ottawa, which stands for Rainbow Ottawa Student experience, serves 2LGBTQ IA plus post secondary students on unseated Algonquin Anishinabe territory. No, they have closed off the nations for themselves following a wonderful spike recently. They have a list of black lead and black empowering organizations on their website with donation links. You can reach that at roseottawa.org/donations. There's a cool little Instagram account called trans is beautiful OTO T stands for Ottawa, and that's all one word that's been plugging small fundraisers for queer folk affected by the convoy, including housing support on their Instagram. Again, that's trans is beautiful OTT on Instagram. Something we didn't get to talk about, which is RAM Ranch ramranch.caran-ranch.ca website was set up in the name of trolling the convoy Zello chats and has been doing a fantastic job about it. There's a whole army of trolls in the truckers, Ella chats and. It's been really entertaining to tune into. They've compiled a list of charities on their website and you can check that out at ram-ranch.ca and clicking on the ranchers donation zone. And yeah. Where can where can people find you on the internets? People can find me on the Internet, some super active on Twitter at at spineless Elk. Where is spineless, the letter L. Fantastic. Well, hopefully. Hopefully this gets all resolved and I don't need to, uh, fly up to Canada to go to a protest. And if yeah, if if we do, that'll be fun. I've been wanting to go to Canada for a minute. Yeah, can we can we can take drugs at Tim horton's? That that would be fun. Yeah. Ohh God. You know, I haven't vomited in a Tim Horton's bathroom in a long time. Our, our local McDonald's that got famous on the Internet for a fist fight that someone pulled a raccoon out of their backpack during, had to actually stop being 24 hours. Left of the mayor pleaded with them because it was using up too many police resources. That is fascism. That is the best kind of place. They if they close that now, 911 calls in a year, that's so dope. Oh God, yeah. I wanna I want to set up somewhere on the border in the East Coast, a Tim horton's directly across the street from a Waffle House and just let them fight. Well, we we do. We we do. Miss that here. That's something you'll have to bring that you have to bring that over, bring the Waffle House vibes over. All you need to do is watch a man get stabbed and then, spiritually, you're at a Waffle House. And that and that and that ties back to the future of the convoy you're right well. That's that does the first today, everybody. We will see you later. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It could happen here as a production of cool zone media or more podcasts from cool Zone media. Visit our website coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts you can find sources for. It could happen here, updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com/sources. Thanks for listening.