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It's autumn time to get cozy and nothing is cozier than one of Casper's award-winning mattresses. Of course, they've got their most popular mattress. The original hybrid, it's engineered for cool, comfortable sleep. You can get a more restful and more soothing night sleep if it's a little warm in your August with the wave hybrid mattress, which provides more support than foam alone. Or upgrade to the wave hybrid snow mattress with snow technology to give you a full night of cooler sleep if you need to try it to believe it, Casper offers free contactless delivery and a risk. Free Hundred night trial. Discover the Casper difference today at casper.com and use code here 100 for $100 off select mattresses that's code HERE 100. Thatcasper.com for $100 off sisters of the Underground is a podcast about fearless Dominican women who stood up against the brutal dictator Kapal Trujillo. He needs to be stopped. We've been silent and complacent for far too long. I am Daniel Ramirez, and as a Dominicana myself, I am proud to be narrating this true story that is often left out of the history books through your has blood on his hands. Listen to sisters of the underground wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everybody, 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. Welcome to. It can happen here, a podcaster that for the first time. Ever is being recorded on an Earth that I no longer have to share with that fascist rap bass or Shinzo Abe and with with me. With me to celebrate this occasion is Garrison Davis. Hi. Hello. And James have have we actually have we like introduced you introduced you yet? I didn't think so. No, I just pop up talking about 3D printed guns and people who hate butterflies. Yeah, yeah. This is this is truly a dark day for democracy. I'm saddened by the horrible loss of a great leader, a hero to feminism and women, and I guess a hero to those who defend war crimes. So I guess before, before, before we. We get into one of the funniest things that has happened in maybe 20 years. James, do you want to, like, talk about who you are? Because you are now one of us and I'm really excited about it. Yeah, I'm gonna yeah. I'm now a podcaster, so who I am, I am a, I'm a journalist I guess, and a historian, and I wrote a book about the first week of the Spanish Civil War and my PhD is in the history of international Anti Fascism, Building international anti fascist alliances through physical culture, which is very nerdy. Yeah, I love that stuff. What else? I'm British. That had not been made abundantly clear by my accent. And I live in Southern California, which means this is a now, this episode is is a majority Commonwealth episode. That's really exciting. We made it. Yeah, we'll be doing the national anthem in a minute here and we'll all just stand up. So, of ex Prime Minister, kind of he's not around anymore, is he? Note he is dead as **** so. We should, I guess we should explain who Shinzo Abe is. Yeah, OK, if you want a really, really long account of what the Japanese Liberal Democratic Party is because they. Are some of the worst people I've ever existed go listen, they're liberal and democratic. Yeah, how does how can this be so? The, the, the, the the very short version of this is that the Liberal Democratic Party is a party that was founded by Nobusuke Kishi, who was one of history's worst war criminals. I'd like personally responsible for enslaving hundreds of thousands of people in China. He's the guy who. Basically, he's the guy who was in charge of the economy of the fascist war machine. Like like in in Japan. World War Two. He was the guy who? I ran like the the the the sort of fascist puppet state called Manchukuo that was run by Japan after they conquered it. Real war criminal. Also, just like personally raped a like extremely large number of people. I think that, like, I was almost never discussed when people talk about him. Almost like like a shockingly high number of sex crimes. It's wild. Yeah, and he's also he's involved with. By the Japanese military sex slave program, which you will hear referred to as comfort women and I **** I were ******* refused to call the comfort women because that is a ******* horrifying euphemism for again, a program of military sex slavery. He also was one of the people who signed off on Unit 731, which was Japan's chemical weapons testing unit, where they ******* like purposely infested, infected and tested chemical weapons on prisoners. Yeah, he's one of the worst people ever. And then he got a bunch of CIA backing and some backing from the yakuza because the CIA is working with the Yakuza in early. 1950 Japan and she's able basically to force all of the other conservative like people to join his party and the the sort of the merger of the of the Liberal Party Liberal Party and the Democratic Party is now Liberal Democratic Party. This is Keisha's party. He founded it. He dragged everyone else into it. He does an immense amount of corruption. He tries to bring fascism back. He narrowly fails. Shinzo Abe is his grandson. The LDP Liberal Democratic Party has yeah it it sucks. It's like like. And their families. The way that I've been thinking about, like, how do you explain this to people who don't, who don't have like a background in like Japanese, like war crimes stuff is like, imagine if like one of Hitler's generals had like survived World War Two and then the CIA made him, made him the ******* Prime Minister of Germany. And then and also he got more fascist because people were saying mean things about his grandpa. He's like, oh, I don't like that they're calling him bad names. I'm going to get more fascist now. So, like, I'll be, I'll be himself. He he he he's he's been carrying out a lot of the same things that that she was trying to do. Kishi was trying to sort of restore the the sort of full fascist power of the police. Abe has been doing a whole bunch of shifts of centralizing power in the executive and expanding the police's power to just arrest whatever the **** they want. Alright, so one of your things about Japan is that like legally in their constitution they can't go to war. And like both Kishi and Abe like this is like their big ******* things that they want. They want to fully rearmed Japan, they want Japan to be able to go to war because they want to do the ******* empire again and you know, so this has led, yeah always been doing fat he also. The the thing he's probably most famous for in terms of like, the reasons people think he's bad because he is, he's like, just actually a monster is. He's just like. A like unfathomable degree of war crimes denial, like he he pulled. So Japan in in the 90s had admitted that they ******* kidnapped and enslaved, like an enormous number of people from of people from Korea, people from China. And I think they also did in the Philippines and Indonesia too, although there's less sort of coverage of that. And like turn them into military sex slaves did things to them that are like. I ******* unspeakable. And so the Japanese government, the 90s, had admitted they did this and apologized for it, and Abe was like, no, **** that. That's that's wrong. He's also a part of this group called Nippon Kagai, which is like a fascist group. And OK, so this is, this is, this is according to a US congressional report, what they believe, quote, Japan should be applauded for liberating Bush of East Asia from Western colonial powers, that the 19461948 Tokyo War crimes tribunals were illegitimate and that the killings by Japanese troops through the 1937 Nanjing. Massacre were exaggerated or fabricated. Oh boy. They also openly, yeah, yeah, yeah. They they also, they're denialist, they're, they're their sex slave denialists. They openly call for the restoration of the monarchy and the institution of Shinto as a state religion. I'll be like, I'll be like, has continually said that I, I the, the sex slaves, like did it were like, did were there voluntarily. Here's another thing. But, but, but but Hillary Clinton just tweeted that Prime Minister Abe was a champion of democracy and a firm believer that no economy, society or country can achieve its full potential if you leave women behind it. Why? You know, to be fair, to be fair, to be fair, both Abe and nobody Shikishi did, in fact. Believe in using women to fuel the economy, just not in that way. Yeah he also there's another thing that so probably these most like famous most controversial thing was so there's this shrine called the Yasukuni Shrine, which is it's the shrine that's dedicated to soldiers who like died serving the Japanese emperor. And in in this. So there there's this thing called the Book of Souls that has like lists of names, right, of just like other people who died and 1068 of the people who were of the people in that book are people who were, who were convicted of war crimes. And there are also 14 Class A war criminals who either died or were executed, who are considered martyrs there and Abed ******* like, visited there and like, parade and ****. And this ****** *** everyone. And this is like, there are lots of people who have gotten mad at me already for celebrating Arby's death. And I my, my, my, my official line on this is if Abe didn't want me to celebrate his ******* death, maybe he shouldn't have celebrated the lives of the people who killed my ******* family. So **** them. Yeah, so he's not, not, not a great dude. He's real packed and problematic dude. Like everything we should mention too, before we go into sort of like the details of the shooting is that there is an election actually, but, but but by the time this episode drops, I think the election will have happened. Where? There is a real chance that the Liberal Democratic Party is going to sort of like just ******* sweep it, because Liberal Democratic Party immediately starts blaming the left for this. There's a whole bunch of, I mean, just absolutely horrifying stuff where they're blaming Korean people who live in live in Japan, which if you know anything about Japanese history when that stuff starts happening, like. In in in 1923 after the Kanto earthquake, a bunch of people just started blaming Koreans for the whole thing and they ******* literally exterminated almost the entire Korean population in several major Japanese cities. And so this stuff is very scary. It's possible that this is going to set off a like an incredible right wing literature, Japanese politics, and. There's a chance that this, this, this could be the actual thing that like full on triggers Japan like we are being and you know going back into sort of just being a pure fascist empire. So this is not, yeah, that that part is really bad. The motivation for the assassination is still, at least at time of recording, still slightly unclear, very unclear according according to some politicians and news media. We do know the suspect is Hideo Kajima so that you could you could infer. Velvet face stud. So yeah, there's there's like, French politicians at a Greek news channel who are using pictures of video game developer Hideo Kojima and passing them off as the shooting suspect. Yeah, which is really funny. Pictures of kashiba like inside, like a a Russian like communist hat ******* thing. Pictures of him wearing a Joker shirt and standing in front of a chick cavara picture. Very funny, and they're using this as proof that it's via left wing terrorist and it's actually a video game developer. It's. Yeah. So in terms of, in terms of like I guess what we know about. The actual shooter we don't know that much is a 42 year old guy who was a former veteran of the of the the Japanese self-defense Force. He was. He was a Navy guy, which I guess partially explains why he can shoot a gun. But yeah, the details are really murky. What we've got at time of recording is the Japanese police saying that it wasn't because of a political thing and that it was because of a group, that he was that. Abby was a member of who the **** knows what that means? That can mean any number of things. I I'm not gonna speculate life on here because I I don't know. I yeah. But also it was extremely funny and we should, we should talk about the weapon that was. Yeah. This is why, this is one of the reasons why it's extremely funny and we should probably going to hand this over to James because James is a bit, a bit more of an expert in this type of. DIY weaponry. So what? What the **** is going on with this homemade gun? Yeah, this ****. Yeah, this **** is ******* this ****. This is crazy. Yeah, yeah, it's extremely funny. It's extremely funny that all these people with 50,000 followers on Twitter who quote UN quote do osin like immediately label this a 3D printed gun, which it's not. It does not look. This gun is being held together with duct tape like that. That is that. That is the kind of weapon that we are dealing with you. This is a homemade gun, like held together with ******* duct tape. It is extremely. It is like he he got blown up by an electric blunderbus. It is. Yeah, it's like there could very well be 3D printed parts in like, around it. But yeah, it is. But it's not. It's not looking. It's it's it's not like, it's not like an FGC 9 or anything. It's it's a weird, like electronic pipe duct taped. Together. Shotgun. Yeah, it's. I think perhaps if people don't understand, we should like, break down how firearms work broadly and then how this one works specifically. Right? So, like, there's no reason why you should be familiar with this, but like you need something to explode, something to make it explode, and something to go out the end and and a way to make sure it only goes in One Direction, right? So what this character has done is seemingly it's yeah, it's like a blunderbuss or a musket in that it seems to be like muzzle loaded from the front. And I'm looking at it now and it really is just covered in duct tape. Tweeted a picture of it. It's a gay. Yeah. This **** is is very old fashioned. He seems to have made his own powder too, like it was very, very smoky, which you can do. I'm going to tell you how to do it, but it's the thing that that is possible. And so essentially from what I'm seeing here, it looks like it's like a piezo electric ignition, which then ignites this homemade powder that he had and then he's put something in a shotgun means it doesn't have rifling right? So it doesn't impart spin on the projectile. So he's basically got two pipes, a piezoelectric igniter, some homemade powder, and then he could have put nails in there, he could have put a cast, lead ball, anything, bolts. And this wasn't the only homemade weapon he had. He's raided his house. He had a whole bunch of stuff. Guys that look at it looks out of it like it looks like it's out of like fallout or something. It is like there was one like blunderbuss that had nine different barrels all duct taped together. It's like exposed wiring, exposed circuit boards, like it's it's like it's extremely janky. Yeah, it's like I'm not entirely sure that the the 9 barrel one, the central barrel isn't touched by the by the structural duct tape. And I'm not sure that it wouldn't have moved in One Direction or the other when he fired it. Well, yeah, I think that's a that's like a yoga. I can't see what he's put something on the. He's made a buttstock with that one, so like he can his shoulder it, I guess. And I don't know if that's like a piece of tyre or what, but yeah, yeah, this is not a precision weapon. Wooden boards, there's like some type of like reflect. It looks almost like a smartphones attached to some of the wiring or like there's like there's like reflective screen that looks like it's like a like an electronic control box, which could just be like an old smartphone. Something, yeah. I wondered if he could, because that's what you use for, for an improvised explosive device, right? It's a it's a cell phone to actuate it. So it could be that maybe he had a plan to just put it near where are they was going to be and then call it. And then have it coauthor. That would be well, I mean, no, this this is a must have. This is a much better assassinate. It has the stock, so I'm guessing. I'm guessing he would be trying to hold it because otherwise there's no reason to put the **** stock there. True, yeah, but who knows like this guys operating on a different level. We have no way to know what he was thinking, at least, at least at least not at the moment. What he was thinking was I want to kill Shinzo Abe with my pipes and planks. He's exactly what whatever you think of him. This man did successfully kill Shinzo Abe with a gun held together by duct tape. It's it's pretty impressive like I I think the other thing about this is kind of impressive a he so so he there were there were two barrels on it that each fired and he he managed to hit him from like a pretty good distance away like we don't have there's there's no video that directly well at least not that's out yet. They're like directly shows the shooter. We have a lot of video because it is giving a speech, right. And so we have a bunch of video of like. Filming Abe and it's and because of where it is coming from off screen like that was a pretty good distance and as best I can tell he only hit Abe. I don't I don't think I haven't seen any reports of anyone else getting hit. So I remarkably impressive. That is actually. That is actually kind of slightly surprising. Yeah, there was, there was no one else hit. It's like he just got the guy he was acting to that that is that is genuinely pretty rare in assassination. Like basically like a homemade blunder. Bust Cannon is like surprisingly. I think we controlled it accurate, yeah. I've just found a picture of it with the cyberpunk 272077 logo underneath you, which is pretty great. Yeah, this does rule. Yeah he he did manage to cause it. Could have just put like a large massive lead ball in it, I guess and yeah whatever because he didn't think. I don't think he was one thing. So one of the the one thing I could say about the the that we asked me know about the ammo is that like they're there were like a bunch of like they're they're one of the bunch of the reports about the injuries that he suffered. We're talking about like he got hit in the back but there are also holes in his neck. So I. My my guess is there was from there was a lot of there's a lot of blood from a lot of different places. Yeah. My guess is it wasn't one thing then, but I don't know it the everything is kind of interesting about this is like the extent to which. Well, OK, so like he was like Abe was like very clearly dead, like people people had like reported him at the scene as having no vitals and they were like, yeah, his heart stopped and it and they they helicoptered him to like what, Tokyo. Tokyo. But the Japanese government did a very good job of making sure the press had like no information. And so there was just like it was like many, many, many hours where they were like pretending that he wasn't dead and like wouldn't confirm that he was dead. And he's like this this man is clearly dead as ****. Like he he has gotten blown up by a blunderbus like in the back is next dawn his like he's not gonna like his neck, his next been shot, his heart has stopped and they just sort of like. Keep it there for for a pretty impressively long time. And that's the thing we we know very little about what happened and why the the press has been keeping the government keeping a very tight lid on information about the shooting so far. Yeah, I guess we want to pivot into the gun control side of this. Sure. I guess. OK, so the, the, the. I mean, like there was a mayor shot a few years ago. A yak is a guy shot. The mayor of Nagasaki. So like and like there's there's been a lot of people like journalists, people who are like supposedly Japan experts who are like, oh, this is really rare in Japanese culture is like, no, it's not. People get assassinated like, like the Japan has a very low rate of gun violence, but of that gun violence, the the, the the number of politicians get assassinated is like unbelievably high. And you know, I mean like there there have been there have been a lot of, I mean like apes, like Grandfather. It was like a Kishi like got stabbed right after he left office, like and he only didn't die because the the the guy who stabbed him claimed that he wasn't trying to kill him, he was just stabbing him. Which is one of the weirdest things I've ever heard, which I don't know. I I I suspect some Jack is a ******** was going on there. But yeah, like I Japan has assassinations it there's there's this weird thing where people think Japan is this place that's like. The no violence happens like, it's a completely orderly society. It's like all this, all this, like, weird stuff they made about famously pacifist in Japan. Yeah, it's like this. This is a country like this. This is a country where people like, like, even in like the 70s, like through the 80s, people would charge like army convoys with sticks and like fight them like, this is a country that like, like people. They, they, they, they they have a sort of *** **** switch that just like, yeah, they have their fair share of like cults that do acts of violence like this. They've this fair share of political extremists that do accidents like this. And like everywhere else, like like everywhere else in the world, stuff just happens sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. I think it is interesting that like, Japan has extremely strict gun control, right? Like licenses, test background checks. A. Prohibitions on most people owning and carrying. But like it's kind of interesting that this is more of a like a like a First Amendment question, I guess in American terms, right? Like if if you're on the Internet enough, I'm sure it looks like this person has just Googled how to make gun. And, like, this is what came up. And so I think it's kind of fascinating that that that this person has been like, aside from their possible connections to any criminal networks. But like, I know the Yakuza were selling guns to people in Myanmar pretty recently. So they have access to this. Yeah. And and, like, the mayor who got whacked by yak is a guy like, if the yakuza is gonna do, like, I don't know if yours is going to do a killing, like, they they like, they they have access to weapons, they would use a real gun. Keep it together, OK. So, like, probably. But also, like, I I wouldn't completely rule it out because I wouldn't rule out them just finding some guy and doing this thing the FBI does and it's like, hey, you're going to go do an attack now? Like it it wouldn't it wouldn't surprise me if that if they did, that was like a possible identity thing. But like, we don't know. I still don't think we can rule out that Hideo Kojima is the mastermind behind this. And it's all. I mean, it's convoluted enough to be academic, I know, right? It is. It's it's just a ploy to plug his next game. Just have to add a few like nonsense names to all the people involved, like blunderbuss, Amen. And then it's just, it's it's easy. Easy. But yeah, it's fascinating that this person was assumingly, like maybe had other plans or had tried several other like craft firearms and settled on this one. But yeah, they have access to a lot of pipes, that's for sure. Did you guys see the yakuza guy who was arms dealing to Myanmar? No, no, uh, for five ******* wild. So he he was like extensively stunned by the feds. So this guy, he was yakuza. He was part of it, like a ongoing sting operation for like several years where he was selling like basically like trading guns for drugs, trading guns to buy drugs. He was selling to a couple of groups in Myanmar. He was. To groups in like the Tamil region, uh and a couple of other people and he uh, he was. At least one of the people he thought was a buyer was actually a fed. And they've captured all of these amazing conversations where they call the guns like cake and ice cream. And like one of the one of the things in the in the criminal complaint is a picture of him just with like a law, like an anti tank weapon. And he's just like giving it like the V sign and he's wearing these like yellow aviators and a leather jacket and like the way they arrested him was at a steakhouse. I think either in New York or New Jersey, but like they they lured him into a steakhouse meeting and then he got busted by the feds. But yeah, these guys were trafficking like serious stuff like surface to air missiles and things, and they have access to some pretty heavy equipment. Yeah, that that's a that's a pretty old. Like the the ocean has been sort of like. I don't know how you describe it. Like I kind of like para arm of the Japanese state in a lot of ways for a very, very long time. Like there are there have been like years of people with basically special forces training. They at one point like kidnapped and killed the Empress of Korea as part of like a thing to like justify starting a war. So they are they are very well hooked up. I, I, I, I don't know. It's still unclear to me because like that's obviously everything again, like they're the the LDP. Has a lot of yakuza connections because kind of, OK, partially, kind of everything is actually connections, but partially also because the aquazol were like a sort of founding like political bloc of the LDP in the first place. So who knows? Like LDP people have gotten like, attacked by people before. It could be that. It could be something else. We sort of just don't know yet. Yeah, there's nothing identifying this guy like I'm just looking at a picture of him and there's nothing particularly sort of identifying his clothing or anything like that. Yeah, I guess, I guess that's the death of Shinzo Abe. Yeah. Probably funny resting kiss, critical support to Hideo Kojima and all of the other freedom fighters. Oh, I guess, I guess we could talk a little bit about the international response to this. Yeah, because people have no idea what's happening. Yeah. I mean, like, so like, all the Americans are sort of like, are doing the all American liberals are doing the like, Oh my God, he was a good guy. It's like, no, it wasn't. This guy was a monster. OK I I will say this. Both the Chinese and the Korean embassies are being surprisingly diplomatic about it as in no one they haven't. No one has actively insulted him yet. I social media wise politically that's a good move for like Inter country relationship but like OK like. Ship Japanese relationships with Korea, with South Korea are no. And North Korea are really bad. And a lot of the reason why they're really bad is specifically because of transphobe and because of all of his ********. Yeah, so they're obviously happy, but they're not going to, like, rub it well. I mean, it's it's not clear to me that they wouldn't have done this if this had happened. Like the 2010 S like instinct. It's going to really hate each other. Yeah, I think there's been some sort of like people, I know people try to do a Taiwan angle on this because Abbey is like a Taiwan supporter, but I, I, I don't, yeah, I don't think there's actually that much the people want this to have much more geopolitical. Like significance that it probably actually will. Yeah, yeah. Well, it's the meantime. Yeah. Fascist is dead. That's always funny. It happens. Yeah. It did in fact happen here. Well, it happened over there, but you know what I mean. Could happen here. Certainly statistically we are, we are about to do based on that. Yeah, you wouldn't need to resort to the duct tape model in America with the amount of firearms here it is kind of a little is sometimes a little surprising how little stuff like this actually happens. So there's obviously a lot of work that goes into like preventing it. But but still sometimes it's it's kind of, it's kind of shocking. Yeah. Like I think, I think, I think if you look at the last 20 years, I think more Japanese politicians have been assassinated, the American politicians. Like, I'm trying. I'm trying to think of an American politician because we are. Because they want more American politicians and a lot of guns. They they they they killed. They killed when they went after Gabby Giffords. They killed someone, I think, but I don't. I'm trying to think of anyone else other than that. And not in recent memory. The guy who shot Reagan is now touring. Yeah, but he didn't even kill him. It's not even assassination. That's just an assassination attempt. Like very bored to one. Yeah. Yeah, crossover between John Hinckley and Hideo Kojima. It's possible that will be the game, I'm just going to keep referring to the suspect. It's worth noting that like he did have armed guards, there were armed guards present that you can see their guns in their holsters as they take down the the person who shot him. But they are they were not on their a game that day. Yeah, that you can see in the video, there's like one of the guys, I think trying to, like, get a bulletproof briefcase in between Abe and the guy just doesn't work. He just it just doesn't. It just fails completely. One job they didn't. Yeah, like operation meatshield. They weren't just on, they weren't just not on their a game. They completely failed at their own. Yeah, yeah. Yes. It's not like the guy even tried to run away. He just, like, stood there and got arrested. Yeah, yeah. He he did not really put much of a did not put up much of a fight. Yeah. Yeah, he know he didn't, I think. Yeah, he he went down pretty fast. I guess. He went with like this smaller gun, maybe to conceal it cause it looks like he was pretty close. Yeah, that is, that is very likely. Well, a very dark day for democracy, dark day for feminism, as Hillary Clinton said. Anyway. Yeah, luckily they have Rahm Emanuel as ambassador to Japan to comfort them in this difficult. The only people on Earth who actually deserve Rahm Emanuel. So, look, if you if you if you didn't want to have to deal with Rahm Emanuel, you should have taken all that CIA money. This is this is. This is now their curse. Well, I'm sure we'll talk more about these types of homemade weapons and all that kind of stuff in the future, because it is, it is interesting. And you know, places where places where like actual firearms are hard are harder to get. We're seeing more and more **** like this popping up, and that will definitely be worth be worth getting into, along with 3D printed weapons. Alright, yeah. Any anything else to add or I'll does that, does that do it? Yeah, I think that's a wrap. Alright, well. Follow the show on Twitter, Instagram, what happened here, pod and Cool Zone media see you next time and critical support to Hideo Kojima. 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He needs to be stopped. We've been silent and complacent for far too long. Sisters of the Underground is a new scripted series about fearless women exploring the life and legacy of the Mirabal sisters, Dominican women who were brave enough to challenge decades of oppression. Together, they led their country toward a revolution against Rafael Trujillo, the brutal dictator who ruled the Dominican Republic for 30 years. Please, please help us has blood on his hands from executive producers Dania Ramirez and Eva Longoria. That's me comes the powerful retelling of this all too relevant narrative. Listen to sisters of the underground as part of Michael Toura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So by now we imagine that you've seen the theories on tick tock. You maybe even heard the rumors, your friends and loved ones. But are any of the stories about government conspiracies and cover ups actually true? The answer is surprisingly or unsurprisingly, yes. For more than a decade, we here at stuff they don't want you to know have been seeking answers to these questions. Sometimes their answers that people would rather us not explore. Now we're sharing this research with you for the first time ever in a book format you can pre-order stuff they don't want you to know. Now it's the new book from us, the creators of the podcast and video series. You can turn back now or read the stuff they don't want you to know. Available for pre-order now, it's stuff you should read books.com or wherever you find your favorite books. Welcome to it could happen here, the podcast that just happened here. All right, that's my. By part done. Chris, what are we, what are we talking about today? I have brought you all here today to discuss one of the most sacred and variable of our political institutions. An institution whose words echo through history and carved the political, legal and economic framework of our world. I am referring, of course, to the bread riot. Hey, there we go. I love a good bread riot. I do too. This is this is a good, a non zero part of why I wrote this episode. How? How is this? How is this relatable? The grain supply seems really stable. Right now, it's always everyone says about the grain supply. No one, no no one has thrown a Molotov through a bank window in 200 years. Because I was reliably informed by several Marxist historians that that bread riots were over. I'm gonna I'm gonna Google Ukrainian wheat harvest as I do every exactly 5 years. The the moment just now came up where where I check it every five years. So let me just oh, oh, oh, is that Oh dear, Oh dear. Oh, is there a problem? Well, let me go eat my fifth wonder bread slice of the day and not think about it. Good stuff. Alright. So, yeah, let's talk bread riots. Yeah, we're talking bread riots. So bread riots are an ancient institution. You, I mean, you can find them, like, very easily as far back as the Roman Republic. Yeah, it is 80% of Roman Republican policy. Yeah. And like bread, like, OK, if you wanted to, like, go further back than that, I have no doubt you could, like, spend probably 10 minutes and find bread riding in, like, Sumeria or something. I didn't do this. And the reason I didn't do this, even though I'm talking about the history of the bread riot, is that that's the sort of the structure of the bread riot. Is. Shaped inexorably by the sort of political and economic conditions around it. And the political and economic conditions of ancient Rome are somewhat similar to us, but not really. So instead of doing that, we're starting in the late 1700s where there are a lot of bread riots, but particularly there's a lot of very well documented bread riots in the UK and France. And I guess before we actually, like, talk about the specific riots, we should. You talk about what a bread right actually is. Because, OK, so I mean on a very superficial level of Red Riot is when people don't have bread and they're riot. But the actual response to that and what the riots look like are interesting and sort of complicated. I'm going to quote now from the book free markets and food riots, and this is just talking about specifically the 1700s riots, but. Yeah, food riots took several forms. A, the blockader entraves that prevented the export of grain from an area in which shortages existed. B. The price riot or taxation popularity in which food was seized by protesters. Adjust price set and the lot sold. C agrarian demonstrations in which farmers destroyed their own produce as a dramatic protest and deed. The market right in which the crowd took your retributive action against commercial agents, bakers, Millers, local magistrates in the form of looting or tumultuous. Assembly to force dealers or local authorities to reduce prices. O OK, there's a lot of different things going on here. We're going to get back to the farmers protest stuff like a lot later because the specific kind of like rural, like versions of this kind of fade into the background for a couple of centuries. What's happening in the urban centers, that was really interesting in a lot of ways, and it gets at the core of what's going on in these sort of like late 1700s riots. Notably, the crowds who are doing the rioting aren't just like, they're just like seizing the bread and eating it, which is the thing that, like, you would assume they would be doing if they were, you know, it's a bunch of people who are starving and there's bread and they take it, right? But that's that's actually not what they're doing. What they're doing is essentially negotiating over price. You see this in this sort of price riot thing, right? You know, the thing that they actually do is they seize a bunch of grain and then they sell it off of what at what they sort of like and what they deem a fair price is. And you know what, this is something to do basically is it's, it's a it's a very, very direct way of trying to get bakers to lower their prices. And the other thing that's about these riots is that they are they're they're very politically sophisticated and they're they're very targeted. There's a thing you hear a lot, and if you ever read anything about any modern riot, you will hear just people ranting about how people are destroying, blindly destroying their own neighborhoods. And it's just, like, not true. Riots tend to have sort of a riots tend to have a sort of political, specific political focus and attacking specific targets. Which is why, like, you know, the first things that go up in a riot are pawn shops, liquor stores, police stations and now stores thank their employee employees badly. They literally have specific targets. Yeah, yeah, like it it's, you know, it's, it's it's very like all, all of all of the stuff that's happening is stuff that has like it. It's the result of of political grievances that people have sort of been accumulating for a long time. And this is also true of these sort of these early bread riots, too, going back to the book free markets and food riots. Protesters did not rampage indiscriminately, but focused their wrath on particular individuals and institutions whom the crowd held responsible for unjust practices. Typically, it was not the producers or retailers of food, but the middle men who were seen as responsible for shortages and price raises. The grain dealers, wholesalers, speculators, and mills. Grain shipments by wagon ship and canal barge were seized and distributed among participants or sold and adjust. Price warehouses were rated with similar results. Textile workers in 1770 Reems quote seized the town's markets, proceeded to sell all the great in the market at 3/4 of the current price. They then turned their attention to the warehouse to the granaries. Numerous religious houses, which they treated in a similar fashion. Yeah. And so, you know, this is a pretty remarkable degree of political sophistication, right? They're not targeting sort of farmers or bakers, and especially not targeting people who are like well known and liked in the community. They're targeting people who they can directly tied to grand price speculation. And this is, you know, and someone says, like this is a demonstration of the kind of like basic contradiction of the market, right. On the one hand, you have bread as this like physical thing that you need to survive. On the other hand, you have bread as market commodity and the market, you know, as a market commodity. It's a sort of speculative asset which people are like buying and selling and hoarding like stocks because not because they actually eat it, because they're interested in this sort of market value. And you know, the markets will call this the difference between use value or like the value you get from eating a piece of bread at the exchange. Value, which is like the the the bread is a commodity that could be traded for the commodities and you know, like this is this isn't something like this is behind a lot of like the housing crisis right now you have a bunch of people who buy houses and apartment buildings that. You know, not because they need to live with them, but as an asset that will appreciate over time. You know they appreciate in value overtime, like stocks do, but this means that people who like need houses to like live in them. Like, don't get a house because they're being held by people who are trying to get their value to appreciate. And the goal of these riots is basically to prevent bread from becoming an exchange value, that is to sort of like market commodity users speculation and turn them back into use values. But even again, sure, this is interesting right? Because it's not like these people are like like like anti market, anti capitalist, right. They they they tend not to sort of just seize the bread outright. What they're doing is they're insisting on buying it at a specific, quote UN quote just price. And this this sort of gets into the question of like why are these riots happening in the 1st place? The obvious explanation like OK, the people are rioting because the price of bread is increasing. But that's that's not actually like, an explanation, right? It's just it's a precondition. But there's a lot of places where bread prices rising, you'd never get a riot. O. A lot of of people have studied this and try to figure out what is happening. The the the second explanation that historians came up with something called the moral economy. And and and in this model. People aren't just reacting to like a price increase. What they're actually reacting to is what becomes known as the entitlement gap, which is this gap between people, what people think they're entitled to based on like the morality and how hard they work, etcetera, and like what they actually get. And so, you know, in less academic language, it's people going like, I'm getting price gouged, this is ********. Bring the prices down to what they're supposed to be and, you know, that's part of it. There's another theory that argues that food riots are driven by these, like, really complicated sort of like webs of horizontal social relations and like things like networks of wives and like political organizations and sort of like alliances that happen inside of villages, stuff like that and that. You know, and and these groups sort of like react to price increases by banding together and forcing people to lower prices now notably. I want one of the like the things I listed in those that like web of things, right, is wives networks as the sort of like first community, Weatherly is the food riots and this is, this is turns out to be important. Women are often like the leaders and initiator of bread riots and this, the sort of theory behind it is that they're actually the ones like buying the bread. And so they're sort of, they're more in tune with disturbances of food prices, etcetera, etcetera. And you know, the food price increases are a threat to what academics call social reproduction or an essence like taking care of yourself, your family and your household. Making sure you can sort of support and raise your children so there's well, so the the the good version of it is it's you're taking care of the people around you. The cynical version of it is it's social, it's social reproduction because you're creating another generation of workers for capital. Because women end up doing like enormously disappointing amount of that work. They, you know, they they wind up in the streets first because they're the people who are most acutely sort of like sensitive to this stuff happening. Umm. Yeah, what's what's? You know, and and. The other thing is sort of worth noting here is that riots are these kind of bread. Riots are usually urban affairs, and they're sort of the product to people who live in cities, right? It's just sort of artisans or industrial workers. There's this, like, fighting core of teenagers who seem to show up in all of these bread riots, and thankfully that that it that never happens. Today. We do not have a bunch of teenagers who show up every time I fight the cops and something bad happens. No experience with this. Yeah, it's certainly never seen anything like that happen. These other countries have the feds put piles of bricks out on the street. Well, you know, This is why we we we haven't. They haven't gotten to that level of entrapment yet. They're not powerful enough. This this is before the development of the police state. Yeah, they didn't have an FBI to burn down the Third precinct. Yeah, they haven't invented the Agent Provocateur yet. Cunning false flag. O what's interesting about the 18th century riots, though, is I've been talking a lot about how these are led by women. And that's true, but specifically the 18, the 1700s ones tend to be more gender balanced than later riots. And I'm going to read this from the historian Lynn Taylor, because it's one of the funniest things I've ever read in my life, and I love it. Cynthia Bolton study of the French Flower War of Seven of 1775 makes clear the mixed nature of traditional food riots. Indeed, the number of men involved had increased significantly in the flower wars due to the changing male economic, social, including familial and political status during the ancien regime. Theirs was a life of precarious in declining social economic position, disequilibrium in the family structure of political alienation, one that left them in position similar to those of mothers, wives, sisters and daughters. The men who rioted had in crucial ways been feminized. Oh boy. They are rioting because they've been forcing them. This, this is a thing that literally happened in in Myanmar during the uprising. They there are kind of local, local, cultural sort of attitudes there that make it, that have made it for a long time like essentially considered like shameful to touch women's clothing or particular. Like there's certain things that like you don't wear and that you're not supposed to look at if you see someone dressed that way, that are like traditional women's clothing. And so a bunch of male protesters would dress that way and form up and, like, ranks at the protests because it made the police, like, uncomfortable and sometimes, like, back off. That's extremely cool. Yeah. There's like some literal examples of that. And very recent riots. Yeah. And and I think that gets at. One of the things that's sort of happening is happening in this. Too, which is that like. One of the kinds of things that generates these bread riots is this kind of is is this instability and gender roles and is this sort of instability in in. What the role of a person in society is going to be and that, I don't know. It has a lot of interesting effects. And when those effects are riots, the stuff, the stuff that happens is really cool because you get a lot of sort of like gender roles getting messed up. You get a lot of like social ties being broken, I guess. So the other thing that's going on in this. That is, is. Important. Because I because it sort of like foreshadows a lot of what the sort of later bread riots are going to be about. Is that and this is this is like the 4th theory of bread riots. If you sort of like go through your economic historians of this stuff they're talking about, basically the the late 1700s are are one of the sort of key moments in like the formation of of the modern state. And what this means in terms of food is that control the food supply is moved from these. This sort of like parent holistic, like feudal state thing where on a local level you have guaranteed prices and access to food. And this has shifted to laws for capitalism, which there isn't there there are. There are no price controls there. There's no guarantee you can get food. And subsequent to this also at the same time is the centralization of the military bureaucracy. The translation of the military bureaucracy means that they're taking more control of the food supply. Here's some free markets and food riots again. Older parents realistic models operating at the local level and assuring a parental supply of necessaries at a low price were undermined by new national policies aimed at greater efficiency and market regulation. Spanning a century and more, the policies included such varied activities as enclosure, land concentration, capital, intensification of farming, proletarianization, grain exports, taxes, tariffs and other government efforts to regulate the food supply. Price riots were simply one expression of popular grievances stemming from this broader change. And this is something that's very common. Bread riots are like deeply and intimately LinkedIn the with the ways that food food product, the food production process, is changing. And specifically linked. They're linked to the ways that food production process is changing because of the state and markets. But we're sort of leading into the late 1700s, and at this point something happened that no one expected. A bread riot went completely the other direction. It irrevocably changed the state and the market itself. And I am talking about histories, maybe most famous bread riot. That's right. It's the French Revolution, baby liberty, Egality fraternity, Han Han. And this is, this is this. Is you mean to tell me that the French had a revolution? I mean, it's kind of, it's kind of marginal, admittedly the same. That doesn't sound like the French that I know that's true. The, the, the, the, the, the, the the. Modern French have replaced revolution with racism, unfortunately. But, you know, look, look, we're, we're, we're in the 1700s. Things are different. Yeah, and so we're in. In a second, we're going to talk about the bread riot that changed the history of bread riots in the course of world history forever. But first, do you know who doesn't love bread riots? Antoinette. Yeah, who is the primary sponsor of this show? She realized the whole cake thing didn't work out great. So now she's saying let a math podcasts, let them cast pods. We're back and our primary sponsor has been executed by a mob. So if you are a member of European nobility, maybe you're a Habsburg, you know? Hit us up and offer us a sponsorship. Yeah, well, OK, we we we're going to rewind a little bit before they kill Mary Antoinette to get to how. That happened. O, one of the things if if if you read the sort of literature on bread rice, one of the things bread, right, people will talk about over and over again is bread rice being a political and they kind of like stretched this to a point. Well, because, I mean, OK. So, like there's a couple levels which just make any sense, right? Like, OK, if if if you think that bread is being sold at too high a price because people are are gouging you, that is political, right. And then you go out and make them not do that. Yeah, that's politics. I people love to say things. Political when they don't align with like a simple political party, like if it if it doesn't line up directly with the kind of approved debate topics between the political parties that dominate things, they like to say, **** is apolitical, but, you know, starving because of tax decisions or whatnot is is an inherently political thing. Yeah. And and and and deciding that you're not going to starve and taking bread from people. It's an incredibly political thing. Yeah, that's the politics. Yeah. You have done a politics. Yeah, you've done, you've done a lot of politics and. You know, but but one of the things that that and the other thing this leads to is if if it if a thing that involves bread suddenly like turns into capital P politics and suddenly you have people doing things that are like well understood as like commercial political gestures, immediately everyone stops calling it a bread, right? And if, but like, if you look at what's actually happening, it's here's a bunch of people who are mad about the price of bread. They went to change the price of bread. It kind of didn't work, and so instead they overthrew the government. And this this is this is this is this is this is the bread riot that that we're getting to now up until you know until I. 1789 like you can argue that like. People historians will argue that, oh, these bread rats are apolitical. That just ends in in a I think it's October 5th, 1789. But by this point, the French Revolution is like, well underway. They've stormed the Bastille. There's a bunch of people in a parliament writing a constitution, but like. In October of of 1789, it's still unclear like how radical any of this is going to be, right? At this point, it still seems likely that there's going to be a king. Not only is there going to be a king, the king is still going to be pretty strong. And then yeah, on October 5th, 1789. Maybe history's most famous bread riot breaks out. O7000 women who are like incredibly ****** *** at the high price of bread in Paris, March on Versailles, which is where the royal family of France had been like governing France from for like 100 years. And these women are really, really angry. And they they they they they basically forced the royal family to come back with him to Paris. And I guess it's important to note here that Paris and Forsythe like 12 miles apart, so this isn't like a multi day journey. They just like get mad one day and they wake up and they walk to the next city over. And this radically changes the entire direction of of the French Revolution, because once well, if the royal family is in Versailles, right like the the, the Parisian mob doesn't have direct access to them. But once they're in Paris, and once once this bread riot like brings the king to Paris, suddenly the entire, like the entire concentrated political power of the French system is now centered in Paris and is now in a place where subsequent bread riots can actually do stuff, and this directly leads to the kings being executed. This leads to our sponsors getting guillotined. And it it basically it's. It's it completely cements. I bred as sort of like the central part of of, like one of the central aspects of what the French Revolution is about. Like by the end of the revolution that the, the, the, the slogan of the sort of revolutionary French working class is bred in the constitution of 1793. So, you know, you can look at the priorities there and look at like all of this is sort of. In a sort of extended rolling bread riot. Unfortunately for us, and spoilers to everyone who has not. Caught up on the end of the French Revolution. Alright, the revolution loses, Napoleon takes power. And this is where we we enter the era of what's known as the bourgeois revolution. This is this is the modern era. And if you if you've read you're like you're like Arab Cobb swam you're like, you're you're sort of very conventional like marks historians you're conventional, sort of liberal historians. I they will all tell you about the bread riots or it dies nearly 1800s. And that's replaced by like strikes and political protests organized by unions and parties because like the the rural class has been like displaced at the center of history by the industrial working class. And. That's just like, not true. And it's not true in in two senses. One, it's in the sense that, like, we have bread riots now, but it's also not true because there's another wave of bread riots that are that are very, very conventional and very much sort of in in in the classic 1700s mode. Here is here's Lynn Taylor again. It is true that the proactive form of protest became common, even predominant, by the early 20th century. However, scattered through the periodical literature are accounts of 20th century food riots, which look surprisingly like those of the 18th and early 19th century, something not expected in modern industrialized nation states. Food riots occurred in northern France in 1911, in Britain during the winter of 1960, nineteen 17 in New York in 1917, in Toronto and both 19241923 in Barcelona 1918, in Vichy France in 1942, and in northern France throughout the German occupation. The form of protest was remarkably consistent in each, and reminiscent of traditional food riots of earlier centuries. And these are, these are, these are very conventional sort of 18th century bread riots that led by women. They refuse, they're led by women who are refusing to pay higher prices for food. And in some sense they kind of are a political in that there are various attempts in like basically all of these protests by like organized political organizations to take it over. And basically every single time the women who are involved are like, no, absolutely not. There's there's a very funny one where I think this is the, the, the, I think this is the British one. In in 1916, nineteen 17 were like a bunch of men show up and the women are like, no, go home. You can't write it with us. This is, this is our riot now. Yeah. The British case in particular was also interesting because this is the middle of World War One. And so, you know, this is the sort of giant presence looming over these, these, these bread riots. And. You know, the government, sort of like the government in response to this response to widespread hunger, like decreased these price controls on food, but farmers are just refusing to obey them. And so women in Bayport organize. And the result was, quote, when one farmer said he did not care what the government said about price controls, there was bedlam. The women rushed the farmer's cart and the street was, quote, filled with hooting, yelling women and young people while potatoes, cabbages and turnips were flying through the air. The example of Mayport soon spread to other parts of the country. These riots are led by housewives who had filled the front lines and did much of the fighting, although the miners of Cumberland were also active in supporting their wives efforts, both as added body strengthening the crowds, but also through the Miners Association and other working class institutions. OAI don't know. I had to include this specifically because the image of a bunch of people throwing cabbages at farmers is extremely funny to me. But. The other thing I think is interesting here is you can start to see the shifts from these sort of 18th century. Like, right. So these ones on a social level where, you know, in the 1800s you're dealing with sort of like town and sort of peasant cultural groupings. Here's a program in the protest. But the 1900s bread riots are being backed by, like, organized political institutions. And there's another one in New York in 1917, which is remarkable for being. It's self organized by like. It's remarkable because it it's it's self organized by women even though it this is like the the part of New York they're in is a Socialist Party stronghold, but the Socialist Party isn't the are the people who do it. It's the women who are like married in a lot of cases to the Socialist Party or and to some extent are in it but are sort of operating autonomously. And they they do this thing where they sort of like they start setting and forcing these boycotts of like shops that are deemed to be like price gouging levels and they fight the cops and they do a bunch of stuff. And the the, the the ones I mentioned in Toronto earlier are interesting because those ones actually do like have an organization in the beginning, but in keeping with sort of the tradition of of of the bread, right, the organization was the Jewish women's, the Jewish Women's Labor League. And these are these are remarkably effective political movements. They win their demands really quickly. I'm going to read one more account because it just rules. Lester Golden and Temma Kaplan have both examined food riots in Barcelona in 1918, part of a wave of riots which occurred between June 1917 and March 1919 throughout Spain. As in previous cases, these riots erupted because of devastating price inflation. I think we know nothing about now. This time resulting from the post war collapse of the economy, the participants were all women. They forbade men's participation and the actions were led first by radical Republicans and then by a small group of female and Arco syndicalists. The women's demands were simple and straightforward. They demanded lower prices for foods. They attacked bread shops and coal wag as it took over a ship laden with fish. When police and civil guard attempted to break out the women crowds of women on the street, the woman turned on them, stripping some of the officers of their pants, spanking or thrashing them and sending them home. Yes, yes, it rules. So that's that's. And it's so good. Perfect, perfect. This is the energy we need in every century that human beings have ever inhabited. It's amazing that the historians are parenthetical notes after that is, quote, rather undermining their authority in the process. Which, yes, I would imagine so, yes, if you are, if you are being spanked by a crowd, you have lost control of that crowd. That that that is that is fair to say. And so they they it takes about three weeks and they they win and prices dropped 30%. So good for them. That's a pretty solid look. Hey, I think I, I think most of the people listening would do some ******** spanking if they could get a 30% cut on their grocery bill. Yeah, it's it's a look, I'm just saying it is much harder to pull down a modern cops trousers because they're wearing like so much weird **** on top of it. But Belt technology has improved tremendously since then. Yeah. However, where there is a will, there's a way. If I learned one thing from high school, it's that anyone can be pantsed. Just you just you just have to. You just have to. You just have to want it hard enough. You have to want it more than the person wants to be wearing their pants. That's right. That's right. You have to believe. So there, there, there's one more of these bread riots that's worth talking about, which also is not conventionally framed as a bread riot, but is entirely keeping with everything I've said here, the February Revolution in Russia. So the February revolution is the revolution that actually overthrows the czar. There's another revolution, which is the October Revolution, which is one of the bullets come to power. But. That's that's that's a separate one. They're fighting a completely different people. The February Revolution has all of the sort of key factors of of a bread, right. Right. There's these massive bread lines. Women are ****** *** by a lack of food. The revolution itself is is led by women whose like male comrades had literally told them don't like don't go out and do a protest on that day this International Women's Day. But the like all all of the men who are like doing this are are convinced that like, the conditions aren't right for revolution. So they try to get everyone to stay home and everyone is like, no. And. You know, like the the sort of key difference between the like this bread, right, and the other bread rounds we're talking about is that. You know the the the demands of the of the, the, the March International Women's Day 1917 are overtly political. Like they they are chanting down with the czar and they're trying to overthrow the government. And this, you know, this is another thing that has this sort of like incredible impact on, on how the Bolshevik revolution is is sort of working right. Like Lenin winds up using peace, bread and land as one of the sort of like central like Bolshevik slogans because part because a huge part of what the revolution is is just a bread riot. And that that that's where we're that's that's where we're going to leave it today with the world's just completely and utterly transformed by another bread riot. And next episode we're going to get to the modern bread riots, because those are also interesting. And yeah, we're going to once again prove everyone who insists that red rice don't happen anymore. Wrong. A thing that I didn't know existed until I started reading this. And then now incredibly mad about yeah. So go out there and have a bread riot. Pants a cop. Or some other kind of riot. You know, a guacamole riot. A matte riot you could have, you could have some kind of corn riot. You could have a riot over ortolan. That would be a unique kind of riot. Don't think anyone's ever rioted over that that bird, that that's such a beautiful songbird, that eating it is a sin. So you have to, like, hide your shame underneath a sheet so God doesn't see you eat it. Have a riot over one of those, you know? Yeah, do that. Yep. Football is back, and bet MGM is inviting new customers to join the huddle and enjoy the action like never before. Sign up today using bonus code champion and your first wager is risk free up to $1000. You'll also have instant access to a variety of parlay selection features, player props, and boosted odd specials. Just download the bet MGM app today or go to betmgm.com and enter a bonus code champion and place your first wager. Risk free up to $1000 the bet MGM app is the perfect way to experience the excitement of wagering on live sports now in more markets than ever. Visitbetmgm.com for terms and conditions must be 21 years of age or older to wager Virginia only new customer offer. All promotions are subject to qualification and eligibility requirements. Rewards issued as non withdrawable free bets or site credit free bets expire 7 days from issuance. Please gamble responsibly. Gambling problem call 1-888-532-3500. Your mirabar matte courage already runs in your blood. He needs to be stopped. We've been silent and complacent for far too long. Sisters of the Underground is a new scripted series about fearless women exploring the life and legacy of the Mirabal sisters, Dominican women who were brave enough to challenge decades of oppression. Together, they led their country toward a revolution against Rafael Trujillo, the brutal dictator who ruled the Dominican Republic for 30 years. Please, please help us. You has blood on his hands. From executive producers Dania Ramirez and Eva Longoria, that's me, comes the powerful retelling of this all too relevant narrative. Listen to sisters of the underground as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So by now we imagine that you've seen the theories on Tiktok. You maybe even heard the rumors from your friends and loved ones. But are any of the stories about government conspiracies and cover ups actually true? The answer is surprisingly or unsurprisingly, yes. For more than a decade we here at stuff they don't want you to know have been seeking answers to these questions. Sometimes their answers that people would rather us not explore. Now we're sharing this research with you for the first time ever in a book format you can pre-order stuff they don't want you to know. Now it's the new book from us, the creators of the podcast and video series. You can turn back now or read the stuff they don't want you to know. Available for pre-order now, it's stuff you should read books.com or wherever you find your favorite books. I love how often the Holocaust has been trending over the last year. That's good sign. That's a thing you wanna see trending in 2022? It's it could happen here. All right, Chris. Continue with your bread riots. Yeah, we're back. There's more riots now. Last episode we talked about historians declaring the end of the bread death of the bread riot and like in the 60s and early 70s, like I I think that this this is one of the ways you can tell that. People genuinely thought the world was going to get better. Was that, like they genuinely believed that, like the centralized state and like capitalism can always provide foods you want to bread riots anymore, you get marked at home. You, if you were born in that. You like grew up and people were fleeing. From Danicus's in the street and, like getting getting eaten by woolly mammoths and then by the time you're 40, you've got the Telegraph. So I get it, right. I get why people think that that progress was was really good back in those days because they got they wiped out. The dynamic assesses. Yeah. I mean, you have seen Howard Taft building the pyramids, right? Exactly, exactly, exactly. You you have, you have, you have seen the future rise up literally in front of you. And yeah, you went from eating mud to Hershey's chocolate. It's an incredibly impressive sort of, sort of period of modern historical evolution. And you know, one of the things you see like, like, you'll see like Marxist calling bread rice, primitive rebels doing like populist mob politics that's been like displaced by proper Marxist class politics. And then like every single one of these people was like the most wrong. Anyone. Like basically from that period until until the moment the, the, the, the end of history guy starts writing, they are the most wrong people like on the planet. Well, it's also funny to hear that idea that like there there was something primitive about these people's class analysis. Yeah. Like the brothers Gracchi and ancient Republican Rome, a lot of this **** they're saying is not at all primitive class analysis like this. It's it's pretty developed. Yeah. And I mean like the the the Marxists will do some long argument about how like, oh, they they have, they have false consciousness. They're not trying to abolish the class system or whatever. And it's like, well, I mean, like, I look at the mark, the Marxist didn't abolish the class system either. So, like, you know? Like, yeah, like these are these are various and this is only going to be coming back to you a lot this episode is that the people doing this are incredibly sophisticated political actors and. One, if that's the sort of modern version of this, is in the 1970s, not only did bread riots, not and there's a new kind of bread riot, and these riots are collectively known as the IMF riots. From from January 1976 to October 1992, there were riots in Peru, Egypt, Ghana, Jamaica, Liberia, the Philippines, Air Turkey, Morocco, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Argentina, Ecuador, Chile, Bolivia, Brazil, Panama, Tunisia, Dominican Republic. Haiti, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Guatemala and Mexico. Yugoslavia, Zambia, Poland, Algeria, Romania, Nigeria, Hungary, Venezuela, Jordan, the Ivory Coast, Niger, Iran, Albania, India and Nepal. Were you just doing like, the wacko? The wacko? Warner song. That's literally all I I found the chart that has all of them. It's like there's just so many. They just keep happening. And again, that's until 1992. Like they they're still happening. And and the other thing I should mention is those are just the ones that are called the IMF riots. There's a bunch of other riots, some of which are bread riots, that aren't called the IMF riots because they're not really sort of like. Directly involved with the IMF and that this raises the question of what the **** is an IMF riot? And the answer is that unfortunately to to understand why people are throwing balls through bank windows, we have to talk about banking a little bit. I I I have talked I guess at length. Yeah I I apologize but we will we will get back to the riots. Damn. But I promise we have to do a little bit of banking. So yeah I've talked up extensively on the show about the crisis of the 70s and you know the short version is that in in a thing that is completely unrecognizable today. The global economy collapses inflation skyrockets are countries across the global S start taking out these adjustable rate they've been taking out these adjustable rate loans and then suddenly they're interest rates spike and they start defaulting on these loans are here's. Our free markets and food riots talking about it. Although the causes of the crisis run deeper, by the 1970s many smaller nations began to feel the strains of insolvency as a result of a worldwide recession, successive oil price shocks, declining world commodity prices, and accelerating debt service obligations. So basically, like, if you're a small country, right, the price of everything you need to buy like oil is going up, and the price of what you can sell, which is like a commodities like copper tin, is collapsing. And these lead to what, like, these massive, what are called balance of payments crises. And so we should talk about what a balance of payments crisis is. This winds up being really important here. There's the story about Che Guevara, like right after, like literally right after the the the, the Cuban Revolution is he, you know, he goes to the US and he's in a he, he sits, he's in this meeting with a bunch of bankers and he's trying basically to get Cuba's gold reserves and Cuba sort of like 4 exchange reserves out of the US the US doesn't steal it. And it was funny about it is all the bankers who are talking to him. Like it all of them report afterwards. Like, wow, this guy talks like a banker, not a communist. And the specifically the reason they were like, oh, hey, this guy talks like a banker is that he knew what balance of payments was. Umm. The short answer is that a balance of payments crisis is when there's more money flowing out of the country than there is coming into it. And the result of this is that you run out of money, and particularly the thing you run out of as American dollars, which is the thing that you need to like, buy oil. So you get these countries that are massively in debt and they run out of money and the only thing they could do is turn to like is turn to the International Monetary Fund or the IMF, who like the only description of the IMF that I have is that, like, they're basically like if the cartoon Bank of evil from Despicable Me, like ran the entire world economy. I they you know so the IMF shows up to these countries and is like lull lumao eat **** and they they force these countries to implement like you in order to get loans. They force them to implement what are called stabilization programs because of the quote conditionality of the loans they have all these like this really technical boring like neoliberal like legal language for it. I the like the the this is all sort of banker speak for if you want another loans you can buy food you're going to have to rob every single person you know when. And and hand us all your money. This eventually becomes known as structural adjustment programs. There's all of this sort of technical language disguise what's going on. What's actually going on is that in order to pay off, in order to pay the bankers for these loans, they are taking food for the masses of children. Yeah, here's a A more technical, I guess explanation of what's happening here. Austerity programs include stern measures or shock treatments that trigger market mechanisms to stimulate export production and increased government foreign exchange reserves. So, according to the theory, currency devaluation makes third world exports more competitive in the international market, reduced public spending, curbs inflation and saves money for debt repayments, privatization of state owned corporations generating more productive investment, and reduced public payrolls, elimination of protectionism and other restraints on foreign investment lures. Or if more efficient export firms, cuts in public subsidies for food and basic necessities help to get prices right, benefiting domestic producers. Wage restraints and higher interest rates reduce inflation and enhance competitiveness, and import restrictions can serve for exchange for debt servicing. So this has winners and losers, and the losers are like everyone in the country that's happening to. And this is, and this is pretty close, cross class like these policies, they hurt workers, they are peasants, they hurt small shopkeepers. The middle class is annihilated just like people who are consumers who buy goods. And even the sort of like the the local capitalists just get screwed by this. Because what the IMF is doing is forcing everyone to have lower wages, taking massive benefit cuts and massively spiking the price of food. And, you know, I, I, I, I, I, I once again remind everyone that this this is explicitly what the Federal Reserve is trying to do to us right now. Like, this is this is the kind of stuff that they're talking about. In order to curb inflation is to just make like pay everyone less, make everyone take benefits cuts, and then increase the price of ****. So, so the the winners of this are like 6 bureaucrats, international investors and like a class of like absolutely horrific large agricultural land owners. And this. This has about the effect that you would expect it to. Between 1976 and late 1992, some 146 incidents of protest occurred, reaching a peak from 1983 to 1985, continuing to the present without attenuation. Now, the the authors who are writing this right, they're writing this in 1994. So when they say they continue to the present without mention, they mean 94. But The thing is, the last one of those riots ended like a week ago. Bro. Yeah, yeah, they're still, they're still going. So anyway, and these, these, these riots are slightly different than the sort of like classical bread riots, right? Because they they are about the increasing price of food. It's also about increasing price of fuel or sort of broader austerity measures or cuts to services, stuff like that. Here's a quote about like what these things actually look like. Demonstrations and riots typically target specific institutions perceived as responsible for the depredations. Marches and protesting crowds converge on major thoroughfares and government buildings, such as the Treasury or the National Bank or the legislature or the presidential palace. Looters attacked supermarkets and clothing stores where fuel and transportation subsidies are part of the austerity package. Buses and gasoline stations are burned. The international dimension of austerity are recognized symbolically in attacks on travel agencies, foreign automobiles, luxury hotels. And international travel agencies or, well, that too, but also international agency offices. And you know, this is going to sound familiar from last episode. It turns out that just like the 18th people, the, the, the attacks of these things are very targeted. The the sort of like forms of resistance have changed overtime because you know, this is now we we we do have modern political organizations, right? Like we get general strikes, you get sometimes you get just noble bread, riots. Sometimes you get these just things that are like large protests and then they turn into riots. And what's interesting about them is that these are very sort of. These are very sort of cross class movements, right? You have your sort of classical sectors of the urban poor you have. Like, particularly in the global S, you have your shanty dwellers, you have unemployed youth, you have small St vendors. Or like a crucial sort of element of these things, you have, like just your guy selling cigarettes on the street. You get. You also get like parts of the industrial working class you get. Sometimes you get unions, a lot of times you get students. Oh, you get like public employees. Sometimes you get professional groups. One of the things I was reading about this, I've read a few books in this area who were talking specifically. And this isn't like the 90s, right? We're specifically talking about professional groups in Sudan. And it's like, it's like, OK, it's it's 1994, people are talking to professional groups in Sudan backing rioters against the government. It's 2019. People are talking about professional groups backing protests against the government. It's like, it's. I don't know, like there, there's this extent to which. All of these things, the IMF riots have just been happening over and over and over again for about 50 years and a lot of the elements are are. Incredibly similar. What one of the other things that's going on here is that these protests are driven are driven by mass urbanization. I said like I typically, austerity protests were precipitated by dramatic overnight price hikes resulting from the termination of public subsidies on basic goods and services, proclaimed by the government as a regrettably necessary reform, urged by the IMF and international lenders as conditions for new and renegotiated loans. 5 deaths in the first Peruvian protest began a pattern of violence. Peru remained a hotbed of austerity protest, with students and workers demonstrating against increased food prices in 1997, followed by followed in 1978 by a March. Public employees over state layoffs. This protest, though cheered by other public workers watching from surrounding office buildings, was dispersed by police tear gas. So like that that's that's a very sort of. Yeah, yeah, like we the the, I mean this is this was happening, this is happening in Peru like last year, right, actually was it last year, was it earlier this year? I don't know. Time is fake. And that's actually like the other thing I sort of startling about this is like the places that riot are still the places that are rioting in. Like in an enormous number of cases, it's it's the same places. Sometimes it's the same people. I think probably the the most famous protest of the sort of era is. It's called the caracazo. I'm pronouncing that extremely badly by my apologies, in Venezuela, which is a reaction to a 1989 like 50 to 100% increase in train and bus fares. And there are these are like, these are massive riots, at least 100 and probably like a couple of 1000 people are like gunned down by the army. And three years later, a relatively unknown Colonel named Hugo Chavez tried to overthrow the government that had carried out the price increases. Chavez. You know, Travis is better known for his other works. But he he's the sort of tie between the IMF riots and the sort of next phase of of political resistance to this stuff which is called the anti, which is like known as the anti globalization movement in the sort of the 90s and early 2000s. And the thing that's interesting about these things is that. I don't know. The IMF rights don't go very well. Like, either they lose or at best what they were able to get was like temporarily stall some of these reforms. And I say like reforms, quite like the sort of neoliberal, like slashing benefits if they were able to pause them a bit and then they would sort of get restarted after people left the street. But in the late 90s and 2000s, people start winning. Argentina is sort of famously forced to like, tell the IMF to **** *** and they default on their loans after this like enormous autonomous uprising 2001. That like very nearly overthrows the government and forces out like 5 Heads of state. There's the whole sort of pink tide in Latin America. The IMF gets like driven out of a bunch of countries in East Asia, and then in 2008, the entire world economy collapses. Which, it turns out, is bad for everyone. And this does this does two things for our story. The first is that like. Countries are suddenly going broke again, and because they're like completely broke, the IMF is just back and it's able to sort of enforce programs on places like Greece and Spain. And the second thing it did was set off an enormous wave of bread, riots and uprisings. And I, I think, like most people, if if you tell them that 2008 set off like an enormous wave of, like protests, they're immediately going to go, oh, you mean the Arab Spring. And I am talking about that, but that's actually not specifically what I'm talking about here. There there's. There were like immediately in 2007, 1008. Immediately after, there was another massive wave of bread riots that every like just everyone is completely forgotten. Unless the thing that you do specifically is study bread riots. Here's from he's from the a piece called the political economy of the food riot. In 2007 and 2008, the world witnessed a return of one of the oldest forms of collective action, the fruit riot. Countries where protests occurred range from Italy, where pasta protests in September 2007 were directed at a fail at the failure of the Prodi government to prevent a 30% rise in the price of pasta. To Haiti, where protesters railed against presidents prevalle's impassive response to the doubling of the price of rice over the course of a single week. Other countries in which riots were reported including Yezzan, Morocco, Guyana, Mauritania, Senegal, India, Indonesia, Zimbabwe, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Yemen, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Mexico and Argentina. And some commentators have estimated that 30 countries experience some sort of some sort of food protest over the period. Now we've been talking a lot about like. Food consumers in this because that's mostly the people who are involved in bread riots, but. You know, as was happening in 1700 with this sort of original stuff like this whole time this is going on, there's this sort of massive shift in the global food economy happening where. And this has been happening for a long time now, but it's it's sort of, it's been accelerating in the last about half a century, which is that the number of people who are like peasants and who produce food for themselves has been massively declining and people are getting forced into cities. And this means that there's, you know, there's been a number of other things that have gone along with this. There's been this massive increase in like cattle production, for example. You get all these monocultures. And another thing I think I've mentioned before is the World Trade organizations like agreement on agriculture, like outlaws agricultural subsidies for the global S but, you know, the US is still allowed to have, like farm subsidies. Which means that, you know, if if when you're when you enter these free trade agreements, you get all of this, like enormously cheap food from the US dumped into all these other countries. And, you know, if you're a Mexican farmer, suddenly you can't compete with all of this food from the US because the food from the US is cheap because the American government subsidizing it, but the Mexican government. And this just like absolutely annihilates any attempt by a country to maintain food security by, like producing food for themselves and this, this sort of class of like self-sufficient peasant farmers who've been, you know, they support themselves by producing their own food and selling to the market. These people just get annihilated and they get forced into what's called sort of casualized labor. They, you know, they they. The later version is like Uber, right? But that they're forcing to gig work, they're kicked out of sort of the the normal economy. And you know because they don't have sort of fixed contracts or. You know, a lot of people are working with for no contract, with, with no contracts at all. They're enormously insecure. And once people are forced into the labor market, like, changes in the global economy can make them, like almost immediately unable to afford food. Because you know, like if the the the the the the less sort of economically secure you are the the the the more. The more affected by price increases, which is obvious, but it's worth saying because it dictates a lot of like, who does bread riots. And. Yes. And so governments are not entirely, like, blind to this, and they're concerned that they're gonna get overthrown. And so you see a bunch of governments trying to respond with sort of price stabilization stuff. I think the most famous example of this is that, like the Egyptian army like literally controls like an enormous number of Egypt bakeries. And they they they like directly run them and they directly run them so they can control the price of bread. They try to, like stop revolutions from happening. But in 2008 they just kind of stopped working. Here's a political economy of the food riot again over the year between 2007 and 2008, the 130% increase in the global price of maize and the 75% increase in the price of rice, with similar price increases in soybeans and other major food commodities. Yes, there are these massive food price increases and. This, you know, this does the thing that massive food price increases does, right? There's, there's and there's immediately enormous riots and there's this cycle that happens where. The protesters, you know, the protesters immediately blamed the government for the crisis. And then the government is like, well, it's actually not our fault because I, you know, it's happening because of things outside of our control. And the protesters are like, oh, it doesn't matter who we elect. I, they do the same things. And, like, they're both kind of right. Like, the government is just like, ******* these people. But it's also true that the sort of like the whole food system is designed to take like. The means of food production out of the hands of like the workers who need the food and putting them in the hands of, like, you know, enormous corporations. And as people in places like Sri Lanka, which going to talk more about later, continually emphasize it like this, this food sovereignty issue is as much of a political issue. Like, it's an incredibly political issue, and it's it's it's as much like what's at stake in these bread riots as the sort of IMF and austerity stuff. OK, this is probably a good place for an ad break, but I can't think of a transition. Yeah, you know. Who isn't allowed to eat? Is the products and services that support this podcast all actively starving to death? So get these deals now while you still can. And we're back O. All right. Now we're going to talk a little bit about the Arab Spring. We're going to talk in an enormous amount about it because. That's a whole thing, but if if you've been following like. The stuff people have written about the Arab Spring, there's an enormous number of people who spend like a lot of their time arguing about whether or not it was actually sparked by food prices. And, you know, you'll get a lot of analysts who argue that, like, food prices in Tunisia where, where their spring starts, like, weren't really higher than normal. And what you're seeing instead is like, well, it's not actually food prices. It's just that there's a generation of people who've been farmers but, like, can't support themselves anymore, who've been forced into, like, fighting nonexistent wage labor in cities. And like that, that is part of what's happening. But I think there's a sort of like fundamental misunderstanding of what causes a bread riot, right? Like, you know, as you talked about in, like in the first episode. One of the things that causes bread riots. Is it's not actually necessarily the magnitude of the price increase that causes them, right? What's that? What sets off bread riots is people, is people feeling like they're not getting what they deserve. Now, obviously, like if the price of bread increases by 200%, you're going to get a lot of people going like, **** this. I worked my *** off and now I can't feed my family. We deserve better from this. It's time to riot. But sometimes, even if prices are stable, you, you you can get you can get a thing where everyone's like, you know, the amount of bread is bad, everything is expensive, and one day someone wakes up and just goes, **** this, I deserve better and they do a bread riot. And and this is the case and you know, and when when that kind of thing is happening, right when when you're dealing with you know what like moral economy stuff when you're dealing with this gap between like. What people think like. Like what people think their life should be versus the fact that their lives are just absolutely terrible. Even if you, like, decrease the price of bread, that's not actually necessarily going to, like, stop people from rioting. And if you look at like occupy, for example, too, like, you know, that's also happening in this. Like what brings people there isn't necessarily strictly the price of food. It's the sense that, like, yeah, I've been screwed by, I've been screwed by the ruling class, and I deserve better than this. And and this is what you see in Tunisia. And one of the things you see in sort of Tunisia in Syria is that, like a lot of the uprisings. Like they have this huge sort of rural core with this population of this huge population of people who been kicked out of the agricultural sector. And you know and like that that is a bread riot, right? And it's a bread, right. And this sort of double sense of, like, it's the people who are involved, who used to be involved in, in grain production and now can't be. And then also that like. You know, people, people have hit this sort of expectation gap thing. And what I think is sort of interesting about this is that. These bread riots, these rural bread riots are like, they're the closest thing we have to sort of the classical 20th century revolution, right? Like that. That's one. That's the thing that causes. Like the 20th century, revolutions are the the first generation of people who are like but maybe the first. Like two or three generations people who come from the countryside into the factories or the people who do revolutions. And but The thing is, this is, this is this is the 21st century, not the 20th century. Like, if you get kicked out of your farm, there's there's no job in a factory like you're just unemployed. And you know, and this changes the dynamics of sort of everything and I think, OK, like people like broadly know the course of like the Arab Spring and 2011, 2014 wave of uprisings, they happen, they get crushed largely. But there was another wave of these sort of riots, protests and uprisings that started in Haiti and like in 2018, over this massive fuel price hike. And here is a partial list of places that, like people have, like rioted in in in large numbers since 2018. Haiti, Sudan, Algeria, Honduras, Chile, Iraq, Hong Kong, Iran, like four times Lebanon like three times Colombia, like 3 * I. A couple of things happen in France. There was a Puerto Rico. There was popular, there was a there was Indonesia. We're on our second Ecuador one now. There was Catalonia like people rioted in the US there were massive indigenous roadblocks, like in Canada. You commedia combo went up where stuff is catra, like there were two different ways of protesting India. There was like Belarus, Kazakhstan. There's Kyrgyzstan, there's bekan, there's Molly. There's stuff in Nigeria or stuff in Libya, like there's stuff in sherlocka. We're about to get to this. This whole thing has been happening, like everywhere and and it's been intensifying in the last, in the last sort of like three or four years. We're now basically in like year four of this cycle. And and, you know, obviously, like every single one of these protests has their own, like, local political conditions and like a lot of these aren't even sort of loosely about the price of bread. They're just about sort of other stuff that's happening. But like like of of the uprisings that I mentioned, like something like 15 of them are directly about the price of food. Or the price of like transited fuel? And we're going to talk a little bit about sort of two of the most recent, like rotest waves. We're going to talk about Ecuador, we're going to talk about Sri Lanka. Because there there are two very different kinds of protests, even though they're both kind of bread riots. Early. They're both very much the modern equivalents of it. But they they they look very different and there's just, I think, I don't know, I think it's interesting reasons why. Yeah, so we're gonna start with, like with Sri Lanka on, on a very basic level, Sri Lanka, it has a giant balance of payments crisis. This is, you know, it's just like this is sort of like large scale political version of famines, right? Like there's plenty of food and fuel in the world, but the government, Sri Lanka does not have dollars to buy it with. Now, the reason the government doesn't have dollars to, like, buy fuel with is because the government is basically like an incredibly corrupt dictatorship that keeps, like, importing luxury goods it didn't need. And they did a bunch of, like, tax breaks on rich people and suddenly the government was broke and everyone was like, wow, how did that happen? It must have just been the pandemic. And it was like. No, you, like you gave all the money to rich people. And then. Like as the crisis sort of went on. They. The government decided to ban fertilizer imports. And so this just meant that people couldn't get fertilizer. So it's like farmers just didn't plant food because, yeah, that's a curious decision. Yeah, it's like, it's it's one of those things. You look at it, it's just like, like, who thought this was a good idea? Yeah. What was the positive end of that game plan here? I mean, like the the like, OK. So like, I I I think what they were thinking is that like fertilizer costs dollars, right? We're running at a dollar. So we're going to stop people from spending their dollars, like on buying this stuff so we can keep more dollars in the economy. But like. What? What are you? What is your long term plan here if you don't have like anything to get dollars with or and you also don't have food? So this, to the surprise of exactly 0 people. Except I guess the government of Sri Lanka causes a food crisis and a food shortage. And this is the kind of classic like, this is the kind of classic like situation in which the IMF will intervene in the 70s and they're interviewing now and, you know, this is, this is a classic like. Struggle against this starting right. You have the ruling class blowing up the entire economy by, like, fueling debt money into pointless infrastructure projects, and now they're doing these like massive austerity measures, trying to get loans to the IMF. This is, you know, this is, this is, this is this, this is, this is this is stuff we understand that we've seen before, but this is also, this is also a food safety problem, right? The Shrilankan government has just completely screwed their farmers, which means we have to import even more food. And and you know the the result of this is months and months and months of very impressive sort of cross class protests with like basically every social sector in the streets. And that's both a good thing and also a thing that is kind of a mess. Because, you know, like there was a civil war, the Civil War ended like less than a decade and 1/2 ago, right? So you have people in the streets from sectors who like, do not like each other at all. And I don't know, you know, you get the thing that happens here, right? You get these moments of, like, incredible solidarity and then moments of incredible, like, what the **** are you guys doing? And, you know, like one of the things that happens a lot in these protests, like in all, all protests like, this is like, OK, the protests are like pretty tame for literally months, right? Like it's just people doing protesting. And then I cops and people like allied with the government started attacking the protesters, at which point people like burn down the house with the ruling family. They start throwing people. I think people probably saw the videos. People like throwing cars of like government ministers into rivers. Which was a good time. And like, yeah, like that that stuff was, you know, a direct reaction to sort of like the government's violence, right, you know? OK, I can't give like a full, like detailed political history here because like, dear God, it is incredibly complicated and I don't understand it very well because. You know, I I don't study Sri Lanka. If you want to go to account of this Rohini, hensman's political dimensions of the crisis in Sri Lanka is is a really good sort of like, short, like, look at what's going on here. Umm. And and this is sort of like, this is, you know, this is a broader trend like all of these protests, right? Like evidence, like every single bread right takes place in its own unique context. Like Sri Lanka, for example, like Sri Lanka used to have the world's best and largest, like mass Trotskyite party. Like they they were the Trotskyites is like the only place on Earth. The Trotskyites had like a real, like mass political party and they were like a part of the real political process. And then they like, sold out the working class and entered a bunch of governments that, like, did terrible stuff. And you know that that's like a local context. Doesn't happen anywhere else. But, you know, every single one of these states, right? Is is embedded in global capitalism. That means that every state is affected by the sort of like broader economic trends and sort of bureaucratic structures to hold everything together. They're affected by the IMF, the World Trade Organization, the World Bank. And the thing that this means is that the timings of uprisings and riots tend to synchronize with each other in reaction to sort of broader out like economic forces. And the product of this is way is the sort of like periodic ways of uprisings. And just to close this out, we're going to talk about the most recent of these. Well, it might actually not be the most recent of these by the time this goes up. But yeah. Yeah, we're going to talk about Ecuador. The situation Ecuador is very different from what's happening in Sri Lanka. The the, the biggest difference I guess is that instead of sort of like waiting for conditions to get bad enough that like an uprising happens like more or less spontaneously, which is kind of what happened she does in 19 and Ecuador there there's there's a very huge protest there. But they were largely spontaneous. But instead of, like, waiting for it, people were just like, wait. What if we just called one of these? And by people here I specifically mean the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador or konai. And you know, OK, OK, as we've seen through this whole sort of thing, right? Like bread riots like adapt to the political organizations around them. And in Ecuador, we're dealing with a quintessentially modern form of political organization, which is the indigenous confederation. And I guess I should sort of like preface this a bit with like the the the the specific form of Indigenous confederation in in Latin America that emerges in this. Is like a different thing than older ones because there have been indigenous confederation for a long time. This is like a. This is a very specific, like, political thing that emerged across Latin America in in. Sort of. The 70s and the 80s really, really are showing up in the 80s as results of like a lot of things, one of which was like how ****** the old, like Marcelynas vanguard groups, like we're on indigenous issues. And one of the one of the groups that forms in this. Is Connie, and Connie is one of the world's most militant like indigenous federations. And since their founding in 1986, they've called half a dozen uprisings against neoliberal governments, and I think they knocked off like 3 presidents. Which is a pretty impressive track record. And on July 13th, 2022, faced with skyrocketing inflation on like basic consumer goods and a like really ****** like far right government, they say it's another one. And and this is another sort of. I don't know. The thing is interesting about this is that it's. It's part general strike, like Art St protest art Riot, and part just like mass March for the from the sort of periphery of Ecuador to the core. And by periphery and core, I mean in this sort of metaphorical sense, like it's much, it's a bunch of additions to peasant groups from all over the country, just like marching on, descending on the capital of Quito. And this is a this is a complicated process. Like the, you know, OK, like the left everywhere has, like, political divides. And mostly they're kind of nonsense in a lot of ways. Like, OK, like, there's ideological divides in this, personal divides and whatever, but like. Ecuador's left. Has has real political divides, and these are these aren't like sort of petty ideological like personal stuff like. They're like they were caught under the sort of previous like old, like leftist pink tide governments of Rafael Correra. Like, there were like soldiers and cops who are beating the **** out of indigenous psychological protesters. And you know, this means that like, yeah, you know, OK, so, so Carrera is like parties running for president again or it's career is not running but careers, parties like running in an election. Right. And you know, this means like, yeah, OK, like maybe you're both leftist, right. But you know, there's a lot of people who are like, oh **** no, like I'm not voting for these guys. These are the guys who like sent the army against our anti mining protests. And so, you know, the the thing that's interesting here is that, like, like, these protests don't even pull together the entire record Dorian left. There's like other stuff going on here, too. Like there, there there's some of the unions that went on strike in 2019. Like don't go on strike this time because of some political stuff that's happening. But the thing, the thing about Conor you that's really impressive is that they're they're still organised enough and they still like they're enough that they're able to take control of parts of cities. And they have a lot of allies and supporters amongst their students and workers in keto. And this means that when the government makes this enormous mistake and arrests Conyers like kind of newish leader. OK, this guy's name. This guy's name. I guess in Spanish it's like Leonidas is this guy's name is Leonidas. He's the head of he's he's he's the head of of coronavirus. Just federation. Umm. And he's been a protest leader. Use purchase leader in 2019. That's how he got elected to like head this organization and they arrest him on day two of the protest. And this is a catastrophic mistake. The protest just like explode and you know by by by by like a week in. I think that the government's claiming they were doing $50 million of damage a day. Which I'm not actually sure I believe that because governments and corporations do this too. When talking about like losses from like strikes as they tend to overemphasize how much damage is done because it makes them like, look better in the press and it makes the protesters look worse. But they they, they, they, they, they, they they're able to damage like significant parts of the economy. And by June 30th, like, they kind of win, basically the government is forced to negotiate with them and. They don't get all of their demands, but they get price decreases for like fuel and gasoline, which is like a huge part of why this happened in the 1st place. They get bans on mining and drilling and indigenous protected areas. They get like strengthened price controls. They get like little rural loan forgiveness, like interest rate decreases. They get subsidies for farmers, get subsidies for families. They get. They managed to get the government to declare a state of emergency, health emergency over COVID. It's like this is this is impressive stuff. And. You know, and the other part of this is that they're like, OK, the agreement is that we will stop protesting if you do this. And if you don't do this, we're gonna do this again. Cool, so. Yeah, I I guess. I guess my to sort of wrap this up, I. There's there, there's an American proverb that is really common among sort of like American China watchers, which is that I. So supposedly the Chinese word for crisis is composed of two characters, danger and opportunity. And it's like not true as like linguistic anthropological analysis of China that that's not what, that's not what the characters mean. But everyone, like everyone in the US, like political establishment, like believes this, right? And, you know, but like, as as an analysis of China, it is completely useless. As an analysis of the US, of the American psyche, it's incredibly valuable, right? Because this is the way the American ruling class thinks it's it's every single crisis is both a danger and an opportunity. And that's something that we in some sense also have to do because that's, you know, these are the sort of situations that we're in, right? Bread riots. Are a thing that just they happen, right? They will continue to happen. They have been happening for thousands of years, like presumably they will happen for thousands of more years. And. There there's no use sort of like either pretending that they don't happen or making these sort of moral or tactical arguments like for or against them because they just happen. And the, the, the question that we're, that we're faced with is what are we actually going to do about it, right? Are we going to set them out? Are we going to side with the state and you're pressing them in the name of sort of like stamping out color revolutions or like providing order instability or like protecting small businesses? Or are we going to, you know, take to the streets and fight alongside them to sort of break the system that creates them? And this the second question from here is if we're going to do this, how? And what what we've what we've seen from Ecuador in the past month or so is that if you take the fight to them and you're sufficiently organized, you can win. And that means the question now, as are food prices continue to increase as food prices are only going to continue to increase? What are we gonna do? And yeah, that that's all I got. I have. I have a single question. Yep. What are we going to do? Well. I'm kind of bummed we never brought up our good friend Pete Buttigieg and his bread, his bread press fixing ordeals. Yeah, I mean that that's kind of a sign of just, like, how kind of like. I guess you could say masculinized like our culture has been that like people didn't riot over that. Because like that is a thing like if, if, if, if, if you said Pete Buttigieg back to like a late 1700s village and he tries to do this thing like he he he, he does the systematic like ride bread, price fixing, right? Like all of these people would have been getting hit by rocks. O yeah, do that again. Yeah, do that again. Wow. Just bear in. Just brazen incitement. Yeah, yeah, that's great. Well, that is it for us today. We love to incite things, folks. Until next time, go incite yourselves. Football is back, and better GM is inviting new customers to join the huddle and enjoy the action like never before. Sign up today using bonus code champion and your first wager is risk free up to $1000. You'll also have instant access to a variety of parlay selection features, player props, and boosted odd specials. Just download the bet MGM app today or go to bedmgm.com and enter. 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Together, they led their country toward a revolution against Rafael Trujillo, the brutal dictator who ruled the Dominican Republic for 30 years. Please, please help us has blood on his hands from executive producers Dania Ramirez and Eva Longoria. That's me comes the powerful retelling of this all too relevant narrative. Listen to sisters of the underground as part of Michael Toura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So by now we imagine that you've seen the theories on Tiktok. You maybe even heard the rumors, your friends and loved ones. But are any of the stories about government conspiracies and cover ups actually true? The answer is surprisingly or unsurprisingly, yes. For more than a decade we here at stuff they don't want you to know have been seeking answers to these questions. Sometimes their answers that people would rather us not explore. Now we're sharing this research with you for the first time ever in a book format you can pre-order stuff they don't want you to know. Now it's the new book from us, the creators of the podcast and video series. You can turn back now or read the stuff they don't want you to know. Available for pre-order now, it's stuff you should read books.com or wherever you find your favorite books. Welcome to it could happen here, the podcast that's increasingly about things that are actually kind of already happening of. And today it's going to be, it's going to be one of those we're talking about in the kind of the uptick in rhetoric around queer extermination ISM that's happened. Most of the stuff is. What this is, is discussions and legislative. Proposal and rhetoric that was really kicked off last month during Pride Month, specifically because of the Roe V Wade ruling that really opened the door on a few not good possibilities. But because we're gonna be talking about some more grim stuff today, we're gonna, we're gonna open with something slightly more funny. And that's a friend of the pod, Doctor Jordan B Peterson. Now, with me today is is Chris and James. Greetings. Hi, O Peterson. He got he got really mad at Elliott Page and now does not really have a Twitter account, and it's pretty funny. And a few days after he was banned for continuing to Misgender Elliot page, he released a video that can only be described as a super villain monologue, as as a part of his new partnership with daily Wire, plus the hit new streaming service of and just because I think it's funny. We're just going to, we're just gonna play a few clips of of this, of this evil super villain monologue because it's really funny, and then it'll circle back to kind of our topic towards the end, so. Ah, speaking Speaking of friend of the Pod Peterson, here's here's our here's our one of the clips that you've probably already heard if you're if you're terminally online. But it's incredibly funny if I'm required to acknowledge that my tweet violated the Twitter rules. What rules you **** ** *******? Ha, good old, good old, Peter said. You know, the, the the thing. I've always been sort of like that clip in particular. It's like, I I don't know if if I was trying. I don't know if I could emulate just this. It's sounding like you've edited together 16 clips, if you know, right? My tweet violated the Twitter rules. It's like it's his speech pattern is so bizarre. And also like in the in the video was like 9 minutes slug like preceding that line he explained what rule he broke around misgendering and harassment. So like he he explained the exact rule. But we always get more Peterson if you ask for it. Up yours woke moralists, we'll see who cancels who. Ohh like extremely funny. He's actually sneering as well. If you watch the video like, Ohh fast, just yeah, he is, he is, he is going all in on the bit he's doing, like Ozymandias, but hammed up. It's it's frankly impressive. This is this one's also also a decent one. I am employing this awkward and impossible naming style because it is now apparently mandatory and and probably doing it wrong nonetheless, as you're doing it wrong is the whole point of what is being made mandatory. But also I'm trying to make a point. I've essentially been banned from Twitter as a consequence. I say banned. Although technically I have been suspended, but the suspension will not be lifted unless I delete the hateful tweet in question, and I would rather die than do that. Rather die. That means that you have a healthy relationship to the platform of Twitter. There's also this, this great clip of him talking about how, like, I'm actually happy how my Twitter account has gone now. Twitter is insignificant in the final analysis, and you're like, what the **** does that mean? What? What the ****? What final analysis are you talking about? What do you what do you mean? The final analysis? Analysis of what? Like, what is? Oh, it's it's pretty funny. There's there is two more clips from this rant that I want to do, which kind of are going to get more to the heart of our issue today, right? They're they're not great. They actually are kind of, they kind of suck. So without further ado, here's our good doctor friend. And finally, with regard to the final phrase criminal physician, I must say that I've had some post coital, so to speak, regrets about that phrase. It is clearly the case that the surgical operation performed by the butchers who butchered Elliott Slash Ellen was legal. So was it criminal? Or not. Were the operations undertaken by the fascist physicians who carried out the Nazi medical experiments legal? Yes. Under the laws of the time. But were they criminal? I'll leave that question up to you to answer. So that's pretty gross for a lot of reasons. One, the kind of historical context of using Nazis to compare to your own transphobia is a little dicey when you consider how what the Nazis did to trans people and to like queer books like, he's advocating for the Nazi position here. Yeah, yeah, great. There's been so many bands on queer books this. Like just in the past two years, the the Library Association tracked almost 1600 books that were challenged in 2021, the highest number since the organization began tracking book bands in the past 20 years. So talk talking about like the Nazi scientist, they're like you like, you have his, his his historical context of obviously is incredibly lacking or he's just a or he's just a grifter. I think honestly, he's just kind of, I think he's just kind of lost it. I I think I don't even think he's fully a grifter. I think he's just kind of. Not understanding what's going on anymore of because there you can watch like interviews and stuff where people can try to use reasoning and logic with them, and you can watch his brain start to process it. But it's just like otherwise he just doesn't think in any sort of logical manner or put his words or his like stream of consciousness into any historical context. He just says what he wants and he's used to people just taking that as a fact. He's used to like regurgitating bad Joseph Campbell and people be like, Oh yeah, you sound smart. Would know he's actually not he's. Of but man, it's it's yeah the the whole Germany Nazi. Scientist experimentation thing is incredibly. Incredibly frustrating. I I don't even know what else to like, say about, say about that, because I mean even that that line you could focus on for a while, be like, compare how like the history of medical documentation of, like, transness and the Nazis, how that's, like, such a big thing is that the Nazis destroyed so much medical research on gender transitions, losing like, like decades and decades of research that we're only now starting to regain. Incredibly gross, but there's this 111 last one last clip I wanted to play of of of our of our good doctor and are we degenerate? In a profoundly threatening manner. I think the answer to that may well be yes, so that's not great. It really is like just advocating for the naughty position every turn. Like, yes, he's just continuing to advocate for fascistic reasoning of fascistic views of decadence and degeneracy in so much as it is a threat to civilization and a threat to Western society. And then he goes on in this clip to justify Russia's invasion of Ukraine because the US is helping Ukraine, which makes Ukraine degenerate by proxy. So Russia is doing a war on degeneracy. And that's like, that's his arguments, like, that's his level of logical reasoning. It's funny because it's like if you ever heard any of the like, radio, because every once in a while there will be radio clips of just, like Ukrainian Russian soldiers yelling at each other, and it's just both of them calling each other gay over and over again. And it's just like, really like. We should bring back that level of discourse to America. Well, we're going to take a quick break and then we will come back to talk about our other really close friend of the pod, Matthew Walsh. So stay, stay tuned for that. God. OK, I have I have one question for everyone here. What, what's, how, how, woman, what, what is what is that? Featherless biped. OK, great. Behold woman. So when we're talking about Matt Walsh, obviously last month he released a a pretty poorly made transphobic documentary that was taken just clips of him getting owned by like actual doctors for not understanding like basic ontology and medical reasoning. The documentary was just other friend of the pod. JK Rowling just expressed support for the documentary. So if that's if that's not an indicator that like. Exercism is just like a direct preamble to open fascism. I don't know what is because, I mean Matt. Matt Walsh jokingly describes himself as a fascist, but that's because his his his beliefs actually are fascistic. Like he said, it's one of those jokes that only is funny because everyone agrees on the central premise. Like it's it's that, it's that. It's that type of humor of so like JK Rowling just endorsing an open fascist. So I'm not going to talk about the documentary in depth here because. It's not that good and it doesn't really make any points that need to be refuted. It it it talks about how like, it talks about how like how puberty blockers are sterilization. Drugs, which is is is not the case long term when you're on them, yes you cannot you cannot do that cause it's obviously inhibiting your your hormones. But once you go off puberty blockers you can procreate again which which also I just want to take a second here to to look at this position which is that OK? So puberty blockers are sterilization things right? Are like, OK, so this is their arguments and sterilization, right? Who are you giving puberty blockers to children? Why the **** do you care? Well, I mean like children. It's like, well, I mean arguing. It's like always like that, but it'll make them, it'll make them permanently sterilized. Like, basically like really, you're castrating these kids by giving them human blocks. Which, no, that's not how that works. You're you're just arguing in bad faith. It doesn't matter. But anyway, I don't want to talk about the documentary in, in length because it's not interesting enough to talk about, but I was this a documentary real quick. Is this the one where he, like, goes to, like, quote, UN quote, the country of Africa and like, asks people. Yeah. And poorly. Pretty translates. Extremely racist. Yeah. Yeah. Great to see JK Rowling, like, known non racist lining up. Yeah. Like behind these essentialist tropes of Africa, the creator of Kingsley Shacklebolt. Yeah. Just the most cringe. Yeah. That's what we call a rich white woman moment. Yes. All right. So but we are going to talk about some other things now, which has been doing. Specifically, how he is increased exterminationist rhetoric into his discussions around trans people. So we're going to open my talking about D transitioners. So the the vast majority of real D transitions, which are very rare, like there's very few of them, especially considering there's already very few numbers of trans people. But like sub 1% or something, yeah, it's, it's it's very, very few, but the vast majority of people who do make the choice. The detransition are usually due to experiencing aggressive transphobia. And and the idea of the D transitioner has been inflated and used as a straw man to attack the trans community, just by and large with with many documented cases of turfs or far right activists creating like fake sockpuppet accounts pretending to be de transitioners to write the horrifying but fictional stories that that that happens a lot. There's a really famous case on Reddit of an alleged D transitioner who was found out to just be like an alt right troll. And this all really sucks, because the people who do detransition because they realize it's just not for them are generally pretty rad people who continue to be very much pro trans because they do understand the fluid nature of gender and gender expression through this entire process. Like but and anyways, when quote tweeting an alleged D transitioner expressing regret of medical decisions that they made, Matt Walsh said this quote we can't just oppose the transition of children. Yes, that's particularly evil. But it's also evil to do it to anyone of any age. This young woman was 19, a legal adult, when she was mutilated. Does that make it OK? Obviously not. Put it another way, it should be illegal for doctors to do this to anyone of any age. It should be illegal for anyone of any age to transition. O this demonstrates the jump from no one like the the the rhetoric of no one should transition until they're an adult to no one should be allowed to transition at all. And it came just as quickly as the trans community was telling you it would. This this jump is not a big one. It is very easy to say no, no hormones until you're 18, to saying no, no hormones at all. And that's that's what we're entering into Walsh's. Rhetoric is increasingly exterminationist and eliminationist just saying that, like his, all of his preferred policies would result in the total prohibition of trans identity and the criminalization of any gender affirming care. These people are fundamentally opposed to having any agency of your own body, whether that's hormones or whether that's abortion, right? Like all of these people get mad just when they see someone with colored hair like they they don't like someone's ability to have bodily. Autonomy, that's their, that's one of their core politics. And you see this a lot, especially when it comes to like trans men, because there's this notion that their that their bodies exist in service of CIS straight men, right? And anything that gets in the way of that is an attack on system and in general and all of patriarchal society. It's like very, very, very much like regular misogyny, but with an added bonus of transphobia. Conservative activist Christopher Rufo made a tweet a few days ago. The picture of Elliott Page pre transition with the caption that says this is what they took from you, right? It's it's like this notion that their bodies belong to you assist man, and by them choosing to change their bodies as they see fit, that's an attack on their bodies. Access to you. It's it's, it's, it's it redoes a whole bunch of misogyny does it does a whole bunch of really bad transphobia. It's a really gross package, but it it it it it hits on a lot of points of like, this type of patriarchal conservative brain. And I think this, this this even carries out into like. Hatred of trans women. As you know, as trans women are seen as predators, so they hate trans women to protect CIS women, right? Like you see, it's all of this like possession, right? It's it's it's this possession of the body of a female. So you need to protect it against the creepy trans women, right? It's like it's it's all of this idea of like, owning women's bodies is, is essential to a lot of these ideas of transphobia. So. We're gonna see a lot more stuff about how it's going to change, from no hormones, no transition until you're 18 to no hormones, no transition until you're 25 to no hormones and no transition at all. This past year, we've seen many proposed felony healthcare bans for trans youth. Said bills have passed in multiple states like Alabama, which means that it's going to forcibly detransition teens across the state. In Missouri, there's a similar bill in the works titled the City of Adolescence from Experimentation Act, which currently applies to individuals younger than 18. But Missouri physicians and healthcare providers under the bill would be prevented from recommending gender affirming care to patients who are under 18, and there has already been discussion in legislative sessions to extend the bill passed the age of 18. While debating the bill seeking to restrict access to gender affirming care, some lawmakers suggested that the medical interventions, like hormones, be withheld from transgender and nonbinary individuals until they're 25 years old and during a public hearing for the House bill. 2649 a psychologist Laurie Hayes testified that she believes young adults under the age of 25 are unable to fully comprehend the dramatic and drastic and irreparable, quote UN quote, changes to their bodies that will they will undergo if they receive gender affirming medical treatments like puberty blockers and hormone therapies. Also, while testifying, Hayes, the psychologist said that she supported conversion therapy, so that's surprising to nobody. It it shouldn't be. It also takes those people to the point where they're not necessarily eligible for their parents healthcare, right? So like I think 26 is the time when you can, when you're too, you age out. Yeah. So it's it's again like it's a back door, like prohibition on transitioning for a lot of people. Yeah. Yes. It's it's just trying to stop it at all. It's you can't you can't take their word for it. Like they just, yeah, they just don't want you around. That's it. They they want you to to kill yourself. They or they want you just to go away or not be trained like that's that's that's what they want. That's obviously I'm going to do a few just. Journal of American Medical Association found that gender affirming healthcare include including puberty blockers and hormones between the ages of 13 and 20 was associated with 60% lower odds of moderate or severe depression and 73% lower odds of suicidality. Now, the study published last year by the Trevor Project found that among transgender nonbinary minors, hormone therapy associated with nearly 40% lower odds of recent depression and suicide attempts. So they just want to ban the things that make you more likely to live, right they? They just don't want you around. That's the actual message. So back back to just kind of Speaking of just not wanting you around. We're going to do some updates on protection Texas kids. Uh, the the extremely open, extremely transphobic, openly Christian fascists. Their words not mine group based in Texas, who organized a lot of events to harass either drag shows or harass pride events last month. It's leader Kelly Niedert I'm going, that's why I'm going to say it, tweeted a few weeks ago. Quote let's start rounding up people who participate in pride. Beds. Huh. I I wonder what she means by that. I wonder what? I wonder what that means. Surely doesn't mean she just wants to kill all gay people. Oh, oh, it does. OK. And and another tweet from the main protect Texas kids account was today's protest went well. No children seemed to be in the drag show, but there were a bunch of adults wearing mouse ears and watching them men dressed up as Disney princesses dance around. Totally normal and not weird, right? So it's obviously not about protecting kids, right? Like it's they that's not the focus, that's not, that's not the focus of their tweet, that's not the focus of what they want, right? Protecting kids, quote UN quote is a cheap excuse just to want to hate gay people and want gay people to go away. That's that's all. That's all it is. We've been like, it's. We're kind of retreading the same ground here, but man, it's it's so it is still frustrating how many people like fall for the bit. It's not it's not about protecting kids. It's not about saving kids from groomers. You can look at all of the sexual abuse in evangelical churches, Catholic churches, Christian summer camps, whatever. It's not. It's not about protecting kids they don't give a single ****. It's about wanting gay people to go away now, both Kelly Netarts and protect Texas kids accounts, which they used to organize their Christian fascist. Both of those got banned in mid June. Kelly has got banned for saying let's start rounding up people who participate in pride events. But this this extends beyond Texas. This extends beyond Twitter.com, right? Obviously these people were just using Twitter to organize, so they're already extended out into the real world. But it's not. It's not, it's not just Texas, either. See, I think it's a congressional candidate. Mark Burns, who is a a pro Trump pastor, was running for South Carolina House district. He called for the execution of LGBTQ and trans people by using grooming rhetoric. And then he laid out exactly how. Executions could legally be done. So this type of like state enforced genocide, let's let's play this, let's play a clip. The LGBT transgender grooming our children's minds is a national security threat because it is ultimately designed to destabilize the Republic we called the United States of America. That's why when I'm elected, I don't want to just vote. I want to start holding people accountable for treason to the Constitution I am going to push to rein. Black quack quack is the House of Unamerican Activities Committee. It was a real committee that was formulated back in the 50s and is a committee that we should reenact that starts holding these people accountable for treason. You need to hold people for treason, start having some public hearings, and start executing people who are found guilty for their treasonous acts against the Constitution of the United States of America, just like they did back in 1776. You know what? South Carolina. This is our guy? No? So that was an amazing the way he misspoke and called it the House of Unamerican activities. Sounds like a fun place. So that's not ideal, is it? Of that kind of sucks. Yeah. That was really out there. He's yeah macide advocating. It's just it's just more it's means it's trying they're trying to mainstream the political ability to advocate genocide, right. And some of them it's not some of them, it's not fully catching on yet, right. It it's we're on the on ramp to this this South Carolina pastor was defeated by the incumbent representative William Timmins in the GOP primary for the state's fourth Congressional District. But pastor mark? Burns still received 24% of the vote. So that's still a lot of people. That's still a lot of people voting for that and that number. I don't think it's going to shrink. Yeah. And like, and it's also worth noting that, like, everyone loses and like, it is so unbelievably hard to beat an incumbents in primary. Like, it's just, it's yeah. So like. Like? Even even if he was just a normal guy with like regular politics, he would have lost that election. So still, yeah, yeah. So it's not actually a referendum on his popularity, like the popularity of what he's saying. It's. 24% of the vote. Yeah, it's worth noting that like even here in Southern California, right where we supposedly like very liberal, we had a candidate for Sheriff's Office who is the was the deputy city attorney and was endorsed by the Union Tribune just openly spewing like transphobic groomer stuff. Yeah, public meetings and getting endorsed by the local newspaper. They were rescinded their endorsement later. But this isn't just like a a red state thing if people think that that is that. That's what I would say. That'd be a lot more common than people who run for Sheriff, who generally tend to be more conservative because they're running for sheriff. True. All right, well, let's let's have an ad break and then we'll come back to talk about wait, talk about Roe V Wade and and the. Attack on future rights, including the ability to have same-sex relationships. Oh wow, what a fun time we have today. All right, we are, we are back. So after the Supreme Court overturned Roe V Wade last month, there was an immediate push for anti-gay, anti trans legal challenges using the same legal logic against the right to privacy based off of the the traditions deeply rooted in our nation's history. Quote UN quote. So this was like undoubtedly going to happen, right? We've been. We've been proposing that this was a possibility for a while, but it was definitely made worse by Justice Clarence Thomas, friend of the pod, who argued in a concurring opinion that the Supreme Court should, quote, reconsider its past rulings codifying rights such as the right to use contraception, the right to have a same-sex relationship, and same sex marriage, invoking Griswold, Laurence and Oberfeld. Three cases having to do with Americans fundamental rights to privacy, due process, and equal protection, Thomas wrote. Quote we have a duty to correct the error regarding these established in those precedents, which pretty grim, pretty grim framing there because that's a bad sign. We are already seeing stuff like this in effect, actually, we don't need to wait for the Supreme Court to make ruling states that are starting to do this exact thing. In an ongoing Alabama lawsuit that cites Dobbs overturning Roe V Wade about medically detransitioning all trans teenagers, there is this deeply threatening turn of phrase. Quote No one adult or child has the right to transitioning treatments not deeply rooted in our nation's history and tradition. Huh. Huh. Interesting how they put adult or child there, isn't that isn't that intriguing? And it's also fun how the the deeply rooted in our nation's history thing is now just sort of like here. Here is the word that you say to let you do fascism and it's like, oh hey, do you know what is deeply rooted in our, in our nation's tradition in history shooting congressmen? This is the thing that has been done many times. Like, maybe again, like, like, this is like, this is, this is the whole, like, this whole thing. It's just like it's it's so the whole thing is it's so incredibly sort of nakedly transparent and cynical and like, this is, you know, it's it's the standard fascist thing, right? Like we're going to create some sort of mythical past and then we're gonna, like, resurrect whatever ******* things existed back then. It's like, oh, hey, what actually existed back then? I don't know. People tried to kill the government all the time. Like they're really, they're really playing from like, the lower keys T traditionalist framework here. They're they're doing all the bits we thought they would do. It's. Not great, uh. Late last month, during the end of Pride, Texas Republican Party unveiled its updated official position on LGBTQ issues, defining homosexuality as, quote, an abnormal lifestyle choice, UN quote, and also opposing quote all efforts to validate transgender identity. The party's new official stance on LGBTQ issues was unveiled during Pride Month and as advocates fight against a record number of anti LGBTQ bills introduced in states across the country this year, more than 340 bills, according to the Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest LGBTQ advocacy group. On the legal front, thousands of Republican activists met at the parties biennial convention in Houston in mid June to agree to the party's platform on a range of issues, including the rejection of the 2020 election. Assaults and a call to a repeal the 1965 Voting Rights Act no. To prevent discrimination against black voters, ah, this is, I would say this is a mask off moment, but they've never had the mask on in the 1st place. People people have like that's that's like that specific one. That is a thing like like half of the Republican Party's platform has been people suing about the Voting Rights Act exactly, exactly 50 years. It's not actually messed up, it's just that they're doing it louder than they were doing it before. Section titled Homosexuality and Gender issues. Had the party stating that LGBTQ people should have no legal protection from discrimination and in fact suggested intent to ensure people's ability to do hate speech and hate crimes, part of the 40 page resolution reads. Quote Homosexuality is an abnormal lifestyle choice. We believe there should be no granting of special legal entitlements or creation of special status for homosexual behavior regardless of state of origin, and we oppose any criminal or civil penalties against those who oppose homosexuality out of faith conviction. Or belief in traditional values. Ha. Hmm. I just, I I just want to put it on the record here that, like the number of a number of my friends who have been attacked like in the last three months is. It's a lot. I got I got called yeah, I got, I got called a ****** for the first time in the streets of Portland a few months ago. Yeah. It's it's it's it's, it's it's it's it's accelerating. It's it's going, it's it's it's going. But yeah, I mean specifically I think a lot of the, the, the, the last part of that resolution there about, you know, opposing any civil penalty against those who oppose homosexuality out of faith. I think that's, that's probably definitely a referencing Stedfast Baptist Church. The church that just opens that openly advocates the genocide of queer people, which we've talked about in our in our last city of Hate episode. Yeah, I think, I think they're also trying to go back to like the whole like cake ******** thing. Oh yeah. Obviously like stuff like that. It's like it's we honestly we are so past the cake problem Now because now they just wanna just yeah now they wanna murder they they they just wanna do like mass. They just want to do mass genocide like I'm so over cakes like and in the trend of increasing the age barrier of gender affirming healthcare into adulthood that Texas Republicans called for the ban of gender affirming healthcare including the distribution of puberty blockers or hormone suppressing therapies and the. And the performance of gender affirming surgeries to anyone under the age of 21, so that is the new Texas Republican official position, is that these things should be banned for under the age of 21. And that's not a, that's not a hard cap. They're going to keep raising that cap as often as they can. And as proof, I will OfferUp the past 35 minutes of episode. Like everything we've said in the past 35 minutes is supporting the opinion that that CAP they want it to go up. Yeah, sure. They also simultaneously advocate for, like, heterosexual relationships, age of consent to just drop. Oh yeah, like 1212 years old. Speaking Speaking of Texas, near the end of June, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who sent his office home in the celebration of the overturning of Roe V Wade, said that he will defend Texas anti ****** law if the Supreme Court revisits Lawrence V Texas. I'm going to play a extremely frustrating clip here. Here's a fun time. I'm sure you read Justice Thomas's concurrence, where he said that there were a number of other. Of these issues, Griswold, Lawrence, and Overfelt that he felt needs to be looked at again. Obviously, the Lawrence case came from Texas. That was the what outlawed ******? Would you, as attorney general be comfortable defending a law that once again outlawed ****** that questioned Lawrence again? Or Griswold, or gay marriage that came from the state legislature to to put to the test with justice? Thomas said. Yeah, I mean, there's all kinds of issues here, but certainly the Supreme Court has stepped into issues that I don't think there was any constitutional provision dealing with. They were legislative issues, and this is one of those issues. And and there may be more. So it would depend on the issue and depending on what state law it says at the time and what was overruled, just just for the sake of time here, you wouldn't rule out that if the state legislature passed the exact same law that that Lawrence overturned on ****** you wouldn't have any problem then defending that. Taking that case back to the Supreme Court. Yeah, look, my job is to defend state law and and I'll continue to do that. That is my job under the Constitution and and I'm I'm certainly willing. And so first of all, in, in this clip of Ken Paxton, he looks like a zombie. Yes. I don't know what's going on with this picture, but his eye, his eye keeps twitching in a way that looks really uncanny. He looks like, he like. Look at look at this man's face. Look at what is going on. You know, pause. No, he looks like that motion, too. It's not an unfortunate pause. He just looks. There is something going wrong with Ken Paxton. We need you to the bottom of this. But also all of that stuff about make enforcing laws against ****** making *** *** illegal, they they don't want gay people to **** is what they're actually saying. And if you do, they wanna send you to jail. So that's something that Ken Paxton once wants to do, wrapped in very flowery language about defending the laws on record that laws that you are enforcing, therefore you're making the laws. In effect. Huh? So. 11 aspect of this that I want to touch on again before we close out. In our in our city of hate episodes about the Christian fascists in Dallas, attacking drag shows and Steadfast Baptist Church. And even in some of the stuff that we've gone over in this episode, right, there's a lot of talk about like government approved extermination, whether that be like for treason, for unamerican acts, executions based off biblical law, rounding up people for degenerate or deviant behavior, arresting doctors for performing gender affirming surgeries. There's there's a lot of like, talk around like the government's ability to legally genocide people. But. The other aspect of this is like the vigilante justice angle of people wanting to just do physical violence themselves. And there's a way that these two things can intersect in a really interesting way. I'm going to play one one last clip here. You know some teachers pushing sex values on your third grader. Why don't you go into thrash the teacher, talk to a normal person's kids about sex in kindergarten? You get beaten up. You should be beaten up. Please. If I was a parent and my 5th grade daughter had had to sleep and shower. In some kind of cabin at some summer camp that I paid money to send my child to and there was a man calling himself a woman sleeping in her cabin. My husband would have beat him into the ground. Where are the men actually standing up against? These men who think they are women that are trying to compete in these female sports shouldn't put up with it anymore. You need to intervene, you need to show up for the sporting and like, this is not happening. Actually, there is almost nothing that can be done. That is that is over the line to stop this disgusting. There was a time. In this country of just a little more decency, where if someone even voiced the idea of taking your kid to a drag show, they'd be arrested. They are underqualified to have children. They should have their children taken away from them because it's child abuse. So that's a lot of stuff. But right, you know it it it fluctuates between talking about people taking this into their own hands in a very, like, obviously like, misogynistic and transphobic way. Again, it's about, like the access to, you know, protecting access to the feminine body. And then a lot of other stuff around, you know, the government arresting people and such, right. It's about the mix between like doing stuff yourself, you know, in a form of like vigilantism or, you know, eventually advocating for the, for the government's ability to do this. Now we've covered a number of incidents of like a violence or of things that that were escalating to the point of that right before it stopped across, you know, the the Dallas area. We talked about stuff in Boise, ID with Patriot front, we talked about the proud boys who stormed the library outside of San Francisco. Think those are in our, in our, I think I talked about most of those across a few of the city paid episodes. Then we have there's, but there there is other incidents outside of just those cities in Atlanta. A youth justice group was forced to cancel their rally in support of trans rights after an organizer received a specific quote, vulgar death threat in Kalama, Washington. A school was put on lockdown after an anti transit student threatened a mass shooting following a broad student walkout in support of a trans classmate who had been assaulted. People graffitied Perves work here on an elementary school in Ventura County, California, following a local right wing papers story about a third grade teacher who affirmed a trans students name and pronouns. In the lead up to Pride Month, an anti LGBTQ activist named Ethan Schmidt Crockett vowed to hunt gay people and trans people and their allies at Target stores. Following the story's decision to celebrate pride, he made the same threat a month before. In June, he attended the counter protest of a Pro gun control March for Our Lives demonstration carrying an AR15. In Kiel, WI, schools are forced to shut down and go virtual after bomb threats were made in response to the district's investigation of anti trans harassment by three students. Something I've been thinking about a lot the past few weeks is that even before Roe V Wade was overturned. Multiple states enacted laws for like vigilante bounty hunters to do the work of the state that the state wasn't legally allowed to do yet like directly, right? And to they were getting regular people to combat and intimidate providers into not doing abortion procedures. And we're already seeing an increase in fiscal attacks targeting queer people, and I think many more regular people are waiting for the state government's permission to do the same thing. We don't need to wait for the Supreme Court to say *** *** can be made illegal, right? States can already start doing this stuff now, and there's already people waiting in the wings, and as soon as they get the go ahead, they will jump. At this opportunity, I'm going to play one final clip that is pretty, pretty grim. I just saw the man tell me in public. That he can't wait until he's legally available. Still, he's legally able to hunt me down. I know that a man in public. You can't wait until you can legally hunt us down. This is not OK. This is not OK. So that was a queer person who lives in Oklahoma. Talking about something that happened to them last month. And I try to, when I make these episodes, I try to not just lay out a whole bunch of bad things, be like, here's the problem, all right, bye everybody. Like, because that sucks, but also. I don't know what the solution here is because this sucks. The California House and Senate just passed Bill SB107. This bill would provide many protections for families fleeing states like Texas and Alabama. It would protect them from extradition from out-of-state investigations and from out of state custody judgments based on providing gender affirming healthcare. The bill is currently in review by the California Committee on Appropriations and then it would need to be signed by the governor. If your state doesn't have a trans sanctuary law on the docket, maybe it's time to. Ask your representative about that, preferably maybe when they're like out at dinner or at church. But also like. Even getting to the point where we're making plans to flee to other states when trans people are forced to make plans to flee out of country, when you're investigating what kind of citizenship you can get based on your ancestral family history once we're at that point. It's really hard. Like, it's it's. And in my in discussions with queer friends, the past few, like the past few weeks, we've been having more and more conversations about that, more and more plans about when things really do fully break down, where do we go? What do we do? Like, and it sucks because there's so many people who live in states like Oklahoma, like Texas, right, where that's people's homes, that's where, that's where these people are living, and they shouldn't be forced to leave. Like they say that that shouldn't happen. And we have great folks like the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club, which I think are providing a really good example of how queer people can work together to start doing community defense in your own areas to say, no, this is our home too, and we're going to ******* walk around with rifles to defend it if we have to. Obviously not everyone mentally is able to do that right, but there's, there's there's other ways to get. Enter to get more connected to your local community, to strengthen like, queer areas inside, you know, states where these things are happening. The other thing I see a lot with queer people that makes me really sad is that fighting the state, right? Fighting these types of big homophobic institutions who want to kill us, that's hard and scary. We feel so powerless. We we want to feel like we have any agency. We want to feel like we have any power at all, because there's so many people with power who are hurting us, and it's hard to actually fight back against those. But we feel powerless as we want to feel like we're able. So instead we turn on other people who are within our own communities because it's easier to attack people who are like us. It's it's it's easier to to to do to do that right. It still gives you a sense of having agency, but they're trying to murder us all, like personal, like disagreements on politics or whatever aside, like. It would be really nice if we stop just doing nonsense, fighting with each other and doing dumb like click drama, dumb discourse like they're trying to, they're trying to kill us. Can we not? Can we not do that? I know you want to find some way to push back on something so you feel like you have an ability to do anything. And doing it against the police, doing against your state government, doing it against the Supreme Court, that's much harder, right? It's easier to do it against, you know, a friend of yours or someone who used to be friends with. That's so much easier. But. That's not helping in their attempts to just do genocide. OI, think. Making plans to get out of where you are if you have to. Making plans is necessary sometimes. I've I've thought of this, I've been even me in the Pacific Northwest have had have have had many thoughts about that. But it's also very important to start strengthening your relationships with other queer people in your communities and starting to put together ways to work with them. To make a show for us and say, hey, we're here, we're not going to. We're here to stay right now. You can't you can't scare us out right now because there needs to be some way to combat it. Because. These people they're trying to do, they're trying to be regressive, right? Like there we are already at a point that we progressed far enough that there they are scared of how much progress has happened, so trying to turn the clock back. Our challenge is to keep the change coming and push back against these people who are trying to hold on to the dead 20th century, right? The fear of change and the fear of the future is driving their return to the past. We don't need to just run away because we should. We should be winning this fight in some ways because we already hold. We already hold the ground that they want to take away from us, so yeah, bad stuff is coming. But just because bad things happened in history doesn't mean they need to happen again. Like we there is ways to intervene to stop this. Should you keep your passports renewed? Yes, you obviously should. But we don't just need to run away because we actually have ground to stand on here. So yeah, and I think, I think one thing it's also important to remember is that the people who got us here were facing way, way worse odds than we are. Yeah, the people who had to do this. Yeah, and so like. Like the the job that we have is incredibly intimidating. It is also easier than the stuff that has already been done right and we already we already got to this point facing. Extremely harsh conditions and we already got there. I don't know, it's just it's always struggling to try to find ways to think about this that gives you a little bit of like. You know, it's like it's so easy to be a doomer. It's so easy just to say we're all ****** we all need to move away. That's the simple solution. But. So there's most simple things are also usually incomplete and wrong. So just trying to find other ways to think about this problem. Because we don't need to tell poor people to run away, and you don't need to tell them they have to fight either. You know, people can make their own decisions and offer their own resources and start. Operating in a network. That helps the survival of all of us in increasingly challenging times. And I should also say like non queer people like. Look, the the defining characteristics of this moment is that there is a silent majority that supports career rights. Yeah, and if, if. The, the, the, the. The only way that we actually lose this is if is if that majority does nothing. But if that, if that majority moves, if the CIS people who actually believe in this stuff and if the non queer people who actually believe that we should have rights and we should be able to live our lives do stuff, we will ******* crush these people. They will be remembered as a ******* grain of dust in the sand that was crushed by the tide of history. And we can do that. We can destroy them. We can, we can, we can, we can make it for, we can make this moment in history a incredibly brief blip where people are like, oh hey, that was wasn't it weird when homophobia came back for like 3 years and then it was just gone again? That, that, that, that is in our power. We just have to do it. Yep. Alright, well. Strengthen community relations. Stop. Stop doing nonsense infighting for no good reason because you want to feel powerful. Put that effort into actually fighting the people that are trying to hurt you, or put that effort into. Making friends. Yeah, that does it for us today. That was my episode on the increase in queer extermination ISM. Yeah, see you on the other side. Football is back, and bet MGM is inviting new customers to join the huddle and enjoy the action like never before. Sign up today using bonus code champion and your first wager is risk free up to $1000. You'll also have instant access to a variety of parlay selection features, player props, and boosted odd specials. Just download the bet MGM app today or go to bedmgm.com and enter. Bonus code champion and place your first wager risk free up to $1000 the bet MGM app is the perfect way to experience the excitement of wagering on live sports now in more markets than ever. Visitbetmgm.com for terms and conditions must be 21 years of age or older to wager Virginia only new customer offer. All promotions are subject to qualification and eligibility requirements. Rewards issued as non withdrawable free bets or site credit free bets expire 7 days from issuance. Please gamble responsibly gambling problem call 188853230. 500. Your miraval matte courage already runs in your blood. He needs to be stopped with being silent and complacent for far too long. Sisters of the Underground is a new scripted series about fearless women exploring the life and legacy of the Mirabal sisters, Dominican women who were brave enough to challenge decades of oppression. Together, they led their country toward a revolution against Rafael Trujillo, the brutal dictator who ruled the Dominican Republic for 30 years. Please, please help us has blood on his hands. From executive producers Dania Ramirez and Eva Longoria. That's me comes the powerful retelling of this all too relevant narrative. Listen to sisters of the underground as part of Michael Tura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So by now we imagine that you've seen the theories on tick tock. You maybe even heard the rumors, your friends and loved ones. But are any of the stories about government conspiracies and cover ups actually true? The answer is surprisingly or unsurprisingly, yes. For more than a decade, we here at stuff they don't want you to know have been seeking answers to these questions. Sometimes their answers that people would rather us not explore. Now we're sharing this research with you for the first time ever in a book format you can pre-order stuff they don't want you to know. Now it's the new book from us, the creators of the podcast and video series. You can turn back now or read the stuff they don't want you to know. Available for pre-order now, it's stuff you should read books.com or wherever you find your favorite books. Hello and welcome to it could happen here a podcast about things that could happen, or in today's case, are about to happen. I want to talk to you today about the Friendship Park, which exists between San Diego and Tijuana. If you haven't spent time at the border, it's difficult to understand how, despite getting bigger and uglier every year, it feels at once omnipresent and nonexistent. Friendship Park was always one of the places where the board had loomed, but it never quite managed to beat out the tremendous feelings of goodwill you could experience there. On a Saturday morning, on a piece of sand next to a steel fence, the demarcates the end of the United States. What is exist to control us, not to protect us? And this is never more apparent than it was at Friendship Park, where you could watch grandparents meeting grandkids and dreamers checking in with their parents. A friendship park, 1/2 century old institution that allowed families divided by the border to meet across the French. The border certainly didn't make anyone feel safer. But overtime, people who had never set foot on the two miles of sand in Imperial Beach that many families walked across weekly to be together made laws that would make it even harder for those families to be together. For decades, the park was the only place these mixed immigration status families could come together. People flew from across the US to meet relatives who were trying to make the crossing N to join their friends and loved ones. It was an emotional place, but most of the time it was a happy place. You could see kids having parties on the Mexican side, and sometimes concerts would take place with the band split between two countries with playing one tune. On the Tijuana side, the fence is covered in murals. At moments it felt like a small victory over the pointless cruelty that happens here on a daily basis. The pocket itself was opened by Pat Nixon in 1951 at the time, she said. I hope there won't be a fence here too long. Since then, the US government has built a secure fence in the 1990s under Bill Clinton. Then it's supposedly more secure fence following 911. Then it built the secondary wall in 2009. 2012 gate was installed to allow people to enter at certain times on weekends and meet their families, separated by just one barrier. Now there are plans to replace that secondary wall, but building a 30 foot wall under the pretence that the current structure is unsound. This new wall made it a Trump design, but built under Biden's instruction. Will not have a gate. And the last place in the country that families could touch and heal will be gone forever. Customs and Border protection blocked access to Friendship Park in February 2020. Heavy rains that year 4th state officials temporarily closed border field State Park, the larger park in which Friendship Park is nestled. Since then. Border Patrol has not opened the gate that lets people unite briefly with their families. They claim an influx of migrants has prevented them from having the staffing required to open the park. But on weekends, agents are posted up right by where the park gate is anyway. In case people try and make the crossing without permission in order to see the families that many of them have been separated from for over 2 years. Throughout those two years, I've crossed to Tijuana to report on the growing number of people come from around the world, from Haiti, from Central and South America and Ethiopia, and recently Ukraine, to name but a few countries. Despite their heartbreaking stories of danger, fear and loss. And separation from the people they love. They haven't been able to file asylum claims due to the Trump administration's spurious use public health laws to severely and illegally limit asylum. I don't have time here to explain the entirety of the Migrant protection Protocol in Title 42. And I don't really want to either because. The justification behind them isn't what's important. The cruelty they manifest is what's important. Joe Biden, who came to office promising a kinder approach, has defended some of these policies in court with his Department of Justice. And a particular cruelty of Title 42, which allowed authorities to expel migrants who arrived at US land borders, has persisted despite Biden's recent change of heart, because several states managed to sue successfully to keep it in place. In the midst of all this, more and more people have been separated by the border. Now, the Biden administration is looking to permanently close the one little island of hope that remained on a beach at the end of America. Obviously, a park with a massive fence doesn't solve a broken system or make the cruelty any less cruel. But it was a place for healing and kindness and love and families. And now that place two is under threat. I caught up with Robert Rivard, a friend of Friendship Park, to talk about the park, the threats to it, and what you can do to help. Robert, would you like to start off to Spain, introducing yourself and explaining sort of where you fit in this in the Friendship Park world and in the world of the border more generally. My name is Robert Vivar and I'm part of the French of Friendship Park for Leadership Group. And, you know, the reason I'm I'm so involved with Friendship Park and my friendship park is so important to me is because I was actually one of those family members that at one point in my life I was deported and the only way that I was able to see some of my family. Was through the border wall there at Friendship Park. In particular my son, who is active duty military and because of his military status. You know that was not able to to come across the border or it was very difficult for him to secure authorization from his command to be able to cross the border. And therefore the only type of visit that I could have with my son and and my my granddaughters was through that border wall. So first hand I I understood very well the importance of allowing on the weekends. At least for, you know, a few hours on the weekend, that opportunity for families to to be able to to meet there at Friendship Park. Yeah. So perhaps we should explain for people who aren't here in San Diego what the what Friendship Park is, right? Or perhaps what it was in, say, 2019 before it was shut absolutely back up prior to COVID Friendship Park is a. By National Park, separated by a border wall, actually, by two border walls on the southwestern tip of the United States bordering Mexico. It's a border between Imperial Beach and Tijuana Beach, and Friendship Park is actually a strip of land inside Porterfield State Park, and that strip of land is in between. 2 border walls, border fences if you if you may say so, and that part is considered to us Friendship Park, which is the area where. A person's families of mixed status families from both sides of the border with me. But it wasn't only a place for families to meet. There's also a place for people of good nature of the United States and Mexico to be able to meet and and also extend their friendship between the two countries and two communities, you know, back up now 50, almost 51 years ago. This is the area that then first Lady Pat Nixon actually inaugurated as International Friendship Park and actually went as far as cutting a barbed wire or having the Secret Service cut the barbed wire there at the park so she could reach across the to the Mexico side and hug the people of Mexico. Because of the, uh, the, you know, the sentiment, the feeling of of that friendship between the two countries. And you know, who are very famous words that you wish that there would no longer be a fence here to separate these two great countries. And of course we know that 51 years later, almost 51 years later, that has taken an opposite course of direction where we now have two border walls. Plans are to erect 2 even higher, uglier hate walls to divide our two great countries. Yeah, so perhaps again, I think people have a. Very. The way that people see the border when they don't live on the border is very different to the way we see the border when we live on the border, right? And I think part of that is in this understanding of walls and fences and barriers and the various things which we have already along the border, right. So maybe you could give us a little sort of potted history of the different. I think you're right there, secure fences, right, that were built through the Friendship Park and across the sort of San Diego, Tijuana area. Right. Well, you know, again, for the longest time, the only fence that used to separate the two countries was that, that strand of barbed wire. However, after Operation Gatekeeper 911. It was uh decided to uh to build a uh, a sturdier fence and then in 2011 the secondary fence was erected and at that time the threat of the park being closed again because of the advocacy of friends of Friendship Park, it was negotiated negotiated with with the Border Patrol that the the park would. Continue to remain open with a limited access over at that time 25 persons at a time on Saturdays and Sundays from 10:00 o'clock in the morning to 2:00 o'clock in the afternoon. That second wall was erected when the federal government. Claimed eminent domain from the state of California and acquired that piece of land. Which is now considered the enforcement area and and to us is the area that we better known as Friendship Park. And so what's the there's a threat to the park now, right? There's there's a new threat and I think people. Again, that might not have realized that we're continuing to build border, border wall, border barrier, border **** it's sometimes called, depending on what part of the country you're in. But can you explain how, despite Joe Biden having signed this executive order, saying what he claims, saying not one more mile of wall, how are we still having this threat of building a bigger, uglier wall? Right. And and, you know, I think that's that's precisely the question. The differential friendship part for asking that why is it that? Give up President Biden has stated that he would not build one more inch of Trump's border wall, all of a sudden now has decided. To finish the construction of of Trump's border wealth, it's a question that that that we all ask in this part of the. The petition that we have reached out to Border Patrol as to the inclusion of the public and in those plans on continuing the replacement of that wall with 30 foot bollard down fencing and that 30 foot bollard fencing, that's what people will be familiar with as the the Trump Wall, right? That is correct. There's something that you know the fencing that exists right now. Uh. You know, it's it's there. And I guess, uh, even though we we may not like what it is and and what it represents. You know, but it is there. But now to go even further and further desecrate our part with 230 foot bollard style defenses just completely. Obstructs the the aesthetics of of the park. Desecrates our park. Yeah. And so yeah. With this sort of further threat to the park looming, you you touched on it earlier, but I'd like to go back to like what the park means, especially to families who are separated by the border. Right. And can't cross to see each other. Oh, absolutely. You know, on on when the project was open on on a weekly on a weekend basis. That, you know, we would have families, uh you know for example grandmothers that had never met their their grandchildren, you know, meet their grandchildren for the first time right across that border wall. You know, mothers that hadn't seen their their kids in 2025, thirty years, you know, the joy of, you know, of of being able to at least see them across that border wall and and just, you know, a couple inches away from them. And even though you know nothing could pass through through that barrier, the only thing that was able to to pass through the the orifice there on the wall or the fencing with the tip of your finger. Which is why we kind of. Uh, created what we call the pinky kiss. Because that's the only thing that would reach across, and that's the only way we would be able to hug and kiss our loved ones on the other side of the border. Very significant and you know something that. That we hope more people would understand is that. You know, by having the park open and families are allowed to be able to visit across that fence. It would allow people, even though it's not the best scenario, but at least it would give people. It would give families the opportunity to remain being a family, to have a little bit of contact with their loved ones, something very important. We keep hearing about reasons for, you know, border walls and more tech tech and security and so forth is because incursions. Well, to us, this is one of the reasons why, you know, we have more incursions because people get desperate. From losing contact with their loved ones, that they're willing to risk their own life to be able to reach their loved ones. That's why you have increase in people trying to swim across the border wall. That's why you have people reaching out to further points in the desert, trying to reach their loved ones. That's why you have people climbing some of these 30 foot walls and falling and, you know, gravely injuring themselves. Because you get to the point that your family is everything in your life and you're willing to risk your life to reach that family. When border when Friendship Park was open. We had a lot of conversations with a lot of people that that came to the park to visit their families. And in speaking to them, they would tell you that, you know, being able to see their, their families, their loved ones and and sharing those moments together with very comforting and very energizing and motivating to continue to fight, to search for a legal opportunity to be able to reunite with their loved ones. Yeah. And I think we should point out that like since 2020, since the park has been closed, it's not just the park being closed. Which is created like a hostile environment for people seeking asylum or seeking to reunite with their families in the United States, where we've had the migrant Protection Protocol, which is better known as remain in Mexico. Right. And we've had Title 42, sometimes called Catch and release, both of which do the same things that you said, which is increase the amount of people who cross in higher risk areas and increase the danger to migrants, chiefly. And so there's this. There's this perception, I think, that things changed in January 2021, but they didn't. I think for most people, certainly people I've met trying to come to the United States to be safe, they still can't. And as you say they. They still can't see their families. And perhaps we should also mention that, like, sometimes we talk about Friendship Park being binational, but it's more than that, right? Like, it's not just people from Mexico who come to meet their families at Friendship Park. It's a it's there's people from all around the world who are unable to come to the United States but are in Tijuana, right? Right, absolutely. And, you know, it's not just, you know, families that gather there. It's a friendships, it's an opportunity for people from. Any part of the world to be able to make a connection, make a friend right across that border wall without. Actually, having to cross the border, if for whatever reason they may be, they they cannot come across to to the Mexico or to the Mexico side. You know the the part is all about. Friendship, that's what? Why to first Lady Pat Nixon was so important. The declination of the park, your consideration of the great friendship that existed and has always existed and and you know what? No matter what happens, that is going to continue because in particular San Diego and Tijuana would really want community. There's a tremendous population in San Diego that have relatives in Tijuana. And vice versa. And it's not only you know the the family, but commerce. You know, we're one community and one way or another, you know. People are are gonna stay connected. Always figure out different ways to be able to to remain connected and have that friendship. And I think part of the reason for that is because. You know, a lot of people see that, that border fence and they see a barrier, but we see that much more than that barrier is the barrier in our heart. And with, you know, the people of our community, that barrier doesn't exist. The only barrier to us is that that fence, the barrier and the heart does not exist because we have respect for each other and and we consider ourselves friends and one community on both sides of that border wall. Definitely. I think it's yeah. The the border exists a lot more sort of on the ground than it does in the Community here, and I think so many thousands of people across every day. It's really odd to have it presented as this hard, impenetrable thing. And then it's also just an annoyance and a reason that we sit in our cars for hours trying to cross north. I wonder if we can talk a little bit about because the the there's a friendship park and then there's the the southern side right park, Dalam estad, what's CM official sort of set up in in Mexico with regards to the park? It's a little different from the US, right? Yeah, well, you know, the big difference on the Mexico side is like our Pastor John Bannister says, on the Mexico side is 1 big party, you know, when one big. Friendly, happy atmosphere. Just like what you would expect to find in any part where families gather on on the weekend and now you know during summer vacation, even during the week. You know a bustling beach city with a a magnificent friendly park, family oriented, family friendly park where where people go to enjoy. The beautiful part. Unfortunately, uh, our our friends on the US side cannot enjoy the park as as much as the our friends on the Mexico side do because of these limitations on the part. Yeah it's it's a shame like you said, it's very contrasting like the US side is kind of difficult to get to and it's only open certain hours. It's well, it's not open at all post we should explain that right. So it was closed in 2020 for. COVID and then if I understand right, following that it remained closed because Border Patrol were understaffed. They claim, right? That is what we have been told, that our friendship Friendship Park originally that it was closed because of COVID and the understanding was that when the COVID situation was over then that their plan was to reopen Friendship Park. However, now we're being told that. Because of a lack of. Personnel that they're not able to staff it accordingly to be able to open it. You know, you touched a little bit earlier on the MPP program. You know, if there has been an increase in incursions into the US, a lot of it has to do with the asylum process that has been halted for so many years, for the last couple of years that, you know, forces people in desperation to take their life at risk. And try to gain entry into the US, you know. It's not that difficult to understand if you're living in a country where crime and violence is widespread. And, uh, you have a choice whether you leave your country and travel 3 or 4000 miles to reach some kind of safety. Uh, to protect the life of your of your loved ones, of your family. Uh. You know. You're you're going to, you're going to. If you risk that, you're going to, you're going to risk, you know your life trying to get across it and protect your family, and the only way you can do it is by jumping over that fence or streaming around that ocean. You know, that's what we've seen happening and a lot of that has got to do with the asylum process that is being shut down. And continues to be shut down. People are going to continue to try to to to save their life and their life with their of their family. That's why we're hoping that. The asylum process can be restated as an international law requires calls for it and that would would definitely show a decrease in in incursions. Again, you know, a lot of these persons are people trying to reach safety for themselves and their and their loved ones. Yeah. And it's been a very difficult situation in Tijuana for a lot of people, a lot of people who have arrived since MP started, like for a while people were camping at the, at the at the border crossing, right, but in town, like at head West. Yeah. It's it's also sort of forcing the all these shelters and nonprofits in Tijuana to saddle the burden which that they do a very good job with largely. But this you know, where this massive richest country on the on earth and we just could have shutting the door at the minute and saying like, you're not welcome, right that that that is absolutely correct. So I know that you, you've been doing some events at the Friendship Park, right. You've got a concert coming up. Could you tell us about that? Yes, absolutely. We have a concert coming up for our 51st anniversary. And the headliner for the concert is a gentleman known as the the father of Mexican rock'n'roll, which began here. Here I'm saying here, which we began in Tijuana, Mexico, Javier parties. And you know what, what is really neat is that have you heard about these was actually the. The mentor of Carlos Santana. And you know, we all love the music of Carlos Santana, an incredible performer. Well, he had his start with Javier, but he's at one point here in Tijuana, Mexico. I keep saying here, I'm in San Diego. You wanna Mexico, and you know, Javier is is an icon of rock'n'roll music and of the huana. And you know what? What I think is really special about this concert is speaking to a heavier. You know. His ideals are very much along the ideals of. What Friendship Park is all about. And, you know, friendship puts a smile on people's face. And that was something that that Javier told me personally. I love to play my music because my music puts a smile on people's face and I like to make people happy. That's great. And and, you know, that's the whole idea behind Friendship Park, to make people happy, to have people enjoy a beautiful park, enjoy their families, enjoy the friendship across the border that we have. Yeah, exactly. And I think it's very sad. The whole sort of canard is very sad, right? Like. The idea that we don't have it, we have enough money to build a giant steel barrier, but not enough money to open this place up for, you know, a few hours a week for people to see their families and enjoy themselves, enjoy that time together. It just seems almost. But pointlessly cruel, I guess. Which I don't know, sometimes a lot of the immigration system seems pointlessly cruel to me. Yes, that yes, absolutely. Then you separate a mother from a child. That is cruel. When you won't allow a mother and a child to even be able to gather for a couple hours a week separated from a barrier. That's very cruel. When you don't allow people of good nature of goodwill to visit, even though it is across a barrier, that is not good. I think it's important that people across the country like obviously like it can be really difficult to care about everything, right. Like it's it's a pretty difficult time and with the Supreme Court decisions and seemingly sort of non-stop mass shootings, it's a difficult time for everyone I think. But like I think it's important that people realize that the border is where a lot of these policies get tried for the first time, right these these things which like if we look at the way that like. Privacy of people living on the border has been eroded for a very long time, and that's happening to other people. Happened in 2020, right? It was a Border Patrol drone that was flying over Minneapolis during the protests. And so if people want to push back and to show solidarity and support, how can they support the park and how maybe can they support the people who are stuck in in Tijuana and want to cross, but not allowed to cross because of of MP or Title 42 or restrictive asylum? This sort of legislation, well, you know what what we're asking people to do if. You know you're in the Southern California area. Yeah, rain or shine, we go ahead and continue having events at Friendship Park on the US side, like our bike rides, our native flora workshops, our border church shop on on Sundays at 1:30 in the afternoon. We invite people to come and join us. Come and join us on a bike ride. Come and join us on border church and show your your support for the need. To continue the work that had been done for so many years at Friendship Park in support of our binational families and our binational community, also very important, contact your your Congressman. Contact your. Your senator. And if you're in California, of course you're you're California senators. Can be a persons we need to urge them to to advocate for us before Homeland Security. Before the Secretary of Homeland Security, so they may understand the importance of. The The Friendship Park offers not only to the families, but to to our communities. You can secure border a lot better through friendship. Then through. You know border walls that at a given moment that can be breached. As we have seen they they they have occurred. Umm. The strongest, uh, security that anybody can ever have is a good, strong relationship. On both sides of the border, yeah, I think that's that's. This very well said. And so if people want to come to Friendship Park, can you just explain how they would get to one of these events or where they have to go? Absolutely. But I would recommend is follow us on. We have a Facebook, Twitter, Instagram accounts, our friendship part. And also our website friendshippark.org where we have information on all the different events on our border, church and this way you can join us. On on the US side or if you want to come to the Mexico side is wide open you can you can go directly ride to the monument area where you can enjoy this stuff. It's great beautiful monument to commemorate the demarcation of the of the of the two countries you know you can you can enjoy either either way but we we do like and we stress people that come out and join us on the US side. Uh. So that, uh, uh, you know, we're not forgotten. So that this beautiful piece of land. If your State Park known as Friendship Park is not forgotten and not only that, you know enjoy the beauty of of of the park, we have a beautiful park there border field State Park adjacent to Friendship Park. Something that very few people are being taken advantage of lately. We've had quite a few more visitors out there. Horseback riding, bicycling, few families out, you know, taking a dip in the ocean. But this is a beautiful beach that that we have there on the US side and now we welcome you know, our our community where San Diego to community to come and enjoy this well. And you know, as you come and enjoy it, you support our efforts. Actually demonstrate the need to, uh, keep our park open? Yeah, yeah, I think that's a very yeah. It's it's not hard for people to help, and I hope they will. How long do we have, do you think, how long do we have before they break ground on this new wall? Right now, we're not sure how long we have. We were told that it was a matter of weeks. Does that mean two weeks? Three weeks? It's hard to say, but we know that it could happen at any at any time, and lately we've observed several. Crews out there, uh, doing uh. Our surveys and such of the area, so we know that it's any moment that there should be breaking ground and we hope that before that Brown breaks that they will consider our request and not offer public. For public support for public input as to what the park should look like, you know, give that consideration to. You know, if you're going to, you're going to replace walls to make sure that. You know the that gates are allotted so that. These visits can continue because as we understand, there's no provision at this point for any kind of of gate. For, you know, for a person access, for people access into the area. That of course tells you that there's no intention of continuing at one point to open the park for the visits. And of course, that's extremely concerning. Yeah, especially for people separated by the border. OK, so just to finish up, can you give us those social medias and web addresses again where people can find you and help? Sure, absolutely. Where our website is www.friendshippark.org. The Facebook you can find us under our Friendship park. You can also find information under order Church. Great. Alright, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk and it's a busy time for you. You're very welcome. Thank you for the opportunity to be here with you today. Thank you. 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. For more podcasts and 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, sisters of the Underground is a podcast about fearless Dominican women who stood up. Against the brutal dictator capital Trojan, he needs to be stopped. 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