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With at-home activities on-the-go games and STEM-advent activities, EIE families delivers hands-on engagement for everyone. Discover fun with engineering and computer science for kids with EIE families. Want to learn more about engineering and computer science at-home activities? Visit EIE.org-forward-slash-families. That's EIE.org-forward-slash-families to learn more. Seeing is believing. And you're not going to believe how bright and vivid the colors are on the Samsung Neo QLED and OLED TVs powered by the Neuroquantum processor. Because this is an audio ad. Unless you can see it, which means you already have one. Nice. Samsung. More wow than ever. 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. Oh, it's it could happen here. A podcast about things falling apart. And today I'm happy that we're recording this right now. James and Garrison. Because we all just got a historic example of something falling apart. Elon Musk's big silly rocket. We're recording this about a day or so after it exploded in mid-air over the Gulf Coast. Showering a turtle sanctuary with toxic waste. It's such a fun news. It's comically perfect. It is really it is pretty cool. Pretty cool. Yeah. Unless it crash landed in a kitten farm. That couldn't really be much. Yeah. No, I mean, it what's nice is that it's given me. It's made me feel young again. Because when I was a wee lad, I was attending a speech debate rally in Cooper, Texas, when the last space shuttle to explode exploded directly over us, blowing out a bunch of the windows in the building and raining. Yeah, yeah, it was it was it was yeah. So whenever whenever a space shuttle explodes over of some sort of explodes over Texas, I get powerful nostalgia. Yeah. So they slip the surly bonds of us to blow out the windows in a high school in Cooper, Texas. Yeah. That's that's how the line goes. It makes me think of all the other things I was doing that day, which was namely playing Lord of the Rings risk in a high school gym as we as we were want to do. Great game. One of the better one of the better risk covers. What are we talking about today? Friendos, buddies, Shuffle pals. Yeah, we're talking about. We're talking about one one man having having a fun time on discord dot com. Yeah. Yeah. Doing the human equivalent of being a spaceship that explodes in the sky. Yes. Um, all right. I suppose discord's not really a dot com. It's more it's more of a more of an application now. But yes, it is what. Yeah, discord and app that I am permanently banned from. Please watch again. What did you do to discord James? You know who's on discord right? Like the worst fucking people are all of the worst people. Yeah, no, we tried to start a discord for the fundraiser live show. And I tried with several emails and every time it came back with ban evasion. Wow. That is extremely funny James. Yeah, I posted a video of my chickens and it has never forgiven me. Wow. Well, I mean, you know, those chickens didn't consent and they were technically naked. So I think it does count as revenge point. No, my chickens are always close. Oh, yeah. You're one of the pansees. There's a big conflict in chicken owners and James has taken aside. So we're talking this week about the discord leaks. And this is one of those things we came into this kind of debating how much detailed will go into. But when we brought this up, like, this is something that Gare James and I is like a major thing in our bubble for the last like week. So we've all been following it. But when we brought this up in the work chat, Danil had no idea that this had gone on. So we're going to start with a pretty basic overview of what what people are calling the largest leak of top secret US military and defense data since, you know, Snowden, so we're going to go over all of that right now. I think I want to start by talking about an MMO RPG called War Thunder. This is a, can you break down MMO RPG for those of us? It's like World of Warcraft. It's a big video game that is played that you play online with a bunch of strangers. It's a free game. You use like modern military weapons to like fight other players. And it's kind of well known for having extremely realistic renderings and sort of depictions of the functionality of modern tanks and armored transports and fighter planes and naval vessels, right? So, and it's like, it's a game for war nerds, right? Like, there's, you utilize like radar in a way that's broadly realistic. Like, if you shoot, you know, if one tank shoots at another, the tanks weaponry works the way it's supposed to in the real world. The armor is vulnerable where it's vulnerable in the real world. And this is like the appeal to the kind of nerds who play this game. And as you might guess from a bunch of people who really want to like in the most realistic way possible, render and fight each other with modern military vehicles. A significant number of these dudes are members of various different like defense departments, right? Or at least our employee in some degree of various different national military forces. Several different as a result, like when arguments happen, you know, with any MMORPG, if you're playing like World of Warcraft, right? And like something gets nerfed or something isn't working as well as supposed to, you'll get these like massive threads in the forums where people are like arguing about how something needs to be changed or changed back or how there's a glitch or whatever. And because War Thunder is so based in realism, when you have these arguments online, it's often like, well, you know, the F15 shouldn't work this way. It should work this way and people get arguments about that. And then someone will, as happened, like a couple of weeks ago, I think, someone will post sensitive information about the F15 strike evil. In order to like prove that it would function the way that they are arguing it should function in this forum debate. That happened earlier this year. And I think with the F15, it wasn't technically cop secret information. It was information that US citizens were allowed to have, but not allowed the post online because that's a violation of something called ITAR, which is a thing that governs the export essentially of military information and technology. But on another situation, I think like a year or so ago, information about I believe the F22 was posted that was extremely sensitive, that was like top secret. And these are again, like some dude who's got some sort of military job and has a clearance and thinks that the right way to use it is arguing about the video game War Thunder. These are not just Americans. I want to be clear about that in July of 2021. There was a player arguing about a challenger to tank who claim to have been a former tank commander with the British Army. And he shared information from the Army equipment support publication. The information had been labeled unclassified, but it was actually classified. And other lakes have been a little more golly, a French Army soldier leaked information on the clear, a Chinese battle tank that was top secret and a Chinese user leaked capabilities at the Chinese Army's DTC 1025 millimeter anti tank round that should not have been leaked. So this should keep happening on War Thunder. It's like a joke, like a War Thunder account when these discord leaks happened a week or so ago, like joke about it. The thing that the game is known for, yeah, is these like different people in different national defense apparatus. I can't stop themselves from like leaking stop secret and know about vehicles. It's very funny. I guess the only reason I know why War Thunder exists. I think it's the only reason why we know a decent amount of what like what by we here at Meanie, I could like, I guess, like Western militaries know, which of course we are all members of. No, about like Russian main battle tanks is from War Thunder leaks. It's very funny. Yeah, and you have to assume I would be surprised if no one had tried just like having, you know, an agent from an national security agency in, for sure, trying to like be like trying to like provoke arguments about Chinese tanks or whatever. I'd be shocked if that hasn't happened. Yeah. Like the overlap between like people who might play War Thunder anyway and people who might work for national security agency. Like those those Venn diagrams are a circle. Yeah, exactly. So it's one of those things where this happens a bunch on War Thunder, but it's just kind of something people joke about because these leaks, like they're meaningful, I guess, to like militaries care about them. But like you sitting at home, you hear like, oh, hey details of like the couple of construction of a of the new Abrams like models has leaked that that's not like the same as I don't know Chelsea Manning leaking information about like war crimes by the US military in Iraq or Edward Snowden leaking info about like the NSA, like it's a little less relevant to the whole. Um, what we started seeing a couple of weeks ago is documents top secret label documents like actual pictures of straight up unredacted top secret US defense department documents. Just kind of filtering out over various discord and they were kind of appearing and random little bits. You'd see one that was like an update on the war in Ukraine that was kind of showing concerns that the US military had about the ability of Ukrainian military to carry out the counteroffensive that everybody's expecting in the near future. You had like casualty estimates from the US military another document that was lead had like a bunch of information inside the Russian general staff. So these are number one very serious leaks, right? You're talking about, especially with the leaks from inside Putin's kind of inner circle, you're talking about leaks that could potentially expose a major US source inside the Russian government. And you're also talking about leaks that just kind of reveal the degree to which the CIA has an enormous amount of information apparently at least about what's happening inside the Kremlin. You know, so these are very significant leaks. But they didn't appear. They weren't being like, you know, kind of filtered out and released by an agency like WikiLeaks. They weren't being sent to journalists. They were just kind of showing up in these, you know, discord is basically a series of chat rooms and they were just kind of showing up in different discord. So this is, you know, a mystery and it's the kind of mystery that like a certain kind of person who is extremely online is not going to be able to get out of their head and is going to kind of try to trace back to its origin. And in the case of this specific mystery, the nerd who could not get it out of their head and decided to trace it back to its origin was my former boss at Bellingcat Eric toler. Eric is a very nice guy, probably the most talented and skilled researcher that I've ever met in my life. And you know, Eric started seeing these like everyone else these toxicor documents and was like where the fuck are these coming from. And this is one of those things we'll talk about. It's become extremely controversial among a certain set of people in the day sense. But when this kind of started number one that you can't really deny there was an intense public interest in figuring out what the origin point of these was because that was the only way to figure out are these actual leaks. When you see something that's just like listed as a top secret document randomly on the internet, if you call up the US government and you say, hey, is this real top secret info? They're not going to say yes, right? Like right, you don't get that response from them. I mean, and especially right now with all of like the AI chat generation tools generating fake documents is one of the main things people are doing for disinfo generating like fake sources, fake documents. Of course, you can like edit things the further to like make them seem more realistic. But yes, you would. Someone who is extremely curious is going to wonder if this is actually like a real thing or if this is just some like bullshit prank or something. And there were edits of these documents did also go by. In fact, Tucker Carlson, one of the one of the original documents shows kind of US estimates for killed in action on Ukraine's on the Ukrainian side and on the Russian side in the war. Obviously, it showed more Russian casualties than Ukrainian casualties, which is consistent with all previous reporting. But the edit of it showed something like like many times as many Ukrainian dead as Russian dead, which is something that was valuable for the people who are trying to argue that like this war is unwinnable on the half of the Ukrainians, guys like Tucker Carlson, who covered the leaks on his show. And knowingly used the fake edit of the leak, I can't imagine he I have to assume it was knowingly because it had been very well exposed by that point. So there's really no other explanation. I think, but anyway, the fact that there were edits of these documents that were not legitimate going around. It's just kind of part of why there was a legitimate public interest in trying to figure out where the fuck are these things coming from. Eric is again, an extremely good researcher and through a mix of open source intelligence and eventually just kind of like calling up people and talking to them, he found would appear to be the source of these leaks, which was an invitation only clubhouse on discord of like 30-ish people most of whom were teenagers. Over time, it kind of became clear that this group was a bunch of kind of young people who had gotten together during the pandemic to talk about games, these guys are all gamers. Most of them were like kids in high school. They kind of were cut off from their friends so they wanted a place to be social. They would share memes, including like extremely racist, you know, borderline Nazi shit. They would like watch movies over and like chat over kind of the voice app. They were all what you call trans cats, which is like basically weirdo Catholic fundamentalists. I think a lot of them deny Vatican to that sort of shit. It's like a whole thing. A lot of them were that at least so there were a lot of like praying and then anyway, a bunch of weirdos. And the head of this group of weirdos was the oldest of them, a guy who was known on like in the discord as OG. And OG, he's a was you know in the land of the teenagers, the person in the 20s who can buy an AR 15 is king. And so this guy is in his early 20s. He's in the military, which he talks about. He posts videos of himself like shooting guns and like, you know, saying racial slurs and like signposting to these like, you know, weird memes and stuff that they're all into, which to them like makes him seem extremely cool, right. It's one of those things when you kind of read the different coverage of this. It's some. There's a little bit of like weird Coltie stuff going on. I don't know if I'd say that it was a cult in more than just like every discord server is a cult. Yeah, the insular online communities like this very often reproduce aspects of cult dynamics. Right. Yeah. Hey, everybody Robert here. We had a little audio error, obviously in the recording. I wanted to clarify this section because it was kind of garbled. The name of the discord server they were in was thug shaker central, which is potentially a reference to one of a couple of things you'll find some disagreement about this online, but it's not really relevant. That's the discord name that they worked under. You get like the overall point of this. It's a bunch of like kids who are fans of games, their fans of like this, this YouTuber oxide. It's like a little group of dudes who got together via fandom and the pandemic. And over the course of years developed like a shared culture and part of the shared culture is this guy OG, who's the older one of them, you know, trying to keep them aware of what he thought was important about kind of global. Politics and that particularly included aspects of like battlefield conditions and Ukraine information about North Korean ballistic missiles, all of this kind of stuff that he had access to because spoilers. He was in an air national guard wing as an intelligence. And then like it was in the intelligence sector of like an air national guard ring and he had a security classification, right. And once this all got revealed, people are like, why the fuck is a 21 year old because that's this guy's age have access to top secret data. And everyone who knows anything about the way our government classifies information was like most of the people that access it are like 20. Yeah, I think it's our wars 50 year olds. Yeah, I think it just genuinely like, you know, like if we've been around war and conflict and the people who do it quite a lot. I think most people would be genuinely blown away that most people doing it are children. Yeah. And this is caused like obviously some problems before for the defense department. But it's also like it's kind of a thorny problem because like most of your workforce are always going to be young kids. These are spoilers shitty jobs often. And that's the only one who will do a lot of them. And also just like if you're fighting a war, most of the people you have that are going to be tasked with field intelligence are going to be in this age ring. So it's not at all weird that this guy had access to this shit. What is weird is that so he starts off kind of like arguing, you know, sometimes he'll bring up stuff that he knows that's from classified documents. While he's arguing about the war in Ukraine or whatever with his friends online. And then he starts doing like a series of regular updates where he'll basically type out details from like a bunch of different top secret documents and he's massive long and apparently kind of hard to read posts. And he'll just like post them into the chat to kind of keep his friends abreast of what he thinks is, you know, important. But he gets frustrated over time that like they're not reading this shit because it's really boring and like kind of weird to just info top secret info. And they know these kids don't again like these other folks are like in high school. They don't really realize where he's getting the info or what he has. But they do the folks who do pay attention recognize over time that like stuff will happen in the real world that corresponds to something he posted a couple of weeks ago and are like wow he seems to have like actually really good information. Eventually OG gets frustrated because he's not no one's paying attention to his posts. So he starts taking photos of just the top secret documents themselves and posting them in the discord back. Amazing. Now this is unbelievably illegal. Yeah, he really crossed a line there. And just I believe it would be dumb. It was by the way it was illegal before. But this is really illegal in terms of like allowing yourself to make it so much easier for the consequences you're fucking around to to find you like that he crossed the Rubicon right there. So and and now we have to face the hard question is this guy in a legalist king or is he more problematic and this is this is the question that we have to actually focus on now. I think I just stopped because it is it is on one hand pretty funny. It's extremely funny. There's zero argument there among people who aren't shit heads. It's very funny. Yeah, it's very funny that like he could be doing an illegalism with with was your intention of doing so. I do think there's some people have kind of apparently called him a whistleblower. I just not that's not actor. That is that is not what he's doing. He's a Nazi who's posting top secret information to impress children online. That's right, Garrison. I do think we have to I think we have to let's let's let's some dig into that a little bit because a whistleblower is somebody who exposes information from inside of an organization for some sort of purpose, right? They believe that what's going on is wrong. They think that like there's said that they believe there's some sort of public interest in information that is being kind of siloed inside of an organization that they're a part of and they released that organization, right? That's what a whistleblower is. This guy was telling his friends and this 30 person discord do not post these anywhere else. This is not stuff that you're allowed to share. This is just for your eyes because we're friends, right? He does not intend for this to get out. But here's the thing. All of his friends in this group are like dumb kids and just like those people on War Thunder, they start getting into arguments with people outside of the discord. One of them is a fan discord for some other YouTuber. One of them is the discord is a Minecraft discord and get into arguments with random other users about like the war on Ukraine and stuff. And when they're having those arguments, they'll hear someone make a point and they'll think back to a top secret document that OG posted and they'll be like, well, I know you're wrong because I've seen like some some CIA like satellite footage that like shows that this isn't accurate. And rather than being like, well, I guess I can't prove this person wrong on the internet without exposing my friend in our private discord to being imprisoned for a decade. They just grab top secret documents that he posted and they post them in these other discord and that's how this shit breaks containment, right? Now, it's one of those things. I do want to note that like these are not generally speaking super pleasant people. OG is the kind of guy who like one of his big arguments that he tries to like make to these kids. He like claims that based on the top secret info he has, which he posts nothing that proves this. The mass shooting in Buffalo, New York by that Nazi at that majority, you know, black frequent to grocery store that that was like a government plot to institute gun control and shit. It was a false flag. So he's not just posting good. He's like lying here too. Obviously, there's no intelligence to post backing that up. He just he's just kind of trying to it's a mix of he's trying to like prove that you know he's trying to make arguments about like what's happening. You know, in various overseas conflicts using US intel, but he's also just like spreading different kind of conspiracy theories that he has to these kids to our by and large looking up to him. There's a couple like the Washington Post has done some some really deep reporting where they talk to some of these kids, where they're like, yeah, man, we loved him like when he realized this shit had broken containment. He like called us and we were all crying because he knew he was going to go to prison. Like there, they seem legitimately distraught. Yeah, there's like lines like he said something had happened and he prayed to God that this event would not happen, but now it's in God's hands. Like these are like weird out ashy kids. I hesitate to like condemn like the literal children too much because they're very vulnerable. This guy is like a bad is early 20s. Yeah, he's this guy is a bad person who is deeply like in a very fucked up way influencing this group of like 30ish teenagers on the internet. And his like weird politics. It's not great. Now that's separate from the question of like, is there a value to these leaks, which we can talk about in a little right. But so as we talked about Eric toler tracks down where this is happening tracks down like the name OG publishes a piece on belling cat. It's certain ripped off by like, I don't know, a dozen like every other newspaper in the world and then additional reporting is done. Belling cat and the New York Times, team up and they eventually like track down and publish an article on who this guy is an airman named Jack Teaksara. And they publish an article about that about a day before this guy gets arrested by the FBI. And it's one of those things. One of the if you if you look at the FBI affidavit. It kind of makes clear how the FBI practice guy down and found him because they did so, you know, using the resources they had before the times did online. And then they've been going after the times and Eric for like revealing the sky to the government, which is is not the case. Basically, once it became clear what had gotten leaked. The FBI because they have access to, you know, the systems by which people utilize and get access to sensitive compartment and information found out who had most recently. And then they had access to the news on the days that kind of correspond to the leaks pulled up information about that and narrowed it down to this guy Jack. They like and they were they had access to like one of the things they did is they called discord and talk to discord and this board helped them track down where the leaks were originating from. They could see that the account that had posted, you know, the top secret data originally was a paid account. They were able to like provide the FBI with this guy's home address and a shit. This is exactly what you'd expect for the FBI. I mean, the FBI has a lot of a non open source means to do this type of investigations. Yeah, they are not doing what Eric is doing and just kind of like clicking through shit for hours and hours and hours until they figure out where it's come from. They are the FBI. They have access to other things. And it's what you'd expect from discord too, right? Like they will comply with whatever. Yes, they are absolutely. These are top secret that you like if they don't have a legal choice here. They're a gigantic company or go and comply. So this is the kind of thing where like one of the there's this big argument. I don't even know what's big, but there's definitely like a weird chunk of the left that has like. The right has immediately started calling this guy a whistleblower. Fucking Marjorie Taylor Green was like he's a Christian and he's a leaker trying to expose crucial details about our government. And like no, he wasn't. He was like trying to fucking groom some teenagers and they posted that as permission. A lot of a lot of the more conspiracy type stuff is like trying to call out like, you know, it's a lot of the more conspiracy related stuff is related to the Russian invading. The Russian invasion of Ukraine and making it seem like the US is doing things that are wrong and secretly helping the Ukrainians too much. And it kind of it plays into this weird weird thing that people have against the way Biden's been handling the geopolitics around the Russian invasion. And it's like it plays into a whole bunch of right wing talking points we've seen around Russia. We've seen this type of stuff get talked about by Tucker Carlson quite often. There's a whole bunch of like little nodes that this that this touches on. And we even see we even see stuff like that among like, you know, people who are authoritarian communists, who are who are still pro Russia, despite Russia not being a communist country. But still like being like, oh, there, you know, this is something he's trying to expose the things that are people are doing wrong to Russia. And it's like, okay, all right. Yeah. And it's one of the and there's also you've gotten among some chunks of this attitude that like, well, I don't care why he did it or like what he is in his personal life. Any leak, you know, of the US military machine is good and should be protected. And it's like for one thing, this guy, like nobody knew where these things were coming from. There was a vested need in sort of figuring out what the origin point was to figure out if they were accurate. But for like another thing, I don't know, man, you can argue about like what point, you know, the digging, whether or not like the, it's ethical to dig this shit back to its source. I would argue that like people also have a right to know if there's some sort of fucking like like if the documents were fake or altered in some way there was a reason to be trying to figure out the Providence of this shit. But more to the point like, I think it's good to have access to like data from inside of our military. I think that's broadly positive. And when I look at these data or when I look at what's been leaked, I don't think most of it's, you know, one of the concerns that's always that always exists when you're talking about a leak of data is like, is this going to expose like potentially innocent people to any kind of arm. And there is a potential for that with some of this because some of it dealt with Ukrainian military readiness for the upcoming offensive and like, so like I don't really care if some guy inside the Kremlin, who's like a member of the Russian general staff and a double, I don't care if that guy like something bad happens to him. He's probably not a great dude. But, but I do care about like a bunch of random Ukrainian soldiers potentially getting harmed. Now, I will say from what I can tell from this, I think the odds of that are pretty low. It looks like this has impacted kind of the timetable for the counter offensive. But I don't know that it's, I haven't seen any evidence that it's exposed things in a way that's like going to cause loss of life, although it's a little bit unclear as to whether that not that might happen. But also, while I think it's accurate to say I'm not saying evidence that like a lot of people's safety have been harmed by these leaks, it's also not, you know, what we're telling it's not anything like what Snowden did or what Manning did, right? Again, Manning revealed videos like the collateral murder video evidence of like breakdowns of order and things that I think are accurate to call war crimes that were being kind of hidden by our government. Whereas Snowden revealed intense details about an NSA spying program, all of that's extremely relevant to the average American. Most of this is just kind of like wonky inside baseball military stuff, which again, I'm not like sad that it's gotten out, but it's also not, it really does seem like a bunch of shit that like a guy pulled out based on his own kind of like weird interest. It's not there's not like a strong unifying theme around them. And again, most of it's most of it's shit that's not going to be interesting to the average person. One of the documents I just read an article about because like we don't entirely know everything that was leaked right now, right? There's been there's like the post in the time seem to have a pretty complete archive of what was leaked, but they haven't published anything because you know they're reading through it and you know actually reporting it out. One of the articles that just came out was about the fact that the Ukrainians made some overtures to the Kurdish-led self administration in Northern Syria to Rojava to the SDF in order to talk about the potential for them attacking Russian assets in elsewhere in Syria. When this has kind of gotten out over like Twitter, it's often been like described as, oh the Ukrainians were going to team up with the Kurds to attack Russia in Syria like like this was an actual like Syria's plan. And it actually the document it seems a lot less inciting than that basically what happened was some folks on the Ukrainian general staff or whatever were like looking into the possibility hey, you know, is there any way that we could kind of anything we could pay the Kurds over in Syria to carry an attack on the Russians and apparently they had access to somebody who claimed to be in the SDF at least. And that person was like we might be able to do something if you can get us some anti air defenses right which I don't know how Ukraine could possibly ship meaningful anti air defenses to Northeast Syria it's kind of bordered on all sides. There is some stuff if you're a walk in the region there's some interesting stuff about this which is that the SDF basically responded like we could potentially do this. We couldn't attack Russian assets that are within the borders of the self administration. Russians are acting as peacekeepers there between Turkey and you know it's kind of desire to invade the entire region. They're not great as peacekeepers the Armenians will tell you that Russian soldiers are not great great gamers but the SDF didn't want to like shit where they were eating right. So there was some like debate about where my they might be able to attack one of the things that is really interesting about this week is that apparently Ukraine at like talk to Turkey about this because obviously the Turks consider the core of the SDF the YPG to be a terrorist organization. But when Ukraine was talking to them they're like hey we might basically bribe these people to carry out an attack on Russian assets elsewhere in Syria. Turkey was like okay well don't do it here here here because that's kind of close to some our guys like that part is interesting but again none of this matters all that much because nothing happened as far as we know in December. Zelensky was like no don't proceed with looking into this. This is the kind of thing like the US military has like plans for what happens if we have to fight Canada. This is the kind of thing defense departments do and as far as I can tell there's no evidence it went much further than like a series of phone calls right which by the way the SDF didn't ever happen I don't know what exactly occur I don't know if it's hard for me to tell good Ukrainians were they talking to someone who was actually representative of the SDF's like military hierarchy or was this like some guy that they thought was because maybe Ukraine doesn't have great context into the like order the US and it's not kind of clear to the US maybe like hook them up with somebody. But it doesn't like at the end of the day you can argue I as someone who follows the region I find this kind of interesting it's not exactly like ground breaking you know and it's importance because nothing happened no one did anything this is like some guys in Ukraine thought about doing a thing and then decided not to which is you know potentially interesting context but we're not talking about the manning or the snowden leaks here. Yeah it's yeah it's that particular document I think is kind clearly they have access to people who have formally fought in Syria with the YPG right there are probably dozens of them now fighting in Ukraine with other volunteer units like it's it's not hard to see how this thought came up but like you say nothing really happened it was just some people like spitballing. So I don't know there's some other like bits and stuff in here that are kind of interesting one of them was there was a document in there about how the US had kind of like interfered in peace negotiations in Yemen. Due to like kind of concerns that they had about the fact that China was kind of brokering a degree of peace between the Houthi rebels in between the Saudi government. There's definitely some like slightly some somewhat shady shit from the US in there but at the end of the day it didn't derail the peace negotiations it's just like yeah there were like like and a lot of it's like that where it's kind of like this is useful context I'm glad historians are journalists reporting it out will have that but at the end of the day like the fact that like well hey at one point in these peace negotiations the US was like you know being being kind of a kind of a dick isn't exactly like shocking you know it's not going to like change your overall concept of what's happening over there it's not stuff that like is most of it's not stuff that's like massively important important it is really interesting that the detail that are our defense establishment apparently has from within the Russian government I do think it's worth noting because we're talking like when we talk about sort of the the provenance of these and the the reliability of these leaks as they regard the war in Ukraine. There's been a lot of talk about like oh this reveals that like the Ukraine doesn't have the capacity to carry out a counter offensive or that the war's gone much worse for them than they think it is kind of worth noting that like prior to the expanded Russian invasion all US military intelligence suggested that the Ukrainian government was going to fold in a matter of days so even though a lot of this is top secret info that doesn't mean it's like a hundred percent accurate right like our guys like think back to the Iraq war are dudes bitch it wrong to constantly. So it is again this is all really interesting and I will say two things I think it's very funny that this this guy nuke his entire life basically to impress children on a discord I think it's extremely funny I have laughed many a time at this I also think it's like I like as someone who is interested in this stuff interesting that good that we have this context I don't think any of this is is like massively surprising or shocking like the the shit that's in that defense industry in or defense intelligence agency analysis of the Ukrainian position right now is like stuff that you would know if you were paying attention to the good osent aggregators who have been covering the war and if you've been like just reading good reporting on what's going on over there. I'll read a little bit of a summary from from an article that's kind of going over some of the other stuff that appears to have been leaked one details information apparently obtained through US eavesdropping on Russia's foreign intelligence service and suggest that China approved the provision of lethal aid to Russia in its war in Ukraine early this year and plan to disguise its military equipment as civilian items. The other includes details of a test conducted conducted by Beijing on one of its advanced experimental missiles the DF 27 hypersonic light vehicle on February 25th it says the vehicle flew for 12 minutes across 1300 miles and that it possessed a high probability of penetrating US ballistic missile defense systems. The documents contain new details about a Chinese spy balloon dubbed killing 23 by US intelligence agencies that earlier this year flew over the United States they detail sophisticated surveillance equipment US intelligence agencies were aware of up to four additional Chinese spy balloons the documents say in another previously unreported revelation. And so let's let's kind of break that down one thing we have here is a basically an argument through from the US that based on their intercepts they believe that China has approved provisioning weaponry selling weaponry to Russia and disguising it as civilian items. That doesn't mean they have done this it means that like there's a gigant that someone in our government has that says that they were that could be disinformation from them it could be out of date it could be something like with this Ukraine and Syria thing that they talked about doing and then didn't do. It's interesting I would say if you are a defense industry reporter it's something that would could should definitely spur you to further reporting because like that's really relevant if that's occurring. But it's not the final word on the matter meanwhile you've got this thing on like yeah this hypersonic missile the Chinese have is good at shooting shit theoretically. This is you know the kind of thing that's that's interesting and I think is probably more accurate than you know talking about the China providing lethal aid because you can kind of you know theoretically you're looking at actual like data on how the missile has performed it just seems like it's something that you've got more fidelity on. But this is again to kind of contrast it with like the Snowden and and Manning Lakes. Well what do you what do you do if like the NSA is spying on people well you could at least attempt to pass laws that restrict their ability to do that right. What do you do if there have been like war crimes committed by your military that were then cover it up well you can at least attempt to prosecute people. What do you do if some other countries got a better missile well there's not a whole lot for you to do sitting at home and like New York City or you know fucking Austin Texas right like like what are we to do about China's hyper I don't know my assumption generally speaking not that this is an interesting but my assumption generally speaking is that when you're talking about Russia China the United States we can all murder each other if we wanted to right like we've all got real nice missiles at this point. And it's this you know the Chinese spy balloon stuff is like interesting I don't think anyone surprised by this like we knew there was a spy balloon I assumed it had sophisticated surveillance technique it's again it's interesting that there were four other spy balloons in the area but we simply know from older reporting that this happened like three or four times while Trump was in office too so like yeah this is something we've known about there's been reporting about this is corroboration that's interesting again none of this is really like a sea change in our understanding. If any of these conflicts it is interesting context some of it's being blown up you know into stuff that it isn't there's reporting and like the number of US servicemen in Ukraine that's being like spun as like we've got boots on the ground there and it's like well they're like embassy guards and stuff there's like 29 dudes that this like confirm this is yeah this confirms there's not a lot of US guys on the ground there. We do send a lot of people when we're when we're doing wars but yeah like every embassy in the world has a contingent of Marines who like make sure that it doesn't just get yeah I don't want to say Benghazi'd but yeah yeah no big gauze yeah that's fine and this is not new news to anyone who's been paying attention but if you are Michael Tracy this is brain melting shit. Michael Tracy's a weirdo quasi left journalist who like early on in the war he didn't want to go into Ukraine very much but he like hung out in Poland and took pictures of like US soldiers and like a facility that they were had been in for years and was like look you know this is evidence of the secret US support and it's like guys I mean for one thing like look at this look at how much shit just leaked out because some kid wanted to impress children if there were like like secret massive formations of US troops or even large like forces of US spec ops guys carrying out operations in Ukraine how good do you think they'd be at keeping that shit secret right for one thing like special forces guys get killed all the time like they get killed they get overrun like it's a terrible risk for us to just like send seal team six and to fight the Russians when spoilers the Ukrainians have really good special forces guys every bit is good as ours actually with in a lot of cases more experience fighting this kind of war and we're give in it's like if you want to talk about US involvement we're giving them their weapons like we're involved fucking plenty there's just not much of a point in us like sending the green fucking berets in to Bakemut right like why that doesn't that doesn't help us at all that doesn't like help our government that's not like good for the military it's it would be stupid anyway whatever in anything else to talk about here do we want to talk about Israel one and oh yeah no this is one of the interest although it's not again basically one of the things that leaked as like the US is spying on all of its allies which this leaks every couple of years we're always spying on our allies including Israel Israel has spied on us a bunch that's why they have nuclear weapons yeah James want to talk about this yeah so this is a document it basically what it alleges is that what what has been alleged perhaps incorrectly is that it was encouraging Mossad staff to attend protests against Netanyahu when he was attempting his like his auto golpe his like his coup from within yeah what do you want to call that right his he was attempting to centralize power right yeah yeah now it's it's a leaked like it's a document it says that it I'm quoting from it I'm quoting from reporting on it at least senior leaders of the Mossad spy service advocated for Mossad officials and Israeli citizens to protest the new Israeli government proposed judicial reforms including several explicit calls to action that decrypt the Israeli government according to SIGINT signals intelligence the info like so actually netanyahu himself has been asked about this and it's worth then he appointed the Mossad director guy called David I think it's by Nair yeah and he has also he's he's on the record previously in news media before this thing that he had clarified to Mossad personnel who could attend protests and who could not attend like because at a certain point in any of these things like you're not allowed to be explicitly political right yeah folks even in a very low point in the US military like you know you're not supposed to say and do certain things and so the there was a petition that went out earlier and again this has already been reported they that was sent by intelligence officers basically saying like we'll go on strike it yeah and there had been again like widely reported instances other Israeli military people saying that they would go on strike or not show up for work if these judicial reforms went ahead so I think again it's been kind of we've really stretched what was interesting I thought was that it had a FISA label on and FISA is the foreign intelligence surveillance act and if people aren't familiar and basically it allows US intelligence to wiretap things which they can do it without warrant if it doesn't include a US person so a US person is not just a citizen but also maybe a permanent resident something like that like a person who has more rights than others in the United States but in this case they seem to have got a FISA warrant which it's very easy to get right it's like a closed courtroom procedure where they go to a judge and like it's not like an adversarial argument there's no one who argues that you should get the warrant and so in practice they really always get these warrants but what it showed they have to just prove that it's intelligence asset of a foreign power and so it showed that at some point they went for a judge and said like hey you know we need to wiretap some kind of some kind of communications or what I'm using wiretap in the broad sense rather than a specific sense but it's interesting I think that they have some intelligence asset in the United States who said hey we know this is an Israeli intelligence asset and to be clear that there could just be shit that's going in out of the embassy and they've decided that they needed to wiretap that and keep an eye on that and given that like Israel's foreign policy has been toxic and terrible for decades but Netanyahu is a new degree of crazy it's I'm surprising that like anyone concerned with I guess international relations would want to know more about what's going on and again like that's it's interesting context as you noted a lot of this had been reported out previously so yeah it's just like it's it's it's all interesting again my my my attitude here is like I'm glad this information is out and I don't really care what happens to Jack Tixiera like yeah and my and my ideal world the policing infrastructure that's come down on this kid would not exist but he made this decision knowing full well what happens when you leak top secret like it's one of those things where it's like just within the context of shit that's fucked up in our country the thing I'm going to be upset about is not a kid leaking top secret info to win an online argument and then having it blow up on him right like especially not a kid who's a fucking Nazi at the end of the day he did something that was obviously done it's like if some guy hops on Twitter under his real name and starts posting pictures of heroin and saying hey guys this is my name and address I'm selling hella heroin here's photos of a felony quantity of heroin and guns I think heroin should be legal but I'm not going to like I'm not going to like make a crusade out of that guys arrest because that's stupid like that you know what happens if you post hey here is my add home address and name here is all of the heroin I'm selling yeah you'll probably get in trouble because you have posted online a serious crime obviously that could be a problem for you that's just not my primary concern in the world when people do really stupid shit and it blows up on them and it's like again leakers you look at the way manning proceeded you look at the way Snowden proceeded they were aware of the danger of what they were doing I mean you know Chelsea did years and fucking prison Snowden fled the country that's actually whistleblowers they under they under they understood this is a serious like this is very illegal and I have to try to take steps to protect myself because the government's going to come after me the thing about jack is like just the level of like arrogance that like I can post this shit all day long and nothing will happen it was like well for one thing this is never going like it's information you're posting online like I don't care there's no way to keep stuff completely contained within a 30 person discord it's going to leak out and when it is the government's going to want to know who the fuck is leaking this shit and you took like took pictures of this shit inside his home like it's just dumb I'm not going to like I don't at the end of the day I have no room in my sympathy for like a fucking fashy kid who committed the dumbest crime possible and gotten trouble like I don't know there's there's people who I don't know for example we're camping in a forest and are getting charged with terrorism and facing longer penalties right jack might do 15 years at the most just like fucked up I guess but you know there's people facing a lot worse for a lot less and I just you know whatever I don't care what happens to this kid he seems like he sucks I think the leaks are interesting there's nothing in here that's like fundamentally changed my understanding of geopolitics though that's where I am I would agree it is a useful reminder to keep your crime offline yeah don't continue to not post crimes on the internet again if you're selling heroin don't post on Twitter here is my name and home address anyone want to buy some fucking China white that's not a great idea if anyone has any top secret documents you can find me on the Star Wars the older public forums just just post just post them there yeah I am part of the Jedi initiate program so just locate that it'll be you know I'm sure I'm sure I'll see it yeah I am on the the news that's the news dormant server on world of warcraft you can just hit me up under my my given name just DM me and what we'll figure that you can send that shit to me over a well instant messenger that's how I take all of my leaks some secure platform you can find me in the mountain project comment section where only good things happen well on worth under two so you can get a sit there to work reasons yeah I'll be shit talking you're you're grading on a problem but also accepting national security leaks yeah we do we do it all all right everybody that's an episode hey more hello pez here and let's be real we all know that SUVs are what's in right now if you go with the Toyota you got a ton of options to choose from like a RAV4 the perfect versatile SUV for right and around in style comes in a bunch of cool colors in his super fuel efficient it'll make you the talk of the town or if you want a little luxury and comfort there's the venza with features like a panoramic sunroof heated and 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eligible for a free trial today based on nationwide test drive data to WS conduct paid drive test for AT&T and uses the data and its analysis number of devices various by manufacturer always pay careful attention to the road and no drive distracted Wi-Fi hotspot intended for passenger use only when vehicles and operation compatible device and vehicle required. Do you love fashion? Do you love getting compliments on how well you're dressed? Are you always seeking the latest trends? Then we're talking to you Boston proper dot com is your fashion destination and the only place to go for all those nods, head turns and new styles. No matter the day season or occasion Boston proper has what you're looking for sophisticated confident clothing designed to flatter and get noticed so visit Boston proper dot com now and start creating your perfect wardrobe Boston proper wear it like no one else. Hello podcasting joys it's me James today and I am joined again by Mo they are an educator attorney abolitionist and they serve overlap communities of activists queer people and prisoners and we've heard from them before we have them about June 11th but today we're talking about something a little different we're talking about redistributing power in the attorney client relationship. How are you Mo? I'm doing okay. How are you James? I'm existing. I'm fine. I'm thriving. So you wanted to talk today you reached out to talk about this I think it's a really interesting topic and it's one that like I've become increasingly more aware of in my coverage of some sort of different stuff that's the various prosecutions I guess in the US and so I was very interested in this can you perhaps start out by explaining what it is exactly that you want you wanted to discuss within the attorney client relationship. Yeah sure I wanted to talk about building a trusting relationship with your attorney where you feel heard and respected and understand what you have a right to expect from your attorney and feel empowered to push for it. And this actually I want to address this both from the side of the client particularly for people who are accused of criminal offenses and I also want to speak a little bit to the people who may be representing folks who are accused of criminal offenses. For people accused of criminal offenses. I want to make sure that anyone in that position really understands what you have a right to expect from that relationship and to feel really confident asking for it for people who are representing individuals who are politically radical or people who are facing politically motivated prosecutions. I want those attorneys to feel safe and ethically empowered to practice criminal defense in a way that honors the goals of clients who may define their legal interests not with respect to only their own personal liability but with respect to a larger set of principles or a larger community. Yeah I think yeah that's a very it's a good distinction to draw and I think I could good think for people to be thinking about so why is this sort of a topic that's that's important right now. Well so I certainly don't want to say that participating in protest or in social movements is dangerous or that it's even more dangerous than it has been in the past. But I am concerned that we might be seeing some arrests and charges that are a little more unhinged than we've seen in a while. So this isn't new but it may be new to a newer generation of activists and I think some of the community knowledge that was cultivated and held 20 or 30 years ago may be outdated or it might be inaccessible to folks who weren't involved back then or maybe who weren't involved in things that were like subject to this level of state repression 20 or 30 years ago. So that includes activists but it also includes even very experienced criminal defense attorneys who maybe haven't interacted with these kinds of prosecutions. You know for whatever reason because they were doing a different area of practice maybe because this was happening to the people they were representing in the geographic area where they practice or like it wasn't happening at the time that they were practicing. So I think that people on both sides of the attorney client relationship could benefit from considering that there are some maybe important and time tested methods of working to mount a collaborative defense in the context of a politically motivated prosecution. Yeah I think that's just to kind of pick you back off what you said I think it's incredibly valuable often like if you've been part of social movements protest movements whatever you want to call it like for a long time often we do have to learn things like the institutional memory of movements can be quite short and a lot of people have come to the protest movement now who were not. So I think in my own case I can involved in sort of the campaign against neoliberal globalization in the early 2000s where we screwed up a lot and learned a lot and some of us are still around and some are not sadly because in part of the groups that happened and like a lot of people understandably have been radicalized by having their bodily autonomy attacked by seeing the cops continue to murder people after we all got in the streets and got shot with rubber bullets to us to stop murdering people. Like all these things that have understandably made people realize that the institutional. The institutions haven't really responded to their demands for basic human decency and so. Yeah they might find themselves out in the streets and government doesn't generally yield power willingly and certainly government right now is doing everything to kind of take what little liberty and autonomy folks have and slice into that so. It's very reasonable to consider these things so if in this attorney client relationship what would be some areas of friction or if maybe I'm phrasing that wrong but like places where people might want to advocate for themselves in order to get an outcome that they desire. Right well so I'll certainly get more into the specifics but I guess you know I want to talk about this because I am seeing disconnects between people in these relationships and just from where I sit I feel like I can see what's going wrong. And and I think that there are some straightforward solutions and I think that having compassion each party having compassion for the other can be really useful here so. I think like one thing that's happening is that attorneys are very much educated to be confident. And so I think that's not the point of arrogance and clients often either don't feel authorized to push back on their attorneys ideas or they do an attorneys then just maybe steamroll them and this is not. Certainly because attorneys are assholes I think it is because criminal defense attorneys are very often taught to minimize their clients legal liability by any means necessary well by any lawful means. I guess that's what I should say. So for criminal defense attorneys who do not primarily work with movement aligned clients this often means negotiating deals with the prosecution that involve cooperating with the state's investigation. So I think that's the kind of thing that's happening over information on your confederates putting the client in an isolated or adversarial position with their co defendants or coeresties or doing things that require a person to renounce or disparage the people or the community is that they've been involved with that they come from. And it's true that using these kinds of tactics to minimize your own legal risk is very often what people charged with criminal offenses want. But that sort of approach is often at odds with movement values and it's often totally inconsistent with what activists want activists want when they are facing charges. So you know trying to minimize legal consequences is you know certainly always a part of our job and it's often a totally valid thing for lawyers to be doing but the idea that an attorney's job is solely to mitigate legal fallout is not actually entirely accurate. What lawyers are supposed to do is work with the client to help the client articulate their goals and then the attorney should use their expertise and their experience to help the client lawfully pursue those goals. And that's why attorneys are supposed to do in every case, but it I think it often becomes. And it's just salient when the client's goals are less focused on minimizing legal consequences and more focused on for example highlighting movement messages or acting in solidarity with other people who are facing similar charges. So you know again I'm talking about this right now in the context of explicitly politically motivated prosecution but frankly. And that's why you're trying to make an impact on what the client has to lead in all cases. Yeah, of course. So one thing that we've traveled that little bit that I think maybe folks are in some areas that I've looked at might not have been aware of is a concept of a joint defense. Could you explain for people who aren't familiar what that looks like. So I think that's a way of approaching a legal case where there are multiple defendants or multiple arrestes typically in a criminal case if you have multiple defendants there's sort of a presumption that their interests are at odds with each other. And one of them or one or more of them is going to get thrown under the bus to reduce the punishment of one or more of the others. And we're talking about something like a mass arrest or an arrest that takes place in the context of a social movement where there are multiple defendants very often those people do not see their interests of being at odds with each other very often they see their interests as being unified. And so they want to act in solidarity with each other and there are a bunch of reasons for for this that are legal and they're also political and social reasons right. Just in terms of people, you know, having caring social relationships they often have commitments to each other and to community but politically people often feel that their individual legal interests are less the important thing that's at stake. And that the thing that's at stake is actually the health and welfare of their social movement right and that if they did do something like cooperate with the state's investigation they would actually be undermining their larger social movement goals legally. And this is really important legally having a joint defense agreement or using a joint defense approach. It allows all of those people to work together in a privileged context right because they share a unity of interest and so they and their attorneys are able to work on legal strategy together are able to do things like negotiate for non cooperating plea agreements as a block are able to just have you know more eyes on the problem. More people doing legal research more people drafting motions right and so in a very material sense this this is. Often a legal strategy working together. Actually leads to better legal outcomes for everybody involved so I want to be clear that this approach both you know using joint defense agreements and using that approach but also just in terms of an individual attorney client relationship acting in a way that's more collaborative is not just cosmetic and it's not just something that makes you feel good if you're someone who's committed to anti authoritarian principles. In a material way approaching the attorney client relationship in a way that is calculated to more fully incorporate the goals and expertise of the client or of many clients leads to better legal outcomes less punitive outcomes it leads to outcomes that are more closely aligned with client values. And that leads to outcomes that are better understood by the client even if those outcomes are bad. Right yeah yeah at least the part of that process and I think a great example of joint defense that we discussed would be the the J 20 case right. And if I'm not miss it again it was a group of folks who were tried together or who the amount of joint defense against charges that were like filed against some. Trumps inauguration it was. They were cuddled in DC protesting trumps inauguration and there were more than 200 people arrested in in this mass arrest and they had a very coordinated defense and they all work together. And ultimately in I'm going to say in large part because they had so many eyes on the problem they had so many people working on it they were able to really go through discovery go through the state's evidence against them and find. Prosecutorial misconduct that led to the favorable resolution of those cases the other thing that they did is that they really all refused to cooperate with the state's investigation which limited the harm that was done to larger social movements because it meant that people were not just rolling over on each other and. And then they were giving the state information to which it was not entitled right like you know information about people's relationships or interpersonal conflicts or you know different kinds of. First amendment protected information that the state always wants to have about activists but which. And not entitled to but which they often end up getting because people who are facing criminal charges you know sometimes. Will will offer that up in exchange for you know what they hope will be some lenience. And then you know they are really good explanation of have how these these techniques like you say they're not just cosmetic it's not posturing or an aesthetic thing it can result in material benefits as well as aligning with your moral desires. Can you explain substantively then how this looks in an attorney client relationship either with an individual or as a group now to join defense. So you know like any other relationship that's predicated on anti authoritarian principles and shared values of mutual aid and self determination. It requires building trust it requires clear expectations honest communication respect for each other's expertise and consent. And I think you know the piece that I think is sometimes missing is a real understanding from both parties that the accused is the person who has rights and liberty on the line. The accused is the person whose goals matter the accused is the person who needs to be able to make decisions about things like whether or not to accept a plea offer whether or not to cooperate with the state. Whether or not to go to trial and whether or not to testify a trial. The attorney is presumably the person who has a lot of expertise with the law and a lot of experience with the legal system and that is valuable and important. But you know it really I want people who are facing criminal charges to understand how much power they ought to feel comfortable exercising in this relationship. You know it is up to the accused whether they want their attorney to take partner joint defense strategy. Now we are seeing some stuff I have recently seen. And bond conditions imposed on people facing criminal charges that appear to me to make it very difficult. For attorneys to engage in a joint defense strategy because sometimes it looks like these co defendants are being forbidden from communicating with each other. And so you know that is an interesting wrinkle but one of the things it can mean is that it's up to the accused whether they need their attorney to go and argue to have that bond condition removed. Right. Yeah. I thought of that but there are definitely cases especially if you are being prosecuted in a group. It's alleged that you've conspired to do something illegal then it yes, that might be a condition of your bond and that would make it very hard to to a joint defense. But like you said that's when you should feel empowered to ask your attorney to stop that from being a thing right. The person who's facing charges gets to make these decisions right and I'm saying well it's your right to decide whether to be involved in a joint defense. It's also your right to decide not to be you can absolutely exercise your right to independent council meeting. The right to have an attorney who is not representing anyone else who's involved in your case like who is not in any way connected to a co defendant or coeresty. Now this is not to say that your attorney has to do everything you want and they're just a yes man and that if they decline to do everything you instruct them to do that you should fire them. You know attorneys do have to operate under certain constraints and this ranges from things like you know some law is not relevant to this case right I've occasionally had clients ask me to use the uniform commercial code to defend their criminal cases which is not a thing. You know I've also had clients ask me to like hold have a hearing or file a motion at a time when like procedurally that's not permissible right so you know you can't just do everything that the client says but look typically the attorney has control over legal strategy because you know as I said presumably they have expertise with law. But like even if you have decided that you're just going to defer to your attorney entirely in matters of strategy or even if you have an attorney who's like not super comfortable involving you in strategy to the degree that like I might be. At a minimum the attorney needs to be able to explain their strategy to you and justify it right so you know again there needs to be mutual trust and respect for each other so expertise. They're not just a mouthpiece but if if you feel like they're genuinely not listening to your goals or not helping you to understand what's happening or they're actively disrespectful it's really important for you to know you can fire your attorney. Yeah I think the one area at least where I've become aware of this is somebody whose attorney was either refusing to or somehow was incapable of gendering them in a way that they would like to be gendered and in cases like that like you you have the right to ask your journey your your attorney to use whatever pronouns you prefer and to be referred to using those pronouns is that is that right. Absolutely absolutely I've certainly heard horror stories and not just and I'll speak to this in a second I have heard horror stories not just about public defenders but also about private council. Being you know casually racist being misogynist being transphobic and you know being ableist being really disrespectful in classist particularly around things like transportation and child care. So you know if you have an attorney who's just straight rude or being disrespectful or like being oppressive in some way I would say you know the first step I suppose would be to bring it to their attention and if they. Don't if they are not responsive you know you should know that you do have a right to choose your own attorney now I do understand that there are you know financial issues with just choosing your own attorney but particularly in the context of. You know movement related prosecutions there often not always but often resources available to you where people will either work to find you someone who can represent you pro bono. Or you know will raise money and the other thing is that if you have a public defender you can almost always have appointed council from another office if you have some kind of. Irrevertevable conflict with your attorney. I think we should talk about public defenders a bit because I think sometimes people can think that like they're sort of the worst option or like the bargain basement choice or have you when in fact there's some there are some things you can get with a public defender you're very unlikely to get with private council and. Absolutely talk about public defenders a little bit. I would love to I love public defenders especially in large cities that have what we would call institutional public defenders. As opposed to you know everyone takes a turn being a public defender for one week out of the year. People who want to be public defenders do not go into public defense for the big bucks they go into it because they care about defending people and keeping people out of jail. And very often you know the people who are in those positions care very much and are really really well trained and they are not dummies and they will work really hard for you and I do want to push back against the widespread perception that public defenders are not good attorneys. They very often are the best available option you are often in very very good hands. Now this isn't to say that you're never going to come across a public defender who is rude or incompetent in some way some way but I would really really caution you against assuming that the public defender is not a super qualified committed attorney. And the other thing is that the offices of the public defender often have resources available to them that private council do not. You know they have investigators they have social workers they have vouchers for public transportation and all of those things are resources that. And be very useful in supporting someone who's facing criminal charges. So again, you know, certainly if you're having some kind of interpersonal problem with your public defender or any attorney. And I want you to feel really really empowered to address it. And hopefully they're able to you know respond in a way that's appropriate and explain what's going on and you know why things are happening in whatever way they are. But I think it would be a mistake to dismiss the public defender as a good option. I agree. I know some public defenders and some of them are really great people very very committed like you said to keeping folks out of jail, which is his goal in a lot of these cases. Some of my best friends are public defenders. No, they don't. And like people obviously will be I guess a lot of people in in some who are anti authoritarian right are going to be like less and positively aligned with any sort of institutions or feel concerned about interacting with people who are part of these institutions. But like as far as those people exist within those institutions to keep people out of much worse institutions like jails. So. I think a lot of people who do public defense really have the sense that they're. You know that their mission is harm reduction right and they're prepared to operate in the confines of what are sometimes. And they're sort of the via thin bureaucracies in order to achieve that. Yeah. And maybe a lot of folks would have run into I certainly know I'm a lot of public turn into 2020 in the course of covering protest. And yeah, it's pretty clear that those folks would largely aligned with with good things, stopping the state doing violence to people in all of the different ways that it does that. Mo, is there anything else that you'd like us to get to with respect to these relationships people might have with their attorney. Yeah, I say there's a lot. Attorneys have an obligation to give their clients their best understanding of what's going on. What paths are available to take. And the possible or likely outcomes of each of those paths right an attorney has an obligation to give you the best possible legal advice based on your articulated goals. Their understanding of the law their experience and their clinical judgment. And their clients have no corresponding obligation to follow that advice. And they can be frustrating from where I said. But it is nevertheless a critical attribute of my work that I do not get to make big decisions for other people. They get to make decisions that I would not make if I were allowed to make them. But I'm not. I think that you know, I try to be really transparent with my clients about what my ethical commitments are what I will do for them. What I am not allowed to do for them. You know, I try to have those conversations in an ongoing way. I don't know that that's common practice. I think people are really busy and that's a hard practice to maintain. I want to encourage people who are in an attorney client relationship to initiate those conversations. Right. I guess the only other thing I would say is, you know, if you have concerns with your lawyer. Address those concerns immediately because the farther into a case you are the harder it is to have that conversation and the farther into a case you are the harder it is to fire your lawyer. Typically you have a right to choose your own attorney. But if you're, you know, one week out from going to trial, the judge may not allow you to do it. Right. Yeah. Right. So, yeah, I mean, I guess I just. I just wanted to tell anyone who's listening that if you are in a situation where you have to have a relationship with an attorney. You know, it's already probably kind of a bad situation. And you should be in a relationship where you feel like your lawyer is taking all of your goals seriously, which includes not just your straight forward legal goals, but movement support and solidarity. And if your lawyer is disrespecting your goals or disrespecting your identities or disrespecting other kinds of ethical commitments you have. You, you can choose to find a different attorney and there are resources available and ultimately these decisions are yours. And then I had some resources that I'm going to ask you to be great. So for people who may be accused of criminal offenses, there is a really great book called the tilted guide to being a defendant. And if you Google that, you can find a free PDF of it. I would also encourage people to reach out to and to become non lawyer legal workers. And so people who have, you know, experience with jail support, people who have experience with court support and with providing sort of community support to people who are facing charges. If you are somebody who has an ongoing case, having a support committee that includes at least one legal worker can be just so critical in maintaining morale and in feeling supported and in having the wherewithal to be an active participant in your own defense. And we do know that when people are active participants in their own defense, they have better legal outcomes. Yeah, I would imagine even if they don't have better legal outcomes, they have ones that are easier for them to understand their more satisfactory because of that. Absolutely. So win win. Absolutely. There are a lot of times when there are no good options on the table. I don't I want to be very clear. Being an active participant in your own defense or having a really great attorney who really listens to you and respects your goals does not mean that you are not going to experience punishment or see repression. It means that you are going to have a better handle on what your options are and why things are happening in the way that they are. So even if you end up in a situation that involves, you know, for example, spending time in carceral confinement, you will at least understand how you got there and you will understand what the other possible options were. Right. So you know, somebody might choose to endure punishment rather than cooperate with the state. And even if that is not what most people would understand as a better legal outcome, it is an outcome that at least was more intentionally pursued than the alternative. Yes. Yeah, that totally makes it to where could people find these these non lawyer legal workers if they wanted to add one or they if they, you know, if they wanted to support from one. If people wanted to find legal workers in their own community, I mean, typically they're. They're involved with movements, they might be associated with your local chapter of the national lawyers guild, they might be the people who are most active in jail support. If you really can't find anybody. You can call the national lawyer skilled anti repression hotline if you are actively facing charges that number is 2126792811. And we can try to connect with you with appropriate legal resources in your community. That is one way that I would encourage people to reach out if you are facing charges. And you're having a hard time connecting with legal resources. That hotline was mostly for federal federal cases and for federal federal repression. But if you call it, we will do our best to connect you with appropriate resources, wherever you are. And there are also some resources for lawyers that I wanted to hype here, which are first of all the national lawyers guild, which is a bar association for people who value human rights over property rights. And the next situation that this is the subset of human beings that the NLGA great for some positive NLGA experiences. What a dark situation that it hadn't occurred to me how telling that was about lawyers as a whole. Yeah, you know, when a subset of your, well, a subset of my profession is equally dark and terrible people. So we just have to try and be better, I guess. The other thing that is available for attorneys who are interested is there is a book put out by the same people who wrote the tilted guide to being a defendant for attorneys. And it's called representing radicals. And that is I think available through a. You should buy it from AK press directly and not from Jeffrey Bezos in any way. Thank you. But the other thing is there are a lot of attorneys around the country who are more than happy to consult to act as mentors to share. And there are a lot of different solutions to share legal research. The people who work in movement spaces as lawyers are typically always prepared to to share our experience and resources. Because we have a stake in other people becoming really good at this. And we have a lot of other clients. So if anyone is interested in helping me to achieve that goal. Either by going to law school or by taking some of my clients or taking some of the people who might otherwise be my clients. Please, I would be delighted to shepherd you into. I have a little like budding movement defenders. How would they be able to find you? Yes, if you would like to find me on the internet, please don't. But I do have a website that you can find if you Google me, it is Moat law. And I am pretty available if you reach out to me by email and have questions. But generally when I come on these things, the only thing I have to plug is the concept of not talking to cops. I want to do an episode on that. Maybe we'll do it one day. I think we should do an expanded how to not talk to cops. Guide. But I guess it's not just the concept of not talking to cops. It's actually the practice of not talking to cops. And certainly like is somebody myself who lives on the border and has to deal with all kinds of different jurisdictions of cops on an almost daily basis. Just in the travel I need to do to live my life. It can be complicated and scary. And if you're not a citizen, it becomes even more complicated and scary. So. Oh, yes, the thing we should discuss in detail. I would like to say that apart from some very, very specific exceptions. That involve being at borders or being subpoenaed to a federal grand jury. You never have an obligation to talk to cops to answer their questions or to cooperate with their investigations. That doesn't mean you can obstruct their investigations. But you absolutely have no affirmative obligation to speak to police officers. And if they ask you if they are trying to interrogate you or ask you questions, you can say, I am going to remain silent and I want to speak to a lawyer. And if the feds show up at your house or call you on the phone or come to your office or your place of work, you can say, I am represented by council. Please leave your name and number and my lawyer will call you. Yeah, that's good to have scripts. I want to, yeah, I think we should we should break down in detail some more scenarios. We should do it another episode because it'll be maybe a bit longer. I think folks maybe I think everyone understands the concept, but the practice and those advice you give an air is great. Yeah. And if you don't yet have an attorney and you feel uncomfortable saying, I'm represented by council, you can just say, please leave your name and number and my lawyer will call you. And then you can call the National Lawyer's Guild anti-federal repression hotline at two and two six seven nine two eight one. And have a privileged conversation about your rights, risks and responsibilities and we can connect you with an attorney in your area. Yeah, that is excellent actionable advice. Yeah, thank you so much for giving us so much to view your time and help. Yeah, I really appreciate it. I'm sure everyone else does too. And it's my pleasure. I am always available to come and talk to you about various the various rights of people accused of criminal offenses. Usually I am talking about your rights with respect to the state, but it has become really evident that I needed to talk about people's rights with respect to their own attorneys. It's good. It's empowering for people to hear this. 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Yeah. Sophie wasn't here for the come episode. Now Sophie, Sophie refused to be on for the come episode threatening to quit. No, no, sadly. Yeah. Yeah. But so, you know, today is a couple of days since we all got the surprising news that Tucker has been let go at Fox. This was news that was surprising to Tucker. There's a couple of things that are funny about the announcement itself, namely that he signed off his last episode saying see you guys next week. Fox, in the messaging they've put out was like, you know, we both agreed that he needed to leave the network that this is an amicable split. The Brian Kilmeade who replaced him the next episode with a Fox News tonight was like Tucker and I are still good friends. He's just decided mutually to take a take a leave from the company. This is definitely not true. We'll talk a little bit about all of this, but the gist of I think it's kind of worth talking about like why this happened as far as we know there's not, you know, objective kind of confirmation about why specifically he got fired. But the broad speculation, some articles have like quoted a Fox News insider who says that it was due to something either he said in a recorded but unaired episode of the show or that it was something that was found in the emails that were revealed during discovery that was profoundly anti-Semitic. I've heard out like in one source at least said that it was anti-Semitic enough that it might have been legally actionable. That's obviously like what the fuck I would love to know what that specifically means. But what we do know is that a former producer for the Tucker Carlson show who was a booking for him is currently suing the network both for a hostile work environment. She claims that she was exposed to intense anti-Semitism while working there. And she alleges that she was basically threatened into changing her deposition. So the lawsuit came alongside her like issuing a correction to her deposition and saying that she had basically lied in order like because she was being threatened by people at Fox, which is like. So there's a lot going on here. So that's kind of the gist of what we know right now as to like why he got a shit can't yeah. That's that's the basics. It's interesting to the heat. It's been like a day now and he has said nothing. There have been multiple people who said that he's not responding to his texts, which is extremely funny. I saw one report that I don't know how accurate it is. I saw one report that says he found out 10 minutes before Fox like release the statement. Yeah, he was in contract negotiations. So he was in the middle of presumably getting a Fox to agree to pay him a shit load more money. Yeah, and now he has no money, which is very funny. Well, he'll still probably get a lot of money somehow. Yeah, I'd be interested to see if he like pivot to something like like OANN or Newsmax. I don't know if they have the means to pay him what he would probably get. Yeah, no, and this is this is one of the questions kind of following this and how and how this decision is going to affect, you know, politics going forward, especially with 2024. The two big questions being where is Tucker going to go and who is going to take his place for the next few weeks Fox is probably just going to be doing like a rotating selection of hosts that totally like make a final decision. So, you know, a lot of people could could end up end up with that job. But in terms of where he's going, there's there's a few interesting options. Now, it kind of does come down to who's going to be willing to pay the probably pretty high price or if he's just going to try to stay independent. But I think something like Newsmax isn't out of the question. I think I think this is this is just like a guess, but I think there's a decent chance that the daily wire is going to go after him really hard. Yeah, he's already pretty friendly with a lot of the people there. They're they've been willing to dish out a lot of money for someone like Steve and Crouter. Now Tucker will be undoubtedly more, but also he's going to be more of a pull. And that that is something that's entirely possible. I mean, the daily wire already produces like usually two of the most popular podcasts in the world like in the top 10. They already have a they have a lot of web traffic. They don't have like cable, but they get a lot of like other other ways to to to spread their work. I have a paid streaming service down there. Like yes, yes, they also have the daily. Yeah, plus. Yeah, they are. I think that they're probably the only people on the right that can offer Tucker. Both money that's broadly in line with what Fox could and an audience that's that's sizeable. Um, potentially even an audience that's larger. One of the things to kind of keep in mind is that Tucker was going to get out three and a half million viewers a night somewhere around there, which made him the most popular host on cable news. Um, but also is minuscule based on historical number one, minuscule based on the kind of audiences that like you can get on streaming platforms today, which are much larger than cable audiences. And his minuscule based on like, I mean, it was like 10 years ago that three and a half million viewers on a night 10, 15 years ago would have been like an unsuccessful show on an easy right. Right. For some, for some perspective, the most successful TV finale of all time was the mash finale, which had like 105 million viewers. Um, like cable cable don't go, you know, television period does not get the kind of viewership that it does anymore. And I think when you're looking at Tucker, he is the main draw for him has to be the audience. He's not, I mean, he's the heir to the Campbell or to the the swanson, you know, dinner fortune. He cannot be motivated primarily by the paycheck, right. That that that there's he's simply like it just that can't be the reason he's doing it. Um, it has to be the, the, the fame, you know, and so daily wire, I think is is a likely place for him as a result of that. Yeah, another thing that's interesting, I thought it's like me, I mentioned that he hasn't said anything yet. And he's probably taking advice from his lawyer, Brian Friedman, who incidentally is the same dude who's representing Don Lemon, who lost his job on the same day, which is just a match. Good year for that guy. He's a good year for this guy. He like, this is the guy who gets a shit ton of money from networks when people get fired from networks. Like he, he was, he has represented like Megan Kelly before. Like, when you hear of a famous person getting let go by network, it's probably this guy who's representing them. And I thought it was utterly hilarious that, yeah, both of them retained the same guy on the same day, having been fired. Thinking about lawyering up, maybe think about like, and, and, and so if you mentioned it, um, that like, Carlson defames people, he lies on an almost daily basis, right? We, we recently spoke about how he took the statistics of Russian deaths from those leaks documents that he used the blatantly altered version of those documents long after everyone knew they've been altered, right? Uh, he needs serious legal clout to defend him from the fact that he lies into fames people every single day. So like, going even though he has a sizeable fortune going out on his own would be costly in the sense of like he would almost have to be permanently defending himself. Yeah. And I think I think this is one of the things where well, I'm it's, it's not clear to me what the impact of sort of the Alex Jones trial has been, but this is one of those things where I think the dominion people actually just nailing Fox to the wall is going to be. A sort of big factor here because it makes it seem easier and more plausible and things that like lawyers are willing to risk getting in fights about for actually going after these people for just like defending people. And so yeah, it'll be, it'll be interesting to see like how, how long Tucker can last on his own before he gets into a giant court battle with someone and whether he is, I don't know, attempts to be slightly more careful. Yeah, like, yeah, exactly. I don't think if he's, if he goes to YouTube or something, he's not going to be spending his, his frozen dinner fortune on legal fees. I don't think so he just, and he can't do what he does without spouting shit, right? His whole thing is just straight up lying and doing this sort of credulous fool routine that he does, which we always results in these ridiculous conclusions that he comes to. So like, I don't know with that maybe the daily why I can sustain that I don't really have a good sense of sort of their clout. If people aren't familiar, should we summarize the dominion case? I know you've spoken about it. I'm passing. Yeah, I did. I mean, you can listen to the two part or I did with Katie and Cody on a, on the dominion lawsuit, where we basically just go over the entire document that dominion prepared for that. But the gist of it is that Tucker knowingly and knowingly, we know that he knew because the discovery process revealed a bunch of his text messages and emails where he talked about knowing that the election fraud conspiracy theory was bullshit. And he propagated it and attacks against dominion and another company smartmatic in order to keep his audience on board, which is a criminal, you know, defamation or not criminal, but at least like legally actionable. You can sue as as dominion did and one like 800 million bucks. So and I do think that's really worth that is that is kind of pertinent when we're talking about who's going to take him next because like obviously the daily wire would want to guy like Tucker. Except for the fact that he could cost them another 800 million dollars, which has to be has to be part of the calculus of any company looking at taking him on and I think is something. None of us, nobody really knows what's going to happen with this, but I think there is a good chance he is permanently marginalized in terms of audience just because of how much like 800 million dollars is not enough to sink Fox on its own, but it is enough to make anybody looking at bringing Tucker on board. And I think that's the second guess of the self. Yeah, I saw some numbers that were I think I think they were saying he was bringing in the highest like amount of revenue of any like, like Kibble do's anchor, but it was like 78 million dollars a year and he lost like so he lost 10 years of his income. He basically lost everything he'd made Fox during the time when he was the number one. Yeah, and that has to be that has to be a huge part of the calculus of like okay, you know, these these people like as as as as much as the right is ideological it is also a capitalist and the risk of the word on that is terrifying. Yeah, and especially when it comes to the daily wire, a cost like that would just probably make their entire company fold. They're not that big of a company. They just have a disproportionate amount of influence because their hosts are really good at like marketing and social media manipulation. Yeah, I have ad revenue now would be a great time for us to pivot to and have for some gold or coins with Reagan. Oh, yeah, yeah, you can hear the ads for the new podcast that our future colleague Tucker Carlson's got every day. Yeah, it's way him and Don Lemon just have it. Yeah, him and Don Lemon. We're calling it. I don't know if there's there's a good there's a good there's a good joke with their two names somewhere. I haven't figured it out yet though. So you do that for yourselves audience. What a good what a good time that we're talking about here. This is just just just a great day. Great week. So yeah, we're looking at, you know, I think kind of when we're talking about what's possible here in daily, why are you agrees kind of the most likely thing if you look at what leaked recently during their drama with Stephen Crowder the contract they were offering Crowder was somewhere around 30 million dollars, which from everything people have said is a big deal for that. That's one of the bigger, bigger offerings they're capable of doing that is, you know, probably the most Tucker is realistically going to be able to get but also one of the things that kind of is noteworthy but the contract they were offering Crowder is that it included clauses where like Crowder's take home could be reduced significantly if he got kicked off of platforms. And fucking Tucker Carlson is not going to keep it a YouTube. I mean, it is it is interesting in that sense of like they were they all of his content was able to be kept up when he was under Fox like on on YouTube, you can find all of his segments and it would be interesting to see how the content moderation differs if like he starts his own shadow on how and how comparatively what things would be would be counted as like community guidelines strikes. But yeah, I mean, just I think I think like last week Matt Walsh's show got got demonetized on YouTube, which if his contractors anything like Crowder means that he is going to be suffering up like a personal financial hit. Yeah, they're taking probably, you know, in the millions that he's losing. Yeah, and there's something I think this is an interesting thing that's been happening the last maybe like six months has been there's the there's been sort of increasing tension between sort of the far right that's basically C's controller public and party and like the money. And they keep running into these issues where in order to keep their base going they need to say stuff that like they're sort of like corporate backers are like this is either losing us money or is so far out there that like it's you know it's either directly losing this money from lawsuits or it's losing us elections or it's losing us like business and now I'm never going to claim that like Murdoch is not the far right because he is. But it's interesting that we've gotten to a point where people like Murdoch are getting more gun shy about what they can put on air because it's finally like the money is finally starting to see actual consequences and they're starting to pull back from the stuff a little bit. Well, see that's part of what I'm questioning is I I'm sure that that is something that's entering his calculus more now since the settlement but it's at least the early reporting suggests that's not really why or at least not most of the reason why Tucker got shit can it's a bunch of shit. Like stuff that is not revealed yet in the deposition that he was saying in email I mean one of the things came out that woman who is accusing him of creating a sexist and anti-Semitic work environment is that he like. When she got hired he plastered swimsuit photos of Nancy Pelosi over her office. And that's what we've heard like the shit that like I think it's possible that a what actually got Murdoch to make the call to can him is that he it Murdoch himself found out through discovery that he was saying shit in emails that would sink the company like if he's saying full on Nazi shit and there's there's documentation of that. Which I don't think is unlikely. Yeah, there's no there's no there's no limit at that point like yeah no the like clearly that shit aligns with his views and he's made a concerted effort to mainstream more and more outright fascist and Genesis white supremacist talking points every year that he's had that shot. So it would not especially when they got his text messages like he might be smart enough not to like maybe use his work email but I think that the fact that his there was some things in his text messages and yeah that wouldn't surprise me it's either that or he said something personal about one of the Murdochs and they they did he did talk shit about Fox executives. Which some people have suggested is like part of why they made the decision to can't him that he actually just pissed off the money men too and this was kind of an excuse to take more action. Yeah again like it's it's it's kind of unclear exactly what happened I think it's probably what talking about in the last portion of this what impact because it is likely that whatever happens. He's he's going to have less reach and a at least less reach in like a practical way because if Tucker starts a podcast even if the podcast has kind of more you know three daily wire whatever even if it's got on paper more listeners than Fox. I think there's something about cable news where you're reaching an audience that's that's different with the ideas that he was he's when he was on Fox he was hitting people who would never have encountered some of this like fascist yet this great replacement stuff. Whereas if he's saying the same thing on a daily wire podcast he's probably talking more to people who are already yeah you know pills so to speak. Yeah so I I I do there's a good chance that overall this kind of tanks his ability to actually like influence culture in yeah radicalize boomers like everyone listening can probably think of a person who they know or is in that sort of great a circle of people who different know who. It's an older person who is very much offline and has encountered these great replacement ideas through Tucker Carlson and become a significantly worse person because of Tucker Carlson's program yeah I mean and you can you can see how all of the daily wire guys like like wall and Michael Noles and even someone like Andy know they they suck up to Carlson so much and have been for the past few years because they realized that that actually gives them cultural access to be on his show on that platform in a way that. They're much more like Peterson to and people here since you are I think people people is broken into the mainstream I think a bit more but like all of these other guys like like Andy know wall she knows they're all good. But they have a lot of internet people and they influence like internet shit and sometimes that could start crossing over but in general the the cable whose platform kind of reifies things into broader culture in a way that someone like wall just doesn't because he like most people don't know who wall she's but most people do know who Tucker is and my dad is like a life long republican voter and when I talk about it. I'm like the first thing he said was like I've never heard of this guy yeah and it's yeah because he's he's a fucking internet weirdo and my dad doesn't you know he knows Ben Shapiro because Ben breaks through to the mainstream but he knows Ben Shapiro from like catching clips of him randomly being shared on Facebook by other people in his age group is opposed to like seeking this shit out and that's that's kind of the power of Tucker and I think one of the things you've seen. And I'm just gonna get that you were kind of talking at which is is the thing that is maybe most hopeful to me is how scared people like Andy know Glenn Greenwald flip the fuck out when this gun announced because they see. I'm made this is a major threat to their reach into their earning potential yeah Tucker can't host them anymore that's potentially disastrous for them and the fact that that's happening right is we're gearing up for 2024 is something I'm hopeful about at least yeah I'll say right. No, I mean it is it is a massive like rejection of of that platform to yeah people like that like this type of like rhetoric that Tucker is doing having this be like publicly rejected in this way will make all these people that are more on the fringes probably make it harder for them to break through in little ways like they used to try to by being on Tucker's show. Speaking of reifying things into the broader culture. By these products. And we're back okay so that there's one other thing that I we've recorded been touching on it but I think it's really interesting is that Tucker Tucker basically has a sort of media ecosystem that revolves around him and that there's a very established pathway. Or how you can become a sort of like a successful profitable right wing grifter which goes through you know you sort of go viral on Twitter you go viral on TikTok and then you go on a Tucker. And you know like people like lives at TikTok right like I think I think there's there's a specific kind of media campaign that even with whoever like whatever absolute asshole that like Fox puts in that slot after Tucker's you know whatever they sort of figure who that's going to be like there's still I think going to be sort of a hold there. Yeah where I think it gets harder to run the kinds the very very very specific kinds of campaigns like Liberty Talk like I. The sort of miles for Liberty shit that's been just making the country on on Fathom bleawful for the past few years. With like that I've been kind of working on writing something scripted about this trans panic that happened in a town very near me in San T right which like was an extremely clear like that was the goal. Right like like do to speech go go viral go on Tucker create you know let them go on the speaking circuit make money like to me at least it seems very clear that that was that was the goal and I want to go. He's a weapon system that they they have learned I like has become kind of the center of right wing strategy really is like get on Tucker cause you know moral panic culture warship. Yeah yeah and you know and like obviously like other foxes do this stuff doesn't work anywhere anywhere near as well and I think it's on the person the person that gets the closest is probably Laura ingram but I think she she kind of suffers from the glass ceiling problems yeah she actually cannot. cases on or would down yeah yeah Tom Brad mosogide yeah I plan with Laura in Grimberg really big it specifically viewingctucker is this thing that was a target weapon I think it's a really good way to look at this and specifically now that that weapon no longer can like actually aim correctly because of theful the most may not be able to write I mean maybe he'll come back to And we're wrong, but I, I, I am optimistic. I think it's all said. Yeah, it puts a spanner in the works of the hate machine that, that he built in a Fox bill. And that's a good thing. But me, you were saying before I rudely interrupted you, you asked all, how to go bust down. I cannot remember what I was going to say. You're talking about how, how, how other, other hosts kind of do the thing, but not quite real. Yeah, they, they, well, I mean, part of it also is just, you know, part of the, the power of Tucker is just the time slot that he's in. Yeah. Which is, you know, that, that, that's the one where like, all of the people who've gotten off of work or who are like turning on the television at night, get to. But yeah, like, Tucker was, I think, was really in, in the entirety of this sort of tv and media sphere was uniquely good at that stuff. And no one else, no one else could do it like that. And you know, like, like, the Fox people will create someone else. But until they fill that spot, a, there's a gap and B, it really remains to be seen whether they're going to sort of pick someone who is as embedded in like that part of the sort of fascist right as Tucker is, or if they're going to find someone who's like, I mean, still really, really right wing and sucks, but isn't like having a ye on. Yeah. Yeah. And it's, I mean, I am kind of curious slash worried about who's going to follow him into that time slot. Folks, real old heads will know. Tucker got his job after Bill O'Reilly, who was the Fox News fascist of my childhood, got shit canned for sexual harassment on an industrial scale. And so that's, that's why Tucker is in. And obviously as bad as Bill was, Tucker was worse. And maybe the person who follows Tucker will be worse than Tucker. I do have trouble imagining what that could be because my god, he really, he went, he went right up to the edge of putting on a fucking swastika, aren't bad. Yeah. Yeah. I will say about the Bill O'Reilly. I think people, people have been like, oh, like Tucker's going to disappear in the way Bill O'Reilly did. I don't, I don't think that's, I think he's going to be a bigger like, assuming he winds up somewhere, I think he'll be, still be a bigger influence than like, Bill O'Reilly was after he got fired. But yeah, I mean, Bill was also a lot older, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that is, that is an accurate assessment. Well, excited, excited to get my new rumble subscription so we can watch. Oh, yeah. All of Tucker and Sam together. Yeah. No, it's going to be glorious to see him finally pair up with Tim Poole. The two, the two of them carrying AK-47s are doing the deal journalism in 2024. Yeah. Yeah. Tucker Carlson for those are not familiar. Carried gun when reporting in Iraq, which for many reasons, it's a fucking terrible idea, including putting everyone else doing your job in change. But it is really funny. It's very, very funny. I will, I will say that. It is funny. I, I, I, I, I genuinely like part of me doesn't, but part of me does hope he decides to do a thing where he's like, I'm going to go do field journalism in Ukraine and just in being so, so, so, I will, I will just get, he just gets fucking marked by God damn like him. No, no, no, no, no, you know what happens? He, he embeds with the aesoph Italian. Yeah. There you go. And they all get taken out. And the great is got, got really kindness. But I think one thing I was definitely thinking about, like the past few years, less, less so that this, this, like past year specifically. But for a while, it was a quite frightening prospect to think about what if Tucker was going to run for president. And I don't think he, he is, he is not going to do that in 2024. Absolutely. That's, that's, that's not happening. But I mean, it's still possible he could in the future. 2028 is, is, is likely, if like, if he wants. But I think the, the loss of this position at this point in time will probably affect that decision because it's something he's certainly been thinking about considering he's one of the most influential conservative people on the, yeah, like on the planet. He determines policy. Oh, did. And he did. Yeah. And, and now it's interesting with him, with him, leaving his job in this way. It's, it'll be interesting to see if how that, how that affects any kind of potential of prospect for him, for him running for office. My big question around all that, and this is kind of unanswerable is like, does Tucker have any appeal outside of the right wing base? Three and a half million cable news viewers is not evidence of the kind of broad based appeal that can draw an independence and win an election. And Tucker has never, you know, the one, the closest thing he's been to a political candidate is when he went up against John Stewart and that didn't go great for him. No. And he moved after, after John Stewart kind of destroyed his crossfire career, he moved to a situation where he was, he had unprecedented control over his show. It was almost entirely recorded and stuff out of a studio and main that he set up. He built everything he was doing around being able to totally control how he was seen, how, what was shown. What of his was like put out to the public and you simply can't do that as a presidential candidate. You have to accept and be able to make work for you the fact that every eye is on you and you, you do not have total control over what about you is put out and published. Well, I think you're going to be repeatedly questioned in situations where you can't edit the footage or stop things from going out afterwards. And I don't know that Tucker has what it takes to succeed in that kind of environment. Yeah. In Shalot, he'd fucking never succeeds again and we never have to hear about him. Yeah, we should shout out this lady Kat Abugazale that the person who had to watch Tucker Carlson for years and years and years and then explain it to people. She works at Media Matters for America, but she is taking the biggest victory lap that anyone has ever taken right now and it's, it's kind of glorious to watch. Doing the Lord's work truly. Yeah, taking on trauma for all of her. Her stuff is quite good. Like she, she did a good job explaining how toxic Tucker was to people who might not have been aware of it. Yeah. Anyway, in conclusion, Tucker, we would love to have you on at Cool Zone. Totally welcome to come host your own podcast. We'll bring you on that. It could happen here. You could do a bastard's guest appearance. Yeah. Oh, I'm just a man. He can. Yeah. Right into the jungle. Yeah. Yeah. We'd rock them directly. Come on, come on Tucker. We'd love to have you. Anyway, I think that's, I think that's a soad. Hey, Mar-a-lo, Pez here and let's be real. 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Now, French workers build brick and mortar barricades on highways and set branches on fire on train tracks. Welcome to it could happen here. The escalation from protest to uprising is, in part, a product of how Macron forced the retirement age increase through a national assembly he no longer controls. Without the ability to win a vote, Macron's Prime Minister Elizabeth Bourne suddenly invoked article 49 of the French Constitution, which allows the ruling government to force a bill into law without a vote. Macron argues that because circumventing parliament to force legislation through his legal, the move is democratic. Millions across France disagree. We spoke to two French protesters, Maillel, a student in Lyon, and a Gat, a union railway worker at a state-owned rail company about the movement. The two met through a struggle committee designed to bring people from different backgrounds and movements together to fight against Macron's reforms. And for, as Maillel put it, victories for our class. A Gat had this to say about Macron's anti-democratic sleight of hand. What they are using right now is a rhetorical trap, which consists of democracy and constitutionality. I don't know if I'm using the right word, but for instance, you know that they may be, you know, that to impose this reform, they have been using an article, which is article 49.3 of our constitution. And they say that, well, this article is in the constitution. We are in a democracy, and therefore this article is democratic, which is absolutely false. It's a fallacious reasoning. It is not true. The 49.3 is an anti-constitution, it's an anti-democratic article of the constitution. And this is what they have been trying to do lately, it is saying to make us believe that everything that's been happening is absolutely normal and implies with the democratic standards of France, which is not true. Also, what they are trying to do to disqualify any opposition from the left wing is to say that the left wing party is actually an extreme left wing party, which it is not. And it's kind of, they're trying to induce a kind of history in all this and to radicalize what is not. What we are asking for is simply for them to listen to what we for once can hold the people generally. When you have a protest, it's only a part of the population that disagrees with the policy of the government. But this time, honestly, there are seven people out of ten who disagree with this, and nine workers out of ten who disagree with this reform. Honestly, I think we can call ourselves the people. Yeah. And in a democracy, well, what you do is listen to the people, not the representatives and not the members of the government, but the people in the fucking streets, I'm sorry. And because they do not want to do that, they try to say that we are radicals and that we are supported by radical political parties, which is not true. Yeah, it's a very religious situation. Yeah, this is what I wanted to say about what their current strategy aside from the repression of which we are going to talk in a few minutes. This is what their strategy is. Yeah, like so basically they confuse all of the forces on the left together. They say that melancholy is funding the black bloc. So it's things like that, the CGT, all of them, it's on the same and they all want the destruction of civilization. That's the discourse on the four rights. Yeah, let me eat babies. That sounds like the American right too. And this is linked to police violence. This discourse, when you were talking about how they're saying that the constitution is democratic and there's nothing you can say, even though well, the point of the constitution is to bypass the problem and I don't know if that's democratic. But yeah, so when it comes to police violence, the reaction is to say that the state holds as a legitimate monopoly of violence. So therefore they can repress as however they want. That's literally what they're saying right now, which is kind of worrying. The French police have been incredibly violent in their campaign to suppress the protests. At an ecological action in Sandsaleen on March 25, tens of thousands of activists remett with helicopters, armored vehicles, and 6,000 grenades, many of which with a French police is new and incredibly dangerous military grade GM2L CS gas grenades. One protester was shot in the head with a tear gas grenade fired by a grenade launcher mounted on an armored vehicle. He remained in a coma fighting for his life for an entire month. Earlier today, his parents released a statement saying that he has begun to wake up but is not fully conscious and his life remains in danger. The day before a special police motorcycle unit called Brav M created in 2019 to suppress the Gillescheon with a yellow vest protests was recorded threatening a group of random people that had arrested for sitting in front of a building. From the Washington Post, the cops says, quote, you're lucky to be sitting there now that we've arrested you. I swear I'd have broken your legs literally. I can tell you we've broken elbows and faces but you I'd have broken your legs. One officer says in the recording, the moment reported. Two slapping sounds can be heard. The report says, along with an officer saying wipe that smile off your face. Later in the clip, a police officer warns the young people they have to taint quote, next time we come you won't be getting in the car to go to the police station. You'll be getting it another thing called an ambulance to go to the hospital. Paris police chief lorette nuet is said on friday he was quote, very shocked by the audio clip. Maielle and I get we're less shocked. This is not really a surprise, unfortunately, because well our lease is not as I don't know it's problematic but maybe not as problematic as in the US. I'm sorry if I'm wrong about that but we also follow sometimes what happens on the other side of the ocean and but I must say that we we have had issues of police murders on the street like and police violence, wanton violence and unfortunately that now it's not new and there is a newspaper called mejaparts who managed to find a excerpt of I think it's a group on what's up or whatever of a policeman talking about race war and and all these kind of things and and unfortunately we know that there are such people in our police. So police are there there can basically fascists all of them like at there of like one of their unions which called alliance and for the political for the presidential elections they invited the right wing party for basically only people who dog we saw about genocide and then the classic Martin Lopin and Zimu as a far right who's openly calling for a civilisation or war with Muslims. So that's the police unions and for a little bit of history and the police we are for example one of the very violent units that you see arresting people all over France which are called brigadotique criminality or back for war and these people come from some sort of colonial units who were in Algeria during the war and when there was a need to repress populations who previously lived in colonies and then moved to France to the main country as they created a lot of very violent units that are recruited through people who were in the Algerian war to basically break down people's house things like this, beat them up you know it was really colonial practices and all of this kind of state with as a repression of poor and non-white areas of town where they try to always have a strong police presence and catch people they say in the act but they're really like making up reasons to arrest people, police violence is not you at all and yeah basically Zizzi in its train all year long against poor and non-white people and then during protests they come against the people who come to protests which are generally different people but not entirely different people of course. The police responds to protests, a Gatz has gotten more violence as the Gilegen protest in 2019 but instead of clearing the streets as Macron had hoped the increase in violence is just narrowing the traditional gap between more moderate trade union protesters and the more radical protesters found in black blocks. I've seen people in America and England saying that the movement is dying down because the inter-union protests are more and more away from each other but in the actual protest people are much much more radical and what happens is that the people who are in the front of the protests before the union and who may potentially fight with the cops and the union will never do. They're more and more numerous like four times bigger than the protests a month ago and so the cops cannot charge us every time they charge people get around them and their rugs which happen to hit their heads I don't know how. Yeah could I ask about that a bit specifically about the dynamic of there being a sort of I don't know I kind of divide between the more militant people who are fighting the cops and the more moderate like trade union like protesters I wanted to ask I guess how firm has that separation been and what I guess have the unions been doing here have they been trying to contain things have they been trying to push forward. Well I think it's a very recent phenomenon kind of especially the way it's taken from now because it's basically a mix of a black block and some gilets zone and some radical people yeah, yellow vest but so the black block it started really in 2016 before this there was no real black block all the time at protests and the attitude of the unions is that they hate a black block it's pretty simple I mean not of course as everyone who is in a union but the unions who organize a protest they don't want anyone in front of them they want people to go behind them and follow whatever they want to do so there have been really aggressive but even if there are conflicts right now I would say the fact that the people in front of the union are more and more numerous I think there's somewhat less tensions the unions I don't think they feel like they can really push against even the black block or radicals who break stuff. If I may add in something indeed there is a difference between the the attitude of the union directions let's say and people like me the simple unionized workers and what Miles said is absolutely true about the the hate yeah they really don't want any sack locks especially in front of them but what I observed in these over the last few demonstrations is that what we call the Cortes de Tête which is really the very head of the demonstration even in front of the unions the official union group where there are the black blocks and the yellow vets there are more and more people I was like I was going to say like me but I'm a bit of a still a bit cowardly and I I'm still afraid of getting in this kind of place but there are more and more unionized workers who mingle with the black blocks and etc and I you know we also have what we call manifestations sovaged the wild and and and not organized protests that are not organized by unions but are kind of spontaneous they happened after the micro force the reform through parliament without a vote and people just went into streets without the union and they burned there were images in Paris of everything burning it was that day and that's what we call the wild protests yeah and in these for the first time I saw unionized workers joining in that is crazy because they were feeling that what the unions were proposing within the the legal and and pacifists and nice frame was not enough because really our president was really just making fun of us and we couldn't have it and what we usually do was not longer enough for us and this is really something new I asked about the appearance of the Gilles Jean in the current protest and what the two thought of them myel the student was somewhat dismissive but the impact that Gilles Jean had on a gap and the rowell workers was very different yeah I can say a little bit but I don't know much about the yellow fists so what I saw of the young vests were a lot of blockages and people against taxes on gas and the way it radicalized was towards some form of radical democracy but maybe not so radical because they wanted the mass movements seem to and on the demand for referendums basically they wanted to be able to call their own referendums and the demands were not directly linked to economics as I saw them many very often and when we saw them in protests in Gilles on they were kind of weird but I don't know them very well what I saw was that the government repressed them really really hard much harder than the usual protests that we do because they were really scared of them yeah because I took part to the yellow vest movement and I tend to disagree a bit with your analysis on this yeah no problem no no it's just a I'm just saying it's not an attack at all at first I must say I hinted this movement because well just long story short it began in 2018 and in 2018 there was a big movement in the a sense of where I work in the railway public company because the the current it's very funny because it's the current prime minister who was the transport minister yeah they just moved them around they keep we keep seeing the same people it's absolutely I can't stand that anyway I have a personal vendetta with this woman and we had been trying to fight off the well they kind of started to kill off our companies only now dying of its low death but this is where it really well this is where the end really began in 2018 for us you mean by privatizations or kittings economy yeah we're not private yet but yeah the door has been open yeah yeah yes and so it's been a really really hard protest for us and we in the end we lost it was really hard and um after that we we've been I've seen these these people the yellow vest stand up and take on our songs to make them their own the the famous only lap it started with in the railway world and it really started in liong I was there and suddenly these people whom I did not see by our side a few months before started to invade the streets and sing our songs I was really outraged I was furious and then I fortunately I I spent time with the people who are more intelligent than me and who said that it was worth going to see these people and see what was in on their minds and what they were thinking especially because there were people who had never before protested they had never been on the street to demonstrate about anything and and they were right to do that and it's it all started with the price of oil and of gasolina and I found that really really insignificant and in fact it really opened my mind about the reality of other people because I do not have a car but some people have a car and they need it to live to get it to make a living and and and not only that but the motives of the protest they rodent and rodent these people they got politicized at such a speed a high speed this is incredible because quite rapidly the what they were demanding was not simply the the lowering of the oil price it was also more democracy it was more social justice it was against the the the cancellation of attacks on unfortunate the great fortune of people on great wealth and and on climate also it merged with with a lot of climate demonstrations and it broated really it was about really a social model and what world we want to live in tomorrow and so this is why I say this this movement was really incredible it was also incredible because it was taken place without the unions it depends on the regions in France in Leon for example there there is no love lost between the yellow vests and the unions the direction of the unions but in other regions like in south of France or in the north it's very different and soon they began to protest together and the yellow vests they they gave us a new a fresh new breath it was really a fresh a breath of fresh air they there were such spontaneous they were so spontaneous and so angry also you know they they they're reminding they reminded us what it was to be angry and to have the right to be angry and not to be helpless in front of an unjust policy and it really changed changes and as just like I said that earlier that in this very movement the movement we live in now there are there there are unionized workers who mingle with the black blog for example well there were a lot of us unionized workers in the yellow vests too and so it influenced us a lot I think we can say that if 2016 had a black blog to the protests now with the yellow vests it changed completely the way we protest as well so all the blockages are like much more regular and the way where people fear less you know to to demand things and to organize without unions I think we can say that it definitely changed things yes also personally I think that if I say wrong things about yellow vests why don't know the import is because yes the concern the buyout or gas price was not not what of pine because I live in the city and I don't have a car so I think it affected more the country the countryside of France which is more concerned with gas prices yeah then the cities also because we already have lots of political movements here so like it's it's kind of different I don't know this it's quite very well to be honest maybe I should just shop no I mean it's it's interesting to me because I remember when the the gilets provisions protests started up there was a lot of debate outside of France and kind of like westerners observing the protests is to are these guys is this something that's like a positive movement are they all right wing and it's interesting that the way in which kind of all of these different sort of errors of protest movements in France have melded together for this this most recent kind of uprising like you've got you know the the you you've got these trade unions you've got gilets jaunes you've got the black block all sort of working yeah as different pieces of this of this uprising you know based on kind of the different tactics of their errors that's fascinating to me I was I was discussing and saying that it's kind of a feature of movements about pensions even if they can be very different that they tend to attract a lot of people and at first the protests were not very radical at all compared to protest we could have with similar sizes but gradually the movement is radicalizing a lot it seems to me the people who are in it and the fact that it tends to mobilize everyone at first you know if it's not very radical where it created this sort of mingling of everybody so it's a yellow vassian union the black block everybody accept the political parties because they're useless but alongside the radicalization of protesters from all walks of life inside France there's been a surprisingly strong international reaction from other European workers and activists you know I I'm wondering you know during the black lives matter protests in the US in 2020 international attention was significant and it was to some extent useful in terms of helping to raise money and stuff for different bail funds people from all around the world help to that extent but I'm wondering is the is the degree of international attention by other countries left wings you know movements on what's happening in France right now is it having an impact directly or is it just sort of like noise well on my part it seems to be a lot of noise yes because a lot of people seem to misunderstand completely the situation and yeah they just give their opinion and that's fine I guess but I I think there may be actual solidarity with some militants I mean I know among anarchists that there are anarchists who come from Italy's fizzaland Germany and other countries who are trying to help actions and protests and I'm pretty sure that among unions there is international solidarity as well but maybe I got you should say something about this yes there is international solidarity honestly this is not something I was expecting but for instance last week in Belgium there are workers from a total plant that actually blocked the the freaking port and to prevent them from sending products to substitute it from to to the the project that was blocked by protesters in France and that was this is for me this is absolutely wonderful and yes so yes there are international solidarity we have been in our interprofessional assembly because we have a local interprofessional assembly and we have been expressing our gratitude to the people in Greece in Argentina in Spain in Germany who expressed their support openly and personally I was really surprised to see how many people actually were in attention to what was happening in our country and it gives us well it gave strength to many people and it also gives hope because I realized that well you know the the main leverage we have on our politicians is the economical average and so when when the boss is a big company and investors and everything start to say well guy your reform of pensions in France is starting to make a mess in Germany in in Spain in Greece please stop your madness well this is a leverage I was not expecting we are trying to to use the leverage of the big wealth and and the big companies in France which is already something quite hard to move and that was really an unexpected support and we really hope that it's going to have an impact because Macron is very narcissistic guy and he loves his own image so if his image is starting to suffer internationally I think this is going to be a big problem for him and his image at the time is really a catastrophe Belgian of course is not the only place for blockades are happening they've become a staple of the uprising in France as well I'm very interesting talking about the blockages of the highways around the Lyon because many cities are trying to do this there is a ren which is important which manages to block the highways very often and so this started in Lyon we tried once a few weeks ago it was a cold by the unions with a few points to block in the morning and people then militants from all over joined the points and like 6 a.m. or 7 a.m. I don't remember but when people arrived there were cops everywhere and they were pushed away and circulation and capitalism could work normally and everything was fine so we were very frustrated so we reorganized completely and through the struggle committee we assembled people from general assemblies all over the city and also Varu scripts and we managed to organize a blockade last Thursday and it worked pretty well it was not exceptional but for first try people were very happy about it and it led to many people from all over in the movement working together on a project and meeting together in assembly and then being together on blockages and I think moments like this which are very important for the movement to to develop I'm not sure if the blockage in itself is the most interesting action in terms of economic damage especially if we don't stay very long but the different social relations it can create and I think you can have a lot of influence in the movement especially when we're thinking about the unions and the leaders of the unions who don't want to mobilize too much we don't want to go too far what can we do outside of that well I think that's all of the answer at least I agree yeah I think that's something that was interesting to me because I think the roadblocks and barricades like that as a sort of social site is like a really it's a thing you see a lot in the past like 20-25 years of protest movements like I this was a big deal in like in well hawk in 2006 there's a lot of similar stuff in Chiron during the uprising there it's interesting to see it sort of like re-entering the repertoire of stuff yeah the kind of the the the different species of social interactions that are made possible by these kind of zones of autonomy that are created yeah and they they ask a lot of new questions for militants how to hold a barricade against cops and against cars it's a lot of different questions which I think they can radicalize people at least to demand more things so it's not clear what they want to demand for now yeah I just wanted to say that I'm really really happy to see people from different parts of society really coming together and accepting to work together like so many things impossible now other students have met basic issues from all universities in my town I now have free access to all publications in French and I'll never pay for anything it's really really great in terms of blockage there is just south of Chiron there is a an oil refinery refinery which is not on strike it's among the only ones so it's really important because in France there's a special system because they wanted to stay independent from oil producers they import the oil and then they refine it in France so basically if we stop all the refineries there is no more gas for cars and right down it's becoming a real problem because of the strikes and this one stays open and so people have started to try and block the entry so right now there's like something like 50 union workers and like 50 radical militants who come there every morning well not this week but last week they are doing it because this week we haven't said but everyone is on holiday kind of somewhat the students are on holiday so many people take their paid leave right now as well it's kind of a special time so but next week probably the blockages are gonna start again and it's great to see union workers meeting with more radical people to try and get an action together and I think when there is solidarity like this great things can happen if I may add something about blockages and everything what works pretty well and it's it's quite satisfying there are big days of mobilization and what has happened several times now is that on the very same day at the very same time there are several appointments a little everywhere in the in the town and to block something to block a highway to block a factory to block a school or whatever and this allows it allows us to to detach and to stretch the forces of the police and so they are never enough everywhere to stop us and that makes that can make that can make the day a real success because you have a lot of things happening at the very same time but there is only so many cops so yeah it works pretty well this is interestingly the same analysis the US police came to in 2020 it's easy to stop one large action but several smaller actions split police forces and prevent them from just cuddling one large block of protesters I guess I think I was interested in is that I think one of the things that happens in the US a lot is you'll get a national day of action but all of the actions like there'll just be one giant action in a city and you don't get the kind of like diffusion that's been helpful with spreading out cop numbers and I was wondering like is this something like the unions are specifically planning to have multiple events all over the place or is that something that's been happening like outside that or no no no the unions only plan once I plan for strike and for the protests there are also actions but only one action and and the others are organized by I mean regular people or no but like you mean the actions on the day they're not organized by the the national unions local unions which do the actions right that's what you're talking about yes absolutely yeah so there are local unions because in France unions are like very federal somewhat this we can talk about it's a bit of a problem but like you know the CGT it started out as an anarchist unions so they were like very into federalism and all of this so there is local autonomy and what happens is workers in very mobilized sectors like the railways the energy workers they will organize through their union actions on that day for example and on top of this for example you have students in a certain high school or a certain university who decide to block something and for example they need support recently there was a notably right wing campus who was blocked by students and so a lot of us came to help them because we've had never seen this campus blocked ever and of course what happened was some fascists attacked them but we were much much more numerous than them so it was no problem but the next time they had a block cage planned at this campus they ended up not having enough numbers so they can sold but the fascists didn't know that it was canceled and so they all came really armed with metal bars and all of that you know still despite the threat of fascist street gangs and they're better armed and more legitimate counterparts in the police the protests continue they continue to block roads they continue to occupy universities they continue to strike they continue to fight the police they continue to find new forms of resistance new forms of solidarity new worlds composed of people who were ordinary times would never have met and in the process they continue to find new ways of being free beneath the cobblestones the beach set another generation of French protesters in May of 1968 all you have to do is pick it up and throw it hey more alopeziere and let's be real we all know that SUVs are what's in right now and if you go with the Toyota you got a ton of options to choose from like a RAV4 the perfect versatile SUV for right and around in style comes in a bunch of cool colors in his super fuel efficient it'll make you have the talk of the town or if you want a little luxury and comfort there's the venza with features like a panoramic sunroof heated and ventilated front seats you'll feel like you're riding on a cloud and it's available in hybrid and all-wheel drive awesome and if you need a little more space you got the highlander which can fit up to eight people so it's perfect for family road trips it also has all types of available features for both passengers and the driver it's 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operation compatible device and vehicle required looking for a fabulous fashion brand that celebrates you and look no further than Boston proper where styles are designed with you in mind so you can look and feel amazing no matter the day season or occasion at Boston proper.com you'll find fashion that knows you best for over 30 years Boston proper has been the fashion destination for confident women who want to elevate their look with unique sophisticated clothing at affordable prices visit Boston proper dot com today Boston proper where it like no one else apart and sometimes about how to put the back together again I'm your host Mia Wong this is a we are once again talking about wizards of the coast now this time it's not about dungeon dragons it is about their other property magic the gathering which if you don't know is wizards of the coast trading card game that's at the forefront of some truly wild stuff right now now you could ask Mia why are we even talking about this about magic the gathering on this show and you know there's multiple answers one of them is that as industrial profit rates have been decreasing in the last half a century capital is increasingly turned towards entertainment as a way to make money magic is now a billion dollar brand partnering with everything from fortnight to the walking dead to and this is not a joke being in the process of releasing an entire set of Lord of the rings cards as capital is flooded into the entertainment industry and magic in particular our silly little hobbies are suddenly the front lines of class struggle workers at TCG player this year given the job of sorting through literally tens of thousands of cars at TCG player processes finally won their second attempt to form a union after two devastating union busting campaigns and this is where things get very very weird and bear with me here dear listeners we have to talk about a little bit of magic by new shot to to understand what has happened in this incident and then we will get back to what the show is usually about which is corporations killing enormous numbers of people so a few days ago Dan cannon a man who runs a very small magic YouTube channel called old school empty G bought what he thought were cards the latest magic the gathering set called march of the machine now magic releases new cards periodically in what are called sets these sets have plots and characters they have written stories they're enormous sort of lore events they they have enormous hype behind them and march of the machine story wise is basically the version of an avengers movie giant apocalyptic threats all the heroes crossing over people hopping through multiverse is etc etc etc now okay this has happened before you know wizards does big sets it wasn't that weird but wizard decided to do something very very weird which is they printed at the first time ever a mini set called march of the machines how much of the machine aftermath now the regular march of the machine set has 387 cards in it aftermath has 50 now I don't know why they decided to do this they've never they've never done anything like this if they've never printed just a tiny set they release a bit after the regular set before and you know the names are very very confusing right one is called march of the machine the other one is marching the machine aftermath I how how is a regular person supposed to get track of this the mind boggles center etc either way so Dan can and tries to buy cards from the regular march of the machine set what he gets in sent instead are by accident march of the machine aftermath cards now these cards are still secrets they have not been revealed yet no no one knows what they are no one supposed know what they are before every set there's an incredibly elaborate process where wizards gives cards to influencers to you know reveal them to the public and at a certain date everyone reveals the beauty all your influential reveals what their card is and there's this whole hype cycle on reddit and everyone argues about how good the cards are and I'll go to the artis and what it means for the story it's sort of it's sort of similar to the the the the the the sort of hype cycles that would happen around trade trailers from Marvel movies or people would be analyzing every detail of it etc etc and these are these spoiler seasons as they're called are a huge deal for wizards date wizards tries to heavily control the entire process but sometimes cards leak out now Dan can and suddenly has been handed a bunch of cards no one has ever seen before so he does what you know every person who just suddenly has magic cards have been revealed yet do I and have been doing for years and years and years he makes a video showing off the cards now importantly this is not illegal I need to stress this because of what what's going to happen what is going to happen next you you know it's it's it's it's very very easy to look at the the sort of severity of what's going to happen to this guy and assume that he broke a law but no he did not he did not break a law nothing he has done he's illegal literally what he's done is he bought some magic cards from someone who screwed up and accidentally broke the street date for selling cards because he confused march with the machine with march the machine after bath eight I wow how can anyone make that mistake right the genius of wizards of the coast marketing is unmatched everything I do is incredibly clear said or etc now in the process because of how many cards he bought and how small the set is he reveals most of the cards that are in the set and then the pinker tins show up to his house forced away through his door make his wife cry threatened to arrest him and threatened to put it in prison for 10 years with two hundred thousand dollar fines for copyright infringement on the grounds of him having stolen material the pinker tins also harass his elderly neighbors um literally just today as I'm recording this a story broken gizmodo that uh revealed that wizards of the coast have used the pinker tins before to go after stolen goods now some of you may be asking who are the pinker tins and you know I think some of you probably know in in very broad outlines who the pinker tins are but in order to really get at the core of what this organization is and why they looked the way they do today as compared to how they've looked at the past we need to ask another question which is how has the balance of military power between the state and corporations changed over time and this seems like a very weird question but the pinker tins emerge in a very weird period of time in this balance they are what fills in the gap between corporations directly having armies that could conquer nations and modern corporations who instead of having their own personal armies have intelligence you know vast intelligence agencies but also rely on the police and the governments as the people who do violence for them so let's go back and tell the story from the beginning by taking a look a brief look at the most infamous corporate army of them all the army of the East India trading company the East India trading company was formed in 1600 and it was given a vast statement not believe over trade in what they call East India which is an area we would broadly call Southeast Asia in the South Pacific today and at the start these guys are optimistically they are half trading group half pirate the level of piracy is really high especially in the early days they trade for spices they steal a lot of other people's spices from places like Java and they bring them back to England they make a lot of money now over the course of the reactions and again it's worth noting these people are kind of the descendants of the British private tiers people like Thomas Drake who'd been you know they're just pirates who have been hired by the government to only go after like spanish ships instead of English ships so they are you know from the beginning the East India company has this sort of DNA of army in it and over the course of about two centuries they are going to conquer with their own army most of what is now India in Pakistan and that territory is either going to indirectly or directly come under the rule of the East India company and the East India company is fighting wars everywhere again they see the Indian Pakistan by force they are fighting wars in Afghanistan they kill unfathomable numbers of people the the worst of these events is the Great Bengal famine there's a there's a behind the bastards episode about this that you can listen to if you want a really sort of long thing about the East India company and the famine but I want to talk about the famine a little bit because so the Great Bengal famine of 1770 kills 10 million people and I knew this intellectually right I studied a bit in college but what I had never actually looked up somehow what I'd never seen was the percentage of the population of this famine kills and this famine is directly the fall of the East India company this is something that big all historians the who have looked at this agree is that this is this is directly the fall of these in the company and the combination of their agricultural policies their tax extraction the sort of putting into perspective how bad this gets the highest serious estimates for the number of people who die in the Great Leap Forward stands at about 30 million dead this is an unfathomable atrocity it is a scale of death at which the human mind breaks down loses the ability to process some of my family lived through it it is horrific in ways that are difficult to even begin to was to describe the Great Leap Forward killed about 5% of China's population the Great Bengal famine killed 30% of the population of India that the East India trading company controlled 30% that's not just sort of small populations statistics either right it's not like they killed 30% of a country with 30 people in it right they killed 10 million people this is an you know this is an unbelievable force of human evil they are they are capable of killing people in numbers that defy comprehension that they're able to do this because they have an army that is the size of a great power in nation state the East India trading companies army in 1800 had 200,000 soldiers that is a massive army today that that is like the size of the active Ukrainian army in 2022 it is more than twice the size of the British army 1800 and you know in 1800 it's not like the British aren't fighting wars right they are in 1800 the British are fighting the war the second coalition so they are they are they are fighting the pulley and right so this isn't a sort of you know completely half-ass like peacetime British army this is a you know this is serious military force and even even once they like fully build up their army at the peak of the Napoleonic wars 13 years later the entire size of the British army is about 250,000 troops that's not much larger than the East India companies army at the same time and at the height of the East India trading company their army swells to again 250,000 which is again the size of the regular British army at in the most desperate war that the British had fought to that point these in Israel trading company is a full-on military great power right but and this is this is something that is going to shape an enormous amount of of the sort of arc of the relationship between corporate and military power it is unbelievably expensive to maintain an army like this the the East the British the the company even though they're they you know they are looting entire nations right they have they have they have they're they're entire states when they fully taken over the tax services they're just walking into temples and taking stuff even but even with all of that profit right they know they have the ability to mint their own coins in a lot of these areas but they still lose money and they still lose money again because they're maintaining this on 250,000 strong army and you know that so you you you have this problem right which is that you have this item on your balance sheet that is unfathomably expensive and then you have a second problem which is that if you have an army there's always a danger when the army goes into revolt and that's what happens in 1857 the British managed to piss off their own army which is almost all composed of Indian troops and they fight an incredibly bloody war notice either this is a point you need to support uprising and the British win and they after victory they strap a bunch of prisoners bodies to cannons and shoot them so they can't be properly buried but the consequence of this sort of horrifying war and and particularly the sort of fear within vokes in the minds of of you know the British populace of like oh my god these not white people can actually fight us is that they directly seize control of India from the East India trading company and for all your nationalization fans out there the British assuming direct control of India was actually a nationalization it's not actually inherently socialist guys you have to be a bit smarter than this but that that aside right this marks an enormous shift in the sort of political economy of violence what is happening here is that states are assuming direct military control over their colonies instead of operating through corporations and this means that what you see is a shift from direct corporate armies to corporations using the state to do violence for them and this doesn't mean that corporations don't use force directly today and it does also doesn't mean that the government's you know words acting as the armies of corporations and like the 1800s but what's happening here and specifically the the direct seizure of India from the East India the direct seizure of India from the East India company marks a dramatic shift in the balance of forces away from corporations with armies doing violence towards states doing violence on their behalf and this is one of the things alongside sort of slave catchers in the US at least to the formation the police um you see this both both both in Britain and in sort of France right you start to get police agencies that are you know largely tacit putting down their own working class and this is one of the one of the sort of an inextrable marches that happens over the course of the 20th century and it's also happening in the 19th century too there is a sort of mass centralization of state and police power and particularly that's an expansion of the bureaucracy right the arc of 1840 is barely a functional state by today's standards right like they they have an incredible difficult time even figuring out how many people there are in the country that their provisioning of services is a joke um nobody has i g cars like people people don't even have birth certificates from the most part and and that's something you know and that's something that changes right over the course of sort of the 18 and 1900s is that you get a massive bureaucracy the bureaucracy is built on the model of the police and they get bigger and more powerful and by the time you're you know you're halfway through the 20th century you get a you get a modern standing army and that's something that is very very weird the founders who you know suck ass in enormous numbers of ways are also fundamentally a deeply opposed to standing armies because you know they are students of Roman history and they know that standing armies have this you know the sort of way of of seizing power but we've landed in a situation where you know they don't really need to right the US army is kept in check by the fact it has it basically a limited budget that increases every year so you can't even like talk about cutting it without getting accused of treason but it didn't used to be like that in the 1800s right after a war would end you know entire parts of the like like all the US cavalry for example sometimes we just get disbanded right there would be these massive reductions in troop size in between wars and you know that's that that doesn't happen anymore right but the product of this was that you know there weren't that many like armed agents of the state running around with guns and that's a thing that is completely and utterly ubiquitous in modern American life I mean it modern American life has reached a point where people you can't even imagine what it would be like if there weren't cops literally everywhere and if you didn't have the ability to call the police about anything and that was just the sort of the state of affairs for a lot of the 1800s in the US that's just you know they're really weren't police and you know this kind of midpoint in in in in in the the level of sort of bureaucratic development and the level of sort of the bureaucracy of violence that is the police happens after a bit after the civil war where there are not enough police to develop the kind of sort of to deploy against the kind of violence that companies need to stop unions informing any other secondary problem right which is okay so you know there are armed troops in a state but the armed troops are the militia and you know a lot of the times the militia can be relied upon to shoot striking workers and break them but there's always a chance that you ordered the militia in and the militia art people from the towns where I you know we're the striking workers are from and this is a real problem with sheriffs too right is that in this period you get you get a lot of sheriffs who just won't prosecute workers because the entire town and the sheriff are all pro union and this is where we come to the pinkertons but first and this is something that the pinkertons would have approved of at some ads and we're back so who are the pinkertons the pinkertons are founded by a guy named Alan pinkerton Alan pinkertons an interesting guy he's he's kind of a radical when he's young he's like he's a hardcore abolitionist who like funds john brown right there there's a whole debate about the extent to which she was involved in a sort of British workers reform movement called the charter lists I'd every source I've read disagrees about how much he was involved in it it's I mean once disagreements are basically pending their ideology I don't know if I'm ever going to get a good answer about how involved in it he is but pinkertons briefly and kind of by accident becomes a bounty hunter but he just like walks across it just runs into a camp of people who seem to clearly be counterfeiters and he eventually becomes a detective around Michigan and then in Chicago and then he becomes a postal cop and in the process of being a postal cop he figures out something that is more lucrative if he figured out a more lucrative way to do detective work than just working for the state which is working for the railways so by 1850 he has a full detective agency going that he renames the pinkertons now you know this is this is the 1850s right you are rapidly approaching the civil war treating the civil war he is hired by George McLellan the just the worst union general he runs a spy network in the Confederacy that absolutely sucks like all the spies get caught his intelligence being awful is one of the things that leads McLellan to suspect you know there's like secretly way more Confederate troops that there actually are so he just never does anything for the entire world he's like the worst union general until he gets replaced yeah when when McLellan is asked pinkertons also out but you know the agency is still around and the detectives are initially known as cited as cinder dicks for a complicated real-roading reasons I yeah I don't know about that one but it's very funny and what they sort of do right is in in this early phase they have this massive network of sort of informants and spies that they sell to the highest bidder they're not sort of we know that they are detectives right in some sense but they're not detectives in the Sherlock sense where you have a guy who sees a bunch of evidence and then uses logic and uses investigation to deduce like who did the crime pinkertons detectives are operatives they do infiltrations this is basically their one trick right is they send a guy undercover and then he gets people to talk to him and then they catch the guy because someone talked right now the other thing that the pinkertons are really really good at is spinning mythology around them uh pinkertons claims that he saved Lincoln from an assassination plot and you know he he successfully convinces Lincoln to flee a building in a disguise right the problem is that you know as early as like the next day after this like supposed plot happens assassination plot happens I people were already claiming that there wasn't one and you know I think the evidence for their not being one is bolstered by the fact that no one was ever like not only was no one ever tried for this no one was ever even arrested for again a plot to assassinate the president of the United States so I I am inclined to suspect that this was fake it's a story to disagree about this but he's able to milk this for incredible PR right he is you know he's like I'm I'm the guy who saved the president and he does this whole sort of like ah if I had been there when I if I if I had only been there when Abe Lincoln was being gunned down by John Wilkes Booth I would have saved him and you know it's this this makes him very famous um they also start doing you know it's sort of worth noting right the kind of crime that they're doing these guys are they're they're basically a corporate anti crime group right they they solve crimes but the crimes that they solve are people stealing from corporations for example they do a lot of solving bank robberies they do a lot of security to stop train robbers they do counter-fitting these are all kinds of crimes that affect rich people and the you know and so the picker teams are slowly starting to gain this reputation to sort of like the hired hands of capital now they're also sort of doing like frontier outlaw stuff there's a gang of people who this is a gang is sort of bandits who they very successfully break up uh but they also go after Jesse James and okay we need to sell the story of Jesse James briefly here because it's it's an important thing to get an understanding of what the sort of conflict that's going on in the west is at this point and the thing that's incredibly important to understand about the story of Jesse James versus the picker teams is that there are no heroes here every single person involved in all sides is just an absolutely terrible person so Jesse James is an ex-confederate terrorist who somehow managed to make robbing trains uncool by doing it dress in a KKK uh rope with the aim of like restoring the honor of the Confederacy so this sucks and this is where part of the sort of like rebel flag like that part of the sort of like lost cause myth those comes from right there are you know there are these sort of frontier outlaws who are like ex-confederates whose thing is like yeah we're like against the man the like the man is like you know the north right but these people suck right these these are these are people who fought and died for slavery I Jesse James in particular like he's again he's he's in this group of like guerrillas who are fighting in in Kansas and Missouri and they do they do things that are genuinely unspeakable so these people suck right but the problem is the people for going after them are the pincertins and we're going to learn a lot about the pincertins by what they managed to accomplish by going after again ex-confederate terrorists who are like some of the worst people have ever lived so the pincertins take this case in 1871 um he sends in a bunch of agents try to infiltrate the gang and Jesse James like smokes them all so it in a very sort of modern cop move the pincertins do a raid on Jesse James's house so they throw in this weird pseudo I it's a very weird kind of explosive device thing that they I don't know they claim that they were just trying to scare like the family out of the house so they could arrest them but the family sees this thing that looks like a bomb and they throw it into their fireplace and it blows up and instead of smoking the family out they have now blown up Jesse James is nine year old step brother and named his mom so the pincertins absolutely suck right like so far in their account the catch Jesse James they have managed to blow up a child and maim a woman now you can ask the question right okay so they they they they have killed a child they have maimed a woman do they get Jesse James no no they don't they never get him because that's what happens when you know you have an ex-confederate in places where with a bunch of ex-confederate with a bunch of people to support the Confederacy right they won't turn over their own people and you know and when the people they're going up against are the pincertins who are like the higher guns of northern capital a bunch of people you know what happens is a bunch of random people end up dead and yeah both both sides of this are incredibly deeply evil Jesse James is later shot by one of his own men and yeah that is that that is the famous story of Jesse James versus the pincertins which I I think is useful in establishing that like God like the south are obviously the bad guys in the civil war but a lot of the people in the union are sort of genuinely awful hired gun for capital people and you know that's not that's not so much of the big deal dream the war but after the war you know you got these battles just like oh god everyone here is like everyone here should simply die now Ellen Pincertin dies in 1886 and he's replaced by his even worse sons and at this point the pincertins cease even sort of the pretense of being a detective agency and they devote themselves full time to being strikebreakers now they have spies everywhere they have you know over a thousand of them at their peak spread across the dozens and dozens and dozens of unions they are spying on meetings reporting with the pincertins and this allows corporations for example if you know who's in a union meeting right you can just fire all of them and this is especially easy and you know in this sort of pre 1930s period where like there is no protected right to strike right like if you if you if you stop working that is illegal the other thing they do is provide quote unquote security for corporations to strikes what this looks like in practice is shooting people and you know sometimes those people are striking workers like the three strikers they killed in the Pennsylvania close track of 1890 sometimes they just shoot random bystanders like the random guy they shot in 1816 while providing security and you know again when you're shooting a random bystander you have to ask like security for who like who who who is the security you're providing for when you're just shooting random people you know and dominantly it's for the boss is from a doc strike and sometimes like in 1877 they shoot children where they they shot and killed a 15 year old you a Jersey Cole Worf strike you know and they do stuff like this all the time right there's a famous incident in Chicago where a bunch of people are yelling at them because again the thinkers have a really bad reputation among workers at this point and you know there's a point where they're they're going by on a train and people yell the train and the pincertins just bomb by taking out the rifles and shooting for people out the window so you know these are these are good people TM right the other thing they do is they they they start getting into breaking strikes by being being a company you can hire to import scabs and this culminates in the homestead strike again there's another thing there's like a giant bastards episode on but we'll do we'll do a short version of of the homestead strike so the homestead strike is this giant confrontation between steel workers and the forces of Andrew Carnegie and Henry Frick Carnegie and Frick like lock the union out of the factory and they call a pincerton army to seize control of the town of homestead this is from the book inventing the pincertins quote by the end of June he had built around the mills a protective 12 foot fence that included rifle holes water means capable of blasting strikers with boiling water and wires a task to a generator which could be electrified in response workers dubbed the mills for Frick now striking steel workers and other residents of of homestead here the pincertins are coming and they they you know they the pincertins are trying to land on these like invasion barges that they've modified and so the homestead people go tries out the barges and the pincertins start shooting at them and this is this is no thing that's very interesting about this whole story is that okay every account at the time agrees that the first person the people who started shooting first with pincertins later accounts suddenly like mysteriously later on suddenly start to claim it like well nobody really knows you started the shooting in the in these fights or like maybe it was a worker but like again everyone at the time because it was the pincertins so I I and given given what we know about the track record of pincertins of shooting children of shooting random people yelling at them outside of a train of shooting just literally random people on the streets I we can be pretty sure the pincertins started this and but you know the the workers and homestead are heavily armed and this starts a massive gun battle I'm going to read from from venting the pincertins again this serious battle would last the next 14 hours after an initial surge the pincertins were pinned down in their barges after several hours to crowd attempted to sink the barges by cannon fire residents borrowed the cannon that had been that the city used for commemorations by the way that that that's a civil war cannon that they're using 1890 to try to sink these boats the crowd also sent burning rail cars rolling towards the barges and sprayed oil lunch the river was attempted to light on fire and hopes that burning the pincertins out of their barges the lubricating oil thrown onto the water proved impossible to set a flame so the pincertins like try to surrender but by this one people hate them so much that every that they shoot these four times and each time that someone will hold up a white flag and a sniper will shoot the flag and refuse let them surrender on on try five the pincertins are finally allowed to surrender and the pincertins are crushed but unfortunately the state militias brought in to sort of break this strike and the union movement in Pennsylvania is essentially destroyed but PRY this is terrible from the pincertins and they start trying to do like a giant PRO to sort of recover the reputation and a lot of what the sort of popular image of the pincertins right comes from the PR off the agency does like after the home set strike they get reproduced by like TV producers later on so fast forwarding a little bit to some other stuff that they're involved in in late 1905 someone blew up the notoriously anti-union governor of Idaho who'd sent troops to kill striking workers a few years ago now Idaho hires a pincertin detective to just torture a guy into confessing to the murder and then also claiming that like basically every instance of violence in the last five years in in in that part of the US was committed by the iww who are the ww or a very very radical union whose thing basically was that society should be run by like confederations of direct democratic unions like run you know all all of society all the production should be run by workers in these in you know in in in in the form of like one giant direct democratic union and people hate this my people I mean like bosses absolutely hate this that you know very i w w very popular with workers bosses are going to spend the next rest if there's just murdering them you know but having having tortured this guy into I saying in into fingering the I the industrial workers of the world in this conspiracy they get big bill haywood who is one of the most famous and like successful organizers the ww and several other iww leaders kidnapped and taken to Idaho to stand trial for murder which again they nothing to do with I haywood is defended by clearance dorrow the infamous I scopes monkey trial and haywood gets off but the case the serious damage that ww if you want to learn more about this whole story I go listen to cool people who did cool stuff there's two episodes about the iww in this period called the iw and the hobos you saved free speech it's good stuff you know I should also briefly mention right another thing that the pinker fans do is okay so if someone someone's wanted in one state right instead of having to like make the other government having to like the state government making requests have to be having to make requests to another state in order to get them to extra write someone they would just have the fingertips kidnapped them this is this is one of the sort of big service they provide they also seemed it's very unclear I don't know the the start record is a bit muddled they seem also to have been people you could hire if so if like your spouse was trying to divorce you which sucks it's a deeply evil they they they do sort of lots more deeply evil stuff which we will get into after these ads all right we're back so speaking of deeply evil stuff they also send a hundred detectives to break a strike of the mostly black brotherhood of temperate workers which is an iw affiliate in Louisiana now they break this they try to break this union by walking into a union meeting shooting 44 people and killing four of them there are like 40 more stories of a guy with a pinkerton walks in shoots once people that I could put here I had to find the limit at some point to how many stories about pinkerton's murdering people that I could I could sort of put but you know there's an interesting shift that starts to happen in the in the in sort of as the as the 1900 the you know the 1900s turn into 1910s the pinkerton start to figure out that it's more effective to form mobs of vigilantes than it is to fight union directly and there's a few benefits here right there's less danger to pinkerton detectives themselves it's easier to deploy large numbers of people instead of having to sort of like pain enormous amount of money for a bunch like 800 detectives and weapons and logistics you can sort of whip up a mob we get them to do the shooting right the pinkerton is also get plausible to liability which is very helpful for the reputation and you know the pinkerton's are very much ahead of the curve here the government you know who is going to displace the pinkerton to serve the main force opposing the iww and later sort of like cio union organizing that you know turn into the two red scares they're going to start taking pages from the pinkerton's book and eventually they're going to you know instead of like sending the US army to invade nicaragua which is what they would have done the 1800s by you know by time you get to the 1980s right they are sending people to train nicaraguan desquates and so we we can track the shift here right as it's as the 19th century comes to a close and we get to sort of the October revolution of the height of the red scare we're in a place where they're starting to be enough cops and enough federal agents to do the job the pinkerton said done in previous generations and you know there there's a sort of robust arguments in in the the sort of histiography about to what extent jay Edgar Hoover and the FBI were influenced by the pinkertons I think there's decent evidence that they they they were influenced by them but the FBI kind of turns into what the pinkertons are you know they're the people who suddenly are like showing up and shooting people showing up in arresting union organizers deported union organized from the country but this puts the pinkertons in kind of a weird spot right there they're the pinkerton name has become synonymous with sort of this this kind of like you know they're called sort of like feudal retainers right these sort of lawless private armies and are you know not supposed to exist in a democracy and so you know in the 1930s when the Wagner act like makes strikes legal right I talked about the Wagner acts a long time ago and episode called ye didn't make so strong but after this they tried to Robert Pinkerton the second who's the new sort of owner of the pinkertons tries to do a rebrand um he has his great quote that's quote he's talking about union busting that is a phase of our business that we are not particularly delighted or proud of and we're out of it however there was nothing illegal about it at the time now okay you can say a lot about what was there wasn't a legal in a period when you know you could order a drink that was cocaine mixed with wine and you know you could just get like opium prescribed to your baby but torturing and murdering people was still legal back then now I guess if you you know if you really wanted to have fun you can get into an argument that like nowhere in the constitution is murder specifically banned but like you don't have fun with that but at fdr and then in the new dealers go after the pinkertons very hard and this is a lot of interesting effects what it means is on the one hand you can't have some guy with detective badge works for corporation walked into a union meeting that start the killing but it also means that when you need someone to smash a union by force it's going to be the state doing it and the apostatiosis of this the sort of one of the internal contradictions that destroys a new deal is that it's reliance on the state to contain the worst excess of capitalism means that you know they have in turn directly enormously empowered the state and the state's military capacity and this means that in the 1980s unions are going to be destroyed by the state that the new deal had built the picker chins are replaced by Hoover and the g-man and the g-man are eventually sort of become known as the dreaded modern fat who you know lurks at every doorstep eating babies and is the the terror of every sort of political movement in the US now the pinkertons for for their part right with union busting now technically illegal and when i say union busting like i mean walking in shooting people started performing a union uh they start working basically as as regular security guards and then they move on to selling surveillance equipment and trainings for government organizations and this reflects a kind of larger shift in what what kinds of military operation the corporations run which is that instead of directly running armies or hiring groups like the picker tins to do violence for them now what they're in the business of as intelligence operations and this changes the way that corporations kill people enormously you know when when when Coca-Cola now needs to kill union organizers right they have paramilitaries for this now some of these guys are contractors some of their pain under the table some of them are in it for ideology some of it for money but it's not you know it's not quite like Coca-Cola has its own military force like it would have been in the 1800s in the early 1800s it's also not there is just like a private there's not like it's not they're not they're not also not like hiring a specific private military contractor right the way they do with they do it tends to be they you know sort of semi clandestinely armed paramilitary now there are limited exceptions where sort of like oil companies will have private armies in places with civil wars are going on but that's usually thing that happens when they're in a place that doesn't have state capacity when they're in a place that does have state capacity like for example Nigeria you get a very very different story so Nigeria is a major oil producer and this has a number of consequences on the places where that oil is extracted a huge amount of it comes from the Niger Delta where the government faces an almost perennial insurgency so okay why is there an insurgency there right part of the recent is that there is an indescribable amount of wealth coming out of the oil and Niger Delta and that money goes mostly to I mean by say most 90% of it right goes to Nigerian elites and corrupt for an oil for an oil companies and you know another part of the reason this turns into an insurgency is that people try non-violence to go to disobedience in the in the Niger Delta to protest to sort of horrific environmental consequences of companies like shell doing oil extraction you know and they have these marches that will draw out 300,000 people in places where this is half of the population half the total population of the ethnic group being affected the Nigerian government responds by publicly executing one of the movement's leaders the famous activists Ken Sara we will by hanging him and then dissolving his body and lines we couldn't be buried which is a real British Empire shit and okay so at this point you've you've come to the sort of crossroad of a non-violent movement right where the government's answer to non-violence will publicly hang you and you get you get this question to put you take up arms and the answer is yeah a lot of people do right this is this is this is a very complicated insurgency in a lot of ways that you know we can't do justice here too but I want to read something from this interview from a guy from the movement for the emancipation of the Niger Delta of men which is one of the like many many many many many like militant groups that appear in the delta over the last 25 years quote this is our territory the soldiers dare not come here now they came and we defeat them he says we are civilized people educated people and we do not want our children to be deprived as we have been deprived so other people can get rich from what is under our feet the oil companies have had many years to treat us rights they have never done that now we are making them think now if this is you know 1820 right and she'll is dealing with people taking up arms and cutting off their ability to sort of like a strapped province of oil they would form an army of semi-literate belgian and British barbarians arm them with cannons and conquer the region and place the entire area under direct corporate rule you know if this was say like the 1890s right they would hire the pinker chance and the pinker chance to go shoot these people for them but this is the 1990s and 2000s so instead what shell does is literally pay the salaries of Nigerian cops who go slaughter protesters in the streets and eventually they moved to spending hundreds of millions of dollars just just between 2007 2009 alone directly funding equipping an army the Nigerian army and a special like war crimes task force called the joint task force that JFT which is this like it's this sort of incredible thing where the army the navy and the police do a fusion dance to massacre civilians and you know I say this hundreds of millions of dollars right that's an underestimate that's just three years that's just what we know about the actual total of the sunk into sort of like literally funding the Nigerian army is enormous now what's what's interesting here is that shell does have its own security guards but the ratio of what they spend on the Nigerian army versus what they spend on their own security guards is two to one and this goes to demonstrate the point that I've sort of been making this episode right which is that there's been a shift in you know if if if if you are a company like shell right who has a need you know who are horrifically exploiting a bunch of people to the point where you need to shoot them in order to keep them in line instead of going to like a private detective agency or having your own army they are increasingly simply funding the state and you know this this means that right again again instead of the fingertips the the actual trigger pullers are cops they are the police there are the military they're weird special forces groups and you know where where that sort of leaves space groups like the pink engines now is there the area that's left for them is in corporate intelligence and this seems to be most of what the the pinkers have been up to recently Amazon hired them in the last few years to work and they're to work with their intelligence division the global security operation center which they use to try to stop out union organizing in their warehouses and Amazon isn't just sort of spying on union organized just spying on basically every social movement they can get their hands on here's from vice in 2019 Amazon monitor the yellow vest movement known as the gile jaan a grassroots uprising for economic justice spread across France and solidarity movements in Vienna and protest against state repression in Iran they've been deployed to get strikes of communication workers in West Virginia Google and Facebook deploys them against their own employees to read out leakers now this is all in line with the pivot of sort of corporate repression towards mass surveillance interestingly the pictures of implanting stories in the press about going back to their roots as mercenaries pitching themselves as you know the force that could stop climate chaos with x military forces the company claims to have been deployed by corporations and put a rico after the hurricane after hurricane Maria in 2017 I don't know if that's true this is possible but again is something that they have to be very careful with the pinker chains is that they are very very brand obsessed even though they're now owned by like a difference or a Swedish security company and they lie constantly so it's very difficult to sort of sort of the myth from the fact when myth making has been such a vital part of their branding from the beginning for another example here's from New York Times magazine among their most popular new services is the pinker chain dedicated professional in which agents join a clients company like any other new hire allowing them to provide intel on employees by by 2018 the agency said it could count among its clients about 80% of Fortune 1000 companies are these numbers correct who knows they absolutely could be lying right on the other hands here's here's gizmo talking about the current reach of the pinker tins in matching the gathering there are other connections between wizards of the coast and the pinker chain agency Robert M. Klimmick who's been the director of security risk management at Hasbro Inc which the parent company wizard of the coast for 12 years was previously the director of supply chain security practice at pinker chain consulting investigations the current manager of global investigations is also a floor of pinker tins agents and so what we saw in the fact that you know wizards of the coast set the pinker tins after a guy who made a youtube video showing some cards that he bought from someone else is you know you can see in that the arc of the arc of what of what the pinkers are trying to do right you have on the one hand the pinker tins falling back into their sort of intelligence role you also have them specifically trading on their reputation to intimidate people the other reputation they acquired by killing unfathomable numbers of people in the 1800s which which they use to sort of intimidate people by just sort of the power of the reputation you can see something very interesting which is that the pinker tins don't arrest Dan cannon directly right they're able to leave with the sort of goods but what they threaten Dan cannon with is the regular police and that is I think a very important aspect of what the story actually is which is it it's a story about the modern division of labor of violence against people who corporations don't like and that division of labor runs through security you know you have your major you have an major corporation that corporation has its own security division that security division is connected to the pinker tins they use the pinker tins as an intelligence network and they have done several times now and then you know when it comes time to you know you can use the pinker tins as like the people with the stoppy booth but when it comes time to actually do violence against someone when it comes time to arrest someone that's the state's job and that that I think is the thing that's that you know that that that's very important to understand about the way all of the stuff works is that the thing that is true now about the year 2023 that was not true about the year like 1873 is that the the the the the the the the the sort of primary driver of corporate violence in you know in in in the US and abroad is not necessarily private security companies it is the state and it is the police and yeah this has been could happen here the police suck a cab get rid of them 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 podcast from cool zone media visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts you can find sources for it could happen here updated monthly at coolzone media dot com slash sources thanks for listening from fireside conversations to game days with friends this time of year means more moments with the coolest people in your life make those moments count with Miller light the greatest tasting light beer for people who love the taste of beer Miller light great taste 96 calories tastes like Miller time go to Miller light dot com slash taste to find delivery options near you or you can pick up some Miller light pretty much anywhere they sell beer it's Miller time celebrate responsibly Miller Brewing Company Milwaukee Wisconsin 96 calories and 3.2 carbs for 12 ounces discover hands-on fun with engineering and computer science for everyone with EIE families powered by the Museum of Science developed for kids ages 4 to 11 EIE families brings kids free engaging STEM activities for English and Spanish learners engineering and computer science for 4 to 11 year olds that's fun and hands-on EIE families delivers hands-on engagement for everyone discover more by visiting EIE dot org forward slash families that's EIE dot org forward slash families let's learn together i'm Malcolm Gladwell i live way out in the country i drive everywhere and you know what scares me that feeling of finding myself stuck on the side of the road but now all of us can avoid that pain by getting our vehicle the part it needs before that breakdown oh no moment with eBay guaranteed fit and over 122 million parts and accessories you can make sure your ride stays running smoothly for the parts and accessories that fit your vehicle just look for the green check get the right parts the right fit and the right prices ebay motors dot com let's ride eligible items only exclusions apply