It Could Happen Here Weekly 183
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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.

Hello and welcome to It Could Happen Here. This may be my final episode on Latin American anarchism, that is. We've covered Peru, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, the many countries of Central America, the former countries of Gran Colombia, and the Hispanophone islands of the Caribbean. Now we're finally getting to the big one, Mexico.

I say we because I'm here with Garrison Davis. Hello. This is this has been it's got to be like a year long series now, right? At this point. Yeah, it's been going on for some time.

with breaks in between and everything. I'm very, very excited. Yeah. To introduce myself real quick, I'm Andrew Sage. You can find me on YouTube at Andrewism and be sure to check out the show notes for all the references, including Angel Capaletti's Anarchism in Latin America, which was an indispensable resource for the entirety of this project. Without further ado, faminos. We have a lot to cover.

Mexico is a massive and storied country, so I can only really give you a gist of its pre-colonial and colonial history for the necessary context. We have to start thousands of years before the name Mexico or Mexico even existed, of course.

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, the land we now call Mexico is home to some of the world's most unique ancient civilizations. First came the Olmecs, often called the Mother Culture of Mesoamerica, known for their colossal stone heads and influence on later cultures. Then the Maya with their dazzling cities, mathematics, and calendars. And eventually the Aztecs, who built the Grand Empire settled on Tenochtitlan, which is now Mexico City.

Unfortunately, we can't spend much time on this rich history. We must progress to the time of European contact.

In 1519, everything changed. Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes arrived and within just two years, the mighty Aztec empire fell. Disease, alliances with native enemies of the Aztecs, technological advantages, and brutal warfare aided the Spaniards in overthrowing a civilization of millions. What followed was three centuries of colonial rule under New Spain. The

marked by extraction, Catholic conversion, and the mixing, often violently, of indigenous European and African peoples. By the early 1800s, the winds of independence were finally blowing. A Catholic priest named Miguel Hidalgo sparked the fight with a cry for freedom in 1810. Specifically, he sought the end of rule by Spanish peninsulars, which are the people who came from Spain and ruled over Mexico,

He called for the equality of races and he called for the redistribution of land. As Angel Capileti put it in Anarchism in Latin America, Hidalgo proposed to abolish, even if by gentle and gradual means, what he called in almost Proudhonian terms the horrible right of territorial property, perpetual, hereditary, and exclusive.

This whole land topic is going to come up a lot in the history, by the way. You may be familiar with the phrase land and freedom, tierra y libertad. That comes from Mexico. Anyway, it took more than a decade of war, but by 1821, Mexico had finally broken free from Spain. Freedom, though, didn't mean stability.

The 19th century saw emperors come and go because there was actually a time when Mexico was a monarchy, foreign invasions by the United States via the Manifest Destiny, and Napoleon's France via monarchical Latin League, and internal power struggles.

The Zapotec president Benito Juarez, who from 1864 to 1867 had resisted foreign occupation by Napoleon's Emperor Maximilian and fought for constitutional reform, sought to stabilize, secularize, and modernize the country. In the mid-1800s, figures like Juarez led a sweeping movement against the old powers of Mexico, the Catholic Church and the military, which had long dominated both land and politics.

Through the layers de reforma, they seized church property, secularized education, and promised a new era of rights and equality. But there was a catch, because to weaken the church, the liberals sold off its land, not to the peasants or indigenous communities who had worked on it for generations, but to wealthy buyers. Ejidos, the communal lands of indigenous peoples, were privatized. Under this liberal banner of freedom and progress,

They created a new class of landlords and pushed rural people deeper into poverty. Benito Juarez died, but his legacy lived on with those reforms to cement the separation of church and state, freedom of religion, the prohibition of forced labor, and so on. But following him came the Porfiriato, a 30-year-long dictatorship under the mixtec president Porfirio Diaz, who continued the modernization of the country but also deepened its long-standing inequalities.

Portillo-Díaz surrounded himself with intellectuals known as the "scientificos." They were positivists, as in adherents of the positivist school of philosophy, which advocated for rational planning and economic development as a path to social progress. His slogan was "Pan o Palo" and reflected the policy of rewarding compliance with prosperity while punishing dissent with severe consequences.

The liberty, order and progress equation sacrificed liberty as the Mexican people were expected to trade freedom for the benefits of these policies. Workers ended up facing low wages, long hours and of course lacked rights while estate labourers were landless and under the arbitrary rule of mayordomos.

Education was largely restricted to elites in major cities. Groups like the Yaqui Indians were forcibly relocated as cheap labor to plantations. Governors, though supposedly elected, were effectively presidential appointees, monitored by jefe's politicos who intervened in local affairs.

The rural artists and elite constabulary maintained order but often disregarded due process, which fostered a whole reign of terror in the rural areas. Diaz's popularity eventually waned as prosperity was monopolized by a small, often foreign elite. This elite emulated European customs, which created a stark divide with the growing proletariat and middle classes. By the second half of the 19th century, Mexico was caught in a contradiction.

A state that promised emancipation through property rights while dispossessing the very people it claimed to free. The Liberal project had failed them, and in its failure, space opened for deeper critiques of property, power, and the state itself.

A younger generation began questioning the system. And with this rise in criticism came rise in repression, which set the stage for the Mexican Revolution of 1910. This whole era of like the turn of the millennia and the start of the 20th century has like so much of this same stuff happening all over the world. Like that's kind of one of the biggest trends that

we've been able to see throughout your Latin American anarchism series is like how, how much they all mirror each other and like how much of like a global movements used to exist. Like not, not like a organized fashion, but like there's like some like other force that is, um,

That is driving these global trends of revolt and revolution. And we see this a lot in the 1910 to 1920 time period. Even just in Latin America.

Absolutely. I also think, of course, it's really easy to notice these trends and notice these tides of history in retrospect. You know, when you're submerged in it, it's just like, you know, all these conversations and stuff happening for sure, all these events and stuff happening around you. But it's only by looking in the past, you could say, oh, wow, this was like a global pattern. You know, so I'm always curious to see like,

When we look back, I mean, the 2010s are already over. The narratives around it are still formulating, right? We're still in the midst of the 1920s. The 2020s. So, you know, the narratives around it will still be developing all now. But we're already halfway through, and I'm sure people have already seen certain trends that are going to make for some excellent retrospective commentary. Definitely, yeah. Like the past 10 years, we've seen this like global far-right power grab and this like

of right-wing populism sweeping a whole bunch of

neoliberal democracies like you like post 90s post war on terror post end of history stuff where you see like the full extent of like the clinton reagan thatcher economics completely completely crumble with far-right populism like taking taking over the reins of most popular consciousness yeah to the point where even like the more like liberal parties are being quote-unquote forced to adopt like similar rhetoric looking at like like like the labor party in the uk and

here in the States, how much the Democratic Party last year completely caved on far-right populist talking points on immigration and stuff. Exactly. I think part of it as well is a failure to advance a positive direction and a positive program. Yeah. You know, when we allow...

the terms of discourse, the arena of discussion to be dictated by the right when we simply react to what they are saying, when we simply respond to their policies and their efforts. You know, we may slow down the progress of their goals, but ultimately, as long as we are engaging in dialogue with their goals, they are slowly inching their goals closer and closer to reality.

Yeah, yeah, that is certainly the trend that I've been seeing the past 10 years, and I'm sure many people have. Yeah, I mean, the Overton window is pretty much entirely dictated by what they decide, you know? I think I've mentioned this before. The right decided they wanted to talk about critical race theory, and then critical race theory became the center of conversation. The right decided they wanted to target...

DEI, gender ideology. Right, yeah. And then that becomes the whole thing, the whole center of discussion. They're not putting forward the policies that are going to hurt pretty much everybody as the center of their policy. That's more like an aside thing. When they give themselves salary raises and they cut taxes on the rich, that's not the center of their political messaging. The center of their political messaging is

you know, various culture-related issues that they can use to rally their base. But it's nothing that's actually benefiting people, you know, and instead of circumventing that effort to dictate the course of conversation and dictate our own conversations, instead we're just kind of following along the tail. But that's a bit outside the scope of this, that's a bit of a digression here. Before we get to the point of the Mexican Revolution though,

We should really take a look at the slow and steady development of radical ideas in Mexico during the 19th century. You see, indigenous resistance persisted throughout Mexico's history through often quiet revolt, acts of non-cooperation that would steadily ensure that Spain could never fully establish its dominion. Even after independence, the colonial structure lived on in the haciendas, the church and the state, so the indigenous communities would continue to resist, sometimes in profoundly anti-authoritarian ways.

By the 19th century, and this history is courtesy Angel Cabletti's Anarchism in Latin America, as I mentioned, in 1861, a man arrived in Mexico with a very distinct name. He was Protino Constantino Rodacanati. He was a Greek immigrant, radicalized by the revolutions in Europe and steeped in the works of Fourier, who was a utopian socialist, and Peron, who was an anarchist, the first anarchist.

He had fled the counter-revolutionary tide, crashing over the continent with a mission. Murakunati believed Mexico, with its long-standing indigenous traditions of communal landholding and mutual aid, was the perfect place to plant the seeds of a new utopian society. And in a lot of ways, he was right. He saw in the ejido system, the indigenous communal land tenure, a living echo of the kind of society utopians in Europe could only dream of.

Where the liberal elite saw backwardness, Rudacanati saw potential. His aim wasn't to civilize these communities, but to learn from them and help them protect their autonomy from the encroaching state through political philosophy and praxis. He seems to be a very interesting fellow, by the way. I mean, he apparently spoke seven languages. He practiced medicine by day and philosophy by night.

He was a Christian, but not anything like the Christians that dominated Mexico at the time. Because, as Ángel Capuleti puts it, for him the essence of Christianity is charity, that is, love for all, as it is taught in the Gospels. And that essence is the moral foundation of socialism and revolution as well. Pure Christianity, he wrote, is the religion that will regenerate the world when people finally come to understand the power of its basic principles, liberty, equality, and fraternity.

But it is Christianity without dogma, like St. Simon's, and without priesthood, liturgy, or hierarchical organization, the model for which he finds the life of Jesus and his earliest followers. Primitive Christianity is authentic Christianity, but has been entirely degraded by the Catholic and Protestant churches, and has nothing to do with so many sects that call themselves Christian. End quote.

A few months after his arrival in 1861, he published a socialist primer in Mexico that marked him as the first anarchist to put forward distinctly anarchist theory in the country. In the mid-1860s, he formed a group called La Sociale with the goal of spreading the ideas of mutualism, free association, and anti-capitalist cooperation through books, pamphlets, and education. Berrocanati and his collaborators launched worker schools aimed at promoting literacy, political consciousness, and autonomy.

One such school was the Escuela del Rayo y del Socialismo, the School of Lightning and Socialism. Hell yeah. It combined moral instruction with a deep critique of the exploitative labor system. This was, you know, education as a rebellion, not just to read but to recognize the exploitation and to imagine alternatives.

Roderick Natty thought of his socialism as the fullest expression of the French revolutionary motto of liberty, equality, and fraternity, which no half-measure like liberalism could ever reach.

He recognized that the immediate objective must be, quote, the extinction of poverty, the distribution and increase of the Commonwealth, the abolition of prostitution, and the conservation of all our faculties, including the intellectual, physical, and moral ones, for the transformation of humanity through science, beauty, and virtue, end quote. One of those things was not like the others, I'm sure you noticed. There was a standout inclusion there, but it makes sense considering his background.

He also saw himself as a cosmopolitan, perhaps owing in part to his unique circumstances as a man with a Greek father, Austrian mother, a French education, and Mexican home. He said, quote, We are cosmopolitans by nature, citizens of all nations and contemporaries to all the ages. The greatest and most heroic human actions belong equally to all. End quote. In other words, our country is the entire world and all men are brothers.

He also wrote that the abolition of all government in the nations, which frightens you and you consider impossible and absurd, though you have never tried it, will usher in a totally new world of institutions in which the peoples of the world will live in happiness. End quote.

Rui Canati was a pacifist in his approach to anarchism, which owed his original introduction to socialism being via Charles Fourier. But eventually he came to understand the need for a class struggle. As he said, quote, a social revolution in which many heroic victims will be sacrificed in the sacred altar to restore the justice denied to the people, end quote. His work attracted young radicals, many of whom would later play key roles in the development of Mexico's labor movement.

Before he started La Social, he'd initiated the first Grupo de Estudiantes Socialistas, from which came figures such as Santiago Villanueva, who tried to organize the workers' movement, Hermenegildo Villavicencio, and Francisco Zaracosta, a leader of rural masses. It's the core of this group that would help him to create La Social, which would educate and agitate but also assist workers beyond mutual aid to an active class struggle posture in defense of their interests against bosses.

So basically, he took these mutual aid societies and made sure that they didn't stay mutual aid societies, that they were radicalized into resistance societies. Because those sort of mutual aid associations were very common in Latin America at the time. You know, workers would create these little groups where they would try and support each other. But it's very easy to fall back on that and to assume, you know, that's all you have to do. Making sure that they have a radical posture, a revolutionary posture, is important to ensure that you're not just

rest on your laurels and expect a change to come to you. And indeed, they did not expect the change to come to them. In June 1865, these resistance societies supported the first industrial strike in Mexico. Unfortunately, it was crushed by the leader of the country at the time, Emperor Maximilian, but it was his occupation and the economic harshness of it all that fomented the spread of anarchist ideas.

Another student out of Rocanati's school came Julio Chavez, a precursor to the more famous Emiliano Zapata and a fervent anarchist communist. He agitated for peasant rebellion and engaged in land expropriations, which grew in popularity wherever he was active, from the Chalco-Texoco region, where he began, to all the states of Puebla and Morelia.

As Capiletti recounts, quote, the federal army finally moved against him and defeated and imprisoned. He was executed in 1869 by order of President Benito Juarez. Before he died, Chavez cried out, long live socialism, end quote. His manifesto, which was written a few months before he died, would help introduce more masses in the Mexican movement to the idea of class struggle. And like a light bulb over one's head, it immediately made it clear who was responsible for their suffering.

Santiago Villanueva and a fellow student of a ricanati named Villavicencio worked arduously to organize the artisans and workers in Mexico City. And they definitely had the cards stacked against them. But they helped to organize an industrial strike in a textile mill in 1868, and in 1869 they established the Circulo Peraltario, and in 1870 the Gran Circulo de Obreros de Mexico, and in 1871 the Newspaper El Socialista.

And this is when the red and black so famously associated with anarchism came into the Mexican workers' movement. The 1870s saw struggles between radical and moderate factions among workers, proletarian presses making a name for themselves, and the first convention of the General Workers' Congress of the Mexican Republic in 1876, with a manifesto that indicated the growing influence of libertarian ideology in Mexico. Of course, there was a tension in that congress between the socialists and the anarchists, but water's wet.

Sadly, Mexico wasn't ready for revolution. Or rather, the ruling class wasn't. While Roda Canati and others sowed seeds among students and workers, the country was swinging toward a reaction. As I mentioned earlier, with the rise of Porfirio Diaz in 1876, any space for radical thought began to close.

Diaz, the strongman of modernization, was obsessed with order and progress. He welcomed foreign capital, built railroads across the nation, and gutted the countryside to make room for exports. And he crushed dissent. While Rocanati avoided outright persecution, thanks in part to his foreign status and pacifist leanings, the educational projects he inspired were dismantled or sidelined. The more confrontational elements of the early anarchist current went underground.

Those who spoke of abolishing property or questioned the Porphyrian vision of modernity were met with jail, exile or worse. Roderic Natti's allies, Alicosta, through his newspaper La Internationale, promoted a 12-point socialist agenda advocating a universal social republic, municipal autonomy, workers' rights, worker associations, wage abolition and property equality.

Despite Diaz's rise, in 1877 he led a present uprising in Sierra Gorda and Planes de la Barranca, battling federal forces until 1880. Despite his defeat and imprisonment in 1881, the rebellion persisted. Salacosta's ally, Colonel Alberto Santa Fe, introduced the Ley del Pueblo, influenced by Bacchunin's ideas, though not a purely anarchist manifesto.

This document emphasized land distribution, national industry promotion, army suppression, and free education. Santa Fe argued that true Mexican independence depended on reclaiming stolen lands, a movement which of course gained traction among the peasants.

General Negrete supported Santa Fe's revolutionary efforts just as he had backed Chavez-Lopez and Salacosta earlier. Santa Fe's resistance against Diaz's dictatorship was more radical than mere electoral opposition. It aimed at transferring sovereignty to local municipalities and land to peasant collectors. However, by the 1890s, Diaz effectively suppressed most worker movements through bribery and repression.

While industrial workers and miners fared slightly better than the peasants, wages steadily declined after 1898. Roda Canati left Mexico in 1886 after giving over two decades of his life to the cause. But his two decades of sowing seeds would eventually flourish in the Mexican Revolution, which we'll be covering in the next episode. Thanks for tuning in. I'm Andrew Sage. You can follow me on YouTube at AndrewZone and Patreon.com slash St. Drew.

Thanks again. This is it could happen here. All power to all the people. Peace.

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That is your Capricorn talking. Listen to High Key on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

This is Bowen Yang from Las Culturistas. And I'm Matt Rogers, and we're the hosts of Las Culturistas. It's Pride Month, and you know what that means. Friendship parties, dancing. Correct. And do you know what the perfect thing to bring to any Pride event is? Bowen, we talked about this. I'm not a thing. Oh, not you. I meant Casamigos. Okay, chic. And honestly, the only other correct answer. Right? There's nothing like having Casamigos at a party with your friends. That makes sense, seeing as Casamigos' whole vibe is friendship. It's literally in the name. I didn't realize that.

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Hello and welcome to Kid Happen Here. I'm back with... Garrison Davis. Hello. And I'm Andrew Sage or Andrewism on YouTube. Now, previously, we explored a lesser known chapter in Mexico's radical history. Before Magón, before the revolution, when a Greek emigre named Plotino Ricanati arrived in the 1860s, convinced that Mexico's indigenous communal traditions could form the basis for a new anarchist society.

Through schools, pamphlets, and mutual aid societies, he helped sow the first seeds of anarchist thought on Mexican soil. Some of his students pushed even further and flirted with many burgeoning streams of anarchism, even as Porfirio Diaz's regime clamped down on anything that challenged his drive for order and progress.

Roderick Natty faded from view and many of his students and associates had to go underground for a time, but the ideas would live on, like quiet sparks awaiting for the next revolt. And the next revolt would come in 1910, when the Mexican Revolution erupted. But keep in mind the context here. When we talk about revolutions, the focus tends to be on the flashpoints, the gunfire, the slogans, the major figures. And I will do a lot of focus on some of the major figures throughout this history.

We have to keep in mind, the revolutions have roots that run deep, run deep below the surface. The revolutions are often shaped by decades or centuries of injustice. And Mexico's revolution was no exception.

Because for over three decades, Porfirio Diaz ruled Mexico with what was basically a velvet glove over an iron fist. He brought railroads and electrification, but also grave, grave costs for the rural poor, the indigenous communities, and the working classes. By 1910, thanks to his efforts, almost all the land in Mexico was in private hands.

The rural poor now found themselves as peons and haciendas, while those that fled to the city found themselves proletarianized, made to work at various industries for long hours, low pay, and little protection. Despite appearance stable and efficient and orderly, the system in Mexico was profoundly unjust. And yet, many saw it as a model for progress in a region full of instability.

A description that seems eerily familiar to the situation that's currently taking place in El Salvador. Beneath the polished veneer, tensions were brewing. Workers were organizing, journalists were risking their lives, teachers and lawyers and even wealthy landowners began to murmur about the need for reform. And in the countryside, those old communal memories refused to die. Even after the land was taken, the land was remembered.

By the turn of the 20th century, Diaz approached his 80s with no successor in sight and the people were getting fed up. Which brings us into the first phase of the Mexican Revolution. According to Ángel Capaletti, the author of Anarchism in Latin America and the main source of this episode, Francisco I. Madero wasn't quite a revolutionary. In all honesty, he just wanted to tweak the status quo, to keep a free market but ban the re-election of presidents.

He came from money. He was an upper-class intellectual, a believer in parliamentary democracy and in free markets. He read the Review Spirite religiously. It was a spiritualist journalism. And he believed in a kind of metaphysical liberalism, where good governance and good intentions could steer history in the right direction. Madero's party, the Partido Democrata, was formed with a single, clear goal. Ending Porfirio Diaz's decades-long grip on power.

But to more radical forces, like Ricardo Flores Magón and the Partido Liberal Mexicano, or PLM, Madero's vision was nowhere near enough.

Don't get fooled by the name, by the way. The PLM had some revolutionary credentials. It started off as a simple, anti-clerical, anti-dictatorial party, but perhaps with the influence of North American and Spanish immigrant anarcho-syndicalists, it eventually took on a libertarian character, guided also in part by the ideological evolution of Malcolm himself. It was neither liberal nor truly a party in the end, but rather a truly revolutionary libertarian organization.

We'll get back to Magón's story in a second. But the point is, when Magón was calling for social revolution, land redistribution, and workers' control of production, Madero merely wanted electoral reform. He had no real program for agrarian justice and was, quote, generally indifferent to the problems of the Mexican masses, as Capileti put it.

Still, Madero's 1910 campaign electrified all of those who were yearning for change, revolutionaries and reformists alike. His challenge to Diaz helped ignite a broader uprising that managed to bring Madero into power in 1911. Before we get into what happened during the Madero presidency, let's go back in time to follow Ricardo Flores Magón's story. Magón was born in 1873 in the village of San Antonio, Iloxochitlan, in Oaxaca.

His roots straddled both indigenous and mestizo heritage. As a law student in Mexico City, he found himself swept into the tide of anti-government agitation. Before he even turned 20, he was jailed for the first time.

He joined the radical press in 1893 with El Democrata, an anti-Diaz paper that the regime quickly snuffed out, but he wasn't deterred. In 1900, he co-founded Regeneracion, the publication that would become the voice of the Mexican left in the 20th century. It was while behind bars, where he often found himself, that Magón encountered the ideas that would shape his life's work.

Thanks to the library of liberal landowner Camillo Arriaga, he read the writings of Kropotkin and Malatesta, and through those texts, crystallized his anarchist vision. Now, even though Magón's ideology incubated quietly in his early political life, it didn't stay buried for long. As his conflicts with the Diaz regime intensified, so too did the radicalism of his actions.

He edited El Hijo del Acuizote, a satirical rag that earned him yet another stint in prison. And after his release in 1904, Magón fled to Texas, where he relaunched Regeneracion with renewed purpose. By 1905, the paper had helped spark the creation of the Partido Liberal Mexicano, or PLM, which, as I said, wasn't much of a political party as it was a radical organ, though it did have some reformist demands mixed in.

They were trying to soften their language at times to appeal to conservative sympathizers of reform away from Diaz. The PLM sought the abolition of the military tribunals, free secular education, workers' rights like the eight-hour workday minimum wage, and the expropriation of idle lands. In short, it went further than the 1917 constitution that would come a decade later, and could be seen as the crystallization of many of the Mexican Revolution's most popular aims.

Magón and the PLM established alliances across borders, particularly among the industrial workers of the world. But that put a target on Magón's back for both Mexican and US authorities. You already know they can't be having solidarity like that. The Pinkertons rolled up, backed in part by Diaz himself, and they were on Magón's tail constantly. Even ended up as far north as Canada, just trying to escape their constant harassment.

But despite the repression, their momentum could not be killed. Between 1906 and 1908, the PLM helped organize a string of strikes and uprisings. The most infamous was the Canaer Nea copper strike. Mexican miners were paid starvation wages while their American counterparts earned double for the same work. When the miners struck for fair pay and better conditions, they were met with deadly force.

The rebellion that followed saw American rangers and Mexican troops massacre more than 200 people, and thousands were jailed. Another uprising ignited in Rio Blanco, where textile workers, already paid a pittance, organized with the leadership of Jose Niera, a student of Magón. When negotiations failed and repression ramped up, the workers responded not with another petition, but with insurrection.

On January 7th, 1907, they stormed the mill, freed prisoners, cut wires, and declared open rebellion. The state responded with a bloodbath. Entire families were dragged from their homes and executed. Another one of the uprisings was a peasant revolt that began in 1906 in Akayukan and spread through Tuxtlas, Minatitlan, and Tabasco. It was crushed, of course.

In 1908 in Viescas, though their plans had been leaked to the authorities, revolutionaries had a firefight with police and freed a town jail. Just two days later in Las Vacas, other students of Magón were fighting for justice. Another set of guerrillas arose in Palomas, but they failed. Yet another insurrection happened in Valle de Olid, Yucatan, and they suffered summary executions.

And all those events, all those small revolutionary bands challenging the state, they failed. But they emboldened the dream of a different world with their will to act. McGowan was jailed again in 1907, but it wasn't over for him yet. And I really don't like to romanticize, you know, this idea of these uprisings that they feel, but, you know, they're still inspiring. We don't want to go too far into that where, you know, self-sacrifice for self-sacrifice sake. But,

I think it's important to point out that there were multiple failed attempts before the successful uprising that ushered in the Mexican Revolution. It wasn't, you know, a first-time successful attempt. And by the time Magón was released from prison in 1910, the revolution had already begun to burn across Mexico. And that is in part in thanks to the efforts of those uprisings, even though those individual uprisings failed.

The Catalan immigrant Amadeo Férez pumped up this energy in 1911 with El Tipografo Mexicano, yet another newspaper with a fierce anarcho-syndicalist spirit meant to mobilize urban workers. At the same time, old anarchist typographers were not only printing their message, they were forming unions like the Unión de Canteras Mexicanos.

In mid-1912, Juan Francisco Moncaliano arrived from Cuba and quickly rallied a diverse group of workers into Grupo Luz, set on establishing a progressive education platform a la Francisco Ferrer. By September 1912, these unions and Grupo Luz united to form La Casa del Obrero, forging a distinctly anarcho-syndicalist identity.

They organized lectures, built libraries of classic anarchist works, and launched a new bi-weekly called Lucha, all while energizing a massive May Day rally in 1913, where 20,000 workers rallied. Like Morgon, these radicals saw through the hollow promises of Madero's democracy. Voting for a new president wouldn't free the peasantry. Legislative seats wouldn't redistribute land. No Congress, no matter how liberal, would ever voluntarily dismantle the system that fed it.

For them, revolution was no less than putting land and production in the hands of the people. No bosses, no landlords, no masters. Just workers, organizing life on their own terms. Madero's revolution, if we can even recall that, had mobilized peasants, workers, and radicals. But that moderate phase was about to end, because once seated as president, Madero leaned heavily on old elites.

He really siphoned energy away from genuine social change with that reformist push that he was doing. A move that sounds all too familiar. Madero's refusal to enact meaningful change lost him his allies very quickly. Figures like Pascual Orozco and even Emiliano Zapata, who had initially supported the rebellion against Diaz, became disillusioned. So while Madero governed, the PLM continued its fight, now against the emerging new regime.

In northern Mexico, PLM-aligned forces initially rose alongside Madero's, but they did not make common cause with him. When strategic positions in Chihuahua were lost, with the middle class and Orozco siding with Madero, the Morganists turned their attention elsewhere. Their next target was Baja, California. In early 1911, they began seizing towns.

Mexicali, Los Algodones, Tecate, and finally Tijuana, seeking to establish a libertarian society, a model for what they called a free America. But the backlash was swift.

American, British and French businesses owned pretty much all of Baja California. Landowners and newspaper moguls in California, USA, which were often the same people, panicked and ended up smearing the Magonists as secessionists trying to hand over Mexican land to the US. In truth, as Magon wrote in Regeneracion,

Does Baja California belong to Mexico? It does not. It is under the control of foreign capital. Mexicans owned nothing of it. The PLM's campaign was not about taking Mexico apart. It was about reclaiming it from the hands of foreign elites. Nothing less than land and liberty.

As Capiletti put it, quote, on the contrary, Magón's goal was nothing other than a classless and stateless libertarian society that would provide the archetype and point of departure for the Mexican and world revolution, end quote. The downfall of the Baja California campaign came at the hands of bourgeois champion Madero, backed by the US government and capitalists. By mid-1911, the Magónist uprising in Baja California had effectively been extinguished. Yet the saga didn't end there.

On the 14th of June in 1911, Magón and three of his associates were arrested, tried in Los Angeles, and Magón himself was sentenced to McNeil Island Prison in Washington State, a fate he endured until 1914, which meant that Magón wouldn't be present in Mexico for the death of one of his biggest ops.

Since Madero failed to gain the support of radicals or secure the loyalty of reactionaries, the conservative military overthrew and assassinated him, installing Victoriano Huerta into power in 1930. And just like that, the so-called moderate phase of the Mexican Revolution ended in blood. Huerta's dictatorship tried to turn back the clock to the Porfirian era. Huerta ruled with military force and repression.

The usual stuff, persecuting labour organisers, shutting down radical spaces, deporting foreign activists, jailing dissenters, murdering people. Crackdowns eventually hit La Casa de Lobreros publications and destroyed the anarchist library. But out of this repression emerged a new tactic. They basically said, you know, you could burn our books, that's fine. Do what you have to do. But you're not going to stop us from spreading our message.

They established grassroots orators, the Tribuna Roja, who took the revolutionary message directly to the working classes, giving speeches where they were at and sharing the message even without access to literature. By May 1914, a new people, Emancipación Obrera, was launched, though it too fell prey to the regime's brutality. Thankfully, the regime wouldn't last long because Huerta's power didn't go unchallenged.

From the north, Venustiano Carranza and the constitutionalists rose to oppose him, claiming to defend Madero's legacy. From the south, Emiliano Zapata refused to accept any government that ignored the demands of landless peasants. And throughout the country, armed struggle reignited. Which brings us to Emiliano Zapata himself. He was doing his own thing politically, but he was inspired in part by the anarchist supporters of Magon.

His ideology was rooted in the Kalpuyi, the collective land systems of his indigenous ancestors. He eventually adopted the slogan Tierra y Lirutad and rallied behind the Plan de Ayala, demanding land redistribution and local self-governance. He had little tolerance for political maneuvering. He saw the false promises of figures like Huerta and Carranza. For Zapata, revolution was not about elections or modernization. It was about giving land back. That's really all he cared about.

In contrast, as the Wario to his Mario, there was Pancho Villa. He was a charismatic northern general and a populist who worked with and against Carranza. As Magón described him, Zapata delivers riches to their true owners, the poor. Villa executes the proletarian who takes a piece of bread. End quote.

Though both were opposed to Carranza, their goals, strategies, and ethics were far apart. Like I said, Mario Tesuario. Huerta didn't last long, as I mentioned. He was ousted by 1914, so just about a year of being in power and being a violent dictator. And after Huerta fell, Finustiano Carranza rose to fill the vacuum. Like I said, he claimed to be continuing Madero's legacy. And his vision of Mexico was just as top-down.

He wasn't exactly fond of anarchists or the radical left in general, but faced with pressure from the Zapatistas in the south and VIA's forces in the north, he coerced his labour organisations like Casa del Obrero Mundial, offered gestures of support, a few favourable labour reforms and even physical space, like giving them the Jesuit college Santa Brigida as headquarters.

In return, Carranza hoped to build a loyal base of organized workers, integrate them into his constitutional army, and neutralize the more radical strains of revolution. And I'm sorry to say that it partially worked. He was able to buy off some of these workers.

While this alliance gave La Casa de Lobreros space to organize workers throughout the country and ramp up educational and proselytizing efforts, much like what would take place in Spain years later, the anarchists began to lose their anarchist roots from the collaboration. Instead of backing Zapata, in February 1915, La Casa signed a pact with the constitutionalist forces and created quote-unquote red battalions within Carranza's army.

But although La Casa expanded its influence and managed to mount strikes among miners, teachers, drivers, bakers, oil workers, textile workers, carpenters, button makers, and barbers in 1915 in response to the economic pressures of inflation and unemployment, by early 1916, their government allies were cracking down on them. Not long after hiring the Red Battalions, they fired the Red Battalions. They shut down La Casa's offices. They sent key figures to jail.

In response, the workers' movement held a national congress in Veracruz, and out of this emerged a new labor federation built on Anarchist and Nicholas principles, committed not to capturing power, but to dismantling it, the Confederación del Trabajo de la Región Mexicana. In May 1916, a general strike erupted in protest of the imprisonment of La Casa's leadership and to demand urgent economic relief.

While the strike was an immediate success, its ease led many young militants to believe that change could come through a benevolent state. Notably, Luis Morones, who would later lead the Confederación Regional Obrera Mexicana, or CROM, signed agreements with Carranza's government. Matters intensified ten months later when a second strike broke out due to low pay. In response, Carranza ordered mounted police to break up assemblies and declared martial law.

The strike was crushed, its committee suspended all activities, and one prominent leader was nearly executed before his sentence was finally commuted. La Casa shut down and the strike failed, but the anarchists endured. By mid-1917, new groups like Luz and several local Casas had reappeared throughout the country.

However, internal debates culminated in the October 1917 National Workers' Congress, where reformist forces led by Luis Morones properly marginalized the anarchists, setting the stage for the rise of the CROM and a more moderate, pro-management approach, aligned with, of all people, the American Federation of Labor, the AFL. Carranza's crowning achievement came in that same year, with the signing of the Constitution of 1917.

On paper, it was progressive. Land reform, limits on church power, labor protections. But to many revolutionaries, including Magón, this wasn't the revolution fulfilled. Far from it. It was a revolution managed. Their wildest dreams trimmed down to a policy. Even its better reforms were hardly enforced. But with the constitution of 1917, Carranza could still claim legitimacy. He could claim progress. And he could claim that the revolution was over.

But what happened to the revolutionaries? Zapata was still fighting for land in the south, but Carranza would assassinate him by 1919. Magón was imprisoned in the USA, denouncing the betrayal from behind bars. Workers were still struggling for real power in their workplaces. And the vast majority of rural Mexicans remained poor, dispossessed, and disillusioned.

In case you're wondering what happened to McGon. In 1916, he was jailed in the US until a group of exiled anarchists led by Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman paid his bond. Now that feels like a cameo or crossover episode of some kind, right? And then in 1917, the year of the new constitution, he was back in jail again for speaking out against the first world war and calling for a social revolutionary war instead. He was sentenced to 20 years and his health deteriorated steadily.

He wasn't a fan of Carranza at all. He called him a strikebreaker, an assassin, and a wolf in sheep's clothing.

When the Kuranza's government offered him a pension, he said, quote, End quote.

So long story short, he didn't accept the money. When the US said they might let him go if he said sorry and petitioned for a pardon, he said in many words, hell no.

Among his more beautiful words, he said, quote, Repentance? I have not exploited the sweat, anguish, fatigue, and labor of others. I have not oppressed a single soul. I have nothing to repent for. My life has been lived without my having acquired any wealth, power, or glory. When I could have gotten these three things very easily. But I do not regret it.

Wealth, power, and glory are only won by trampling others' rights. My conscience is at peace, for it knows that under my convict's garb beats an honest heart. So he died in his jail cell in 1922, possibly assassinated. Zapata, like I said, was assassinated by Kranzer in 1919, and Kranzer himself was assassinated in 1920. In case you were keeping track, both of Magan's major ops, he ended up outliving, right?

He outlived Madero and then he outlived Carranza, but he still died in jail, which is, you know, kind of tragic. But Carranza's successor, Alvaro Obregon, was both friendly with reformists in the CROM and not as hostile to the anarchists as Carranza, which gave the anarchists an opportunity to regroup. Strikes built up across the country. Miners, oil workers, textile workers, dock workers, and more. Some 65,000 workers in July 1920 alone.

Out of this momentum came the Federación Comunista del Proletariado Mexicano, or FCPM. It was an ideologically mixed group, but leaned in an anarchic direction and starkly contrasted itself with the reformist ways of the CROM and the international ally, the AFL. The FCPM went on to establish the Confederación General de Trabajadores, or CGT, in 1921 as a direct challenge to the CROM.

They were fully declaring their independence from state and party. Their focus was on class struggle. The Mexican government flew to its socialist language from time to time, but the anarchists saw through the charade. They called out that so-called socialist-like government's deportation of anarchists and socialists. They even called Moroni, the guy who started CROM, Mexico's Mussolini. It's an interesting insult.

The CGT stood against the Moscow-backed Third Internationale and instead allied with councilists like Rosa Luxemburg and Anton Panekoeck. They also formed a specifically anarchist section within the group meant to play the same role played by the FAI for the Spanish CGT.

The Mexican CGT backed strikes, including in 1921 when they backed a rail workers' strike against US companies. And in 1922, they expelled CGT leaders who had flirted with electoral politics, reiterating their anti-party stance. They would not allow themselves to be retaken and capitulated to reformist aims. That same year, May Day protests turned into confrontations when right-wing thugs killed a demonstrator's child in front of the US consulate.

And they didn't stop there. Anarchists in the CGT helped organize tenant strikes in Mexico City and Veracruz. They led general strikes in textile mills and rallied against state violence. They protested in solidarity with international struggles from Spain to Boston, from the murder of Salvador Segui to the jailing of Sacco and Vincetti. They also had to deal with efforts to defame them through misinformation, such as the accusation that they were embezzling workers' funds.

Throughout the early 1920s, you had some new libertarian publications jumping out. You had Verbarojo, you had La Humanidad, Sachitario, Tierra Libre, Alba, Anarquica, and so on. And by 1924, under President Calles, who followed the assassinated Obregón, the tides began to shift. Calles was more hostile to the anarchists than Obregón and openly favored CRON.

He gave Morones a cabinet post, passed laws to undermine CGT organizing, and escalated repression. The CGT held its ground, organizing general strikes, occupying textile mills, confronting police, expanding to the countryside, all their usual stuff. They fought for short-term relief and long-term revolution. By 1926, CGT had grown into a federation of 157 affiliated groups. Unions, syndicates, agrarian communities all included.

And yet, by the late 1920s, things started to fray. The CROM was declining due to their attachments to a government that was no longer conciliatory to their political ambitions. And the CGT couldn't capitalize on that decline of the CROM. The government sought to marginalize them entirely. Thousands of former CROM members joined the CGT while the CGT itself began to make some slides toward concession and reformism.

and so it reached a point where they were calling themselves anarchists. But the anarchism was nowhere near there. And yet, anarchism didn't die. It morphed, it migrated, and it regrouped. After the fall of Spain in 1939, exiled members of the CNT and FAI arrived in Mexico, reinvigorating the scene for a time. They published Tierra y Libertad, built new organizations, and kept the memory and the fight alive.

A few anarchist impulses managed to emerge within the Mexican Communist Party into the early 1930s as well. At least according to Kirchhofer, President Calles ended up founding what became the Institutional Revolutionary Party. A contradiction if I ever heard it. And they basically ran the show in Mexico for 71 years straight, from 1929 to 2000. Their administration co-created the conditions that would birth the Neos Apertismos in 1994.

They're not anarchists, as they have been very clear to state, but maybe they will get a two-parter in the future, going into their history in more depth. The history of anarchism in Mexico has been quite the story, I must say, and with that we've reached the end of that classical history. Its modern history is still being written, still being told, but this is the end of our exploration for now. Not just of Mexico's anarchist history, but of this entire series of anarchism in Latin America.

I joked about making an episode about Quebec's anarchism scene, but that may remain a joke for now. We've journeyed a very long way together, from the Andes to Buenos Aires to Montevideo to Sao Paulo to all over. We've seen how long before the name anarchism arrived on Latin America's shores, people were resisting hierarchy. Through indigenous forms of autonomy, African-Maroon communities, and present traditions of land sharing and reciprocity.

We saw how these anarchic and anarchish instincts met new ideas, genuinely and intentionally anarchist ideas, coming from Proudhon, Bakunin, and Kropotkin, brought over in pamphlets and in the minds of exiles and immigrants. In Mexico, those forces took on a revolutionary scale. Murdo Canati planted the seed. Magón amplified its voice. The workers, the peasants, the students, they all gave it their all, their fire.

And even when that fire was smothered by reformists, by nationalists, by reactionaries, by capitalists, by the bullets and the bribe, it never truly went out. Across the Americas, these movements rarely won in the traditional sense. They were often betrayed, suppressed, and erased from history. But although anarchy was not achieved, anarchists and the anarchist idea will survive.

Anarchist thought is radically resilient and it never really disappears. It usually just goes underground or into the margins or into new forms from student collectives to feminist organizations to squats to ecological struggles. Inspiring movements that aren't necessarily anarchist but lean in a direction that questions some of the familiar patterns of authority.

Thank you for walking this journey with me. I've been Andrew Sage. You can find me on YouTube at Andrewism and support the work over at patreon.com slash Jane True. All the sources, citations, and further reading can be found in the show notes. This has been It Could Happen Here. All power to all the people.

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Welcome to the War Update, an update about war. I'm your host, Mia Wong. With me is James and Robert. Yeah, war never changes, etc., etc. Yeah, except for, yeah, I mean, sure. All the fucking time. All the time it changes. Yeah, except for all the changes. Yeah, I think it's a line from a film. Yeah, I mean, the most important part doesn't change, which is most things in proper place at right time, right? Yeah.

That's what determines war winning. The things that matter are what change. Yeah. Also, what doesn't change, not great fun for the most part, not an enjoyable way to spend your time. Not enjoyable except for the chunk of people who tend to make most of the calls. Yeah. Enjoyable. They like it a lot. Yeah. Enjoyable. You're an old guy in a big house. Yeah. So we're going to be talking about three wars. Yeah.

Yeah, I think we're going to lead off with the India-Pakistan war, and then we're going to do the other two wars in some order. Do you want to announce the other two wars? Yeah, we're going to talk about the end of the armed conflict between the PKK and the Turkish state, maybe. Yeah, we'll be talking about Yemen a little bit. Yeah, man. Yeah, let's, oh God, let's do this. Okay, so the good news is that, look,

Look, we do have good news, which is that we have not all died in nuclear fires. I know there are some of you for whom you are very disappointed, but we're all still here for better or for worse. I mean, for better. Like, I'm very glad we didn't all die in nuclear fire. Yeah. So let's let's let's talk about the recent war between India and Pakistan lasted about four days.

So, all right, we've talked about this a little bit before. The very basic sort of elements of this conflict. We've talked about partition on the show before when India sort of gained independence from the British Empire. It split into India and Pakistan. Millions died. Horrific sort of conflict. People killing each other, like mass migrations across the borders. Very, very, very unstable set of borders get set up that change a bunch of times and

And one of the aspects of this sort of whole thing is that Kashmir was supposed to be this independent state.

And then through an extremely convoluted process that I am, again, once again, pushing off to another episode with, like, actual good experts on this because this is a very, very convoluted thing. But the short version of it basically is that this series is sort of escalating conflicts and ends basically in a sort of short war and then Kashmir being split in two between India and Pakistan, basically.

Where, like, about a third, roughly, of Kashmir ends up under Pakistani control, and then about two-thirds ends up under Indian control. Now, there's an agreement signed by sort of Kashmir's ruler at the time to let India, like, annex, like, two-thirds of Kashmir. So the actual dividing line basically ends up being, like...

Where the army stopped, you know, it changes over the years. But the important thing here, right, is that Peshmerga is supposed to have had an independence referendum. Right. That was like, yeah, the deal. Yeah. Now, in a move that is like genuinely even more stunning than the shit that like Indonesia pulled in West Papua. So in West Papua, right, like Indonesia pulls a like fake independence referendum. Right.

Here, they've never even done that. Like, they've never even pretended to have the referendum that they're supposed to have had. It's like a sub-Assad level attempt at democracy, you know? Yeah, yeah. They're just like, nope, eat shit. Like, you're basically a colony now. Now, as part of this deal, right, Kashmir...

got a pretty substantial amount of autonomy. I'm going to read, there's actually, there's a very good Jacobin, one of the rare good Jacobin articles, which usually tend to be the ones written like not by the American Jacobin writers. By some freelancer who made 50 US dollars for writing it. Yeah. Unless their rates have gone up. Yeah. This is written by Arish K. And I'm going to, I'm going to quote here from this article. Quote, central to the instrument of a session,

It's the document that the ruler of Kashmir signed to sort of like hand Kashmir over to India. "...was the constitutional provision of Article 370, which assured the Kashmiri people autonomy over all matters besides those pertaining to defense, external affairs, and communications. The article was supposed to be temporary and provisional because there was a promise of a referendum by which the people of Kashmir would decide their own political fate."

to remain part of India, to join up with Pakistan, or become an independent state. But, as we've already mentioned, this just never happened. I mean, they didn't even do a sham one. It just literally didn't ever happen. And India has just been imposing its rule on Kashmir ever since. I mean, it is also worth pointing out that Pakistan has also been imposing its rule on its part of Kashmir. But the Indian occupation has become increasingly brutal. Basically, since it started, it's just continued to get worse and worse.

And it is sort of a full-blown military occupation, right? There's just like a bunch of fucking Indian troops in the street. And as it becomes clear that India is like never going to let Kashmir be free or just even let the Kashmiri people decide what they want, militant struggles ensues. And as Kate points out, it's originally spearheaded by the secular Jammu-Kashmir Liberation Front. And this group is just sort of wiped out because it wanted an independent Kashmir.

And this was convenient to neither the Indian or the Pakistani government because Pakistan wants, and Pakistan talks about this a lot internationally, like one of their sort of international political things is like, yeah, we want free cashmere. But it's like, no, you don't. You want cashmere to be part of Pakistan. That is not the same thing as being free. Like, you're very clear about this. And so Pakistan's engagement towards this,

Kashmir has always been about this, right? It's always been about making sure that there wouldn't be any kind of sort of independent Kashmir. And so both India and Pakistan crush the sort of secular Kashmiri independence group that have been spearheading a lot of this. And over time, Pakistan has sort of, through a complicated series of things, has asserted a lot of control over a lot of these groups or has intelligence relations with them.

ISI kind of notoriously works with militant groups. The ISI is the group in Afghanistan that really full-on did the thing that everyone thinks that the US and the Saudis sort of did in terms of funding the worst parts of the Mujahideen. That was really mostly Pakistani intelligence. So they have a lot of relations with a bunch of people who absolutely fucking suck.

And they've, you know, sort of used a lot of these groups as like a way to sort of poke a stick at India and also, you know, like attempt to obtain their sort of like domestic political goals of like weakening India for their own sort of internal stability, which we'll come back to later. Well, the internal stability of like military, of the power of the military in Pakistan and also like taking the rest of Kashmir, right?

Yeah. And so this has caused a really horrific conflict in which the people of Kashmir have suffered a bunch of horrible shit. In 2019, that autonomy, you know, again, the autonomy that was the carrot in order to like join in order in exchange for Kashmir joining India. Right. And supposedly getting this referendum like the like the carrot was supposed to be that they're supposed to have an unbelievable amount of of internal autonomy.

And in 2019, it had been being eroded for a long time, but in 2019, India is just like, eat shit, fuck you, it's gone now, have fun. And this causes a bunch of protests, it causes militant group attacks, it causes a genuinely astonishing crackdown. I mean, they turned off the phones and the internet in Kashmir. The Indian government just did this. And it became unbelievably difficult to get any information out.

They arrested unbelievable numbers of people. There are, I mean, just absolutely horrifying accounts of the shit that Indian security forces were doing to people. You know what I mean? Like, this is a colonial occupation, right? The things that happen in a colonial occupation, they fucking torture people, they kill people, they, like, they rape people. It's really fucked. And during this, as more sort of, like, militant attacks erupt,

Like, India does the first version of its... Well, not the first version, but it does... Like, it launches a series of attacks on southern Pakistan. And this is kind of... You know, there were escalations of it a couple of years ago. But, you know, the sort of big deal this time was insurgents and its...

We have a group that claim responsibility for it. It's still, I don't know, it's still unclear the extent to which the Pakistani government was actually involved. There's a whole thing with this. But a bunch of sort of insurgents killed like 25 Hindu tourists in a Kashmiri tourist town. And it's really fucking horrifying. This immediately causes this just unhinged wave of Hindu nationalism, like Hindu sort of nationalism in India, right?

We talked last time about all of these Indian government officials like literally talking about, quote, an Israel-style final solution to Kashmir. So a bunch of very, very horrific shit is happening. And then India decides that it's going to start launching attacks across the border. There's like the immediate small arms fire. There's missile strikes. There's drone attacks. And then as this sort of escalates, India launches attacks on three Pakistani air bases across.

And again, like they hit an air base that is in the city where Pakistan's army general headquarters is, which is a kind of provocation that has not happened since like the last time these two countries were just straight up at war. And, you know, like that could have killed us all. It didn't, but it absolutely could have. And it was also just horrifying for it. And it's worth pointing this out, right?

The people who are getting killed on both sides of the border here are Kashmiris, right? Because their home has been occupied by these two powers. When India and Pakistan go to war, the people who die on both sides are Kashmiris, right? Who are being killed by two states who've decided, fuck you, we get to control your fate. We get to be the people who fucking occupy your land and then claim to be the people who represent you.

And, you know, the civilian toll of this is fucking horrifying. There's a bunch of civilians are killed. People spend a huge amount of time cowering in these like horrifying overcrowded bunkers. There's a good sort of BBC report on this. Like there's so many people packed into bunkers that like you can't even like walk. Everyone's just like pressed against each other. And three days later, you come out of your bunker and your fucking house is gone. And those are the people who survived, right? It's just horrifying.

And eventually there's a ceasefire.

Everyone is now saying different things about the ceasefire. The Indian government is trying to downplay the U.S.'s role in the ceasefire. The Pakistani government has been talking about how a whole bunch of places were involved, including like Iran and Turkey to some extent, or Turkey more than Iran. It seems like the U.S., the U.K., and Saudi Arabia all played a role in sort of mediating it that we can sort of confirm. The U.S. seems to have played the largest role, which I guess...

I don't know, like, Marco Rubio was like, we should probably not have a war between two nuclear powers, which, okay. I'm glad that, like, he's finally found a thing, a level that he won't stoop to, which is we all die in nuclear war. Um...

I mean, like, I would rather Marco Rubio was not the Secretary of State. But, like, of the people who could be under the Trump administration, he's not as bad as some of the other folks. Yeah, I mean, it's like he...

We are fully in, like, which of Hitler's generals would you prefer to be in charge of this territory? So, like, fuck all these people. Yeah, we don't need to debate Rommel right now. What we do need to do is throw to ads. The Erwin Rommel of the podcast industry. Okay, so there are a few things about this conflict that are very, very bad. One is that India...

Has demonstrated the capacity to launch attacks against Pakistan that don't involve them mobilizing their ground troops, which takes forever. It is hard. That's really fucking bad. It's also bad that, again, they fucking hit like the air base next to Pakistan General Army General headquarters, which means if they try to do another attack, they're going to have to hit a bigger target. And they apparently it seems like the Indian government has sort of concluded that they can do this now.

It's also very bad that, like, most of the, like, domestic Indian left supported this, including CPIM, the Communist Party of India, Marxists, which is, like, the sort of social democratic, technically Maoist party that is supposed to be, like, the left in India, like, back the attacks. And they've always had a fucking terrible line on Kashmir. So it's also worth mentioning a little bit. There's been a lot of reporting about India, you know, Modi isn't making a bunch of noise about trying to just straight up cut off Pakistan's access to water.

which is very scary. Yeah. It's worth noting, Kay talks about this in that Jacobin piece. Kay's argument basically is that they don't actually have the infrastructure to do this, which is good because that would be a genocide if they just knocked out all of Pakistan's access to water.

For agricultural purposes and for drinking purposes, it'd be really bad. But here's, I'm going to read this quote. Under the treaty regulations, India is required to share hydrological data that is essential for planning to deal with floods and or droughts during monsoon seasons. Denying Pakistan access to this data would have a damaging impact. Moreover, because of the limited storage capacity, India can change the timing of water flow, which is crucial for many crops during sowing seasons. So there is still a lot of damage they can do. They can't.

straight up do like a genocide but they can do a lot of damage and while both sides have backed off of like direct military conflict India still is committed to every single thing they can do to fuck with Pakistan which affects just like the people of Pakistan this has also been politically very good for Modi because ultra nationalism it's been bolstering the sort of like Pakistani military government because there are ultra nationalists feed off of this and it's once again really fucking bad for the people of Kashmir who are the ones getting killed on both sides of the border yep

War is bad. Free Kashmir. Hate this. Yeah. Well...

Speaking of war being bad, let's talk about what's going on in Yemen. So if you remember from the last quarter or so of the Biden administration, after Israel launched their reprisal attacks to October 7th on Gaza, the Houthis, which is a, depending on your stance, either the legitimate government of Yemen or a rebel group in Yemen,

The international community stance is a rebel group. The Houthis stance is different. Started launching a series of missile attacks, both aimed at Israel and aimed at shipping in the Gulf of Aden, right? In order to disrupt, because a significant amount of the world's trade goes through there.

And this took a number of forms. They have ballistic missiles. Some of them are indigenous, by which I mean made by the Houthis, oftentimes using stocks that were captured from the military and government of Yemen previously, you know, that they supplanted in a lot of areas.

And other times using missiles that were given to them by Iran. Yeah. Right? So it's a mix of tactics. They have also used drones and they have also landed troops in order to capture bulk freighters, including one called the Galaxy Leader. And I think 2023, that was full of cars. And their claim was that it was a British...

And obviously the Brits had been helping to arm and support Israel. The vessel was actually registered in Lebanon. However, whenever we get into discussions about like whose vessel is whose, none of that, none of what is registered matters. Vessels are registered all over the place for a variety of nothing. It's always nonsense. That means nothing. It means nothing. The Marshall Islands. Yeah. Like.

Nothing in the entire world matters less to the reality of a situation than where the vessel is registered. I'm not saying that justifies or doesn't what the Houthis did. I'm just saying it does not matter where the vessel is registered. The ship was owned by a Lebanon-based company, but also given the nature of capitals, it doesn't matter all that much. Now, what also doesn't matter is that in January of this year, the Houthis freed the captain of that ship.

And they made an announcement that they would limit further attacks to vessels flagged as Israeli or owned by Israeli individuals or entities. Right.

Now, that also doesn't mean a lot, right? Because the nature of international trade means that there are a lot of, you know, you could basically argue if you're the Houthis, well, this is owned by a multinational corporation who owns companies in Israel or who has heavy investments in companies in Israel, therefore, right? As a result, you know, the Houthis continue doing the Houthi stuff and Trump, you know,

saw them as kind of a convenient target, a convenient place to flex his military muscles. And there were some people within the United States defense establishment that considered that extremely convenient too, right? And this is largely due to the fact that Biden prescribed a very limited campaign against the Houthis. Now, this does not mean inexpensive or insignificant. We kept at least one aircraft carrier in

carrying out strikes in Yemen for like a year or so, which is kind of the first combat duty that an aircraft carrier has had in quite some time. That was really like active taking incoming fire, not incoming fire that ever really threatened the carrier itself, but

But that's sort of beside the point. And there were people within the U.S. military establishment who were consistently frustrated with the Biden administration that they were not letting them operate at a high enough tempo. Right. And kind of the the number one guy advocating for this side of events was General Michael E. Carrillo, who is the head of Central Command or CENTCOM. Right.

And his attitude had been, we need a much more aggressive, high tempo campaign. He pitched the Trump administration when they came in. I think it's like an eight to 10 month long campaign where initially they would degrade who the anti-air assets. So first we go in there and we use our air power to establish what's called air supremacy, right? Air superiority means that you have better quality air support, but also your shit can get knocked down. Air supremacy means you have complete control of the skies, right?

The U.S. military is fairly used to having air supremacy. If you look at, like, for example, our combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, when it came to, like, fighter aircraft, helicopters would get shot down from time to time, obviously, and have accidents. We weren't losing F-18s in Afghanistan, right? Like, they weren't getting knocked out of the fucking sky by the Taliban. We had air supremacy. In Ukraine...

Depending on what part of the of the battle space you're talking about, either things have been more or less at a standstill or Russia has had air superiority, but not supremacy. Right. Because Ukraine has very solid modern anti-aircraft defenses and has been able to exact a toll. Yeah.

We will talk to a greater extent about what's been happening with India and Pakistan. It is exceedingly unclear at the moment who got the better of the engagement. Did any of those Chinese anti-aircraft missiles actually knock out aircraft? Did any India lose any aircraft?

Did Pakistan down any aircraft? We actually like everyone's making different claims right now. And I don't have objective evidence. Right. Other than that, we can we know that things that there's at least evidence of at least one case what looks like refugia of a Rafale. And in at least one case, there's what looks like a knocked down Chinese anti-aircraft missile. I'm spacing on the exact name right now. But again, that doesn't mean anything about how they actually fare in the battle space. Right. So anyway.

Yeah.

And he estimated that would take about a little under a year, right? But the better part of a year. And the Trump administration said, you can have your higher tempo war, but you've got to show results in about a month, right? In about a month, the U.S. military carried out about 1,100 strikes. They killed, they say, hundreds of Houthi fighters, destroyed quite a bit of weapons and equipment.

Very unclear how many fighters they killed. Certainly hundreds of people. Were those all Houthi fighters? How many weapons and equipment were destroyed? I don't have access to that sort of data, and I'm not entirely confident that anyone in the U.S. military has a much better idea. Certainly a little bit more data, but also they get that shit wrong all the fucking time. Yeah, it's also like it's worth noting, right, when they're talking about like casualty numbers.

The Houthis are not a small rebel group. No. They control the capital of Yemen. Right? This is like the government. Right? Yeah. They are not a peer state in terms of the U.S. in that they do not have the manufacturing base and capacity, but they are equivalent to a small state actor. Right? Yeah. Yeah. And so when you're bombing them, right, like...

You're you're you're just you're blowing smoking craters in apartment buildings in and the Houthis are so experienced with getting bombed. They've been bombed by a lot of people before. None of this is new to them. Right.

Yeah. So in the first 30 days, while they you know, the US has made a lot has made a lot of claims about how many people they killed and level of degradation of Houthi capacity. The Houthis have have done some damage to US capacity. They have shot down seven at least at this point, at least seven MQ-9 Reaper drones, which are $30 million each.

And in addition, now four F-18 jets have been lost. Not probably to, not probably just to fuck ups that are a result of the tempo of activity, right? These all tend to be craft that are landing and don't get caught by the catapult system that they've got on these aircraft carriers or otherwise wind up in the Red Sea, right? There is some suspicion and debate as to like, is there any sort of like

internal treason going on here? Is somebody on the aircraft carrier making these fuck-ups happen? This is being investigated, I believe. Although there's no confirmation about what exactly has gone down. It's weird to lose this many F-A-18 Super Hornets in a very short period of time. Yeah.

I will say my understanding of it also is that the only thing that's going on here is that this aircraft carrier has been out past the point it should have been refitted. Yes. Like so extraordinarily. And it's also not weird that people fuck up when they are carrying out operations at a tempo they never have before. Right. And there's a very good chance that it's nothing more than that. The more you fly, the more accidents are going to happen. Yep. Right. Yeah. Period. Also, I want to say, I want to say, imagine you are like the Deco.

Oh, man. The first one goes over. I'm not going to say poor motherfucker. That motherfucker's getting fucked. Yeah. Okay, the first one goes over, right? And then the second one goes over. And now it's happened twice, right? And now you've probably been fired. Yeah, you're out of a job. And they put a third guy. And that first guy's kind of lucky because when the next two fall off, at least maybe that's less pressure on you. Yeah.

Yeah. Like, like, imagine, like, you're the deck officer of the fourth. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, Jesus Christ. Oh, man. That's got to suck. So in about 30 days, the U.S. military had burned more than a billion dollars on this operation. Right.

At which point Trump and people around him were like, oh, fuck, we can't keep this shit up. We can't maintain this tempo of operations. There were warnings given from within the Defense Department that we have used so many of our most advanced munitions that if China makes a move on Taiwan, we're not sure we have the reserves necessary, right? These munitions, when we talk a lot about the capacity of U.S. firepower, people talk about shit like in 2018, how we like, we got a, there was this, um,

Al Qaeda guy who had been responsible for the attack on the USS Cole 20 something years ago. Yeah. A long gas time ago. Who, uh, who got, who used a cell phone? He shouldn't have used briefly and then turned it off. And we were able to get visual confirmation of where he was from the cell phone signal and knock his ass out with a drone. Right. And we do have incredible capacity potentially to make unbelievably precise strikes. However,

That capacity is reliant both upon a functional network of human intelligence, a functional network of operators of aircraft and drones who are not completely burnt out by the tempo of operations, and access to incredibly advanced munitions which we do not have in an exhaustible capacity and are reliant upon an international supply chain to continue to manufacture.

Right. And all of that has been endangered by the tempo of this campaign. And ultimately, there's a great New York Times report on this that's just absolutely damning to the military that came out. It's called Why Trump Suddenly Declared Victory Over the Houthi Militia that declared that after all of this.

The best we can say is perhaps a modest degradation of Houthi capacities that they can easily recover from given enough time, which they're going to get because Trump both declared victory and stated that the Houthis had yet again agreed to stop striking shipping capabilities.

in the Red Sea. And he was like, this is a win. We made a deal with them. Big deal maker. Donald Trump made a deal. Now, if you look at what the Houthis said, all they said is, we're going to stop striking Israeli shipping. Which, if you'll recall, is what they had said in January. So...

Did we win? No. Did the Houthis win? Not yet, but they didn't lose. And again, if you understand your insurgent warfare, you win by just not losing for long enough, right? Yeah. And it's also worth mentioning, too, when you're talking about the global supply chain part of this, right? On the one hand, the U.S. has done an extraordinary amount to try to make sure that as much of the supply chain as they can is in the U.S. On the other hand, it still requires...

a bunch of other places, including a bunch of rare earth metals that the U.S. gets from China. Now, you may be noting we are currently fighting a trade war with China. A bunch of our strategic planning is about stopping a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

So, and we've just expended a shit ton of our stack pile of munitions that we can only replace by using shit we get from China. So absolute just genius brain shit that's happening here right now at the highest levels of the regime. Myanmar has a lot of rare earth metals, but China is currently a lot closer to securing those than the United States is. Yeah. Which is not great. Well, that's all I got. That's the Houthis.

Let's have another ad break real quick here. Yeah, let's do that. Let's do that. Let's have an ad break. Lovely. What a nice advertising break. We are now back. I know many of you have been asking me about what is happening in Kurdistan. So I'm going to try my best to very briefly explain that in the last segment of this show. So...

The PKK, right, the PKK being the branch of the Kurdish freedom movement that has operated in Turkey, as Turkey or Northern Kurdistan, and mostly since the mid-20-teens, has been based in Iraq or Southern Kurdistan, right? It convened its 12th Congress in the second week of May, and it decided to disband itself, lay down its arms. And I think the phrasing it used was to say,

cease armed activities under the PKK name, which is a way of saying things. More broadly, it did genuinely seem to indicate a commitment to like this sort of ballot, not the bullet approach. I'm going to quote kind of extensively here from the statement that the PKK released and then from other statements from like people

Jemil Bayek, the leader, one of the co-chairs of the KCK. The KCK, if you're not familiar, it's a Kurdistan Communities Union. That is a group that allows the different areas of the Kurdish freedom movement, all of which are inspired by the political thought of Abdullah Ocalan, to sort of come together and

discuss their paradigm, their goals, their methodologies, I guess. So I want to read from the PKK statement to begin with, quote, The process initiated by Leader Abdullah Ocalan's statement on February 27th and further shaped by his extensive work and multidimensional perspectives culminated in the successful convening of our 12th Party Congress between May 5th and May 7th.

Despite ongoing clashes, aerial and ground attacks, continued siege of our regions, and the KDP embargo, our Congress was held securely under challenging conditions. Due to security concerns, it was conducted simultaneously in two different locations. With the participation of 232 delegates in total, the PKK 12th Congress discussed leadership, martyrs, veterans, the organizational structure of the PKK, and the

and armed struggle, and democratic society building, culminating in historic decisions marking the beginning of a new era for a freedom movement. It's a very long statement.

as tends to be the style of statements from the Kurdish freedom movement. It talks a lot about Abdullah Öcalan, as tends to be the style of statements from the Kurdish freedom movement. I've linked to it in the show notes if you'd like to read all of it. And I'd encourage you to if you're interested in this sort of thing. They talk a lot about the democratic nation concept and the idea that Kurds and Turks have coexisted in Turkey for a long time.

I thought this part was of interest. I'm going to quote again here. The decision of our Congress to dissolve the PKK and end the method of armed struggle offers a strong basis for a lasting peace and a democratic solution. Implementing these decisions requires that leader Apo... Apo, it's a vocative form of the Kurdish word for paternal uncle, but in this instance, it's referring to Abdullah Ocalan, right? That's his nickname. ...

Leader Apo lead and guide the process. That has right to democratic politics be recognized and solid comprehensive legal guarantees be established. At this stage, it is essential that the Grand National Assembly of Turkey plays its role with historical responsibility.

So a couple of things sort of note there. One is that they're talking about this transition towards democracy or a brotherhood of nations. They talk about somewhere else, right? Brotherhood of peoples. It's occurring under the leadership and direction of Abdullah Ocalan. If you are not familiar with Abdullah Ocalan, you can listen to Robert's theories, the Women's War, which did a great job of explaining a lot of the stuff that we won't have time to get into today. Very briefly, Apo has been in...

Imrali and various other Turkish prisons since 1999. For long periods of that time, no one was able to see him. He was held completely incommunicado. At times, there were hundreds of troops guarding only him on this Turkish prison island. That is no longer the case. He made this statement on the 27th of February. And since then,

The Kurdish freedom movement has had access to Öcalan, right? He actually made another statement on the 18th of May where he said, and I quote, a new contract is needed based on the law of brotherhood. What we are doing represents a major paradigm shift. The nature of the Turkish-Kurdish relationship is fundamentally different. What has been broken in the bond of brotherhood.

It seems like through the Dem party, which is a left-leaning party in Turkey, which has supported the Kurdish cause and for a long time has served as the interlocutor between Turkey and the Kurdish freedom movement.

through the Dem Party, they have access to Öcalan and they're able relatively frequently, it seems like these Dem Party officials to go to him, rally and talk to him. And so they're talking about his leadership continuing

through this this democratic transition right for the kurdish freedom movement jimmy bikes jimmy bike again uh is the co-chair of the kck in institutions within the kurdish freedom movement uh there's a co-chair system right which means so that a man and a woman both share the chairmanship of of an institution such that patriarchal structures aren't replicated in the movement um

that sets the goal of the co-chair system. He has a two-part interview in ANF, which I've linked again in the notes. He talked about how the first role of the PKK, of the movement even before it was called the PKK, was to quote-unquote reveal...

the Kurdish, quote unquote, Kurdish question, right? That's how they refer to it. Other times they'll talk about how Kurdish people were on their knees and like under the leadership of Ocalan, they stood up. They talk about also how Mount Ararat, Turkey has a plaque apparently where it says like, here is buried the imaginary Kurdish nation.

and the Kurdish nation is certainly not buried anymore. It's very active. Kurds are very politically empowered in two of the four countries where Kurds live. In Turkey, they are to a lesser extent, but they're still present. No one can deny their presence. In Iran, it's still, I guess, more difficult at the time for the Kurdish freedom movement. Bayek said, "...within our initial paradigm and our first manifesto, the Kurdish identity, the Kurdish people, and Kurdish society were formed."

A society in love with freedom was formed. A people emerged that would fight for freedom under any circumstances. On this basis, we are now developing a new paradigm, a second manifesto. This paradigm, this manifesto, aims to resolve not only the Kurdish question, but also the issues of the peoples of the Middle East and humanity as a whole. Rehbar Apo, Rehbar just means leader, Rehbar Apo is no longer leading only the Kurdish people. He is leading all peoples and humanity. Um...

Incredible line. Yeah, it's... KCKS lied. Yeah, it's... Yeah, it's... Yeah, this is the sort of rhetoric we can expect from the KCK, right? Like, they're very dedicated to Ursula and as a leader. Yes, yes. And...

You know, Robert and I have both been to Rojava. Heard a lot of no life without our leader speeches and seen a lot of those posters as well. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like you can't really go into a space. You'll see other, like, it's not just Ocelan, right? You're going to see Irwin Mercan and you're going to see, it's not like just a guy with a mustache. You're going to see women idolized in the movement too, but yeah,

Auxiland to the greatest extent is like their dear leader figure you can see his face all over Rojava and they're very dedicated to Auxiland's leadership and like this change in structure does not change that or this change in approach does not change that in fact it underlines that right like

the letter that Ocalan wrote and he wrote letters to different parts of the Kurdish freedom movement came this change, right? So it's still at the instruction of Ocalan, albeit with the consent of these delegates who went to this PKK Congress, right? And voted. I've reached out to the KCK to ask for comment on like exactly

exactly what this means in terms of most of the KCK as I said are in the mountains of southern Kurdistan now and they have fought Turkey there for years right we've covered that on this podcast northern Iraq southern Kurdistan however you wish to

to call it like turkey has been bombing they were bombing it last time i was there i'm sure they were bombing it last time robert was there they've been bombing it ever since and the villages that have really suffered as a result right people have lost their children they've lost their lands they've often had their crops burned right by these bombs so i i'm interested to know like will the idea of the kurdist freedom movement leaving the mountains there is uh

I mean, it would be a hell of a sight. They've been in those mountains for a long time. But I don't know what this means for the Kurdish freedom movement in southern Kurdistan. But I have asked. I don't know if this means that they will attempt like a straight up electoral strategy, right? Or when Ocalan's asking for a new contract, right? Like a new social contract. That's how...

In Rojava, they literally have a social contract, right? The social contract is generally like a theoretical construct. In most neoliberal democracies, the idea that you and the state enter into an agreement whereby you give up some freedom and you lose some danger and the state gives you some safety and it takes some of your freedom. In Rojava, the social contract is a real thing, right? Like it's a thing that is formed in consultation with society. So when...

When we see APO asking to ban a new contract, does that mean that they will engage on the basis of a new Turkish constitution? I don't know. I don't think any of us have answers to these questions, and I imagine that they don't either, right? They have decided to pursue...

this strategy of peace they've decided that through their armed conflict they were able to prove that they exist and that's a that's a phrase that specifically people have said to me in the Kurdish freedom movement like we had to pick up arms to prove that we exist.

And now that there's no denying their existence, they can use different methods, right? Like they'll put down their weapons and talk and establish with Turkey how to coexist, having established that they exist through the arms struggle. So for them, this is like they're celebrating it, right? They'll draw the analogy very often to like Sinn Fein in Ireland. That's one that you'll hear pretty often. And that this is their Good Friday. Now in the Good Friday Agreement,

britain released people from prison a number of very highly cherished very highly respected members of the kurdish freedom movement are still in prison of course ojalan being the most sort of widely loved and respected member of the kurdish freedom movement i don't think we're seeing ojalan come out of prison i don't think there's a world in which turkey would let that happen but maybe we will see some other people released maybe we will see those people i don't

I don't know, enter into electoral politics. Some of them have been in the struggle for 50 plus years, right? Like 50 years living in the mountains and constantly being worried about being bombed. So it'll be fascinating to see how this, this has been a long bloody conflict. It's been going for longer than any of us have been alive. If the friends are happy, then I'm happy for them. Right. And if peace is what they want and they can get away to continue fighting

like Jim O'Bike says, like the people in love with freedom, like if they can keep their freedom and they could do it without war, then I'm happy for them. Because like, I've talked to a lot of Kurdish parents who have buried their children. God almighty. Been to too many of the graveyards in Northern Syria. Yeah. Those little white graveyards with little children's faces like that will stay with me forever. Whatever stops that, you know? Yeah. Like if...

One of the things that kind of struck me when I was in Rojava last time is that like death just falls from the night sky sometimes. Yeah. And maybe, maybe it's your baby. Maybe it's you. Maybe it's your grandma. And it's a pretty horrible way to live. And going through that for your freedom is something very brave. And they have endured some of the worst conflict on the planet in the last few decades. Right. They fought some of the worst fucking people on the planet on one plane.

And if there is a way that the people of Kurdistan can enjoy peace, I want that for them because they've been at war for a very long time. Hi everyone, it's James. I'm just adding this pickup to the episode. I was able to get some questions answered on behalf of the Kurdish Freedom Movement and I would just like to share those answers with you. So I asked if Ocalan was able to address the Congress. I'd previously been told he was. This is a response.

Throughout the more than 26 years that Kurdish People's Leader Abdullah Ocalan has been held hostage in the prison island of Imrali, he has always found ways to convey his messages and perspectives to the Congress of the PKK that has taken place. So it was again regarding the 12th Congress of the PKK, which convened from May 5th to May 7th in the Free Mountains of Kurdistan. He was able to forward his ideas and analysis via the various delegations that have visited him throughout the last few months.

I asked about Özilan's call for a new social contract and they told me, Kurdish People's Leader Abdullah Özilan's calls and the historic initiatives that he has taken do not imply that the Turkish state has adopted the same attitude or that the state has changed its approach. Kurdish People's Leader Abdullah Özilan is not simply hoping for a change of mentality in the state, but is moving forward, developing his project and thereby pulling the state along with him.

What he is currently primarily concerned with is a redefining and reconstruction of the historical alliance of the Kurdish and Turkish people, which has been derailed during the past century. A long-term democratic solution to the Kurdish question necessitates a recognition of the role of the Kurds in the establishment and development of the republic.

Relations between the peoples must be brought back to their historical roots. Such a vision cannot be realized unilaterally. It lays in the nature of the way the struggle of the Kurdish peoples lead Abdullah Ocalan and the PKK that when they want to achieve a solution to a specific issue, they initially create through struggle the necessary conditions and context for it. What Abdullah Ocalan does is to set the context and to encourage all related circles in Turkey to take upon their responsibility for a lasting peace."

And then I wanted to ask about the people who were incarcerated and like the steps that they needed from the Turkish state in order for this peace process to continue. And this is what they said. A historic initiative was taken by Kurdish People's Leader Abdullah Ocalan and the PKK. First of all, there was a publication of the quote, call for peace and democratic society and quote on February 27th.

Then there was a declaration of the unilateral ceasefire on March 1st, and now there was the 12th PKK Congress, May 5th to 7th, with a decision to dissolve the PKK. All of those steps were unilateral steps that were not the result of negotiations with the state.

So far, no official negotiations have taken place and no written or verbal agreements have been reached. The steps taken were only a sign of goodwill and expression of seriousness about peace. Now it is upon the Turkish state to answer to this initiative and take the first practical legal steps to

So far, all we have seen is empty rhetoric. For the process to actually unfold, Kurdish people's leader Abdullah Ocalan must first of all regain his physical freedom and the conditions for him to work freely, healthily and securely must be guaranteed so that he can fulfill his role as the chief negotiator of the Kurdish people.

Also, the constitutional reforms that grant the basic rights of the Kurds and recognize them as one of the primary constituents of the republic must take place now. These are the first necessary steps. From there, a peace process can unfold.

If you're wondering about Rojava, just to finish up, Masloom Abdi made a statement. Masloom Abdi, leader of the Syrian Democratic Forces, right? Sometimes called General Masloom, Hoval Masloom, depends who you... Depends what side of things you're on, I guess. Masloom Abdi made a statement congratulating the PKK, saying he hoped all parties supported the peace process. The SDF is still in clashes with...

of the so-called Islamic State and increasingly with Sunnis within the Syrian revolution who are growing disheartened with what they see as al-Shara's moderate turn, the Damascus government being disheartened.

to Lib for some of these Sunni groups. And so ISIS, the Islamic State, whatever you want to call it, Daesh, is using that as a chance to recruit people. And that is why we are seeing ongoing fighting. Literally, I saw that they were burying one of their SDF fighters in Kambishlo today. So,

Unfortunately for the people of Rojava, the killing and dying continues, which is sad. Yes. Yeah. I want peace for my friends there and in Burma. Yeah.

Despite the fact that Robert and I get paid to go to wars sometimes, it doesn't mean we don't want our friends to live in peace. I would like there to not be any more to go to. Yeah, that would be great. I'll find something else to do. Yeah, fuck it. I'll go run with the bulls again. I went white rotter rafting yesterday. It was nice. I could just do more of that. Yeah, no, I'll rock climb. All right, everybody. We're done for the day. Go, hopefully not, live in a war zone. But if you do, hopefully that stops soon. Peace. Hike.

Listen to High Key, a new weekly podcast. You better listen. That's literally the definition of being an Aries moon. Just one little spicy off comment. That's all it takes. Everyone loves me at the cancer. And then the Aries comes out and they say, what is that? No, you're going to come for me being an Aries and you have a Sag moon? Get out of here. I'm a Capricorn rising, so that honestly balances it out and makes me more likable. What?

That is your Capricorn talking. Listen to High Key on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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That's ChumbaCasino.com. No purchase necessary. VGW group void. We're prohibited by law. 21 plus terms and conditions apply. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a show about things falling apart. And today, the thing falling apart is the Galactic Empire. This is episode four of our four-part series talking about the politics of Andor Season 2.

Andor has sadly come to a close. This will be our final discussion episode talking about Andor season two, episodes 10, 11, and 12. I'm Garrison Davis. I'm joined by Robert Evans and Mia Wong. What a, what a exhilarating four, four weeks this has been. Yeah, I'm going to miss it. Yeah. We're, we're, we're getting relief from the horrors to live the horrors in another universe. Yeah.

Yeah, no, it sucks now that we have to just do all this stuff except like the eight years in the past version because the level in which they've advanced here is far beyond certainly the US's revolutionary potential. Alas, yes, track.

Tragic. Hey, if anyone wants to be Armand Mothbud, take it applications. You can be the good liberal. You can be it. Oh man, I'll take a fucking Krieger at this point.

So I think we're going to do these episodes a little bit differently. I'm not going to do a whole synopsis for each of these episodes, since for these last three, the show has mostly eschewed plot for emotional and character beats. So instead, I want to quickly go over each of those character points, and then we can discuss those in detail. And most of our discussion will probably be around episode 10, Make It Stop. Yep.

Let's start at the beginning. Lonnie's last meeting. Ah, yeah. So the ISP double agent Lonnie Young calls Luthan to an emergency meeting to give him one final batch of intel after burning his cover.

It's really shocking and worrying when we see Luthan and Lonnie meeting in public. That already lets you know, oh, this is the end. Stuff is the most jover it's ever been for Lonnie. There's a great line that got one of the strongest reactions with the folks I was watching it with when...

Luthan's about to head out and he's talking with Clea and she's like, don't do this meeting. If it doesn't look perfect, we don't engage. Yeah. And Luthan responds, I think we've used up all the perfect. I think we've used up all the perfect. Yeah.

It's this really good, there's some very impressive face acting from Skarsgård here. He's so good. There's so much he wants to say to this person, who, as we'll discuss, is essentially his daughter. But ultimately, all that happens is she says, tuck your shirt in. It's insane. Yeah.

So he meets with Lonnie. Lonnie needs like assurances for like him and his family's safety. Luthen tells them that they'll be able to flee to Yavin together. Sure. Sure, buddy. Yeah. So by accessing Dedra's computer files, Lonnie learns that the Emperor's New Energy Project, the Kalkite mining on Gorman, the Kyber on Jedha are actually part of a massive super weapon. Luthen is warned that Dedra and the ISB are preparing for a raid on Coruscant and he may be the target.

Luthen ends up killing Lonnie to tie up loose ends and passes off the information to Clea to relay it to the Rebel Alliance while he goes to thermite their computer hard drive saying, quote, I'll do the burn. I'll do the burn. Again, it's Jover. Our shop, our little home, our little base of operations in Coruscant is getting destroyed. This is truly the end of an era here.

Luthen either knows or has like decided that he has run out of time. And the only way to be sure that the information safely reaches the Alliance is to give the ISB a distraction. And that distraction is himself. Yeah. And again, it's very consistent. He's clearly trying to buy time for Clea to escape. Right. Like that's that's part of part of his purpose here. Yeah. And I think he's also just done, you know.

Totally. He's done. He's tired. And he doesn't have it in him to run anymore. That's kind of what he discusses in this next section, which is such an efficient piece of screenwriting when Dedra arrives at Luthen's gallery. You can only hide in plain sight for so long, and that time has come. As Dedra arrives, Luthen says, here you are at last. Uh-huh.

Every line in their exchange, before she lets him know, hey, I know who you are, but every line leading up to that is a double entendre. Every single exchange they have is actually communicating something else, and it's wild.

Forgery is the sad curse of antiquities. At the moment, only two pieces of questionable providence in the gallery. Insane stuff. It's great. Insane writing. And it's perfect that she keeps trying to get some sort of acknowledgement that she's won. That's all she wants out of this, is for him to basically... She's actually kind of desperate for him to say, you did good, kid. You caught me. It's crazy. And all he does is throw shade at her.

no it's like he chipped sucker rebellions already gone you dip shit fascist like you fucking failed too late no but like referring to himself and in some ways her as like as an antiquity like like like you said like he is tired he is done he is yeah he's kind of a relic for the current era of the rebellion and you don't know it yet but so are you yes and so is so is her

only two pieces of questionable providence are in the gallery. Amazing. So, Lutha hands Dedra a ceremonial dagger. She asks if it's real. He smiles and remarks, we still don't know. And the tension mounts. The tension mounts, yeah. It's amazing. So good. I get every single line. It's like the screenwriters playing with us. Just amazing. I think Tom Bissell and Tony Gilroy, all these episodes, just phenomenal. Mm-hmm.

Dedra, now I'm nervous. Luthen, you've come all this way. And then she unveils this artifact that she has brought to Luthen for evaluation. She says, it's a little damaged perhaps, but I'd say it's held its value as she looks Luthen up and down. Again, same thing, very efficient. Luthen is a little damaged, but he is held his value.

And Dedra reveals the vintage Imperial Starpath unit that first brought Luthen's operation under Dedra's eye.

And now that both of them have their cards displayed on the table, they get to exchange a little bit more clearly without having to use these coded phrases like they were before. And they had this fascinating back and forth. She talks about how Luthen's been hiding in the shelter of Imperial peace and quiet and just wants to burn the galaxy down.

And Luthan gets to poke at her for how he's been aware of her this entire time, and she's only learned who he is. Quote, I've known you all along. Hardly seems fair. She says, you disgust me. Everything you stand for. And he says, do you know why? Freedom scares you. This is what Dedra's last arc is really about, and it eventually paradoxically leads to her fate.

Now, I think probably the best line in this little exchange is Luthen telling Dajara, quote, you're too late. The rebellion isn't here anymore. It's flown away. It's everywhere now. There's a whole galaxy out there waiting to disgust you. Great line. Amazing.

Yeah, again, this whole time he's been increasingly cooking her. And also cooking his hard drive, buying time as his hard drive burns up. Yeah, yeah. It's just some great stuff. And Dedra, we get some great face acting from...

Oh, yeah. What is it? Denise is her name, right? Yeah. Gao, I think. Where you just see in a second she sees the smoke and then Luthan collapses because he has stabbed himself in the heart. Yeah. Which is also, like, it serves as another kind of riposte to every argument that she's been making. Like, it's his ultimate counter to her claims that, like, you're fundamentally selfish. You're just doing this for yourself and your own, you know, desire to create chaos. You're trying to sow chaos. He's like, no, but...

Bitch, I'm going to stab myself in the heart. Like, you don't know what commitment is. It's great. Yeah, he uses this ceremonial dagger that he earlier hands to Dedra and stabs himself so that the Empire won't be able to torture and try to extract information from him about the rebellion. Buddy, you gotta have some explosives.

Like, you can't be relying on staggering yourself with the dagger. This is like a screenwriting thing. Yeah. Like, Deirdre has to get out of this. They have to access the computer later. I was like, come on, buddy. Come on. I think this is very, like, poetically written. Yeah. Yeah, you know, it's beautiful. I like, like, the romance of it.

But man, Dedra fucked up so bad here. Fundamentally ruins absolutely her entire life. The emotions really got the better of her. She really wanted to win one over on Axis to validate herself and her obsession the same way Cyril does. And it fucking bites her in the ass. It destroys the Empire. It destroys the entire Empire. Yeah.

Yeah, I like that they had her simultaneously. She's both right in that if she had been listened to, she could have stopped the rebel victory. But also she fundamentally like destroys the Death Star as a result of her insistence on being right. Yeah.

Fits into that old Marxist category of objectively revolutionary. Just by like how she fucked this up specifically. And yeah, as well as stuff we'll get to. I think we've talked about how the Death Star plans got stolen from her fucking hard drive. Or like the learning of the Death Star existence through the hard drive. Oh yeah, sorry, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, they don't have the plans yet. Yeah.

So Luthen's transferred to the hospital, and then we get a flashback with Luthen as an early Imperial Army sergeant involved in a massacre on Clea's home planet. We see him huddled over in his ship with a flask,

repeating the words, make it stop. Make it stop. As sounds of carnage and destruction go on in the background. What's interesting to me is, yeah, you're basically just hearing what's happening outside. He's in an Imperial Army uniform, and you're hearing radio chatter. And it's radio chatter that could have come from any war of the last 20 years. It's very much modern warfare.

radio call. It's it sounds like a lot of the shit you heard and like the collateral murder video, like the some of the stuff that got leaked by Chelsea Manning, where people are like, yeah, hit everything on that hill dies. You know, anything past this this point in this like line of buildings, anyone you see on the heat scope, kill them like it's that kind of stuff. Right. Yeah. And it's it's it's very much like

It's very non-Star Wars chatter. Totally. He's horrified at what he's doing. He's trying to find ways to cope with it. He's drinking out of a flask and yeah, just like...

repeatedly repeating to himself make it stop just this like very short scene like recontextualizes a whole bunch of things about Luthan's character yes including his behavior on Pharax during during the riot where he like doesn't get involved and instead looks on from a distance with like a very

like a very blank expression and like when i first saw that episode to me it felt like lucan was like first confronted with like the fatality that he's dealing with like like confronted with like the consequences for actually engaging in revolution because he's always been kind of in the shadows he's been more of this like orchestrator he doesn't see like that like the tactile death that accompanies his actions so

It's like, that's how I first saw that scene. And now this has been fully recontextualized as like, Eric's is like a PTSD moment for him. Like, yeah, it's this is that's that's not the first time he's seen combat. Yes, this is this is it changes the way you can now look back at that scene, which is very, very cool. Yeah. And it's also interesting to think that he's putting himself in the perspective as much as anything of the Imperials doing the massacre. Yes. Yeah. As opposed to the civilian victims of the massacre.

I read an interview with Tony where apparently because they did not have Luthan's backstory set up in season one. Like they didn't fully know where he was going to go. They didn't have a single one nailed down yet. And it was apparently Skarsgård who was like, don't have him be another person who's pissed, like who just hates the Empire because it took everything from him. Like a normal revenge story where like the Empire kills his family so that he becomes an insurgent. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. And I really I think it's beautiful that like, yeah, his backstory is that, no, he was made complicit, like, however, whatever got him into the army in the first place, maybe just conscription. You know, he may not have even had a choice to join, but the empire forces him to do like puts him in a position. And he's it's as much discussed with himself that he goes along with it as far as he does. Yeah.

And you get in those lines that he's just repeating to himself over and over again as he like make it like that's his whole motivation. Right. Like that's the next 20 years of his life are him trying to make it stop. Yeah, that's the title of the episode. Yeah. Well, we'll talk more about that and his motivation at the end when we discuss kind of Clea. Speaking of which, in this flashback, it is shot from the perspective of Clea hiding in like a cubby on on this ship. Yeah. Yeah.

and Luthan named, I think, Lair, Lar, which is... Lair. Sergeant Lair is his original name. Well, we don't know what his first was, but he just reverses it. Yeah. Yeah, I was like, come on.

No, but like, this is also like poetic, right? This is... Oh, it is. It is. This is Star Wars poetry, right? It's like poetry. It rhymes. Obstacle-wise, don't do that. I just got to put this in there. Don't do that. Do better. But...

Sergeant Lair finds Clea as a six-year-old hiding on this ship. We then go back to the present as Clea infiltrates a space hospital to get to Luthan, intercut with flashbacks showing how Luthan used his military experience to train Clea in insurgent warfare. So here we see Luthan being kept alive in this Coruscant hospital for later interrogation.

And then suddenly Dedra is arrested in the hospital by an ISB marshal for at first unclear reasons, which we will get into later. The ISB has found Lonnie's body. So there's a dead ISB agent in Coruscant. They've heard of how Dedra did this raid without authorization, without notifying the agent now in charge of the Axis investigation. And then she's taken into custody.

In these flashbacks, we see Luthen and Clea going town to town, pawning historical artifacts while he teaches young Clea insurgent warfare. One of the most devastating exchanges is when Luthen describes Clea as his daughter to a shopkeeper to help negotiate a price. And afterwards, Clea asks, am I your daughter now? And he replies, well...

when it's useful. Yeah. She's... And then he says, I'm Luthen, you're Clea. I'm Luthen, you're Clea. That's all we need to know right now. That's who we are now. Yeah. Clea says, like, I'll have to think about that. And Luthen says, sometimes it's not up to us. Yeah. Yeah.

Another exchange happens after Cleo watches this like imperial firing line kill a batch of kids who are allegedly suspected of shooting a stormtrooper. I think it probably could have actually been Luthan. It's unclear and it essentially just demonstrates like collective punishment, right? And Cleo gets very

upset at watching this massacre and runs off to Luthan and also like interestingly like when Luthan knows this is going to happen he like chooses to like not watch he's like we don't need to be here we can we can just leave but Clea chooses to stay and watch and then runs back to him

And he tells her, we fight to win. That means we lose and lose and lose and lose until we're ready. All you know now is how much you hate. You bank that. You hide that. You keep it alive until you know what to do with it. Yeah. And I love both that he's...

he's attempting to give her as much like agency as he can within this situation where he's also like crafting her into a person. And so like, if she decides she wants to go see this massacre, he'll let her do it. Like he's not going to, he's not going to try to make her, but if that's what she wants, he's not going to stop her. And then when she's seen what she needs to see, he's going to give her the best advice that he can give her. And,

There's another line coming where he's she asks if he's scared and he's like only about what I'm doing to you. Right. That like you like he is still deeply he feels deeply compromised by this position he's put himself in with this only other person that he really can trust.

Yeah, they do their first large-scale direct action together on the Emperor's home planet of Naboo. He teaches her how to blend into the surroundings as they remote detonate an explosive planted on a bridge. While in the present, Clea disguises herself as a nurse to disappear into the hospital where Luthan's being held and blows up the hospital parking lot as a distraction to get to Luthan. These two things mirror each other. It's like poetry. It rhymes. Clea says to Luthan,

You're afraid, he says. I'm only afraid of what I'm doing to you as he hands this child a detonator. Yeah. And she's not willing to, she can't, like, make herself use it yet. I mean, I feel like she was almost willing to. She was psyching herself up to it. Luthor actually took it away and, like, had himself do it. Yeah. Yeah.

But that scene by itself where he's telling her not to look at it, to make sure you're looking at me, only turn after everyone else has turned, very fun stuff happening in Star Wars. Yeah, it's great. The decision he makes here is... You see a lot about their relationship. And again, how deeply compromised he feels by it. Of both like...

I have to get this person ready for what's necessary. And also I have to protect her from like the worst things that we're going to have to do together. Like he does want to remain primarily the one complicit. So I think in part because he does believe I mean, fundamentally, that's the core of his character. He does believe she has a future outside of this.

And that's the entire point of what he's doing. Yeah. You know what else is necessary, Robert? For us to throw to ads because otherwise we can't keep this movable feast on the road. Okay. We are back.

Back in the present day on Coruscant, Clea finally reaches Luthen in his hospital room. And I guess, like, leading up to this moment, it's unclear if she's going to try to, like, rescue him, like, extract him. And no, there's no time for that. She takes him off life support and lets him die. There is no escape for his character. Yeah. Like, Luthen never gets to see that sunrise, but...

He did everything he could to give the rebellion the best chance. And Clea gets to finish and live out what he started. He wants to give Clea that sunrise. This relates to his core motivation as a character. He's not getting revenge against the Empire for killing his family or something. That kind of cliched story is not what they're doing here. Instead, this is all...

all about kleia yeah it's about how he's like found kleia and both of them are broken by what he has done so then he spends the rest of his life building the rebellion for kleia so that she can live on and and she can she can beat the empire and that's the entire like point of him like that that is what's driving him he is like the most selfless character to

Tony, in an interview, said, quote, there are only a certain number of reasons that you can change your life, and one of them is just absolute self-disgust. So we found a way for him to have a belly full of it at the right moment. Yeah, and I love that that's his whole motivation, ultimately, is undoing the only part of what he was involved in that he can undo, which is saving this person. And saving this person involves destroying the thing that

Took her life away from her. Yeah, the entire apparatus of the Empire. Yeah, yeah. I think we're kind of wrapped up with this episode here, but the Cleo Hospital infiltration sequence is...

superb. So good. Like one person doing all of this stuff to the absolute befuddlement of like the Imperial troopers. She's really embodying the line from Rogue One make ten men feel like a hundred. Yeah. And yeah she's able to infiltrate this hospital like she's working with a team of like ten people and it's just her. Shout out to the granny alien in the elevator. Very fun. Great little comedy moment. Incredible.

But Leslie, do you have anything else to say about episode 10? I mean, yeah, I like this. This is obviously like my favorite episode of this particular batch. It's maybe the best in the whole series. Like this is absolutely. Yeah. I love the Lutheran Clea moments. I love seeing like how at the same time, this like hint when you're seeing them kind of haggle over the price of this antiquity that they've got.

That like, OK, so Cleo always had this this degree of like cunning and this ability to kind of like recognize what's going on with probably how she survived in the first place. Right. She's she was always someone who saw more than other people, which she's the girl. She's the girl. She's this.

Yeah. Yep. Yep. And at the same time, you get this piece of Luthan like there must have been like whatever he was before he joined the military. It was somebody who had this kind of deep knowledge of antiquities and probably this desire to make something of his life other than what became of it. And all that he's got left of it is like utilizing that real piece of himself to make a fake Luthan.

Right. Like that's just such an interesting character beat for him that like this, this thing that is probably closest to the real Luthan, the one that existed before his military service, before the empire ruined him, is completely remade in the service of making himself into something he's not.

So when I first saw this, I was really worried because I think one of those interesting parts about Clay as a character is that she is the only person that Luthen trusts absolutely, right? She's the only person that he sees fully as an equal. She's the only one who has all the information that he has. And...

you know, I was kind of worried that it was, okay, well, now she's effectively his daughter. And it's like, no, it's actually like, she is still the only person. Yeah. Like, even though Luthan has been sort of raising her, like, he's been trying to raise her as an equal as much as he possibly can. Yeah. I think that's a really, really, sort of, fascinating, like,

wait for this thing to have gone like the the actress of clay has said like like from clay's perspective like she doesn't really fully see luthan like as her father figure because like inherently like he was like involved in the actual killing of like of her family like she she is she has found a way to kind of love him through that

But it's not like that immediate familial love. It's a different rationalization that she can still give him a final kiss on his deathbed and does care for him. But it's so much more complicated and murky and roped in with politics and roped in with

Yeah, but here's the thing what I'll say about that, and this is kind of my favorite part of that, is I can see how she would be like, this feeling I have towards him isn't like what someone would feel towards a father. But also, she doesn't really know how people feel about their parents because she didn't get to have

them very long people can feel like that can't feel that way about their father feeling both this deep sense of love and disgust towards your parents is an incredibly normal experience and she just doesn't i think maybe there's a degree which she doesn't even really realize how how common that is because of what was taken from her no that's a good point that's a good point yeah all right episode 11 who else knows

Krennic and Dedra queen out together. Hell yeah. Look at them go. So Dedra's in this interrogation chamber and Krennic grills her about how this piece of information has escaped containment. And Dedra's face throughout this whole scene...

Oh my God. She comes into it. You can tell she thinks I'm going to get out of this. I'm going to talk my way out of this. Yeah. Surely I will sort this all out. Oh,

Yeah, no. Once she realizes that this is actually about the leakage of the Death Star plans and not just a simple raid on a rebel weapons dealer, she realizes the kind of gravity of her situation. She complains about how she's been forced to scavenge for information because there's not an efficient intel sharing operation across different Imperial branches. And...

Krennic says to her, if you're not a rebel spy, you missed your calling. Which is the biggest insult you can say to her. Oh my god. Right? This destroys her. Yeah. And like, this is the same mistake that like, Cyril makes, right? They're trying to like, to like,

Do this like try hard stuff. You think initiative is rewarded here. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. You know, you follow orders. You do not take your own initiative. You are not your own person. You follow what you're told to do. You don't take things into your own hands. This is what I'm saying.

This is how the whole system crumbles. Yeah. It's phenomenal how, like, she is so much, like, you know, especially in Cyril's eyes, right? She is, like, everything that he wanted to be but, like, couldn't. And yet she has all the same flaws as him. They're both children trying to, like,

and seize their spot in the Imperial world. And they can never escape the logic of children. It's phenomenal. So yeah, basically, because she was sent memos accidentally, she was accidentally added to Huthi PC small group. She had information on the desktop that she shouldn't have, that she stored on her computer, that then Lonnie was able to access with a stolen code cylinder.

And this is why she's detained. And I love too that Lonnie makes a statement that like he didn't tell Luthan he had this. Cause he's like, well, you would have made me use it. Super cool. And there's this, yeah. Like Lonnie has gotten very good at this. Like he was right to not tell his boss. Sometimes you share and sometimes you don't. And yeah.

The idea of him holding onto this code cylinder this whole year, knowing that you can only use this once before you're kind of found out, and then waiting until he's heard chatter that Luthen's going to get raided, uses the cylinder, then discovers all these other files, it shows how important Luthen's operation is. This is, I think, what these last two episodes are really about, is kind of like the redemption of Luthen in the eyes of

of the other rebel agents. So, yes, Dedra is completely fucked and it's hilarious and Ben Mendelsohn is prancing around the scene. He's having such a good time.

It's so good. This is like, it's like this and the thing where he's going, pal, kite. Yeah. He's so good. It's like his two best, like, this also just really like, god, they didn't let him cook in Andor. Like, it's him and like Mothma. It took time to know how to cook, you know? Oh, yeah, but it's like, it's like, like these, it's like, the thing about this series is you've been getting to watch, oh, sorry, yeah, in Rogue One, yeah, it's like you've been getting to watch these people who have just been playing like

Kind of generic Star Wars characters, and you get to watch them cook. And it is a thing of beauty. The real freak gets to be let out. It's amazing. They're all freaks.

There's that glorious moment when she realizes how fucked she is. When he puts his finger on her head. Like she's just an odd. She's there for him to act off of. She's a button, right? She's a button. We can push you when we desire to, but you don't go off by yourself. It's phenomenal. And he's turning her off. Yeah. Yeah.

And he has this line where he's like, you think I would come here for the death of an ISB clerk? Say the word. Yeah.

Yeah, say the word. Death star. Yeah. Amazing. And then, yeah, he turns her off and is like, yeah, we'll get by without you somehow. Yeah, hopefully we'll be able to get by without you. Yeah, and it's both funny because, like, he is just, he is nuking her. There's nothing left after this. And also, they can't. They actually can't. They actually, they actually fucked.

He's dead in like two days. Tarkin's about to obliterate his ass with a button. Tarkin's about to be space dust. Because he's also a button. Along with Yolaren and everyone else. Yes, everyone's a button. And it's crazy how much of the ISB gets totally wiped out the week of the Death Star's destruction. And this shows the real decline of the Empire is this like,

This administrative bureaucratic state that's been running the real day-to-day operations gets completely wiped out. And now these two Sith lunatics have to personally run everything themselves, and they can't do it. They just can't. They were relying on all of the Republic holdovers that actually knew how to run a state. Yeah, these guys like Yalarin and whatnot, who were like...

Part of gas. He was good at his job. Yeah. Oh, part of gas. And they all get iced out. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is a dynamic that I think... Because everyone... You were trained from birth in the US to know the revolution devours its children thing. And no one ever talks about this side of the fascist. It's like, no! The liquidation rate for these people is astonishing. They also all turn to these people. And it's like, you can watch...

Like, Vader doing this to people. We're like, Vader... Like, yeah, Vader just keeps fucking killing his officers. Yeah. On his Super Star Destroyer. All the time. Well, and what we see throughout Andor is rebels fuck up all the time. They fail all the time. We see moments of failure from Luthen. We see them from Cassian. We see them from Draven and the guys at Endor. Bail. Mon Mothma. They all fuck up. And then they get...

the chance to learn from their mistakes and get better, which is ultimately why they win. And that privilege is never extended to the Empire. No, even if you're really good, you're going to make some mistakes. And the first time you do, Darth Vader chokes you to death. And so the Empire never gets better.

It's interesting because this was a point in the old canon where like one of the arguments of like why the rebels won the war was like X-Wings have shields. Yeah. And TIE fighters don't. Yeah. So you can make a mistake in an X-Wing

But if you make a TIE fighter, you're just dead. So the Rebel pilots end up being better than the Imperial ones because they survive. And there's this other, like, there are lots of these interesting parallels, too, where, like, the death of the administrative state was also sort of an old canon thing where it's like, so the way it plays out in the old canon, it's like at Endor. And this, like, is the thing in the new canon, too, I guess. But, like, all of the best officers are trying to get promoted up the ladder. And so they're all on the Emperor Super Star Destroyer. Yeah. Yeah.

And when that thing goes down, it's like, yeah, it like, and this is, this is partially just a thing of also about like how imperial administration works is how centralized it is, is that they have single points of failure. And this is, for example, how Rhodesia fell. It's like, yeah, they put all their fuel reserves in one spot. It got blown up. And it's like, we don't have a state anymore because everything's so centralized and it being so centralized and everyone being so essential. And also you killing all these people because your organization doesn't tolerate failure. It just, it creates these, this cascading failure points where you knock out a couple of people on it. And suddenly it's like, everything's,

I do want to return to the point of how fascism eats its own at the end, because Tony has some quotes on that. I'm just going to speed run through these next few kind of points here. The ISB tracks Clea's movements via hospital security cameras, even though she tries to avoid them.

and evade detection. She is basically stuck on Coruscant and starts hiding out in the old safe house, broadcasting an emergency pulse code to her comrades on Yavin. Meanwhile, a divorced Cassian and Melchi get drunk and start bullying their autistic robot friend while playing poker.

It's so good. It's so funny. Yeah. There's such cases. Hey, I know. Oh, I know. I'm well aware. I am the sober autistic girl in every one of these things. Well, and they understand the most important thing about television sci-fi, which is a robot awkwardly playing poker with his human face. I know. It's a core. All the greats.

Data, K2SO, holding hands meme. And I love that K2SO is also constantly being like, you guys are drinking a lot. Yeah, I love that when they're about to go on this last mission, Cassian is canonically drunk driving through space. He is one half shot away from blacking out. It's time to pilot a spacecraft. Most realistic insertion. Yeah.

No one will be this drunk again until many, many years later in this galaxy until Civil War generals are fighting each other and we'll be this drunk. Yeah, Ulysses Simpson Grant is the last person to be as drunk as Cassian Andor was in this scene.

Wilman's old, like, Luthen radio goes off with an SOS message. She takes it to Cassian, who then, yeah, drunk drives their Yuling off Yavin. Let's have a shout-out to our man Draven here, who is... He's kind of...

He's kind of based. I like Draven. I love that they managed to both make him be, he has to be the foil to Cassian because Cassian does not want this chain of command bullshit. He's so sympathetic. But he's not wrong and he's not a dick. He's like, look, man, I've got like 400 other freighters I'm worried about right now. There's like shipments of rifles that I have to keep. I have to keep all of this in my head. I can't write any of it down. I haven't slept.

in days. I eat nothing but Tums. Like, I can't even drink hot coffee because otherwise my fucking ulcers light on fire. I don't even remember when I ate solid food. My IBS has IBS. Can you please stop taking off in the middle of the night?

It's so funny that the thing that Cassian does at the end of Rogue One is just like a regular curving on the face. He just keeps doing this. But no, like consistently, Draven, even if he gets pissed off at Cassian, consistently has his back still, which is, I think, really, really sweet. Yeah.

Yes. Yeah. Krennic realizes how fucked they are and tries to get the entire ISB to mobilize to locate Clea as she is probably in possession of the Death Star intel. Quote, there will be no horizon to the scope of your inquiry.

And this is where we have some of the most interesting stuff from Partagas and how he views like rebellions and revolutions as a disease. Yeah. And this relates to some of his lines from season one, where he describes the ISB as quote unquote, healthcare providers. We treat sickness. We identify symptoms. We locate germs, whether they arise from within or have come from the outside. The longer we wait to identify a disorder, the harder it is to treat the disease. Unquote. Yeah.

And then when the ISP decides on what grounds they are looking to apprehend Clea, Pardagraz proclaims that, quote, she's diseased. She escaped the hospital with an infectious condition that threatens everyone with whom she may come into contact, unquote.

I'm so glad they did this because this is such a core part of the ideology of fascism, right? Yeah. Of seeing that the body is a nation and there being these sort of like parasitic infections that are inside the nation that are like undermining it. That's like just the core of fascism. And you're just getting to watch like the people in the middle of the empire just literally trying to do the thing in the most literal way possible.

Right. Like they're just they're just coming out and saying what the ideology is and how it works. And I may be it may still be a level of metaphor that is slightly too high for the average Star Wars viewer, but they are just telling you the politics. Yeah. And I really appreciate that. Yeah.

Now, while stuck in an ISP holding cell with an unbuttoned collar, Dedra is crashing out. And you can tell because the collar is unbuttoned. But somehow she's still able to give the ISP a lead to track Clea through her use of obscure radio signals. One of the cool parts here is an Imperial radio technician is impressed at Lucin's radio setup. And can't help but be excited when learning how it works.

But they say that Luthan targeted the storage files and the radio signal library when he burned the console. But still, they were able to track Clea's pulse code to a nearby apartment on Coruscant. And in preparation for the raid on the safe house, the ISP jams comms around the area right as Cassian, Melchi, and K2 arrive to extract Clea.

As Cassian gets into the apartment and finds not Luthen, but Clea, and then tries to plead with her to come to Yavin, he also kind of lambasts Luthen for not coming to Yavin sooner, because he couldn't swallow his pride. And Clea says, quote, Thank the galaxy he didn't. He stayed for this. The people in Yavin have to know what they're up against.

Thank the galaxy he did it. It's so good. All right, let's go on break and then we'll return to discuss the final episode. Okay, we are back. Episode 12, Jedha Kyber Erso.

So Cass is trying to convince Clea to leave like right now, right this very second. Please, dear God, come with me. And Clea is still like kind of pissed about the whole situation. Like Gavin, after all these years, what a bitter ending. Cass tries to argue that if she comes, she's helping to keep Luthan alive, which she calls big words.

The Imperial SWAT team, importantly, not stormtroopers. Instead, these goofy ass SWAT guys surround the apartment trying to locate Clea.

As the ISB locates Cass, Clea, and Melchi, they throw a stun grenade, which, this is very interesting to me, does not really affect Cass and Melchi as much. Like, Clea gets knocked out, but the Narkeen V prison shocks conditioned Melchi and Cass against the stun grenade, which is, again, phenomenal. It's so good.

And I think just generally like Clea has again, Luthan has protected her from a lot of like the direct. She doesn't have CTE. Right. If Cassian had lived another 30 years, like his fucking brain would have been melting because he's been around too many goddamn explosions and he's been electrocuted. And the same thing's true of Melchi. Right. They just barely feel it.

To be fair, it's not like she hasn't blown up a bunch of things. No, she has. From a distance. From a distance. We just watch her liquidate an entire Imperial security complement to go kill Luthan. It's not like she hasn't done this before. No, no, no. But she's raised by an old soldier who does the responsible thing that you do if you have the experience, which is you tell the younger people, no, no, no. Use your ear pro. No. Get further back. I know you don't think you need to be, but get further back. Okay.

Like, my ears ring all the time. Don't fucking take risks. I also kind of wonder if maybe there's a level of protection from the stun grenades you get, again, when you are still right on the edge of a blackout. Yeah, that's compelling. Okay.

So, as K2 just completely demolishes this Imperial Riot team, the ISB calls for backup, but everyone is spread too thin because they're out searching for the emergency disease warrant from Pardigras. Yeah. So good. So, Klay does get to Yavin, and here we see a lot more of, like, the tricky aspects of Yavin politics. Mm-hmm.

Saw is kind of getting impossible to deal with. He is huffing way too much fuel. He's huffing an amount of fuel. I don't know if I'm going to say it's too much, but I do love his insistence. Dude, we know you're on Jedha. We know you're on Jedha. You don't know where I am. You don't know where I am.

You know, yeah, like, Moth's trying to, like, argue with him about how they're trying to, like, get to the bottom of, like, the Imperial Kyber mining on Jedha, and they're like, we know you're on Jedha, and he tries to deny it. You don't know where I am. Yes, we do. There's also this great thing at the end of that where Moth was like, we're just trying to help you, and Saw just cuts the line, and I think it's Draven, or whatever the rebel intelligence ghoul in the room is,

cuts the line and Moth was kind of just going like, uh, and he goes, oh no, we've absolutely been sending spies into his group. And she's been, Moth's just kind of just like, we've been bugging him. He's absolutely right. And this is something I think is interesting about, because like, in Rogue One, Saw is like, seems like such an unbelievably paranoid asshole. It's like, no, like the rebel's

rebels really have been like trying to, the rebels and the empire really have been trying to infiltrate his group for like so fucking long that he's completely lost his mind from just like the paranoia. Also, he is canonically again, a 46. Yeah.

Hopefully all that fuel really does rapid age you. Yeah, it's not great for you. So then we have, I guess, the most frustrating part of the episode. Good, but frustrating to watch with this rebel spokes council meeting about Luthan and the Death Star intel. Oh my god, are these people annoying. Oh my god.

Ugh. Yeah. What pieces of shit. These people who have done basically nothing. There are senators who have defected to Yavin, and they don't know the cost of things that they're actually dealing in. Bale says that Luthan stayed on Coruscant too long. And again, no. No. Luthan stayed for this piece of information.

And Mon's getting kind of increasingly frustrated as everyone's kind of like bad talking Luthen. Again, we've been very clear on this show about

Luthen as a complicated character with some people more pro-Luthen than others. And Mon, like Mon herself, has a lot of reservations about Luthen. But she also knows it's like her directly and everyone else are only here in part because of what he's done. That's not saying he was right about every single thing, but that still is true, right? He's still very important to this. And everyone's being quite dismissive of Cassian and the intel from Luthen and

Cassian kind of gets put into confinement and gets dismissed and requests to visit Clea in the hospital. And this is where Mon finally speaks up and immediately grants him permission. Because she knows all these people. And she's the only one on this little council that knows all of these people and knows how much they have sacrificed. But still, Mon is still a good operator here. And she asks her cousin Vel to...

with Cassian and like suss out how real this Death Star intel is. When Vel does this, she doesn't try to do it like covertly. She like talks to Cassian very like flatly being like, hey, like Mon sent me here to try to figure out if

If this is legit, is, is this legit? And they discuss the Intel. Meanwhile, Cleo gets up from like her, like medical, medical Bay and starts walking around Yavin in the rain. And like, Oh my God, somebody please hug her. Like someone like do something like she should not be left alone. Like she's had one of the, one of the most traumatic days of, of her life.

someone like take care of her and, and Vel runs into Clea and like Vel and Clea have had like kind of a, kind of like a dicey relationship. But like in this moment, we see like just the importance of like sheer solidarity and Vel like cares for her, gets her to like cover, gives her like a place to sleep. And it's a really touching scene. And I want to talk about this moment a little bit because I think it's an interesting character thing with Clea here where Clea throughout this entire show is the only character who hasn't put together the entire time. Yeah. Like,

like, even Pardagast at, like, the very end starts to sort of crack, right? Clea is the one character who, like, when everyone is falling apart around her, when Andor's falling apart, when, like, even when Luthan is falling apart, Clea is always on it. Fuck you.

Fuck you. Pull yourself together. You have to hold this together. Yeah. And it's like her, and you have to just go like her task. This is when she's finally is able to break. Yeah. She's been holding in so much. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like one, her task is finally over. And so she can like let herself fall apart. And two, it's like,

a thing that could finally actually drive her to fall apart is the fact that she just had to fucking kill the person who raised her. Yeah. She had to fucking kill Lutheran and then get out. And you can see this thing where that I think is like very familiar to a lot of people were like, she's been, and she also has to hold all this information in her head because if she forgets any of the information that she's been told by Lutheran, the rebellion is doomed. And, and, and when Andor like first meets her on Coruscant, she's like, it's spilling out, it's just jumble of words. Yeah. And it's like, it,

And it's this thing where she's finally reached the point where it's like she has one last thing to do and she can fall apart. And then she can finally, instead of having to be the one who's caring for literally everyone and holding literally everyone else together, she can finally rest. And she doesn't know how to do that. Because she's always had to be the one who's holding everything together this entire time.

I do love the moment when Luthien first gives her the information and he forces her to repeat it back to him. Make sure you can express it to me. And then she does the same thing to Cassian and Cassian doesn't. Cassian doesn't repeat it back to her. But yeah, that small... You have to have a ritual. You have to have a protocol to make sure you actually... To make sure that I know you actually have this information. You need to express it back to me. It's just a nice little short moment.

In the next morning, we see Cassian taking care of Vix's plants. Good for him. Yeah. And then this is when Cass and Vel talk. And they say that they're going to drink to Luthan justice once. Which, again, Cassian's drinking right in the morning. Good stuff. Yeah. As soon as he wakes up. Yeah.

Like he does every day. Yes. But they say, you know, like, we can't toast them all. Like, Lieutenant Gorn, Nemec, Cinta, Ferex, Marva, Gorman, the Aldanis. And one short little tidbit here. Vel talks about how there's people falsely claiming that they were part of the Aldani crew, which is the most accurate thing I have ever seen. Oh, yeah.

Where they're like, everybody keeps taking credit for this. And she's like, man, if someone did that in front of me, I'd just shoot their ass. I'd fucking kill them. They're the only two people from the Aldani raid still alive. And like, yeah, the idea that we're getting rebels stolen valors, but very realistic. You know, I actually punched Richard Spencer as a 14-year-old. Yeah. We all did. It's very cool. Yeah. Yeah.

We then start hearing Nemec's manifesto playing. And it's unclear if there's playing it for the show. To remind us of it, yeah. But then we realize that it's part of us listening in the Imperial Security Bureau's briefing room.

And it's a really wonderful thing to return to. And one of Paragraz's underlings walks up to him and says, it just keeps spreading, doesn't it? And he says, it's been hard to contain. Again, using this disease rhetoric. He then asks for a moment to collect himself and then shoots himself in the head.

This is one of the most fascinating parts of the show, like knowing the kind of the tear that he's going to face for failing while also being confronted with like

how much of his work for the Empire has been worth it. Like, it's not... His emotions here are not clearly laid out to you because it's more interesting for you to think about them yourself. Yeah. And I've seen everything from like, oh, he realizes he was wrong to he realizes, like, the Empire is the disease or just he realizes the disease got out of control. Yeah. Like...

more than they had realized. And the punishment he could be facing from the Empire is not worth it. He's a career man, and why would he be sent to Narcina 5? He is not going to El Salvador.

Finally, Cassian is sent to meet a source on K'fring. That's one of the guys infiltrating Saw's operation to learn the location of Galen Erso, the designer of the Death Star. And then we have this final montage across all of our characters. We have Mon and Vel having breakfast with the Grunts. You have divorced Perrin flying around on Coruscant. You have Dedra in a Narkeena prison.

And Clea gets to see the life of the Rebellion. Saw's at Jedha. Krennic is at the Death Star. B2Emo has a new friend. And Bix is holding a baby, watching the sunrise. Uh-huh. So...

I want to talk mostly about Bix here. But first, I think Mon eating with the rebel troops is like very cool to have her just like with the regular people. She's not like with like bail and like not like not like often like a special like counselor's room. She's like just with everyone. We'll also talk a little bit about Clea here as well.

But I think I want to just do Bix to start if that's okay. Sure, sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Tony has talked a lot about this ending scene and about how he wanted to end with a sense of hope. And the hope for life beyond the Empire. Life beyond...

imperial oppression and Bix with the baby is supposed to symbolize this. And Bix is literally looking at the sunrise. And this metaphor of the sunrise has been something for Luthan, how he's never going to actually get to see life beyond the Empire. And he knows that. He sacrificed that. It also calls into view Cassian dying at the false sunrise of the Death Star. And I've seen, I guess, some people upset about Bix's

just being off-planet with a baby and feeling this is kind of like relegating her character. And I think there's a lot of things going on here. This show goes so, so, like way, way beyond simple politics of representation and woke casting, right? Which can often end up feeling like shallow boxes to check. Because this show actually depicts things like carceral injustice, manufactured consent for genocide, how structural patriarchy drives imperial oppression, right?

Like the depth of the political mechanisms the show is tackling, I think is so much more worthwhile. And it's not immune to criticism for those reasons, but I think that aspect can be overlooked oddly. I think we kind of like take for granted like how good the show is at so many aspects of politics. And like this show specifically has women in so many different roles beyond like the, you know, pop feminist, girl boss badass, which has been linked to Star Wars through Leia, Ahsoka, and to a lesser extent, like Rey and Jyn.

And this trope is itself kind of low key misogynistic. But in Andor, we have, we have Mon Mothma, we have Vel, we have Cinta, we have Cleo, we have Dedra, we have Marva, we have Bix. And I think motherhood is something that characters should be allowed to embrace. And like motherhood's always had a very tricky relationship with Star Wars because of Padme. But like being, being a mom is not the issue with Bix's character. You can still critique how she was relegated to becoming like the punching bag for the show. Um,

But being a mother is, like, not bad. There's a quote from the Palestinian militant Laila Khalid, like, revolution must mean life also, every aspect of life. And she specifically referenced motherhood. And, like, Bix is a fighter. She's a survivor. She fights her way out of depression and PTSD, and she does spend years engaged in revolutionary action.

And yes, it may have been nice to see more of that revolutionary action on screen. We do see some. It might have been nice, but this is also a limited series show with a ton of characters, like 400 speaking roles. And that has not been afforded to everybody. And that can be unfortunate, but I think I understand what's going on with this character overall.

And I do not, I do not think the problem is the baby itself. I think that's actually fine. And her deciding after years of fighting to take like a few years off to have a baby should be viewed as a choice that like she's like allowed to make, I guess. I also think there's, there's something like there's a lot of agency in the choice to like, I'm done, but I'm not going to make that decision for this other person. For Cassian. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

But I don't know. It scanned to me. I do like thinking that in this last scene, as we're watching these last bits of all our characters, not only, as people have pointed out, is Cassian going to be dead in two days, along with Ben Mendelsohn, and shortly thereafter, Grenmoff Tarkin.

But like all the other stuff that's canonically going down, like right, right. As fucking Clea sees that first sunrise, like you have to imagine Han Solo somewhere is doing a line off of like a space prostitute and some sleazy bar. It's like 4 a.m. in the morning where he is. He hasn't slept in days. You know, Luke Skywalker is looking at his aunt and uncle being like, well, they're never going to be lit on fire. Obviously, just beautiful. Yeah.

To kind of reiterate on the point about how like fascism also eats its own, something that Tony has discussed before, specifically in relation to like Cyril and Deirdre and Partagras, right? Tony says like, quote, fascism doesn't just take down the oppressed. It doesn't just come for the people it's trying to control. It inevitably destroys the people who have worked the hardest to build it.

And that's been true all through history as well. In a different interview, he says the empire is just shattering, fragmenting, grabbing, destroying and taking. And then the people that are doing it on the imperial side are all isolated. They think they're part of something, but really they're not. Look at what happens to Dedra. Look what happens to Pardagraz. Look what happens to Cyril Karn. He tries to believe in the dream. It's the carelessness and the cruelty and the lack of empathy. That's what I'm pitching.

Even in this little final montage, we have this brief shot of Perrin, which is interesting. That's Mon Mothma's estranged husband, I guess. Uh-huh.

and Tony has discussed parent as well. And during like the wedding scene, we, we learned that, that like as a kid, like while he was in school, he was kind of a quote unquote political fire brand. Yeah. And he has sacrificed that a little bit. Tony says, quote, there are a lot of sacrifices in this show, all variety of sacrifices. He's made his sacrifice for hedonism. He doesn't look happy in that car. Unquote. No, I,

I do like the little wrap up we have we have on parents character there. Although I also love if you'll notice he's with the wife of the guy they married their daughter off to. It's golden. You have to assume has gotten purged at this point.

because they realized that he had been funneling funds to the rebellion. But I do like we even get that this is the only little private rebellion that he can manage right now as he's fucking this guy's wife. Everyone has their own rebellion. Oh, man. And I guess finally, at least for me, I guess part of me wanted to see more of the development of Yavin as how revolutionary cells come together. And Tony has addressed this as well. Quote,

Yavin makes me nervous, if you want to know the truth. There's things about Yavin that make me nervous, and the logic about Yavin that makes me nervous, even within the Star Wars canon. The security there and how some people know about it, but the ISP doesn't know about it, and there's some places where you don't want to poke too aggressively because you don't really want to get into the undercarriage. That was a place where I didn't really want to get into the undercarriage very much.

That's that is that is understandable. And then finally on Clea and Luthen and specifically like Clea's Clea's last look there, like in the morning after her walk in the rain, after all of this, you know, frustration between like Luthen and Yavin and

And Tony says, quote, Clea and Luthan are over amplifying the distrust and hate in the same way that some of the people on the alliance are over ramping the disagreement. I think one of my favorite moments in that montage at the end is when Clea wakes up the next morning after her night in the rain, and she looks out and sees that there's people running and people carrying supplies. And she's seen how big Yavin is. And there's this Mona Lisa smile that she has that's almost beginning to take pleasure in some sense of ownership of what she's helped create.

She realizes how much of a contributor, how much of an investor she and Luthan are in Yavin. She's watching the people there, and just a little moment of pride comes on her face. That she warms up just a little bit and begins to take ownership of the rebellion. That's everything to me. Unquote. There's something I love about Yavin...

where you get to see sort of the beauty of it and the beauty of what's going to destroy the Empire, where it's like, you keep just seeing, like, people who survived all of this shit and make it to Yavin. Like, Meshi is, like, the other survivor of the Narkeen F5, like, prison break, right? And he's, like, one of the people going out with Endor. The...

What's the other rebellion twink's name? The kid who threw the brick. Willman. Yeah, Willman. Willman's French resistance girlfriend makes it there. And you get this little microcosm of all of these people who are the survivors of all of these imperial horrors have gathered in this place. And it's like, these are the people who are going to destroy the empire. And I think something really beautiful about that is...

And then I also think there's a really interesting thing in, in the oven politics we do see, which is that like, you know, so like I get, I am notoriously the shows like Luthan hater. I'm not really a hater of Luthan. I just, I just don't want the most annoying people in the world to try to replicate him in real life. Um,

But also, like, the Central Rebel Command is a shitshow. It's a complete disaster. They're like top-down hierarchical command from that council. Those people, at every single instance of this, attempt to lose the war, right? They're too pissed off at Luthan to, like, listen to the information that he literally fucking died to give them, right? Like, this entire operation had been about giving them the information to...

Destroy the super weapon that will destroy the Empire. And they don't want to listen to it. And, like, in Rogue One, like, that council tries to surrender. Like, they literally vote to be like, yeah, sorry, we can't fight the Empire. They're too strong. And then, like, the rebel military defects. And it's not defect. Like, they stage an insurrection. They go rogue. They rebel. Rogue One. Yeah. They go rogue. And they're the ones who do this. And I think it's just interesting...

as much as Gilroy doesn't want to like touch Yavin that much, there's this, there's an interesting political dynamic of like, yeah. Okay. So like we finally developed this sort of like centralized political force capable of bringing all these things together and they're useless. They are worse than useless. They, they, they nearly destroyed the rebellion that they had been sort of like trying to bring together on multiple occasions. And they're only stopped by doing that by these sort of like unhinged gorilla, like people who are completely out of control and like these like rogue operator, uh,

people who fundamentally like the the inheritors to Luthan's legacy right like which is Cassian yeah by the actual rebels not the fucking senators and I think that's like a because I've been I've been seeing there's been I've been seeing some small attempts to like recuperate Mon Moth but from this it's like no Moth was the only senator who backs the like go for it like we're carrying out this ready to seal the Death Star planche like she's the only one right and

And I think this is like the actual fundamental break here is between these people is it's like when the chips are down, are you willing to fight? And most of the sort of like liberal sort of like defecting noble leadership isn't. Except for Mothma. And

And she's just like, and Bale at the end too is like, I want to go down fighting. And that's the fundamental difference. I'm going to go down swinging. Yeah. Yeah. And that's the fundamental difference between like someone who politically I don't like, like the Marquis de Lafayette, like that motherfucker went down swinging. Like,

He, that man, at every single point of his life, was always funding an insurrection, was always like, I will take the bars. Yeah, let's throw a punch. Let's throw a punch. Let's throw a punch. Yeah. And it's like, you can compare that to the German liberals, or the liberals who, when Pinochet takes power, were like, yeah, when Pinochet called them all to report

to, like, have meetings with the government. They all went, yeah, we're gonna go report to, like, talk to the secret police, and they all got, like, killed, right? And that's the difference between those two things, and that, I think, is a really, really, is a crucial political distinction to draw out, is, like, it's not even necessarily, like, your class background, it's not even necessarily, like, what your politics are, because a lot of these people believe the same things. It's, like, when the chips come down, will you fight, or will you try to surrender? Yeah. And...

that's something I think, I don't know, like that, that's to me the best part of Andor is like that. And I think that's the part of it that's like being set up in this episode that I love. The very last thing I'll say, because this has gone on way for, for quite a while. I'm so sorry. Is, uh,

I was talking with a friend after we watched these episodes, and we were talking about how this show, really, in the end, is a call for internationalism. Planets are stand-ins for different countries and different cities, right? They aren't doing the full revolution on Coruscant, the center for imperial power, the imperial core. There is some organization happening there, right? There is people based out of there. There's networking, right? Like, Luton's Intel shop is there.

But most of the physical armed struggle is on other planets. The first base for the Alliance is built on Yavin 4, but the Rebellion isn't initially overthrowing the Empire on Coruscant. Though, through their interplanetary efforts, the whole galaxy gets liberated and the seat of power can be seized.

And that sort of galaxy-wide cooperation mirroring a worldwide cooperation that we have really lost in the past few decades, I think is one of the points that should be taken away from Andor here. Yep. All right. Well, I think that's our episode. Yep. Bye, everybody.

Oh.

That is your Capricorn talking. Listen to High Key on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

This is Bowen Yang from Las Culturistas. And I'm Matt Rogers, and we're the hosts of Las Culturistas. It's Pride Month, and you know what that means. Friendship, parties, dancing. Correct. And do you know what the perfect thing to bring to any Pride event is? Bowen, we talked about this. I'm not a thing. Oh, not you. I meant Casamigos. Okay, chic. And honestly, the only other correct answer. Right? There's nothing like having Casamigos at a party with your friends. That makes sense, seeing as Casamigos' whole vibe is friendship. It's literally in the name. I didn't realize that.

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This is It Could Happen Here, Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today I'm joined by Mia Wong, James Stout, and Sophie Lichterman.

This episode, we are covering the week of May 15 to May 21. Joe Biden has prostate cancer. There's antinatalist terrorism. And the DHS is maybe going to do a reality TV show. Probably not, but it's a bad plan. How are we doing this week? That was a trifecta from hell. It's so bad. This one's so bad. It's really... I have to do the laughing right here because... Good lord.

Like, oh, many, many of these weeks are bad. This one's particularly bad. I don't know. DHS reality show. We'll get to that at the ending segment. Sure.

Hey, this is Gare from the Future Cutting In. We recorded this a few hours before some pretty major news, the shooting of two Israeli embassy staff in D.C. We will be talking about this in next week's Executive Disorder, as well as the new budget bill which targets trans healthcare. Now, back to the episode. I think let's start...

with you know a brief acknowledgement of uh joe biden's prostate cancer what was jill doing to him oh my god garrison you could have said that start at the bottom and you didn't i'm allowed to say that because i'm the most gay guy coded person on the podcast which is saying something so so yes and now because we live in a truly sick world

Scott Adams couldn't even let... He couldn't let him have his moment. He couldn't even let Joe Biden have his moment. This anti-Biden hatred has transcended so far that Scott Adams couldn't even let Biden have his moment and announced the same day that Scott Adams has the exact same type of prostate cancer. So...

Two down. Biden down, Dilbert down. Big week for prostate cancer. And boy, howdy, have people been weird about it on the internet. Yeah, I'm not going to get into how long he maybe has known he's had it. He's had skin cancer removed before. I think that ship has mostly sailed.

I think our opinions on Biden are pretty well documented. So I don't think we can dedicate much more time to this. Okay, the one important note that I will say is if you have a prostate, get checked for prostate cancer. Yeah.

Like, get the screening. It's good. It'll help you. Unless you are over 75, in which case I think most people don't get screened for it, right? Because it's slow growing. I'm pretty sure Biden's over 75. Yeah, that's why I thought it was somewhat remarkable part of the issue there. I mean, all I can say is about once a month I think about how at the DNC those Thank You Joe chants lasted four seconds. I have actually been thinking about the Thank You Joe chants for...

a lot of this time this week, frankly. You had to be there. It's one of the most horrifying things as they let this very clearly dying old man out to pasture. Cancer diagnosis aside, very clear he was in some degree of decline. We don't need to retread this. This is pretty well known. But no, I have been thinking about how that whole auditorium broke out and chanting, thank you, Joe, for your

Nearly five minutes. And then the following, the rest of the week, not a single mention. It was done that day. It was wild. Anyways. So yeah, RIP Dilbert, I guess. Let's move on to antinatalist terrorism. So I've learned this week that people don't know what antinatalism is, which as someone who grew up in Portland is kind of surprising to me because there was some very, very prominent...

like anti-natalist protesters who would sit up downtown outside of Powell's books pretty frequently. And we kind of all grew accustomed to them. And honestly, I'm a little bit sympathetic to their arguments. I understand where they're coming from. Anti-natalism is the belief that procreation is unethical. This could be based on the idea that there's been like this rapid increase in human population, which has done extensive damage to the planet, or that simply being born is inherently a non-consensual act, especially being born into a world with high levels of suffering.

So these people opt to not have children as this ethical standpoint. Everyone's entitled to their own choice. You don't need to agree with it, but whatever. Now, interestingly, this past weekend, there was a quote-unquote active terrorism that has been linked to anti-natalist philosophy. I'm just talking about this as it is an instance of kind of

The brain-rodification of this entire society and the redditification of terrorism combined with this growing sense of nihilism driving violent extremist actions. No one was killed except for the perpetrator, alleged perpetrator, in this incident. But I still think this is worth talking about as it can be seen as in a sequence of weird terrorism. This is something that Roberts can be working on for a piece later.

later down the line, right? This is not the first car bomb this year. We had the Tesla, Tesla Cybertruck explosion earlier, which was similarly kind of a weird, a weird incident. Yeah, yeah. That one was, I think, that one I think was the official inauguration of the years of lead paint.

which we're just perpetually living in now. Yes, yes. I mean, the gas leak here, if you will. So yes, on Saturday, May 17th, a car bomb went off outside a fertility clinic in Palm Springs, California, killing the suspect, 25-year-old man named Guy Edwards Barkas. The FBI is calling this a quote-unquote intentional act of terrorism. The clinic was closed when the explosion happened. The building was severely damaged, but no embryos were harmed.

Investigators believe that the suspect attempted to live stream the bombing with a website being found online that appeared to be in connection to the incident where the suspect describes himself as a quote unquote pro-mortalist.

Slightly different from antinatalism. Correct. It is more of an affirmative version of antinatalism. Oh, no. Where you want to actually take concrete steps to decrease the population of the planet. Yeah. Not necessarily in a way that's promoting the mass killing of individuals.

He says, quote, understand your death is already guarantee, and you can thank your parents for that one. All a pro-mortalist is saying is let's make it happen sooner rather than later to prevent your future suffering and more importantly, the suffering your existence will cause to all other sentient beings. That's his definition of a pro-mortalist. It could be linked to other philosophies that encourage like self-harm and ending your own life as a conscious choice.

On his website, he discussed his goal of, quote, sterilizing this planet of the disease of life, unquote, and declared the need for a, quote, unquote, war against pro-lifers.

His website also highlights other philosophies such as negative utilitarianism, effelism, abolitionist veganism, quote, basically philosophies that have realized religion is R-worded, that there is objective value in the universe, and it lies in the harm being experienced by sentient beings. So although it may seem, quote unquote, dark, it's the polar opposite of nonsense like nihilism, unquote. Right.

Negative utilitarianism is something that comes up a few times on his site as well. This is the viewpoint that instead of positive utilitarianism, we try to maximize human pleasure. This is trying to minimize suffering, human suffering and the suffering tied to existence. And the aggregate suffering as well as if there's more people and there's going to be more suffering, so you should both...

make choices in your own life that may limit your suffering, but also make sure that you don't reproduce because then even more suffering will happen because of your actions through your children.

This is the most Bay Area shit I've ever heard in my entire goddamn life. Very West Coast. This is... Yeah. 29 Palms is not the West Coast. Like, a lot of this is in conversation with, like, the rationalist subculture. Sure. Yeah. Post-rationalist. It's like... It offers different solutions. These people shouldn't be allowed to use computers for, like,

50 years, like just a ban on California using computers. This is all like deeply online stuff. These are popular websites, subreddits, like YouTube channels. These are people who are dealing with like, you know, pretty intense existentialism, depression, who then channel it into this like semi-niche like online community and online philosophy. Now, Guy's best friend, a self-described quote, vegan rad femme antinatalist,

recently arranged her own suicide by having her boyfriend to shoot her while she was asleep. What? What? Correct. Yes, this was the bomber's best friend who died very recently, like last month. And Guy claims that they were both, quote-unquote, anti-sex misandrists with borderline personality disorder. And he admits that her death, quote-unquote, put him over the edge.

This is the most, this is the most online, like, like, like best vegan, rad femme, best friend, anti-natalist has her boyfriend. Shoot. Her is the most, even though her, her anti-natalist Tumblr page has like women loving women, anti-gender ideology, misandry stuff, and yet still has a cisgender boyfriend in many such cases. Uh,

So, yeah, you can see how this type of a community gets, like, fostered and people make online friends and then encourage their own self-destruction. Yeah. We have to destroy the internet. A quote that he has on his website is, quote, I've known for years now that I wasn't going to allow myself to make it past my 20s, unquote. And, like, this is a sentiment I hear even a lot of, like, young people saying is this, like, this, like, belief that,

that they're not going to survive their 20s. Like their belief that like the world is so bent on destruction that I'm probably not going to make it out of my 20s right now. And that changes the kind of choices that young people are making. And this is getting increasingly common. Yeah, for sure. I think it's a very different world to be growing up in than like,

the late teenage early 20s of you know like millennial people the millennial world it's very it's very different yeah um and you even had manifestations of this in that millennial era right it got it kind of pushed into this like

like nihilist school shooter culture, which you still see remnants of now in the true crime community. There is some crossover between an act like this and some of like the school shooter fandom, the Columbiner stuff, especially considering the resurgence of Columbiner culture that we're currently seeing right now in the United States. But yeah, the general sense of like widespread dread and the interconnectedness of this is more unique.

I keep thinking about that Hunter S. Thompson quote about those poor bastards who were born after 9-11 don't know the party's over. The party is over. And, yeah, welcome to hell. So, the suspect's dad said to reporters that Guy had a childhood obsession with pyrotechnics. He set the family home on fire and burned it down when he was nine. He made rockets, stink bombs, smoke bombs as a child. Videos on YouTube, likely posted by Guy, show M-80s exploding in the desert, fireworks,

a hydrogen balloon being set ablaze, and a bucket of radioactive uranium ore. Is that, did he obtain that like out there in Wonder Valley? This is still being investigated. His voice in these videos matches the 30-minute audio manifesto explaining his motivation for the attack.

saying, quote, basically, it just comes down to I'm angry that I exist and that, you know, nobody got my consent to bring me here. Basically, I'm anti-life and IVF is kind of like the epitome of pro-life ideology, unquote. This is out there. Is there any information on the... Because a lot of explosives and other munitions have gone missing. 29 Palms, for people who aren't familiar, is a town...

near to palm springs uh nearer to joshua tree there's a pretty big military base yeah yeah it's the big marine code like desert warfare training explosives have gone missing there before uh the base claims that they've been recovered um it is unclear what explosives he used at this point it was a pretty large explosion investigators are low-key impressed

at this explosion. Is that what they said in their official statement? If you read between the lines, they're surprised at how effective this car bomb was. Again, this was a guy who spent a lot of time online, a lot of time on Reddit. It seems like he got obsessed with this. He had a fascination with explosives at a young age. So that obsession combined with this antinatalist obsession

And this urge for self-destruction manifested in this action. This week, Reddit banned an antinatalist, anti-life subreddit allegedly frequented by Bomber. I do just want to say that this is, I think, the only IVS clinic in the Coachella Valley. So like,

for people who are accessing those services, that's a serious disruption, right? Yeah. It sucks. So me and Robert are going to talk more about kind of this trend that we're seeing in extremism or in extremist acts. I still don't like the nihilist violent extremism term, but we are seeing elements of that getting more and more common, especially combined with the true crime community, which essentially tries to encourage young girls to commit school shootings. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I guess to finish up, I do just want to say that I know it's a really hard time right now. A lot of people are...

Trying to find ways to cope or feeling like they can't cope or feeling like they're not enough, I guess. Hopelessness, this sort of like existential nihilism. Yeah. And combine that with a lot of people who work for the government suddenly finding themselves out of work and, you know, the economic pressure that puts on people. And I understand that people are pretty in a tough spot right now who want to say very briefly, obviously, like the world is more beautiful with you in it.

And if you're experiencing suicidal ideation or mental health struggles, a couple of resources I wanted to suggest are the Fireweed Collective and the Jane Addams Collective. Addams spelled with two Ds there. A-double-D-A-M-S. We will have links to both of them in the show notes. You can also put them into DuckDuckGo and they were the first responses that came up for me.

If you need those resources, reach out to those people. Yeah, it's good to see the sunrise and it's better to see the sunrise with everyone you love in it. And yeah, that's that's a thing that you can make sure you do every day. All right. Thank you, James. Thank you, Mia. We're going to go on break and then come back to discuss immigration. All right, we're back.

James, I see the amount of text you have in your document. This is a very long section, James. Wall of text. I assume this is all good news. So let's hear it. All right, Garrison. I'm so glad that you have seen my wall of text because I have been looking at court documents for days. So much fun on Pacer. You have been Pacer posting in the group chat. Oh, yeah. I have been the court listener for...

as well. Okay, so this is one of the more insane things I've seen on Pacer in a minute. I'm talking about the case here of Mr. NM, who was identified at some point, and we'll get to that. NM. Yeah, it's not uncommon for migrants in these kind of high-profile cases to be anonymized where they can, right, just for their safety.

So NM received a final removal order in Nebraska in 2023. And on the 7th of May, DHS attempted to report NM to Libya. You'll remember that we covered that week's ED, right? They did not manage to do that. And in this court case, we've seen from another detainee that one of these detainees was given a document to sign and told that he would, quote, be a free man in Libya.

after signing. Obviously, it's unclear how one can be a free man when one is just dumped into a country where one doesn't speak the language, has no contacts, and there is a war. Doesn't make sense in any way. This man is not from Libya. That is correct. None of these people are Libyan.

And again, whenever someone says the word Libya, you have to figure out which Libyan government you are talking about because there are multiple of them because there is a fucking civil war going on there right now. Yeah, and whenever someone talks about people being free in Libya, we should bear in mind that migrants are literally sold into slavery in Libya. By both governments. Yes.

NM English is limited. His main language is Karen, which of course is a language that people speak in Kartule, the Karen homeland, which is part of Myanmar. On the 19th of this month, so that's two days ago, I sent a notification to his lawyer saying that they'd read him a notice of removal in English that they were removing him to South Africa. Ten minutes later, they attempted to recall this message. And then later that same day, they notified his lawyer that they'd once again read notice of removal to him in

English that he was being removed to South Sudan. South Sudan, the world's youngest country, if we're not familiar, a country in which conflict is escalating as we speak. The government's carrying out a barrel bombing campaign this very week.

His counsel set up a video meeting at 9 a.m. on the 20th, but just before that meeting, his counsel found out that he had already been removed. Mr. M had refused to sign the order of removal to South Sudan. And we're seeing right now in a court case, it's a class action, Mr. NM is one of the members of the class, right, that

There was a preliminary injunction against these people being removed because they are the same people who the Trump administration previously tried to remove to Libya. And at this point, they tried to remove them to South Sudan. Before they are sent to these places, they're supposed to have a reasonable fear screening.

That is where someone can articulate if they have a reasonable fear of being removed to that country. If they will be persecuted there, they're likely to face torture or violence or be picked on because of who they are. Then they're supposed to have a 15-day opportunity to submit a motion to reopen if the Department of Homeland Security finds that they don't have reasonable fear. So there's supposed to be this process where they can say,

I have a reasonable fear of going there. If I go there, I'll be persecuted. And if the HHS says, no, we don't believe you, then they have 15 days to submit more evidence. Right. Are they being allowed to do that or no? No. That is what this case hinges on. Right. So they were informed possibly hours before they were moved to South Sudan that they were being moved to South Sudan.

Then they were taken to a secure facility where they couldn't contact their lawyers. And in at least the case of Mr. NM, he had scheduled an appointment with his lawyer and was deported before he could do so, right? And this has happened a few times before as well. Yeah, that's correct. In the past, like, few months. That's right, yeah. And specifically, there was a...

a preliminary injunction against this, right? So quoting from Judge Murphy, who is the judge in the Massachusetts District Court where this is being held, the government's actions are unquestionably violative of this court's order. The government said they have complied with my order because they didn't hear anyone yelling at their jailers that they are afraid to go to South Sudan. This is clearly insufficient.

Yeah. So what he's articulating here is like this chance to articulate reasonable fear, right? I do want to point out that in Biden's asylum ban that he passed in 2024, they moved from

a question of are you afraid to go back to your home country to what's called a shout test where the migrant has to articulate that reasonable fear unprompted right to have a chance at asylum in the united states so this again like all these immigration things i'm not saying things for the same under biden but i'm saying that there is a pathway to how we got here and it goes through biden's executive order and like miller is very willing to use anything in his toolbox yeah absolutely yeah yeah anything that look

For decades, carceral liberalism has built a series of tools which now lie in the hands of a very illiberal government. And they are being used against people for whom those who supported carceral liberalism may have some sympathy. That is how we got here. That's a good way of putting it. So the situation we are in right now is that these people were flown seemingly in a Gulfstream jet plane.

Gillian Brockel, who's a Formula Washington Post reporter who we're going to have on the show next week, was able to identify this jet based on where it took off and its call sign. It stopped in Shannon in Ireland. Notably, Shannon is an Irish civilian airport, right? It's not a US Air Force base. And this does raise some questions within Ireland, within Irish politics about Irish neutrality here, right?

The jet then flew on to Djibouti, which it is believed is where the migrants are right now. In court, the discussion probably half an hour before we recorded this, DHS is claiming that they can do their credible fear interviews there on the tarmac in this plane, which people are saying is in Djibouti, right? There's suspicion it's in Djibouti. DHS is claiming that the location of the plane is classified.

But there's widespread belief that this plane is currently in Djibouti, including, as I say, Gillian was first. NYT published something that didn't credit her, should have credited her. So...

To do the credible fear interview, they have to have a chance to research what will happen to them in South Sudan. They have to have access to a lawyer. Most of these people, like Mr. NM, will also have to have a translator. Then they will also have to have privacy. Their credible fear may be something they don't want to share with everyone else on that plane. Because that could also put them in danger. Yes. Also, that's a baffling place to suggest somebody have that intimate or private of a conversation with

It's just such a violation of their human rights. Yeah, many human rights being violated here. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the U.S. has a big base in Djibouti, right? So I imagine that's why they're there. Remember that they have that 15-day period. So if DHS finds that they don't have credible fear, then they will...

have 15 days, right, to bring another, to reopen that? Where will they be housed? Somewhere in fucking Djibouti, presumably, if that's where they are, right? There are many, many unanswered questions at this point. Now, last night we learned that one of the

Burmese people. It appears that there are two Burmese people. We know this because the Department of Homeland Security today started tweeting mugshots of these people. Jesus. Yeah. And, uh, yeah. Claiming that they were convicted of various crimes. Among them were two Burmese men and M appears to be Nyomint and the other appears to be Kyomya.

Both of these men have been accused of various... have been convicted, I believe, of sex crimes. That's where they got their removal orders. Other people, among the dozen or so people on the plane, have been convicted of some of them. One of them is South Sudanese, and he was convicted of removing the serial number from a firearm and of armed robbery, others murder, and various other fairly serious crimes, right? None of that means that you should just get dumped in South Sudan, right? That is not a punishment in US law. It is not...

a morally or legally acceptable thing to do. It's just truly baffling, honestly. Like that's what they're doing. That's the move.

Yeah, the move is to send them to South Sudan, where it's worth noting that South Sudan's government have said it will probably send these people back to their home countries. Evidently, the reason they are not being sent there is because they have articulated a fear of going there or they have protection. It's called withholding of removal, right? So they can't be removed to that country. And basically, that is where evidence is.

Did they manage to remove, apparently, somebody to Burma today or late last night? I'm still waiting on my sources in Myanmar to confirm that the Burmese hunter is as leaky as a sieve. If those people are land, we will know about it pretty soon. We have pretty good sources in Burma, so if that happens, we will know.

They also discuss another party, someone who goes by OCG, a gay Guatemalan man who asserted credible fear of being returned while in immigration court. He was deported to Mexico, where he also asserted credible fear. Mexico gave him the choice of remaining in Mexico or going to Guatemala. He went to Guatemala, where he is now in hiding.

The DHS claimed he said he didn't have credible fear and then later reversed that and said they didn't ask. So the judge is now asking how on earth they got this conclusion that he didn't have credible fear and deported him. He's saying he might potentially put DHS officers on the stand to explain how this happened.

In other immigration news, ICE just today, this is Wednesday, has apparently been dismissing court cases against people who turn up for a hearing in immigration court and then immediately arresting them. What the fuck? Jesus fucking Christ. Yeah, like...

It's a little unclear what the move is here, but clearly they're trying to remove them in a more expeditious way, right? They have a court case trying to remove this person. They're saying... Because the court case has, like, you know, a certain amount of time it needs to process. If they dismiss the court case, then they can... They have a right to appeal and... Yeah, but if it's dismissed, then they can expedite other, like...

Non-judicial removal. Yeah. Well, they can do what they're doing here. Yeah. They can try and run people out before they have a chance to get to their lawyer. Right. Like that seems to be the underlying theme of all of these things, which is that your due process and your rights under the law are too time consuming. So we're going to try and make an end run around your rights by sending you to somewhere fucking horrific. That is the underlying theme.

Theme here, unfortunately, this removal will likely now affect a lot more people because the Trump administration has removed the 2023 temporary protected status for Venezuelan people. We talked about TPSs in my Darien series. The TPS provides protection from deportation to people who are already present in the USA when it passes. Generally, it's if a country has experienced war or other instability that makes it dangerous. You have to apply for the TPS.

They don't provide a pathway to permanence or citizenship, but they do give people work authorization and they often have to be frequently renewed by the executive branch.

You have to be in the US the day it's issued, so you can't enter after. Despite what you might have seen on Twitter or whatever, that's not the case, right? It also doesn't count as a legal entry, so you can't use the bridge to a green card. Trump stripped this protection from about 350,000 Venezuelans under the 2023 TPS. This does not impact... There are two different TPSs for Venezuelan people. They're in a bit of a unique situation.

The quarter of a million people covered by the 2021 TPS are still for now covered by that, but it doesn't exactly bode well for them, right? This appears to be the largest blanket removal of legal status from a group of people in United States history.

And it's a little unclear what this means for the 350,000 Venezuelan people currently residing in the U.S. under TPS, right? But it's another case of like, by their compliance, Isolatory probably knows where they live. So these people, it's possible that we will see deportations of these people back to Venezuela. Again, the situation in Venezuela is dire. It's a place where... That's just so many people, too. Yeah, and like...

Again, if people haven't listened to my Darien series, I would like that because I put a lot of myself into it. But I have a great affection for Venezuelan migrants. I've spent a lot of time in Caracas when I was younger, and I've spent a lot of time with them in the Darien Gap and when they arrive in the United States. And yeah, it's really fucking heartbreaking to hear. Like, when you think of 350,000 people, understand that a good number of those people will be little children. Yeah.

Yeah. Right. People who never had any agency, people whose parents risked their lives to give their kids a chance at a better future. And that's been ripped away from them right now with the consent of the Supreme Court. Like if you're removing 300, like 300,000 people from our country, that's just straight up an ethnic cleansing. Like that's what that is. It's about a third of the Venezuelans living in the United States right now. Right. Like it's, it's way more than decimating. Yeah. Obviously,

We will see what legal recourse these people have. We'll see how this goes down, but obviously very concerning for these people whose country is falling apart and, uh,

being returned there will be terrible for them, right? Not only will they likely have none of their savings, all of the resources they poured into getting here, but they're also likely to face political persecution. So yeah, that's all the exciting and uplifting news I have from the immigration side of things. Hey everyone, it's James with a pickup. Today, Myanmar Now is reporting that the United States has deported

20 people since April to Myanmar. Most of those people, seven of them have been released. The remainder of those people are being held by Burmese military intelligence in a prison that is notorious for torture, sexual violence and the general...

inhumane treatment of incarcerated people that we've become very familiar with in our writing about Myanmar. We don't know who these people are yet. Obviously, this is a story that I'm looking into and I will continue to get back to you on. But it seems like somehow we have not been aware of this until now, but dozens of people have been deported. They're saying that 27 people in total are expected to be deported and 20 already have. So obviously, this is very disturbing news and something we'll keep reporting on.

Well, thanks for keeping us updated on that, James. Yeah. We're going to go on break in return to talk about the FBI, Palestine, and some exciting new reality TV. And tariffs. I'm sad. Okay, we are back.

First, I want to do some quick updates about the FBI. Kash Patel has announced that he's shutting down the FBI's DC headquarters in the J. Edgar Hoover building. Around 1,500 agents will be transferred around the country. And in this same interview, Kash Patel and Dan Bongino said,

went on TV to say that Jeffrey Epstein died by suicide. And of course, Megha reacts very normal to this. What do they have on this? It keeps getting gotten to them. You said Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide.

People don't believe it. Well, I mean, listen, they have a right to their opinion. But as someone who has worked as a public defender, as a prosecutor who's been in that prison system, who's been in the Metropolitan Detention Center, who's been in segregated housing, you know a suicide when you see one. And that's what that was. He killed himself. Again, you want me to? I've seen the whole file. He killed himself.

I'm upset because I forgot that Dan Bongino was a person. Yeah, me too. Oh, I have not forgotten. This is my beat. I have not forgotten. So yes, of course, Maga's acting very normal about the affirmation that Epstein killed himself. Quote, okay, now I'm losing confidence in them both. This is not good at all. Quote, let me read one. Let me read one. Let's do this. This is fun. Okay.

Sad to see Cash and Bongino have been compromised. Mia, your turn. Dan, blink twice if they threaten you or your family. Now I got a D-1, right? Yeah. Deep state, traitor. D-E-I, hire. Oh, classic. Oh, there it is.

There it is. I knew it was coming. As much as he likes to wear his Kuyu hunting gear. But no, there's thousands of comments from these mega Q people who feel betrayed that people like Patel and Bongino have spent years doing content creation videos

talking about this grand Epstein conspiracy that now they claim isn't real, or they are in fact covering up the real conspiracy that Donald Trump was friends with Jeffrey Epstein. So yeah, there's also an interview clip where Trump

was asked if he was going to release the whole file and at first he said yes and then he caught himself and was like well actually no we'll probably have to be careful about releasing the whole file because it could compromise people what kind of people you're talking about there Don anyway we have a chance to swing the Epstein demographic now is our time division to our enemies

The next thing of the doc is I found interesting, Gerson. Oh, this is just one piece of uplifting news. Yeah, this is I'm just going to read the headline from NBC because I simply can't improve on it. No, it's perfect. Quote, suspected serial killer shouts out Trump in last words before he's put to death. Keep making America great.

Glenn Rogers once told police he had killed about 70 people. He was executed by lethal injection Thursday in Florida. That's the way that I knew it would be Florida. Literally seconds before he got the lethal injection, he said, President Trump, keep making America great. I'm ready to go. Last words. Wow. So that kind of shows you the current wellspring of Trump's support right now. That's really hitting his prime demographic of suspected serial killers. I just have to say that had big Florida energy.

For real. Mia, I think it's time to hear the lucid lullaby of Tariff Talk. You know, all right.

Before everything gets so, so like I do the most depressing segment I've maybe ever done on here. Tariffs. That can't be true. No, not the tariff. The next one I genuinely think is the most depressing thing I've ever done on here. But the tariffs. So our negotiations with China that were supposed to like solve all of the tariff problems are already breaking down. Both sides are like sniping at each other. This is not going to work. It structurally cannot work. The U.S.'s demands on negotiating table are.

which is, again, the political and economic rationale behind this is that the U.S. should not have a trade deficit with China. That can't be solved. And it's already breaking down. The talks are almost certainly going to fail and we're going to be right back to where we were.

It's also worth talking about a bunch of companies have been doing price raises. And I think it's worth going back a little bit to some of the economic work we've done in this show with the people at Strange Manners and talking about, in our previous episodes, about inflation and about how price works.

Because this is really, really badly understood by just about everyone, which is that the way that people tend to think about price is as like, okay, it's supply and demand. There's two Xs that meet on a graph. That's not how price is set. Price is set by specific people in supply chains, right? They're constrained by certain factors. And one of the biggest things they're constrained about is that if you raise prices, people get pissed at you. But the way that they actually do pricing strategies is cost plus markup, right? There's a cost.

of the physical good and then they do a markup and the markup is the profit margin. And the thing about tariffs, right, is that the way that tariffs affect supply chains is that each part of the supply chain now that's moving, that's importing stuff, right? Each part of those things now has an additional cost that they have to put into their cost-less markup ratio. Now, Trump wants all these companies to just fucking eat shit and eat the price of the tariffs. He's been tweeting about this

Or posting about it, I think, on Truth Social and possibly also on Twitter. Truthic. Again, all of his truths have been reposted on X now. Yeah. Retruthed?

But the thing is, right, and in theory, right, like Walmart could just like take this, right? In theory, like, you know, like the really, some of the really, really big companies could in theory do this. They won't. Like a lot of, and the other thing is like these companies have an incentive not to raise prices because it pisses consumers off. And also because Trump is just like directly threatening sanctions on companies that raise prices. Mattel, for the people who make Barbie, said that they were going to raise prices on toys and Trump is now threatening them with 100% sanctions. Right?

Or 100% tariffs? Only three dolls. Yeah. So, you know... The government-allotted limit of dolls. Completely hinged situation we've gotten here. We're going to have doll quotas. But, you know, again, it's worth mentioning, right, that, like, in theory, for a little bit of time, some of these companies can sort of eat this or they can fuck with their supply chains. Companies have been publicly talking about this. The problem is the suppliers because the distributors tend to have pretty high...

margins, right? Like your Walgreens, like Amazon to some extent, like their margins are okay. And like Amazon makes most of its money from government computing contracts anyways. So it's not as catastrophic, but the suppliers operate on very low margins. The shipping companies, everything else along the supply chain operates on really, really low margins, right? And those people have to raise their price.

Because otherwise they're just going to die. And when they raise their price, right, that ink, that's an increase to the, the, the, the next company's costless market, which increases the next company's costless market, which increases the next companies. And we're starting to see this ripple through the supply chain. Things are disappearing from grocery stores. They're going to continue disappearing from grocery stores. And as, as this goes on and as presumably the tariffs from China come back into effect when these negotiations break down and the next round of tariffs goes into effect and the liberation day tariffs come off their 90 day pause and go into effect, uh,

This is all going to get worse. This has been Tariff Talk. Lovely. This, unfortunately, was the fun part of the episode. Yeah, I was going to say, it's going to get worse in three, two, one. Okay, so when I said this might be the bleakest segment I've ever done on this show, we need to do an update on Palestine because things have gotten...

Like, when I was kind of opening this episode, I thought it was going to mostly be about Trump's plan to, like, deport the entire population. Well, not to deport, but to, like, deport most of the population of Palestine to Libya. That's not even the immediate crisis. The immediate crisis is that... That's not even true. What I'm saying, the immediate crisis... Last week, I thought the crisis was going to be the 11-week blockade of Gaza and the fact that everyone is about to starve. Yeah, and so the actual specific thing that we're getting to right now is...

Israel is attempting to evacuate. That's their wording. What they're actually doing is ethnically cleansing basically the entire population of Khan Yunus by just forcing everyone out of the city, right? The United Nations has said that nearly 100,000 Palestinians have been displaced in Gaza in the last four days as Israel has been expanding its ground invasion of the Gaza Strip. This has been combined with the 11-week-long blockade of Gaza. I think by the end of this week, it might be week 12, right?

This has set off an enormous risk of famine. I'm just going to read this from Al Jazeera. Quote, some 70 days after the Israeli military halted the entry of food, water, medicine, and all other life-saving supplies into Gaza, the report said, this is a report from a UN-backed food security group of analysts, said,

The report said, quote, goods indispensable for people's survival are either depleted or expected to run out in the coming weeks. Quote, the entire population is facing high levels of acute food insecurity with half a million people, one in five, facing starvation, it said. Approximately 93% of Gaza's population is experiencing acute food shortages, it added. The report also said that one in five people could starve between now and November.

People have already started starving to death. Israel has been blocking aid from getting through. They symbolically allowed a small number of trucks in, but aid groups on the ground, and I want to emphasize that this reporting is coming directly from the Times of Israel. If you want to understand how bad the situation is, the Times of Israel is reporting that aid groups on the ground say that none of the aid has gotten through, none of it has been distributed. This is, I don't know how to convey how bad it is,

Indescribable numbers of people are on the verge of starving to death and the Israelis are simply not letting any food arrive. They keep talking about how they're going to let food arrive because this is actually, this is the first thing I've seen them do that's actually seriously gotten people.

I mean, not even seriously, but it's like gotten a lot of their Western allies pissed at them because they're just very obviously trying to exterminate entire population by starving them to death. Yeah. And this has caused the UK, Canada and France to issue a joint statement coming out against the Israeli policy and telling them to fucking stop and let food through so these people don't starve.

The UK is talking about suspending free trade agreements with Israel. They're talking about sanctions on West Bank settlers. The whole group has threatened that they're going to take more actions unless the Israelis let food in.

Now, the Israelis, because of the Israelis, shot at a bunch of diplomats who were visiting a refugee camp in Jenin. This was like a few days ago. Yeah, it's like a few days ago. Yeah, yeah. And so that's that's not been like making anyone less angry at them. It's genuinely remarkable that we've reached a place where like the UK, Canada and France, who are all major weapon suppliers to Israel, are like talking about sanctions against.

Like even targeted sanctions, like, yeah, you know, and like the UN's like Human Rights Commission was like, well, this is bullshit. You can't just do targeted sanctions. It's the entire government doing this. But like, you know, the fact that they're doing something is an indicator of just how apocalypticly bad the situation is right now.

Yeah, I want to read this quote from The Guardian from just perennial most fascist guy in the Israeli government. But he's saying something. Yeah, who's their fucking finance minister who said, quote, Now we conquer, cleanse and stay until Hamas is destroyed, he told a news conference. Along the way, what remains of the strip is also being wiped out. Cleanse, conquer. Yeah, very normal things to say.

The extent to which they are simply doing a genocide here has reached a point where even a bunch of Israel's closest allies are going, what the fuck? I don't know. I really hope that people are able to force their governments to actually fucking do something about this because if they don't, it's going to continue to get really bad. Yeah. And I mean, I guess right now that's mostly like if you're, if you're in like the UK, Canada or France, uh,

and you think you can apply more pressure on your government, like go for it. Do, do, do it. Do that. Like, I don't know, I don't know to what extent pressure can even be mounted on the Trump administration, but it's, yeah, I think that's pretty much a dead end. Right. Yeah. But like, but seeing these countries align outside of any U S influenced to, and potentially recognize the Palestinian state, according to Lamond, right? Like,

is significant and yeah people in those countries should absolutely like stay in the streets yeah because like and this is the thing here right like these countries the stuff that they're threatening to do is not enough to really make a difference here but like if they're willing to do this they can be pushed further yeah you have to get your foot in the door and Carney has also seemed susceptible to this yeah as there has been a block on arms deals to Israel for the past few months in Canada yeah yeah

We're going to close with another story of anti-humanity, but just a slightly different flavor. And I know this show does often just end up feeling like a bad news roundup, and that is because there's a lot of bad news. I have a little good news for the end, actually. That's a good thing we'll have some good news. Yeah, as a treat. And part of the good news here is that this probably will not end up happening, but it's still useful insight into the minds of these ghouls. Yeah.

And I've long advocated that reality TV is basically inherently satanic. I think it's a spiritual darkness. Is this offensive to Satanists? It is a spiritual darkness that has plagued the United States for far too long. I think it's ushered in a degree of evil that is nearly unfathomable. Yeah. And the...

current administration is essentially a reality TV administration on a very clear and obvious level. Yes, but did I enjoy watching The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives? No. Yes, I did.

I think watching it stuff is actually a personal moral failure. I think you're channeling darkness into your soul. I'm loving it. Last week, multiple outlets reported that the Department of Homeland Security was considering participating in a reality TV show where immigrants compete against each other to gain U.S. citizenship. Jesus Christ. The proposed series would be called The American.

This nightmare has been dreamed up by Duck Dynasty producer Rob Warsaw. And apparently he's been trying to make this since Obama's second term, but only now has made progress on getting the necessary backing from the DHS after sending Trump's DHS a 35-page pitch. Warsaw wants it to be, quote-unquote, the biggest loser for immigration.

Which, again, reality TV is inherently evil. That's fucking insane. It should not be tolerated on any aspect of human society. No. The Wall Street Journal header reads, quote, This isn't the Hunger Games for immigrants, says the producer behind the pitch.

If you have to say, this isn't the Hunger Games for immigrants, that means this is the Hunger Games for immigrants. Getting a lot of questions about my, this isn't the Hunger Games for immigrants shirt already answered by the shirt. To quote the Wall Street Journal, quote, DHS spokeswoman, Tricia McLaughlin, said that she had spoken to the producer of the proposed television reality show and that consideration of the idea was ongoing.

It is, quote, in the very beginning stages of that vetting process, she said, adding that, quote, each proposal undergoes a thorough vetting process prior to denial or approval, unquote.

McLaughlin was also quoted in the Daily Mail as saying she thought the television show was, quote unquote, a good idea. Jesus. The pitch details that the immigrant contestants would board a train called the American and ride across the country to meet, quote unquote, interesting Americans and learn about the local history and culture while competing in region specific, quote unquote, heritage challenges to prove they are the most American. So,

Such cultural contests would include balancing on logs in Wisconsin, building a rocket at the Florida NASA headquarters, assembling a Model T Ford in Detroit, and collecting gold in a San Francisco mineshaft. Prizes would be quote-unquote iconically American, like 1 million American Airlines points, a $10,000 Starbucks gift card, or a lifetime supply of 76 gas.

Immigrants would be split into teams that compete head-to-head across one-hour episodes, ending with an elimination challenge, followed by a town hall and a final vote. To quote the producer, quote, unquote.

I feel like even this will humanize migration to the United States too much for them. And like if they will be afraid of that, like of these people articulating their desire to be here and what it means to them. And I feel like that doesn't end well for the administration. This might be too liberal for the Trump administration. Yeah, it could be too liberal. I'm not even joking.

This as a concept just should be the death knell for the idea of America. If America has an experiment, we tried it, it failed. This is the most America thing I've ever heard. As an experiment, the American project was a fucking disaster and it needs to stop because this is what it's done. No more American projects.

The pitch has pre-vetted contestants first arriving at Ellis Island aboard a boat called the Citizenship. There, they are greeted by the show's host, quote, a famous naturalized American who was also born in another country, unquote. The pitch recommends Sofia Vergara or Ryan Reynolds...

upon arriving, the host would gift each of them a personalized baseball glove. America's pastime. There's no way Sofia Vergara or Ryan Reynolds would ever fucking do a show like this. That's batshit. Yeah.

Yeah. I fucking hope so. To quote the producer's pitch, quote, we'll join in the laughter, tears, frustration, and joy hearing their backstories as we are reminded how amazing it is to be American through the eyes of 12 wonderful people who want nothing more than to have what we have. Unquote. This is one of the most evil things I've ever heard of. Yeah.

The live finale would have the winner getting sworn in on the steps of the U.S. Capitol by a, quote, top American politician or judge with F-16s flying overhead. Quote, there won't be a dry eye in the house, unquote. There have actually been like high spectacle single individual awards

awards of citizenship before. I'm thinking, for example, Herman Boccia was a, he's often known as like the one man army of Booner. Herman John Boccia, he was, I believe, living as an undocumented person in the United States when he joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.

volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War, where he was an officer. He then joined the United States military and fought again in World War II. During the Battle of Bona, he personally led a charge against several Japanese pillboxes, which he eliminated with grenades. He then had his eardrum perforated, and I believe he was shot in the arm himself.

He was awarded, I think he wasn't awarded the Medal of Honor, but he was recognized for his bravery. Congress passed an act to make him a citizen, and he declined to attend the ceremony because he wanted to get back to the front lines. That rules. Yeah, bit of

bit of a legend. Yeah, a little bit cooler than the live grand finale of The American. The pitch clarified that the losers would not be immediately deported and that the contestants would have a leg up in applying for citizenship the more traditional way based on being pre-vetted for this show. So it's good that he had to clarify that they would not be immediately deported upon getting eliminated. Yeah, fuck me.

That's a good sign. Yeah, another thing that you should always have to clarify on a TV page. At a Tuesday congressional hearing, Kristi Noem denied having knowledge of the reality TV show, despite reporting to the contrary, while also defining habeas corpus in this hearing as a, quote, constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country, unquote. So, there you go. Yeah, that's not what that means. Kristi Noem is...

a disaster. That is kind of the opposite of what habeas corpus is. And there is substantial reporting showing that DHS staff are looking at this pitch. It might not go through now based on all this backlash, but they were looking through the pitch, including possibly Corey Lewandowski. But yeah, that is the reality TV news.

James, do you have anything, uh, anything to, to end on here? Please, James, please. Yeah, I know something, something a little bit nice. So for those of you who like me enjoy a strawberry ice agents arrived at the West coast, Berry farms facility in Oxnard, California. Uh,

earlier this month where they were met by a gatekeeper who demanded a warrant and refused to let them enter the facility without one and eventually managed to turn them away. So this is a rare dub, I guess. Clearly, as we enter the time of year when things need to be picked in the fields, this will be a place where ICE sees the opportunity to conduct its enforcement operations and like

It is genuinely positive to see that this company, I guess, critical support to this company that obviously underpays and takes advantage of migrant labor, that they have provided them, according to an anonymous source in SFGate, with know your rights training. And in this case, the gatekeeper was able to not let the ICE agents enter and eventually they left.

ICE isn't impervious. All week, ICE has been releasing statements complaining about being compared to the Gestapo. Once again, another thing that you shouldn't have to be releasing statements about. My I am not the Gestapo shirt has people asking a lot of questions. Yeah, and they're also publishing false stats about

ICE officers being assaulted in the line of duty. So, like, obviously, they're facing some kind of, like, fear, even among their own agents. That's why they're all, like, covered up wherever they go. They're trying to prosecute people for posting information on ICE agents in your area. Yeah, yeah. But like I say, they're not impervious. There is a difference between a judicial warrant and a warrant that ICE has essentially made itself, right, the latter, right?

not being signed by a judge. And it appears that the gatekeeper was aware of that. We still have courts. You still, in theory, have rights. Well, it depends, but yes. Yeah, theoretically, that was a pivotal word. But yeah, shout out to the gatekeepers at the Oxnard strawberry plant. They could be stopped by a doorkeeper. Like they can be resisted. They can be stopped from doing things.

Yeah, and it is genuinely important that this person understood the difference between a judicial warrant and these documents that ICE might produce. And it does illustrate the value of being educated and educating people in your communities about these things if they might be at risk for this. All right. We reported the news. Boy, howdy did we. We reported the news. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

This is Bowen Yang from Las Culturistas. And I'm Matt Rogers, and we're the hosts of Las Culturistas. It's Pride Month, and you know what that means. Friendship, parties, dancing. Correct. And do you know what the perfect thing to bring to any Pride event is? Bowen, we talked about this. I'm not a thing. Oh, not you. I meant Casamigos. Okay, chic. And honestly, the only other correct answer. A Casamigos margarita during Pride. Now that.

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