Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 41

Episode Date: July 2, 2022

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode.

So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's got to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Ah, welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and how to deal with that and hopefully take care of yourself and your people. Today, we have a returning guest, Carl Casarta from Enrange TV. Now, Carl, every time you and I have chatted on a show together, it has been about firearms,

which is obviously your passion and specialty. Well, one of your specialties, but today we're not talking at all about guns. I mean, maybe here and there. But today, we're talking about the thing that has been your career for what most of your working life, fair to say. That's true. You want to kind of walk through your background here because we're going to be talking about information security and sort of the future of threats that are going to be coming throughout the next few years of our lives. Obviously, this year in particular, there's been a bunch of stories about like Russian attacks

on digital infrastructure and vice versa. And that's always like pretty much has been something that's in everybody's back burner since we got the internet, usually through like questionable films with Sandra Bullock. I think net, that was net, right? Yeah, the net. The net. Yes, exactly. Yes.

Were they somehow hacked a car in 1998 or something? Well, you got to do that when you're flying through cyberspace with your VR coming on and your gloves, right? Yeah. But yeah, you want to walk everyone through kind of what your actual background is in this industry first? Yeah, totally. So if anyone watches inrangers, watched it for a long time, you'll see this reflected in some of my content because I do deal with some of this intermittently on the channel.

And it's definitely influenced how I approach my work there with the social media and all that. But so way back when I was like one of those kids that was in the hacker space and I grew up like trying to make computers and technology do what it wasn't designed to do and learn to make it do things it shouldn't have done for my own interests or others around me, not in any really negative way, but like just a deep curiosity and how do this stuff work and being part of the early online community. We're talking pre-internet where you'd have like an acoustic coupling jack modem and you would dial in like war games. Yeah. Literally plug your headset into the thing.

God. I was on boards like that way back when, right? We never should have gone past those days. Doing things wirelessly was such a mistake. Like I'm so pissed off that when I like sit down to research, I'm not like jacking into a gigantic box. Like that makes me livid. Like Shadowrun promised me that I was going to be like using one hand to shoot at the approaching corporate security guards and have another hand on my like keyboard that I wear around my neck that I like plug into the wall to hack buildings.

Well, hey, maybe someday we'll have neurological implants or wet wire implants brought to us by Monsanto that'll eventually get ERM and we'll just get shut off in our own rooms, right? From your mouth to God's ears, Carl. Absolutely. Who doesn't want that? Who doesn't want my neural tissue tied directly to a corporation? Oh, fuck yes. But anyway, so I grew up in that space and it actually back then naturally turned into a career. It wasn't like now. Nowadays, you pretty much have to go get a bunch of certificates and a college degree to even start looking at an InfoSec career.

But back then, if you kind of had like skills with a Z at the end, you could get a job. And I landed up doing like help desk at this one company and landed up. They noticed that that's where my interests were and I landed up becoming their information security architect over a couple of years. And that turned into a multiple decade career, pretty much culminating in working at a tier one internet backbone provider, doing subsea fiber optic, like routing, networking and DDoS mitigation and botnet control search and destroy. So it really turned into a really wide career, not only like when I started off backbone internet, but like encryption firewalls, application layer controls across the board for multiple corporations. So it was a weird and interesting space, but I don't really do that much anymore except on the side.

But I've had a pretty exciting career with it. So I think probably a good place to start is just in general because folks are always interested about this. What is your recommendation for people less? Like what should I be doing to kind of protect myself as I force my head under the constant stream of sewer water that is social media these days? Well, yeah, you know, the simplest thing and everything in InfoSec is always controversial, just like anything in life. Any recommendation makes someone's going to be like, but otherwise or anyways, or there's a better solution. And there always is a better solution. But the realistic thing is when you talk to the average person, the average person isn't going to sit there and hack a Linux box to have a better social media experience.

That's not realistic. So the best thing anyone can do, the simplest best thing is to get one of the trusted password managers. There's a number of them out there. I'm not going to recommend an individual one right now because anyone I recommend someone's going to go, but there's another one. But there's a few of them out there. Having a password manager and having a unique, difficult, complex password for every account you log into on the Internet is the first number one thing you can do as an individual to protect your interest. Because if you're logging in with the same password monkey to Facebook, Twitter and your bank account, that is a disaster waiting to happen. So the first thing you can do, password manager, passwords you yourself can't remember as a result.

I allow the password manager to generate like 24 character long, alphanumeric crypto nonsense. You put a gun on my mouth and say, what's your password to your bank? And I don't know. I can't tip it to you. I have no idea. And so that right there is the first thing any basic individual can do to protect themselves on the Internet. That is totally sensible. I'm not great at password managers, but I never know what my passwords are and they're all different.

And so my life is this constant stream of needing to figure out what my password was, failing and resetting it. But it does mean that I change passwords regularly. Right. But what's so great about password managers is you can have passwords that you could never human remember. And you can have unique ones per website. Every website you log into could be unique. And by having it in this database that's properly encrypted with a key phrase or even dual factor, then at that point means you literally just can cut and paste your passwords into things. You don't yourself know what they are.

And if depending on your privacy levels, you can do that locally with local solutions with files like on your own machine. But frankly, a couple of the cloud based solutions as much as the cloud freaks people out is the better one because it'll work on your phone. It'll work on your laptop. It'll work on everything everywhere. That makes total sense. I think another good thing to get into while we're on this subject, we just started talking about passwords and obviously it is important to keep and secure those. I think one thing folks don't often think about, especially people who are activists who may foresee or have engaged in things that are legally questionable. Don't think about enough is social media networking as and by which I mean having social media that like it is possible to find your other social media by like knowing, you know, like having the same name and Twitter and on Instagram and stuff.

Having social media that like can be tracked across accounts, most people would be surprised at how easy it is to do that. Bellingcat a huge amount of tracking Nazis tracking, even like a ton of the what the work I did not do, but my colleagues did to like Doc Docs Russian, like Secret Service agents and stuff was like, Oh, we found them in, you know, somebody. They're their bosses wedding, like they're tagged in this thing in VK. And from that, we were able to like find their, their account on this other site and like from that, like now we have this like map of everywhere they've been for the last like three weeks and we can like build this social map of their entire life. So by list by just literally existing in modern space, you're constantly leaking some form of metadata, right, you are you are always leaking metadata and the more of you allow to exist in the world, the more that's the case. So like, there's also you got to think about what the threat is and what the risk is right there's the risk of the individual having a parasocial relationship with the internet like I do as a content creator is one thing people. There's always someone that wants to delve into your private life, but that's a very different risk than a nation state actor, right? Those are two different things. And when it comes to a nation state actor, quite honestly, unless you're real good, and I've been doing it for a long time, the individual bluntly is kind of fucked. As a general rule, your best security as an individual in that situation is the anonymity of the crowd. But when we're also not talking about most people who are threatened to kind of by the state in that situation are not being threatened by the federal government, but they may have they may like be attending protests and not want the Louisville police to like put together that they're in an affinity group with people and like something you can do for that is make sure you're not like if you have a personal account that's under your name with your friends that account shouldn't be liking and sharing

things from like a political account that you have or from the account of like a group that you're a part of or something like that. Like just try to think about and look at your your digital footprint from the outside and think is it possible to connect me to people I don't want to be publicly connected to through this. And the minute you've breached that connection once it's gone forever, right? Forever. Yes, this is the same thing is like with phones like someone will have like their regular phone which by the way all these smartphones are just surveillance devices in our pocket right. Let's say you let's say you go get a burner so that you don't want to be connected to the device that you normally use on on a level that's one step above the regular individual level. If you ever have those two devices emanating at the same time they're now connected in a way that like let's say the authorities can associate them together because of triangulation and seeing a burner phone and your phone coming from the same house. You've breached all the privacy you would have had from your burner phone for example.

Now, Carl, do you have much to say on the subject of because I know one thing I have seen people do people who are, you know, having conversations that they're concerned about is put bags in Faraday cages and I've heard mixed things about how reliable Faraday bags and stuff are for actually stopping signals. Do you have much to say on that matter. My experience with that is not all not all bags that you can just buy off the internet or made equally. So, what you want to do is test it and you can only test it to a certain degree but the really simple tests are, you put it in the bag and you try to dial the darn thing or use any Wi Fi connections to it and that's a simple test now is it as good as like, is it as good as not having the thing on you of course not No, or else is always the best answer, but a properly in my opinion a properly built Faraday box or cage or bag that you've put some testing into is a pretty reliable solution. So, a problem that you might encounter is or that I have so one thing I have heard people talk about is like, well, in order to have kind of a private conversation we like drove to a specific location and we left our phones off in the car and then went on a walk. And the problem with that is that now you have both just driven to a location with those phones and those phones are associated with each other right. Well, so first of all, you got to think of a world where all of this metadata is being collected at all times so these phones and their associations and physical physical proximity to one another is stored somewhere at all times, whether or not it's going to be

resourced or accessible to the powers that be when they want it to be it's all there. My phone next your phone next to that guy's phone, those associations all exist they're all talking to the same cell phone towers in the same area giving them not only GPS coordinates but triangulation data, which by the way if you go way back to the record Kevin Mitnick that stuff was going on back then before they had GPS and triangulation data to get him right. So that stuff's all still happening and those associations that occur in regards to saying I turned my phone off. How do you know that's off. Most of these modern phones. What does off mean. And yeah okay pull the battery. Maybe, but even then, I would not trust any of these devices in the regards to them quote being off, especially things like phones that have unremovable or not removable batteries off is more like sleep, but it is right. Yeah, I mean I think one of the worst things that's happened for personal security is the end of the phone where you can remove the battery, like, you're unable to actually cut power to it, without you know disassembling it is a real issue. One could argue that there was like that that's a much as much more insidious reason they did that or one could argue that it was just one of design and comfort and it's like hard to say it doesn't really matter if it wasn't serious or not reality kind of a porcano los dos situation right yeah totally so when now that we're talking about phones here's another thing that's been near and dear and I think you've seen some posts for me about this. Um, everybody really likes the convenience of things like biometrics thumb authentication fingerprint ID facial identification. And here's the reality of that we know this already and there's legal, this exists in legal space already, but the reality is is that you can be coerced to provide biometric data against your will. So if your phone is authenticated to you with a fingerprint ID or your facial ID, they can pretty much say, you must give us your thumb to unlock this phone or for that matter, frankly they could hold the phone in front of your face in certain

circumstances, even against your will and it will unlock the device. And that is considered not a violation of your rights. So for example, if you had a long strong password on the phone, they cannot coerce you to give that up because that would be a violation of your own rights and fifth amendment, which is interesting. So, yeah, but at the same time, one could also argue that in certain circumstances where there's a lot of cameras that are necessarily watching everything you do. But you could also consider that passphrases could be dangerous like say in an airport, because all those cameras could see you plugging in your passcode. So it's a matter of if when and where right. So what's the right solution at the best time but I would say that if you are going to be in a place that was contentious. It is almost always better to make sure you do not allow for any biometric authentication on device. Yes, I never like never turn on don't even like ever have had it in the like ideally, you have never turned on facial recognition on your phone like even if you like deactivated I don't know I don't I really that was that was one of the first I used to be in tech journalism right obviously I'm not an expert on any of this but like the worst thing in terms of like my personal comfort with devices was when they were like, everything's going to read faces and fingerprints I don't I don't love that. But you know it's inevitable right because it is. And I had in the past I did a fingerprint unlock earlier in my life, and I do not have any devices that unlock that way anymore but you do like it is more convenient right you miss it when you need to get to your phone quickly and you can't do it. But like I don't even I don't even let my phone have just like a four phrase like password anymore like it's eight characters for me it's a little bit of a pain in the ass but it comes with fewer risks. And one of the things that's challenging to every individual is they have to look at what their threat profile is right so like, for example, soccer mom driving her kids to school and stuff. She might be really good well off with a biometric

authentication on her phone frankly. Yeah, because if she didn't use that maybe she wouldn't even use a proper four character passphrase. And if she's not concerned about being at a protest for example, and having some authoritarian take her phone away from her and authenticate to it. Maybe she doesn't need to worry about that. But for a lot of us in the world we live in. That's a different risk profile right we got to think about what our risks are as individuals and what makes sense so if your passphrase is going to be 1234 or use a thumbprint ID. For most people they'd be better with the thumbprint ID. But for someone like myself. No, it's not a good idea. Yeah. And that's, um, yeah, I think that kind of brings us to probably the last part of this, which is, do you have specific advice on like VPNs. Obviously I recommend everybody use signal. I just for messages in general, but like especially stuff that is secure. Don't if you if you like number one first rule of any kind of this sort of security. Don't ever put anything on your phone ever that's legally questionable if you can avoid it like conversationally like right do not don't send it over a phone if it's something you would not be able to survive having read to you in a courtroom. So for the audience, a lot of the audience may not know what signal even is right so signal is a is a text messaging alternative so like for example on your phone you've got regular text or if you've got an iPhone, you've got I message signal is an end end encrypted solution that you install as an app. And because it's end to end encryption, it means that it passes the wire in theory not decryptable by the parties that are passing the data packets in the middle. So that's a man in middle of the decryption right so for example, I message is encrypted theoretically end to end but it ultimately has the cryptographic keys. So there is while they might say one thing. There is nothing really preventing them from being man in the middle and being able to read the message in transit from a to be. But if the keys are stored on your device which are then protected with your

text phrase, or whatever your authentication mechanism is, and those keys are not archived or kept by some hierarchical man in the middle authority. If it's done right, which signal is done pretty well. It means that your data in transit is probably not decryptable. And that's why signals a good solution and it's a good one for the average person install the app. It works just like test text messaging, but you can have a pretty good level of knowledge that the data you're passing is not being decrypted or caught in transmission on the path. So I would say get get signal. It's it's your best bet right like and again we said I said, you know, you don't want to ever say anything over a phone. That is something that could get you in trouble but also like life is life and that's not always realistic for people in certain situations. So again, signal is your best bet. Nothing is perfect. And again, if you're putting it on your phone, there's a number of things that could go wrong every single time you do that, but that that's one of your better things that you could do and then of course we talk about VPNs. So VPN to those like I'm just going to go with the basic levels because I don't necessarily know the level of knowledge that people are listening. VPN is a virtual private network. So what that is is you connect to this virtual private network and it passes your data through an encrypted tunnel to an exit point somewhere else on the internet, in theory, masking the source and origin of your request. So like for example, let's say you were looking up something on the internet that you didn't necessarily want people to know you're looking up. Yeah, let's say you're researching the truth about the assassination of President John F Kennedy by Bernard Montgomery Sanders. And you know that the NSA is looking for truth seekers who are who are finding out the reality of that

situation you know you don't necessarily want them to know that you have have become killed. Right. So if you were to do this from your computer at home, what would happen is to people that don't know how this all works you would be coming from an IP address that's associated with your account that you're connecting to whether it's Verizon or Comcast or whatever, and you go and search up that truth. And the NSA finds you with a keyword search for JFK and the truth. And therefore, because of that keyword search they go to Comcast or to Verizon, and say hey, we are requesting you tell us who did this search, they will get them essentially a request that's a legal request for information and then Comcast or Verizon will provide the NSA. This is the IP address and account of the person that did that. What VPN does is you connect to the VPN service first, the connection from your machine to the VPN services that encrypt it. Now does the VPN service know your IP address? Yes. But when you actually type in that information or go to the internet to request that data, it actually goes through the VPN's private tunneling network and egresses from somewhere else on the internet, thus masking your actual IP address and in theory, your origin of source. Now that's not 100% true. But what that does is mean that if someone, if say the NSA, wanted to know who was doing this truth search, they would then find an IP address that actually came out of, let's say, Joe's VPN service, and they would have to go to Joe's VPN service and go, we noticed this emanated from your network, who did this? At that point, you have to trust Joe's VPN service to not disclose their account information about you. So what you've done is you've changed it. We know the telecoms will communicate with the government or whoever if they need to. They always will. You don't necessarily know if Joe's VPN service will. You've changed your trust model from your telecom to your VPN service.

So if you're going to pick a VPN, you have to do a little bit of research to know that it's a trustworthy resource that won't just give you up at the lightest form of interrogation. Yeah, and none of them, again, there's nothing perfect. And often, like, we did find out what was it last year that one popular VPN was like run by the feds. Like, yeah, that's not an impossible thing. I know a lot of folks, particularly journalists use proton, which is I think based in Switzerland, and you will get given up if you if the Swiss government is angry at you, right? You brought up a very good point. Services that exist, that exist outside of the conus, the continental US, mean that they are under different legal jurisdiction than ones that exist wholly within the conus. Yeah, so as a result, if something from the United States government comes as a request to the Swiss company, there's a much like like higher chance that a Swiss company would be like, we don't really care about your request. Yeah, that's worth considering. Also, think about this. This actually works in reverse and I don't want to get too deep into this. But when you're working at a tier one internet backbone provider, you should know that sometimes traffic strangely gets pushed offshore and then back to the United States for analysis that would normally be, let's say, not necessarily constitutionally legal in the United States. So there's a lot of shenanigans going on. Yeah. And again, like, I think protons generally a pretty good service. I've had no problems with it. But we should be clear, none of these are perfect solutions. There is no perfect solution.

The only perfect method of digital security is not putting things on the internet, or like through, you know, the mobile networks and stuff like that is, if it stays between you and someone else. That is your best bet of it not being, you know, intercepted or something a conversation that you have in the woods without phones anywhere near you is the most secure kind of conversation. Let me second on proton. I agree. It's a good service. There are others out there. We're not trying to pick on one in particular or pick against anyone in particular. There's a bunch that work. Yeah. Another thing that you need to consider in this sort of thing is also what you're dealing with. Like so, for example, on I put up a post a while back because there was a bunch of stuff going on in Ukraine with with people posting photos that got their locations. Oh, yeah. That things happen. I mean, that's and that has been happening for a decade in that war, like almost a decade as long as it's been going on. And I posted something about it in one of the recommendations I made on there was a contentious one about I'm going to back it up in a minute as I use I mentioned for the onion relay.

So the tour is essentially a was originally created as a as a way to deal with the dark web, quote unquote, and to also relay traffic in a way to mask the origins very much like a VPN service. Now, there are a bunch of these. So what it was is there's these onion relay nodes all over the internet. So if you connect to the to the onion network, your traffic bounces through three, four, five, six, seven of these nodes, you can sort of dictate what you want depending on the client you have. And so let's say you connect to an onion router network node in Arizona and then you egress somewhere in France, and you've jumped through six nodes in the process. Well, one of the things that's a well known fact is that a number of these onion relay routing nodes are owned by nation state actors, whether it's the United States or others. So one of the things I got taken a task for and I want to explain this is people like well that's a compromised network. It doesn't mean that it's useful. Actually, it does because depending on what you're trying to do may matter. If you're trying to mask the origin of your data source or your upload or your search for a short duration of time, this will still help you jump through six nodes. They've got to relay back six nodes to figure out the origin of the person connecting to the relay network. And that's assuming that there was a compromised node in the process. So yeah, that means if you're passing data through a compromised node, does that mean the data in transit is safe? No. But is the is the anonymity of the origin of the poster safer for a longer duration of time? Yes. So these things get really complex real fast.

And this is again, one of the best things you can do because there's no single perfect solution but stacking so not just going through tour but also tour into VPN at the same time and you're you I think one of the better ways to think about security is kind of the way Sebastian describes how insurgent war works, which is it's all about creating friction for anybody trying to spy on your shit. There's no perfect answer but the more things you can make be a pain in the ass, the better your odds that you will not have an issue right like that's all you can do is make it potentially more annoying and more difficult for for whoever might be looking right like it the more friction you can create, broadly speaking the more secure you're going to be. Absolutely now another thing to think about and we're getting kind of deep in the weeds here this is above and beyond the average person right the average person get a password manager. Don't use your same password everywhere and don't use biometrics unless you're forced like pretty much have to and move on with your life but yeah once you're beyond the average person, this is what we're talking about now. So like if you're if you have a computer and you use it as your normal day to day operating system, talking to your friends doing dot dot dot dot dot, but then also need to do something else a little more privacy inclined, you should not trust that device. So at that point, your web browser may have all sorts of cookies and metadata and storage in it that even if you're going through a VPN, still may be able to reveal your identity as well as MAC addresses and other stuff. So if you really want to get pretty into the weeds with this you have to do something like use an ephemeral operating system install that has no legacy data on it.

One example of that that is that it's a Linux based when it's called tails, you essentially use it like a live USB drive, you boot off of that only or you use a machine dedicated for this, and you burn the OS down. Every time you're done because there's no legacy information or data that can be pulled out of your web browser, or your cookies, or your MAC address information that can associate it with you, regardless of if you've done everything right to mask your IP address of origin. That's the hot girl shit. When you're when you're when you're doing when you're doing that kind of stuff. And again, I think at this point, I think up through most of this it's been kind of like 5050 people being like that's too much and people being like okay yep this is exactly what I already am or need to be doing. This is probably very few people need to be concerned about that sort of thing, but you know it is I know I know it like again I worked at Bellingcat. I had a number of colleagues who were like personal enemies of the Russian state had to do stuff like this. And it's, you know, paranoia. I mean, and here's the thing going above. So again, like if you're a normal person you probably don't need to be, you know, doing stacking a VPN, you know, getting signal and all this stuff but also why not. Right. Like there's no harm in the additional security it is a little bit frustrating. But here's one of the things I think people don't often think about enough. You're not engaging in that kind of security stuff, purely because there's a threat now. But in part because you don't know what the future is going to bring and one of the things that I would point out for that is a lot of people right now have been having for years conversations about a thing that may soon legally be murder on a federal level, you know, abortion, right. And so it is possible that overnight an awful lot of conversations a bunch of people have had legally will suddenly be very illegal conversations

and then you may be glad that you took greater care with your your personal security prior to that point. I mean, like so think of the I mean, I'm not a person that menstruates but a menstruation tracking app is very useful to a lot of people who do. And those tracking apps now that metadata in there. At some point could be extremely dangerous or incriminate or incriminate criminalizing well incriminating excuse me to someone who otherwise was doing nothing more than trying to maintain their natural health. And so that is a really dangerous concept so at this point, I mean within the United States I hate to say this, those apps are probably dangerous to the individual because that data could be easily used by a government resource to do something bad to someone who's done nothing wrong. So, I think we should move I mean at this point I think we've covered the basis that you could kind of responsibly the advice you can responsibly give someone in a podcast and folks should be able to let me throw one thing out real quick so you mentioned like for example we don't you don't necessarily have the risk vector that requires using VPN or signal. Let me say this way back when gosh when I was doing crypto work decades ago. I was what you mean cryptography and not we should specify these days.

Oh yeah excuse me cryptography encryption yeah yeah yeah yeah I had the opportunity work with Phil Zimmerman of PGP and actually PGP pretty good privacy, which was one of the fundamental security project or projects way back when was actually written for human rights violations. He wrote it because people doing research of like warlords were getting their laptops taken away and then finding out who spoke to them and getting people killed. So PGP was like this human rights thing right from the beginning and cryptography back when I was young and naive I always thought to myself, this is what we need this is the future when everyone gets proper crypto will blind the government will blind corporations, we're going to have this crypto anarchist future where the government and corporations can't get us. And the reality is, most of that God who served and the truth is cryptography is too hard for most people to use. And as a result we don't. But here's what I will say, the more people that do something simple like use signal, or use a VPN just to browse the internet, not because they're doing anything to various, just because their privacy like conscious. Yeah, because it makes it normalize. And that means that the person that's using it because they need to for likes let's say, to protect human rights, doesn't stick out like a needle in the haystack, because everybody's already doing something saying in the first place, normalizing proper privacy and cryptography is better for everyone. Yes, yes, absolutely agreed. This is a nice segue, because you were just talking about the past and how beautiful and bright it seemed. Let's talk about what you see as kind of the future of info security threats.

Well, I mean, so there's so many levels to that. First of all, if we're talking nation state level, I personally strongly believe that all of the big players have already compromised everyone's networks. Everybody's got everybody. We got Russia. Russia's got us. China's got us. We got China. Anybody right now could go in and pretty much fuck up the grid on someone else like that. Yeah. And that's not actually the least that's that's safer than other possibilities, like, because there is a level of mutually assured destruction there where it's like, yeah, man, Russia could take down the grid, but like, that wouldn't be good for them and vice versa, you know. Yeah, no, true. So the reality is, though, everybody's in everybody's network. Those days are over. When it comes to the individual and I'm going to have a the audience, there might be people in the audience that feel differently, and it still doesn't mean that we don't try. So one of the things I want to say is, you're going to hear some skepticism here because I've been doing this career for a long time, and I've seen things go wrong more than right. And so in that regard, this is going to sound kind of cynical. But when it comes to the idea of individual privacy, in my opinion, with the exception of when you're taking a very active effort in something very specific that you want to keep private, because that's something you're working on personally. The reality is individual privacy is dead and gone. And we're just starting to smell that corpse. Whether it is credit card data transactions, your cell phone history, your phone numbers, what you've done on the Internet, what you've done on social media or not done on social media, whether you have an account on Facebook or not doesn't

even matter. The metadata and the trailer you're leaving behind you is all aggregated, all of it behind big data corporations, all of it compromised, all of it searchable, even stuff the government has on you has been sold to large corporations because I can tell you that some of the data that they kept for like let's say DMV or MVD, they decided to sell it off to a corporation and they themselves access it through a third party when doing research on you. So all of that big data, there's a law of physics, the more you aggregate, the more it'll get compromised. Um, jeez. I'm sorry, that's the truth. No, no, no, I mean, yeah, you're, you're, you're like, it's this, there's this frustration because I can remember the days when the privacy hounds and I don't say that in a negative term, we're like warning everybody about, Hey, you don't want to be aggregating all of these different social media things together. Hey, you don't want to be using all of these services. Hey, there's actually some like real downsides like all of what's happening. Like part of why things are so cheap on Amazon is, you know, that, that your data there is, is one of the assets that they have and those people were absolutely right and they, they lost harder than anyone has ever lost at anything.

Like when I was back there at that company doing all that cryptography work, we were trying to give crypto like to the average general population of the internet. I had this, like I said, this naive view of like the future that was going to be this place where we're going to have the internet where everyone was connected and it was going to be, not only will we have personal privacy through cryptography, but we would be able to transfer information to one another in a way that would make the shenanigans impossible. Well, to some degree, that's been true. We've seen some of that. But to another degree, we also have Snowden dropping the bomb on revelations about what the government has done to the individual and how they've broken the law with all of our privacy and data. And what came of that? A man in exile in Russia and pretty much fucking nothing. Yeah, right? Nothing. And I was sitting at a DEF CON presentation where General Alexander was on the screen talking about what they weren't doing while Snowden was dropping revelations, proving him to be lying. And nothing comes of it, right? Nothing really comes of it. And one of the things that's so real and so whether it's the tribal level, your neighbors across the street, or the internet tribe. We as a people in the aggregate are always willing to give up our rights to something bigger for convenience. And we've done that. And it's called Facebook and Twitter and social media.

And in the process, what was going to be an amazing resource has become the trap. It's such a, you know, Garrison, my friend who is much younger than me, has grown up with the internet being what it is now, right? Like this kind of like nightmare trap, you know, that's sucking us all in this like giant squid that has us in its tentacles. And it's, I get, I sometimes like dissociate talking with them about certain internet things because in my heart, it's still the promised land. Yeah, I wish I, I guess my, I wish I felt that way. It doesn't feel like that way to me anymore, to be honest. I mean, it's not right. Like, I mean that in like sort of, I have this, I don't know, I've never entirely been able to like let go of the vision of like, oh, it could have been, there's so many things that could have been. Well, it's like, you know, it's like all technology, anything can be weaponized, right? Like an AR 15 can be used for good or for evil. A knife can be used to make a beautiful meal or to commit a murder. And the internet is technology and it has been weaponized.

It's been weaponized against us. But at the same time, if we just turn a blind eye to it and then not learn how to use this technology to our advantage, we're allowing them to do that unabated. And that's where like the kind of hacker mindset comes from, which is like, how do I make this thing do what I want it to do for me while not letting someone else do it for them. And unless we take control of the technology for ourselves, like I said earlier, normalizing using signal and even basic VPN and cryptography, then we're just giving it up. We're not even making it a challenge. We're just like, here you go, have it. And that's something that I think that's more important as a community. Maybe as people grow up on the internet versus seeing it becoming something that I saw become something, maybe either a they'll just accept, which I hope isn't the case that the reality is privacy is dead. Or maybe they'll approach the internet differently than say someone of my age did, where frankly we kind of messed up and we didn't realize that primrose path was actually trap. And that's a, like, that was a mistake. And maybe we can kind of like evolve beyond that. But like, you're asking, where is info set going now? I don't have good notes for that. Like when I first started working in the career, it really felt like a great thing. We were doing important stuff. We were doing DDoS mitigation.

We were going into hospitals and making sure that insulin pumps weren't compromised as a DDoS host, believe it or not. Hospitals are info set nightmares. And we were doing stuff that felt good. And then later in the career, I realized, wait a minute, I'm not doing anything to secure anybody's personal information or make the internet safer. I was just protecting some corporate coffer. And the reality was that the private information that we were supposedly protecting, the debate would turn into calls, which was what's more expensive, losing the data or the lawsuit for losing the data. Literally, those were the conversations and corporations. And those are the conversations that corporations have now about each and every one of ours personal information. Now, when you, when you think about, so I obviously, I'm in a different, that was in a different field. But when I was doing a lot of the research on terrorism that I was doing, I had these things that were like sort of the, this kind of attack is going to happen at some point. I feel that very much about like drones, there's going to be like a mass killing of civilians, not in a war zone by a civilian weaponized drone at some point in the not too distant views going to happen, it's going to be done. That's absolutely an inevitability. That kind of stuff. Do you, what are when you think about kind of the the digital equivalence of that, like, what are you looking towards? Well, I agree with you about the drone, like you can see, oh God, yes, you plot the, you plot the dots and you know, it's going to occur, right?

It's not, it's not possible to avoid. We've unleashed that out of the cage and it's going to happen. Quite honestly, I think we're seeing it already. We're seeing, we're seeing the level of privacy invasion that I don't think people already know has happened. Like, I know some of us realize that and we talk about it and we rant about it, but like, I don't think people realize the level of the incursion that has occurred to the point where all of this data aggregated to the point they know what toilet paper you prefer to buy. We're talking like people like Facebook, knowing that, or the size of the corporate oligarchy that controls the internet, whether it's the small alphabet court, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft becoming a smaller player, weirdly. But when you think about those big names, they kind of like control everything and every piece of data about you and everything you move and say that I think I think what's the end of that. I don't know how we got to the end game of that, but I don't know how we roll it back. And that's the thing. So what's the prediction? My prediction is it's going to get worse and we're going to get to the point where there isn't room to move without that surveillance tracking you. And like, so for example, you think of things like sci-fi minority report, you walk to the mall and there's facial ID happening everywhere you go with targeted advertising at the mall.

Oh, that's coming. I guarantee that's coming. And all of that's happening already. And that facial recognition stuff that's going on is happening currently now. We're just not that aware of it happening. The cop car is driving down the road and every license plate is being measured with the cameras being OCR optical character recognition. And that's coming back and they're tracking every car they're driving by on the highway, even though there's not a GPS unit on your car. The ability to not be tracked will soon be impossible. How's that? Yeah, I mean, allegedly, when I was younger, there were like certain stupid petty crimes I would commit just because like people will not be able to do this in the future. And I have a moral responsibility to steal the light bulbs from in front of this bar and throw them in my dress. One day that will be a thing that people can't do without getting caught. And so like I just I had to, you know, there are like some bright spots because I think you're absolutely right. There's no on like a broader scale. There's no turning back the clock for stuff like facial recognition and how fucked up it's going to get.

There are states like where I live in Oregon where like they have passed laws that are just like you public facial recognition is not a thing that is legal in this state. And I definitely support more attempts like that because again, anything you can do to stymie them to reduce the spread of the grid to reduce the profitability of these things, even though it's again, overall a doomed cause, right? Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I obviously I think that that's a good law, but I don't know that laws stop corporations when corporations have more power than law. Yes, of course. And it's like, I mean, obviously, you can you can ban it for police to use and stuff, which does something to the extent that, you know, they follow the law. But none of this is, I don't know, like I that's one of the things that makes me most depressed about the future is the thought that like the space for and this is not like a major issue, I guess, but like the space for kids are just like fuck around and do dumb shit when they're 19 is going to get so much smaller. I mean, I would say, I mean, I think the thing is like as a natural human being, whether you're doing anything wrong, even if you're not doing anything wrong, the nature to feel like you have a private space that's to your private community space.

I'm not even talking about wrong or right here. We're just talking about just that feeling that at this moment, this is my space where I'm not being watched is a natural healthy need of the human orgasm. Yeah, organism. Interesting. Yeah, but no, it's a it's a human need. And I think we're going to find those spaces become smaller and smaller. And I think when you said what's your prediction, I hate to say it, but I think the prediction is, it will become impossible to not be tracked. Now, yes, the bright side of that, the bright side of that, maybe, maybe there's a bright side. But at some point, when that's the reality, it could somehow also affect the people that are powerful. And the people that are small. And we all realize that humans are humans. And therefore, the failings that sometimes we have as all human beings, we just kind of acknowledge and be like, Oh, yeah, of course.

That's just what people do. Like maybe we just realize people are people. But the idea that there's never going to be a space to not get tracked. I don't know, to me, I find darkly disturbing. It is disturbing. I do think it kind of to pivot off of what you were saying. The other aspect of that that is more positive is that all of this stuff, all of this surveillance shit, or at least not all, but quite a bit of it is, you know, in a way, it's like a knife fight. There's no way that both parties don't get cut. And, you know, the ones wielding the knife might get cut less, but they're still going to get cut. Part of what that means in this situation is that the prevalence of all of these different ways to surveil and track also allows us to track the in the same way that like police law enforcement watches people through their phones, but also a hell of a lot of cops are getting filmed doing fucked up shit now, right? No, that's that's a great. It does cut both ways. Now, again, the balance of the cuts, I don't think is going to be work out in our favor, but it's not going to be nothing on them either. And you're right. I think there are. There are some things that we will learn in the future about the people in power in the world that it wouldn't have been possible for us to learn in the past or may not be possible even right now. And that could be beneficial. And if we learn that about people in power, then they can't weaponize it as much against the people that aren't in power, right?

Yeah, you know, one thing that I'm because I'm thinking a lot about the fact that a bunch of folks in the reproductive health care industry have pointed out that right wingers have started using drones to follow people home from like Planned Parenthoods or follow them to their cards to like build databases of people who are going to places to potentially like do that kind of reproductive health care that these folks don't think should exist. The other side of it, though, is that it is also possible to surveil them and it will be possible to track the people doing that sort of thing and it will be possible to do that in terms of like legal accountability and it will be possible to do that for the people who embrace questionably legal tactics for for frustrating those efforts or illegal tactics for frustrating those efforts. They have access to the same technology. And again, it's it is a knife that will cut everybody. And I guess that's better than just one person getting cut in this situation. That's that's the concern I have, right? I agree with that. Like I said, technology goes, it's a weapon and is weaponized in all directions, depending on how you use it for good or for bad. And so this is the same place I come to when it comes to the gun control argument. I mean, yeah, we did get to guns. No, no, no, it's the same problem, right? Because if we allow only one side to have all of the control and power and understanding of the technology, then we at ourselves are at a huge deficit.

We cannot defend ourselves or fight back. So when it comes to this kind of data and technology, knowing the basic fundamentals of what you can do to protect yourself, understand the reality of what the surveillance state or a corporation is, and then doing your best to not make it easy for them is at least one step forward. But if we don't own this technology, if we don't own the tech, someone else will. And they will use it against us. It's as simple as that. And like, they're super simple stuff. Like I was going to bring this up and like, you can't see video because it's a podcast, but like there's these cool glasses from doctoral called reflecticles that I'm showing you, Robert. And it looked like regular sunglasses. But when you put them on, they do, they reflect IR light and actually mess with cameras in a way that your turns your diet facing a ball of light. That's awesome. You can wear these. You can wear their called reflecticles. You can wear them and just walk around the mall and all the cameras get blown out by your by your glasses. Like, see, doing that just because you can is kind of fun. That's the hot shit. That's the shit I was promised that that at least does exist. It's not everything I had hoped it would be in terms of its ability, but it is like that kind of stuff rules and I will be picking up a pair of those.

Well, we should probably close out. I did want to note because I mentioned this, I got something a little wrong when I was talking about the facial recognition ban. It is an ordinance in the city of Portland itself. It's the first city that has done this and it prohibits the use of public facial recognition technology by all private businesses in the city. So that is the scope of the band that ban that exists in Portland. I recommend looking it up. It is the kind of thing that I would support everyone pushing for in their city. Because again, the more holes you can make in this thing, the better. Yeah, I don't want to put that down. That's a good thing. But the challenge of this is just like I mentioned earlier, moving the data out of the conus and back. The minute photos from like I take my iPhone and scan the crowd and then put that picture up on the Internet. Yeah, it's not under their jurisdiction and all that facial recognition happens on every face in that. And that is, again, we'll do another episode at some point about things that you can do to discuss. That's a whole different bag of tricks. But this has been really useful and really valuable. Carl, do you want to plug anything before we roll out here?

Not much. That's my normal thing. If you're interested in this kind of content, but with a more firearms oriented thing, you can find me at inrange.tv. But you'll also find some information security stuff there as well. I cover that intermittently when it applies to both topics. So if you if you even if you disagree but appreciate my approach to this, come check me out. I appreciate it. Awesome. Check out Carl, check out in range TV and continue to listen to podcasts because the only thing that will save us is podcasts. Well, I didn't seem right, but good for business. Oh, it could happen here is the podcast. We're talking about things falling apart. And you know, a place where things have fallen apart a bit is large chunks of Ukraine due to a Russian invasion. And, you know, we've chatted about this a bit on the show. We've had some interviews with some folks who are living and fighting over there. And today we're going to talk with Jake Hanrahan, a friend of the pod, who has been over a couple of times this year, including since the more expanded conflict began and has just released a new documentary on the popular front YouTube called Ukraine's anti fascist football hooligans fighting the Russian invasion. Jake, how you doing? Thanks for having me back. Thanks for being on. Now, Jake, first off, I guess we can get into YouTube censorship stuff, but I want to chat about, like, how this story came about and when you kind of got in contact with these people,

because kind of in brief what you have, you know, the clips notes that you hear from like folks who have kind of an axe to grind is that like, you know, Ukraine is all neo Nazis and the governments all run by neo Nazis. And the reality is that Ukraine obviously has a substantial Nazi problem. And as with any country where you have a substantial Nazi problem and some degree of freedom in terms of, you know, your ability to organize for other political purposes, you also have a shitload of people who are anti fascists who have been fighting those fascists in the street, often with intense levels of violence. And this is a story about a group of those people who have now kind of retooled their organization and capacity towards fighting the Russian invasion. Yeah, man, exactly that. I mean, so what I wanted to do with popular front, you know, I've been reporting from Ukraine since 2016, I've been there more than 10 times on the ground in the Donbass like way before, you know, people were focused on the area again before the invasion. So I was very aware of, yeah, there is a significant fascist element to the militias out there. But it's the same, any country in Europe that would have a war would have the exact same thing. Trust me, if we had it in Britain, we would have a similar issue, you know, Eastern Europe, obviously it's a little bit more hardcore. But that's the way it is, that's Eastern Europe for you. And I will mention just at the top as well, I would argue that Russia has a much worse neo Nazi problem. They had more than 15 people were killed between 2014 and 2015 by an actual neo Nazi serial killer gang in Moscow that filmed these attacks. They have a massive neo Nazi party.

You know, they're exporting Nazis all across Europe. And we know there are several, you know, well trained neo Nazi battalions fighting for the pro-Russian. So it's neither here nor there. Yes, there's Nazi problems in the region. But I didn't want to constantly be on this back for like, no, actually, yes, there's a Nazi problem, but not this, not that. I was like, how can we do a documentary that's kind of a positive way to be like, well, instead of saying, no, not everyone is this, or having to film with a unit and then being like, actually, these guys are fascists. How can I show? Black sun patches are uncomfortable. Yeah, right. Like, oh, a totem cough again. Like, it was like, how can I kind of put a dock out there where it's like, oh, no, actually, like, here's a different side to it. And, you know, this group, obviously, as soon as the war started, again, Ukraine is a country of 44 million people and it's a very diverse, a very smart, very open country in terms of people will tell you what they think and they will argue with you. And you won't be, you know, you can have like really serious discussions with people about politics there and not fall out, you know. You know, very, I think like a very clever people are really nice people. I love Ukraine, love Ukrainians. So, so it's, to me, it was, I knew about the place like, yeah, of course, there's a massive anti fascist element in Ukraine. Okay, it's definitely smaller than the fascist element, but already, since the war started with there's eco platform, there's Harkiv hardcore, there's the resistance committee, that's called to its clan, there's operational solidarity, like, there's a Nestor Makno machine gun repair unit and there's so many different anti fascist left wing elements to the conflict, they just get a lot less attention because the fascists have got really good propaganda over the years.

And let's be honest, a lot of the fascist groups are fighting in the East and right now, it's kind of, look, combat, yeah. Well, it all hands on deck, right? It's like, everyone's like, yeah, okay, we don't really care. Like, we just want to not die, which is understandable. But my point is, I looked at this, this group, the resistance committee, which is this kind of anti authoritarian, you know, coalition of various different units. They have Revdia under their wing, which is an anarchist group in Ukraine that I made a documentary with a few years ago. So I was looking on, maybe we'll do a doc on Revdia again now that they're fighting on the front. But then I see this other group with them put towards clan and it's like, what? Like, firstly, the name is kind of weird. Right. In the U.S. that brings up some unpleasant connotations. In the U.S., yeah. I mean, it didn't really click to me, but I get it.

So what does like hoods mean? So basically, when they would go and do, you know, when they would go and beat up fascists, they'd all be like, right, hoods up, hoods, hoods, hoods, hoods. Oh, gotcha, because you're putting your hoodie up so you don't get, like, spotted on camera. Right, exactly, quick, hoods, hoods, hoods up. There's footage of them beating up Nazis as well, chanting, they had a chant, hoods, hoods, hoods, like, you know, to put the fucking fear into them. Yeah, it's dope as hell, yeah. Yeah, and then clan, I mean, the Ukrainian translation of clan, it's with a K, it's not about the Ku Klux Klan, you know. Anglicization can lead to some unfortunate things.

Right, right. But also, you know, they're smart guys and at first I thought this wasn't true, but then I spoke to them, it was true. They were kind of aware, they're like, yeah, HHK, Hutsuts Klan, they're kind of trolling KKK. Like, it's like a second meaning, because in Ukraine, you know, they've got that culture, they're very cheeky, they think it's very funny to be like, ha, ha, you know, fuck you. So for them, they were like, yeah, we're basically trolling the fascists. Like, they hear Hutsuts Klan and they're like, oh, surprise, sorry, we're anti-fascists, you know what I mean? Boom, your head's broken. So it was kind of that vibe and, you know, they didn't really think about it.

You know, he's like the kind of de facto leader. He was like, he told me this and then he was like, I just kind of wanted to piss people off as well. And you got to remember, these guys started over 10 years ago before, you know, politics was as online as it is. And they started off in the hardcore punk scene. Now, you know, I'm sure you know, like, you know, hardcore punk, especially in Europe is like a very, very exciting, very fun, very happy and like gnarly fucking scene. So for them, it was like, yeah, we're the Hutsuts Klan, like, you know what I mean? But unfortunately, some people in America are like, why are they called Hutsuts Klan? I don't believe that they're anti-fascists.

It's just like, mate, there's over 70 videos of them beating up Nazis successfully. It's a whole continent that doesn't have the same history as the United States, right? You can't assume that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, even if you said in England, like KKK, like now people would be like, who? Oh, yeah. Like, oh, yeah, I've heard of that.

It's not like we didn't have it here like that, you know? Yeah, and it's one of those, so I mean, one of the things that's interesting here and that you hit on in your documentary is like these folks, that these are not just like anti-authoritarian folks. They're very much committed to anti-racism, which is, you know, a place like Ukraine where the history of there being, you know, folks who are not white is not quite as extensive as it is in a lot of places. It's really interesting to me to have people who are kind of organizing specifically for that purpose. And I think really cool. Yeah. Yeah, it is really cool.

And it's for them, what I found very fascinating is it's just natural. So, you know, I said, you know, their political ideologies, some of them are like, well, some of us are anarchists. Some of us are kind of anti-fascist, but otherwise kind of a political. And, you know, it's very simple for them. It's like, why are you? I asked them, well, how come you guys are anti-fascist? And they're like, well, we just see life differently. Like, you know, it's like, obviously, like there was no big political theory.

It was just like, no, it's just basically they were like, it's just wrong, you know, like fascism is just wrong. And we're tough guys, you know, and we joined, we were, we wanted to be the ones that said, no, we're not the fascists. We're the anti-fascists. And luckily for them, they had a really good friendship group and a very solid group who were all very good at combat sports. And like in the doc, you know, Anton says, our enemies is almost every other Ukrainian football firm in the whole of the country. But you will ask even their enemies, they will tell you like, yeah, unfortunately, those guys are tough, you know, they, they can fight, you know. It would have to be. Yes, exactly.

They had to be. They were like, we had to be, you know, so I mean, I, I do my research. I found a kind of a fascist football altars forum in Eastern Europe that banned any mention of hoodswords clan and it kind of boiled down to the fact they were just so embarrassed. So many of the fascist groups were getting beaten up, like by, by anti-fascist and often outnumbered, you know, even got to a point where hoodswords clan weren't allowed to, they wouldn't even talk to them to do like arranged fights anymore in the field. So instead of quitting hoodswords clan said, okay, then when we see you, we'll just beat you up in the subway. We'll beat you up in the street. Like, you know, and a lot of people might say, oh, well, this is violence. For me, the football hooliganism side of it, I don't see an issue with it personally.

I mean, they're not attacking anyone innocent. They're not attacking bystanders. It was all very contained. It was all very, you know, it was, that was their thing. You know, so that, that to me is, is whatever. And when you're talking about neo-Nazi groups that were, I mean, in Ukraine, they've stabbed up the Roma community, they're destroying LGBT events. And, you know, hoodswords clan were just like, no, we're not about that. We don't think you should do that.

And so they formed and for 10 years they were fighting. But now they have called a truce because they're like, you know, Anton explains in the doc, he says, look, there's a bigger problem now, because Ukraine is actually not a Nazi junta, as the Kremlin says. It's actually quite easy to kind of, you know, it's a very small subset in the, in the relative size of the actual military. So, you know, it's actually for them. They said, well, yeah, it makes sense. We put all our other political differences aside, because this is way bigger. You're talking about one of the most powerful militaries on earth, invading our country and killing our people. I mean, we've seen the massacres in Butcher and Erpin, you know, people killed civilians, hands behind their back, executed in the street.

30 of the people killed in Butcher were children. Like, you know, this is just insane. So for them, they were like, yeah, we can, we can call a truce. You know, we don't like them. But right now we're not going to beat each other up on the front line. But I think it really kind of shows the testament of how serious Hothood's clan are about the anti-fascism that even whilst in the truce, most of them actually still joined the resistance committee, the anti-authoritarian groups. So they're not just directly next to fascist battalions. But again, you know, a lot is changing out there in the front now.

I don't know. Anton said to me, he was like, I'll be honest with you. We didn't put this in the dark. He said, I'll be honest. I think after this war, a lot of these far right guys might change their minds, because now we see what totalitarianism brings. Death, you know what I mean? Whether that's hopeful thinking or not, I'm not sure. But you know what I'm saying? Because obviously I would hope that that's what happens.

I tend to go away. But yeah, the thing that scares me, of course, is there's just as at least as much a chance that, you know, they get more powerful. Which is again, part of why it's important for folks like Hothood's clan to be organizing and getting weapons and being prepared. Because like, yeah, that if that conflict comes after the war, you know, you don't want the fascist militias to be the best armed and most organized. Yeah. And this is the issue, you know, but I think for them, it's like, OK, we'll deal with that when it comes, you know, like, I think they're very aware that this war is going nowhere, you know. And, you know, they say in our doc, oh, we just want to go and kill Russian pigs. I mean, you know, what they mean is, I mean, some people are like, well, that's really bad. I was like, mate, you're talking about that.

It's a war, man. It's a war, right? They were they were guarding the areas where the massacres happened, you know. Yeah. Hothood's clan got shelled, trying to get civilians out of Borodanka when Russians were shelling. You're talking women and children. Yeah, I'm surprised they said that mildly, you know, like, yeah, like, you know, it's a war, man, it is what it is. And also their football hooligans, their wild people, you know. Yeah, it's it's, I mean, that is kind of interesting, though. I'm curious, do you have kind of an assessment of what kind of numbers they're looking at?

Like how many folks they've actually got in the field on a regular basis? Yeah, so the resistance committee is, I don't know, like 50 to 100 right now. Hothood's clan, they have like maybe 20 to 30 of their guys in that group. But then they also have other people that joined different units in the East. So they were like already military, so they didn't have to go, you know, a former militia. They just joined the military. So there's like quite a strong Hothood's clan mortar group. And I know that so one of the footage we included in our documentary where a Russian tank gets blown up like very close quarters.

He gets hit with a javelin. He's like 100 feet away. That was a Hothood's clan attack. That was one of their guys doing it, you know. Yeah, so yeah, so there's they're all over the place. Unfortunately, due to various bureaucracy within the territorial defense, I do think that the resistance committee might have to split up to actually get to the front. You know what I mean?

Like they're probably going to have to join other units because there's some issues that the, you know, various people, they're just not sending them out there. It's not because they're anti-fascist or anything. It's nothing to do with that. It's because, you know, it's corruption, man. There is some corruption emerging. Some commanders just want to sit around and not actually have to go to the front. Whereas, you know, the fighters themselves are desperate because they're like, you know, our people are dying. We want to avenge them and we want to stop it.

So, you know, right now, Woods is planning essentially on their way. They're doing a lot more training right now. They've been given the go ahead. Yeah, they're going to the east. And as far as I know, they're kind of on route, obviously stopping off doing training. I think they have an RPG, they're going to be an RPG unit. So there'll be a very close quarters. You know what I'm saying?

So it's going to be gnarly for them. These guys, as you stated, all kind of started out as a friend group, right? Like they weren't, this isn't a political party. These aren't like, these guys didn't start as ideological comrades. They were like buddies who are into the same team and into the same kind of combat sports. And now they're, you know, they're going to be, some of them are going to be dying in front of the others, which is like a difficulty, I think. I'm interested in kind of how are they actually organizing sort of in the field?

Is it just, as I've heard of a number of militia units, kind of along the lines of the Ukrainian military? Or have they kind of adopted different organizational styles in their hoods hoods units as befit sort of their unique kind of origins? Yeah, that's a good question. Well, I mean, it's kind of tricky because essentially they're, you know, I guess they formed as a militia, you know, as soon as the war started, they got guns. But then, you know, Anton was like, we have everything from the anti fascist networks, everything we need apart from the weapons. So they had to sign up as a part of the territorial defense to get weapons. So they're under the territorial defense, as are, you know, 100 other different people that did the same thing. So luckily, forward to its clan, I think because they're so close friends, I mean, you can see it in the dock, you know, I even the subtitle of our dock is like, you know, this is a film about friendship, violence and resistance,

because that's essentially what it is, you know, so they're very close friends. So commanders have recognized that that, yeah, this is a group that is disciplined as well. A lot of them are straight edge, which is actually a discipline in itself, you know what I mean. So they're very well disciplined. They're very good, you know, the training is very good. They know what they're doing, but they have like a commander that is from the territorial defense. If you like, it's not, he's not hood hood clan. He's never been assigned a commander sort of thing.

So they're being taught just the same kind of tactics as anybody else as they're an RPG unit. I think, you know, there'll be a lot of close quarters stuff, but they're just doing a lot of arms training. There's, you know, Constantine in the dock, one of them is like, I just want to get better faster. They're very focused on being like, not an elite unit, but they want to get it perfect. They're not just like, yeah, let's go and kill. They're like, no, we have to be good, you know what I mean? We have to go in there and have the same discipline and organization as we had in the streets when we were fighting. The reason that they were renowned as being a good street fighter in football, looking firm, despite being completely outnumbered,

it's because they had good discipline. They're tough. They trained and also because they're good friends, they will have each other's back. It's not a hobby for them. It's a lifestyle, you know. Yeah, it's just so much went into it. You know, hood hood clan started off the back of anti-fascist punk, punk hardcore in Ukraine. And then that itself was a scene.

And then the football organism and then, yeah, now it's crazy really. It's honestly one of the most fascinating stories I've covered. Now they're a fucking frontline unit. It's sad, man. I hope to God nothing happens to any of them. Probably the nicest guys I've filmed with, you know. But yeah, it's a good question, man. And it's very tricky to know how it's going to happen for them once they're on the front.

I mean, Anton, the main guy he has served before in 2014, he joined the militia to fight in the Donbas. So they do have some experience, you know. And it does seem like kind of their natural, the skills that they've been developing. Because there's broadly speaking, from my understanding, kind of two main types of combat going on in Ukraine. There's what you're seeing a lot in the Donbas, which is this kind of like meat grinder, like frontline shit. And then there's sort of the seek and destroy kind of stuff where you've got people sort of hunting convoys and doing ambushes. And it does strike me like these guys' talents would lend themselves more to the ambushes than... I mean, there's not really any talent that helps you in the sitting in a trench meat grinder kind of shit.

But obviously, you don't have that choice when you're serving under, you know, the national military. Yeah, yeah. I think you're right. Like, they would be much better placed as like, you know, I guess like a kind of shooting scoop kind of unit. Right, exactly. Yeah. And I think they will be because, you know, they're trained with RPG. Some of their fighters already have javelins on the front and and laws. So, yeah, I think that's where it'll be if they just put them in some kind of meat grinder position, which very much could happen. You know, I mean, it's bad for anybody. Let's be realistic. It's getting very bad in the Donbas right now.

It's a nightmare. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and that's one of the there's been posts and stuff from people talking about like, you know, the a lot of the fuck ups that are happening. Because, you know, Ukraine started this war with everyone being kind of overwhelmed by the competence of their military effort. And now that things in the Donbas have turned into this kind of ugly slog, there's been some, you know, oh, the, you know, units getting hit by their own artillery fire. There's been messy stuff that happens when you have a fight like this, right? Like it is it is unavoidable when you have like a situation like has developed in the Donbas. But that doesn't make it any less unpleasant to endure as an actual soldier. Like it's just, it's one of those. I mean, there's only so much that like competence and training can do if you wind up getting squeezed into that kind of position. And this is why a lot of people, even Ukrainians actually had a conversation with a Ukrainian friend yesterday that was saying like, you know, the situation is so bad in the East.

We really need to be honest about this because, you know, if people think it's going better than it is, okay, it's good for morale, but it's not good for the guys on the ground. Like they're not going to get what they need. And the reality is that it's getting really bad and it's not anything to do with incompetence from the fighters. It's just the war. The level is getting so hot. And, you know, Russia has learned from its mistakes, unfortunately, from the start where they completely fucked up. But now, you know, things are getting a little bit hairy. Ukrainians are doing like an incredible effort. But again, it's like, yeah, you're talking about decades and decades of armor and, you know, weapons that Russia has. It's very well US being like, oh, 20% of their armor is blah blah blah. I doubt it. You know, I very much doubt that.

It doesn't look like that, certainly from when people I'm talking to in the East, you know, so I think, again, when, you know, Ukrainians are like, well, we do need more weapons, it's because they need more weapons. You know what I mean? They really do. Well, this is like one of the, this is one of the things that's difficult to, I think, get across to people. Because there is such a, you know, we are dealing with the legacy of decades of shipping weapons places and not having that help the conflict in a lot, in a lot of ways. And decades of stories, like, you know, all the weapons that got sent to the Iraqi government and then wound up in ISIS's armory and shit. Which creates kind of an easy narrative for folks who are like, well, you know, you're just trying to prolong the conflict and making it worse by shipping in weapons. But the reality is, one side of this war has a substantial percentage of all of the artillery that exists on the planet. Yeah. And the other side does not.

Yeah. And I do understand that argument, though, like I totally get it. Yeah. It's, it's, I lived through the early 2000s as well. I understand it. Yeah. It's like war isn't a template. It's not like, well, does this happen there, this weapon there, or whatever.

And it's like, you have to weigh it up no matter what bad is going to come from this. Do you want the bad to be, okay, there's a problem with arms in Eastern Ukraine, which they're Eastern Europe, which there already is, and it gets worse? Or do you want the bad problem to be Russia's taken over the whole country, massacred everybody and is, unlike, undoubtedly going to try and move into other countries? Yeah. It's like, do you want AIDS or do you want cancer? I don't know. And do you want the, do you want the lesson from this to be that if you're just willing to burn a couple of hundred thousand human lives as a state like Russia or any other state, you can easily gain access to, you know, a pile of wealth, right, in the shape of a country, which isn't a positive, it's not like a good lesson for anyone to take out of this, but like, if, if Russia wins, that's the lesson, right? Yeah.

Yeah, no, that's the reality. Like, it's all very nice having a 50 tweet, Twitter thread about why this, that and a third should or shouldn't happen. But that's just completely removed from real life. I mean, real life is, it's going to be very bad, very nasty, no matter what happens. And you just have to weigh it. Oh, I don't like NATO. Oh, I don't like this. Yeah, me neither. But I care about people that die for no reason, you know, like, I think that's the real issue. I think people need to stand with the people, you know, and if that means, okay, use the tools that you have. Okay, like, oh, I don't like NATO. Well, yeah, but they're going to give them weapons. Do you think that Ukrainians like having Russian firearms? Probably not, but they also don't give a shit because they shoot. It's that simple, you know, kind of coming back to the subject of your documentary.

If weapons are going to be going over there and by God they are, I would hope that as many of them as possible are going into the hands of people like the hoods hoods clan, right? Yeah, I mean, that is, that is a, yeah, a lot of, there's definitely, this isn't from them telling me, but it's just from research I've done. There's definitely a discrepancy in terms of which groups get what weapons and it's not based on ideology, but it's definitely based on some serious bureaucracy that needs to be sorted out. You know, I have some, some Western volunteers that I know that are on the front right now. And they're saying like, for some reason, you know, one unit that is not an RPG unit, for example, have more rockets than the RPG unit, you know, and it's like, what, like, and that's not because they've used them all. It's supply lines. Again, it's not even corruption often. It's just supply lines are wrecked or whatever, but it has to be addressed. It has to be looked at. I mean, I'm no tactician. I don't know anything about that side of things. I'm just basing it on what, you know, people are telling me because, you know, I like to talk to them and hear what's happening. Yeah. I think we should move into, you know, when I when I pull up your documentary on YouTube, which is again for folks at home titled Ukraine's anti fascist football hooligans fighting the Russian invasion.

The first thing that I see is this video may be inappropriate for some users. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and it's we've talked a lot on our various shows on this network about all of the fascist propaganda that you can find, not even find on YouTube that will be like spoon fed to you if you wind up like watching a video game review or something. Oh, yeah. Yeah, this is something that you've been dealing with on popular front. Somebody seems to have like an axe to grind with you guys. I don't know. Maybe it's just the algorithm, but I'll be honest. I felt like it was just the algorithm until this recent one. Right. So, so yeah, like you said, if people want to fight, I mean, the dots called frontline hooligan, but yeah, the SEO. Yeah, it's Ukraine's anti fascist fighting Russian invasion.

Yeah. But yeah, the second it was uploaded, it got age restricted. Now that to me is very odd. I don't get why there's no gore in it. Okay, yeah, there's violence, but there's a guideline where you can show violence in if it's relative to reporting which obviously it is because it's an anti fascist football looking firm fighting Russia. So of course we're going to show what that looks like. But yeah, there's there's no, there's no gore. There's no, there's just, it's just lads hanging out talking about their lives now they've been tipped upside down and how they really dislike the far right. Now, to give you an idea of how messed up this is. There's a real a real parasite. YouTube is called Danny Mullen and he has a video on YouTube where him and his, his friend boy for them scoundrels go to the Mexican border and the whole video is trying to get with quote like hot Ukrainian refugees. Now it's the most disgusting thing you've ever seen. They're praying on young girls. Some of them are very clearly underage and that is monetized. That is monetized.

And it is even on the algorithm. I found it because I was watching Ukraine war stuff and it was put onto my recommended. Now these are the biggest parasites you've ever seen in your life. And they have hundreds and hundreds of thousands of subscribers and they're making money from content like that. That is not age restricted. There is no censorship thing. There is no message saying this might be offensive. But a documentary which is 100% journalistic covering anti fascists fighting one of the worst invasions we've seen in Europe is suddenly deemed inappropriate and is age restricted on YouTube. Tell me what's going on there. That doesn't seem right to me. So basically YouTube by doing that is saying we're actually happy to make money off of people that exploit underage Ukrainian refugees, but we're not happy for people showing the world a different side to the war. That to me is madness. Like it doesn't make any sense to me, you know, and it's nothing but soft censorship. Some people are telling me it's not, it's not censorship.

Of course it is censorship. This is the way the world works now. Yeah, because I mean a huge chunk of the success or the visibility of anything that you're putting on YouTube is whether or not the algorithm is going to like suggest it to people. Even people who have watched your other like not not even talking about like suggesting it to somebody who's never heard of popular front but like people who have watched multiple things that you've done and are just on YouTube. The thing that would make sense is for when you put out a new thing them to get like YouTube to be like, hey, we know you've watched this shit. Check out this. But that's not going to happen for a lot of folks because of this kind of thing, which is yeah, fucked up. Yeah, yeah, right. And it's like, it's not just me either. Like, I mean, it's other people it's happening as well. And basically what it is is if we wanted to make the doc somehow be allowed to be monetized or not even monetize. I don't even want the monetization. The whole channel is demonetized. I just want it to not be a restricted because that is an algorithm torpedo. And you know, it's like I would have to recut the whole documentary essentially censor myself my own journalism make it to me make make the integrity of the doc weaker just to be able people to see it like this is war. This is real life. I just it's just really depressing.

And this is something I mean, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook have all been guilty of degrees of this. But there's this of all of the things that don't that are allowed to spread unchecked on those platforms. They have this consistent, maybe because it's it's easier to algorithmically go after but this this consistent pattern of going after war journalism. And like, your, you know, what's happening to your documentary is a piece of this but like the much scarier piece is a tremendous amount of documentation of war crimes in places like Syria have been deleted. Kind of automatically over the years, which means that like, again, evidence of crimes against humanity has been lost forever because of these kind of like purges of war content that I don't think are actually protecting anybody from anything but are in perhaps even making things worse. Yeah, of course, and it allows Russian propaganda or whatever, like, people are going to seek that out and they're going to digest it, whatever way they can. So then surely you should say, okay, take the brakes off. Let's, you know, if you care, which I mean YouTube is a media platform, you would think that they would say, okay, well, this is kind of our duty to balance it out to allow all the free information. I'm not even saying, oh yeah, throttle Russian propaganda, I think people have a choice to see whatever they want to see, even if it is completely ridiculous. But the fact that they're censoring the stuff that you would think is okay to see because for, for, for I know, you know, our content there, you won't find a lie in that documentary, you know, we're very honest, very frank with the situation.

We're not whitewashing fascism in Ukraine. And we're certainly not putting out Russian propaganda, we're just telling an interesting journalistic story. So you would think as a media platform, that would be like, yeah, right up their street, but it's not really a media platform. It's a moneymaking platform and, you know, they just, they just survive for adverts. Yep. And I think that is kind of where we're going to, we're going to leave off for today, unless you have, do you have anything else you wanted to get into on your documentary, Jake? No, man, I just, I guess the last thing I would say is I want people to kind of know that there are many different factions out there. This isn't, you know, I saw someone comment being like, oh, you found the only fascist and anti-fascist in Ukraine. I was like, no, there's, there's, I've been documenting them. There's thousands. There's so many, you know, and not just like, oh, anti-fascist, yeah, we, this is what we believe, like people form in units.

There's a whole pipeline of anti-authoritarian activists. There's loads. And generally, like Ukrainians are happy, you know, they'll take the help they can get. It's not like Ukrainians are like, God damn, those anti-fascists, no, they love them. They love them the same way they love anybody that's defending the country. You know, it's, it's just normal. And I think people should really, you know, if they want to watch our doc as well, like if they can share it, that would be great because it's just very, it's a struggle to get people to watch it now because of, because of it's been torpedoed on the algorithm. So if they go to youtube.com slash popular front, they'll find it's the first stop there. But yeah, if people can share it, that'd be great. All right. Well, check it out. Again, the title is Ukraine's anti-fascist football hooligans fighting the Russian invasion on the popular front YouTube channel. We're also going to have a link in the bio if you are someone who doesn't like to type things. Yeah. Thank you, Jake. All right, everybody, that's the episode.

Welcome to it could happen here, a show that is currently taking place in the death of abortion rights in the U.S. And yeah, it's not good. With me to talk about this is Shereen is Sophie is Garrison and is Robert Evans. And OK, so what one of the things that's been happening in the immediate wake of the Supreme Court decision that has destroyed Roe v. Wade is there's been a lot of discussion about the abortion rights movement in Mexico. And by discussion, I mean in sort of classical American fashion, people saw exactly one meme and reposted it. And that's now the sum of like all American knowledge about the abortion struggle in Mexico. So to try to get a deeper understanding of what's been going on in Mexico and how the struggle for abortion was one there. We're talking to Erica Yamada, who's a feminist and human rights activist born and raised in Mexico. Erica, thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, thank you.

Thank you so much, Chris sharing to see Garrison and Robert. I'm so honored and excited to be here and very grateful to be considered to share about the struggle for abortion rights in Mexico. So before starting this discussion, I would like to share a little bit about myself and the organization I work in to have some background about the experiences and data I will be communicating in this space. I have been involved in many agendas for girls and women's rights for approximately eight years now. I am currently part of the woman delivered 2020 class, and I also work in the non governmental organization gender quality citizenship work and family that has 25 years of experience working for sexual and reproductive rights in Mexico, particularly for the access to legal and safe abortion. Our organization promotes and advocates for the sexual and reproductive health and rights of use through the DC, the DC is the network for sexual and reproductive rights in Mexico that has presence in 12 states and we focus mainly on marginalized communities. We support children use women and advocate for change at local, regional and national level, and their access is contributing to the criminalize abortion guarantee access to health services and generate a favorable public opinion about women's rights to decide. We are also part of the National Code Choice Alliance in Mexico, an effort of five organizations, gender equality, the Population Council, IFA's Central America, Catholics for the right to decide, and he did it with different expertise regarding abortion.

Together, we have worked on comprehensive strategies that include the legal, the social, religious, ethical and investigation aspects of abortion. And well, I would like to start like sharing some of the context and the legal situation of abortion in Mexico if it's okay or yes please. In our country, voluntary abortion during the 12 weeks of pregnancy is legalized only in certain states. Mexico City, the capital was the only state in the whole country that they criminalized abortion in 2007. 12 years later in 2019, the state of of Oaxaca became the second state to ensure access to this health service. Afterwards, 2021 was historic. It was a very, very historic year to us. Four states, Hidalgo, Veracruz, Baja California, and Polina also the criminalized abortion. Then this year, 2022, three other states have been added to this list. Sinaloa Guerrero and Baja California Sur. This means nine out of 32 states have decriminalized abortion. In the other states of the Mexican Republic, abortion is only allowed under certain grounds established by the law of each entity. For example, if it was a spontaneous abortion, if the pregnancy was due to non-consensual insemination, if the woman's life is in danger of death, if the product has serious genetic alterations, if the pregnancy causes health effects, among other reasons. It depends on each criminal code of each state. And I also must add that pregnancy due to rape is the only indication that permits legal abortion in all states.

And now, coming back to what Chris said, that there was like a meme. I think you refer to the meme of the public protest. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, of the black clad female protesters attacking. I couldn't tell if it's, I don't recall if it's a city hall or a police station or something. There's a building they're going after. I have also seen some of these media reports that say that they say that we achieved legal abortion thanks to these radical public demonstrations. And while it is undeniable that among the most significant achievements is the grow mobilization of feminists and women to eradicate violence and demand justice. Mexico, Mexico has demonstrated the world, this revolutionary progress with the mass feminist protest. And this image is from 2019. It was a huge feminist protest that condemned violence against women, especially sexual and feminine side violence, police brutality and the community that permeates the governmental system. We received a lot of international media attention, and it has been one of the, like the recent highlights of the feminist movement in our country. Like the struggle for abortion entails so much more. And yes, it did have some influence. For example, in 2020, feminists in two states, Quintana Ruan Puebla took their local Congresses and demanded the discussion of abortion initiatives. And they have put this agenda on the table. It is worth mentioning that the struggle for abortion, that it goes back so many years. Feminists have been fighting for reproductive rights, including the access to legal abortion for that. The progress regarding this struggle has unfolded historically during these recent years for many other reasons.

One thing I want to go back to a little bit to talk about is you were talking about the protests being pro-abortion protests, but also talking about anti-femecide and anti-violent stuff. And I was wondering if you could talk about the anti-femecide campaigns too, because that's been a really big part of this that gets basically no coverage in the US. Well, in Mexico, 11 women are murdered every day. We have a huge femicide problem that has been silenced by the government, even by the president who minimizes this horrible situation. So in 2019, there was an emblematic case where police officers raped and tortured a girl, and that's how this protest started. And since August 2019, most feminist protests have been regarding the violence against women. But I would also like to add about the struggle for abortion. I think that in the global south, the Maria Verde, the green tide, it played like the most fundamental role. This movement, which came from Argentina, is one of the main successes that strengthened the struggle for abortion rights, and even the feminist movement in Mexico. It expanded in many countries, including Mexico. Here we have a national green tide and many local green tide groups in all of our states. And these collectives have made a large role demanding social and legal decriminalization of abortion across the country.

And there is also an increase of networks that provide self managed abortion information and accompaniment services which have contributed to fighting the stigma that still swims abortion. And the green tide and the feminist movement, it has become like, how do you say, it's been merged and feminist movements and the green tide fight for legal and safe abortion, but also to eradicate the violence against girls and women. Yeah, that makes sense. And about the green tide, I have two questions about the green tide. One is, what kinds of tactics have green tide groups been doing? And also, how linked have the international movements been? How closely have these organizations been communicating across and working together across the different countries? Okay, since the green tide came from Argentina, like the most, how do you say, the communication comes from regional countries in Latin America, and Mexico has been learning from these Latin American countries, their experiences. We have seen the feminist movements, the protest also more in the south, and the green handkerchief has this very, very powerful symbol of legal and safe abortion, and this has also contributed to the social decriminalization of abortion. And wearing this green handkerchief in the protest also means demanding this health service. And one of our tactics is, of course, pressuring the government in Mexico, political will, primarily from the left-leaning ruling party has been fundamental for the decriminalization.

With the new government that arrived in 2018 headed by Andrés Manuel López Obrador, we have more allies and progressive legislators. So, due to the majority that this political party has in many local congresses, the feminists of each state have been able to pressure and work with these legislators and keep pushing this agenda. That's awesome. I think something that I'm still stuck on is that, at the very least, all the states agree that abortion is okay if it happened from rape. Is that what you said earlier? Like, that's the one, like... We have a federal law, it's the 046 official Mexican norm, that states that abortion is legal if the pregnancy is due to rape, and all the states, all the public officials have this obligation to ensure that this happens. But sometimes, like, we have so many prejudices that sometimes even doctors don't respect the law, but by law it should be legal, and it's not that they all agree, it's the federal law. Yeah, it's just so... I mean, it definitely has its flaws in people with their own biases, but, like, here, usually the rapists will have more rights and protection than the person that got raped. Like, the family is allowed to sue the person that got an abortion, for example, it's insane.

But, so, then here, a lot of it, a lot of the bigotry comes from, like, Christianity and religion. Is it the same, like, is that the baseline for the opposition there too? Yes, because Mexico is a predominantly Catholic country, and abortion entails many controversies due to the different positions that come from this religious stances, that ignore and deny the access to this service, and deny it's a human rights issue. And religions, anti-rights groups, or how do you say anti-choice groups, have a powerful presence and are actively hindering law proposals regarding this topic. The prejudices and stigma are present even amongst health care providers, and sometimes the religious people, they pressure these health care providers, the legislators. For example, every time there is a law and a local Congress, there are so many religious groups outside the Congress. They are, how do you say, like, bothering the legislators, they even get their personal numbers, and they are harassing them. Yes, harassing is the word, they're harassing them.

So, yes, they have a lot of power, a lot of money, and this affects even the states where abortion is legal, because as I said before, sometimes doctors deny it even if it's requested under the legal indication. So, yes, it's a problem. I'm curious what you see as kind of the value of the street actions that were carried out as opposed to kind of the actual organization on the legislative side of things. Like, what degree do you think both contributed to, you know, the successes that y'all have seen? I think both were very, very important to the recent successes. The public demonstrations helped the feminist movements strengthen. Like, it is, like, yes, this recent protests have been the, what do you say, it has been where the most women have gone out to the streets, taken the streets, and it has helped because the government has responded to some of our requests. And also, it is extremely important to talk about the organization and also something I didn't mention, and that I would like to emphasize is that in 2021, the Supreme Court of Justice in Mexico ruled favorably in four abortion-related cases, and this provided us with progressive jurisprudence and legal interpretations in favor of recognizing and increasing abortion rights.

So, these has, how do you say these has served our movement and all the argumentation to push the decriminalization laws. And well, about the four cases, in the first case, the Supreme Court declared that limitations to access legal abortion after rape must be removed. In the second case, it declared that the absolute criminalization of abortion with consent is unconstitutional. And in the third case, it declared that the protection of life from the moment of conception is unconstitutional. And in the fourth case, the Court ruled that legislative reforms broadening the boundaries of conscientious objection in the federal health law are unconstitutional. And the Supreme Court is the highest court of justice in Mexico, and all judges should respect what they established. And well, unfortunately, it doesn't happen in all states, but it is like the most important precedent we have right now, and it is fundamental for our argumentation in local Congress. Has the national government done anything at all to try to force the states who are like not following the rulings to like accept the rulings?

No, because our president, he is very neutral in this topic, and he has spoken against feminist movements, and he thinks that any protest means like conservators against his liberal government. So, no, we don't have this support from the national government, although as I mentioned before, we have a lot of allies in many instances that have helped to pressure state public officials to respect the law and to keep pushing this agenda. Is the president, I'm just curious, I'm ignorant, but is the president like, well, how is he received by the general public? Like what's people's like, is he neutral because he's a coward because he doesn't want to rock any votes, but what's the response for the public? Well, he still has a lot of support from the majority. He is one of the first, how do you say, progressive presidents, although we have been very disappointed by many of his actions, for instance, the increase of militarization and the criminalization of feminists, of human rights activists, of journalists. However, it is the first time in so many years that a president talks about poor indigenous people that send support to rural communities. So, he still has a lot of support. One thing that, I don't know how much, I don't know how much you want to get into it, but we talked to some people, oh god, I don't remember how many months ago now, but we talked to some people a while back who were doing trans rights organizing in Mexico, and they were talking a lot about how, they were talking about how, I guess, like, anti-choice conservative groups have been using, have been using sort of organized transphobic groups as a way to sort of divert attention away from the abortion struggle and the

struggle into stuff that doesn't, like, challenge the status quo. And yeah, I was wondering if you wanted to talk about that a little bit. Yes, thank you so much for talking about this. Transphobia in the feminist movements is horrible. Like, the transphobic feminists have been getting to conservative public officials, they have been approaching religious groups, and they have even affected the Christian agenda because some of our laws include people with the capacity to get pregnant. So these health services include trans men and non-binary people, but these transphobic feminists have been, how do you say, utilizing this struggle because of this prejudices. And it is very, very sad, and some of our, some of the main and most famous references in feminism have been citing this transphobic side. And yes, they are approaching to the ultra-right and they, they have been hindering not only trans people's rights, but now women's rights in general. And I think, oh, was it, I'm trying to remember, off top of my head, I think that there was a picture that was going around that was some of the organizers from one of the, like, transphobic feminist collectives, like, taking pictures with them. Yeah, I think, I think it was slip of the tongue. Yeah, but I don't know. I haven't seen that image. But there was a forum some weeks ago, it was a forum in the National Alphanomist University of Mexico, and it was a feminist discussion. And a lot of the feminists were so, so famous in all Latin America, started to say some transphobic points. So, yes, this anti-right movement is very present in feminism.

And I guess the other thing on that point that I was wondering is, how have, like, protrans feminists been sort of fighting back against these people? Has that been happening a lot? Well, we try, but it has been very, very difficult, because literally there are transphobic people everywhere, everywhere. I mean, government and non-governmental organizations and institutions, and the majority of the people are not, what do you say, socially conscious about, about trans rights, so transphobic people have so much more power. But sometimes we denounce it in social media. We report it to international organizations, and that we have all the human rights narrative and argumentation in our favor. But it is difficult because there are so many transphobes everywhere. We have also contacted international organizations to publicly say that, for example, if you want to access a certain grant, you have to have an inclusive position, whatever it is. The trans movement has strengthened so much since 2019, because in Mexico City, the law to recognize trans children and adolescents was pushed for the first time, like, via the administrative way. So there has been, how do you say, a commission of trans organizations, collectives. So I think that is the most noteworthy focus.

Yeah, I guess there's been a lot of people, like, looking to the green tide and looking to sort of the broader Latin American feminist movement for sort of inspiration and also for sort of tactical advice. And I was wondering what, like, what advice would you give people in the US who are coming into this fight now, and where would you send people to learn more stuff about it? And some key points I consider relevant is, firstly, the visibility of the pro-choice agenda and the social decriminalization of abortion. When we talk about legal abortion, we have to emphasize a lot also on the social decriminalization. It is very important to work on strategies to redo stigma and demonstrate that abortion is a common reproductive event that must be used using gender perspective and the human rights framework. We encourage public dissemination of the legal, medical, and social information with hard-sustained data from international organizations that position abortion as a human right and an essential health service, and related to this first point, the narrative and the argumentation. We have to focus on the access to safe and legal abortion as a human rights issue, which means it's a governmental obligation to ensure access to this service. In our case, Mexico has national and international commitments regarding gross and women's rights, and I'm pretty sure the United States also has this commitment, so it's their obligation, it's the government's obligation to

ensure, and also regarding their narrative, we have to work on naturalizing abortion and encourage people to stop using this word as a crime. Abortion is a human right, and it is a reproductive event in the lives of women and people with a capacity to get pregnant, and it's a reproductive event that has always existed and will always exist, either naturally or induced. And some of the organizations that I know up here that can provide information are the pro-choice alliance organizations, Catholics for the right to decide, they can give the religious and ethical arguments, you know, my organization, gender equality, we have the social argumentations, we are companion with the girls and women, we are in 12 states, and we are in the mobilizations, we are in the local congresses. Also, Jire, Jire in Spanish is Grupo de Información de Reproducción Elegida, they have all the legal expertise, and they work these reforms and laws to decriminalize abortion. We have EPAS, EPAS is an international organization, and they are medical experts, and they provide all types of data and information regarding this part. And the population council, they are the experts on monitoring and investigation, and they have many research papers. There are also like other pages that can give information, for example, about what do you say, self-induced abortion, the health organization has a protocol, it's a public protocol for self-induced abortion, and it is completely safe to do it at home.

Well, I really appreciate all that information. Yeah, thank you so much. Yeah, thank you so much. I think it's really helpful to hear what other countries have done in the same struggle. It's like so similar but different at the same time, because we've dealt with the same similar things, like terfs and religious opposition and everything. So it's really helpful, I think, to see, to realize that, first of all, it is a basic human right, like it's not even, it's like internationally an issue, and then just to see how other people have organized is really important, I think. Yes, and now I believe that we have like kind of a similar situation where there, well, it's a situation of legal discrimination in which only women who live or have the resources to travel to the states that have decriminalized abortion can exercise the right for voluntary legal interruption of their pregnancy. Right. Because I, like, I don't know much about this situation in the United States, but I know that it is legal in some states, right? Yeah, yeah.

It is legal in some states and then like in contrast to that, it's like illegal even in case of rape and like the people that have been raped can be sued. It's like a very like up and down kind of balance. But yeah, there's definitely both that exist and I think that's where it becomes really hard to extinguish the bad side. Yes, part of our struggle to decriminalize abortion in the other states is because women who live in poverty and marginalized conditions, who want to have an abortion but reside in other states where it's illegal, kind of do so under legal circumstances. So it's also a class problem. Yeah, definitely. And also in Mexico, there are some states that even criminalize a spontaneous abortion. It wasn't even induced. And instead of calling an ambulance, some people call the cops when when a woman is dying because of a spontaneous abortion. So, yes.

And this has caused also a public health problem affecting girls and women in more vulnerable situations who live in the in the most restrictive context, rural and indigenous communities, also migrants, girls and women victims of sexual abuse, women with disabilities, among others, and always, always, always the most vulnerable, vulnerable women are more susceptible to getting unsafe and best in abortions, which can lead to infections, hemorrhaging, injury to internal organs, and even death, there are some places in communities where there is not even access to internet or through basic health services and girls and women are still dying between unsafe abortions. Yeah, and they are like 100% preventable deaths. Yeah, no, totally. Yeah. Thank you, you're even amazing.

But it's interesting because that's true, I think, regardless of the country, the most vulnerable are the most affected, whether it's, I mean, it's a class issue, it's a race issue, it's a disability issue, it's like, so all these things that, I mean, rich people will get abortions either way, like privileged people will always have a route to take care of themselves. So it's just, I don't know, it's unfortunate just seeing how like humans have functions, regardless of the country that they build. It's sad. And criminalizing abortion does not reduce its practice, I think that cohabiting it will end its practice and it only increases the probabilities of these unsafe procedures, and it increases the stigma and prejudices, and it even strengthens this anti-rights and choice groups, but when abortion is performed in a safe and important matter, it is even less risky than childbirth among other interventions. And for example, it is much safer for a girl to have an abortion than to continue with pregnancy. Yeah, when the pregnancy is like threatening her life.

Yes. And well, that's why we have to keep fighting for legal discrimination. Thank you for lifting it back up, I was really getting down there. Yes, and here in Mexico, like bills continue to be promoted in different states, we keep forming and strengthening alliances, and we have to strengthen these alliances with all types of sectors. And that's why the alliance works, for example, because we are the religious sectors, we work also with legislators, with doctors, healthcare providers, even in schools, and with the public general. So it is a collective effort and a collective commitment. Yeah, very true. I have nothing to add, that's good, better than that.

So thank you so much for joining us, and I'm going to step away now. Thank you, Sherry. Yeah, of course. Yeah, and I guess one last thing, well, A, do you have anything else you want to say and then B, where can people find you on the internet? Like, if they want to, and do you have other organizations and stuff that you want to promote? No, I'm like Erica Yamada and all my social media, and the organization I work in, it's Equidad de Género Ciudadania, Trabajo y Familia, but the National Network for Reproductive Rights where we are in 12 states, it's called DEDECED. It's B-B-E-S-E-R, and you can find those in most of those states, and we can provide information regarding abortion if you write to us. And also something I would like to say is that even after it's legalized, we must continue to ensure that these abortion services are implemented and that they can reach to all girls and women,

that it must be guaranteed in paper and in practice, and yes, the emphasis in reaching the most underserved and vulnerable populations. All right. Well, I think that's probably going to do it for us today. Erica, thank you so much for talking. Thank you so much. The wealth of information is really valuable. Thank you. Thank you so much. Yeah, and thank you all for listening. That's your episode for the day. Welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm Garrison. With me today is Chris, and today we'll be talking about something that I was wanting to do for Pride Month, but time kind of got away from me, but we'll be talking with Noah Adams, who does research into the kind of crossover between autism and being trans.

I know we briefly mentioned some, like, rhetoric around this on our War on Trans People series episodes, and Noah was kind enough to reach out to me, be willing to discuss this more in depth. Greetings. Hello. Thank you. Hi. It's always Pride Month somewhere in the summer, so I think we're good. That's true. That's true. So I guess, I first want to kind of hear how you personally kind of got into this field of research, and then maybe kind of clarify what exactly your field of research is. Sure. Well, I guess where do you start? I mean, I'm a trans person, and I'm also autistic, so it's sort of a natural crossover for me. I got started in trans research or trans activism doing suicidality work in such a long time ago now, but in, I think, 2006, myself and my best friend cycled across Canada to bring awareness for trans suicidality, and in memorandum of a person, a friend who committed suicide. So, you know, we went to a lot of different communities in Canada, including Saskatoon, and did talks about, you know, did talks with local trans communities about suicide, audio prevention stuff, and met a lot of great people.

And then I came back and I did my master of social work, also on trans suicidality research, kind of looking at how there's a lot of different research out there and who knows, you know, there's a lot of different rates that are given all high and, and where are we supposed to, you know, fall on that. And then I finished that and I was kind of tired of doing suicidality work. You can get a little bit, a little bit exhausting and kind of great. I have a, I have a much darker sense of humor than I used to. Yeah. So, a friend, I was kind of drifting into autism work and a friend who, Jake Pine, who, who's a professor now at York University, suggested I kind of move into that area and here I am. So with the kind of crossover between being trans and have and, and I guess I'm not the best I don't know. I consciously don't kind of know all the what the most appropriate languages would you say that you would you prefer to say that you like have autism or you are artistic.

I mean, I think it's pretty universal in the autism community to talk about identity first language. So yeah, exactly autism kind of leads and that's. Yeah, I mean, I guess I'd say I'm autistic. Most people don't say person with autism. Yeah, yeah. So with that, how have you kind of what what initially got you to, you know, we see a lot of propaganda and stuff trying to almost like take away people's agency around both being trans and, and, and, and with and have and being autistic right there's a lot of a lot of propaganda there from like the Turks in the UK really started this out and really accelerated on this point. And I mean we're not there's a whole bunch of basically autism exterminationist groups out there and a whole bunch of other kind of problems around this. How when, when these kind of crossovers start happening, where did you kind of what what kind of prompted you to see this and be like, Hey, here's this thing that needs to be researched. And here's how I'm going to go about it, because you see a lot of people talk about this thing, but it's always generally to like attack trans people or attack autistic people.

I mean, you know, there's a lot there I mean I would say, you know, my sort of seedling of interest is is I just really don't like injustice. I mean, that's such a broad thing to say but I really, you know, injustice against people for the sake of who they are really just kind of pisses me off. And, you know, I mean when you pick a research topic you kind of pick something that you're willing to spend hours and hours and hours in a library or, you know, a virtual library, what have you just kind of plowing away at it. And it seemed like I was pissed off enough at the injustice of the way autistic people and the way trans people are treated, especially the way I think, I think we're ignored by both speakers by both, you know, for for Turks and trans exclusionary folks. I really feel like we're an easy target where, you know, autistic people or for that matter people with developmental disabilities or people with with any kind of music has these single quotes on this any kind of impairment based disability feel like a soft target for people that just want to attack trans folks. Right, like as they're a group that are so it's incomprehensible to them that we would be able to speak for ourselves. So they're, you know, I mean, I don't even think that they, I don't think they care about autistic people but I don't think they even even occurs to them that autistic people might have and trans autistic folks might have something to say for themselves.

So what's kind of the scope of your research been the for however, however long you've been working on this for it's it's for a PhD program correct. Yeah, well I started doing, I wrote a book on trans autistic folks that's sort of a series of interviews with folks. And, you know, I mean I just asked them like about their lives and what it was like to be trans and what it was like to be autistic and what it's like to, you know, try to transition as an autistic person and a lot of stuff came out of that around, you know, how difficult it can be for folks that are there about to access trans health care and to sort of navigate their way in the world. And this is for my PhD work it's sort of an outgrowth of that so I'm looking specifically at how trans autistic community group sort of grassroots group formations are are forming and and what their goals are. How do you like, how do you go about like ethical research into this topic because definitely the like, you know, there's a certain way to like, there's a certain way to be like I'm researching autism and trans people to be like, huh, that's a little bit of a side eye right because because of how some of because of how like the turf groups talk about it and obviously you're transit autistic and that's to completely different but like definitely. I was definitely wondering like, is there like how what types of like ways does ethical research go about so that you actually understand people when you're when you're talking to them it's not it's not about like, here we need to we need to like solve these problems because they're not

problems to be solved. It's research into living people who are like having lives. I mean that's that's a great question. I'm sort of sorting through that myself right now because I'm just, you know, working through my ethical research proposal. But I think you just have to be really honest and open and really write all this stuff out like how are you going to contact people and what are you going to talk to them about and showing other people what you're doing and being very open to that process. If that makes sense. Yeah. And what types of ways do you see the the crossover kind of between ableism and transphobia and like what. How have you seen that crossover be used to kind of hurt both trans people and people who are autistic and people who are both. I think the most explicit way has been, I, you know, I see a lot of articles by the Guardian or the Daily Mail, you know, bring up the specter of autistic people being overrepresented overrepresented again in finger quotes.

Among the trans population going to gender clinics and there isn't ever any explanation after you say that the scaremongering is is just saying there's autistic people supposedly overrepresented among trans folks. Oh no, but as if it doesn't need saying it's it's assumed that that's that's appalling, you know, but I would like a little bit more explanation. There's there's a lot said by how they how there's how they frame it and how they and like what they don't say. They really freight like the it's all framed as if this is in, you know, something that everyone recognizes as like a problem and countering that is really challenging because it is. Yeah, because like again, you're doing research into this in this into this specific crossover and what kinds of stuff have you kind of learned throughout your research about about this. I mean, it's interesting like it's that attitude is also represented in the academic literature like over the last. Oh, I bet. Yeah. I'd say over the last five years, the literature on the crossover of autism and and trans folks has like skyrocketed like in, I always say in 220 alone, something like 150 articles were published, whereas two years before that maybe 20.

Okay. And the vast majority of them are mentioning the the co occurrence in passing. So they're saying, oh, well, we read these other things where autism and trans identity co occurs. So thus you should be very careful prior to providing trans health care because they might be autistic. Yeah, that's the thing I wanted to talk about was like medical gatekeeping aspect. And like you especially see with these like turf, you know, there's a lot of like infantilization with the turf rhetoric around this. And then that kind of leads to this type of medical gatekeeping. Yeah, I just think, you know, I see I see this I saw this in a book with the interviews I did and I see it in so many other places and especially conversation with folks is that, you know, the problem seems to be if you tell an unexpected narrative to the person in charge

of keeping you for transgender health care, you're going to make them nervous. And if you make them nervous, they're not necessarily going to say no, but they're going to say to themselves at least, oh, let's wait and see. And for for autistic folks waiting and seeing might mean forever. Right, like I talked to folks in the book that, you know, without without mentioning actual cities, because of the, you know, the particular situation of this person. Let's let's, you know, let's say he lived in New Orleans, and he wasn't able to access trans health care in New Orleans, because it just wasn't available to folks who were autistic. And so he ended up moving to Chicago, which which shows you know he moved to Chicago specifically to get trans health care which shows a level of capacity that they're implying in the context of trans health care in New Orleans that he's not capable of. But you know he can uproot his whole life, move across the country, find a doctor and then he talked to the doctor in an informed health clinic in Chicago. And they were like, oh yeah, we knew that you were from this city and we do that you were autistic before you told us because there's this whole pipeline of autistic trans folks making the migration to Chicago from this particular city because they can't get health care.

I mean, like, you know, I'm also thinking about, you know, like kids trying to come out as trans who have autism or have any other kind of, you know, quote unquote developmental disability. And like, just all of the ways that that can be used to gaslight kids about their gender identity. In your book you mentioned stuff around like self discovery and coming out in issues with family. What kind of what kind of things have you heard heard about that in terms of how how kids that the kids are figuring figuring out gender stuff, while also having this whole other thing that people used to kind of, you know, add on to their experience. You know, one of the things I noticed, especially in, you know, sort of trans autistic autobiographies is that, you know, gender doesn't really make an inherent sort of sense to a lot of autistic folks. I mean, it doesn't make sense to me, but I mean, I have I have something going on in my brain. I don't know what it is. I don't think it's autism. But yeah, gender is never made sense to me either. And I think like where you for autistic people, especially where you come across things that don't make an inherent sort of sense. It's difficult to accept them. Like so much in the world doesn't make inherent sense, but that can be a real sticking point for autistic folks.

So, you know, what I see, what I seem to see a lot of is that by the time folks come out of, well, first of all, it seems like, although, you know, I don't want to quote any particular kind of research on it because I think the jury is still out. It seems like autistic people are more likely to identify as non binary. Okay. Or to just not identify with gender at all. And it does seem like by the time folks come out as trans, whatever, you know, permutation of that, there is for them. They've tried just about every other identity they can, you know, they can try out, like especially, you know, I mean, we're aware that there are social stigmas and social expectations around gender. So I think for a lot of autistic folks, they're going to try to fit that, even though it doesn't make sense to them, they're going to try to fit within that because they know it exists. And by the time they come out as trans, like, or male or female or what have you, like, we pretty well know.

Does that make any kind of sense? Yeah, no. I mean, there's a lot of misconceptions people have about, about, I mean, both being trans and being autistic, let alone being both. Um, is there any, like, yeah, like, what sorts of common misconceptions about this on like, on like a broader level? Would you like to dispel? Sure. Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of people get told, you know, you can't, you can't be autistic because you're too, you're too articulate.

Or, you know, you have too much of an opinion. Autistic people can't have an opinion of themselves or their own life. Yeah, that's gross. I'm paraphrasing, but I think that's what it equates to. Yeah, absolutely. Um, and then, you know, trans folks get told, it's not uncommon to get told, oh, well, you can't be autistic because you're trans. So you're sort of in this, this no, no person's land. That's such a, that's such like an ontological attack on someone's being.

It's so... It really is, yeah. Like that's, you know, like, you know, already, like, again, just being solely trans or autistic, you get some of that. And then together, it's like, it's just attacking every kind of part of you that you're trying to figure out. Well, I mean, I mean, in terms of attacking people rhetorically, it's sort of the perfect weapon because you can make autistic trans people into whatever you want to be convenient to you. What kinds of stuff do you think people should know about this to help kind of either, you know, to help either like counter some of like the rhetoric around this or just to gain better like personal understanding, right? If they have, if they have, you know, people in their lives who are like this, or maybe they suspect that they're, that they're trans and they're autistic. Like how, what kinds of, what kinds of stuff would you like people to be more aware of about this intersection?

Well, I guess I remember a story someone from the book told me about how, you know, he was, he had his best friend is trans and autistic as well and has a number of physical disabilities and he was kind of, he's sort of the caretaker for him. And he was kind of talking to him about how, oh, well, I don't know if I'm trans and I don't know if I should, you know, if I should use that label or like, you know, maybe it's not the right thing to do, or it's bad or something. And his friend was like, well, you know, you're not, you're not a hormone of vampire. Like you're not going to like suck the hormones out of somebody else and, and hurt them by taking away their testosterone. Oh, I wish, I wish it worked like that. You know, I would be a trans vampire. This is about you and what makes you comfortable. It's not about like, you're not hurting anybody else, being yourself.

I think, you know, autistic folks like anybody else, you know, worry about, I mean, we're, we're just as susceptible to, to the attacks on trans folks as anybody else, right? Like, and you worry that like, well, maybe this is the right thing to do. But like, what are you hurting by, by exploring it? That doesn't mean you have to be trans or you have to transition or, or you can't change your mind. Like, but it doesn't, it doesn't hurt anybody. Why don't you just be open to it? Even just like temporarily trying out different names or pronouns, right? It can, can be like such a big deal.

And it, it can be very incidental. Like it doesn't, it doesn't need to be so cataclysmic. Right. That's something that you can experiment with and it's fine. Right. You never, you don't need to lock yourself into anything. But of course, you know, when it's about your personal sense of identity, of course it feels much bigger. When I think, I think people worry about what other folks, I mean, obviously people worry about what other folks will think of them and what that means for them. I don't know. I mean, it seems like a strange comparison to make, but I don't know if you've seen Crimes of the Future.

Oh, I've not yet. Oh, it's, it's really good. It's, it's the most recent David Cronenberg movie and there's this screen. I'm going to give away the end of the movie. Spoilers. I know. Finally, we're turning this into a movie podcast. What I've always wanted. There's this great scene at the end though, where Vigo Mortizen is like in this, he has this special like very David Cronenberg bone chair that he has to like be in to move him around while he's eating. Yeah. And he finally is convinced by his partner to like try the plastic chocolate bar that's, you know, supposed to be like, it's a whole digestive thing.

I won't get into it. But, you know, there's this moment of realization and like he's been avoiding this for the whole, the whole movie and he like tries it and he's eating it. And suddenly there's this, this realization moment in his face where he's like, oh, this didn't have to be so difficult. Yeah. Like I society doesn't want me to do this and it's, it's seen as a crime and it's seen as as terrible. But actually when you cross that Rubicon, it wasn't as bad as you thought. Yeah. I mean, especially if you, if you're, even if you're not like coming out to everybody, you know, at the same time, right?

You can start, you start off with a small group of people that you know are going to be with you and you try it out with them. And if you like it, then great. That's, that's a really good sign. If you, if you start it and you're like, and this doesn't feel right, then you don't need to commit. Like it's not a thing, right? That Rubicon can feel so big sometimes. Yeah. And it feels like you're, you're jumping across a giant, like the Grand Canyon, but really all it is is you're stepping across, you know, a small stream and you can step right back across there if you didn't like it.

Yeah. So what kind of things we like to see happen around like the medical gatekeeping so that it's less fucked up? I mean, I know a lot of, I'm actually at a conference in Belgium right now for trans health, sort of medical trans health stuff. And, you know, I mean, I think one of the things I keep coming back to is you don't need to treat autistic people in the realm of trans healthcare any differently than you do anywhere else, like anyone else. Like, especially in the gatekeeper model we have, like either you have the capacity to consent or you don't. Like that, that test is, and I have lots of thoughts about that if that's for another day. But, you know, whether you meet those tests or not should not be any different just because you're autistic. Would you like to, I guess, talk just briefly about your book, you know, what's it like what what what the scope of it is where people can find it that sort of thing.

Trans and autistic stories from stories from life at the intersection by Jessica Kingsley publishers. It was out in 2020 I think people can find it on Amazon or wherever you buy books I'm sure pals bookstore over there in Portland has it. Yeah, it's a series of interviews with folks who are trans and autistic I sat down with folks and and asked them about their life and and what's going on and what that looks like and then I sort of, you know, try to transcribe that into into a text into a narrative form and put that in a book and here we are. That sounds wonderful. I see the I see the I see the listing on Amazon.ca for our for Canadian Canadian folks as well. Thank you so much for talking about this. Is there any other kind of random thoughts that you would like to you would like to mention that we haven't that we haven't brought up yet. Sure.

You know, I always like to plug groups washes work which looks at, you know, they do a lot of work in trans autistic stuff to, and they kind of look at why more people may be trans and autistic. And one of the things they've, they've found is that it may be that autistic people are both less capable of hiding the fact that they're trans and less less capable of caring or caring about hiding it. Yeah, it may be more obvious that there is a concurrence there, not an actual overage of a concurrence let's say. Yeah, yeah, that I mean, that was definitely in the back of my mind. Yeah. Well, again, Noah, thank you so much for coming to talk with us. Can I can I plug a couple things is that plug plug away. This is still still your time. Okay.

So I'm leading a refugee sponsorship group for a group of five for a trans guy from the Middle East, and we're raising funds through the Metropolitan Community Church in Toronto. We got to raise a certain amount before we can put the application in. And I can give you that link, but it's at Canada helps.org. And the name is trans. Trans proud. I can write up the whole URL, but it's kind of long. I will, I will put if you send me that link, I will put it in the description for people to click on. Awesome. And you can find me at Noah Adams on Twitter, because I got in early enough to get my name. Yeah, wow. March 2009, just right on the cusp. Well, again, thank you so much for reaching out to talk about this intersection. Hopefully, if anyone was interested in what we were talking about. Please check out Noah's book to just read a whole bunch of stories from from from people about this.

Yeah, awesome. Thank you. Yeah. All right, everyone, that does it for us today. See you on the other side. Oh, yeah. Sophie, that's how we open the episode. I didn't think anything could be more appalling than that other thing that you said that I won't. Oh, when I was talking about Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas wrapped together so tightly that they can't tell who's where one person's skin begins in the other. You walked us right into this, Sophie.

I walked you right into it, just like Neil Gorsuch walked right into that and then decided, you know what, in for a penny, in for a pound of this is it could happen here. Podcast about serious problems where we talk about them seriously and sometimes about the Supreme Court having a threesome like that, like that, like that cruise ship where there was the threesome and then a giant 60 person fight. How's everybody doing today? I think the opening will work better if we just bleep out and yeah, yeah, yes, always bleep out come, except for right there. So I feel like today we should chat about one of the many things that's that's a problem, which is a specific piece of disinformation that is spreading and not quite like wildfire. It's more spreading like in the background like monkey pox on the internet. This is not like the number one piece of conspiratorial nonsense that's getting around, but it's getting around deeply and I'm seeing it on the left and the right. You have if you spend any time at all on social media, which statistically you do, you've probably seen a bunch of stories and like freaked out posts about fires and arson at agricultural facilities and factories of food factories is often how it's phrased.

I think the post I saw about it that was sort of most emblematic was someone being like, hey, you know, you're probably not aware that some huge number of chickens died in this fire recently and a bunch of cows died in this field. But if you were, it's the only thing you'd be talking about. And the idea kind of that people are pushing when they when they catastrophize this is that there's this massive rash of attacks on American food infrastructure at a year when we're already due for a food crisis because of the Ukraine. And it's going to be this this big like looming disaster and some like shady group is trying to starve everybody. And we brought in a friend to talk about this because it is not at all what what people who are kind of catastrophizing are saying. And I want to introduce Carl to the show. Carl, how are you doing, buddy? You know, live living life in a one party state. Yeah.

Yay. I don't know, man. There's a lot of parties these days like the one on that cruise ship. So or the forward party, our favorite. This is a big Yang gang podcast. Now, Carl, you and I have buddies on the old Twitter for a while. You were the origin of one of the terms that that that we use a lot on this show. And yeah, I wanted to I wanted to talk to you because this is this is a pretty potent piece of weaponized unreality.

It is. You have been tracking this for a while on kind of your own. Yeah. Well, this is one of those ones that's it sits in between a lot of the other conspiracies, right? So like you said, it's it's kind of the background operating thing right now. And, you know, so when we think of the big conspiracies right now, they kind of revolve around what they always did, right? The population weird NWO like secret society stuff, the Q the Q brand of that, however we want to look at this is a little bit different because this is more overtly political, right? So this is this is looking to not just dig the whole of well, everyone's out to get us.

Bill Gates is buying all the farmland, you know, the crazy stuff we normally I mean, you know, that's right in this, but it's not the center part. And yeah, I've been looking at this for a few months now since I first saw it. And I first saw kind of traces of this right after the invasion of Ukraine started. So early March, things started to kind of shift and nothing, you know, you post here and there that are now missing stuff like that, the kind of classic, well, let's test the waters. Let's see how people accept the idea that maybe something else, you know, in the in the conspiratorial way is going on. Just asking questions type. Yeah, exactly. It's the just asking questions.

It's a just well, maybe think about it kind of thing. And those those peak my interest because those tend to be pest balloons. And for this kind of thing, I had a weird, you know, there are weird feelings you kind of get when you watch some of this as much as we do. Yes. I know what you made. Yeah, you can kind of sense when the thing has enough ingredients to catch on. Exactly. And especially when there's super kind of inflammatory ingredients, right, you know, the Bill Gates buying all the farmland is a good example.

Not quite as inflammatory, but catches on because people, you know, it's it's the the social paradigm. There's always like, there's always this, I mean, and this is something, again, that's a broader thing with conspiracies. There's always a germ of truth. The germ of truth with that is that Bill Gates has bought a lot of farmland. Now, if you compare it to the total quantity of farmland, he has bought very, it's like, yeah, it's a fraction. 3.03% or something. I mean, it's an absolutely tiny amount of the total, right? Yeah, because this this country is, I don't know if you've looked at it map recently, pretty sizable country, the United States of America.

Kind of a big place when you actually look. Yeah. And so the kernel of truth is there. There are, there are fires, right? There are industrial accidents. There are weird stuff happens in big industrial situations. We have a large industrial farming situation in this country. So you see it.

And I think part of what makes the kind of the idea that, oh, this is suddenly happening and it's suddenly like a massive problem. Easier to sell to people is that most Americans know next to nothing about the food supply and how it works. Like if you have, because I grew up in and around farms have been a lot of my life in agricultural areas. Yep. Farms and things related to farms catch on fire fucking constantly. Oh, yeah. You may not be, yeah. I think they said there are 5,000 annual fires.

5,000 annually, about 15 a day. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's giant fields of dried grain. It's fields of dried grain and it's shit like silos full of like flour and stuff, which is like, there's nothing, like, yeah. Silo's explode. Yes. Like the, like a silo full of grain is slightly less explosive than like a military like missile or some shit. Well, yeah, it's like they detonate if you catch them at the right way.

Well, exactly. And like, I know here in Minnesota a few years ago and there's video of the floating around, you know, there was a, you know, a corn, a corn silo split. Yeah. And the dust goes out and something, you know, a car engine because it's hot sparks it off and it's a fireball, you know, so these things happen. And I can remember there was one of the last things I saw and I went and covered in Texas before I moved was there's this little town called West, which is not in West Texas. It's in North Texas. It's in between Dallas and Waco, which is in between Dallas and Austin because no, Waco is not a destination.

And they had this big, God, it was some sort of, what was the, I'm going to Google what the facility was. But it was, it was this like, yeah, it was a fertilizer factory and it caught on fire. There's a terrifying video of this guy with his daughter watching it and it goes off like, like a fucking fuel air bomb. Yes. It killed the entire town's fire department, like all of them dead in a second. Oh yeah. I mean, Anfo, right? Like that's literally what that is.

It was basically fucking Anfo. And because it happens, this is like 2013, I think, it never, it's just this big tragedy. If it had happened a couple of years later, there would have been like a conspiracy attached to it. Oh, I'd be talking about it right now. Yeah, it was just slightly too early. Yeah. But like, this shit happened. I mean, the point of making is that, and that we're making here is that like, this shit happens all the time.

And to the numbers we were quoting earlier, there's no evidence whatsoever that there are a higher number of these events this year than there ever are. Basically, one of the things that we've seen is as of like the spring of this year, a list has been compiled. Yeah. And it's mainly on places like Gateway Pundit and Zero Hedge, where they've got like a hundred different events. And it looks very compelling when you just see this list of, and there's this fire, and this many chickens died here, and this many cows died, and there was this explosion. But again, if you actually look at the number of events that are expected in a year, there's nothing abnormal about this. No, in fact, it's pretty middle of the road for any year. And like the bird calls, right, like that's a great example of this being just absolutely out of the park conspiracy land.

I mean, there's a massive avian flu epidemic going on right now that's killed more birds, you know, than the last 10 years. Yeah. And so when you start talking about, you know, 300 million birds worldwide being called, whatever, massive numbers, that funny how avian flu does that. And that's a response. But when you get into the Zero Hedge, who is really pushing this right now, world, that's one of the top ones on the list. And it also makes, you know, they have their little maps up right now with all the drop tabs that show where things are. Right, right. They love doing.

And there's a, you see this in other conspiracies. I think one of the big ones that kind of was a little, I don't know, on the edge of getting mainstream recently was like the conspiracy about people disappearing at national parks, where it's like mapped. 4-1-1. Yes. Exactly. It's supposed to be like. David D. David D.

Going for it. Yeah. And it's like, yeah, man, people, there's 350 million people in the United States, like, and also people go missing while hiking. And one of the, like, a bunch of stuff isn't on that list, like the number of those people who were found again and what. Exactly. A lot of people just like slip and fall and never a seat again because they fall down a cliff. Yes. Yeah.

And the drugs are kind of dangerous, funny enough once you're off the trail. Yeah. That's why they're fun. Yeah. Exactly. There was a whole 4-1-1 documentary made a few years ago about this person who went missing. You're like, were they dropped into a secret underground government bunker? Were they abducted?

And like a year later, they found his body at the bottom of a cliff. Yeah. And you're like, it doesn't, you know, that doesn't talk about the horrible stuff done with, like, especially in Canada with all of the missing Indigenous women. Exactly. It is actually a big problem. Yes. But I mean, back to the fact, back to like the farming thing, I think what all of these, you know, stories show is just the innate order of industrial farming is actually the problem here. It is scary.

Yeah. Yeah. It is absolutely scary. But it's also like normal scary, like the thing that's scary is that the system of industrial farming is incredibly dangerous. And like, if you actually want to be properly horrified about something relating to food production, look at how many people die because they get sucked into bogs of pig shit. Exactly. Or drowning grain silo. Or drowning grain silo.

I mean, people legit, lots of people die. Whole families. Yeah. Because one person will fall in the grain silo and they'll try to get him out. I know people who have died that way because I grew up in a very agricultural area. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of this is just like people don't know the country.

But Shireen, yes. So industrial. I mean, like, yeah, for me, for me, someone that hasn't grown up in any agricultural area at all, this is. Yeah. I mean, grain is like quicksand. It sucks you in. Yeah. It takes you to that bottom.

If you don't spread out immediately, you're going down and there's really no way to save somebody. It's pretty. Stay the fuck away from grain silos. Yeah, do not play around grain silo. Do not fuck around with grain silo. It is. It is. It is killed entire families because people try to see each other, then they get sucked

down and it's pretty fucked up. Yeah. Yeah. It's bad when you have livestock, livestock poop, and sometimes that poop is super useful. Chicken shit is one of the best fertilizers ever. You can make chicken shit very, very useful. Pig shit is like nasty. It's toxic.

It is very hard to do anything. It's a bio weapon. Yeah. Once it's in the ground long enough, it's a bio weapon. Theoretically, if you were to really care about it, you could make a use of it given enough time, but there's so many pigs, because our hunger for bacon is insatiable, that you wind up with this massive toxic sludge. So there's the chunk of the country in which most of the pigs come from.

There are these huge pig shit bogs that are like, there are countries smaller than bogs of pig shit that we have in the United States. Oh, yeah. And people die in them all the time. They get sucked down into the pig shit. Or you suffocate because you get one of them burst. I mean, there's so many weird things because they're methane and hydrogen sulfide sinks. So it's just like bad things around farms all the time.

And that's just farming. And what we're ultimately, what we are seeing here, if you want to like actually analyze the thing that is happening with all of these conspiracies, it's what's called the frequency illusion, which is the idea that like, if you've ever, I don't know, if someone, when somebody like teaches, like you learn a new word, right? Or you like, you hear about a historic event and then you keep seeing it. You're going to see it everywhere. Yeah, exactly.

There they are. Yeah. This is something that an author that Garrison and I quite like, Robert Anton Wilson played with a lot. It's why like 23s, one thing you'll notice in like Hollywood movies and TV shows, if you look out for 23s, they're fucking everywhere because a whole bunch of people who got into Hollywood are fans of the same guy. And there's this conspiracy with the number 23 people sticking.

It's all over the fucking wire. It's in a bunch of shit. And it's, yeah. At the base of things, like humans are a pair of dealing machines, right? So we're looking for patterns and static. That's what we do. Yeah. Like in my mind, it's part of our like ancestral, you know, deep in the past protection mechanism,

right? That's how we can start to meaning. Yeah. Exactly. Well, it's that and it's how you look for monsters in the woods. You know, it's like when we're looking for eyes in the dark, that's part of it. And so, you know, we tend to find meaning in points and then try and connect them because that's how we work.

And so this is a great example of this because it hasn't gone full queue level yet where it's just absurd to be absurd the shield itself. Like you can see where people are trying to pick together points that normally are just industrial access. Yeah. So, you know, some of the stuff I saw early on before like the cow death posts and the stuff related to climate change, what you really were seeing was people trying to make order out of what is just chaotic accidents.

Yeah. And now, and now with. That's exactly what I was. Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead, sir. No, it's something you rarely actually see in the cascade of, you know, conspiracy theory like this.

And it's been really interesting for me watching that because, you know, as someone who's far too into watching people melt their brains. This this kind of lays out some of the ways that this works for all of us. And I think it also offers a roadmap in certain ways to like see past it and be able to correct it for yourself so you don't get into the same. Oh, there are a thousand points of light here. Let's follow all of them. Yeah.

It's one of the things that's interesting. So like we just called it the the the recency bias or the frequency illusions. Yeah. Also the recency illusion, which is like the belief that things that you have like noticed only recently are recent phenomena rather than things that go back a long time. They're these are kind of interrelated. But this this sort of phenomena that we're seeing is often called the bottom mine off phenomena.

Absolutely. Yep. So so the the the bottom I'm pretty. Yeah, bottom the bottom mine off group was a it's also called the German Red Army. It was a yeah, it was a West German terrorist organization from like 70 fucking years ago. Like this is not a recent thing, but there was an article about them in like a Minnesota St. Paul newspaper in 1994 that happened to be one of the first newspapers with an online comment page.

We do this very well. Oh, no. Well, yeah, no. So this is like you'll always hear referred to as the bottom mine off phenomenon. It has nothing to do with this terrorist group other than the fact that one commenter on there saw an article about them within a couple of hours of someone else in their life telling them about the group. And so they named it in the common section the bottom mine off phenomenon because yeah,

like it's which is an example of the phenomenon. Yeah. But like that's that's it is it is it's a thing that people do for again, good reason. Like like you've said, like if you're a fucking hunter gatherer and you notice that like, oh, after a rainstorm is when the big cats come out and hunt. And like if somebody if one of your friends gets eaten by like a tiger, it's probably after a rainstorm. You associate after the rainstorm with danger, which is like good, right?

Like the more we live inside urban environments that usually usually less this becomes useful. Yes. As relating to more of our like instinctual practices. Yes. Right. Learning to recognize this like first step of delusion is really important. Yeah. Because it can help you make decisions in the future.

Right. But I think it's much more similar than we realize to like how people think of religion because even religion. Yes. That's literally what I was just about to say. Order added disorder. Yeah. Like what you were saying is like there's so much chaos.

People can make sense of the world and just like religion, you're trying to make order out of disorder. Exactly. And you look for signs. You look for patterns. It's like an element of magical thinking where. Yes. Yes.

You look for reasons that this has meaning. Yes. Yeah. So I understand where they're coming from. Absolutely. And so the problem again, the problem is not with your brain because this is not like a bad thing your brain is doing. It's just a thing your brain is doing.

The problem is that this is one of the easiest ways that bad faith actors can take advantage of you and other people. And so in terms of protecting yourself and others from it, and again, one of the problems with this and one of the things that makes it so, so much more difficult, 20 years ago, the Bader Minehub obviously, the Bader Minehub phenomenon was as much of a thing as that dude in the fucking comments page that Minnesota paper approves, but there was less shit coming at you. So you kind of had, even if you might get caught for a little bit in the like, oh, is

there something weird going on with this German terrorist group? You kind of had the space in your head and the space in your media diet to like actually parse that out and calm down. But today it all comes with you a little flood. There's like three new fucked up Supreme Court decisions. Oh, and now all of the food factories are on fire and all of the chickens are dead. And this war in Ukraine is actually elevating the food prices and it all compounds on itself. If you, when you start seeing something new like this, come into your media diet that

seems scary, one of the first things you should do is just try to get a handle on the raw numbers. Exactly. Is this outside? Well, this is a complexity issue. Is this abnormal? Yeah. You know, this is a complexity issue.

That's how I like to look at it. And that's exactly one of the great ways to kind of get, disrupt the complex nature of this and the amount of it you're taking in is just to start breaking it down. Numbers are great. Right? Like if you can look and see there are 18,000 instances of industrial accidents leading to X, Y or Z and 5,000 fires, you start to really get yourself into a better position to understand what's being thrown at you.

Yeah. But I don't think most people can actually understand what those numbers mean. Like they're just like, they're large numbers, but I don't think people understand like, that means a lot of that stuff is happening versus just like one or two things you hear about and you don't realize probability wise that it's like insignificant because I don't think those numbers make sense. I mean, even to me sometimes I can't, I can't picture so many things. So I think it's, I don't know, maybe it's just like a deficit in how our brains work.

You may not be able to understand why the numbers exist, but you can try to compare them to previous years, right? You can't. Exactly. You can expand what you're relating to, right? If you're looking from, here's everything from March of 2022 to June of 2022, you're like, whoa, this is a lot of stuff just in these few months that if you compare that to every preceding year for the past five years, you're like, oh, this actually isn't

a regular. This is, this is, this is still fucked up, but it's actually kind of normalized. And it's not, it's not an abnormal phenomenon right now. And so even if you can't like understand what the numbers are, you can still compare them to previous things, but, but yeah, I mean that does require more work than just like looking at a meme, right? And the reason why this stuff works is because people know how to exploit this part of our brains really well, not, not, not, not, not this part of this brain is, is useless, right?

It has uses. You can play with it, but it's also is exploitable. And that's the thing that you want to be aware of is trying to be cognizant of if the information you're taking in is exploiting this pathway and then choosing how, how you want to maybe circumvent some of those mental effects. Exactly. Well, and we have such, I mean, as humans, we have a real issue with this kind of brain hacking and it's something we're just all kind of getting up to right now and understanding

and we still don't fully understand some of this, but you know, I, a lot of the stuff I, I kind of initially worked off of for the concept of weaponized on reality kind of talks about social engineering in the way that like freaking was done and hacking back in the day was done. Yep. It's almost similar to that in certain ways that it's kind of shocking, right? Like it's a conspiracy, but it's also a management tool and it's a, it's a memory management and, and, you know, ultimately a reality management tool and giving it numbers, looking at context

like that does take time, but some of these are like going to, going to be hard and fast rules probably going forward to like interact with the digital world because this is going to be how it is for a long while. There's a book that was, is kind of considered to be like the foundational text of, or at least strategic document of the Islamic state called the management of savagery. And the title gives away what, what you're doing, right? You're carrying out, you're, you're engaging in acts of savagery, terrorist attacks that, that, that kill innocent people that are, that exist to disrupt the, the state that you're

in, in order to, and you're attempting to like, you're attempting to build kind of a, a milieu of savagery, which then provides you the opportunity to take an exert power. And what we're seeing here is like the management of cognitive biases, right? Exactly. The management of like these weird little evolutionary holdovers in your brain that, that don't quite work in the modern world, but if you understand what ha, what's happening, you can take advantage of them and you can, you can trick people into thinking things are happening that aren't. It's the same, you know, you can see this, the right does this very effectively in a

lot of the anti-trans stuff they've been doing, where obviously with gay, you know, if you look at the population of trans and of gay people, some number of people in that community are going to do things that are bad, right? Because it's a population of human beings. And because the country's large enough, if you get people hyper focused on, here's a story, here's another story, here's two, here's three stories. Now is that, does that mean that there's any kind of actual systemic problem? No.

That community is no more likely to do things that are bad than any other community. But if you get people focused on each of those stories in their head, they feel like there's, they feel like there's an epidemic and like, well, we have to get a handle. It's the same thing that gets done with like Islamic terrorism, right? Where it's like, yes, since 9-11, actually not that many acts of Islamic terrorism in the United States, extremely fucking uncommon, much less common than right wing terrorism, like homegrown terrorism. But the media doesn't really cover one of those kinds of terrorism and loves to cover

the other. So you get people periodically tricked into thinking that they're under direct threat from the Islamic state or whatever the fuck. Right. Well, and I think it's, you know, I think going to that point, right? Like it's almost a, I mean, it's a reality filter, right? So like it's a way to selectively filter out things that would counter the narrative that you're trying to overall push.

And I think that that's something, that's what's interesting me about this in a lot of ways is that we're seeing a filter being set up that only allows people into one lane of this thought. And we've seen what the end result of that is with radicalization and things that come along with these kinds of conspiracies. But it's really, it's been very wild to watch since the, you know, the 19th, 20th of April till now where we're seeing it, you know, Sarnovich is doing it, any one of the guys you can think of.

Stephen Crowder was doing it. Yep, exactly. Tucker ran a couple things on this and kind of interspersed it with his, you know, white male virility shit. It's we're in a weird place where these are starting to be able to be played with and on each other. And that kind of filtering, you know, starts to get people on boarded from a conspiracy into, you know, what we're seeing now is kind of the white nationalist, Christian nationalist

movement that's, that's become that, that thing. And you know, for me, that's where my interest stems from because of this idea of weaponizing on reality, seeing what happened in Russia when that happened and seeing this kind of thing, which is so similar to that filtering and that narrative shift and building that goes on in that world. It's been, you know, staring into a void feels bad sometimes. This is just one where it's like, oh, this is terrible. And it's just the beginning of it.

Every once in a while, the void stares back and you're like, oh boy. Oh yeah. No. And that, yeah, exactly. I mean, that's, that's the problem is sometimes it just stares you right in the eyes and tells you, yeah, I'm here. And that's a bad feeling. Yeah.

Well, I think that's more or less what we needed to talk about. That would be like, you know, like one of the, one of the ways to come by this, if you can is honestly creating your own memetic graphs is really useful because these things spread so fast when they're in images of dates and instances spread like wildfire. So if you can make your own, which compares it to previous years, say, hey, this actually isn't a new pattern, this is something that's been, this is, this is just what happens in industrial farming, I think spreading it via memetic images is one of the, if there is a way to combat it, that's probably one of the core ways to go about it.

Yes. Just how fast those things spread. Absolutely. Again, you can see, I've seen some useful people have been trying to push back against, you know, this idea that there's been this like massive crime surge in San Francisco and stuff. And they, it uses the same tactics, right? Yeah.

Absolutely. You have like a couple of videos of people shoplifting or something and then you make a, and is there, is that kind of crime actually up? Well, no, it really isn't, but like it doesn't matter because where is it any higher there than it is in some place like Duluth, where no videos are coming out? Like no, it's not, but it's, you have to be aware, the first thing you have to be aware of is the phenomena, is like the way in which they're taking advantage of you. Exactly.

And like, yeah, then you have to, you have to kind of deter and you have to use the tactics they're using against them. And one of the things that is effective is these, these graphs with kind of like numbers and dates and shit on them. People love to feel like they're looking at research. Yes. Yeah. But yeah, at the same time though, not to, not to be like, I don't know, negative about

this at all, but in my mind, this is like a modern day version of someone starting a religion and making people, like making the sheep of this like following and then having them turn into like whatever it is, whether it's Christian nationalism or whatever. But just like in religion, if people are presented with science, they don't fucking care. You know what I mean? Well, you present them with like, I don't know, some people that I think are beyond saving. It's not science. It's about everyone wants to have access to special secret.

Secret knowledge. Yeah. The secret knowledge. Everyone wants to have esoteric knowledge that no one else has. So these graphs are so compelling in the first place because you're like, oh, no one else knows all of these things. No one else has laid it out in this manner. So if you can present your information in that same style, say, hey, no one knows that

this is actually part of this overall thing that's been going on for years and it's about industrial farming. And then you hope that it that will spread. Yeah. That then that spreads because it because it infects the same point in someone's brain, right? Exactly. We want to we want to feel smart.

We want to feel unique. We want to have like esoteric knowledge. So if you can, if you can frame it to fit that same mold, then it's not science. It's just playing with the same tactics that got them convinced of this in the first place. Exactly. Yeah. People. That's different for sure.

Yeah. I think I think, Shireen, like it's true that like if somebody is a committed believer in whatever, like Mike Cernovich or something, you're not convincing them. Absolutely not. But the danger, the thing that they're doing that's dangerous is they're they're quote unquote, pilling a lot of like random people into believe that there's a problem that scares those people and when those people get scared, they're willing to accept shit they wouldn't otherwise scare.

And I think those people, you can push, get to step down from the ledge because one thing we do want, this is also a problem, but like think about like climate change, right? And how much of the denial of climate change is not based around getting people to reject the idea entirely, but getting like when people bring up a specific problem being like, well, look at this weird new piece of technology that some kid developed and like, this is going to fix it. And then you get to not worry about it, right? So if somebody suddenly starts freaking out about agricultural fires for the first time

and you're like, actually they're lower than they are in normal years, this isn't a problem. Then maybe their brain, maybe you can get their brain to go like, OK, then I won't worry about that because I don't want more things to worry about. I just have been given them. That's my hope. Targeting the ledge people. Yeah. We're targeting the ledge people.

Yeah. You're not getting to true believer. You're not getting to true believers at this point of any of this stuff for the most part. You know, that takes a wholly different level of work. I mean, that's that's in the ballpark in my mind of deradicalization, right? Like you're you're in a wholly different ballpark. And if you can target the people who are thinking about jumping into the pool too, they tend to if you do change their mind, they become some of the biggest proponents of trying to

get other people off the ledge that they might know. And that's something I've seen. Or something. Well, it's something I've seen. People that are leave a cult or something. Yeah. It's it's it's very similar. And it's something I've seen even in my friend circles, you know, talking to people who five

years ago were fully, you know, in the, oh, let's do Donald Trump for the lulls thing. You know, now those are the same people who are telling their friends, oh, shit, we have a Christian nationalist movement that's trying to overthrow democracy. And that's a huge, you know, like that's a huge help to everyone, right? You want more people saying the truth to people who might not hear it from someone like us and can internalize it. And we got to infiltrate. There's, you know, the truth takes a lot more work than fiction, unfortunately, but once

it starts to work, it's a compounding. And the truth tends to really set people free as corny as that is. If people find out they've been lied to, they get they want to know why it worked. And that works in our favor and the truth's favor. And reality is the thing we, you know, we got to protect this at all costs because we're getting tidal wave by unreality. And that's a problem for all of us for different reasons. That's a more uplifting note, I think, than a couple minutes ago.

Yeah. All right. All right. There we go. Go. I don't know. Fix it. Yeah.

Go fix things. Yeah. Go fix things. Don't go swimming in grain silos. And yeah. Yeah. Avoid grain silos. Always avoid grain silos.

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