Speaker 1: I found this, perhaps not in the strangest of places,
Speaker 1: but while watching a travel food show in Anthony Bordain
Speaker 1: No Reservations, somewhere in the seventh season, when he goes
Speaker 1: to Cambodia. Half Way through the episode, a woman begins
Speaker 1: talking about the Khmer Rouge regime led by Paul Pott,
Speaker 1: and I looked it up and began to learn about
Speaker 1: the horrors involved, not in the supernatural sense, although I
Speaker 1: couldn't believe humans could be capable of such atrocities, especially
Speaker 1: after what happened in Nazi Germany. Searching for patterns, I
Speaker 1: learned about the Uigurs and the Turkic Muslims and re
Speaker 1: education centers in Shinjang, China, the disappearances, torture and forced
Speaker 1: labor and eritrea of up to four hundred thousand people
Speaker 1: since nineteen ninety one, The Russian filtration camps during the
Speaker 1: Chechen Wars, the Volune, the Almarscot camps in Bosnia, and
Speaker 1: the nineties North Korea's prison camps me and mars Rohinga
Speaker 1: ethnic cleansing. These stories terrified me to my core. Ideas
Speaker 1: that spread like viruses and cause so much pain, and
Speaker 1: the way the messaging affects belief. I'm convinced if there
Speaker 1: is true evil in the world, this is it. And
Speaker 1: in all of these cases, they started with people having
Speaker 1: a hard time believing what was happening, justifying it with
Speaker 1: the law with seemingly valid reasons, allowing themselves to be cruel,
Speaker 1: saying that it can't be that bad, that those who
Speaker 1: sound the alarm are exaggerating, that's just politics, that it
Speaker 1: couldn't possibly happen again, And then it did, and it does.
Speaker 1: It happened with the Native Americans, with African Americans during
Speaker 1: the times of slavery, the Japanese interment caps never again,
Speaker 1: we say, and then it happens once more. Today, I'm
Speaker 1: going to tell you about the most horrifying acts carried
Speaker 1: out by humans. So please take care as you're listening.
Speaker 1: This is how governments disappear humans. My name is Edwin,
Speaker 1: and here's a horror story. One call them names. In
Speaker 1: nineteen thirties Germany, the Nazis didn't invent the hatred, they
Speaker 1: just made it. Formal laws like the Nuremberg Laws of
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty five legally defined who counted as a Jew
Speaker 1: based on ancestry if her grandparents were Jewish, you were Jewish,
Speaker 1: even if you've never stepped inside a synagogue. Religion turned
Speaker 1: into a racial identity that the state could regulate. In Rwanda,
Speaker 1: the division was even more rigid. The Belgian colonial government
Speaker 1: issued ID cards labeling, and these labels locked you into
Speaker 1: legal categories that shaped everything access to schools, jobs, political roles.
Speaker 1: When the genocide began in nineteen ninety four, these ID
Speaker 1: cards became a death sentence. At checkpoints, perpetrators would asked
Speaker 1: to see your papers and it could be killed on
Speaker 1: the spot based on what it said. The Ottoman Empire
Speaker 1: had its own versions of this during the Armenian genocide
Speaker 1: in nineteen fifteen. Armenians were already second class under Ottoman
Speaker 1: law for centuries, but they were further singled out as
Speaker 1: enemies of the state during World War One. The government
Speaker 1: claimed Armenians were conspiring with Russia and pose a threat
Speaker 1: to national security, and that label enemy was enough to
Speaker 1: justify entire communities being deported or killed. In Nazi Germany,
Speaker 1: Jews were called rats, and Rwanda Tutsis were called cockroaches
Speaker 1: and me and mar Rahinja Muslims were labeled illegal Bengalis
Speaker 1: labels like these are tools. They make violence easier by
Speaker 1: making people seem less than human. And it's subtle. But
Speaker 1: it's not just other countries. This kind of naming has
Speaker 1: happened here in the United States too. In nineteen forty two,
Speaker 1: following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the US government ordered
Speaker 1: the force removal of over one hundred and ten thousand
Speaker 1: Japanese Americans, two thirds of them were U S citizens
Speaker 1: that were taken from their homes. They were labeled enemy,
Speaker 1: aliens or potential threats based solely on their ancestry. There
Speaker 1: was no trial, no evidence of wrongdoing, and entire families
Speaker 1: were uprooted in place into interment camps. Under Executive Order
Speaker 1: nine oh sixty six, the government created detailed records, maps,
Speaker 1: and property inventories. Japanese Americans were fringer printed, assigned family numbers,
Speaker 1: and tracked. A century earlier, the force displacement of Native
Speaker 1: American nations followed a similar path. Through laws like the
Speaker 1: Indian Removal Act of eighteen thirty. Indigenous people were officially
Speaker 1: labeled as wards of the state that put them outside
Speaker 1: the legal protections of citizenship and sovereignty. The US classified
Speaker 1: their land as federal property and designated tribes as obstacles
Speaker 1: to settlement. The Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, and the Seminole
Speaker 1: were forcedly marched from their ancestral lands during what became
Speaker 1: known as the Trail of Tears. Thousands died along the way.
Speaker 1: And what's common in each of these stories is the
Speaker 1: way that governments or societies first find a way to
Speaker 1: divide people and then formalize that division, to track it,
Speaker 1: to say you belong and you don't. And it's all
Speaker 1: very organized, very procedural, just names at first, but once
Speaker 1: those names are on paper, they can be used, and
Speaker 1: history shows they usually are number two. Say bad things
Speaker 1: about them. Words don't kill, but they prepare the ground
Speaker 1: for those who will. And before they're pushed out, locked up,
Speaker 1: or buried, they're spoken about in a certain way, loudly, publicly,
Speaker 1: and over and over until the language stops sounding strange.
Speaker 1: In Rwanda, for example, the airwaves were filled with poison.
Speaker 1: Broadcasters joked about extermination, warned of conspiracies, and encouraged the
Speaker 1: majority to defend themselves. And when the genocide began in
Speaker 1: April of nineteen ninety four, people had already been shaped
Speaker 1: by years of propaganda. This happened in Nazi Germany too.
Speaker 1: Joseph Goebel's Ministry of Propaganda spent years portraying Jews as parasites, corruptors,
Speaker 1: and a threat. Cartoons would show them with hooked noses
Speaker 1: and greedy hands, and school books warned children to beware.
Speaker 1: If people believed their neighbors were dangerous in subhuman, then
Speaker 1: they could be removed without guilt. In me and Mar,
Speaker 1: the Rahinda were labeled as Bengalis, implying that they were
Speaker 1: foreign invaders from Bangladesh, even though their families had lived
Speaker 1: in Rakhine State for generations. When the attacks began in
Speaker 1: twenty seventeen, soldiers and militias buried entire villages, They raped women,
Speaker 1: and forced hundreds of thousands into refugee camps across the
Speaker 1: border and throughout the government insisted it was merely handling
Speaker 1: illegal immigration. This is twenty seventeen, not even that long ago.
Speaker 1: But the most chilling examples are often the quietest ones,
Speaker 1: the one I mentioned at the start. In Cambodia, under
Speaker 1: the Khmer Rouge, people were linguistically erased. Intellectuals, professionals, and
Speaker 1: religious leaders were called new people, the phrase that stripped
Speaker 1: them of history and reduced them to a thread against
Speaker 1: a revolution. Anyone even wearing glasses or speaking French, maybe
Speaker 1: owning a book, could be marked for death. Now the
Speaker 1: pattern shows up over and over again. The labels get
Speaker 1: more violent, the speech becomes more casual, and leaders say
Speaker 1: things like they're different from us or they're taking over,
Speaker 1: And eventually entire populations are spoken of in metaphors as floods, infestations, diseases.
Speaker 1: And once people become a problem, the solution comes. Next,
Speaker 1: the way leaders in the media talk about a group
Speaker 1: becomes colder and rougher, allowed to be said without consequences.
Speaker 1: Hate becomes part of the public conversation and when no
Speaker 1: one pushes back, becomes normal. And once that happens, once
Speaker 1: is acceptable to mock, insult, or threatn whole groups of
Speaker 1: people in public. The damage is done. The people who
Speaker 1: hold the power know they can go further, and history
Speaker 1: shows they usually do. Three start the work. Once people
Speaker 1: are labeled and talked about as a threat, The next
Speaker 1: step is only paperwork. Violence comes from systems, boureocracies, forms, checklists, laws.
Speaker 1: With the groundwork has been laid, the system takes over,
Speaker 1: and it moves pretty quietly. In nineteen seventy five, the
Speaker 1: Khmer Rouge rolled into Panampen and declared that Cambodia would
Speaker 1: be rebuilt from zero, and within days the government emptied
Speaker 1: entire cities everyone, teachers, doctors, children, the elderly. They were
Speaker 1: forced to march into the countryside. Hospitals were cleared out,
Speaker 1: schools were closed, property was confiscated. There were no trials,
Speaker 1: no public explanations. It was all done under the logic
Speaker 1: of the revolution. The city dwellers were labeled as impure,
Speaker 1: or bourgeois or capitalist enemies. The killing came later, but
Speaker 1: first came the machinery of control, lists, orders, and silence.
Speaker 1: During Stalin's role in the Soviet Union, entire populations were
Speaker 1: displaced or eliminated by administrative decree. In the early nineteen thirties, Kulaks,
Speaker 1: which were wealthy peasants, were declared class enemies. Local officials
Speaker 1: compiled blacklists or families trains were organized to deport them
Speaker 1: to Siberia. There was no need for protests or mobs,
Speaker 1: just a chain of commands, signatures, and silence. Millions were
Speaker 1: caught in the net and Guatemala during the nineteen eighties,
Speaker 1: the military government launched a campaign called Bland Campagna Vittoria
Speaker 1: centaidos aimed at defeating the guerrilla insurgents, but the so
Speaker 1: called insurgents were often entire Mayan villages. Soldiers and paramilitary
Speaker 1: units used detailed maps and village registries to target communities
Speaker 1: for destruction. Thousands were killed. It was done under the
Speaker 1: language of counter insurgency, but the logic was clear. Remove
Speaker 1: the identity, erased the resistance. In every case, these systems
Speaker 1: were dressed in the language of order and policy. They
Speaker 1: claimed to be protecting the nation, securing peace, managing risk.
Speaker 1: Behind those words were the spreadsheets and blueprints built for displacement,
Speaker 1: even the tools meant for safety, which were birth certificates,
Speaker 1: senses records, ID cards that were repurposed in Nazi Germany.
Speaker 1: The government had already been tracking racial backgrounds for years,
Speaker 1: so when it came time to deport Jews, Roma and
Speaker 1: the other targeted groups, the records were already in place.
Speaker 1: The trains ran on schedule. The scariest part is in
Speaker 1: that these systems existed. It's how ordinary they looked while
Speaker 1: doing extraordinary harm. Clerks at desks, inspectors with clipboards, local
Speaker 1: officials just following the rules, and by the time the
Speaker 1: system is fully in place, it no longer feels like violence.
Speaker 1: It's just process four pick aside. Once the system is
Speaker 1: in place, something else has to be cleared before mass
Speaker 1: violence can begin, and that's doubt. That means silencing anyone
Speaker 1: who might raise questions, whether that be journalists, judges, teachers, neighbors, clergy,
Speaker 1: or even former allies. People who might ask is this right?
Speaker 1: They're dangerous to a regimed that's decided, it's already knows
Speaker 1: the answer. In April nineteen fifteen, before the full scale
Speaker 1: Armnian genocide began, the Ottoman government carried out a quiet
Speaker 1: purge hundreds of Armenian intellectuals, writers, priests, politicians that were
Speaker 1: arrested and instanbul and deported to remote provinces. Most were
Speaker 1: never seen again. They were the people most likely to
Speaker 1: speak out. Their removal created a silence that made the
Speaker 1: mass deportations and killings easier to carry out in the
Speaker 1: months that followed. In Germany, the Nazis targeted ascent from
Speaker 1: the start political opponents, especially communists and social democrats. They
Speaker 1: were the first to be arrested and sent to early
Speaker 1: concentration camps. As the regime grew stronger, even internal critics,
Speaker 1: Catholic bishops, Protestant pastors, conservative politicians, they were all threatened, sidelined,
Speaker 1: or killed. Books were burned, newspapers were shut down, Teachers
Speaker 1: were forced to swear loyalty oaths. Resistance didn't end overnight,
Speaker 1: but it did get quieter. In Yugoslavia during the nineteen nineties,
Speaker 1: nationalist leaders pushed hard to eliminate multi ethnic cooperation. Political
Speaker 1: moderates who promoted coexistence between Serbs, Croats and the Bosniacs
Speaker 1: that were called traders. Some were assassinated and others fled.
Speaker 1: The media was used to stoke division and paranoia, and
Speaker 1: by the time ethnic cleansing campaigns began, there were fewer
Speaker 1: voices left willing or able to object. I found that
Speaker 1: the same thing happened in Cambodia with the Khmara rouge,
Speaker 1: who was targeting anyone whom I question it. People with education,
Speaker 1: foreign language skills, or even soft hands were marked for elimination.
Speaker 1: Family members of suspected enemies were killed. Two. The idea
Speaker 1: was simple, no one should be left who could challenge
Speaker 1: the truth. As a regime to find it. This is
Speaker 1: the turning point, because once the people who would normally
Speaker 1: speak out are gone were too scared to try, there's
Speaker 1: nothing left to slow things down. The road ahead is
Speaker 1: open legally speaking, of course, five displacing people. Now what
Speaker 1: follows looks normal. People don't always disappear in the middle
Speaker 1: of the night. Sometimes they are told to pack a bag,
Speaker 1: like in nineteen forty two, the Japanese Americans were sent
Speaker 1: to camps surrounded by Barb's wire in remote deserts and mountains.
Speaker 1: The government called it evacuation, and later we called it
Speaker 1: what it actually meant. In tournament. Through the Armenian genocide,
Speaker 1: what began as deportations who became death marches. Armenians were
Speaker 1: ordered to leave their towns for relocation, but the routes
Speaker 1: had no food, no shelter, and no end. Thousands died
Speaker 1: along the roads and others were killed along the way.
Speaker 1: Women were abducted, children were taken from their parents. The
Speaker 1: promise of relocation was a lie. In Bosnia during the
Speaker 1: nineteen nineties, civilians were rounded up. Muslims and Croat families
Speaker 1: were forced to leave with whatever they could carry or
Speaker 1: face execution. In some cases, men and boys were separated
Speaker 1: and later killed. Now, in even more recent examples, the
Speaker 1: pattern repeats and me and Mar the Rahenga were pushed
Speaker 1: out of their homes by soldiers and armed mobs. Villages
Speaker 1: were burned, families fled across a border into Bangladesh, and
Speaker 1: those who didn't were killed or captured. The government insisted
Speaker 1: it was a security operation, but the scale and targeting
Speaker 1: told a different story. By the end of twenty seventeen,
Speaker 1: over seven hundred thousand Rahinia had fled. The language around
Speaker 1: these displacements is always careful. Governments speak of relocation or processing,
Speaker 1: clearance or protection. The victims are framed as threats, intruders,
Speaker 1: or burdens. The violence is disguised as policy, and by
Speaker 1: the time the photos and videos of camps and caravans
Speaker 1: show up, it's already well underway. What ties these moments
Speaker 1: together is not just a movement of people, but the
Speaker 1: message behind it. You don't belong here, not anymore, not
Speaker 1: with us. That message doesn't need to be shouted. It's
Speaker 1: printed on official letterhead, it's signed by an officer, and
Speaker 1: it arrives at the door. Backed by Law six, create Chaos,
Speaker 1: displacement clears the which strips people of protection, identity, and connection.
Speaker 1: Once they've been moved out of site into ghettos, camps,
Speaker 1: detention centers, forests, what happens next can happen quietly. This
Speaker 1: is the point where persecution becomes extermination. And Rwanda, the
Speaker 1: killing started fast after the assassination of the president in
Speaker 1: April of nineteen ninety four, roadblocks went up overnight. Of
Speaker 1: the course of one hundred days, more than eight hundred
Speaker 1: thousand Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered. Entire communities were
Speaker 1: wiped out, and the infrastructure that once tracked people by
Speaker 1: decards addresses they all made it easier to find them.
Speaker 1: In Cambodia, the population was sent into rural labor camps.
Speaker 1: The killing began slowly, though people who complained disappeared little
Speaker 1: by little. Execution sites were called killing fields. Victims were
Speaker 1: often told they were being relocated again, but instead they
Speaker 1: were being led to Maps decimated that nearly two million
Speaker 1: people died, almost a quarter of the population. In Bosnia,
Speaker 1: the violence was fast. In July of nineteen ninety five,
Speaker 1: more than eight thousand Bosniak Muslim men and boys were
Speaker 1: separated from their families under the watch of peacekeepers. They
Speaker 1: were loaded into buses, driven into forests and fields and shot.
Speaker 1: Their bodies were dumped into mass graves, and later, to
Speaker 1: cover up the crime, the graves were dug up and scattered.
Speaker 1: Survivors of the towns evacuation never saw their loved ones again.
Speaker 1: In the forests of eastern Poland and Ukraine during the Holocaust,
Speaker 1: entire Jewish communities were taken outside of town and shot.
Speaker 1: Men with lists walked door to door, collected families and
Speaker 1: marched them to the edge of the woods. Children were
Speaker 1: killed two Though these weren't hidden massacres, they happened near farms,
Speaker 1: roads and villages. Ordinary people saw them and most stayed silent.
Speaker 1: It often starts with the idea of removal, but eventually
Speaker 1: the question becomes why keep feeding, guarding, or transporting people
Speaker 1: as they're just not welcome here anymore. Now, the logic titans,
Speaker 1: the solution shifts, it becomes final, and by this point
Speaker 1: most of the outside world is either looking away or
Speaker 1: struggling to believe it. Governments speak in vague terms. The
Speaker 1: bodies are hidden or denied. There are no images from
Speaker 1: inside the worst places, only rumors, fragments, testimonies that sound
Speaker 1: too awful to be real. The killing stage is about
Speaker 1: the system accepting that people marked as them have no future.
Speaker 1: It's about society turning away or worse, participating. Seven change
Speaker 1: the story now. In the years after the Armenian genessid,
Speaker 1: the Ottoman government fell, but the denial remained to this day.
Speaker 1: Turkey refuses to recognize what happened in nineteen fifteen as genocide. Instead,
Speaker 1: it's called a tragedy of war or mutual suffering. After
Speaker 1: the Holocaust, much of the world said never again, and
Speaker 1: Germany built monuments, changed school curriculums, prosecuted many of the perpetrators,
Speaker 1: but even there, denial crept in Neo Nazi groups were
Speaker 1: emerged and conspiracy theory started circulating. In Cambodia, the Khmer
Speaker 1: Rouge trials took decades to begin. Many of the regime's
Speaker 1: leaders lived long, quiet lives before ever seeing a courtroom.
Speaker 1: For years, the genocide was barely taught in schools. Survivors
Speaker 1: often kept silent, unsure who to trust. It wasn't until
Speaker 1: a new generation pushed for truth that museums, memorials, and
Speaker 1: textbooks began to fill the gap. In Bosnia, workrooms were
Speaker 1: convicted at the Hague, but back home, many were honored.
Speaker 1: Streets were named after them, murals were painted. Some schools
Speaker 1: teach at the Surrey bernitza of massacre never happened in
Speaker 1: the United States. The government eventually apologized for the internment
Speaker 1: of Japanese Americans. Survivors were given reparations, but most of
Speaker 1: the camps are gone now. Many people don't know that
Speaker 1: they even existed. And this is what bothers me, even
Speaker 1: as I tell you about it. With so much killing
Speaker 1: and tragedy, all these stories begin to sound like just
Speaker 1: numbers and facts. It's the same reason why we react
Speaker 1: the way we do when we hear about a mass
Speaker 1: shooting on the news. As time passes, the clarity fades,
Speaker 1: the photos seem too old, or the stories just too distant.
Speaker 1: Becomes easier to think that it couldn't happen again, that
Speaker 1: maybe now we actually value lives. The same is true
Speaker 1: for the force removal of Native American tribes. The trail
Speaker 1: of tears is taught in schools, but often without the
Speaker 1: weight that it deserves. There are few monuments marking the
Speaker 1: thousands who died, few preserved homes or gravestones. The people
Speaker 1: are still here, but the history is usually told in
Speaker 1: past tense, as if it belongs to another country. If
Speaker 1: you take something away from this episode, please let it
Speaker 1: be this. The constant pattern of a fascist movement follows
Speaker 1: these steps, and it's based on works by Jason Stanley,
Speaker 1: Madeline Albright, Umberto Eeko, and Hannah Arendt. Create an enemy class,
Speaker 1: cultivate a mythic national identity, undermine truth and expertise, glorify
Speaker 1: law and order, militarize politics, euro democratic institutions control education
Speaker 1: and culture, suppress dissent, promote rigid gender roles, normalize cruelty.
Speaker 1: Doesn't this sound familiar? Now? From all this I've told
Speaker 1: you so far, none happen in the same place, different ideologies,
Speaker 1: different enemies, different borders. But the steps, they're familiar, and
Speaker 1: they repeat most of the time. The people inside these
Speaker 1: stories didn't believe it would go that far. They told
Speaker 1: themselves that it was just a phase politics or just talk.
Speaker 1: They believe their institutions would stop it, that the neighbors
Speaker 1: wouldn't allow it, that their country wasn't like that. And
Speaker 1: they were wrong, not all of them, though some helped
Speaker 1: people escape, some resisted until the end, but many, most
Speaker 1: watched it unfold and waited for someone else to act.
Speaker 1: That's why these stories are remembered, because of how many
Speaker 1: people let it happen. History whispers and repeats itself. What
Speaker 1: looks like bureaucracy today might be the bones of something
Speaker 1: far worse tomorrow. No country is immune, no society is
Speaker 1: too advanced. The truth is, any place can build the
Speaker 1: wrong system if the wrong story is told long enough,
Speaker 1: and if enough people choose to look away. So remember
Speaker 1: the steps, Remember how normal they looked as they began,
Speaker 1: and remember how hard it was to stop once they started.
Speaker 1: I was born in California and now lived in the
Speaker 1: US for most of my life. I remember being in
Speaker 1: second grade during the racist Pete Wilson's policies in the state.
Speaker 1: I understood them much later, but I remember the fear
Speaker 1: on banning bilingual education, saying that undocumented immigrants should be
Speaker 1: excluded from schools in public services. Instead of focusing on
Speaker 1: the efforts on legalization, ICE feels more like a machine
Speaker 1: built to show us that we don't belong. The patrols
Speaker 1: like an occupying force. Its job is to intimidate, to divide,
Speaker 1: and to disappear people. Parents drop off their kids at
Speaker 1: school and never come home. Children left and after school
Speaker 1: programs crying for someone who wasn't coming back, and somehow
Speaker 1: it's legal. When Trump said they're not sending their best,
Speaker 1: he was talking about my parents. When he said animals
Speaker 1: infestation and they're invading our country, he gave permission to eyes,
Speaker 1: to customs and border patrol, to racist communities that refuse
Speaker 1: to read, to travel, or explore ideas outside of their
Speaker 1: own echo chambers. That kind of language was chosen. That's
Speaker 1: the language of fascism. And let's not excuse previous presidents too.
Speaker 1: No one has come up with a solution that also
Speaker 1: gets accepted by the majority. In fascist regimes, the first
Speaker 1: step is to dehumanize a group, usually one that's racially,
Speaker 1: religiously or culturally different. The second step is to remove them,
Speaker 1: or to control them so fully that they can't resist.
Speaker 1: Ice rates, family separation, border camps, militarized checkpoints, and politicians
Speaker 1: telling us to go back to where we came from.
Speaker 1: That's not immigration policy. That's literally ethnic cleansing by paper work.
Speaker 1: I've shown you examples, and yes, I understand the points
Speaker 1: of not wanting people to keep coming into the country
Speaker 1: for safety. Reasons or whatever. But some of the very
Speaker 1: problems they're escaping from were created by the US foreign
Speaker 1: policy to begin with. And I've heard the arguments and
Speaker 1: I understand them, I really do. Some people say if
Speaker 1: they came to illegally, they should face the consequences. But
Speaker 1: what's the same energy for corporations that employment documented labor
Speaker 1: laws are adjusted for them white only for them? What's
Speaker 1: the outrage for the white Europeans who overstay visas. They're
Speaker 1: not putting cages, their kids aren't taken. Others might say,
Speaker 1: my grandparents came here legally. Why can't they please understand
Speaker 1: that your grandparents weren't blocked by laws designed to keep
Speaker 1: out people who look like mine. Before nineteen sixty five,
Speaker 1: US immigration law gave massive preference to white Europeans. Records
Speaker 1: show this. The National Origins quota system from nineteen twenty
Speaker 1: four to nineteen sixty five was designed to preserve a white,
Speaker 1: Northern or Western European demographic majority. Meanwhile, quotas on Mexicans
Speaker 1: and Central Americans were harsh and arbitrary, even though US
Speaker 1: companies recruited US for labor. They say, you should have
Speaker 1: come the right way. The thing is there is no
Speaker 1: right way for most of us. Please please ask a
Speaker 1: friend who's from a Latin American country what it's like
Speaker 1: for them to travel. It's the simple question, and not
Speaker 1: just to the US, but to other places. Ask them
Speaker 1: about the paperwork and sufficient proof they must show the
Speaker 1: agents while crossing borders. Plus, there's no visa for fleeing
Speaker 1: gang threats, no green card for working fourteen hour shifts
Speaker 1: under the table the meat packing plants. Then they say,
Speaker 1: why should we be paying for them to have benefits?
Speaker 1: Undocumented immigrants cannot receive food stamps, Medicaid, or welfare. They
Speaker 1: are eligible. And yes, undocumented immigrants pay taxes through individual
Speaker 1: tax payer ID numbers. That's how they file returns, and
Speaker 1: they pay into Social Security and Medicare but cannot access it.
Speaker 1: Survival cannot be a crime. Our presence challenges a myth
Speaker 1: of what the United States is supposed to be. There's
Speaker 1: this imaginary vision that the US is supposed to look
Speaker 1: a certain way, feel a certain way, and sound a
Speaker 1: certain way. As a kid, did you ever hear about
Speaker 1: the manifest destiny? It was literally a belief that the
Speaker 1: United States was destined by God and history to expand
Speaker 1: as territory across North America that's from ocean to ocean,
Speaker 1: and it was coined in eighteen forty five, and it's
Speaker 1: deeply rooted in racism. It treated non white populations like
Speaker 1: Indigenous peoples and Mexicans as inferior and obstacles to progress.
Speaker 1: The movement assumed that Anglo American culture was superior and
Speaker 1: that non white people had no rightful claim to land
Speaker 1: or sovereignty, reflecting and reinforcing white supremacist ideas. Perhaps the
Speaker 1: majority is afraid, afraid that our kids will speak more
Speaker 1: languages than them and graduate college, that will run for office,
Speaker 1: that will own land, that will remember everything they did
Speaker 1: to us and demand justice. So what can we do?
Speaker 1: We tell our stories. We start to pass to legalization
Speaker 1: and naturalization so we can vote. We protect each other,
Speaker 1: We sue ice, We build sanctuaries. We raise a next
Speaker 1: generation to know that fear is not Their inheritance was
Speaker 1: stolen long before we crossed any line. Some of our
Speaker 1: ancestors lived on it, their hands built it. We don't
Speaker 1: need permission to exist. They want to make us ghosts,
Speaker 1: but we're still here. If you have any questions about
Speaker 1: anything I mentioned in this episode, please reach out. This
Speaker 1: episode was intended to share with you the truth of
Speaker 1: the darkest times in human history, and perhaps you can
Speaker 1: help in spotting patterns