Hello, dear listeners, we wanted to re-release this two-part series from last year in a single episode

because it's become incredibly relevant in a new context. Right now, we're seeing similar gang-related

excuses used to identify immigrants as gang members in order to justify abducting them off the street and sending

them to either U.S. detention centers or to the terrorism confinement center in El Salvador with no

due process. As we know, many of those taken have not committed any crimes, but have been retroactively

deemed members or associates of dangerous gangs, and even as terrorists, all based on

incredibly flimsy evidence like tattoos.

This, although incredibly alarming, is actually straight out of the American playbook. From the

1980s into the 2000s and into this very day, mostly black and Latino adults as well as minors

were accused of being in violent gangs with similar flimsy evidence in order to justify far harsher sentences

for the same crimes that non-gang members were committing, and also to strip away the rights

of entire low-income communities. Coming side by side with the disastrous war on drugs, an episode we put out back in

2018 that continues to be relevant as part of our new gang narrative today, these two panics

help to create the highest rate of imprisonment in the world right here in the USA. It also feels important to mention that even if someone is

somehow associated with a gang, that can mean so many things, as these episodes will hopefully

demonstrate and has never been a crime in and of itself, no matter what those in power seem to imply.

The gang initiation series you are about to hear is in the context of the urban legends that many

of us heard growing up in the 1990s, but it shows how the outrageously exaggerated idea of

violent murderous gangs coming for innocent Americans

has been used by both Republicans and Democrats by federal, state, and local forces, to further

their own careers through the ever-popular, ever-racist, and ever-classist law and order agenda.

We hope that these episodes can illuminate our present moment

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