4.4 • 3.1K Ratings
🗓️ 5 May 2025
⏱️ 112 minutes
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0:00.0 | Hello, dear listeners, we wanted to re-release this two-part series from last year in a single episode |
0:07.3 | because it's become incredibly relevant in a new context. Right now, we're seeing similar gang-related |
0:14.7 | excuses used to identify immigrants as gang members in order to justify abducting them off the street and sending |
0:23.6 | them to either U.S. detention centers or to the terrorism confinement center in El Salvador with no |
0:31.4 | due process. As we know, many of those taken have not committed any crimes, but have been retroactively |
0:39.4 | deemed members or associates of dangerous gangs, and even as terrorists, all based on |
0:46.5 | incredibly flimsy evidence like tattoos. |
0:51.0 | This, although incredibly alarming, is actually straight out of the American playbook. From the |
0:58.0 | 1980s into the 2000s and into this very day, mostly black and Latino adults as well as minors |
1:05.7 | were accused of being in violent gangs with similar flimsy evidence in order to justify far harsher sentences |
1:14.1 | for the same crimes that non-gang members were committing, and also to strip away the rights |
1:21.2 | of entire low-income communities. Coming side by side with the disastrous war on drugs, an episode we put out back in |
1:30.5 | 2018 that continues to be relevant as part of our new gang narrative today, these two panics |
1:37.3 | 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 |
1:47.7 | somehow associated with a gang, that can mean so many things, as these episodes will hopefully |
1:54.1 | demonstrate and has never been a crime in and of itself, no matter what those in power seem to imply. |
2:03.7 | The gang initiation series you are about to hear is in the context of the urban legends that many |
2:09.7 | of us heard growing up in the 1990s, but it shows how the outrageously exaggerated idea of |
2:17.2 | violent murderous gangs coming for innocent Americans |
2:21.3 | has been used by both Republicans and Democrats by federal, state, and local forces, to further |
2:28.8 | their own careers through the ever-popular, ever-racist, and ever-classist law and order agenda. |
2:37.1 | We hope that these episodes can illuminate our present moment |
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