Bubble Pop with Rachel Gilmore - How do ordinary people become agents of state murder？ (feat. Yannick Veilleux-Lepage)

00:00:00.000 hello i'm rachel gilmore your least favorite person's least favorite journalist welcome to

00:00:11.440 bubble pop this is the live show where we talk about some of the biggest headlines and juiciest

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00:00:45.920 we do pretty much always take some regular questions as well. So let's get into it.

00:00:52.500 It has been a tough couple of weeks. Armed thugs are gunning down protesters in broad daylight on

00:01:01.000 American streets, and the administration has been lying to the public to defend those executions.

00:01:06.580 It's raised a lot of questions for me, both as a Canadian who's trying to avoid our bad habit of

00:01:13.240 copying what the U.S. does first, and also as a human being just trying to understand how people

00:01:19.280 can be so cruel and do evil things to each other. So when I saw Dr. Yannick Veille-Lepage's post on

00:01:27.940 Blue Sky, it struck a chord with me. He asked, how do seemingly ordinary people become agents of

00:01:37.680 state murder? Then he posted a whole thread of various great thinkers, academics, and more who

00:01:45.080 have grappled with that very question. So it's one that I want to grapple with now too. So I asked

00:01:52.320 Yannick to join me on the show to help me do it. Dr. Yannick Véa-Lepage is a professor at the Royal

00:01:58.900 Military College of Canada. He's an expert on tech, far-right extremism, and terrorism tactics,

00:02:04.880 and I am really hoping that he can help us to at least try to make sense of these really senseless

00:02:11.740 times. Or at least we'll talk about it all. So Yannick, welcome to Bubble Pop.

00:02:19.360 Thanks for having me, Rachel. It's very exciting to be here.

00:02:22.880 Yeah, I'm really excited to talk to you. When I saw that thread, it just like really,

00:02:26.680 really struck me. And I don't know, because I think that that is the overarching feeling that

00:02:33.640 a lot of people have when they're watching these horrors is, you know, how can people do this? Like,

00:02:41.120 it makes you question is there like a critical mass of evil people in the world or do good people

00:02:47.900 sometimes do bad things so I wanted to ask you like as someone who studies these issues were you

00:02:55.020 surprised when ICE agents started actually killing protesters and why or why not so I wasn't

00:03:03.960 surprised in kind of a structural or analytical sense uh but I was still deeply disturbed by by

00:03:09.880 what I saw. Part of the reason why I'm not surprised by this, if you take an institution

00:03:14.800 like ICE, its everyday mandate involves violence and coercion, it involves surveillance, it involves

00:03:22.060 detention, forcible removal. We've seen, you know, for example, the deportee flights to El

00:03:29.300 Salvador's. And then if you place these individuals in this institution in a kind of like highly

00:03:35.500 politicized street context and particularly a context that's framed by the media but also the

00:03:42.300 Trump administration as a context of disorder and threat. There's really the conditions for

00:03:49.420 lethal escalation and this is I think what we saw. One of the things I was kind of trying to

00:03:57.260 really bring forward with this threat is that it's not about individual malice and I think there is

00:04:04.860 often a desire to attribute blame to one particular individual, but rather it's about

00:04:13.100 institutional logics. It's about how enforcement cultures can interact with these different

00:04:17.580 pressures and also about ambiguity. And this is really one of the central question that exists

00:04:25.180 when the broader literature on state violence, but also on genocide. And I teach graduate course

00:04:30.860 the royal military college on on genocide compared to genocide um and this is essentially this this

00:04:37.420 question of how is it that ordinary people end up doing these things that seem absolutely uh

00:04:45.100 extraordinary it seems outside the norm of what we believe is is capable and and this is what i

00:04:53.100 kind of try to to get my students to think about but also uh my followers on blue skies and your

00:04:58.540 audience is that even before somebody like pulls a trigger or or or you know pepper sprays someone

00:05:06.060 or uh you know batons someone there's procedures there's mandates there's chains of command there's

00:05:12.940 narratives about targeting and all these things are going to shape how agents see the situation

00:05:18.300 and how they think about what their role is and what they the the people they interact with role

00:05:25.420 are and whether they are perceived as as threats so you know when we think about violence when you

00:05:30.940 think about the people inside the system um but we also need to kind of emphasize that it's not

00:05:38.460 the blame cannot be attributed to one individual right we just kind of look at this through like

00:05:42.300 a systemic uh a level and this is one of the things that i think is is missing in a lot of

00:05:48.300 analysis about the violence that's occurring during operation metro search is this kind of

00:05:53.500 broad systemic understanding of how you know bureaucratic processes are enabling

00:06:00.940 and this this violence unfortunately so like to answer your question i'm not surprised in an

00:06:07.260 analytical sense uh but seeing the reality of the killing of renee good or alex uh freddy it

00:06:16.220 remains deeply shocking um yeah no it's um i i can't help but wonder and i'm sure we'll we'll

00:06:24.700 get into a lot of this over the course of the conversation but it just immediately struck me

00:06:28.940 when you were giving that answer i i feel like in telling ourselves that it's a unique bad actor

00:06:37.180 someone who has something wrong with their brain or is you know uh uniquely cruel in some way it

00:06:44.700 makes us feel as though we would never do that it's a comforting thought that if the conditions

00:06:50.060 were right that we know that we wouldn't behave that way and i i think that um if anything that's

00:06:57.260 that's a dangerous line of thinking because it prevents you from inoculating yourself from the

00:07:02.140 conditions that could then make you into an agent of state violence if not murder but um i wanted

00:07:10.060 to drill down on uh your thread and uh you know the the posts that i saw that originally prompted

00:07:17.500 me to reach out to you for this episode um as i mentioned in the introduction you asked how do

00:07:23.900 seemingly ordinary people become agents of state murder and while some of the authors that you

00:07:31.100 cite throughout this thread they detailed different explanations for this there are

00:07:35.820 definitely some themes that are woven throughout and one of those as you mentioned in your initial

00:07:40.780 answer a little bit um is just the banality of it all i mean i think that a lot of people have

00:07:45.740 heard that phrase from hannah arendt the banality of evil um the the element as you mentioned of

00:07:52.940 bureaucratic routine so i wanted to ask you if you could explain a little bit more and just kind of

00:07:59.100 expand on what you mentioned about how the ordinariness of evil acts plays such a significant

00:08:06.380 role in producing state murder yeah so ordinariness really is important to this conversation the

00:08:13.660 reason why it's important is that it explains scale right if mass violence or state violence

00:08:19.420 required you know sociopath or psychopath or kind of serial killers that are work that i found

00:08:26.220 their calling working within these institutions um state violence would be rare it would be very

00:08:32.700 rare right um but history actually shows us that that state killings are carried out often and

00:08:38.780 they're carried out by by ordinary people um and this is the insight as you mentioned it's often

00:08:43.820 attributed to to anna iran and and her book uh heichmann in jerusalem just to give a bit of

00:08:49.660 context on this book because it's extremely important uh heichmann was one of the the

00:08:54.620 principal architects of the Holocaust. After the fall of the Third Reich, he escapes through 0.76

00:09:02.780 ratlines and ends up working in a car factory in Argentina. Eventually, Israeli intelligence gets

00:09:12.060 essentially a tip-off saying that kind of one of the most high-ranking remaining free Nazi is

00:09:20.940 in argentina and they send a snatch team made up of massad and shimbet they identify him um

00:09:28.860 and then they they essentially kidnap him um they force him to drink a ball i think it was whiskey or

00:09:36.860 or scotch i don't quite know they get him they get him properly 0.64

00:09:40.380 shit-faced they put him into an el al uh uniform so the the israeli airline and they essentially 0.91

00:09:48.140 just kind of carry him onto an israeli or an al flight commercial flight as a drunk pilot uh and 0.98

00:09:55.260 then they bring him into back to to israel where he's he's put to stand trial and there's a lot of

00:10:01.740 questions as well as like whether somebody like that even deserves a trial but the decision is

00:10:06.460 made to make him stand trial this ends up being like a an extremely important media event um you

00:10:13.900 know we're this is 1961 so it's you know 15 years after the end of second world war a lot of people

00:10:20.060 have kind of moved on to other topics it's not a you know i think kind of like there's a collective

00:10:25.660 trauma right we're talking about not only the holocaust but also a war that has killed tens of

00:10:31.180 millions of of civilians has created deep scars and there's a i think a collective desire for

00:10:38.620 people to kind of move on and talk about other things the eichmann trial essentially brings

00:10:43.740 back the holocaust as a topic of kind of dining dinner table conversation okay so with that uh

00:10:52.460 iran goes to jerusalem and she observes the trial she's reporting for the uh the magazine the new

00:10:59.660 yorker and she later writes a a book and in which essentially she says that she's not struck by

00:11:07.900 eichmann's like cruelty or even his like profound devotion to national socialism but rather about

00:11:13.820 kind of like how boring and ordinary he he he seemed he spoke in cliche he was fixated on like

00:11:21.420 procedures he described his action and kind of like a boring administrative task uh rather than

00:11:27.900 talking about like moral decisions and dilemmas and conundrums so essentially what she she argues

00:11:34.460 it's not that he's innocent but rather she's very very clear in his her text that he is guilty of

00:11:40.620 of perpetrating this horrendous crime but rather uh she argues that that the evil is present in

00:11:49.480 this kind of modern bureaucratic system doesn't require sadism or like deep ideological hatred

00:11:55.800 it just requires people to stop thinking morally and instead start thinking about like rules and

00:12:01.600 procedures and and also careerism and career survival yeah i think this is super useful today

00:12:08.080 uh i i think if if there's one book that i recommended this is probably the one i would

00:12:14.420 say is the starting point is probably one of the most important one in these kind of like micro

00:12:19.080 approach to to genocide so essentially micro i mean the study of the individual perpetrator

00:12:24.260 um and it's useful when we start thinking about ice agents in minnesota right i think it's as i

00:12:30.820 it's easy for us to demonize them it's easy for us to think that they are personally cruel that

00:12:36.020 they enjoy ripping children away from parents and and all these things uh that we often see as

00:12:42.420 cliches but i think a much more convincing explanation as to why we are seeing this on

00:12:48.900 kind of large scale is because of the institutions um the institutions that allow actors to see

00:12:56.580 themselves essentially as functionary of a broad system and that essentially removes um kind of

00:13:03.700 moral hesitation there's another fantastic uh uh book that i mentioned if you if you'll indulge me

00:13:09.940 in this yeah of course and this is christopher browning's ordinary man and i think the parallel

00:13:15.540 here is is so striking so essentially browning uh is an historian and he studied a reserve police

00:13:24.500 regiment a reserve german police regiment that was active in poland in 1942 this is this regiment is

00:13:34.580 mostly made up of middle-aged men often veterans from the first world war um and essentially

00:13:42.580 they're not in in browning's talent they're not ideological extremists um but nonetheless the

00:13:49.620 battalion does commit massacres it commits mass shooting it rounds up jews for for deportation to

00:13:56.900 to nazi extermination camp and essentially his argument is that these people became mass shooters

00:14:04.500 became agent of death uh through peer pressure through obedience through societal and situational

00:14:12.580 escalation um essentially the fear of kind of sticking out from this this group from their peer

00:14:21.380 motivated them to continue in these acts of of violence and i i think again this is one of the

00:14:29.060 plays where we we can draw a very interesting parallel where um you know it's it's it's it's

00:14:39.140 again it's it's easy to try to focus on the individuals but we also need to kind of start

00:14:43.220 focusing about how ice as a culture as an institution with rituals with pageantry right

00:14:53.460 they're dressed a certain way they talk a certain way they're wearing gear that is not necessarily

00:14:59.140 standard issue they're covering their face they're wearing sunglasses um how that creates social

00:15:05.860 cohesion within ice agent and then somebody saying like oh guys slow down or this is excessive force

00:15:13.300 or this is not actually our mandate that essentially gets pushed down by this desire

00:15:20.180 to to be part of of this team and the fear of kind of in-group retribution

00:15:27.460 it's so interesting it's um it's scary when you think about it i mean one thing that struck me

00:15:33.300 when i was uh i was watching a little youtube summary of that book ordinary men because i'm

00:15:38.820 an excellent student um and i i saw i heard in it that um these men also didn't have to do all

00:15:49.540 the things like like not everything they were given a choice in some instances of whether to

00:15:54.980 shoot people or not like they didn't have to be in the firing squads and they didn't

00:15:58.740 and and they chose to do that and and these were as the title of the book alludes to ordinary men

00:16:04.900 and you can correct me if i'm mistaken about that based on my little youtube research but

00:16:09.220 i found that really shocking because it does kind of uh complicate those notions that

00:16:17.220 you know there's a uniqueness to the kinds of people capable of doing these things and and

00:16:23.220 forces us to ask ourselves some uncomfortable things about how easily we can be swayed in

00:16:27.220 those situations as a result of peer pressure careerism and ordinariness and i i wanted to

00:16:32.740 drill down a little bit more on the um the first half of what you were describing there which is

00:16:40.020 that the banality the ordinariness um i i was hoping you could tell me a little bit more about

00:16:47.540 how these evil acts become seen as ordinary like is there a specific process to it that we see

00:16:55.940 happening again and again is it um a variety of ways like is it just um they make it boring i mean

00:17:04.180 i've frankly as a i'm this is a little bit of a tangent but as someone working in media i've

00:17:09.140 noticed how quickly uh folks become desensitized to issues and i've also noticed the power of

00:17:15.380 you know for example i i did a story on the companies who are profiting from um ices uh

00:17:22.980 you know mass deportations and uh just the the numbers and the the paperwork and the boring

00:17:30.020 graphs and the government procurement documents like it's boring as hell and i think that makes

00:17:34.660 it easy to turn your brain off and and dehumanize an element of what is actually being done with

00:17:40.980 that paperwork with that money with those contracts so i i guess i wanted to ask you like

00:17:46.180 How do we get there where someone like Eichmann is a key player in the Holocaust when he, as he said, never killed anyone himself?

00:17:59.100 How does that become normal? 0.77

00:18:01.320 That's a great question. And I mean, the answer is it's complicated.

00:18:04.720 But if if I was to kind of try to to break it down into kind of three main processes or mechanisms that I think we can see.

00:18:15.440 The first one has to do with, like, a shift in agency and the absorption of authority.

00:18:21.460 And this is where, like, Stanley Milgram's experiment often come up in these conversations.

00:18:25.700 So for those who might not be familiar with Milgram, essentially he did an experiment trying to essentially answer this question, but he recruited a bunch of subjects.

00:18:39.880 And they were essentially told that they were doing experiments based on learning.

00:18:45.440 and the so there's a an individual essentially an actor who's playing the role as the subject of the

00:18:55.760 experiment where in reality the the subject of the experiment is the administrator of the test

00:19:01.340 um so these administrators of the test which are recruited are essentially told we're going to ask

00:19:07.940 these questions to to this actor and when he gets it wrong administer an electric shock

00:19:13.800 And we're going to see whether or not this essentially improves somebody's ability to learn.

00:19:21.020 Now, as the tests progress, the shocks are said to go greater and greater and greater,

00:19:26.820 start approaching kind of a lethal amount.

00:19:29.240 In reality, the actor is not really getting shocked.

00:19:33.060 But essentially what this experiment has showed us is that in a setting where there's somebody in a lab coat,

00:19:39.040 somebody with a seemingly notoriety you know a professor or a social psychologist

00:19:46.640 and is instructing the subject to keep shocking the actor uh or the the student if you will um

00:19:55.440 most people simply obey and and if you go on youtube you can essentially see these videos

00:20:01.760 of the experiment where people say like well you know i don't know if i should do more and then

00:20:06.800 this the the administrator of the test being like no no you have to continue we can't stop this test

00:20:12.400 so essentially what what he found right is this notion of of shift in agency people uh

00:20:22.400 while you know while the participant were distressed continued because even it was their

00:20:27.200 the responsibility rested with the authority and not with them so the moral question kind of shifted

00:20:33.280 from is this right to am i doing this correctly and the psychological shift i think is is crucial

00:20:39.600 because it shows us how when moral agency is kind of uh uh handed upwards violence can become routine

00:20:48.000 for the individual so again like if if we bring this back to to what's happening in minnesota

00:20:53.440 uh ice agents have been told that they are acting under legal authority uh steven miller essentially

00:21:00.240 told them that they had complete immunity uh they are told that they are doing this for national

00:21:05.920 security and that their work is is essential uh so therefore the psychological burden of the

00:21:12.880 decision making is shifted upwards and in the protest uh environment in minnesota uh where

00:21:20.000 there's ambiguity and high stress this shift becomes even uh even more pronounced um

00:21:29.200 uh yannick i think um i don't know if this is uh coming through for everyone or if it's just my

00:21:35.040 air pods but there's a bit of a issue with the mic i don't know if you could maybe just unplug

00:21:40.000 it and plug it back in just to see if i can try i'm also going to go close my door because i've

00:21:46.400 just heard my toddler come back in and uh does this work is that better yes that's perfect that's

00:21:54.400 perfect so i'm having a bit of a i'm having a bit of a perfect storm i have the city of kingston

00:22:01.040 literally cutting a tree down in front of my house and i have a sick toddler uh downstairs so

00:22:06.800 i do apologize oh no don't apologize at all it's you know what uh we are ordinary men as they say

00:22:14.160 right so it's uh there are life things happening around us so um anyways thank you so much for uh

00:22:21.520 uh you know just uh adjusting that but so you were just talking about the milgram experiment

00:22:27.120 and all these people yeah diffused so yeah so that's one of the the processes right essentially

00:22:32.960 you're able to shift moral responsibility upwards uh and then therefore you're not essentially

00:22:39.040 concerning yourself as whether or not you are responsible for these actions because you have

00:22:43.520 been told by the vice president the president the uh the head of dhs by special advisor to

00:22:52.480 the president that what you are doing is not only lawful it is also essential um the second shift

00:22:59.840 that we see is essentially this this this notion and this comes out of a a fantastic book by uh

00:23:07.680 bauman uh called modernity in the holocaust and essentially his argument here is that the holocaust

00:23:12.560 is not a product of the breakdown of modern society, but rather is a byproduct of modern

00:23:18.420 society. And his central claim is that the Holocaust could never have taken place if

00:23:24.620 it wasn't for all the tools of bureaucracy. And what we mean by this, you know, rational 0.66

00:23:30.220 planning, division of labor, supply chain, weaponization of technology, you know, IBM

00:23:38.400 counting machines and so on so essentially his argument here is that

00:23:43.140 bureaucracy makes violence efficient and psychologically manageable so the

00:23:50.820 argument here is that individuals are assigned specific narrow tasks and these

00:23:56.700 are evaluated on like technical performance and therefore they're

00:23:59.960 shielded from the overall outcome right so if you if you take for example kind

00:24:08.100 of what we are seeing here in Minnesota, you've got various individuals who all have different

00:24:16.940 roles to play in this.

00:24:18.500 I think this kind of goes back to your reporting yesterday on the Canadian contracts when it

00:24:23.340 comes to ICE, right?

00:24:24.100 So like the individual who is building a vehicle that is going to be sold to ICE does not see

00:24:32.280 himself or probably doesn't see himself as having a moral responsibility for what's happening

00:24:37.120 in minnesota the sale agent who manufacturer who sold that contract or created that contract

00:24:44.640 doesn't see you know is not the one who pulled the trigger and we can kind of keep going on

00:24:49.680 so essentially what we're seeing here is that responsibility ends up being diffused amongst

00:24:54.320 dozens hundreds thousands of individuals um and then the last aspect is really this notion like

00:25:01.520 peer belonging and particular peer enforcement i've talked about browning um and i you know

00:25:10.640 again this kind of goes back to belonging because uh as a form of pressure right like once violence

00:25:18.240 is normalized within a group the absence of that violence abstaining from that violence essentially

00:25:24.960 starts feeling like a betrayal or a weakness to the group you're participating in so you know if

00:25:30.800 you're if you've got an ice agent you've got somebody who's much more restraint how are his

00:25:37.680 colleagues going to see this individuals and essentially is it simply going to be like he

00:25:42.000 doesn't have our back he's not willing to do what he needs to do in order to protect us uh so so

00:25:48.880 violence becomes something that we do as opposed to something that i do or i choose to do um so

00:25:58.000 This is, you know, these are the three processes that I think help us understand what's happening.

00:26:03.080 Yeah. So I find the peer pressure aspect really interesting.

00:26:07.400 I mean, yeah, it makes it feel so frightening because I think everyone can think of situations, particularly when they're a teenager or if they're working in an office where maybe things are normalized.

00:26:22.480 I mean, even, again, working in media, just like the desensitization that you have to have, because there's just so much traumatic information coming in at all times. So you just focus on your job. And if you're not able to just swallow the traumatic information coming in, you're maybe not seen as tough, right?

00:26:41.900 um and i yeah could you speak a little bit more to how like peer pressure has shaped what we're

00:26:49.080 seeing here i mean i think you did a pretty good job just going over it now but if you can dig into

00:26:52.900 it anymore i just think it's fascinating so yeah so like as i was saying right so like

00:26:57.720 violence becomes a group norm violence is something that essentially becomes the accepted

00:27:02.640 modus operandus of how a group behaves and carries out their duty and i think we we see this with

00:27:11.080 like just the sheer level of aggression that ice agents are engaging and are using when they're

00:27:17.720 engaging with the public and we saw this particularly in the killing of alex uh pretty

00:27:23.640 but but it doesn't even have to go to the point where where uh someone is killed right there's

00:27:29.560 hundreds of videos by bystanders by citizen of uh you know police and um that that essentially

00:27:38.440 shows these extremely unorthodox and extremely aggressive interaction that you know seems

00:27:45.400 completely out of the ordinary right like if a cop behaved that way um it wouldn't be tolerated

00:27:53.080 um so so this is one aspect of it but essentially what ends up happening is that opting out of this

00:27:58.360 opting out of this mo and this behavior risks isolating the the individual or bringing him

00:28:06.120 shame or even seen being seen as disloyal or not trustworthy you're not kind of having uh the back

00:28:11.880 of his his comrade and and over time this becomes the standard practice uh and belonging essentially

00:28:20.760 becomes more important than moral hesitation it also becomes quite important when that group

00:28:26.040 is seen as being kind of targeted ostracized right so like ice agents have really brought about this

00:28:31.720 narrative that they are under threat they're covering their faces because they are at risk

00:28:36.520 of being doxxed uh they're at risk of of their neighbors right so we know that the the individual

00:28:42.280 who killed um uh renee good had told his neighbor that i believe he was a florist i i think that

00:28:48.360 was just kind of cover story um so you you then have this kind of sense of belonging even you

00:28:56.200 know that that's even more present because not only is this how you operate but you essentially

00:29:01.560 feel under siege by the kind of broader community so the only people that are going to understand

00:29:05.640 you are your peers so you're not going to risk ostracizing them by by trying to dial dial back

00:29:11.560 your your behavior um you know there there's a lot of place where we can kind of see this coming in

00:29:18.040 um i and and i think this is one of the the the things that kind of scares me with a lot of the

00:29:25.480 language that's come out around uh these these two killings um what we've seen is is people like you

00:29:34.440 know vice president jd vance but also other trump uh administration officials justifying the action

00:29:41.480 reiterating this kind of narrative of like self-defense even though anyone who sees these

00:29:47.640 videos and particularly the the alex uh pretty video but you know i i also made another thread

00:29:53.800 that that got a lot of traction i wrote a thing on foreign policy but i have research ground on

00:29:58.440 vehicle ramming and i've seen hundreds of vehicle ramming videos and and running good did not

00:30:05.320 intend on striking uh uh ross um but essentially what we're seeing is that this narrative is

00:30:12.520 essentially seeks to frame these actions of self-defense and then this narrative is kind of

00:30:19.080 quickly reinforced and amplified uh by like pro ice memes and pro ice or pro administration

00:30:27.560 podcasters and commentators and and whatnot and all of that is aimed at reframing or recasting

00:30:35.880 federal action as justified and reframing these protesters or bystanders or observers as dangerous

00:30:45.960 as domestic terrorists and this combination of like political endorsement and online

00:30:50.760 affirmation creates this environment where like restraint for the individual ice agent becomes

00:30:57.000 slightly costly uh and escalation is societally rewarded as opposed to to to to the restraint

00:31:06.520 and kind of the calm law enforcement approach that that would probably be much more optimal

00:31:12.680 in a setting like this yeah it's so interesting because i i think um one thing that struck me as

00:31:19.880 you were speaking there is that the narrative that is being established one of self-defense

00:31:25.400 one of you know um just this idea that these protesters are dangerous and the uh you know the

00:31:32.680 uh ice agents are are defending um themselves or defending society even um as a result of that

00:31:40.760 broader media ecosystem that's painting uh anyone racialized really because that's what they're

00:31:45.960 doing it's not just uh migrants who have varying levels of uh immigration status um you know and

00:31:54.600 none of that would make them inherently violent but they're they're really portraying like they're

00:31:58.200 constantly um a lot of these media figures uh illustrating and uh defining and amplifying

00:32:05.720 stories wherein there is a person of color doing something evil that's why i think they highlighted

00:32:11.560 that story of the stabbing on the bus for example by that man who was a person of color who uh

00:32:17.560 stabbed a white woman it was clearly a man having some kind of a mental health crisis but

00:32:21.480 they it really became something where they were like framing this as almost a race war and i i

00:32:27.480 think that that leads into um you had cited albert bandera as arguing that perpetrators kind of

00:32:34.760 preserve a self-image of being a good person while doing harm and you know this is something

00:32:41.400 that's achieved through language like and you later mentioned the role of dehumanization as a

00:32:46.600 result of this cruelty something i would also argue can be achieved through language too so

00:32:51.880 i i guess i just wanted to ask you if you agree with that premise like um what is the role of

00:32:57.720 language here and and the portrayal of ice agents the way we speak about them and the way we speak

00:33:03.640 about the victims in preserving the self-image of the perpetrators in this modern age of

00:33:10.280 political violence while also condemning the victims?

00:33:14.000 Yeah, language does a lot of work here, and it does it often kind of quietly, which is

00:33:19.640 interesting, right?

00:33:21.360 So I think one of the most common pattern is the use of bureaucratic or technical language.

00:33:28.440 So you're reframing violence as a procedure, as an operation, as an arrest.

00:33:37.000 Detention becomes, you know, unlawful detention becomes processing, you know, people are cases,

00:33:42.960 their unit, their threats.

00:33:45.700 So essentially, all this type of language is aimed at removing kind of moral weight

00:33:50.480 and replacing it with like a managerial logic.

00:33:54.120 So you're not harming someone, you're doing your job properly.

00:33:57.800 that's that feels very different um and another pattern that we see and i've alluded this before

00:34:04.200 is kind of this this defensive framing so harm is seen as prevention or necessary so the perpetrator

00:34:10.920 is positioning themselves um as reacting rather than acting so phrases like you know we had no

00:34:18.680 choice uh or this was unavoidable essentially allows people to to see themselves as like

00:34:24.840 restraint and and reasonable even when lethal forces is being used right and we saw this

00:34:31.160 narrative essentially and this narrative kind of continues on particularly with the case of alex

00:34:35.880 printing where they're talking about how like you know uh these agents protected themselves they

00:34:41.800 were approached with somebody with a firearm you know but let's not consider the fact that he was

00:34:47.880 you know that he had a lawful conceal and carry uh permit um but or she tried to to to run him

00:34:56.680 over all this essential narrative shifts the blame away from the agent of death if you will

00:35:03.560 to the victim and that's extremely important and that's even more important when it's done at a

00:35:08.440 high level uh by a tori figure by somebody who has uh a certain gravitas behind their their their

00:35:16.920 their position or have a huge platform like truth social uh for example and then the other thing you

00:35:22.920 you you you talked about right is this kind of demonization talking you know rather than talking

00:35:28.200 about individuals and humans and family members you know talking about you know invaders uh

00:35:35.400 criminals rapists uh all this language that we have kind of seen be used to describe undip uh

00:35:43.720 undocumented or undocumented migrants in in the united states um does a lot of work at kind of

00:35:55.640 deunizing them and essentially one positioning them as a threat but also positioning them as

00:36:00.360 as another um and this isn't unique to this this time this is also used by like by far-right

00:36:06.120 non-state actors and and so on but essentially what ends up happening here is that individuals

00:36:12.360 disappear and they become a threatening category once that happens the harm starts feeling less

00:36:18.120 like a moral violation and more like risk management right we are doing this because

00:36:23.160 we have to we have to in order to protect you know in the case of minnesota we have to do this

00:36:28.360 in order to protect kind of the welfare system against you know large-scale fraud we have this

00:36:33.560 in order to protect you know young women on the bus from to use their example from being stabbed

00:36:40.280 by by somebody who is deranged etc etc etc um so essentially what ends up happening is that this

00:36:48.120 language and the other thing that we see is that this language often hardens after violence and

00:36:54.440 this is one of the things that we see both in the renee good and the pretty uh killing right where

00:37:01.080 they're not being framed by the administration as as bystanders as civilians but agitators

00:37:07.320 protesters professional protesters um and and all of this all these harsh descriptions

00:37:16.040 allows perpetrators to to psychologically justify what they've already done um and and hopefully

00:37:24.360 allows the population to kind of excuse it and and and look away um so so essentially i think

00:37:33.000 it's worth really paying attention to the language that's being used it's not cosmetic it's not

00:37:37.960 accidental it's really to me this is the earliest warning sign that these two cases are not going to

00:37:45.960 be isolated incidents unless there's a large reversal of course in the way ice behaves and

00:37:54.440 also in the way the administration talks about ice violence yeah i think that's such a scary part

00:38:02.360 because that's something i'm hearing from so many folks who sort of study this arena is that this is

00:38:07.160 on a trajectory where it's going to get worse and i it really strikes me that this is a process

00:38:14.120 like getting to this point is a process that seems to be an overarching sort of theme of this

00:38:18.200 conversation is it takes a lot of different factors and different um normalizations peer pressure

00:38:25.400 specific use of language from authority figures um a level of bureaucratic involvement that

00:38:31.880 makes it more banal um to undertake these evil acts and i i guess um like maybe this is sort of

00:38:41.000 me asking you just to summarize everything you've already said but in the specific example of the

00:38:45.320 united states like how long has this process been coming and like what are the factors that

00:38:55.320 have contributed to this dissent maybe specifically that people might not have

00:38:59.880 recognized that we can try to pay attention to to avoid falling into the same traps because i'm sure

00:39:05.720 we've got some of the preconditions here as well um you know we're so culturally similar to the

00:39:10.520 states um like how did this process get pick up speed and and and take place i guess and how can

00:39:21.480 we avoid it okay so as far as this kind of notion like gradualism i think it's extremely important

00:39:28.760 right this didn't happen suddenly and it didn't happen accidentally uh so in the united states

00:39:33.640 we see this process building up for for decades right there's been a slow normalization of

00:39:39.320 security logic and like everyday governance has been like particularly with the wars in

00:39:44.040 iraq and afghanistan you've seen a large transfer of military weaponry to civilian law enforcement

00:39:52.200 and federal agencies right and all of this kind of falls into you know what we can kind of look

00:39:59.080 back and what i'm sure historians are going to look back at this in in five years ten years

00:40:03.960 are all going to kind of trace these things uh as being incidental or as being uh incremental to this

00:40:10.600 uh you know the the the narrative around the war on on drug the post 9 11 you know war on terror

00:40:18.280 the framing of like black lives matter protests uh discussion about migration all of these things

00:40:26.200 have a role in bringing us to to to where we are um so kind of like how do we how do we

00:40:35.960 start thinking about preventing this and particularly like within the canadian context

00:40:42.920 there's a couple things right like canada is not the united states and i think it's important that

00:40:46.840 we kind of avoid direct comparison like the legal frameworks of different political cultures different

00:40:52.600 institutional histories are different but like at the same time i think there's often a default

00:40:59.960 settings that canadians have which is to see themselves and to understand our history in

00:41:04.680 comparison to that of the united states and therefore to literally whitewash our history

00:41:09.720 right being like well we didn't have slaves so therefore we're a post-racial state or whatnot

00:41:16.680 but like if we actually start looking and talking about the dynamics that i've discussed um these

00:41:23.960 fit very very well uh to explain like the colonial violence against indigenous communities in in in

00:41:30.440 canada we if we go back to to to that question right we see the same bureaucratic systems being

00:41:38.520 used to to define indigenous populations as problems historically uh we we that the problems

00:41:46.920 that need to be managed rather than as people with autonomy and rights we've seen policies

00:41:52.520 like forced relocation residential school systems suppression of cultural practice

00:41:57.560 forced sterilizations all these were implemented through like procedures and mandates and chains

00:42:02.600 of command that allowed participants in these programs to see themselves as carrying out policies

00:42:08.280 rather than committing harm so there's a parallel to be made here and and although i don't kind of

00:42:14.120 foresee seeing the same type of like you know law enforcement or if you will have immigration

00:42:21.400 enforcement activities on canadian streets and particularly not descending into what we're

00:42:25.880 seeing in the united states i think there is something particularly dangerous with a society

00:42:32.680 thinking that they are immune and inoculated to state violence because often state violence

00:42:39.640 doesn't occur where you expect it to be and this is something i talk to my students about this and

00:42:43.880 i generally tell them like if you were to go back with a time machine in 19 in the 1900 early 1900

00:42:50.920 and you found some european intellectuals and you said you know in 40 years there's a european state

00:42:57.400 that's going to mastermind the destruction of two-thirds of european jews guess which state it

00:43:04.280 is i think people would say it's either russia or france they wouldn't say germany um and yet 0.60

00:43:12.200 interesting this is where it occurred so i i i do think it's it's very we have to be very careful

00:43:19.320 when we start thinking about kind of state violence and state killing um because post facto it's very

00:43:26.360 easy to connect all the dots and essentially trace this narrative that explains how we got

00:43:32.040 there it's much harder to see it as it is gradually occurring and to put a stop to it yeah

00:43:40.760 i uh i i want to leave a little bit of time for audience questions here but i have one last thing

00:43:45.800 i really want to ask you and i i don't know um if you have like it's it sucks because it's a big

00:43:52.040 question but I'm just wondering like if there's any tools that people can equip themselves with

00:43:57.620 or or things that they can practice in their daily lives or or think critically about to

00:44:03.820 try to ensure that they don't become uh I guess desensitized or or become participants or become

00:44:13.680 the ordinary people who are vulnerable to that peer pressure those um you know the banality that

00:44:20.800 allows people to become perpetrators of evil like what can individuals do and look out for

00:44:25.280 and if you can i don't know do like a quick answer so that we have time for questions i'm so sorry

00:44:31.520 because it's such a big question i feel bad asking you to say quickly i i this is this is cliche

00:44:37.280 because i'm a professor and i'm just going to say you know educate yourself educate ourselves have

00:44:41.360 these conversations right i think what's useful to this conversation part of the reason i was excited

00:44:44.960 to talk to you about this is the recognition that no matter how good of individuals we may

00:44:53.120 think we are we all have the potential if the right situation the right institution the right

00:45:02.000 structures are present to do things that we will we would find otherwise morally abhorrent um

00:45:10.640 So, being cognizant of that can end up being a protective factor.

00:45:16.460 Understanding our small roles in creating and perpetuating inequalities and facilitating state violence is extremely important as well.

00:45:29.340 So, that would be kind of like, if you want a short answer, self-reflection, I think, is probably a really important place to go.

00:45:37.380 Now, at the same time, it's not an easy thing to do, right?

00:45:39.860 all these people we've talked about the ice agent the members of battalion 101 eichmann

00:45:46.040 they were capable of self-reflection but the institutions around them exercise such an

00:45:53.440 important power and there's so many of these kind of micro and macro uh micro and um macro factors

00:46:01.540 i've talked about that were present that those voices essentially being drowned out or are less

00:46:07.880 important in calculus. That's so interesting. So basically, folks, look yourself in the mirror,

00:46:15.700 check in with yourself and, you know, be willing to accept the fact that we're not all as smart

00:46:21.240 as we think we are. We're not all as immune to this as we like to imagine. That was what terrified

00:46:25.800 me when I was like researching for this. I was like, damn, you know what? I always assumed that 0.98

00:46:30.340 I would stand up, but listening to all of these experiments and how they played out, you know,

00:46:35.040 if it's framed as me needing to do a good job and me like focusing on one technical aspect,

00:46:40.660 I can see how it's easy to be vulnerable to that. And that horrified me. And I think that

00:46:45.860 that's a hard thing to reckon with within yourself, but doing so is a necessary part of

00:46:50.760 changing that within yourself. So this was a great conversation. I want to leave some time

00:46:57.140 for folks to ask some questions. We have about 10 minutes left. So if you guys have any questions,

00:47:01.620 you can put them in the chat now. And while you do that, Yannick, would you love to tell people

00:47:09.340 where they can keep up with your work? Because I'm sure that after listening to you,

00:47:12.940 like this was such a fascinating conversation, people are probably going to want to follow

00:47:17.520 your stuff. So where can they do that? Yeah, so on social media, I'm mostly active on Blue Sky,

00:47:22.600 although I wouldn't say I'm particularly active. So I can be followed there. I sometimes post some

00:47:30.660 insights on on on linkedin as well i have left the the other main social media platform uh in

00:47:38.180 in recent months um yeah um in addition i do you know most of my work is is is published academic

00:47:46.100 work uh so if anybody is not kind of in the university setting uh and would like to have

00:47:51.300 access some of the stuff that i've written don't hesitate to reach out my email my rmc email is

00:47:56.100 easily found send me an email and tell me what document you're looking for and i'll be happy to

00:48:01.220 share that with you as well awesome i've noticed that trend with academics is uh they always say

00:48:07.620 reach out to me and i'll send you my paper because um it seems like the world of academic

00:48:12.500 publishing is a bit of a a bit of a mess and really expensive so a lot of people are just

00:48:18.660 willing to send the papers which is cool this is the thing right we could do an entire hour on

00:48:23.060 academic publishing which is another evil um but essentially we don't make any money on our

00:48:29.940 scholarly work right and at the end of the day most of the most of us are writing because we

00:48:35.060 have something to say and we want to push the discussion forward uh so therefore making it

00:48:39.780 more accessible is certainly useful totally okay we've got a question in the chat here from

00:48:45.060 scalpel 11. they want to know please can you comment on how anti-immigration is always used

00:48:50.740 successfully to increase fascism yeah so it goes back to this notion of demonization right and

00:48:59.140 there so there's a couple of factors involved here but essentially having an other um

00:49:06.820 is really a good fashion to create this notion of an existential threat which allows people to

00:49:14.340 to go on and to accept different you know procedures or practices that otherwise

00:49:21.460 they wouldn't be willing uh to do so that that's one aspect um the other is either present or

00:49:30.260 imaginary right and kind of going back to to the conversation the example i was giving earlier

00:49:37.140 about you know if i had a time machine i went back to the 1900 i mean one of the things that's

00:49:41.220 really interesting is that if you actually look at the distribution of jews in europe

00:49:44.820 prior to the holocaust there's actually very little in germany that's not where they're

00:49:48.660 concentrated um and i do think that is part of the reason it is one of many but it is part of 0.90

00:49:56.180 the reason that jewish populations were othered and framed as this existential threat um so that's 0.65

00:50:04.420 that's one of the the mechanism that exists here yeah for chi uh wants to know have you noticed

00:50:14.180 the correlation between brand obsessed console warriors turning into political ones so um i i

00:50:21.620 guess sort of i mean i'll let you just take a crack at it yeah yeah i mean it's an interesting

00:50:27.380 one it's not necessarily something that um it's not something that i've looked at very carefully

00:50:36.100 but i think it goes back to kind of this this this this we live in a climate where it is extremely

00:50:47.860 easy to access information it's also extremely easy to share information right so there is

00:50:53.620 now you know this is part of this kind of depth of expertise right everybody can have an opinion

00:50:58.820 everybody can uh proclaim this opinion and often particularly with social media platforms which

00:51:05.380 you know do a lot of well they do some great things um but at the same time what they do is

00:51:10.580 that they amplify voices of people who ordinarily are essentially just crackpot um and this is

00:51:16.820 something that i've seen particularly with x and particularly with the monetization of x and and

00:51:22.260 where it really struck me was in the aftermath of october 7th and then the israeli incursion into

00:51:29.220 gaza the amount of like osint like open source intelligent accounts that propped up and were

00:51:37.860 sharing content that had nothing to do with october 7th or nothing to do with the israeli

00:51:43.780 incursion into gaza uh came you know it came from ukraine it came from places in africa it came from

00:51:49.860 previous conflicts but they're sharing this content as being kind of you know the ocean

00:51:56.580 expert showing this this unseen footage before and the reason is that there's monetization

00:52:01.860 so it doesn't actually matter whether your content is accurate as long as your content is either

00:52:07.620 shocking enough to get a huge amount of engagement or controversial enough in order to to to get that

00:52:14.100 engagement i think that's part of the answer um but there's also like a lot of amazing work that's

00:52:19.780 being done by some of my colleagues on um gaming ecosystem and the dynamics that exist within these

00:52:29.940 and how uh some gaming communities can essentially end up being pathways into misogyny into racism

00:52:37.860 into islamophobia and and so on it it's worth again doing quick google you'll you'll find a lot

00:52:44.820 of fantastic work that's being done on this topic by by people other than than me always so humble

00:52:53.060 hey you academics always uh encouraging us to listen to all kinds of voices it's probably part

00:52:58.820 of why you're so smart um because you're willing to listen to others so uh canadian wants to know

00:53:06.340 how do we confront this nonsense without alienating like almost all of our family's friends co-workers

00:53:14.340 all right so there's a there's a psychologist at the university of sherbrooke his name is

00:53:21.060 david morain and he wrote a fantastic book i'm not sure if it's been translated into english

00:53:27.140 um but essentially the entire premise of the book is how do you talk to your your your aunt or your

00:53:34.820 uncle who's kind of gone down the the rabbit hole is now holding values that that are inherently

00:53:42.340 problematic um it's a hard question and i don't think there's a particular answer uh in my

00:53:49.060 experience i'd say that kind of confronting someone directly with you are wrong and this

00:53:55.460 is why you were wrong does not yield very positive result i think kind of coming from a place of

00:54:00.740 empathy uh coming from a place of kind of asking questions and trying to kind of guide people to

00:54:07.140 the realization uh that that the views that they're holding um aren't kind of borne out in

00:54:14.100 the facts or that if you actually kind of look at things objectively you end up with a very

00:54:18.260 different world you can be helpful um you know at the end of the day often these are people you care

00:54:23.220 about right there's a reason why they're your friends and and your family so having this

00:54:27.860 compassion i think can help at the same time i'm not saying go hug a nazi right like that is not

00:54:34.100 what i'm talking about here um but i think when you ostracize people when you other them

00:54:41.700 when you essentially say your views are not worth engaging these people are going to become much

00:54:47.300 more entrenched and as a result they're going to seek light-minded people and there's going

00:54:52.500 to be this eco chamber we did a paper a couple years ago where we looked at um women of storm

00:54:57.460 front so stormfront is this kind of like og white nationalists website it's existed since 1996 and

00:55:03.940 we essentially took all the conversations within a sub sub forum called the women of support and

00:55:09.940 what we found in this paper is that actually very little of the conversations had to do with like

00:55:15.460 ideological stuff so ideology was like interwoven into the conversation but a lot of this stuff had

00:55:19.700 to do like with relationship maintenance with trying to raise families with household issues 0.99

00:55:25.380 and whatnot and often these women kind of lamented the fact that they didn't have a real life social 0.76

00:55:34.100 peer network anymore that they had been pushed away or ostracized or become estranged from their

00:55:39.220 families and friends because of their white nationalist views and therefore they needed to

00:55:44.180 ask you know the storefront was all that was left as far as a way to kind of create social bonds

00:55:50.580 now that becomes extremely difficult right because now you're not talking about de-radicalization

00:55:55.380 solely through counter messaging, because you might convince them that, you know, white

00:55:59.460 nationalism is not a great thing. But if that also means losing all their friends, losing all the

00:56:05.440 people they talk to, all the people they interact with, and having no one, then the de-radicalization

00:56:11.180 process becomes way harder. So I don't have a particular answer, but here's some food for

00:56:17.320 thought. I hope. Yeah. Yeah. That's something that struck me so much again and again with the

00:56:23.140 extremism reporting I've done is just, you know, anecdotally you hear from people who,

00:56:28.000 I think that's why so many people were radicalized during COVID as, you know, people might have

00:56:33.020 been initially just vaccine hesitant and, you know, didn't have access to resources. And then

00:56:39.840 they were isolated from their friends and family because their friends and family didn't want to

00:56:43.680 be around them because they were unvaccinated. And then they fell into these communities and

00:56:47.320 that became their only community. So as those communities became increasingly radical and

00:56:51.340 started espousing their white supremacy and being increasingly blatant with the hateful nature of

00:56:58.480 their content, a lot of these people had no option but to go with it because otherwise they'd be

00:57:03.160 completely alone. And it's a really difficult thing. Yannick, thank you so much. I'm sorry to

00:57:10.460 the folks in the chat. That's all the time we've got today. But you know where to find Yannick so

00:57:16.320 can keep up with his work and you know maybe throw a question into his dms or i don't want

00:57:21.840 to offer you up like that but you know if uh if you guys have any i'm sure that if it's good faith

00:57:26.720 there's a chance that if he has time he might answer if not you know just keep up with his work

00:57:31.840 follow uh follow bubble pop and uh janek thank you again so so so much for your time today this

00:57:38.880 This was a fantastic and fascinating conversation.

00:57:42.100 Thanks for having me.

00:57:49.500 Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Bubble Pop.

00:57:52.980 I'm Rachel Gilmore, your least favorite person's least favorite journalist.

00:57:56.360 If you enjoyed this episode, consider subscribing on YouTube, Patreon, Substack, or wherever you like to listen.

00:58:02.100 You can also find me on TikTok, Instagram, Twitch, and Blue Sky.

00:58:06.120 I'd like to give a special thank you to Hans Vivien Wenzel for making the incredibly groovy

00:58:10.520 music for Bubble Pop. You can find more of his stuff on Spotify under the artist name Hans.

00:58:15.540 That's a lowercase h with an exclamation mark. Thank you again for spending this time with me.

00:58:20.720 This is my dream job. I know I say that every week, but that's because it's true every week,

00:58:25.400 and I couldn't do it for one second without your support. So thank you, and I'll see you next time.

00:58:36.120 Thank you.

Bubble Pop with Rachel Gilmore - January 30, 2026

How do ordinary people become agents of state murder？ (feat. Yannick Veilleux-Lepage)

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