It All Happened Before

Episode 10: We've Watched Journalists Become Content Creators

When mainstream media gets captured, the story doesn't end — it migrates. In Turkey, journalism moved from legacy newspapers and TV channels to scrappy independent websites, then to YouTube, and now to individual creator channels where the line between reporter and personality has all but dissolved. This week, Istanbul-based journalist Gülsin Harman joins us to map that journey from the inside. Gülsin has worked within Turkish and global mainstream media — she contributes to the New York Times and BBC Monitoring — and has spent the last several years researching and advising the independent outlets that emerged in capture's wake. So she thinks about not just whether independent journalism survives, but how it stays solvent. We get into the questions that keep independent media awake at night: Which business models are actually working, and which are quietly failing? What does it mean when mid-career journalists like Nevşin Mengü leave CNN Türk to become "newsfluencers" on YouTube — when reporting, opinion, and creator culture fuse into something new — and how does that reshape public debate when your trusted news source is also someone you follow? We also compare notes with the US, where the same migration is underway. And because digital media isn't immune to capture either, we talk about how Turkey's independent journalists have learned to recognize economic and political pressure in its newer forms and survive it. Plus a detour into Hasan Piker's growing streaming empire — fitting, since this episode runs nearly as long as one of his Twitch sessions. Our Guest: Gülsin Harman is an Istanbul-based journalist contributing to the New York Times and BBC Monitoring's Turkey coverage, an editorial strategy consultant for independent media, a 2020 Nieman Foundation Fellow at Harvard, and a member of the News Product Alliance and the Society for News Design. Subscribe to our companion newsletter: itallhappenedbefore.substack.com [http://itallhappenedbefore.substack.com]

Episode 9: We've Been Frustrated with the Opposition Party Before

The Democratic Party is trying to figure out what will work — and the competing forces within it are doing so loudly. In Maine, an oyster farmer and Marine veteran named Graham Platner pushed a sitting Democratic governor out of the Senate primary. In Michigan, physician Abdul El-Sayed is running neck-and-neck with the party-preferred pick. In California, eight Democrats are splitting the field so thoroughly that two Republicans may take both top-two slots. Same frustration underneath: in fighting and vision contests. If you've watched Turkish politics for the last two decades, you've lived this frustration. Erdoğan's AKP has held power since 2002, in part because the main opposition — the CHP — kept losing with candidates its own base was lukewarm about. Voters showed up. They lost. They showed up again. In Episode 9, we talk with Dr. Aytuğ Şaşmaz [https://aytugsasmaz.com/], Assistant Professor of Political Science at Bryn Mawr College. Aytuğ's central concept is the valence deficit — the gap between a party's values and voters' belief that it can govern competently. The mechanism is internal: when parties lose cohesion, they nominate factional loyalists instead of capable candidates. We talk through what changed between the CHP's 2023 alliance loss and its 2024 historic win — 35 of 81 provinces, the AKP's first national defeat in two decades. And we sit with the harder part: six months later, the regime arrested İmamoğlu. Aytuğ reads the arrest not as a refutation of the strategy but as confirmation that it was working. Then we push on the comparison. Where does the CHP framework map onto the Democrats? Where does it break? We've been frustrated with the opposition party before. The question is what frustrated voters did with it — and how any of that travels. Subscribe to our Substack: itallhappenedbefore.substack.com [http://itallhappenedbefore.substack.com] Further reading: Aytuğ's piece in Medyascope [https://medyascope.tv/2023/07/02/aytug-sasmaz-yazdi-kilicdaroglunun-liderligi-chp-orgutunde-donusumu-nasil-etkiledi/] on how Kılıçdaroğlu's leadership transformed the CHP organization (in Turkish).

Episode 8: We've Seen Protesters Called Terrorists - A Conversation with Dr. Lisel Hintz

In March 2025, masked federal agents arrested a Turkish PhD student on a Somerville sidewalk as she walked to break her Ramadan fast. Rümeysa Öztürk's offense, according to the Trump administration, was co-authoring a Tufts Daily op-ed critical of the university's response to the war in Gaza. Her F-1 visa had been quietly revoked by the Secretary of State. She spent six weeks in detention, much of it in a Louisiana ICE facility, before a federal judge ruled there were no grounds to deport her. If you grew up in Turkey, none of this looks new. An op-ed becomes evidence. A student becomes a security threat. A protester becomes a terrorist. Days after Rümeysa's arrest, our guest Dr. Lisel Hintz [http://www.liselhintz.com/] co-wrote a piece in The Atlantic — "We Study Repression in Turkey. Now We See It Here." [https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/03/repression-turkey-we-see-it-here/682233/] — making the case that Trump's playbook against student activists looked unmistakably like Erdoğan's. She would know. Lisel is a political scientist at SOAS, University of London, and the author of Identity Politics Inside Out [https://global.oup.com/academic/product/identity-politics-inside-out-9780190655976] (Oxford, 2018). Her current book project examines Turkey's state-society struggles through the lens of pop culture, and she writes regularly for Foreign Policy, the Washington Post, the BBC, and other outlets — work that pays close attention to how media itself, both captured and creative, shapes what's politically possible. After Gezi protests in 2013, Dr. Hintz mapped how the Erdoğan government built a vilification playbook around three moves — naming, blaming, framing — designed not just to discredit protesters but to actively demobilize them. We talk through how that playbook is being run in the United States right now, from the framing of anti-ICE protesters as domestic terrorists to the repression of pro-Palestine activism, and where the parallels stop and the differences begin to matter. We ask Dr. Lisel Hintz the question that haunts every conversation like this one: when protesters keep losing, why do they keep showing up? What does persistence actually do, politically — even when nothing visible seems to change? Her answer is one of the most clarifying things we've heard on this show. It happened in Turkey. It's happening here. The language the state uses to make dissent look like danger travels easier than we'd like to think. Listen and subscribe: itallhappenedbefore.substack.com [http://itallhappenedbefore.substack.com]

Episode 7: We've Lived With the Deep State -- A Conversation with Mert Can Bayar

Americans have been talking about the "deep state" like it's a new discovery. It isn't. Derin devlet is a Turkish coinage — a phrase the rest of the world borrowed from a country that has lived inside conspiratorial politics for so long that the language for it had to be invented there first. There used to be a kind of conspiracy theory that, however wrong, at least tried. It marshaled evidence, connected dots, named the shadowy operators. The new conspiracism is something else entirely: no proofs, no patterns, no operators — just innuendo and bare assertion. A lot of people are saying. In this episode, we chat with Mert Can Bayar — political scientist, postdoctoral scholar at the University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public [https://www.cip.uw.edu/people/], and one of the first scholars to take seriously what conspiracism is doing to democracies, not just to individuals. His dissertation, The Politics of Good and Evil, traces partisan conspiracy theories through the parallel democratic erosions of Turkey and the United States. Why those two countries? What does it mean that Turkish political culture has been "built on conspiracism" since the Tanzimat era — and what changes when an entire nation comes to embody itself in a single paranoid spokesperson? Why did Erdoğan grow into conspiracism while Trump arrived already fluent? And — Mert Can's most counterintuitive finding — what do we make of the fact that partisan conspiracy theories actually increase political participation? Is that good news? Or is it precisely the trap? We also spend some time with the question Bruno Latour kept asking before he died: where exactly is the line between the paranoid fantasy and the popularized version of social critique we teach our students? More on Dr. Mert Can Bayar: LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/mert-can-bayar/] · CIP profile [https://www.cip.uw.edu/people/] · personal site [https://mertbayar.com/] Subscribe to our companion newsletter via Substack [https://itallhappenedbefore.substack.com/]

Episode 6: We've seen the gilded buildings before

In 2014, a year after Gezi, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan moved into a 1,100-room palace built on Atatürk's protected forest farm — in defiance of court orders that ruled it illegal. In October 2025, Trump's crews demolished the East Wing of the White House to break ground on a $400 million ballroom, financed by anonymous corporate donors with active business before the federal government; this spring, he unveiled plans for a 250-foot triumphal arch across the Potomac from the Lincoln Memorial. When asked whom the arch was meant to honor, Trump replied: "Me." This week on It All Happened Before, we sit with the strange, telling pattern of leaders who build colossal monuments to themselves at the precise moment they believe the institutional resistance is broken. Both projects are bunkered — Erdoğan's against biological and nuclear attack, Trump's housing a classified military complex underneath the ballroom floor. Both involved demolitions that overwrote an older symbolic order: Çankaya, where every Turkish president since Atatürk had worked; the East Wing, the traditional working space of First Ladies. Both bypassed the courts and the planning bodies meant to constrain them, often with the courts then being remade in the leader's image. And both, in different ways, are being normalized. We trace the comparative pattern — from Ceaușescu's Casa Poporului to Hitler's Reichskanzlei, Tito's bunker at Konjic — and ask the question that should unsettle American listeners: a decade ago, Erdoğan's palace generated discussion and outrage. Today, it's just where the president lives. How long does that normalization take?