Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 12

Episode Date: December 4, 2021

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. But now, all signs point to a new serial killer in Hollow Falls. If this game is just starting, you better believe I'm gonna win. I'm Tig Torres, and this is Lethal Lit. Catch up on Season 1 of the Hit Murder Mystery Podcast, Lethal Lit, a Tig Torres mystery, out now, and then tune in for all new thrills in Season 2, dropping weekly starting February 9.

Subscribe now to never miss an episode. Listen to Lethal Lit on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's gonna be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. What's? What's? What's? I'm Robert Evans. This is It Could Happen Here, the show that asks, what's? And also other questions, more, more, more meaningful questions than that about, you know, things falling apart, fixing them, all that good stuff. With me today, as usual, Garrison and Chris, and as is currently unusual, but will be more usual every proceeding month after this one, our good friend, St. Andrew. St. Andrew, take a bow.

Tell you what's up, man. Bow. It's not quite a bow, but it's fine. How are you doing today, Andrew? I'm good. I'm good. You know, it's rainy. It's chill. It's better than the kind of hot weather we've been getting lately. So I'm good. Yeah, it's raining and chill here, but that's seven months of the year. I think there's slightly different climates in Portland, Oregon and Trinidad. Probably. I've been told. So we have had you on a couple of weeks back to talk about Solar Punk, and we're going to be bringing you back on about twice a month to talk about whatever the hell you want to talk about.

And so I'm going to now hand the episode over to you and trust like a little lamb that you'll lead me somewhere beautiful and filled with good forage. Ah, yes. Sunshine Rainbows, the promised land. Yeah. Okay. So I think we've all noticed that the environmentalist movement kind of sucks. I mean, jumping into it kind of raw. Sucks isn't has not done the things that need to be done has not accomplished has been around for like over half a century or actually really more than that. And, you know, where are we now? Yeah, you know. Of course, we do have to confront and acknowledge that like, there's the issue where oil companies literally suppressed a whole bunch of information and, you know, co opted like a lot of the earlier movements and stuff. But we've kind of known for a while now, and we are still here. So it's like what gives, you know, I think there's a kind of an interesting phenomenon that I wanted to talk about today.

Known as soft climate change denial. So are you familiar with that or what do you think it is based on first impressions? I mean, yeah, I've heard the term I would think it's sort of. I mean, a number of different things, including the idea that like, well, there's nothing we can do. So nothing should be done, you know. Yeah, yeah. What what what you got, son? Yeah, most of my understanding of the term is like someone like saying they like know that climate change is a thing. Like they recognize that, but they are kind of more in denial of what solutions can be done to really change anything. That's generally my understanding of the term when I see it like online or something. Yeah. What was you, Chris?

Yeah, I usually see it with it's like it's usually in the context of people, you know, in the US, there's the whole. There's whole political factions whose entire thing is saying like we believe in science. And then they'll go talk about like how much they believe in climate change. And then two seconds later around or like signing law and sign liberalizations. Yeah. So that's my understanding of it. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So according to everyone's favorite source, Wikipedia, soft climate change denial is a state of mind, acknowledging the existence of global woman in the abstract, while remaining to some extent impartial, psychological or intellectual denialism about its reality or impact.

And something I've spoken about in my channel in my most recent video, where I was talking with the different facets of solar punk, you know, what solar punk is, what it needs. Things that could probably potentially drag down the solar punk movement and things that people have been using to try to drag it down because solar punk is kind of building in popularity. And with anything that builds in popularity, there are attempts from all sorts of angles to coopt it and to repackage it and commodify it and all those things. So I've kind of noticed with the solar punk phenomenon that there's this effort by people who profess to care about the climate and stuff to try to push it away from more radical directions towards something more appealing and appeasing to the status quo and to the system. And I mean, according to the Wikipedia definition, you know, it's they call it a state of mind. I think it's also like an implicit philosophy that undergoes like entire groups and entire movements. You know, so like, for example, obviously, you know, it affects individuals where, you know, people will miscalculate its risks and think that climate climate change is just extra storms or something. But then they also like people or really the movements that would neglect its urgency with just these platitudes and these directionless actions that just serve like this kind of middling reformism. Like they underestimate the extent of social change required to like mitigate climate change. So they basically don't seek to change the status quo or just to sort of tweak it ever so slightly.

So like capitalism with a carbon tax or something. Yeah. And then of course, there are people who kind of straddle that that fence or maybe it's more of a spectrum between soft climate change Nile and hard climate change Nile, where they might overestimate the extent of scientific uncertainty. So they might think that, oh, well, you know, yeah, global warming is happening, but we don't exactly know how much it's going to change the climate or how much it's impacting our lives and that kind of thing. So they basically turn it into something that is still up for debate. You know, and that's why I say kind of straddles that line between soft line and hard line because obviously the hard climate change Nileists, they're just like, oh, well, you know, it doesn't exist. Or if it does exist, humans don't cause it. If humans do cause it, there's nothing we can do, that kind of thing. Have you all had like experiences with soft climate change Nile like in your own personal organizing?

Oh, yeah, yeah, I would say so I've encountered. I mean, it's kind of a thing you encounter constantly in American politics because it's it's really like often times your best option in terms of like, it's that or the people who say that talking about climate change is socialism. Yeah. You know, so I was an environmental studies major for most of college and then I decided not to do it. And then I got like a minor instead because like one class off and long story. But you know, it was interesting seeing it there because like, you know, there were basically like two possible reactions to learning that one was like people who, you know, one was you get incredibly depressed. And that's what I did. Or and then the second one was people would, you know, and these people who like actually, you know, you know, these are environmental studies majors, right?

Like these people had spent a lot of time studying this stuff. And they kind of like, I don't know, is this almost like like this kind of intellectual retreat where you could see people basically just like convincing themselves that like somehow this would be OK. And they'd like, I don't know, people would just they get like completely obsessed with like electoral maps. Like no, no, no, no, no. OK, OK, if we win exactly this number of seats in this year, then like we can we can start doing carbon credits or like, I don't know. It was it was it was really interesting to watch because it was like it was it was. I mean, because I think I think there's there's like there's very there's bad faith versions of it. And then I think there's also versions of it that are just sort of like people do not want to accept.

Yeah, like the what's necessary to stop this. And so they sort of like that or they can't even really like think about what's necessary. Yeah, because because of how the education system works. And trust me, I could go on like long rants for the education system. It really it really really it really limits people's ability to think outside of like this very, very strict box of possibilities. Because, you know, so much is left out of, for example, history classes and so much is left out of really all the subjects. There's this very clear ideology that you expected to come out of the education system with. And so even when you reach academia and higher education and stuff, you're still stuck with that mode of thinking.

And even as you're presented with all this new information, because your brain can't really like handle like the great extent of what climate change is, you know, kind of retreats into this sort of simple kind of all we just need to vote because voting is all I know voting is all I've been told to do. Voting is politics and politics is voting. That's the extent of it. Right. Yeah, it's like this weird form of self preservation that people need to do in order to kind of like keep their keep them from in their mind, you know, like spiraling out of control. This is the only thing that, you know, they have they need to focus on their own life right now and their own current problems. And if they think about this, this like large looming threat too much, it just freaks you out, right. And you have if in order to keep in order to just keep going on with your life, a lot of people like segment off this type of thing in their own brain. So that, you know, manifests in a lot of cases and this kind of soft denial so that you can just keep on going.

Yeah, yeah. I received with friends I see with family, you know, obviously there are the handful of people who still at least in my experience who still deny climate change. But then there's like a bigger portion of people whose whole understanding of climate change is just this. Well, we just need to recycle and we just need to like switch to electric vehicles. And yeah, once we do that, you know, we'll be okay. We just tweak a couple of things, get some solar panels. And yeah, you know, the understanding of it has been completely limited to like this very restricted conversation. Yeah, that is like basically cultivated by certain interest groups and certain lobbying groups and the kind of thing, you know.

Yeah, only a certain amount of change is allowed. And that's what we're allowed to think. So that's what we're like shown for examples of in like media and pop culture or whatever. Right. So this is, you know, this is kind of what, you know, like all of like the YouTubers who got money from Bill Gates when Bill Gates wrote his climate book. All of the things that they were talking about is like, it's like this kind of stuff. Because the only way for Bill Gates to keep his money while, you know, talking about climate change is to have these kind of half-assed like solutions that are actually deny the impending reality and deny that. No, the only way to actually fix it is by taking all of his money. Which he's not as big a fan of.

Yeah, I mean, have you all seen the Kuskasacht video on climate change and coming social climate change? The one video on climate change? Kuskasacht in a nutshell. It's like this YouTube channel. Did you spell that? So people can find it? Oh gosh. No, but people will, I think people know, I think a lot of people know what it is, or you can just search in a nutshell on YouTube. In a nutshell. K-U-R, I'm going to try, I'm going to try.

K-U-R, no, it's K-U-R-G. Was it K-U-R-Z? Yeah, I think it's K-U-R-Z-G-E-S. A-G-T. A-G-T, right. It is a weird one, but what are you talking about? Can you fix climate change? Yeah, yeah. Where the whole thesis was basically vote with your ballot and vote with your wallet.

Yeah, that's the only thing that you're really allowed to do. Those are the options. Right, yeah, and I believe this is one of the videos sponsored by... They put this on, yeah, they did, it was, and then they had this whole line about some people think we need to change like our system from climate change, from capitalism. But we're not so sure about that. We don't know the answer. So they basically shrug towards our system, this is the problem with the system, but they basically gave it no attention. But their channel is literally about going deep into research about things. So it's very obvious that if they spent no time doing any kind of research into why people have the system in critique, that obviously Bill Gates' hand is very deep in their pockets.

Yeah, because I believe the researchers actually kind of know that, but they're not, they just can't say anything. They're not allowed to. Yeah, and I think they're making the bargain a lot of people make where they're like, okay, well, if we can push for the immediate necessary changes, we can worry about stuff like that later on. It's just important to get something done, and so we'll compromise and we'll not call for what we know is actually necessary to deal with the problem. We'll just go with a half measure, because at least it's something. We've got to do something now, right? The thing that's always been very grim about that to me is you look about how that plays out, right? And it's always like, well, okay, so our half measure is going to be, we're going to just put a monetary value on indigenous forests so that governments can steal them and get paid for taking the land. There's never stuff like, why don't we like make more marshes, which is, you know, if you're going to talk about stuff that like could actually be done, right?

It's like, okay, well, we'll do re-marshing, do we want, like that stuff like is easy and doesn't need, you know, you don't literally have to overthrow capitalism to get people to like restore marshes. Whatever happens, because that's, you know, the whole basis of the sort of soft denialism stuff is not actually, you know, it's not actually an attempt to solve climate change, they just want to make money. And it's extremely grim. Yeah, yeah, there's this video that the storyteller is this YouTuber he did recently on co-opting movements. And he was explaining that with the March in Washington, right, during the civil rights movement. That was an organic movement that, you know, the people had come up with, right? But obviously, a mass movement, the FBI isn't going to just sit back and let that happen, right? So they brought in these leaders. They're called the big six. And the storyteller was explaining that basically, they were paid to co-op the march to basically become its figureheads and its leaders.

They hadn't organized it themselves, but they came on afterwards and became leaders in the March and read the speeches that they were supposed to read and that kind of thing. And so that sort of mass movement was basically defund like that. I mean, obviously, reformers were made and, you know, civil rights act was passed. But then, you know, after all that happened, an MLK got disillusioned by the system as a whole and wanted to start pushing even harder against capitalism and whatnot. That's when, oh, well, coincidentally, you got to pull it, you know. So I think it's interesting that these movements, they're able, they're comfortable with these movements up to a certain point. And they're comfortable with these leaders going in these certain directions at a certain point. But then when you actually start posing a threat to the status quo, that's when, you know, you become a problem in like a major way.

Not to say that MLK wasn't a threat to the status quo, but just to say that, you know, there was, they have certain limits that they don't want people to cross. Yeah, capitalism, one of the things that makes it such a robust system in terms of its ability to not get overthrown or destroyed is that up to a certain point, it loves dissent. It loves anti-capitalism because you can market that very easily. Like, there's a lot of money in anti-capitalism. There's a lot of money in being critical of the system. It's just when you hit a certain point, then it becomes, you know, the CIA or the FBI or some person who's been convinced to shoot you's problem. Like, there's a point at which that's no longer accepted, but quite a bit of criticism and even like agitation to change or end the system can be accepted because it's monetizable. And speaking of that, you know what time it is?

Time for an ad. It sure is. It absolutely is. Oh boy. Time for an ad or that's the CIA at the door. We won't know until we come back from break. Ah, we're back. It wasn't the CIA this time.

Good news, guys. Thankfully. In fact, they flew all the way down just to meet me. I'm honored. Honestly. Oh, I mean, they've gone to Trinidad for less. Oh, that's true. Yeah. Yeah.

But like we were saying, right, there's this whole issue of these movements being able to go in a certain direction, but only up to a certain point. I think it's something that Peter Gallilou also talks about in how non-violence protects the state in the sense of, you know, these people are able to, once they get a certain level of attention, all of a sudden, you know, you're invited to speak at these events and you're invited to go this place and that. They basically get consumed into the workshop machine, the NGO machine, the climate conference machine kind of thing. So you end up with all these figures, these organizers, these activists who go from like generally trying to organize their communities and their spaces. And they're like at such and such conference because, well, they think it's an opportunity to like actually make like a bigger change. But in reality, you know, they just there to be defined, you know, to like, for example, who really comes to mind is like Greta Thunberg. I mean, I haven't looked at deeply into her past or anything. I know there are certain right wingers who are very obsessed with her.

But I know that she recently said that she's kind of done with politicians because when you think of how she basically came up, you know, right, exactly. You think about how she basically came up. It was like she is talking at these events and, you know, people are inviting her to things because, you know, look at this cute little goo yelling about climate change, right. And she basically becomes this spectacle, you know, and that spectacle is entertained up to a certain point. And people make big events out of her, you know, like breaking down in front of these politicians and stuff. And you know what, they just go right back to normal. I think it was COP26 was like last week or the week before. And representatives from, I think the prime minister of Barbados was there and she had this, you know, their great speech about how global nothings do more for, you know, these countries in the global south because, you know, they have a responsibility that kind of thing.

Cool. But at the same time, you know, there's like developments going on Barbados to, you know, basically bring in more tourists and to bring in more and like, you know, resorts building and that kind of thing that basically add to the emissions and add to the negative impact in the environment, you know, same thing with like Trinidad's government, you know, like representatives from Trinidad went to COP26, including the prime minister. I know they're all about things changing and, you know, the climate movement and climate change being real and actions need to be taken. And then like, this didn't make it in like, like mainstream news, of course, but in local news, basically right after Prime Minister Trinidad, Dr. Keith Rowley, he went and met up with like Shell. Yeah. Like representatives at Shell to like basically bring the country and the company closer together. You know, because, you know, Trinidad is reliant on oil and that kind of thing.

So obviously, these sort of leaders and these sorts of movements, they only go up to a certain point. And even then so much of it is just this performance. Yeah. And this act, basically. I'll be I'm putting together a thing on COP26 right now. Because I think it actually it does demonstrate a lot of the soft denial stuff that you're talking about. Like the biggest thing to come out of COP26 in terms of like actual deals is just progress on carbon markets and carbon offset credits. That's really that's really the only thing we actually got.

And I say yeah, but not like us, but like, you know, the people in charge, they got this and the quote they gave was that the being able to buy carbon offset credits, meaning that like, you don't actually make emissions differences. So instead, you you buy pretend emissions differences from other countries that actually did make changes so that you don't get penalized. Yeah, it's fine the credits for but they said they said buying the credits can potentially unlock trillions of dollars for protecting trees, expanding renewable energy and other projects to combat climate change. It's not just the thing right tax the fuckers like don't the climate credits. It's like, it's the same as saying like Hail Mary's because you you send and you went to your priest and confessed. It's like, I've I've I've done bad things to the environment. Tell me like how many times I need to go through this ritual in order to in order to cleanse myself of having the atmosphere. Exactly. I think it's bleaker than that in a lot of ways.

Like it's it's it's it's it's it's really it's the climate version of like the World Wildlife Fund having death squads. OK, now Chris, you are very anti death squad and I think we need to deal with that at some point because hashtag not all death squads. Yes, but I will need to be able to account for my strong anti death squad stance. This is a. Yeah, you say that now, but you're going to get a death squad to fight the death squads and then where are you going to be? See, another death squad exception. They get a death squad to fight your death squad and then it's like they cancel each other out. So then you have to get another death squad and then see.

Yeah, Marxist Leninism. Yeah, it's a number of other things to be fair to Marxism. And then I think that might make you kind of question the integrity of cut 26 is that there were more delegates at cut 26 from fossil fuel companies than there were from any individual nation. So it makes sense. This rules. Yeah. Yeah, but then right. That's like another thing, right?

Because you're talking about cut 26 and where soft climate change now gets into that. But I don't think I think soft climate change now can only be applied so far when it comes to those sorts of big spectacles, those big major events, because. Even if they themselves really truly understand the depths of climate change and trust and believe like these oil barns and stuff, they know like they have all the info. Yeah. Right present front of them. They've done they've already done their like cost benefit analysis and like risk assessments and kind of thing. So they know exactly like what the impact is going to be. They have the money to have access to the scientists.

Right. But it's not soft climate change denial for them. It's. I'm a capitalist. I'm going to do what a capitalist does. You know, it's ultimately a fun way they operating within a system. You know, so soft time change now. It is like sort of a psychological phenomenon.

But we also keep in mind that there's also like a structural component to it. So that even if that a person does not face soft climate change now as an experiencing soft climate change now. That alone, even if they like fully confront the issue. That's just an individual, you know, and there's still like a whole structure around that individual that will still incentivize certain behavior. And then of course, with the incentives of certain behavior comes like the psychological justifications for that behavior. So it kind of almost becomes that they end up justifying themselves into soft climate change denial. You know what I mean? So it's kind of like, yeah, it's like, it's like, it's like a feedback loop that reinforces its own existence.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that honestly, like the feedback loop model is where we have a lot of our problems with climate change. They're all very much linked to the feedback loop model of things trying to justify their own existence. And then, you know, certain, and then on the reverse side of things, you know, when certain changes in the climate happen, those create their own feedback loops, which create more changes to happen. It's like everything, everything is just one, one massive loop. Yeah, which kind of gets me to like this, the discourse around climate change and stuff is like halted and diverted and immobilized, you know, by soft climate change now, you know, discussions of the very real, very current, very near future and very violent impacts of climate change are just basically softened.

Like, like, you know, when you try to throw a punch in a dream. Yeah. Like you're trying to like push and then it's like, you know, it's like this kind of soft or like you throw something in space, I guess, it's just you put all this effort into it and then you go in another direction, that kind of thing. I don't know where I'm going with this analogy, so I'll just keep on going. Basically, that there's an issue with the conversation with the discourse has just been, you know, harmed by the psychological phenomenon. But then of course, there's the other side of psychological phenomenon of soft climate change denial, not the hard climate change denial side, but rather the, I'm so on the opposite end of soft climate change denial that I'm like an inconsolable and like illogical and can't even imagine the possibility of anything happening kind of boom, do more.

Yeah, yeah, the kind of the kind of extreme doomerism where you you recognize how you recognize that clumpage is bad. But then you you see it as such a massive overwhelming thing that basically shuts you down from being able to do anything else. And you just like exactly, there's really no point to do anything if it's going to be this bad. There's really no one's you know, it's such a hard capitalism and the systems that are working to keep it going are such a hard thing to overcome that it seems like the best thing to do is just sit down and do nothing. Yeah. And that's the thing right like these are slash collapse people. Right. I mean, I appreciate that they don't shy away from like the really difficult stuff.

Yeah. But then they also stumble into this kind of like hopeless doomerism like this dramatic kind of we are screwed. We're all going to be fighting this Mad Max style arena. Like that's not how you know, climate change is going to play out. You know, it's not a movie. You know, like it's things are going to break down in certain places and other places are going to lock down in certain ways, but it's not going to be like this. It's going to be like a sudden global devolution into madness like that. You know, that's not really how social change.

That's already how collapses have, you know, function in history. You know, of course we live in a global civilization and previous collapses have been fairly localized. But still, you know, climate change is both global and local. So there are certain changes that will only affect certain localities. This is something that actually the book desert addresses fairly well. And they find, yeah, that's what I'm drawing from. Yeah. Yeah.

Because I find really frustrating because especially on the online left, there's people who treat desert like the gospel, or at least they say they do. But they're actually extreme doomers who fetishize collapse. And they're like, oh, everything's hopeless. Redesert. Yeah. But then you put the message of desert. No, desert is like explicitly anti-collapse. And saying collapse isn't going to happen.

Collapse is a fantasy you tell yourself to keep you going. And for those who haven't heard of desert, desert is a book that's available for free online about what's coming. It's titled desert because of an old quote about how empires leave nothing but deserts in their wake, basically. It's just like a thing that, I think the exact quote is like empires make a desert and call it peace. Yeah. And it's basically discussing the fact, not just literal desertification, but that that's more of a better picture of our future under climate change than kind of these Mad Max dreams. This slow dissolution of resources and environments. And that that's kind of the, yeah, it's a good book.

You can read it yourself and it's quite influential online. But yeah, as Garrison pointed out, there are people who kind of take it in a direction that I don't believe the authors. I mean, clearly the authors didn't mean because they directly called out that kind of thinking. Yeah. It's kind of like some people treat like collapse and stuff as basically the secular version of like revelation in the Bible. Yeah. Yeah. Or it's like the non-Marcus version of like the revolution.

It's like it's like this, this kind of mythical event to like prepare for and almost be excited for. But like it's it's fake. It's a fantasy. It's something we tell ourselves to keep ourselves going as things are bad. But it's not it's it's not real. Yeah. Like any day now the trumpets will sound in the heavens and the screws will be broken. Yeah.

The great beast will arise from the sea and you know all that vibe. Yeah. And I don't know what the solution is for that. I don't know how both on like the soft climate denial side of like how do you go about how do you go about? It's like the little thing we can really do is the people, you know, we know how do we go about and tell them that, hey, things are probably going to be a bit worse than what you're preparing for. But how do we tell the people who are doomers? Hey, it's not going to be like this weird dystopian thing that you're thinking of either.

It's like it's it's it's interesting. It's like they're both veering off in two opposite directions. But it both kind of leads to the same point of kind of doing nothing. What one version is one version of nothing is basically, you know, voting for stuff that's not that's never going to happen. The other version is not just not doing anything in general. Yeah. And I don't know how to how to reach those types of people very easily. Yeah, which kind of brings me to like my thoughts on like how we move past soft climate change now.

I don't think it's just a matter of like trying to like push like campaigns on people. I think it's going to be like a very personal sort of journey that each person has to go through, right? Because each person is different. Each person is like has different worries and dealing things in a different way, you know. So like you want to keep in mind like people's mental health and sort of fortifying your mental health and helping people fortify theirs. Because when it comes to mental health with regard to like climate change, doing it in isolation in my experience has not really worked out. I think what has worked best for me is when I am with I'm connected with a group of people or even just one other person. And when I'm feeling down about climate change, because despite all my, you know, messages about solar punk and you know, we can do this like that.

That's basically the message of my YouTube channel. You know, I still experience like those sort of thoughts and feelings all public about it. Yeah. But what I try to do is when I'm feeling those things, I try to be with people who are not currently feeling that, you know. So we're not feeding off of each other's nights of energies. Yeah. So like when I'm in a bad spot, you know, I have people around me who could lift me up and when they're about, they're in a bad spot. Because it kind of comes in waves, you know.

Yeah, absolutely. No, yeah, it's it's it's silly to deny those thoughts exist because they do like they're they're very they're a very easy neutral state, at least for me to slip into. And the way to get around that is by doing chores at a farm and shoveling poop and taking care of animals and cooking for people. That's like the way that I get out of that kind of mindset. And you know, not to be too hard on all of the kind of doomer nihilists, because there is there is there is there is there is like a sect of like doomer nihilists who use like the actual definition of nihilism, which is like, if things don't really matter, we should probably fuck some stuff up. And that's very useful, right? Like if you're if you're on that train, you're like, yeah, you should be tree spiking if you're OK with if you think nothing matters. And you are you want to be an actual nihilist, then yeah, you should make you should make destroy.

Just make sure it's focused on the people with actual power. Because if you're willing to do that, then great, we need we need as many as many people like that as possible. But it's certainly easy to do that once you have friends. And once you're not stuck in this super depressed state all the time. Yeah. And I think there's a, again, we do take a look at like some of the criticisms people have of the show online. And I know one that's come up a bunch is people will listen to like our when we'll talk about, you know, the severity of the problems. And then we'll talk about things like, you know, mutual aid, collectives and small garden seed bombings and all that stuff. And we'll be like, well, that's not a solution. And no, of course, that's not going to solve the global problem of carbon emissions from a civilization of seven billion humans.

What it does do, focusing on stuff like that, focusing on building soil, focusing on building community resistance, in addition to like having an immediate impact on the number of people, you know, in your community. It builds a sense of power for the individual. It gives you something to do that isn't just thinking about how bad things are. And that puts you in a mind state that's more useful to actually potentially dealing with the bigger problems at some point. You have to have a sense of your own agency that feels real if you're going to actually change anything. And you can, you can build, it's a muscle, right? You can build it up by doing things that are not bigger, but are part of the solution. Yeah, exactly. And it's valuable to do that for your own mental health.

Because then maybe you, maybe if your friend group, if your affinity group, whatever you want to call it, people you are hanging out with, if some of them are always engaged in something productive, then when you're in a doomed spiral, you can find someone who's working on something and vice versa. Yeah. And it doesn't just help your mental health, but it also contributes to the prefigurative activities that we need to actually make a switch to a different system. You know, like revolution is something that happens overnight or in the far future. It's supposed to be happening all now because as we build those systems, you know, we are building up power. You know, it's kind of like how the black socialists in America describe dual power, you know. It should be a building these systems and putting these things in place so that we can push towards like a fundamental transformation of the system. And it's iterative, but as more people build on top of that, you know, that's how the transformation happens.

We're all also going to contribute. I mean, I think it's important to talk about this both to acknowledge like it's a thing that happens and we all deal with. We all have our moments of like overwhelming despair over what's happening. And some moments of unrealistic optimism too. Yeah. Everyone's in a while. And the unrealistic optimism needs to be encouraged as long as it's not the kind of, well, we don't need to do anything because someone's... I guess there's toxic optimism and there's helpful atoxic.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic. And occasionally ridiculous. Deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records.

We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring and mind-blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC.

What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space.

313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match.

And when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Optimism would be like reading an article about some new carbon capture technology and being like, oh, cool. Well, I don't need to worry. But most optimism, I think, is positive. And I think it's good to build a capacity for optimism by building your personal sense of agency and power by doing shit that helps. And I think that accepting that you can do things that are meaningful, and that there are things to be done that can help the situation is a critical way of fighting against this soft climate change denial,

which is a major threat because there's, I think, honestly, at this point, more people who are subscribing to some form of soft climate change denial than there are people who are just denying climate change in its entirety. And that's, I think, where a lot of the effort has to go. So I think this is a really important thing for people to understand and to be vigilant against. Absolutely. Yeah. All right. Well, Andrew, where can the audience find you outside of here right now? Yeah, so you can find me on my YouTube channel, Saint Andrewsum. And you can find me on Twitter, I'd underscore Saint True.

Excellent. Well, you can find us here where you just found us. We'll be here tomorrow unless this is a Friday, in which case we'll be here on Monday. Have a good, you know, life. Have a good life. Take care. Interesting person who has something to say. We're going to talk about feminism, race, writing in books and art, food, pop culture, and yes, politics. I started show with a recommendation. Really, I'm just going to share with you a movie or a book or maybe some music or a comedy set,

something that I really want you to be aware of and maybe engage with as well. Listen to the Luminary Original Podcast, the Roxane Gay Agenda, the Bad Feminist Podcast of Your Dreams, every Tuesday on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. From Cavalry Audio comes the new true crime podcast, The Shadow Girls. I always wanted to know what it felt like to kill somebody. Prosecutors described him as a serial killer savant, picking up these girls, getting them in a position of vulnerability when he got a hold of their neck. That was it. I'm Carolyn Osorio, a journalist and lifelong resident of the Pacific Northwest.

I grew up near the banks of the Green River and in the shadow of the killer that bears its name. How many times did you bring the camera to the river? One time. Just one time. I started fantasizing about having sex with his mother and he fantasized about killing her. But this podcast isn't only about tracking down the killer. It's about the victims. We stayed in the woods. He always liked to go in the woods. He was just to all of the kind of things.

Do you know how he feels about prostitutes? Listen to the Shadow Girls on the iHeart Radio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Executive producer Paris Hilton brings back the hit podcast How Men Think. And that's good news for anyone that is confused by men, which is basically everyone. Get an inside look at what goes on in the mind of men from the men themselves. It's real talk, straight from the source. The How Men Think podcast is exactly what we need to figure them out. It's going to be fun, informative, and probably a bit scary at times.

Because we're literally going inside the minds of men. As much as we like to think all men are the same, they're actually very different. Each week, a celebrity guest host provides honest advice in his area of expertise. When I agreed to do this reboot, I had a few conditions. No sugarcoating, no mind games, and absolutely no mansplaining. Men are hard enough to understand without the mind games. Listen to How Men Think on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart,

and also sometimes about how things have been falling apart for a while now. And today we're going to talk about how things were also bad in falling apart in the 2000s, which is a profoundly cursed time period. And specifically, we're going to talk about, I think, a part of the anti-war movement that does not get much attention, which is the Port Militarization Resistance that happened sort of 2006, 2007. And with us today to talk about this is two people who are part of this movement. We have Julianne Neuhauser, hello.

Hello. And Brendan Maslaskis, done. Yeah, both of whom were organizers and activists while this was going on. Yeah, thank you both for being here. Yeah, thanks for having us. So yeah, as I was saying a bit in the intro, I think this is a part of the anti-war movement that is not very well known. I think a lot of people know about the initial stuff that happened in 2003,

and people might know about some of the stuff that was happening against the war in Afghanistan, right when it started. But I don't think most people know that even after 2003 doesn't work, that it continues and it continues sort of informs that are very interesting. So I guess I want you to start out. I want to ask how we sort of got from the early part of the anti-war movement into this and how you got involved. I wanted to say that there's this narrative about the movement against the war in Iraq,

that there is the largest protests in human history, at least at that point, I don't know if it's still true, against the invasion. And then it didn't work and everyone kind of went home and ended there. And to a certain extent, that's true. But like you said, the people that didn't go home went in interesting directions. And so at the time there were, direct action was not as acceptable as it is now. The protest movement was largely dominated either by big liberal coalitions or PSL front groups that were basically indistinguishable in what they actually did, which was basically nothing.

And in the best of cases, and in the worst of cases, counterinsurgency. But then there were small groups of people that, when we saw that it didn't work, and we saw that these giant peaceful marches from one part of town to another, or voting for John Kerry or whatever, didn't work, that we started to look for other options. Yeah, and I got involved, I'd say with the anti-war movement, that idea of how war is unjust was really taught to me from a very young age. I mean, my parents were children of the 60s and they had family members fighting in Vietnam and friends dying in Vietnam and were against the protests back then.

So I grew up hearing these stories and of course stories from family members, particularly one of my grandfathers, both of them who were veterans in World War II. One of them was a Marine in the Pacific Theater and still into his 70s, 80s and 90s until his final days was just dealing with horrific PTSD and had always taught me from a young age never to get involved. And I remember very clearly, I'm sure it's on everyone's minds now, when the invasion of Afghanistan started, when the invasion of Iraq started. I was at that massive demonstration in Washington, D.C. that Juliana just mentioned.

And I ended up, I'm from Utica, New York, I went to a rural high school just outside of Utica, Rusbell, generally speaking, in Poverish and also very conservative area of New York. And I had the recruiters bothering me, military recruiters in high school, recruiting my friends and they were just everywhere in the hallways. So it was very present with me when I was younger, I moved out to Olympia, Washington, 2006. And that's one new student activist group, Students for a Democratic Society was launched. That's how Juliana and I first met. We were both in separate chapters of that new organization in the Pacific Northwest.

And the port protests started just a few months after I moved out there in Olympia in 2006. So wait, to clarify this for a second, because I've never quite been clear on this history. So there was a second SD, like Students for a Democratic Society that was like unrelated to the first one. Yeah, it was reborn briefly at the end of the Bush administration. That explains a lot of things that were very baffling. We're not that old. Yeah, we were definitely in the second, you know, the rebirth of it. So, you know, I think it took on some things in spirit, you know, but also was, I'd say different in many ways.

And it was very active. To me, at least it was very exciting to be a member of the new SDS because there are over a dozen chapters in the Pacific Northwest. And it was a great way to connect with young activists all over the US. So SDS is emerging in this time period. One of the other things I was interested about is something some of you were talking about in the early part of this, which has to do with the way that these giant, both the sort of answer coalition PSL Frank group, and I guess the ISO was still around back then, coalitions work versus how like anything else worked. So was SDS sort of like consciously set up in opposition to those groups?

I don't think it was conscious, but there was just like, I mean, these days, I mean, like there's a lot of controversy around PSL with like anarchist versus tanky politics. None of that mattered at that time. Like none of that mattered. The only thing that mattered was the answer, which is the PSL front group was completely fucking useless. Like they completely indistinguishable from any peace police liberal democratic front group. There was literally no difference just in terms of their aesthetics. Maybe like, is there a donkey or a hammer and sickle on something? That's the only difference we saw.

So I don't, I don't think there was, it wasn't, there wasn't like a conscious, like political opposition to it. It was just like, they're not doing anything. And so we had to look in another direction. Actually, you know, it's hard to keep track of the alphabet soup of authoritarian communist groups at times. But this was actually answer for those who don't recall. It was a front group for the Workers' World Party, the WDP, which yeah, I mean, it's, it's hard to keep track, right? Yeah, it's the same thing. So, okay, so for people who are sort of unaware of this, there's a network of connected but sometimes feuding like weird Stalinist cults that kind of kind of like,

they hold on through like the 80s and 90s and they start sort of rebuilding again around the anti-war movements in that period. That's the PSL, it's the WDP that's answer like, and I think it's like, most like modern anti-war groups are also still these people, which is incredibly depressing, something I want to talk a bit about towards the end of this. But yeah, just for people who have not spent the last half decade in the trenches of extremely weird anti-war politics. So yeah, so I think we should get into how the sort of the first action starts in Olympia. Yeah, so, and there were actually a couple actions that happened in the year preceding that, you know, before I moved out to Olympia in 2006. It was not yet under the banner of PMR, Port Militarization Resistance. That was a name that was officially coined in, you know, in May and June of 2006.

And so just to give you an idea, Olympia, it's a college town or at the Evergreen State College is there. It's also the capital Washington state. So you have that going on. It's also a military town. It's a little over 20 miles south of what we called Fort Lewis. It's now called JBLM, JBLM or Joint Base Lewis McCord. It's an Army and Air Force base. Now it's one base.

So you had all these, you know, different kind of elements in, you know, in tandem in that town. And the public port, the Port of Olympia is one of about 70 or so public ports in the state of Washington. Some of which are, I mean, they're used for all kinds of things, you know, for commercial private industry, but also the military and the U.S. government. So, you know, I heard from someone, I don't even remember who that the military was sending a ship to the Port of Olympia in late May of 2006. And this happened for 10 or so days. And it was just kind of a natural instinct for a whole bunch of us to go down to the Port of Olympia. But it was, it was the war machine in our backyard and the idea was to just block the vehicles. It started out with just like less than 10 people, a number of folks getting arrested, and that very rapidly culminated into larger protests every single day.

And then active blockades, people, those of us like Juliana and myself and other folks using civil disobedience or what we prefer to call civil resistance to try and stop or at the very least slow down these striker vehicles. And to give folks an idea of what a striker vehicle is, you can look it up online, but it's kind of halfway between, you know, a tank in a Humvee, it doesn't have the slats, you know, that a tank would have. And they were being used in both Iraq and Afghanistan for raids of residential areas. They were really on the front lines of the war in both those countries. And that's what we were trying to stop. I only got involved later because I wasn't living in Olympia at the time. I was in another SDS chapter, but my roommate was from Olympia. And he had been involved in that first round of protests in Olympia before moving up to Bellingham.

And so like hearing his story has got me very excited because just like finally someone's someone's doing something like someone's they're not just like, you know, it's like everything else was just so liberal. Like whether it was marching from one place to another or writing to your Congress people or occupying their office. It was like asking someone else to do something which you knew from the beginning they were never going to do. Yeah. And finally this was finally someone was like actually getting into it. I think the first one of the things that happened here was that they started to avoid that. There's kind of a geographical thing that I think for people who either don't know Washington or because they're normal people don't know like the port areas of the city is very well because it's like, like unless you're a longshoreman like why would you go down to like the port of Tacoma?

Yeah. Nothing there. Yeah. But they kept moving it around because Olympia is also not very big. And so it's there's really only two roads into the port, which is very small. And so it was it's very easy to block it. And so then I think the first time that I got involved was in 2007 when they had moved it because they kept moving it around to try and switch things up. Wait, before they're moving the ship around?

No, it's like each time they had to make a military shipment, they would, it's like, like once the ship was in the port, they would just have to go through with it. But then, you know, it's like every six months or so they had to make another military shipment. And they would change the port usually each time to try and basically to avoid us. It doesn't seem like this is like normal practice. The first time I had gone down was in Tacoma, which is a much, much, much more industrialized port than Olympia. It's, you know, it's like a big port, a more normal port, I guess. And that one was honestly pretty crazy because you're just trapped in this giant industrial maze, basically at the mercy of the riot cops. The best success we had was definitely at the port of Olympia.

I think in 2007, and Olympia was definitely the glory moment, which was when people were able to on and off, like actually hold the port and control its engines and exits. Yeah, and I want to, you know, just emphasize that, like the one, the military changing their approach to avoid us. So jumping from port to port with these different shipments, they actually went so far because we were so successful as a movement in the Pacific Northwest to ship Stryker vehicles by rail out of the Pacific Northwest and even going so far as to ports in Texas. But, you know, one, one thing that we did is that we built up contacts with other activists with longshore workers all up and down the West Coast in California. There are other activists we're connected with in Texas, Hawaii, New Jersey and New York. There is a desire in the antiwar movement. And, you know, in some extent, maybe it's like it was small, but some folks in the labor movement, especially in Oakland, where the ILWU, the, you know, Longshore Workers Union is a lot more militant than say in a place like Olympia. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, people wanted to replicate this model because, as Juliana said, we were successful in 2007. We shut down the port of Olympia for a total of, it was essentially two days.

They were not, they're not shipping anything in or out. We set up blockades. We're willing to throw down with the police in the street. And one of the things that was cool about that blockade is that what are the, there's two entrances, like I said, and one was completely blockaded. And then the other one, we had like a moving, I don't really know what it was, but something with wheels that we could move in and out to open it up. And so then we could allow like civilian cargo to move in and out, but then like we feel it back in place to block military shipments. So were you able to actually like stop them from like while in that one intercom we actually like stop them from moving the stuff all together or did you eventually get cleared up by the police and they moved it? We would eventually get cleared out by the police. It's like we were never able to, it's like we held it for two days that those protests took place over a series of two weeks or more or less. We were only able to fully hold it for two days before eventually they would clear us out. But one of the things is that it does, it did create problems for the army. Because when you work with a port, you know, it's like you've got like a certain timeframe that you've contracted with the port to do whatever it is you're going to do. And it's not too happy if you take longer than you said you would.

Yeah, the other thing I want to add is, you know, I think the other really important element with this whole movement going on is the Pacific Northwest was specifically Western Washington where the two of us were living. It was, you know, the center in a sense it was the heart of the anti-war movement in the country at that time. One, because of this militant direct action that we were, you know, we were building up in the streets and trying to throw a wrench in the gears of the war machine to at the very least slow it down, which in some ways we did. But, you know, we were up against so much. But the other added element, of course, is the GI resistance and the soldiers who are resisting. Ival, also known as Iraq veterans against the war, was very active there. They set up a GI coffee house across, you know, literally across the street, you know, the gates for one of the entrances for Fort Lewis. There are a whole bunch of soldiers that were going AWOL. We had friends who were active duty soldiers who had fought in, you know, Iraq and Afghanistan that were AWOL. And they were hiding, you know, refusing to go back into the striker brigades that joined us in port militarization resistance. There were a whole, you know, long list of soldiers that were very publicly saying, you know, I'm refusing to fight in Iraq or Afghanistan for, you know, various reasons.

And so we are very much connected with this movement too. And I think the higher ups in the military, they're hyper aware of that. They studied us very well, you know, to the point of actually spying on us. So that's like a whole other element of this story, too. One of the things that I've heard from talking to other people who were involved in this was that, like, wow, like, during these protests, like, the level of police militarization just like skyrocketed. And like, I remember, I was like, different about this, like, you know, if you go back and look at, like, old system of a down videos, you know, they'll have these things. You see these riot police and like you look at them. And it's like these people, they look so much less armored than like the people that we have now. And one of the things that I thought was interesting about this was that like, this is, I think, one of the points where you start getting the modern riot police showing up that are just like, you know, completely encased in like armor and yeah, we'll talk about just like the police response to this because I think that's that's another thing I think there's there's a kind of a tendency to sort of project back what the police look like in 2021, just onto the whole history of police and I think it's like it's it's it's it's gotten worse even the last 20 years.

Yeah, I mean, so I live downtown in Olympia and probably just like a six minute walk away from the Port of Olympia, and also very conveniently just a few blocks away from the police station so so lucky us so we actually saw, you know, we could see from the front of down on the road down in the sidewalk from the front of our house, some of the military shipments going by. And we did see that absolutely and at times it was it was terrifying I mean I lived in an activist house we jokingly called HQ, because that's just you know where it because of its proximity to the port that's where a number of us were having meetings, you know, around these protests early on 2006. And yeah, I mean we like, they look like Robocop, and it's something I had. You know, I hadn't like I had been to like mass marches and demonstrations like the RNC protests and DNC protests in Boston, New York, and like in Washington DC. And so I would see these like riot cops, but they were I mean ubiquitous in the sport protests. It was like a whole army of them that was sent out. I mean when Julian, Julian said that things got kind of crazy at the Port of Tacoma protests. I mean there was like a police riot, you know, like the cops went absolutely nuts or shooting people with tear gas and pepperballs and, and brutalizing people. I had never before witnessed anything like that and it got to the point in, you know, an Olympia where we kind of knew early on that we were being traced by the police, to the extent where, you know, one friend of ours was followed from our house to the bus station to take a bus to school by the police and then was stopped and essentially assaulted by them on the street and we had another fellow activists, and you know roommate of mine who is going out to driving out with a few friends, a few fellow activists from Olympia to Aberdeen about an hour's drive so Aberdeen there's a port of Grace Harbor there, pretty conservative small town it's where Kurt Cobain is from.

One of the famous Kurt Cobain themed McDonald's. They served billions and billions served in that one McDonald's and Kurt Cobain's McDonald's. But yeah, I mean, you know, they, they were, they were following they had orders, the Washington State Patrol to, you know, pull over a car full of known anarchists there was alert gone out to all the police departments they pulled them, they pulled them over. They made them walk the line he was hadn't you know wasn't drinking and no drugs, like nothing in a system, but they he was driving under like one mile per hour under the speed limit. They arrested him for DWI, you know, eventually fought the charges, sued them, and you know, won a big settlement out of all that but that's just one example of many of the lengths that the police would go to. It was pretty severe even. There's a house of a bunch of anarchists younger anarchists called pitch pipe info shop and Tacoma and that was also a big target, the police were swarming around them all the time. They had like cameras set up like specifically just outside the info shop like there weren't surveillance cameras there before but then there's like oh well just conveniently put them on this one specific street corner. Yeah, I think like those one of the things I was reading about this is you have that stuff and then also, I think one of the scariest parts of this is that like army intelligence gets involved. And yeah, do you want to talk about the man named quote unquote John Jacob who was in fact not that. Yeah, so you know I'm curious what what memories you have of our good dear friend, John Jacob, Juliana.

I don't think I ever actually knew him in person, but he was the moderator of the listserv wasn't he. Yes, he's one of the moderators of our listserv. When I look back on it I'm like the port militarization resistance, the serve was always just like this dramatic shit show. It's like looking back on it I was like, Oh, a cop that did nothing did absolutely nothing to like establish order or. That was a purpose. Yeah, so I think there's definitely some things that happen like, you know, looking back from our vantage point today it's like, Okay, things make a little more sense at the time though. And we're in this movement right and so that means like meeting people where they're at we find all kinds of people that would like want to join the movement like I like I said earlier like active duty soldiers that were joining. So I met this guy named John Jacob, and he sent an email out to me I was one of the contacts for the Olympia SDS group. And it's like hey, you know there's kind of like a parent organization that's an old like elder activists are in to kind of mentor us called movement for a democratic society very small never really took off but like I'm interested in getting involved. He met up in public and he seemed like an all right guy I mean he was, you know, 40 ish early 40s.

He told me like, you know, been in the military for years and he actually still worked at Fort Lewis so he was always open about that, but it only went that far he didn't ever tell us what he actually did there and it wasn't abnormal for, you know, we have many folks that had active duty, you know, on base and civilian civilian roles or soldiers as I mentioned that we're in Port Militarization resistance. So he gets involved and he gets really involved with Port Militarization resistance he goes to protest he gets pretty close with this group of anarchists, I mentioned who lived in Tacoma. And he seemed like a really solid guy to most of us. And you know things happen as as we progress and you know as the military responded to our, you know how effective we were in the anti war movement and the GI resistance movement by changing their tactics. And we'd noticed that okay, when we first started the protest. We, we had the ability to catch the police by surprise by setting up, you know, blockade here, or having a surprise action there at this time or this port etc etc. As time progressed we found out that you know we were having these making these decisions for tactics in our strategy we thought that we're in private and then for whatever reason the police kind of knew about where we're going to be before we even showed up. And I remember that clearly happening 2007 the port of Olympia. In Tacoma there was a lot of things like that, like, there was one time when they're like some people who had a meeting in a closed room, like all or they had taken like the batteries out of their cell phones.

They had simply written on the whiteboards, the time and place they're going to have their next meeting which is going to be in a diner near the port. And if for any reason the room was bugged, it wouldn't be caught up, because it was just written on a board, and then it was like a small meeting too so it's like there wouldn't. And then when they got to that diner there was like, full of cops, and like clearly waiting for them like, at that point it's like, it was very clear there was some some level of infiltration involved. Yeah, and I think we're from early on, like, you know, we, we knew our history, I mean, you know, one of our fellow activists and PMRs and a friend of ours, Peter Bomer is a professor at the Evergreen State College he was in the original SDS back in the 60s and, you know, he was essentially a political prisoner for a couple years in both Massachusetts and California. I mean the feds essentially tried to assassinate him back in the 70s when he was active in the anti war movement in San Diego like we knew, you know, former Black Panthers and we read our history so we knew about the history of Cointel pro the counterintelligence program of the 60s and 70s, and the war on the anti war and civil rights and Black Power, American Indian movements, etc. So we knew, you know, just intuitively early on. But there's one thing that happened in particular, which prompted some of us to file for a public records request with the city of Olympia.

And another activists walking down the street in Olympia. They were the wild blues industrial workers of the World Union, and we had like a one of those metal newspaper boxes downtown, and it was locked to a pole, you know, with a bike lock, and there are some city workers there with a pickup truck and they're cutting the lock to this newspaper box and they threw it in their pickup truck. And one of our, you know, this friend of ours was there was like, what, what the hell, what are you doing, what's going on. And one of the workers just kind of shrugged and was like, I don't know, the police told us to do this and they drove off like they stole, you know, our essentially like our union property or whatever. So we had a, you know, our lawyer friend Larry Hildes and the National Lawyers Guild, you know, call and kind of threatened the city and, and then a number of us got together like hey you know let's do like a public records request with the city of Olympia freedom of information law, right. And so we did and request was, you know, just requesting any all information the city had any exchanges communications by email etc. And so we had a lot of inquiries and like other agencies about anarchists, the IWW students for a democratic society. And their initial search that the city clerk did yielded something like 30,000 responses. So she's like okay I got to narrow this down. And I don't know I was working on the request at the time and for some reason like I don't know we're poor protest or near military base communications between the army not thinking anything.

So the initial responses we actually got, you know, maybe 100 130 or so different documents just copies of emails etc. That were little puzzle pieces for this massive puzzle, and it was just a few of them. And so there was you know there was an email talking about our guy in the Navy going to a PMR meeting to get some intel. There's, you know all kinds of things like that there are a few emails in particular, and the email address was something like John J. Towery at, you know, army.us whatever the email address was. So there's a crew of activists that got together, put their heads together did some research quietly for a few months and eventually found out by publicly accessible information like voter registration records, and also finding out something about like a motorcycle club called like the, I don't know like the Brown Butte club or the Brown Butte club or something and, and like found out that this John Towery guy that was in this motorcycle club and had his, you know, was registered to vote outside of Tacoma in this town there. It was actually John Jacob. It was this guy that we thought was a fellow activists, an anarchist, and a friend, you know, I thought he was a personal friend of mine. When he was out, he was actually essentially an army intelligence officer, working for something called a force protection unit at, at Joint Base Lewis McCord and also working with a whole list of different agencies and what turned out to be like a massive surveillance network that had a national scope. This guy was sent by the army, along with many others to infiltrate us to spy on us and to disrupt us was huge.

Yeah, and that's one of the things that I've always thought was really interesting about this is like so like I learned about poor militarization resistance basically because I was like poking around the history of like the anti war movements and I ran to this and I was like, what because and that was what I thought one of the things I thought was really interesting about this is that like, like I think this chapter the anti war movement is even on the left is like not very well known, but like the seriousness with the army seems to have taken it easily is really remarkable. Yeah, I'm wondering what you do think about that. One thing we have to emphasize is, is that we were not a large group of people. Yeah, like the number of people who are actively involved in poor militarization resistance at its peak was at how many people do you think it was Brandon. Well, it depends. I mean, I'd say they're probably like at its peak, maybe probably four to 50 people that would like consistently show up to things, you know, maybe a slightly smaller very core group, but we would have demonstrations with like, and then like 400 people, you know, Yeah, and like, that would be like the max. Like, there is, it's like there is like the peaceful likes kind of like support actions, you know, you'd get like a couple hundred people and then like for the stuff like where it's like the first night that that the part of the entrance to the part of Olympia was occupied to be like, like 40 to 50 people. These were not, these were not very large groups of people. I feel like, and like I said, it's like one thing that we need to keep in mind was that the peace police were much stronger back then than they are now.

Nowadays, like as we saw last year, it's like people in the US have learned to throw it out, but that was not the case at the time. And so this is a very, very small group of people. I think we accomplished a lot from with how small it was. And larger sort of accomplished way more. But even that small core of like 40 to 50 people with maybe expanding out to like a larger group of a couple hundred had them that scared that they went that far. Yeah, and this is one of the things I've been thinking about a lot recently of this seems to be a very consistent thing, which is that like the two things that are guaranteed to like just have a hammer drop on you if you touch them is pipelines and ports. And that was something, you know, we've talked a lot on here about pipeline protests. But I was interested in what you two think about this is like a very particular moment right now in what you're dealing with all these logistics chain failures. And I was wondering if you do think there's anything that we can learn from how your versions of the sort of port demonstrations worked for potentially trying to leverage that in the future, especially with like contract negotiations for the port workers in Oakland coming up next year. Yeah, that's a great question. You know, there's this old saying and in the IWW direct action gets goods right and I think it really boils down to that it's building up, you know, mass movements and social movements from below that rely on direct action that rely on civil resistance civil disobedience. Yeah, and the pipeline protests that have been ongoing where indigenous people have been on the front lines of that for many, many years now. I mean the kind of repression and surveillance that we face really pales in comparison to the kinds of, you know, surveillance of repression that folks were facing at Standing Rock, for example.

You know, I think, of course, one of the, well, one of the main differences is that it was primarily the military, you know, with us right that was surveilling us because this this was very specifically, you know, a war issue and a military issue. But yeah, I mean, I think, you know, like, I think there's a big questions like what, what do we have to do that's, that's new. And to me I say, you know, for both that kind of militant action but also for the labor movements like what's not, you know, we don't have to reinvent the wheel there are things that have a tried and true track record of getting the goods. And that is, you know, these more disruptive kind of actions and movements. And so one of them would be, you know, I guess my suggestion would be to like, go back to the basics. And even like I would say now, you know, this, remember this at a time when like Facebook was around right like but we weren't really using that for organizing we relied on like face to face meetings, you know, phone calls and building up trust with people and building up our capacity to like, take actions and make change you know I think I'm not saying throw out everything that you know that at least some of the good that social media has to offer but like, I think going beyond that and going back to these older tactics and then for the labor movement, like the big thing is, you know, and it's just like a bigger question for, for mainstream unions in particular. And there, the whole idea of like union contracts is that workers also lose a lot yeah they get some things but business owners and bosses have rights carved out in those contracts and with the longshore workers I mean the difficult thing with that of course is like there would be some hydraulic strikes that of course like longshore workers have done and continue to do, you know, around like the war in Iraq, historically supporting women Abu Jamal, Mayday, etc.

and Oakland, but they have some things with that written into their contracts and you know for all these other like unions it's like well you know we can't strike it all for for the next two years or next three years whatever the life of the contract is like I think it's a bigger question and challenge for the labor movement to move beyond that and not be putting this straight jacket of of contracts like that. Yeah I think that that particular like the no strike clause part of contracts I think it's an interesting thing because it, I don't know, there's not, I mean there are some unions that will actually do stuff around fighting it but mostly people just sort of don't care and I think you wind up in a situation where it seems like you kind of have to plan your tactics around when contract negotiations are happening because otherwise you can't actually get people to do anything more than like a one day symbolic strike. Yeah, and or you know the challenges like you know we have this great American tradition that's not. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you hey, let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and fascism. I'm Ben Bullock and I'm Alex French.

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Unique to the US it's universal really and it's one that resonates with me breaking the law. Right. And like we're you know we're like civil disobedience that is that what we are doing in the streets and blocking the ports we were breaking the law and we knew it. And that's what the civil rights movement the black freedom movement did in the 1960s. But like we have recent examples of workers breaking the law and mass like the West Virginia teacher strikes that happened a few years ago. Teachers in every single county in that state went on strike they broke the law and they won something out of that. And I think that's what we really need to encourage people is this idea of breaking out of like the norm and breaking the laws which you know the laws that are in place which are not there to you know expand our freedom they're there to contract it. Yeah one of my friends had a joke about what was the exact line it was. It's only illegal if you get caught and it only matters if you lose which I think is a good way of thinking about both.

Yeah absolutely yeah and you know yeah I think it's also like it's worth mentioning that like the other sides the law doesn't matter to them at all like they just tear it up and like light it on fire constantly. So don't don't bind yourself if you can if you can not get caught and not like go to prison for the rest of your life don't bind yourself by a bunch of like paper at the other side just doesn't care about. And that's an excellent point because that's the big thing you know with the army and law enforcement general like surveillance of us they were in the police just their actions or brazen actions on the street like the riot police. They were just breaking the law all the time they absolutely have a deep visceral hatred of the Bill of Rights of civil rights and civil liberties. And so there were a number of you know court cases that sprung out of you know this movement. There's a case called Panagakis Vitauri another Giuliana Panagakis was another PMR member co plaintiff in that case and you know is it a case against the army that you know we we waged and brought up to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and you know eventually lost and could have brought it to the Supreme Court because they didn't but you know like the the other thing is like the violation of the Posse commentatus act. It was the whole other thing you know we don't have to get like so tied up until like the legalistic thing but like the point your point is valid like they don't care about the laws that are already there they'll they'll just intentionally break them break their own laws that they have set up and you know they'll just get a slap on the wrist because that's really all that's all that happens to them. I think I think that's a good note to end on break the law it's fake it's also bad. Do you have anything you want to plug other than that other than you know encouraging people to break the law.

Okay your local port. Yeah yeah I mean I think it's you know I guess just encourage people to do is you know it sounds like what we're doing by having us on the show and like there are some in our very recent history you know movements and wins that we all as activists today can still learn from and I think part of that. You know I don't want to call us elders because we're not that old but like one part of that is like making sure like our movements are still like a multi generational and like we we learn from each other and also as as Juliana and I did like I mentioned earlier like we learned from the movements of the past sds the black panthers the black freedom movement etc. But there's a lot that you know these these struggles I think have to offer us today. Alright well thank you thank you both for talking coming on talking with us. You're having us. Thank you. Well this has been it could happen here find us at happen here pod on Twitter Instagram and the rest of our stuff is a close on media at the same somewhat accursed social media places I don't know why I'm saying somewhat they're just a cursed. Yeah.

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I'm going to sit down and talk with Lucas Herndon. Lucas, you live in New Mexico at least. And you wanted to talk to me a bit about some stuff that's going on in your school boards. We just did a two-parter on fascist attempts to kind of take over and dominate school boards around the country. And you've got some personal experience with that. So I wanted to kind of just turn this over to you to start us off. Yeah, thanks Robert. Thanks for having me on the show. Yeah, my name is Lucas and I live in Las Cruces, New Mexico, which is in the southern part of the state. We're close to the border for people that are interested.

And yeah, my experience that happened last week is sort of the quintessential It Could Happen Here. Yeah, it definitely did. It definitely did, exactly. Las Cruces, politically speaking, is actually a very progressive little town. I mean, in general, New Mexico has been, however you consider it, progressive or not, has been blue for quite a while in terms of voting. It's not like Texas, politically at least. Right, exactly. We voted for Bush the first time, but have voted blue every election since 2004, federally.

Yeah. In my little stretch of the state, our congressional district has been red, but the city of Las Cruces, which is where the biggest city in the southern part of the state, where the second biggest city in the state, our city council has not only been democratic, but progressively democratic. We have, as of this recent election, from the beginning of November, we now have an all-female city council. And there is, at least, we have one, if not two, trying to think, sorry. Currently, there are two folks on the city council who have immigrated from Mexico in their life. One will still be on. One is now running for Congress. We have the school board that currently is sitting, is generally progressive, and the one we just elected, we just elected our first openly queer person onto that school board.

Our little group of legislators that go up to Santa Fe every year is very progressive. Again, just to reiterate, Las Cruces, New Mexico, pretty progressive little place, and yet at the school board meeting last week, totally dominated by a public attendance of very far-right extremists spouting all kinds of nonsense about all kinds of things. So, yeah, it was pretty wild. And this happened in Portland, Oregon, too, which is also famously, I wouldn't call Portland politics progressive, but solidly democratic when the school board meeting gets taken over by far-right activists. Yeah, so when did you first become aware of this? Well, so it was a weird convergence of my personal and my personal life where I work for an organization called Progress Now New Mexico, so it's like I do progressive politics for a living. But a colleague who works for the ACLU here had asked if I would go and help lend support to this gender inclusion policy that the school board was going to be commenting on. They weren't voting on it that day. It was what's called a first reading.

And she asked if I could go and if I could just speak and I was like, yeah, absolutely be happy to. So I was going to go and talk about this in a, I'm sorry, professional capacity. And then that day, as like before I went to that, my daughter who's in middle school texted me a picture, a bunch of kids had on Monday of last week, which was like Trans Awareness Week or Trans Visibility Week. Some kids had shown up wearing trans flags and pride flags on that Monday. The following day that Tuesday, some kids showed up wearing thin blue line flags in response, like indirect response. And in my daughter, you know, my daughter is aware enough to know what that means. So she texted me and was like, I can't believe this shit. And I was like, I know. And then I'm like, right, so then I'm like, okay, well, now I want to go speak about this gender inclusion bill or policy personally, right, like now it like has impacted me. So I show up at, you know, about an hour before the meeting supposed to start, because the third thing that kind of happened was that I, I am on like a bunch of mailing lists because of my job. I sent out the local GOP, who is not very active, because again, they kind of lose all the time. They sent out a like, come show up at this thing, you know, email. So I showed up early thinking, okay, well, I want to see if there's going to be something. And at first I was like, oh, like, I don't think they showed up. I don't think that they turned out, that's good.

But it turns out they were all like hiding in their cars, so that they could like, swarm the building at once. And so then like about half an hour before the meeting they all walked in at once and like I was already sitting inside the room and they all came in at once and they took over all the chairs they were standing room only to the point where like the there was a bunch of FFA kids that were there that was supposed to be recognized for, you know, FFA something or other. And like they had to kick some people out so that they weren't violating the fire code. But that's how many. Yeah. So, anyway, that's kind of how it all that's the setting for where this all happened. It turns out that at the same meeting, there was going to be a policy discussion on a different policy that had to do with New Mexico's revision of social studies standards. And of course that got everybody hot and bothered about so called CRT, which isn't a thing. But so like they were there but I mean but the folks that showed up to speak I mean they were all over the place they were talking about critical race theory they were talking about the revolution bill and like trans violent the myth of trans violence. And, but then of course like like COVID protocols and all kinds of I mean just again like way out there stuff. And actually kind of funny I was listening to knowledge fight this morning and Jordan and Dan really hit on it that like they have just figured out that these are places they can go and yell and like no one you know like school board. People are going to like they're all just these are all just like teachers like retired teachers who are on these school boards and they're like, they're not there to just you know have these like whatever discussions so they're not going to you know they just like let these people yell and they

did. So anyways it got it got heated pretty quickly because I mean again these people just like go off and they get they riled themselves up and lots of applause and anyway that's kind of how it all started, I guess that's what it was. And I mean has there have you noticed kind of any sort of mobilization in the community now that this is happened because it seems like the first ones of these at least always take everybody by surprise people are not used to still not really used to school board meanings being, shall I say interesting, certainly important but like not a thing that you have to really be concerned about for the most part and that's that's changing have you seen the community kind of start to adapt to that. Yeah, you know since so you know I put some content out on my, you know, local Twitter and and and got some traction there things to sort of your retweet I think but but then the biggest thing was that kind of going back to what had happened at my daughter's school that progress that got worse if you will the following day the Wednesday of last week, some kids showed up in an actual Confederate stars and bars flag, which is, yeah, that's nuts. Yes, Confederate state. New Mexico. You know, I'm messy in New Mexico, which is right down the road was in was the capital of the Confederate territory but yeah, but it wasn't a state at that point.

It was not a state. Correct. Yeah. And I'm not aware of with their battles in New Mexico. I know we had some in like further south Texas than you would think but I was. Yeah, there's a couple there was one famously up north called the Battle of Glorietta. Yeah, and then there was one here where I live wasn't a battle it was a bunch of Confederates got stranded and super drunk and then couldn't cross the desert fast enough so they got stranded up in the mountains at a place called Baylor Canyon and the they get to the top and like the north was just sitting there like waiting for them and was like, Well, you're captured now.

We'll see that's clearly that's some history worth celebrating right there. Oh yeah, 100%. Yeah, yeah. I think that the biggest like one of the scariest but biggest things is like, and this goes towards the this is a slight tangent but like the social studies revision, for instance, in the state of New Mexico. There are two paragraphs in our history book about the Gaston purchase. Like, I live in the chunk that is the Gaston purchase and like the Gaston purchase is at like James Gaston was a notorious racist who left the south and took all of his railroad money went to California and Mexico lobbying hard using his influence and money to try to create a slave state in Baja, Mexico, like that's what he was trying to do. And like that part of the that part of the context of why the Gaston purchase even happened is like totally left out of history books and it's like if anywhere it should be taught.

It should be taught in the place that is called the Gaston purchase when it comes to the United States. So yeah, anyway, just a little tangent there why it's important to have context and history. So sorry, going back to my daughter's school and these kids wearing the stupid stars and bars. So that I so like I went and spoke to the assistant principal and was like, so I understand that your answer to this was to ban all flags. Yeah, he was like, and he was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, because they're causing a disruption to education. And I was like, hmm, yeah, but I, you know, I feel like you're giving the false equivalency to like, you know, gender and pride acknowledgement to versus actually flag. Yeah, it's it's I mean, it's this constant. This has happened in a couple of places, including a town in Oregon where it's like, this is sort of the the centrist and kind of the right wing solution to this is just that like, well, if kids can't wear racist hate flags, then gay kids can't wear a flag that says that their existence is valid. You know, because those are the same thing.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's frustrating. It is frustrating. So that was not my favorite thing. And so then the culmination of that this week was that my daughter's social studies teacher who had allowed the kids in her class to make little paper flags after the real flags were banned was fired. Jesus Christ. And because it's a personnel matter, no one is willing to tell me more. I've called the president of the school school board who'd actually in all fairness, he doesn't actually probably have that much sway over these kinds of things. I would imagine that happened at a level, a level that was not his but yeah.

Yeah, but I mean but I but I have anyway so I did call him I also called the school and got very little information from them, obviously. So, you know, who knows, but again, like that's how it was perceived from the kids in her class. Yeah. And that's so like what we know happened is that we know that after the flags got banned she let kids make flags out of paper and hang them up and by Friday she was gone. So, like not a great response. No, not not not ideal. Not ideal. Yeah.

So anyway, that's kind of where we left that but I guess maybe what maybe what I should say to get back to your original question which is to say like have we seen a mobilization that yeah like, so I learned at the newspaper the reporter is who that teacher, like a couple weeks ago, had actually been in the newspaper because she had also like she she spearheaded this like response like a pork like a girl who wore a hijab to school had been bullied. And like when news got around in the school like the like the majority of the student body and this teacher like went up and above out of their way to make her feel welcome and like walk her to her class and like it got kind of viral on local tick tock. So, like, this teacher got quoted in the newspaper so I like called the call the report I tweeted the newspaper and I was like, it's like you guys know that the teacher who was in like startlet in your article is fired for allowing kids to voice their thoughts on about these flags things right yeah and they were like no we didn't know and I was like, you should probably find more. So, you know, I don't know where we're going to be at now the next reading for the gender inclusion policy is the 14th of December so we've got a couple weeks before that next school board meeting. I think that on my end like there's going to be some local organizing to try to get some better more inclusive voices to be a part of things.

I don't, you know, I don't know what the interim will hold, because it's like, you know, it's the holidays and there's a lot going on and Kyle written house and build back better I mean there's like, you know, there's always a million things happening. So it'll, you know, there will have to be some drum beating to like get people to show up to that but on the other hand, I think with some of the momentum we have, and I think people will show up in mass for the 14th in support at least. It's kind of a community that in general we have shown up and shown out to support, you know, these kinds of issues in the past, but I do think that up until now, people felt for pretty asleep about it. Yeah, I mean, and hopefully you do see the kind of response you're expecting. Can you walk me through sort of how the kind of attempts like you talked about getting the local media aware of what had happened to that teacher. What are people like what is the actual organizing effort look like on the ground like how are you trying how are you and others trying to get the word out so that, you know, there's a response to this. Yeah, so I think that the first thing is is that there was, there was a problem with the way that the school board handled public comment that first time in an attempt to help limit their own. Sort of exposure to some of the toxic stuff they knew was coming their way. They had, they had instituted a limit on public comment. You had to show up by a certain time and fill out these little pieces of paper saying that you were there to comment about something. And if you weren't there then you couldn't sign up.

And the problem was was that all these like old white male retirees who are sitting around listening to Alex Jones all day, they had nothing better to do than show up to this meeting at three o'clock in the afternoon. Whereas a bunch of, for instance, teachers, students, parents, they were busy because they were in school or like picking their kids up from school. So I think one of the things that we're going to try to do is get public comment ahead of time and we're going to try to like bombard the not bombard us. That's a violent word, but we're going to try to like just make sure that voices from the community that hadn't been represented are represented and sent to the school board ahead of time. I think we're going to try to go and save physical space ahead of time. For those of us that can right for those of us that can we'll go and we'll try to save physical space and we did learn that even if they keep that policy for the little forms we can we can actually give that time we can fill out other people's names right so we're going to try to like make sure that we have better voices. That was one of the things if you listen to the recording of what I said at that meeting. I asked the school board president if it's possible for me to yield my time, because it had literally been like a dozen white men out there spouting nonsense, and then I get up there and I'm like, yeah, hey, we've heard from enough white men can we have like a member of the trans community, or one of the women of color who are here to talk about this, but couldn't get here in time and their legal team was like oh no like you didn't sign up in time or whatever so. But it turns out we could have put their names down ahead of time so we're going to try to organize that thing so that people can show up and save you know physical space.

And then I think the other thing too is to try to involve some other local elected officials from the county and city level, because again we have these really amazing progressive candidates who have come from all walks of life including the trans and members of the LGBTQ community. So, having them come and speak in their official capacity. I think we'll carry a lot of weight for the both for the school board but also just for the public to hear from those voices. Yeah. So these like have you have you gotten any kind of research on where the people showing up are coming from are these like folks within your community or these people coming from kind of outlying areas to swarm these meetings like is there is there kind of an active research contingent. It's part of what I do. It's part of part of my job with progress now in New Mexico my, my title is energy policy director I usually spend most of my day talking about oil and gas stuff. However, I've been doing this job long enough that before I became that person I was actively researching and tracking a lot of white supremacy activity in the in the state especially along the border some of the border malicious stuff a couple years back. Yeah. And in that regard, I knew and I knew a number of these folks, a lot of them do live in the city. But so our county is considered rural by the census, even though we're a city of 100,000 people but we're a big county so there's there's 200,000 people here. So, so there was, you know, it's hard to tell how many people may or may not have lived in, for instance, the public school district. But what I can tell you like hands down is that of those dozen folks that spoke before I did, like, there's no way that at least, I mean, maybe one or

two of them had kids that could have gone through the Las Cruces public school system, but like the majority of them far and away like either aren't from here at all. Or, you know, they've lived here for a long time, but they are, they are not active parents or even grandparents of kids that live and will go to school in this in this district they're just, they're just agitated right wingers. Yeah. And it's how does this all tie in because New Mexico's had, I think it's kind of been on the back burner in terms of like national violence, but y'all have had some really significant dust ups not just with, you know, the border militias for years there have been violent acts and even murders as the result of that stuff going on but like during last year's the protestor for George Floyd's murder y'all had some really ugly, shall we say dueling rallies were like right wingers shot at people, and some really some nasty situations I'm wondering are like those folks, like are you seeing that kind of organization being brought into the the school board meeting or is this just kind of bubbling up as part of the same stew. It is, yeah, it there it's loosely affiliated for sure. And the crossover, the crossover is hard to tell. I mean, what am I trying to say, there's there is crossover, it's hard to tell how on purpose it is or sort of the fact that this is like a small population community states right. What I what I mean by that is that some of the some of the physical white supremacists who showed up last year at one of our BLM support, you know, George Floyd related peaceful protests, who they showed up at a parking lot across the

you know, armed long guns, tack vests, all that kind of stuff, who that those were the folks that when I, when I went and filmed them and and put them on blast to to try and sort of out them as best we possibly could or at least identify them. They came back and doxxed me as and then went after a number of my colleagues up north in Albuquerque. That was about a week before there was the there was a shooting of a anti fascist protester in Albuquerque. And and it was during sort of all of that stuff that I was like trying to talk about all this out loud and got tied into a few more other anti fascist voices in the state so since then we've all been kind of working together. And we found each other on Twitter, thankfully. And so, so what it seems like is is that like the folks that showed up to the school board meeting were what I'll call usual suspects like politically active old, you know, right wingers that being said, in that room, there were a number of people that I've identified as showing up to anti vax rallies, a number of the Trump train rallies that happened last year before the election. And at least one person who I recognized as being, I have never seen carry a firearm but like has been at rallies where people were carrying firearms and that kind of thing in response to these, you know, in response to like peaceful protests. So there is crossover for sure. Where do you see this going like because you've been kind of paying attention to this for a while, not just the school board stuff but just kind of the general problem of right wing organizing in your area like where do you where do you see this heading within kind of the context of New Mexico.

Well, I mean, so we haven't really talked about this but like, so while while here in Las Cruces, we did really well during the November election in terms of our school board to be reelected. Yeah, a really good progressive school board president and two new good progressive candidates including like I said the first, you know, queer openly queer person. So that's amazing. However, up in Albuquerque, they lost seats to some of these far right wing candidates. So the Albuquerque school board is not not looking as good politically. So I mean, so on the like, I guess what I'd say is on the soft end what I expect is more continued pressure in sort of the the way these things are supposed to happen which is to say like continued presence of the right wing folks at meetings yelling taking up space, slowing things down, running for office when the time comes, you know those kinds of things I see. I guess I wouldn't be surprised though if, if I if there were further escalation of things in a, you know, in the way we've seen other places in terms of some sort of, you know, an armed response or somebody showing up to, you know, New York open carry state and so people can walk around with guns all the time. And, and, you know, I mean that's the thing too is like while I didn't see anybody with an open carried firearm at the school board meeting, there were guys wearing like, you know, vortex optics brand hats, blue, blue line shirts, a guy with like a Remington shirt, you know, and, and like I don't begrudge anybody from gun culture, I'm, you know, I'm a lefty with a gun so it's like, I get gun culture but like, when you show up in those things and then those spaces with that kind Yeah, you're making a point. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're you're you're not. Yeah, I get that. Have you, is there some kind of have you seen like any kind of budding left wing armed response like is there do you guys have like an organized group of folks who have been showing

up when there are armed protests in the area? I mean, I always have my gear with me. I mean, I've got, I've got a ceramic plate. I've got my, you know, rifle and pistol. I, I am a member of a number of different groups. I've been a member of the SRA. I've, I've worked with some of the armed groups up in Albuquerque. So what would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you hey, let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt and I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring and mind blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads? In our podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down.

It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.

I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. There hasn't been a ton, but I've got what I'll call a loose affiliation with a number of folks that I would trust to be armed if need be. Thankfully, that hasn't happened yet. Thankfully, the one big, big protest that happened here in Las Cruces that I was sort of nervous about, and I did have my gear for, remained peaceful, and we took over some streets and blocked traffic for a couple hours. And there was never any violent response from anybody other than maybe like one car at one point trying to push through and car got banged on. And that was about it.

But so to answer your question, like, yes, there are those of us that are left wing and armed, and there are those of us that have been able to show out if we needed to. Thankfully, we haven't had to at this point. Yeah. Well, all right, I think that's everything I had to ask. Is there anything else you wanted to get to, to make sure to talk about today? Well, I just, I mean, I would be, I would be not doing the best of my job if I didn't mention the fact that like one of the, so one of the talking points of the right wing here at our school board is that New Mexico's education system is is 51st in the country. And I, the, the, my assumption is that that has to do with DC's public schools being counted. Jesus. So it's not a great, yeah, that's not a great record. Yeah, it's not, it's not a great record. And, and I, and I, you know, as a parent of a kid who's in the public schools, I, you know, I cannot ignore that, right? That's, so that's a legitimate talking point. But the, but the thing that they want to bring it up out is that, you know, they're, you know, it's because we're trying to be gender inclusive, it's because we're trying to like, you know, teach kids about like actual history that

happened, whatever. And the reality is it's because our education system is unlike most places funded by the oil and gas industry and not by like our communities. And so like, you know, 18 months ago, oil prices crashed, right. Yep. The state of New Mexico had to have an emergency special session for our legislature to figure out how we were going to like, fund things like cops and schools and like, whatever. And then like now, you know, oil and gas is like gangbusters and where, you know, record prices and like the state of Mexico has this like surplus budget. But the thing is, is that like that, that extra money that we're going to get this time doesn't make up for the like cyclical bad, you know, way that we fund our schools. So I just want to like tie in that like, like all of these things tie in together right like we can't talk about education in New Mexico without talking about the oil and gas funding. And so anyway, so like, because that's my, you know, that's part of the reason why I was going to go talk about this stuff at the, on my professional level is that, like, I get to talk about education as an energy expert in the state of New Mexico, because energy and energy education are so intertwined here. And like, when you have literal like, Koch brothers founded and, and like monetarily supplied think tanks in the state of New Mexico, who are pushing out this kind of propaganda and encouraging people so that there's a group called the Rio Grande Foundation, and another one called power the future. Yeah, power the future of New Mexico, like both of those organizations are like tied to the Koch brothers, because the Koch brothers are tied to oil, and they're pushing these right wing talking points.

And it's all part and parcel of just like, you know, clouding the information space, that's what they want to do they want to have, they want to have the new cycle dominated with things like CRT and gender inclusion studies to, you know, to tie up things like school boards, so that, so that the electorate is busy talking about these things. Well, meanwhile, they're just raking in money handover fist, you know, stealing our oil. So anyway, I just, that's so important to me to like, make those connections. Especially in this state and it's something that a lot of people don't consider and don't think about. And it's just really important to me that people understand that so yeah. All right, well, thank you so much, Lucas. This has been, I'm not going to say fun, but certainly enlightening and I think valuable, a good, a good dispatch from, you know, a fight that we continue to see is important here and that everybody should be paying attention to both wherever it happens, including in Las Cruces and around the country, because they ain't given up. And they can't be ignored. Yeah, and that's, you know, and you've mentioned this many times over the years, but like, that's the kind of things like we have to show up. Yeah, we can't just let them have these spaces. And, and I think that this this past school board meeting was a great example of why.

And, and I'm really counting on a lot of my, my friends and close, you know, the folks that I have come to love and support in this community to show up and show out for that because that's, we've been there right we've like I said, you know, and if you look at the Las Cruces politics over the years on the news cycle, like you'll see stories about our, you know, progressive city council and passing of living wage and, you know, banning plastic bags, you know, like all these like, you know, we've tried, we've tried to be that kind of little community. And, and, and yet, you know, these folks are still there and they're still loud. And if we give them the space, they will take those spaces over. So, yeah, yeah, absolutely. So thanks for having me on. Let me talk about this. Yeah, really means a lot. Thank you for stepping up because it is this is the thing that's a giant pain in the butt is that everybody's got a lot going on life is complicated. There's all sorts of shit to do in the old world. But every time these fascists and their their affiliates decide they're going to try to take over something, you know, as busy as people are as exhausting as it is, you do have to like, they can't just be allowed to do it. Like, that's how they win is they have they have unlimited energy for this shit. And if they're not, like the thing that causes them to lose energy is actually being outnumbered and shown to be like, like, like being kind of pushed out by communities. You can do it. It takes it, but it requires people showing up. Yes, that's exactly right. So I appreciate the signal boost means a lot to me. And this is there any local orgs that people can support.

So big shout out to a group called cafe here in Las Cruces that works on all kinds of border issues, immigrant rights, but also like workers rights and immigrant, like student rights, migrant student rights. They've been very active in this for a long time. And so yeah, definitely shout out cafe here in here in, I mean, all of New Mexico, but specifically it's other New Mexico, they're doing a lot of work and then dreams and action, which is part of a national network for dreamers. But again, here in New Mexico, I've done a lot of good work. Okay. Yeah, thank you very much, Lucas. All right. And that is going to do it for us here at it could happen here. Until next time, go hang out at a school board meeting. Go take up space from fascists. Yeah, go take up space from fascists in general. With great conversations. Make sure to listen to the black effect presents podcast on I heart radio, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Adoption of teens from foster care is a topic not enough people know about and we're here to change that I'm April didn't really host of the new podcast navigating adoption presented by adopt us kids.

Each episode brings you compelling real life adoption stories told by the families that live them with commentary from experts. Visit adopt us kids.org slash podcast or subscribe to navigating adoption presented by adopt us kids brought to you by the US Department of Health and Human Services Administration for Children and Families and the Council. I call the union hall. I said it's a matter of life and death. I think these people are planning to kill Dr. King on April 4, 1968. Dr. Martin Luther King was shot and killed in Memphis, a petty criminal named James Earl Ray was arrested. He pled guilty to the crime and spent the rest of his life in prison case closed. Right. James Earl Ray was a pawn for the official story. The authorities would parade. Oh, we found a gun that James Earl Ray bought in Birmingham that killed Dr. King, except it wasn't the gun that killed Dr. King. One of the problems that came out when I got the ray case was that some of the evidence as far as I was concerned did not match the circumstances. This is the MLK tapes. The first episodes are available now. Listen on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to it could happen here. The podcast about, you know, the problems and stuff that are happening and how to maybe make them better. And speaking of the problems that are happening and how to make them better, Garrison Davis. Hi. Hello. Hey, Chris. That's so that's a weird segue.

I wanted to introduce this video telling you guys that I just watched a movie that you should watch because it's pretty rad. And it's ties into all the things we talk about. It's called the Pizza Gate Massacre. Oh, no. It is a micro budget under $100,000 film that looks great. They did a really good job with the budget they had about an Alex Jones employee type person and a mass shooter who go looking for to try to solve the pizza gate thing. Oh, boy. It is a an actually very nuanced and I think deeply knowledgeable commentary on specifically like the Texan conspiracy scene like it's okay. The film they're Alex Jones character who's played by a woman in this they film in the original studio that he recorded and back at that's funny. Like the filmmaker who did this gets like the culture in the area and kind of the relationship between the people who get radicalized and do shit and the people who just profit from it. It's a very good. It's it is by the way a grind house horror movie like whatever you're expecting it's not that it is like it is an incredibly gory grind house movie. But it's it's pretty it's pretty fun. What does that have to do with Cup 26. Nothing at all but it has a lot to do with it could happen here because okay. All right.

We'll watch it anyway. This is a good happen here a show about how things are kind of falling apart and how we can maybe slow that down or prepare for a certain future. The first episode about cops right. I mean I mean we are we are planning an episode on Washington State Patrol. But no this is a different a different kind of cop about just as useful. So in the first five episodes of the daily show or season two which if you haven't listened to you should definitely listen to those as they kind of act as our shows manifest of sorts. But nevertheless the first time episodes of the scripted daily show put forth like a more like realistic non-sugar coated look at what climate change will bring if we continue on our current course. But not just looking at the obvious environmental and extreme weather effects but also like the socio political effects. So when I was helping Robert out with the research for those episodes some of the best indicators of like the mainstream conception of the scientific environmental and political status of climate change was at the United Nations past IPCC reports which is the intergovernmental panel on climate change and the cop conferences. So during the first few weeks of this past November of November 2021 the 26th annual cop conference took place in Glasgow. And yeah the name of the conference is kind of a decent indication on how useful these things actually are.

But a cop stands for a conference of the parties and for almost three decades they've been like the main international stage for countries and companies to discuss climate related information and like their alleged like goals. So yeah they're a good indicator not unlike sometimes they do present actual good science and like decent predictions but they're often just like a good indication of what kind of the mainstream people think about what climate change is. And you know what the people in power how they are viewing it and how urgent they think it's worth addressing versus how much money they want to spend on it. So the most notable cop in recent memory was the 2015 one in Paris cop 21. This is kind of where the Paris climate accords were born. The commitment was to aim for 1.5 degrees of warming and it was signed on by nearly all major countries of course the US signed on left then re signed on. But anyway under the Paris agreement countries committed to bring forth like a national plans figuring out how they would reduce their emissions. But they would do it like by themselves and they would be called NDCs or nationally determined contributions. And the idea was for every five years countries would gather up and present their current plans on the national stage.

This was what cop 26 was going to be. Now it was delayed a year because of the pandemic. But cop 26 was the time for countries to present their NDCs on for like their updated versions on their plans to reduce emissions. So most of the NDCs got submitted before the conference and kind of led the discussion of the conference by like mid October. I think about 70% of the countries or states that signed on to the Paris agreement submitted their submitted their version of the NDCs and those countries about 140 of them are responsible for the majority of global emissions. So that was what kind of led up to to cop 26 from happening. And the overarching aim of the conference according to cop 26 president when I try to pronounce this name. Alak Sharma. He said that the idea for the conference was to like keep alive the 2015 Paris agreements target to keep global temperatures from rising above 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre industrial levels. So that was like the goal of the conference going into it was to kind of keep this idea of the Paris climate Accords of still being achievable.

And that's and that's not what happened at cop 20. So now it's important to kind of point out that the commitments laid out in the Paris Accords don't come close to limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees as it is set in the Accord. It's like like they they acknowledge that which is what the kind of NDCs are for. But even still those are just not those are those are just non binding agreements. But anyway so the Accord the Accords and the the restrictions and goals and well there's no restrictions as just goals. The goals in them don't don't come close to limiting to 1.5 degrees. And we've already most likely shot way past the point of that being in any way achievable. But you know we can still limit things from being mega bad like four degrees but we are we are already on a certain path.

So in in asking nations to set tougher targets by next year for cutting climate warming emissions. The new agreement at Glasgow acknowledged that the commitments that were in place are inadequate. And if rigorously followed the new national pledges so include the stuff including the Paris Accords and the new Glasgow Pact and all of the individual like NDCs. If all of those are followed the world is now on track for 2.1 to 2.4 degrees Celsius of warming by the end of the century. And that is the lower estimate as we'll see later on higher estimates were also shown at at the at the Glasgow conference. So we have the idea was to hopefully keep it to 1.5 and already we're pushing that back by almost a whole a whole degree if we're going to like 2.4. So that that's that's like the main the one of the main impacts there is like just totally kissing 1.5 goodbye like know what no one even is going to view that as a possibility at this point. So I don't know how many people were still looking at that as a really a goal apparently some of the planners have caught 26 apparently were.

But I mean I know for us we've we've been aware of that and then I'm not sure how you know really what mainstream liberals were thinking before this. But hopefully at the very least maybe cop 26 made them realize that maybe it's there's a this kind of it's maybe worse than what you were thinking. But there are other things did happen at Glasgow that are that are worth looking into. So the the main quote unquote achievements of the Glasgow deal besides like revisiting the emissions cutting plants to try to keep stuff down which of course we're you know not not not met in shot way past. But we also had the first ever inclusion of a commitment to limit coal use now the way phrasing is going to work here is going to be really interesting. Because the reason why this deal got passed is because some very specific shifts in their phrasing around coal use. The other thing that caught that caught 26 tried to do was increase financial help for so called developing countries and provide funds and assistance for like climate disasters. So like when when like extreme weather events happen have a set of funds set aside to help countries in these disasters.

Now those are that is a good idea. But as we'll see later the way cop 26 actually did it is not actually doing it. It's like they're they're pushing they're they're postponing this kind of goal. But they're just making it a prospect. But back to coal. So the Glasgow climate pact was the first ever climate deal to explicitly plan to reduce coal. Which was a one of the worst like fossil fuels for for greenhouse gases. And and coal really can be phased out. Coal can be phased out by electric power really easily. It is the easiest one. It's way easier to phase out coal than it is natural gas or other or sorry. What's the the the other main one. There's three. There's a coal natural gas.

What's what's the last one. Regular gas. I guess so. Yeah. Yeah. Petroleum based stuff. Yeah. Yeah. So the coal is because coal is mostly used for heat. Electrically generated heat is way is way easier than all than those other two. So coal coal really should be phased out as soon as possible. But the commitments to phase out coal that was introduced in earlier negotiations led to some fighting specifically among India and China who were in strong opposition to the phrasing and the actual constraints of the deal. And a lot of this is like the argument that like if these countries are still developing it's not fair to them to remove this resource when other developed nations had it. So that's that's that's we see that argument a lot around like climate change stuff is like oh you you're just going to stop other countries from developing because you you you got to get to this certain point of being a successful like wealthy nation.

And like with all this like industrial development on the back of fossil fuels and stuff. But now you're going to remove that opportunity for other countries. Now there is there is a lot of stuff around like degrowth frameworks that address this issue and specifically try to try to get fossil fuel savings like a decrease in emissions and be able to use some of those gains to assist countries in getting stuff set up to a decent standard of living. But you know that that is going to be addressed on a whole nother scale around like capitalism and and how countries intervene in other countries that that's kind of like a bigger political question. But anyway, India and China did not like that did not like the cold deal. So in the end the countries did agree to phase down coal rather than phase out coal. So that is the phrase that they ended up using is phase down. The people weren't super happy about this. The Cup 26 president, Alak Sharma said that he was deeply sorry for how these events unfolded and like focus on coal is good.

It's responsible for about 40% of annual CO2 emissions. But also like just focusing on coal leaves a really big lack of discussion on oil and gas. Like there's those are also like very bad and arguably we should be focusing on those a lot like those are those are the main ones. We should get we should get rid of coal. Yes. But if we just focus on that, then there's a lot of other stuff going on. So that is that is a lot of coal talk. You know who also uses coal. Our sponsors. Yeah, we're entirely sponsored by Joe Manchin.

Big friend of the pod. Thank you. Thank you for always having our back Joe. Anyway, here's some ads. And we are back talking about Cup 26 and there is there is a decent there stuff stuff did happen. So I know it is going to be more of a science see a numbers episode but it is worth actually figuring out what what happened there. Because everyone just kind of had the perception like, oh, Cup 26 was a failure because yeah, it was. But it's it is good to know what actually is going on at things like this. Because if we're going to get some kind of, you know, liberal change, this is where it's going to happen. So it is good to keep an eye on what these types of people are thinking.

So we left off on talking about how there are plans to face down coal and there was like a general lack of focus on oil and gas. And it is interesting if you so there was a group of activists led by this. I think I think it's an NGO called a global witness assessed the participant list published by the UN at the start of the meeting. And they found that there was 503 people with links to fossil fuel interests who were like accredited members of the climate summit. And so and they were like delegates. So Cup 26 delegates associated with fossil fuels outnumbered national delegate numbers for every other country. So there were more people representing fossil fuel interests than there were representing any individual country at Cup 26. So you're thinking, huh, maybe I wonder why this stuff's not going too good.

Oh, it's because it's being run mostly by fossil fuel companies. Yep. That's, that's, huh, that's an interesting, interesting little thing there. Yeah, so the other the other kind of notable thing about Cup 26 is it led to a quote unquote breakthrough in the rules for government led carbon markets. So this is the thing that the neoliberals are really excited about is this idea of carbon markets because it's a way to make more money kind of off of removing carbon and just to create a lot of red tape and bureaucracy. Around this idea of lowering emissions. So I guess one of the ways to describe carbon markets, if you're kind of unfamiliar with this idea is that countries that do not meet their emission reduction targets in their national climate pledges are like penalized for this. So countries that countries that don't meet their emission targets or or want to just pursue like less, less expansive emission cuts.

What what what this deal set out to do is that instead of actually lowering emissions, they can purchase like emissions reduction tokens and credits from other nations that have cut their emissions more than the amount that they pledged. So like by you know moving to low carbon energy and various stuff. So the turn of phrase that people were using to discuss this to how you can like purchase purchase credits to represent emissions that you didn't cut but wanted to is that this can potentially unlock trillions of dollars for protecting forests, expanding renewable energy and other projects to combat climate change. So the idea here is that the money used to purchase these credits is going to get put into other things that will help fight climate change. But all of this is non binding and speculative and it just furthers this whole carbon market concept, which I'm not thrilled about. Yeah, we should we should do like a full episode of carbon markets, but the thing so I this is you know this is the thing I studied academically in college and is incredibly important for everyone to understand that carbon markets are fake and do not work at all. Ever.

Yeah, one has ever gotten one to work. No one's ever gotten the national one to work and no one's ever gotten an international one to work. Implementation of carbon markets like China had a big thing they're going to implement a carbon market. It was fake. It didn't work. Their carbon emissions still increase. Very, very important like how fluffy carbon markets can be. So you get carbon credits if you're a business like Tesla that makes no emission electronic vehicles. And Tesla for a lot of its earlier history made a significant chunk of its profits selling carbon credits to polluting industries. And basically saying you guys keep polluting we got your back like the fact that we're putting electric cars out under the street means you guys can keep emitting at the same level like that's that's like literally how how kind of the business can work.

It's it's not the best way to fix the problem. Yeah, so there's a lot of a lot of talk was around carbon markets because that's of course with the neoliberal establishment neoliberal establishment is going to focus on because it still is within their kind of worldview. How do we monetize the rot? Yeah, how do we how do we make money off of the world ending? Which I guess we're going to see a lot more of that in the next in the next few decades. The other the other thing that they decided on is next year there's going to there's going to be again so there's they decided to procrastinate which is just a general theme of COP conferences. I mean it's what we've been doing with it's what everyone's been doing. Yeah, climate change.

Yeah, forever. So yeah, the main thing they do is decide to procrastinate. So next year there's going to be a UN committee to report on progress towards delivering $100 billion per year in a promised climate funding. This was after rich nations failed to deliver on the 2020 deadline for said funds. And then financing is going to be discussed again in 2024 and 2026 those conferences. But this this deal left a lot of more vulnerable nations who were going to rely on this promised funding kind of just they just left them with nothing. So the whole idea was that like, yeah, we need this funding to help people in these disasters and different like losses and damages and to help, you know, start start making more renewable energy technology in lieu of doing tons of tons of coal mining. And that's where this money was going to get used for.

And it's not happening. So this this promise was initially made at a UN conference on climate change in 1992. And we're still we're still pushing it back year by year. So this pledge is older than I am. Yeah, it sure is. It was another pledge made in 2009 to provide $100 billion to emerging economies was supposed to be made in 2020. That also was missed. And it was it was designed to help nations adapt to climate effects and make the transition to clean energy.

And the COP26 president said that around 500 billion will be mobilized by 2025. So cool. Thanks for saying those numbers, which mean nothing. It's fun. It's fun how you can just talk and say things and it doesn't actually matter. It's it's one of the things that's so frustrating about this is trying to get a handle on like how how a lot of these solutions are supposed to work. So like one of the articles if you're trying to actually if you're not just taking our word for it, which you never should and trying to research like carbon credits and carbon markets and like how they might work or might help. Like one of the articles you're going to come across is an article in nature.org called making carbon markets work for faster climate action.

And this is very much obvious from 2021. So it's pretty, it's pretty recent and it's not at all a climate denial piece. It's just kind of laying out a case for how carbon markets could be very effective at reducing emissions. But you have to grapple the whole time you're looking at this with the fact that like they haven't that they have a global global emissions. Or still shoot and they provide a number of like options for how this could work. And it's one of those things where I'm not going to say it's impossible. I'm certainly not an expert on this and you can read through the article. If you want, but it's it's certainly certainly the thing you can say right now is that carbon markets have not led to a global decrease in emissions because we have not had emissions decrease other than that little dip we had when a coven.

Did it's it's sweet little dance. Yeah, that one month where we could actually see the sky again. Yeah, that was pretty rad. But yeah, there's there's I mean you can check that article out for kind of the pro carbon markets case. It all seems I mean one of the things that's frustrating to me about it is it all it's all like. Yeah, here's how it might work if you know everybody got on board the Paris climate agreement and also all of this worked ideally. But there's there just doesn't seem to be a lot of. I just don't see any evidence that like they've shown that this is actually likely to be helpful.

It's more just like yeah this this could this could work if we do these other things. Which is frustrating that's like all all of the kind of shit that you get at at COP26 where it's like yeah I guess theoretically if you were to do that or if that were to work the way you're saying or if that were to work with the assumption that like all these other factors don't grow over this period of time then then this might help but we also know what's happened with emissions and global attempts to reduce climate change, which is not to say that like. Emissions in the United States like there have been there's been a lot that's been done to curb emissions from the United States now the thing that's often left out of like the discussion of. These different things and how they impacted our emissions is like well a lot of those emissions got pushed off to other countries that are now making the things that we were making for. Yes, that's the big thing when people argue against degrowth and they're like no you can you can still keep growing your economy. Well or lowering emissions like yeah one country can but we still want the stuff so we're just moving it to other countries to produce. So like we're not actually lowering it on a global level you can lower it on like an individual country level but not totally globally because we still want to consume the thing.

This one of the single most frustrating things about talking to people about climate change is that. Okay, you know if you talk to the sort of new local market people right if you talk about literally anything else right the only thing they ever talk about is how the entire world is interconnected how the entire economy is connected how we're more interconnected than ever. And then the moment you start talking about climate change. They go oh well it's all the individual country individual country individual country the economy is not connected at all it's all about the individual policy yeah country it's like no it's not the it's about like. All of the like the emissions are for indirect investment driven right it's about it's about it's about where it's about where investment money is going and. You cannot and you know this is this is why cop in some ways like this is why it doesn't work and even though it's the only family that could work right you have to have an international response has to be coordinated it has to be. Working across national lines because again that's how the economic system works. But it doesn't because a states individual states can't and will not ever solve this and then be.

Cop is like okay so here's here's your international framework but also we're just going to have you know the actual the the actual international framework is going to be just. Essentially hair it up by a bunch of fossil fuel companies. And so it's just you know it's it's the worst of both worlds. I mean it's in it you can see there's there's some kind of acknowledgement at the fact that this is an international problem in in like the basic idea of carbon markets which includes the idea that like. You can companies that admit admit less and don't use up their carbon budget can like sell carbon credits and you can do this across international lines and like. If we hold cut if we hold companies to different like emissions standards internationally based on things like the Paris climate agreement and that will cause the carbon credit system to work better. There's that acknowledgement that it is an international problem but again I just don't. I don't see I don't see evidence that it's working and they they like none of the evidence that I've read makes it seem like there's a very good case that this is going to at the very least that this is going to provide the kind of emissions reductions that are necessary to

or stall the worst case scenarios that are coming. And if we're going to be again to be completely intellectually honest here we can talk about degrowth all day long. I have a similar problem with that that I do to a lot of these the different kind of targets that the United States of America introduced stuff like carbon markets where it's like I don't I don't see that solving the problem either it's like a theoretical it's it's yeah if we were to get people to if we've gotten people on board with degrowth we've already fundamentally shifted the very nature of global society and also the way in which Americans and people in other Western nations like conceive of economics at a fundamental level. And one thing to say that like yeah if people accepted that and and got on board with a lifestyle that is not based on this this kind of capitalist notion of endless growth of ever increasing extraction from the world in order to create value. We could we could actually stop emitting at the kind of levels that are going to lead to these horrible consequences. The question is like, I don't see. I don't see you can I think you can argue that degrowth is more realistic in that yes, that would absolutely work as opposed to carbon credits and other things like well theoretically it might work if they do all this other stuff. Yeah, it does. It does revolve to it. It does revolve on the cultural notion of America and the West completely changing. It's a big it's a big ask, you know. Yeah, I mean like there is there is smaller steps like totally like reorganizing how cities work so we do not use cars like like like redoing a public transportation like sector in you know making like solar panels and renewable energy are required part of like city infrastructure right there's a lot of ways to push us towards that thing but there's not one thing we can do right because it is in large parts a cultural change stuff stuff will help with

emissions like if we if we redesign cities around public transportation and make it so stuff is not as far apart and yeah that's going to help lower emissions if we if we require all these other types of renewable energy projects to be built into buildings and added on to our current cities and yeah that is going to help lower emissions but you know there's not one one big step that we can all do at the same time. And I think that that's I don't know it I have two minds about it one part of me says, that's absolutely the most intelligent way to go about it is focusing on things like reducing the use of like like like really all ending car culture in cities. Yeah, because it's not even a reduction thing it has to be like that that has to die. But we're a lot closer to that than ending the idea of like capitalism. Yes, yes, because they're a number one because there are capitalist very capitalist countries that have that do not have a car culture that like stopped that and that actually like had one at one point and then reworked there. So that's that's, and that would yeah that is a significant that's probably go that would probably lead to larger emissions reductions than any kind of carbon credit system could ever lead to. I also. And so yeah I think that that's on an objective level yeah that's it's smart to focus on stuff like that where you're all you are arguing for reducing growth. But you're also arguing for like hey, your life will be more pleasant if you live in a city where you can walk everywhere and you're not at risk of getting run down by, you know, two ton trucks anytime you cross the street and like, you're not dealing

with smog and pollution and horrible like hour and a half long communists on these crowded nightmare highways. But it's also, it's still incrementalist you know, we are we are talking here we are kind of like walking through here. We're talking about the best incremental solutions and what is the most realistic of those. And I think that's fine I think that's kind of where we have to be because that is what's most likely to actually happen to make the problem better. But it is, we have to acknowledge it is incremental like we're not, we're not solving the, it would be very arrogant to say like here's how we solve this problem once and for all, you know, I just want to. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you hey, let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and fascism. I'm Ben Bullock and I'm Alex French in our newest show. We take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century.

We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring and mind blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads? From I Heart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the I Heart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you find your favorite shows.

I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the I Heart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.

What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the I Heart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.

How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. There are closing expectations on COP26 and the other kind of things happening in the periphery. Here's ads. Okay, we are back and we're talking about kind of what happened towards the end of COP26. So we already kind of discussed how the deal was made, what was in the deal, what things were talked about. Now we're kind of going to talk about, you know, the other kind of closing thoughts around it. In the lead up to COP26, the United States Special Presidential Climate Envoy, John Kerry, he's supposed to be like our climate guy. He also said the goal of the summit was to hope that we can limit stuff to 1.5 degrees.

He called this the last best hope for the world to get its act together. But by the time COP26 came to the end, his language and attitude had kind of changed. After two weeks of debate and negotiation, his final remarks reflected kind of the points we've been talking about. And said like the government energy policies currently in place around the world are projected to result in about 2.7 degrees Celsius of warming above pre-industrial levels. And government pledges to cut climate emissions with limit warming to 2.4 if they are met. So that's, again, we're just launching way past this like mythical fantasy of 1.5 degrees. And the other scary things is that we're getting a lot closer to large scale feedback loops. Feedback loops are things like once we have reached a certain degree of warming, environmental effects will be triggered that will cascade and produce like exponential growth in warming.

It's not purely theoretical, but it is mostly stuff that we still probably can't prevent. And we really need to get on it like ASAP because once these things start happening, they are very hard to reverse. One of the biggest ones that are already being affected is photosynthesis by plants on land and how that is decreasing its ability to suck up carbon. About 30% of our annual carbon emissions are removed by the air by photosynthesis and the rest of which are dissolved in the ocean causing ocean acidification or that you just hang around in the atmosphere which causes a bigger thermal blanket. So photosynthesis has like a thermal maximum beyond which carbon can only be taken so much of it in and then the process which by plants give off carbon and water actually increases. And we are already at that point in a lot of places and we are at that we achieve the warming required to get to that point a few times throughout the past decade. So land-based carbon uptake is projected to decline by nearly 50% as early as 2040 and these effects have not been included in any of the published pathways leading to lower degrees of warming. And again this isn't just speculative like the biggest example of this that we can like point to is like the Amazon rainforest how that is now a net emitter because it is no longer sucking up enough carbon to offset the amount of carbon and actually shoots out.

So we need to stop deforestation and keep planting more trees essentially because that sucks and also just as a general kind of indicator of the cascading effects that are happening. And we are still on the path for kind of large scale disasters in a lot of places around the world. The it's around 19% of the Earth's land area is in pretty pretty dire risk on our current emission pathway. The Marshall Islands, the Maldives, Vietnam, Southeast Asia, Middle East, parts of North Africa and Central America overall around one third of the land humans occupied are predicted to either drown by sea level rise or become or become too hot for human life just by the end of this century alone. So that will cause, you know, migration, panics and wars and all like a whole bunch of bad things that we can we can limit that like that is something that we need to limit now. And if we don't it's still it's still happening. So these are the other kind of things talked about at the end. That was kind of cop 26 as a whole. The one last thing I want to mention is just how evil Facebook is. So kind of kind of an aside, but Facebook's Vice President of Global Affairs talked and about Facebook's efforts to combat climate misinformation as the Glasgow summit began. But as this was happening, conservative media outlets like Newsmax or we're running ads on Facebook calling global warming a hoax, gaining hundreds of thousands of views, stuff like you know, can of someone's a daily wire, we're spreading climate misinformation. But you know, as as Facebook is bragging about its ability to to combat misinformation around climate change, the UK based think tank influence map, which identified

misleading Facebook ads from several media outlets around cop 26 also found that fossil fuel companies and lobbying groups spent half a million dollars on political and social issue Facebook ads during the summit, resulting in over 22 million impressions, including content that promoted environmental effects under what we would call like greenwashing, stuff like, you know, the American Petroleum Institute, putting up putting an ad out over like a natural landscape as it like touts its efforts to tackle climate change. So all all of that kind of stuff. So I just think it's really dumb, because Facebook brags about its ability to combat climate misinformation, as it's running ads, saying climate changes the hoax and then doing general like greenwashing is more common, but still it's frustrating. And yeah, just as a note, like we talked about this in the Facebook episodes of bastards that dropped recently, but like the number one spreader right now of climate disinformation on Facebook is Breitbart, which a lot of the Facebook papers have gone on to like the extreme lengths Facebook executives went to keep Breitbart as one of their like trusted news partners and continue putting their stuff out to a huge audience because it goes very viral it was good for engagement on the platform. And that's the decision Facebook's like whatever they say. This is like when we when we're talking about carbon credits and we're talking about like the different proposed solutions. I'll do a bit of waffling because I don't want to come across as too certain about what the right way to go forward is. When it comes to how Facebook has handled climate disinformation, it's very black and white. They enabled it for direct profit. And they talked about it. And people within the company were like, Hey, we're deliberately enabling climate change misinformation in order to make more money.

It's a it's a it's a very easy case to make. Yeah, so that wraps up my my report back on COP 26. I know a lot of a lot of stuff was like, there's a lot of headlines like before the somebody even ended before the deal was even finalized. I was like COP 26 is a failure, which is like, yes. But I think I think it is worth actually relearning what happens at these things. Because I think we have this idea that they're like some like mythic secret gathering of people to discuss plans. And it's like, no, like you can actually like see everything they're talking about. Like it's all out in the open. Like you can actually see what what the plans are. It doesn't need to be all shrouded in. It doesn't need to be like shrouded in mystery. So I just wanted to give people like a rundown on what the actual people in power, how they're discussing climate change and what their expectations are. And how, you know, expectations have, you know, the past five years have risen by basically a degree, right? Because like in 2015, we're like, we can do 1.5. And now we're like, we can do 2.5. Yeah. So that is what we've done in five years. That's what's happened. And I think that's what justifies the kind of blanket pessimism about anything coming from COP26 about anything being suggested by like a state actor or an international organization, which is that like, we've all watched the last 20 years. Like they've said a lot of great stuff about what could work. It's like that nature article about like, okay, well, like you've got a bunch of math here arguing about how it might work, but we've got the last 20 years of policies to say, but it probably won't.

Right. But it's almost certainly not going to work. Right. So we can say like, yeah, theoretically, this might be helpful, but like realistically, nothing, everything you guys have argued about in the same way has been a miserable failure pretty much. Well, that wraps it up for us. You can follow the show on Twitter and apparently Instagram at happen here pod and coolzone media. We got a new coolzone media show dropping soon. Make a corp. That's pretty exciting. Yeah, check it out. It's about how we love Amazon and you should pay the money. I don't think that's what it's about. But anyway, um, yeah, so buy some carbon offsets from Amazon. And with that, and with that, we're closing the show. Listen to waiting on reparations of I heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. The art world, it is essentially a money laundering business. The best fakes are still hanging on people's walls. You know, they don't even know or suspect that they're fakes. I'm Alec Baldwin. And this is a podcast about deception, greed and forgery in the art world.

You knew the painting was fake. Listen to art fraud starting February 1st on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to it could happen here, a show about how things are falling apart, or at least generally a show about how things are falling apart and how to, you know, maybe, maybe not fall apart that much. But we have a we have a little bit of a different episode for you today. A friend of a friend of mine reached out to me recently in the wake of a pair of episodes we did from behind the bastards on sexual abuse within the Boy Scouts of America, which was if you're not aware an endemic problem with more than 100,000 victims having come forward in the last year alone. And this is a case that kind of ties into that. It's it's the case of a young man who committed murder and a young man who was also a victim of a terrible series of crimes. So I wanted to kind of shine a little bit of light on the case of Heath Stocks today. And to help me do that is Mr. Michael Kaiser. Michael, welcome to the show. Good afternoon. Thanks for having me.

Michael, would you like to introduce kind of your affiliation with this case before we go over the broad strokes of it? Sure. Again, my name is Michael Kaiser. I'm a criminal defense attorney with the Lassner and Cassinelli firm in Little Rock, Arkansas. This case started in the 90s and I was I'm 32. So I was not practicing then I came into this case in the last two years after Heath has already been sentenced to three life sentences. And I assisted him in filing a petition for a commutation asking for the governor of Arkansas to reduce those sentences to a term of years and giving him a chance at parole while he is still alive. And and can we let's go over kind of what happened in this case, the basics, because this is this is a really sad story. And it's one of those things where there's there's not a lot of I think easy answers. But yeah, let's talk about sort of the broad strokes of what happened and we can drill into what what you're trying to achieve here. So the broad strokes are back in 1997. When Heath was a young man, just 20 years old, he was arrested and charged with killing his entire immediate family, both his mother, father, and his younger sister. He was quickly identified as a primary suspect, questioned, confessed, arrested, charged and within, I believe, six months had pleaded guilty to all three capital murders and received a sense of life without parole for each each one of those for a total of three life sentences.

Shortly after he was convicted, it came to light that his longtime Boy Scout scout master, Jack Walls had been molesting Heath since he was around age nine or 10. That it was a serial sort of abuse that he that Heath was not the only one that it was particularly brutal and that his abuse didn't just involve, you know, sexual acts. It was kind of a long term. I hate to use the term brainwashing, but a lot of people have about what he did to those boys. Heath is not the only life that was ruined. Heath's family is not the only family's lives who were ruined, but Heath is unfortunately the most extreme case where he ultimately committed a crime against his family. We'll get into the circumstances in a second. I just wanted to add a little bit of clarification. The scout master, we're looking at between 100 and 150 victims kind of conservatively based on what I've been reading. Yes. And it's some of, I mean, so this guy, some of it's the stuff that you heard in a lot of these other cases. Some of it is very unique to this guy, but he would basically, he would have kids over camping on his land. He would take them shooting. He worked for an ammunition company. He would molest them. He would also like purchase prostitutes for them.

It was this, I mean, a lot of really some of the worst abuse that I've read about in connection to any of these, these Boy Scout sexual abuse cases. It's pretty harrowing stuff when you read the stories of other kids who were kind of in the same position that Heath was. Yeah, unfortunately, you're correct. It's, you know, every time you think this can't get worse or this case is so extreme that you find some other element that's more offensive, more appalling, more victims, more, more families ruined down the line even today, 30, 40 years, 50 years later. Yeah, so how does the, the, because I mean, one of the things about this is, this is a pretty, the initial crime here is pretty horrific. And I think it's, it's one of those things where it is hard to have a lot of sympathy for Heath until you kind of learn about what this guy, like his, his role in the crime, because it was not just a case of, you know, a kid committing murder. It was a case of a kid being very deliberately pushed into committing murder and potentially I think there's the allegations being made or that he was, he directly helped with it as well. Yes. So, you know, at first glance, yeah, it looks, it looks really bad for Heath. But over the years, what we have learned is that what really happened is that Heath had been serially abused sexually, physically, emotionally and otherwise by Jack for a period of 10 plus years.

His mother discovers the abuse and discusses it with her, her pastor, another religious counselor. Heath informs Jack that, you know, his mother is aware and Jack instructs Heath to do as he's been taught and to kill the problem. Jack was never convicted with anything associated with the death of the stock's family. However, his first set of life sentences for the many assaults that he was convicted of, when they were reversed, it was because the judge in that, in that sentencing hearing said, you know, the death of the stock's family is also on your hands. And because he hadn't been formally convicted of that, he actually had his original life sentences reversed. At resentencing, he got essentially the same sentence, multiple life sentences and additional years. But yes, there is a connection. It wasn't known at the time, or at least it wasn't publicized. And if it had been, I think the results of Heath's case would be very different.

I don't think you and I would be speaking right now. Yeah, and it's I mean, obviously, like this is this is this is a thoroughly horrible situation. And when somebody commits three murders, I think even people who are very critical of the criminal justice system should agree that like something needs to be done. But I it just seems so unfair to lock this kid up for his entire life without kind of acting as if this was just a thing he did on his own rather than kind of the result of a pretty horrific. I mean, one of the most one of the most horrific patterns of abuse and exploitation of a child that I can imagine. And I don't know. I don't know what would actually like help other than getting him into a situation where he's not spending the rest of his life in a prison cell. Like, I don't know what the long term for him looks like in terms of rebuilding this guy's potential to have a life. But it certainly starts with him not spending the rest of that life in a jail cell. The problem we've encountered with Heath's case is the parole board and many just even just people that encounter the case wonder why would he attack and kill, you know, his immediate family rather than his abuser.

And in the 25 plus years or in the 25 years or so since this happened, I mean, juvenile that our understanding of the juvenile brain neuropsychology in general has come leaps and bounds. And so we know that a serially abused child has brain damage from really about the time that that starts happening. And so in Heath's crazy world, and we do have this in our clemency application, we've had abuse specialists evaluate Heath and see how he, you know, his actions conform to our current understanding within the crazy world that he lived in. He actually was making, dare I say, the reasonable decision. So Jack had demonstrated numerous times over the years he has physical sexual and even control over Heath's life. He can ended at any time he explicitly and implicitly threatens the boys all the time. He's got weapons everywhere. He's a Vietnam veteran.

He brings them out to his property shows them how to shoot shows them what he will do to those who, you know, go against him. So within Heath's world, he actually made a somewhat reasonable decision. The bigger threat was Jack. He can't kill Jack, so he has to do the thing to appease Jack to avoid the more severe abuse. That's oversimplifying it. But that's something that I don't think we would have been able to conceptualize back in the 90s. You add the element of there's it's male on male and we're talking about a very small rural community in Central Arkansas. And that element cannot be overlooked at all as well.

That was a huge thing that Jack was counting on to keep these boys silent. He explicitly told them if you tell what happened to you, they're going to think that you are homosexual and a liar. So there's just there's there's just so many horrible things in this case. Jack had decades of experience doing this. And unfortunately, because of his position in the community, the son of a prominent judge, the longtime scout master, the community's man of the year, multiple times. He had access to dozens and dozens of boys, in fact, entire generations of these of these boys in Leno County. Heath's case is just one of many. Unfortunately, it's the most extreme case and it's kind of test the bounds of our mercy.

But the kid that discovered Jack, while he's a hero, ultimately he killed himself and he's not the only one. So unfortunately, the stocks family are not the only people who lost their lives and not the only people whose lives just like he's were completely destroyed by Jack Walls. Yeah, and this is this is an important thing to understand, because when we're talking about kind of the the lingering impacts of childhood sexual abuse, you can take a wide variety of forms. And when we like, but it but it is important to understand that the damage it can do goes so much further beyond like the physical damage done by the abuse. Like these are your your brain is still forming and growing when you're that young. And Heath, this is one manifestation of kind of what can happen at the more extreme and admittedly as as the result of like this is why it's such a heinous crime to abuse a child in this way. And it's just, I don't know, like you're right, it is it it tests the limit of people's capacity for forgiveness seems like the wrong word, but like clemency. You know, this again, this is a pretty heinous crime. But at the same time, I can't bring myself to think that what he endured leading up to this shouldn't have an impact on what happens to him afterwards.

Right, like it does. It does reduce his his complicity in this. And I just feel it feels so wrong to say that like, well, he should spend the rest of his life behind bars, like that's just not. I can't imagine anything could help. Like I can't imagine that could help in any way, just writing this this person off forever. I don't know, it just is it's it's fucked. What are the next steps for y'all for your for the defense team. So at this point, we've already filed a petition with the Arkansas governor requesting a commutation. That's not a pardon. That's not something saying say that Heath is innocent. We're asking the governor to modify his sentences to a term of years, 40 years in each case to be served concurrently. So in effect, one single sentence of 40 years. Another 15. Yeah.

Well, in Arkansas, you're actually at the time he was convicted, he'd be pro eligible at 70%. So that's 28 years. That's not a guarantee of parole. That is just what it means parole eligibility. So that's what we've asked for. We think his institutional record speaks for itself. And if and when he is a candidate for parole, he hopefully will make parole. He's he's he's done everything within his power to do so. If this fails, it's right now we in Arkansas. It first goes to the parole board who makes a non binding recommendation to the governor. They have recommended that the governor deny it, which is unfortunate. But again, it's not binding on the governor now has a believe until February or March of 2022 to issue his decision. He has not yet. We have requested a sit down with the governor. I don't know if we'll actually sit down with Governor Asa Hutchinson. We will sit down with his criminal justice coordinator.

We're thankful and lucky to have the support of all of the remaining victims, family members. So both sides of Heath's family, you know, we have we have extensive support. It wasn't they they a lot of them had to work to get to this point. A lot of them had to understand the true impact of the abuse. But at this point, we have extensive support from both sides of his family. As far as we know, there are no objections to his commutation application from from victims, family members, the only ones that there have been are from the sentencing judge or from the sentencing court. It's actually not the same judge and the sentencing or the prosecutor from that from that county. Again, a different person, but they they felt the need to object. Should this fail, we will seek additional post conviction remedies.

In Arkansas, we have something called a petition for writ of Erochorm nobis. You can file it. You have to ask the Supreme Court. Hey, is it OK if I file a petition back in the trial court asking them to consider something that if we had known back in 1997 and 98 would have affected the outcome of the litigation. In this case, we would point to the we've had Heath evaluated and will point to that neuro psychological evaluation as as new evidence. We couldn't fully make a connection at the time between his abuse and and the offense to answer that question. Why he he killed his family rather than his abuser. We now can. And so that's what we're going to allege is that is that new evidence, whether the court will will find that it is remains to be seen when Heath tried this on his own about five years ago.

The court denied it. He alleged the new evidence was the fact of the long term sexual abuse of him by Jack Walls and the court in an opinion that really does not shows shows the lack of understanding of long term juvenile sexual abuse found that. Well, no, you personally were aware of all of that in your own mind because it had happened to you. So that was not new evidence. And I mean, we know that the average male who makes this sort of disclosure, it occurs deep into adulthood. So yeah, it's just at every level of the system, even today, we're still feeling the effects of kind of that old school mentality about about this. And it's unfortunate. We could talk about kind of the the carceral state and this idea that like penalty is the way to respond to any kind of crime.

But even if you believe that even if you believe that like you have to punish people with incarceration when they commit crimes, he's done 25 years. That's no one is discussing the possibility of Heath not being punished for the murder, you know, because it's he has been not just with time behind bars, but with the fact that his family's gone. The idea that the state could do anything that's worse to him than the scout master did, to be honest, is kind of absurd in my head. But where is there anything that like, I don't know, I'm trying to determine like what can be done to help in this situation. Is there any way people can actually help outside of like you and the team that's that's working to try and sit down with the governor? Yeah, I mean, public support is is wonderful. The more people that are pointing out the problems in Heath's case and with his sentences and that are reaching out to the governor, the better we think our chances are. I apologize, I don't have the email address on me, but the governor has several publicly accessible accounts, as does his criminal justice coordinator, even just getting on Facebook and bringing it up. There's a Facebook account managed by one of Heath's friends in Florida called at hope for heat stocks.

It's all there's also a website. I think it's hope for heat stocks.info. It's probably the most extensive trove of resources. In this case, it has almost all original documents. It's where I still go to access things when I need them, even though, you know, I am his attorney. So there's a lot out there. There's a lot of ways to support the cause, even just telling other people about it. We do have a documentary in the works. I actually don't think it has a producer at this point, but we're hopeful to have something out in early 2022 to make Keith to make Jack to make this case more of a household name. The hopes that, you know, if there's more support out there, more pressure on the governor, it'll increase the odds that he'll do the right thing here. Yeah, I mean, this shouldn't be a political issue. This shouldn't be a left or a right thing. Like everyone should be able to see this is the result of abuse and that should have an impact on what our society actually does to this kid in the wake of the crime.

Perhaps it's like foolish to hope for some sort of rationality in 2021 as regards a case like this. But I would hope that we could be rational about this and everyone agree. Yes, this kid deserves something more than what he's gotten. I don't know. It's a bleak one, though. That's putting it lightly. New York recently passed a law that kind of acknowledged kind of where you're at with it for victims of domestic or sexual abuse who then committed crimes that weren't necessarily during the course of that specific abuse. And it allowed people like Heath to apply for resentencing if they met certain statutory qualifications for things that mitigated their crime, didn't justify it, but that didn't come out originally. Unfortunately, in Arkansas, we don't have a similar process. The only thing we have available is this clemency commutation process. And unfortunately, as you said, it should be a political, but it's not. It's explicitly political.

The parole board are all appointees by our governor. The governor is an elected official. There's a reason we filed it in the last year of his last term in Arkansas. He is term limited. So we're trying to get him at a point where he's as free from the politics to do what he actually thinks is correct, but to think that politics will be removed is, I mean, it never is. No, this is this is the United States in the twenty twenties, you know, politics is is a factor here. And there's a deeply divisive case in the state and especially in Lono County. Well, it's hard. I can imagine it being hard to talk with people about just because, again, the nature of the crime is is horrific. And so if you talk about like, well, we we think this guy should have another chance at life and you're like, well, but he killed three people. He killed a sister. And yes, that is the case. But that's not the only thing going down here. And you just have to I think if you're if you're at all, even if you're not coming at this from kind of politically where I am in regarding, you know, the carceral state, you have to acknowledge that like this does not erase heaths crimes,

but heaths crimes were also the result of not just the Scoutmasters abuse, but of a number of failures on a wide level in our society that allowed that abuse to occur. And so I don't know, I feel like there's a lot of reasons why it behooves us to to give this kind of another chance. I don't know. That doesn't make it easier to convince anyone else. But yeah. Well, how would this case play out if it happened today versus in 1997, even in a more rural part of Arkansas? I think our understanding of several of the issues here is so has come so far that my hope is he would have received a term of years rather than being charged with capital murder. They originally were seeking the death penalty and he made a deal for multiple life sentences, both as someone under 21 and as a victim of long term sexual abuse. I would like to think that if this happened today, even in that county, what we're asking for is something close to what would what would happen. I would hope. Yeah, I would hope so that that's why again, we didn't ask for a pardon. We didn't ask let him out today.

We said, let him earn it. Let him still feel the weight of of what he has done, but give him that light at the end of the tunnel because, you know, there is no one in the Arkansas Department of Correction. Even with the there's just not a victim like him there. And there's not someone who could be an advocate for victims like him were he to be released. So, yeah. Well, all right, Michael, is there anything else you wanted to get into with this or any other ways people might be able to help? Check out the website again. Yeah, post on social media. The one thing I think we didn't focus on here is Heath himself. Heath is a deeply spiritual individual. He's someone who lives with this on his conscious almost every moment of the day.

This is not not someone who, you know, feels he's skated by by avoiding the death penalty. This is someone who has had to learn about trauma mostly on his own because with those life sentences, he is ineligible for so many of the programs of the scant programs and resources that we have in the Department of Correction because they don't give it to people who don't have parole dates. So he's had to do a lot of this on his own. He's come a remarkable way. He's still someone that needs probably extensive treatment and therapy to deal with his own trauma as well as to deal with the effects of what he did on himself. But he's a remarkable individual. He's a great self advocate. I wish you could speak with him as well. He's someone I'm proud to represent, not just that I do because I get paid. This is why I got into the practice of law is this type of case. He is not innocent, but he is not.

He should not be bearing the full weight of what occurred while, you know, Jack is serving a life sentence. I think he should have one or two or three more for his role in this. I mean, he's youth and he's brain damaged because of that sexual abuse should have and now should be considered. And we just hope the governor will. Yeah. Yeah, hopefully so. And again, if you want to learn more, there's heathstocks.info. There's a lot of good about Jack Walls on there as well. And you can there's a link to make a donation to Heath's defense. All right. Well, Michael, thank you so much for coming on today. And I hope you have a good rest of your week.

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