Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 130

Episode Date: May 11, 2024

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Being Dad, The Dress, 30 to 50 Feral Hogs. If you knew what any of those were, you spend too much time online. And hey, I do too. 16th Minute of Fame is a new weekly podcast hosted by me, Jamie Loftus. And every week we take a closer look at an internet character of the day. Who are they? What made them so notorious? How did the internet or the algorithm choose them? And what does a person do when they're suddenly confronted with more attention than the human psyche can handle? Listen to 16th Minute of Fame on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

As important as choosing the right destination when traveling is choosing the right travel partner. Gene! Gene Fodor! Gene! Who's going on? But be careful because the worst trips result when two partners have two different agendas. The CIA really need your help, Gene.

Freeze, Americano. Huh? Oh, Gene, run! Listen to Fodor's Guide to Espionage on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. John Stewart is back in the host chair at The Daily Show, which means he's also back in our ears on The Daily Show Ears Edition podcast.

Join late night legend, John Stewart, and the best news team for today's biggest headlines, exclusive extended interviews, and more. Now this is a second term we can all get behind. 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 going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. This is It Could Happen Here. I'm Garrison Davis. The past few years, we have regularly covered the rise of legislation that restricts access

to public space and medical care for trans people in the United States, as well as attempts by politicians, lobbying groups, and media personalities to drum up transphobia in hopes of quote-unquote eliminating transgenderism from our society and culture. The quest to eliminate transgenderism includes harassment campaigns targeted against specific individuals, boycotting companies that feature trans people in their marketing, and banning queer books, media, and art from libraries across the country. The conservative right has decided

that the boogeyman of gender ideology and the woke mind virus is one of the most pressing threats to Western civilization. This brand of transphobic militancy opposes any form of visible queerness, viewing it as an ideology that acts as a viral cultural contagion.

That's why they spend so much time trying to ban drag shows and art featuring queer people. They know they're losing the cultural battle, and that really scares them. As trans people have been trying to weather this huge wave of organized transphobia, trans and queer artists continue to push forward with multiple hit films coming out this year from trans directors and trans actors and actresses are taking more and more high-profile roles. Last episode I interviewed comedian Ella Yermann and filmmaker Vera Drew on the process of creating independent queer media. This episode will focus on why we are seeing this new wave of queer art, why mere representation

isn't enough, and attempts to go beyond the online media ecosystem. Ellie Ehrman is the host of Late Stage Live, a queer Gen Z public access late night show on Brooklyn Public Access and YouTube. The format of late night comedy is almost wholly dominated by old white cis straight men. Late Stage Live attempts to deconstruct the genre in which it aligns itself with, utilizing sketches, correspondence segments, and original reporting, but for a younger, queerer, more politically radical audience. The show is not just made for Gen Z queers, it's also made by an entire team

of young queer and trans people, which gives it a very unique feel compared to literally all of its competition. The show itself feels queer and highlights the massive gap between simple queer representation and queer art, or in this case, queer late night comedy. There's a palpable distinction between hiring a gay person to work on Seth Meyers versus having a late night show that is built on queerness. On that note, here's a clip from my interview

with Ellie Ehrman, host of Late Stage Live. There's like a huge difference between like the token queer writer and like a show that centers queerness and transness. And I'm really proud of that in terms of our show. I think that's one of its main drives is how queer focused it is. Something we talk about in every episode, in every piece. Reed loves to hammer this home is sort of the question of why us.

It's the first question we ask when anyone pitches any segment or piece or story of like, the question is like, what's the game? What's the perspective? And then why is it us delivering this perspective? Because anyone can write a piece of political analysis. Lots of people do. But like, what about this story is uniquely coming from us, uniquely coming from the host Ella from the writer's room? And I think we found it most strongly in the last two pieces, the Lips of Ticac piece, and then the episode before that we did a segment on the Alliance Defending Freedom, which is a spooky, evil, conservative cabal that trains lawyers to overturn SCOTUS cases. And I think those both felt really focused in on sort of us as young queer people.

And I think the Gen Z part is also really relevant for us. A lot of Late Night is hosted by old men. And as much as I love Jon Stewart, he is an old man, an old cis white man, an old cis, as far as I know, heterosexual white man. Who already left the job 10 years ago? And he already left the job 10 years ago and he already left it right and he's back now. But like, what does that say about anything? Yeah. Yeah. And everyone's talking about politics is like old white guys and

everyone in Congress is old white guys or George Santos. And there's like this sense of like the world is ending, as you probably know, on this show that builds itself as like amidst the collapse or whatever your tagline is. But like Gen Z is so uniquely affected by political goings on in a way that I suppose this is true of every youngest generation that like all of the decisions are impacting us most, but it feels more urgent these days because the world is ending with climate change and with the encroaching global fascism and with the decay of late stage capitalism that it feels so important now more than ever to center those experiences and look at how the world and the news and politics impacts these groups of people. The way we achieve that is,

yeah, we don't just have one token queer writer. Our room is all queer, largely trans. About half of our writers' room is non-white. And as we grow, that number will either stay the same or get bigger, certainly not smaller. Yeah, at the end of the day, I think the fact that the room is Yeah, at the end of the day, I think the fact that the room is completely queer and predominantly trans and non-white and all young, it just sort of happens. And the fact that it started that way and has been built from the ground up that way, I think gives us a huge edge. Even if The Daily Show fired all of their writers and hired only trans people, I think it would be a hard pivot to get the show to suddenly be doing what we're doing,

just because the whole structure is built differently. In Vera Drew's new movie, The People's Joker, an autobiographical transgender coming-of-age parody set in the Batman universe, the shallowness of queer representation is actually one of the core themes of the film. In the movie, the main character is not satisfied by simply being a token diversity hire for a late night comedy show, and instead hijacks the airwaves and charts her own path. This plotline, like many others, mirrors the director's own life, and the movie itself is a perfect example of how creating a piece of art inherently built on a multimedia experience of queerness

will produce a wildly different result than simply having a gay person in the writer's room. Here's a clip from my interview with Vera Drew. It's not even that I feel like queer representation is too straight or cis. It's just not even an accurate reflection of queer reality. Every gay couple I know is nothing like a straight couple. I mean, some of them are. But those gay couples always break up. They're just reenacting cycles and thousands and thousands of years of patriarchal bullshit on each other when they could just be having hot gay sacks with each other. And that to

me is the biggest tragedy of representation. And it is also why I think people lash out at us so much. On one level, I understand the idea of this is getting shoved down our throats, you know, because like, it kind of is. That's coming from a place that I sort of agree with, because they're getting sold this like propaganda that it's like, they're just like us, you know, and like, to me, it's like my experience is so specific to me. And so specific to, you know, like the experience of a trans woman. There are things about my life that are similar to that of a trans woman, there are things about my life that

are similar to that of a cis woman, but certainly not identical. So I never want to see art that is that. I'm really over trans people being used in a way that they're either... I mean, it doesn't really happen anymore where they're treated like freaks, but it's the tragedy porn or pedestalizing us, I guess. I hate that my identity is inherently political, just because this is who I am. It's not a pleasant situation to deal with. So I think with Joker, yeah, people with Joker, I really wanted to talk about representation in a way that also just

wasn't annoying because I also... It's not even that I'm tired of having this conversation. It's just sad that people like us keep having to have this kind of conversation because I've also heard it now within our own community that I've heard other trans filmmakers say, we should only be telling happy stories. We should only be spreading queer joy or whatever. Absolutely not. No, absolutely not. That's embarrassing. I want to spread queer panic. I want to... Not even panic, just like queer existential horror, I suppose. I don't know. Well, I mean, for me, it's like, I don't know, like, because I've gotten shit to... I haven't

gotten a lot. And now, honestly, that I've started mentioning it in the press, people haven't said it to me as much as good. But I was getting a little bit of the like, how, oh, making the Joker a murderous trans woman. Oh, please. First of all, like, villains are queer coded. It's the history of film. Oh, almost all of the bad men villains are queer coded. Exactly. Completely. And like, why can't, so why can't... A, why can't we do it not in a subtext way? Why can't we just do it directly?

And then also, I live in a country that villainizes trans people. So why can't I process that very thing by making myself a queer villain in a movie that I made. And I don't know. I think what I hate about the queer joy thing and the... People's Joker is a very funny movie. It's very colorful. It's very campy, but it's also devastating. It's got a very serious message to it that I think it brings up a lot of emotion in people when they watch it, both cis people and trans people. And I think that speaks to something else just about representation. I told this story that was so specific to my experience and trans people are identifying with it and relating

to it. But so are cis people. Yes, we should be telling stories that portray the trans experience honestly or the queer experience honestly and specifically. And if we do that, if we do that effectively, that is still art that a cis person can consume because cis people also go through transition. Cis people also have to die and be reborn sometimes. And I think just everybody comes of age, it's just trans people and queer people have to do it more visibly and publicly and externally a lot of the times. And I don't know, for me, that was another reason too of just being like, no, we're going to

get this out into theaters and make this theatrical experience before anything else. It was always made to be viewed, I think, with a crowd of people. Yeah, yeah. Kind of like a midnight movie vibe, I think with like a crowd of people like, yeah, yeah, kind of like a midnight movie vibe, I guess. When you think about it, Jesus and the Joker do have a lot in common in terms of getting baptized, getting born again. It's, it's really very similar characters. Absolutely.

And I mean, that's why, uh, cause I think this was something while Bri and I were writing the movie that, that she was constantly every step of the way, like, what are you doing? Like, why are you bringing this much like Gnostic Christianity to this? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Uh, like I remember, you know, there's this like French song that's in the movie called I'll Be Your Joker that's was composed and performed by Emily Sloan. And the lyrics to that performed by Emily Sloan. The lyrics to that are a poem that I wrote. It's not anywhere in the movie,

it's just in that song, but it's the people's joker prophecy. I actually wrote it in this Gnostic Bible structure, and then we translated it to French and recorded it as a song. And that was really coming from that place of... I love... I mean, I'm obsessed with Jesus. And I just always have been. I was raised Catholic. And I'm not Christian, but I have a lot of Jesus stuff around my house. I'm just obsessed with the iconography and really love the story itself as a myth and the mythic understanding of death and rebirth and also just thinking of it as another example of the hero's journey. And I don't know. Somebody asked me at a Q&A, basically,

how do you have the balls to... Because by the end of The People's Joker, you basically find out it's like... It is like Dune. There's a weird Messiah story happening. And that partially just comes from... I think, for me, queerness is inherently like a very spiritual experience. It just has been for me. And I think a lot of trans people actually deal with Messiah complexes. I think it's something that I feel safe saying I have. And I also really wanted to unpack that just idea of the like Joseph Campbell, white savior, hero's journey thing. It Could Happen Here will return after these messages.

We now return to It Could Happen Here. During my interview with Vera Drew, she mentioned something about not just wanting to throw the movie up on YouTube when the film was dealing with legal issues resulting in uncertainty around how the film would be released. And that got me thinking about queer people's relationship to platforms like YouTube as the sort of default way of sharing video art. A big reason why is simply because the platform is so accessible without many of the hurdles

and roadblocks of more traditional distribution models. But sometimes I worry that it's become so default that our reliance on YouTube has actually become a self-limiting factor that overdetermines the scope of our own art. Let's return to my interview with Vera Drew to continue this topic. Queer people, specifically trans people,

have kind of been stuck with a lot of their art or video art just becoming this thing that you throw up on YouTube. We've done a good job in making a community there, I suppose, but at certain points, it feels very insular. We've created this little tiny bubble that everything is just trapped inside of. Because obviously we can't rely on big studios to make our own stuff or distribute our own stuff. That's not happening either.

But I feel like we're kind of kicking ourselves in the foot. If our only artistic output is like. Techno music and YouTube video essays, both of which can be good, both of which can be art. But there's a whole other world out there that I feel like we have closed ourselves off from. And so I'm kind of interested in like on that choice to like not put it on YouTube and actually like ride this thing out as like a movie. Yeah, I mean, that is it's it's it's such a relief to hear you talk about it in that way because yeah, I never want to just be dismissive of online creators.

Sure. Like I worked in TV for 10 years as an editor, and I was very fortunate to work on a lot of really cool shit. Like I worked on... My first job was... I was an intern on the Eric Andre show, and then my job immediately after that was on Nathan for you. So I really got to work with like all these really amazing comedians, many geniuses. And in that process, like always knew I had wanted to make film. Like my earliest memories are are wanting to make films.

Like right around the time I saw Batman Forever, I was like, I want to be a director. I came up in post-production just because a lot of editors end up following... A lot of editors are really just direct, frustrated directors. So I was like, here's a place where I could learn my craft. And I've always loved experimental animation and visual effects and stuff. And also incorporate that as well into my career. And it's good. I'm so glad I had it as an incubation period for me to find my voice and my aesthetic and

learn a lot from these super talented people. But there was always this frustration that I had because when I would take stuff out to pitch or anything that was my own story, you can't really get trans art made in any mainstream space. I think that's one of the things that's most frustrating about the whole woke culture bullshit just because they act like we're some sort of woke culture bullshit just because it's like, they act like we're some sort of elite class that's favored by the media, which it's like, I can just tell you, I'm on my press week right now. The media is certainly enamored with trans people. But I don't think it's coming from a place of like, we're trying to change and put everything in, make these people in charge. It's just clickbaity

and it keeps people arguing online. So it was very hard just to even break through as a director too. I mean, I was at that... Forget pitching shows that I've written or whatever. Just trying to get episodic TV work. I just couldn't do it once I changed my pronouns. I was literally up for jobs that went away after I came out. So I just reached this point of, I think, maximum frustration and wanted to whatever I did... I don't want to say I was ready to walk away from working in the industry in 2019, but I kind of was. I was just at this point where I was like, I need to make a fucking movie or something

on my own and just put all I have into that. And that's going to be the way people will either finally take me seriously as a director or I'll at least have made a movie and then I can just be in debt and I'll have a movie I made. So to me, it was always about not necessarily like finally being taken seriously by my industry but just like kind of making this giant piece of art that is not only like a big like look what I can do, you know, style thing but but like, is also just about all of that, about the frustration of being allowed in, but only being allowed in, in these certain ways, like whether it's on like a diversity cast or like, you know, whatever. Like I was, I worked on

the show. I can't really talk about it because it's like NDA stuff. And I don't think the show will ever come out. But I was in the writer's room on a cartoon that was being rebooted. And it was one of my favorite cartoons of all time. But I had a day where I was just sitting in the writer's room and I was looking around at my coworkers and I was like, oh, wait a minute, it's all girls and I'm a girl and I'm a trans girl. We're all just being brought in to rehabilitate this problematic piece of art. And it was like this crazy moment of having also had lost jobs because of my identity

and now being in this place where it's like my identity is like this bargaining chip. So anyway, how does this connect to the online art conversation? I've always kind of had to also play in online spaces. I started a public access station with my friends a few years ago called Highland Park TV, a few years ago, it was like 10 years ago now. But that's still going on today. And it was basically just this space for us

where we could just record whatever. We'd meet up one week and come with some pretty simple sketches and shoot it on our public access set and throw it up online and 12 people would watch it and that was it. But that was cool. You build little followings and communities that way. And I had always just wanted to break out of that because I think my sensibilities are pretty me and edgy and weird. But I'm really kind of a basic bitch when it comes to the stuff I like. My taste is very

college dorm room. I have a Back to the Future tattoo. I'm very influenced by genre film. And I love David Lynch. I love experimental influenced by genre film. And I love David Lynch. I love experimental film and stuff too. But I've always really felt like I could do it. I could be just like a genre filmmaker. But when we had the controversy at TIFF, I had a lot of pressure on me to just put the movie out there. And I could never articulate to people why it was important to me to not do that and to hold out. It wasn't just financial. It really was. I mean, maybe it's ego thing. But it's also

just like I've been doing this long enough to know the movie was going to always find its audience. But there needed to be a plan in place so that I could actually put it towards having a career that I wanted my whole life. I think it's ridiculous that we live in a culture now where every artist, even the ones like me who have had a trade in an industry, that we have to really carve our own path in online spaces or on Twitter, or YouTube or whatever. It just keeps us all in cycles of poverty. I fucking hate posting to Twitter. I do it still just because it's the easiest way to get the word out. But every single time I send a tweet, I'm like, this sucks. I'm supporting

one of the worst people alive right now just by still using this site. Somebody who hates me, and people like me so much that he literally won't talk to his own child. Yeah, I really just wanted to kick the door down for myself and hopefully for some people that come after me. And I really don't want to be the type of filmmaker and the type of queer filmmaker who holds the ladder up behind them. It's not even that I have integrity. It's just that this movie is that to me. This movie is such like it's a gospel on how we need to be making art more ethically and more for ourselves and from a place of care. And yeah, that's just I want to hopefully change my little corner of the industry as

much as I can toward that. I mean, it definitely feels like we're getting more and more people are embracing this idea of independent queer cinema. And more people are deciding instead idea of independent queer cinema and more people are deciding instead of putting whatever short film they want on YouTube, try to do a festival circuit. That was one of the things that I think I really respected after what happened at TIFF. I really respected your insistence to like, no, we're going to find a distributor. We're not just going to throw it up online and call it a day. It's not just going to be like a fan film.

It's like, this is an actual, like, expressive piece that we're going to... It might mean that you won't see it for another two years. But it shows, like, a level of, like, actual artistic commitment that I found gave the project a real sense of, like, weight. Oh, thank you. The notion of this comfortable YouTube bubble we've created is perhaps why I find the public access TV side of Ella Yerman's Late Stage Live so compelling.

A lot of queer people around my age grew up with the transgender video essay as the primary form of our artistic video output. And there's a lot of good video essays out there. But at a certain point, it started to feel like the main way a young radical queer person could engage with the art form. It's gotten to feel so insular and a bit restrictive, like we're enforcing our own bubble. On top of this self-limiting aspect, I'm not even sure how much growth the format even has anymore. Recently, I've begun to see more queer artists specifically trying to make things outside the strict video essay framework. Even some of the most popular trans video essay creators have been trying to move into documentary and narrative filmmaking. I asked Ella about moving beyond the video essay bubble because although Late Stage Live

does air on YouTube as well as Brooklyn Public Access, The format is not just your average transgender video essay. We don't have any pink lighting at all. Yeah, it's definitely something I've been thinking about a lot, both like in my own personal career and and for the show. A lot of my bylines in the last few years are all YouTube based with Late Stage and Some More News. And it's frustrating that even as YouTube has seen so much growth and like celebrities

come from YouTube all the time and some of the biggest names in the world are internet stars now, there's still like the sense of illegitimacy to be doing a project on YouTube and like when I try and get published in like more legitimate journalism magazines every so often, I'm always looking at my resume and being like, I wish I had like a byline in a magazine instead of three years of writing for a YouTube show that I love so much and think is doing better works than most of these magazines, but like that I know won't get treated the same. So there's definitely an aspect to that that I think, yeah, like it's partly because YouTube is so accessible.

Anyone can post on YouTube that I understand why queer people have sort of relegated themselves to this bubble. Trans people have wrote like why we've ended up with like, you know, the trans video essay scene. Thank you, Mother Natalie. But it makes it hard to sort of break into this like final frontier of legitimacy, I think. And I think by like, yeah, like not fully committing ourselves to being a YouTube show

from the get go, we do sort of leave doors open to be considered like a more legitimate television production, which is exciting for like growth opportunities. I think the live studio audience also really pushes us out of that zone. We get a lot of accusations from people who are mean on the internet of using a laugh track. And I just want to say, and I will say it until the day I die,

it would be so much easier if we were. I could totally tell when there's gay people laughing in the background versus a laugh track. That's a very clear difference. Absolutely. It would be so easy if I was just plugging that in in post. But no, we bring in 30, 35 gays every month just to laugh at my jokes. And sometimes they don't. And you can see that too when they don't laugh at my jokes. But I they don't. And you can see that too, when they don't laugh at my jokes. But I think that is something I was really excited to do that is different from a lot of the other video essay sphere

because it also brings in aspects of live performance that I love as a standup and as a theater artist. And also, yeah, just pulls it into a slightly different genre of thing that we're making. And I think certainly in terms of growth growth and audience building and like the potential of being picked up by some larger organization, it definitely puts us in like a different, it makes us look slightly different than like a YouTube show,

even if we can all like sort of quietly acknowledge like, well, what all of our growth is happening on YouTube and Instagram. But like, as you said, like real late night is huge on YouTube now too. And there's all these other extra correlating factors of like monetization on YouTube sort of died a few years ago after the ad apocalypse or whatever. And so you have to go through crowdfunding sources like Patreon or sponsorships or X other wide. Like there's not like you can't nebula or whatever new streaming service for YouTube pops up.

Yeah. Right. You can't nebula or whatever new streaming service for YouTube pops up. Yeah. Right. You can't just rely on AdSense anymore. And that's frustrating in its own degree. But I think even beyond that, yeah, like not relegating ourselves to being a YouTube show both thematically and concretely in terms of content and form is like really exciting. And I think like even as we grow and gain a budget and are able to buy nicer cameras,

we wanna keep the aesthetics and vibe of edgy, radical public access, because it's a part of the voice of the show along with the practicalities. Yeah, having background ketamine jokes, I think, really is what sets you apart. The quote unquote VHS cleaner that sits on the desk every episode. I don't own a VHS.

We will return to It Could Happen Here after these messages. We now return to It Could Happen Here. To me, the most exciting thing about the idea of a new wave of independent trans cinema is that we'll get to see a whole bunch of trans films that otherwise would never get made by the big studios. After trans filmmaker Jane Shonbrunn's successful festival run of her small-scale feature debut titled We're All Going to the World's Fair back in 2021. Her next film, called I Saw the TV Glow, got picked up by Emma Stone's production company and A24. The film is now coming out later this month. In the case of The People's Joker, it dares to take Warner Brothers and Disney at their word that their privately owned intellectual property is in fact our

culture's version of mythology, our very own Greek gods. And so if these characters really are the cultural icons that the monopolized companies who own them claim them to be, what happens when we actually do treat them like mythology and use these characters to artistically mythologize our own lives? By skillfully sidestepping copyright law via effective legal parody, we get to have a Batman film through the lens of transgender chaos magic, which I'm afraid would simply never happen under Warner Bros. discovery as they can't even stop deleting their own finished films to get tax write-offs. A few weeks ago, I showed my I could happen here

co-host Mia Wong, the People's Joker. And afterwards, we talked about what makes it feel so special and its place within the pantheon of queer cinema. One of my dear friends, Vicky Osterweil, is writing a book called The Extended Universe about sort of copyright law and what it's done to film and specifically focusing on on Disney. And the thing that's different about the People's Joker, right, if you if you want to know why the People's Joker is, you know, why specifically you couldn't make this, it's it's partially because it's trans and it's partially because it's actually a movie. Yes.

And this is this is this is this is Vicki's argument, you know, and this is this is the hidden truth about the film industry is that movies are not designed to sell movies. No, they're designed to like copyright. No, no, it's worse than that. Like a superhero movie does not make money on the movie. Right. The movie theater is not making money on the movie. The movie theater is making money on food. The company itself, that's not where the money comes from.

The money comes from toy sales and sales of stuff afterwards. So what you're actually seeing when you're seeing a superhero movie is just an ad. And advertising for products. And this is part of what the People's Joker is that makes it different. And specifically because it is trans and because of the way that it's trans, this makes it impossible for it to be made by a corporation. And because trans people fought to make it, it gets to be an actual movie and not a fucking toy sales thing.

Yeah, because they're not going to be making a toy of mustache pedophile Batman. Yeah, right. And this is incredibly important for the genre of film, because, you know, I mean, there is a world that is not too far off where we are the last people making actual fucking films and not advertisements. Yeah. To use this sort of like only semi ironically using the sort of lofty like Marxist language is like, yeah, like we kind of also have been given the historical task of saving film from its complete annihilation by these fucking capitalist copyright ghouls. It's a pleasure to see. It's a joy to see. I was reading an interesting article recently that talked about how trans media's orientation has been very referential. It's been very

much based on experiences that trans people have as kids engaging with media, whether that's with something like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, whether that's with DC Comics. And it's because transness is so much about recontextualizing your whole life and identity, a lot of trans media has also been about this form of recontextualization, both with I think The People's Joker is a great example, also the upcoming film I Saw the TV Glow, which is very much based on like Buffy and other kind of like Monster of the Week style TV shows. It's combining all of that kind of stuff with a lot of lynching influences, both in these cases, both in the People's Joker and in I Saw the TV Glow, to create this like fever

dream of self-identity in this referential format. And that's been an interesting trend to watch in trans cinema. And I think that's something to look for when you're engaging with future trans cinema projects, seeing if those kind of things pop up. And if they don't, why is that? What else is actually happening instead? I think those are going to be some interesting ways to engage with our own DIY art in the next decade here. Because as much as everything we talk about is so depressing on this show, about how everything dealing with trans stuff is about how everyone's trying

to kill us and restrict our medical care, that does not actually stop us from becoming people who actually engage with culture in any real sense. I think despite everything that's targeted against trans people, it does not stop us from actually having a cultural output. And the thing a lot of conservatives are afraid of is our cultural output. The fact that trans people keep being actually really compelling artists and really compelling people in general makes conservatives nervous. I don't think it's impossible for conservatives to make art.

I think there is conservative art that actually can be seen as like, okay art. But they certainly are afraid at how good trans people are at making music and now making movies. When I was talking with Mia, she brought up a good point that I'll paraphrase here. Part of why we're seeing this new wave of independent trans cinema is the result of a combination of two things. One is that trans and queer artists have been and continue to be chewed up and spat out by the traditional media machine. And two, the traditional media machine itself is slowly rotting from the inside, which can be a tricky situation to navigate for a lot of queer artists. a tricky situation to navigate for a lot of queer artists, but simultaneously it also means that we're in this position where, having been spat out, we have full rein to go make our own massive, grotesque, degenerate queer art on our own, because there simply is no

artistic alternative. Trans people need to be submitting to film festivals, regardless of whether or not cis viewers and critics will understand the work. Filmmaking is one of those art forms that you can't really do all by yourself, but that doesn't need to be a limitation, that can be an asset. Gay people are good at a lot of different things, and filmmaking integrates so many different artistic areas and skills. And as we've seen, a movie made by a community of queers can

create such a unique result. When talking with Vera Drew, she mentioned that having a whole team of artists help her complete the movie is also in part what ensured that she would find a way for the film to be distributed the right way, so that it's seen up on the big screen and not just published online for free. That was another thing that really kept me from doing anything irrational with the film, posting it on Google Drive with a contribution, like a donation link or whatever. I have all these artists that just worked on this movie with me for two and a half years and like, no, we're gonna fucking do this. I said I would do this and I'm gonna do this because I can't just feed this back into the incubator and the fucking feedback loop of trans Twitter and cool underground circles

that I totally love to be a part of. But we're all trying to get more visibility outside of those things. So yeah, I always really just wanted to honor that, honor the team and make everybody feel valued and I paid as many people as I could and it was very straightforward about what I could afford and a lot of people worked in ways that they just felt compensated and that was very appreciated. I think in general, everybody on this was very underpaid. But it was such a labor of love and such a personal thing for all of us that everybody just showed up and really rallied around each other and really just kept saying yes and

to everything. And it's so cool. I don't know how I'll ever really be able to replicate. I don't think I should either just because it was quite a gargantuan task. But it was literally the best time of my life was making this movie. I think it really taught me just how to be a human being and how to love and how to finally feel connected to my queer community. Because I think the People's Joker is really... More than anything, it's really about nuance and relationships and family and politics. And it talks about nuance by really leaning into these extremes, which I think just is also inherently queer. And I don't know. That's to me is another

thing. It's just like I hope... There's a lot of trans filmmakers that are starting to pop up in the genre space. But I hope we see more of it just because we all grew up on the same movies that cis people did. So why can't we make similar art and tell our stories in the process and also do it in a way that's like not hiding in the shadows. The People's Joker is slowly ending its US theatrical run, but you can still look for tickets and showtimes at the people's joker dot com. And you can find Vera Drew online at Vera Drew 22. Late Stage Live just released their sixth episode, and I'm really excited to see how the show will grow and evolve over time. And we've actually recently hit an inflection point with the show where, like, the sort of organic haphazard growth is no longer sustainable for us.

We've been having a lot of really exciting and scary conversations behind the scenes about like, formalizing our production process and kicking our shit up a notch so that we have the potential to make this bigger and better and more polished. But it is at its core still like a production born out of community and like mutual respect. I'm Ella Yermin. You can find me on Instagram at Ella.Yermin on X.com at Ella Yermin. I think I'm on Blue Sky also, though I don't do anything there. You can find Late Stage Live as Late Stage Live on all platforms. That's Instagram, X, YouTube, TikTok. Probably also Blue Sky, but those are the big ones. And then if you're interested in finding my stand-up show, we're at T4T Comedy on Instagram and X.

Oh, and then most specifically, if you're interested in helping fund Late Stage and make us bigger and better and shinier, you can go to patreon.com slash late stage live, where we post, yeah, we have a behind the scenes photos and videos and we make a semi frequent podcast where my head writer and I talk about the news and shoot the shit and talk about the process in a lot more detail episode by episode. And we're so grateful for our current patrons and for opportunities like this. And we're excited to see where the show goes. That does it for us at It Could Happen Here. I hope you enjoyed my Transformers and G.I. Joe ad break references.

And if not, you can send any complaints to the president of Columbia University. Solidarity to everyone across the country who's been out the past few weeks. See you on the other side. Bean Dad, The Dress. 30 to 50 feral hogs. If you knew what any of those were, you spend too much time online. And hey, I do too. 16th Minute of Fame is a new weekly podcast hosted by me, Jamie Loftus, where every of Fame is a new weekly podcast hosted by me, Jamie Loftus, where every week I take a closer look at an internet character of the day. Who were they? What made them so notorious? Why did the internet choose them? And what does a person do when they're suddenly confronted with more attention than the human psyche

can handle? I'll be talking to internet historians, experts, and yes, the main characters themselves to get a fuller picture. Because I think that even outside individual experiences, a character of the day tells us something about how the internet worked at that time, and how the attention economy developed into the freaky three-headed dragon it is today. Together, we probably won't be able to properly log out, but we can take a walk down scary internet memory lane and see one day a little more clearly. Listen to 16th Minute of Fame on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your

podcasts. I am the ferryman. In the shadows of the afterlife, the ferrymen of souls guides America's most influential spirits to their eternal rest. Where are you taking me? Are you death? This road is not on any map. How much for a ticket?

All I ask for in payment is a tail. I don't know who got to Kennedy first. And the devastation those first bombs caused. I've never been to hell, but I know intimately the hymns of the damned. All 12 episodes of The Passage are available now. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey fam, I'm Simone Boyce. I'm Danielle Robay. And we're the hosts of The Bright Side, a daily podcast from Hello Sunshine that's guaranteed

to light up your day. Every weekday, we bring you conversations with the culture makers who inspire us. Like a recent episode with Hollywood royalty, Regina and Reina King, we talked about the creative power of women's relationships. I feel like, thank God for women. Like, especially when it comes to black women, the way we lean on our mothers, our grandmothers,

our sisters, our friends, we're just each other's pulse. I mean, it's molecular, you know? Listen to the bright side from Hello Sunshine on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to it could happen here, a podcast that is I don't know, I'm going to I'm going to I'm going to speak for the rest of my hosts who aren't here so they can't stop me and say this is a podcast normally opposed to brunch. I'm your host Mia Wong.

And today we are talking about something that we kind of haven't been covered. We haven't covered as much as I think we should have, which is unionization in small businesses. We've talked a lot about unionization and sort of larger things. We've talked about sort of mid-sized chains. But today we're talking about the unionization of a place called Friday. I'm in love in Portland, which it's it's if you sort of imagine the platonic ideal of what do you

think a place called Friday I'm in love is going to be like it is in fact that and with me to talk about this is soul and Janie from the Friday Workers Union. I yeah, both of you. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much. Yeah, thanks for having us. Yeah, I'm excited to talk about this. I'm partially you know, I mean, as we sort of discussed a little bit,

because I want to get into a bit later the specific dynamics of sort of small business union stuff. But first things first, I wanted to sort of talk about what actually, you know, how did you all decide to unionize? Because I think this is a bit different story than the kind of thing we usually get on this show. Absolutely. Well, I've been at this particular restaurant since 2019, and it's been something that's come up every now and then. I think we're just a very queer workplace.

We're a very leftist workplace. And we tend to have a lot of common ideals. And I feel like what makes our unionization effort unique or maybe not unique, but just different than a lot of like, we need to start a union right now kind of efforts is there wasn't a thing that caused it. We were all like me and five other people were just sitting around a table and decided, hey, we should just start a union. And so we kind of looked into what that looks like and the snowball started rolling downhill. Yeah. And this is something I think is really interesting because, you know, I mean, one

of the things you get really commonly in sort of like anti-union propaganda, you see this like I, so a lot of my family were engineers, right? And engineers do this all the time, where they're like, oh, we don't need a union. We're like, happy. We're well paid. Everything's great. And then, you know, you look at you, you look at what happens to them. And it's like, oh, well, now you have Boeing, right? It's like, well, you, you, you, you all, you all never organize. You no longer have any power and your planes are like falling from the sky. So yeah, this this is a I'm taking this taking my soapbox moment to be like you two out there, even if your job is good, at some point, it's going to not be and you should unize first before they, I don't know, like be Google and decide that don't be evil actually constrains them from making money and decide to be evil.

So get get out of them before. Couldn't agree more. Absolutely. If this is felt very, very proactive, um, I, um, I haven't been there nearly, nearly as long as some of, uh, my comrades, but, um, the general, like consensus is that like things are pretty good. So instead of letting things go bad, let's make major steps to protect what we have. Especially as you kind of notice how this small business is slowly, slowly starting to operate like not a small business.

And we had a, one of our food carts was upgraded to a brick and mortar at the beginning of this year. And pretty much in that moment that that started operating as a real restaurant, it things really clearly, I think, started setting in that like this is a bigger operation than it used to be. And they very, like the owner very much still has the intention of making it as good of a place to work

as he can, which is to be appreciated. But it's also understandable that as things start to grow, it's a lot better if it's a collaborative process in terms of making it the best place to work that it can be. And I think getting a seat at the table is something that we have to make for ourselves. But it doesn't necessarily have to be a threat or retaliation. This is something I think is kind of important with unionizing, especially places that are

kind of, you know, like, or, you know, we're even where the sort of the boss is legitimately trying to, like, do the right thing, which like is kind of true of like my work, right? Like, you know, like the people above my bosses are kind of a fiasco. But like my immediate like bosses are like, you know, it's Robert and Sophie, right? Like they're pretty chill. But, you know, like one of the dynamics that sets in is like, you know, it's not. What the actual conditions are isn't necessarily always going to be under their control, even if you know, like even if they want to do the right thing. And the demands of things like scale and you know, the demands

of sort of market competition have this sort of disciplining effect on what you know, like what what your working conditions can be if you're going to compete with, I don't know, your donut shop that torches its union workers, right? For example. Yeah. Purely abstract. Purely abstract. Absolutely. Seeing a shop of 12 become two shops, a food cart and a commissary kitchen of 35, that definitely, it's just pushing the business in a direction very naturally. It feels

very much like a part of how systems work. Even if your owner has really good intentions, just the nature of how capitalism works starts to change things at scale, for sure. Yeah, and that that gets into something else that I'm sort of interested in how the sort of unionizing process went because this is a very, I mean, I guess going from 12 to 35 is a big increase in the number of people, but that's still a very small shop. So can you talk a bit about what it's been like organizing a number of people that you can very easily fit into a room? It's been interesting and it's been exciting in that way because we are able to cram into a room and the energy is very palpable. And so like inspiring momentum to get shit done in each other has been really, really

wonderful in that way. But I think also it's, it makes it easy for us to be very tactical with how we are handling this process where we're making sure that at all four locations there's a majority if not unanimous approval and support and membership in the Union and the more that the more that I'm meeting Union organizers and Union reps and people from IWW the more that I'm realizing we're in a situation where we can establish some really lovely precedent for similar workplaces who want to start a union, who are about the same size as us, or even like neighbors in our, like on the, on the streets that our locations are at, where we can do things like,

there's not enough precedent in the IWW for a service industry in general, but particularly it's very common to be in the negotiating process. And one of the things that will be offered to the employer in exchange for whatever you're negotiating on is like a no strike clause like, okay, we'll just, we'll give this to you of like, we're just not going to be able to strike for the duration of our contract. And so in exchange, we can get some other stuff that we're asking for. But because we have such a strong majority, and in all four locations we have a strong majority, I think we're currently planning on keeping the right to strike.

Hell yeah. And, you know, we're not planning on it. I hope that we don't ever have to do that. But just having that as precedent, I think, will help our community and other similar unions. Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, this is something that going back to, if you look at the sort of heyday of American unionism, if you look at like the 50s, 60s, 70s, like those contracts didn't have no strike clauses in them. Some of them did. So sometimes it was like a federal thing. But the thing about no strike clauses in them. Some of them did. So sometimes it was like a federal thing.

But the thing about no strike clauses is that it makes, you know, we've talked about this a bit before on the show, but one of the sort of issues when you have a union is like, okay, so even if you get a contract, right? And that usually takes a long time, takes a lot of fighting. The company is immediately going to start trying to violate the contract.

And so, you know, your contract is only as strong as your ability to enforce it. And, you know, one of the really, really good way to enforce it is by being able to go on strike. But normally, like, yeah, people aren't organized enough to actually, like, fight their employers on it. And so it just ends up being a kind of standard part of contracts. And yeah, it's really exciting that y'all are committing to fight for that from the beginning because it's, it's, it's hard. It's, it's not, it's not an easy thing to do. Yeah. The more I learn about how unions operate, the more I'm realizing that, you know, it doesn't necessarily stop people from getting fired. It doesn't necessarily stop people

from having, you know, injustice happen upon them, but it just gives you the ability to fight in the first place. And I think a lot of employers who are facing a workplace who are wanting to unionize, recognizing that it's not like a threat. It's not like OK, we're. We're going to have this union and everyone's going to go on strike the next day and our business is going to

tank, but it's they're just asking for the right to. To have a better negotiating seat. Yeah, this is something I actually think is really interesting about this campaign where there's this really kind of I don't know. I think

if you're able to build a precedent of being able to negotiate a contract that doesn't have a no strike clause that allows you to go on strike, whatever, you know, whenever you want is something that is like characteristic of liking of, you know, of an of an incredibly militant shop. But I think if you can, if you can actually get the precedent of, you know, having companies treat this as normal because something that should be normal, right? Like this is how a lot of the US used to work. It used to be if you were on like an auto line assembly line,

there'd be there'd be a guy in a back with a whistle. And if the if, you know, if a contract violation happened or like, you know, if the company's asking you to do something that you aren't, you know, that you're not like contractually obligated to do, the person would, you know, the union person would blow the whistle, immediate strike the entire assembly line goes down. And you know, it turns out you actually can run a completely functional economy like this. But the kind of the mentality of the people who own bit who own businesses right now is that you should never at any point

like, you know, you should never at any point let your workers do anything at all. You should immediately fight them at the moment. They try to unionize. And I think, you know, having a precedent of like. You know, of of of being able to get this kind of stuff without immediately having to launch like, you know, like immediately immediately kick off a series of strikes with your employer is a good one. It's a good one to set. That we have so many people that are super interested in like being a part of this organizing effort because because we all like being there,

like I think it's huge in comparison to lots of stories that we hear about. Yeah, really wanting to bring that to the restaurant industry because unions are criminally under recognized within service work recognized within service work. Yeah. And arguably an industry that needs it the most. Yep. Yep. Well, and that's the other exciting thing about this shop is that, you know, you were talking about sort of like there not being enough service organizing within it with the IWW. And that's true of like basically all unions because and especially shops at your scale, because you know, a lot of these unions are using like a very kind of crude cross-cost benefit analysis. And their their assessment is like, well, why should we bother to organize like this shop that has 35 people at it?

Because, you know, this is going to like, we're like, the amount of dues money we're going to get out of it is like not, you know, is not is not worth the effort. But on the other hand, you know, like, do you know how many workers there are? Like how many of these like how many of these tiny shops across the there are across the entire country that if you know, and if everyone just refuses to organize them, then you're leaving like tens of millions of workers just sort of like screwed. Yeah, I can't speak for all IWWW, but I know like talking with like the Portland branch definitely mirrors our shop and it like how queer and leftist it is. It's not surprising that they are working with the IWW or with the coalition of independent unions,

which is a Pacific Northwest like union for unions kind of thing. It's not surprising that like our values are aligned and it's like making for something like really fun and like, you know, setting a new kind of industry standard for service industry. Yeah. Unfortunately, speaking of industry standards, I have to go to an ad break. It's in my contract somewhere, probably, although I don't think my employers have read my contract in a long time, but you know, such are the dictates of a podcast that your senior bosses don't listen to. Yeah, we will return in however long the ads are. And we are back. So okay, another thing that I kind of wanted to talk about is what has it sort of been

like in terms of like, you know, so like how, how, how has, you know, in a shop that's like this small, how has the sort of like organizing conversations gone? Right. Like is that is everyone just sort of close enough that, you know, you were able to kind of do this organically or was there still sort of a like mapping process for all of the shops or. Well, luckily, it has gone pretty smoothly, but we were advised early on to create an interest map where we go through the list of every coworker that we have and talk about like how well do we know them?

Do we think they would be down? Like, well, this person would obviously be down. This person, I guess we'll just have to talk to him and see. And apart from a few cases, it has been very successful and easy so far. It's really lucky that almost all of our co-workers are comrades. Yeah, I think like our first like conversation was, I think about 10 people at like a bar close to like the main Hawthorne shop. Once we had that get together, it really became about how do we get our satellite locations on the same page with a super majority at one shop,

then just moving on to the Pioneer food cart and then our commissary kitchen and then you know, our little, you know, the Pioneer food cart and then our commissary kitchen, and then the Mississippi location that was just, you know, hiring a whole new staff for and, you know, getting them in, you know, collecting them into the fold. And yeah, IWW was very helpful in like how to like kind of create those processes to like ensure that, you know, we were approaching people in the right way and getting a proper headcount. Yeah, that can be a disaster. Yeah.

Oh, god. My union, we're still trying to hash out whether some people are in the union or not. And people will leave the company. And this happens all the time. Right. Like one of the things you discover really quickly when you do union organizing is that you're like management doesn't actually know how anything works or like even who's working for them and what they do.

They have absolutely no idea. And so you have to do their job and figure out what everyone does. What management would be so mad at you for saying you're saying such blasphemy. You know, look, if if they if they did, if they didn't want me to talk negatively about them, they should pay me more. They simply do not pay any of us enough. That's not a universal rule.

Time to time. Yeah. Yeah. But I think that, you know, what's what's interesting about the shop too is it really seems like y'all just sort of speed ran doing a good campaign. Like you're doing all of the things that that you you you get from good organizers. But then, you know, every once in a while you just get a shop where it just kind of everything just clicks and goes. It has been five months start to finish, which I feel like is significantly faster than

most. Yeah. Most of that is just down to that there aren't very many of us. And so talking to everyone hasn't been that crazy of an endeavor. Yeah. But I think probably in the first meeting or two, we just crunched the numbers and realized, okay, we're not gonna have any trouble having majority. But we have to, and so the focus of our work went into making sure we do it right and learning to inoculate people and talk to people we haven't talked to yet

and people for whom it would be a little more sensitive or more like in-depth conversation and educating ourselves on what starting a union actually looks like. And IWW has been very helpful providing these little trainings that I've been able to go to. It's funny that they're on Sunday afternoons, and so I'm pretty sure I'm the only person at our brunch restaurant who doesn't work Sunday afternoons, so I've been going to those. But. Yeah, this is something that like, I don't know, I feel like it should be a thing that

so I was at this will, I guess will have come out after the labor does episode that I'm doing but something that I, I feel like I don't hear much discussion of in union organizing that I feel like there should be is like fighting management on scheduling and like trying to fight for, you know, people actually a having consistent schedules and be not just having like, I don't know. Like I, I, I, I, I know a lot of people who find out their schedule on Facebook, like four hours before they have to go in. Right. Like that's insane. That is that is not a way for industrial process to function. Right. No, thankfully, that has not been one of our issues,

at least at least not systemically at Friday. Yeah. But it does make it hard to do intro organizational training is because it's like everyone has weird scheduling stuff going on. So it's hard to like, I don't know, I feel like it's an underrated barrier to getting a lot of people from different unions to work together is that no one is ever off at the same time. That's real. Yeah. Absolutely. I know it's been it. We're I think there are a huge aspect of our success, I think, is that we have been able to like, I think the unique part about the breakfast place is that breakfast place is that it's not open from, you know, a.m. to p.m.

It's not open from 10 a.m. to 11 p.m. Like a restaurant could potentially be open. We are open for breakfast. We're done at two on the weekdays. And adding in a standing union meeting at 4pm once a week was very easy to add to everybody's schedule. I think the nature of the Breakfast Place led to that working very, very easily. Yeah. And our coworkers that maybe needed a little more persuasion that like, hey, no, don't

worry. This is, this is really happening and you can be a part of it. Even if you know that they're pro-union kind of getting the ball rolling with people, sometimes takes a meeting or two and being able to have the peer pressure of like, Hey, we're going to a meeting right now. I know you're not doing anything after this and I'll give you a ride. Helps a lot because then they go to their meeting and they're like, wow, that was awesome.

I never knew I could take control of my life in any way. Yeah. That rules. There really is nothing like just being in a in a place with a bunch of people who all are trying to like actually do the thing. Like you know, I mean, I think this is why, you know, like as we're recording this, like a bunch of campus occupations are going right. And I mean, I don't know, God, hopefully by the time this comes out, they won't have all died horribly because this is getting recorded on what day

is it? April 28th. So, in-shallah, this isn't being released into like hell world. But yeah, you know, I mean, I think one of the aspects of those camps is that like, you're just there with a bunch of people who you get to talk to and organize with and It turns out that actually being there face to face with a bunch of people is just great and that's that's the thing That's the thing you can also like that You know as as much as like union work can just can be work, right? They could you can be you sitting in front of a spreadsheet and going oh my god Well, what does the person respond like it's also?

I don't know. It's also like, could be really great. And I don't know, you should, you dear listener should experience it because it rules. I couldn't recommend it more. It is the best feeling in the world. And yeah, so when I are addicted to it to feel like you're actually doing anything real. Hell yeah. It's incredible. That's something we heard from our WWFriends is that this, especially with how early in the process we are, how exciting that is to just get everybody in a room

and feel like we're all working towards the same thing. Um, and that you do get addicted to it. And that's often where the union organizers came from was like starting their own and they're like, Oh, I need to keep doing this. Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think that's a pretty good dough to end on unless you do have anything else that you want to make sure we get to first. Yeah, with like how early in the process we are. After this comes out, like we will have like dropped our authorization cards and like

actually started like the formal process like we're still pretty early on. But we already have a fundraiser set up with a local beer bar we're at, Worker's Tap. Hell yeah. And that's super exciting. And we're building our socials and probably have a GoFundMe for strike fundraiser. So yeah, early days, but very exciting, very purposeful days. It's going to be a big week. Hell yeah. Yeah, where can people go to find the union and go to support you all?

Well, our socials are not live yet, but... All right. So yeah, this is being recorded before things go live. We will. We will have the links down there. Yeah. Yeah. We I think we're settling on the tag, the username fried egg w you which we are saying Foo Woo about because you know, you got it. You got to you got to make you got to make this fun. But yes, we will be sharing that with you. I'm glad you knew, because I wasn't sure if we had a handle agreed upon yet.

Yeah, find us on the socials, fridaywu. With it being early days and us not even being public yet, I've built those accounts, but they're not ready to go. So we're in this dead zone period where we've built the infrastructure for a proper election, even though we are very hopeful that our owner will recognize us with the majority that we have. But yeah, our zero, uh, our zero

day is May day a couple of days from now and we are very excited for that. Very much so. Oh yeah. Hopefully it goes well. It will be in the past by time this comes out, but good luck to both of you and thank you both so much for coming on. Oh, the pleasure belongs to us. We're both fans. Thanks so much for having coming on. Oh, the pleasure belongs to us. We're both fans. Thanks so much for having us on. Yeah. And yeah, this has been Naked App in here.

You too can go experience the joys of organizing your workplace. So go go do that or go to a student occupation or do both. I don't know. There's a lot going on. There are many places for you to experience the joy of organizing with other people. So go go do that. And yeah, you can find us in the usual places. I don't know. Sophie will probably be on in about one second.

I add pivot, not add whatever. Listen, this, this has gone completely off the rails. I have not had enough sleep. I know. No sleep for organizing. Bean Dad, the dress, 30 to 50 feral hogs. If you knew what any of those were, you spend too much time online. And hey, I do too.

16th Minute of Fame is a new weekly podcast hosted by me, Jamie Loftus, where every week I take a closer look at an internet character of the day. Who were they? What made them so notorious? Why did the internet choose them? And what does a person do when they're suddenly confronted with more attention than the human psyche can handle? I'll be talking to internet historians, experts, and yes, the main characters themselves to get a fuller picture. Because I think that even outside individual experiences, and yes, the main characters themselves to get a fuller picture. Because I think that even outside individual experiences, a character of the day tells us something about how the internet worked at that time, and how the attention economy

developed into the freaky three-headed dragon it is today. Together, we probably won't be able to properly log out, but we can take a walk down scary internet memory lane and see one day a little more clearly. Listen to 16th Minute of Fame on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I am the ferryman. In the shadows of the afterlife, the ferrymen of souls guides America's most influential spirits to their eternal rest.

Where are you taking me? Are you death? This road is not on any map. How much for a ticket? All I ask for in payment is a tail. I don't know who got to Kennedy first. And the devastation those first bombs caused. I've never been to hell, but I know intimately the hymns of the damned. All 12 episodes of The Passage are available

now. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Imagine you ask two people the same exact set of seven questions. I'm Minnie Driver, and this was the idea I set out to explore in my podcast, Minnie Questions. This year, we bring a whole new group of guests to answer the same seven questions, including actress and star of a mega hit sitcom, Friends, Courtney Cox. You can't go around it, so you just go through it. This is a roadblock. It's gonna catch you down the road.

Go through it. Deal with it. Comedian, writer, and star of the series Catastrophe, Rob Delaney. I shouldn't feel guilty about my son's death. He died of a brain tumor. It's part of what happens when your kid dies. Intellectually, you'll understand that it's not your fault, but you'll still feel guilty.

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James. Yeah, it's me, me and Andrew again. Yes, once again. So I recently dropped a video on states, or more pointedly, a video that sought to define the state and its functions, synthesize its critique by anarchists, and basically understand the ways that states fail both society and nature so that we can let go of status inevitability and think outside of it to realize the freedom and power of all the people. Most people aren't anarchists, unfortunately, but I've noticed that generally speaking, some folks are more receptive to anarchist ideas, and others just seem to shut down without engaging with it earnestly or meaningfully. You get a mix of those reactions in my comments, though overwhelmingly toward the receptive side,

because I mean, that's the kind of intellectual curiosity I try to attract in my comments, though overwhelmingly toward the receptive side, because that's the kind of intellectual curiosity I try to attract in my space. But the more hostile reactions had me thinking about a book that I read many years ago and did a video on years after that was called The Authoritarians by Bob Altmaier. So I want to take another look at the ideas in that book, because even though Altmaier. So I want to take another look at the ideas in that book, because even though Altmaier doesn't land on any truly radical conclusions, his scholarship in my opinion gets us closer to understanding the psychology of both authoritarian followers and authoritarian leaders. Also, rest in peace, I found out that he died when I was preparing this, just this year in February. But that aside, we'll be talking about the former first,

and that is, what's up with authoritarian followers? Let's get into it. First, we need some context. So in the wake of World War II, social scientists sought an explanation for the evils perpetuated by the Nazi government during the war. Theodore W. Adorno, Els Frenkel Brunswick, Daniel Levinson, and Nevid Sanford published The Authoritarian Personality in 1950, proposing a personality type for the fascist follower ranked on an F scale. They particularly concentrated on prejudice within the psychoanalytic and psychosocial frameworks of Freudian and Fromian theories.

Their work was highly critiqued, but it was also highly influential in laying the groundwork for our understanding of authoritarian personalities. In the aftermath of Adorno and Company's book, social scientists would continue to tweak, develop, and expand our understanding of authoritarian psychology. Most notably, the concept would be refined by Bob Altamire, a Canadian-American psychology professor who proposed the right-wing authoritarian personality in 1981. After numerous studies, Altamire presented his findings in his free book The Authoritarians in 2006. I had to clarify though, right-wing here is not being used in the context of the political

spectrum, which is a concept that deserves its own scrutiny. In this context, Altamire uses the word right in the sense of the Old English writ, an adjective for lawful and proper. Altamire defines authoritarianism as, quote, something authoritarian followers and authoritarian leaders cuck up between themselves. It happens when the followers submit too much to the leaders, trust them too much, and give them too much leeway to do whatever they want. Which often is something undemocratic, tyrannical, and brutal." I find this definition of authoritarianism lacking, but I'm an anarchist so of course I would.

To me, if authority is defined as the recognized right above others in a social relationship to give commands, make decisions, and enforce obedience, then I would define authoritarianism as a matter of degree to which you uphold the principle of authority. I think many people are at least authoritarian-lite because that's the status quo, unfortunately. But more specifically, I think the people we call authoritarians are those which are especially invested in the enforcement or advocacy of strict obedience to authority at the expense of freedom and plurality.

So right-wing authoritarian followers, or RWAs, are those which overwhelmingly support the established authorities in their society, like government officials, arms of the state, and traditional religious leaders. In North America and elsewhere, RWAs tend to be political conservatives. However, that doesn't mean the authoritarian personality is exclusive to conservatives, nor is it exclusive to North America. But the scale is definitely tailored to a North American and English-speaking audience, lended to its documented issues with translating to other regions, but with effort, I could

definitely see it being adapted to other cultural contexts as well. And as Altamire argues, the concept of the right-wing authoritarian could equally apply to society where the established authorities claim to be represented in the left. So what defines the right-wing authoritarian personality, psychologically speaking? They feature three primary traits or attitudes. For one, a high degree of submission to authorities who are perceived to be established and legitimate in the society in which one lives. Two, a general aggressiveness directed against various persons that is perceived to be sanctioned

by established authorities. 3. A high degree of adherence to the social conventions that are perceived to be endorsed by society and its established authorities. These traits are measured with the Right-Wing Authoritarianism Scale, or RWA scale for short. It's readily accessible online, so I'm not going to go through the entire scale point by point, but it basically includes a mixed series of statements that folks can indicate their level of agreement or disagreement with.

Statements like, our country will be great if we honor the ways of our forefathers, do the authorities tell us to do, and get rid of the rotten apples who are ruining everything. Or, what our country really needs is a strong, determined leader who will crush evil and take us back to our true path. And just to mix things up, a woman's place should be wherever she wants to be. The days when women were submissive to their husbands on social conventions belonged strictly in the past. As you could imagine, the degree to which you agree or disagree with these statements would place you somewhere along the scale. The lowest total possible score on an ultimized version of the test would be 20, and the highest

180, but most people who hit either extreme. A sample of a thousand Americans in 2005 found that the average score was 90. Technically speaking, high RWAs are just people who score higher than the average population, so it's really a relative tune. Also, another disclaimer, in the context of psychological studies, personality tests can definitely make mistakes about individuals. So it's not a diagnostic tool for individuals to determine if they'd make a good stormtrooper. However, the scale can reliably identify levels of authoritarianism in groups.

Also keep in mind that stuff like the interpretation of wording and foreknowledge of what the test is trying to measure can definitely influence results. Still, this tool has been used for most of Altamire's research on authoritarianism, so it's good to be familiar with it. So now you may be wondering, how well does the RWA Scale's measurement of submission, aggression, and conventionalism map onto people's reality? So for submission, high RWAs tend to believe that people should submit to authority in almost all circumstances. So they put a lot of trust in the law and the authorities. Maybe not all authorities in every single circumstance, but they definitely bought into the concept

itself. They're the types who trusted Nixon during and even after the Watergate Crisis. Likely the ones in Germany in 1945 who refused to believe that Hitler was responsible for the Holocaust. The type to rabidly support anti-terrorist initiatives, no matter how invasive. Throughout his research, Altmaier found that high RWAs are far more likely to tolerate police burglaries, drug raids without warrants, police crackdowns on peaceful protests, subversion via agents provocateurs, and so on. As far as they're concerned, Fath knows best.

Their favorite authorities are above the law. But like I said, they don't always submit. Their blind support can be trumped by other concerns. But most times, they're not big fans of holding officials accountable for their actions. They really don't care if a cop kills someone in broad daylight or someone drives through a crowd of protesters on the street. In terms of aggression, higher WEs aggress when they believe right and might are on their side. Right meaning their hostility is authority approved.

Might meaning they have a physical, tactical, or numerical advantage over their target. They don't fight fear. And just like they go easy on authorities who commit crimes, they go easy on anyone who attacks people they're prejudiced against. But they definitely don't go easy on the people they hate. They seek to sentence criminals to longer terms than average, and they're some of the loudest supporters of capital punishment. And if they hate one group, betcha bottom dollar they probably hate other groups too. You could call them equal opportunity bigots.

Chances are if they hate immigrants or trans people, those are not going to be the only targets of their ire. Their prejudice has more to do with their own personality than their target's actual attributes. Still, they don't always aggress when they think the proper authorities approve. Just like they don't always aggress when they think the proper authorities approve. Just like they don't always submit. There are always more factors that play in any given situation, including a fear of counteraggression or consequences that may hold their hostilities.

Regarding conventionalism, higher WAs believe that everyone should live by the norms that their authorities have decreed. Multiculturalism, plurality, diversity, those things clash with what they consider correct and what they consider wrong. They usually get their ideas from fundamentalist religions, so you'll find that higher WAs are strong advocates for the traditional family structure, with patriarchal husbands, submissive wives, and obedient children. They're also far more likely to support their government's patriotic version of various historical narratives.

Most interestingly, their conventionalism even influences their response to the high RWA test itself. If they were told the average response for a statement on the test, they were far more likely to adjust their answers to the mean than most. When asked what they would like their own RWA score to be, low RWA's said they would like to be low RWA's. Middle RWA's said they'd like to be low RWA's, but high RWA's said they want to be middles, not lows or highs. Why?

Because they tend to rank being normal very highly in values tests. Also just because they want to be normal doesn't mean they don't want to be richer or smarter than others. No, it doesn't mean they're necessarily going to drop their prejudices. They may get tugged slightly, like with the somewhat decrease in prejudice against gay people after the legalization of gay marriage, but their normal is often a measure of what's normal in their in-group. So if it's still normal in their in-group to be violently homophobic, more than likely,

they will still be violently homophobic. The conformity is the value rather than specific bigotry or what have you. Yeah. Talking of conformity, Andrew, we have to conform to the needs of sponsors of this show right now. And we're back. Yeah, so Altmaier has been lightly critiqued for rendering RWA as the dominant psychological account of authoritarianism. Of course, it makes sense that RWA has been the focus, considering the distality of authoritarian

personality was born out of post-World War II studies of fascists, right-wing authoritarians often favor established, absolutist forms of government and weaponize the presently dominating hierarchy to facilitate said absolutism. But there are authoritarians who also favor absolutist forms of government, with slight differences, believing that the presently dominating hierarchy, should be overthrown and replaced with their own. These have potentially been called left-wing authoritarians. Even though the right and right-wing authoritarian didn't have anything to do with the political spectrum.

Let's keep pushing. In Chapter 9 of The Authoritarian Spectre, Altamire conceptualizes Left-wing authoritarianism, or LWA, as also composed of submission, aggression, and conventionalism. So essentially, LWA is a subcategory of RWAs. He's also quick to point out that not all leftists are LWA's, but as he describes them, LWA's are revolutionaries who 1. submit to movement leaders who must be obeyed, aka submission. 2. have enemies who must be ruined, from capitalists to counter-revolutionaries, aka aggression. And 3. have rules and party discipline that must be followed, aka Conventionalism.

In essence, Authoritarianism is psychological. RWAs support the established authorities, LWA's oppose them in favour of their own, but the underlying dispositional core is still Authoritarianism. But the focus is on RWAs in general here. Concerning these traits of mission, aggression, and conventionalism, it's clear that people with right-wing authoritarian personalities are rather dangerous. They find it easier to bully, harass, punish, maim, torture, eliminate, and exterminate their victims than most people do.

They're more willing to join mobs and militias, more likely to blame victims for their misfortune, and more likely to condemn common criminals to long, brutal sentences in jail. They seem to have a lot of hostility boiling away inside them that their authorities can easily unleash. So we have to ask, what causes this? Why are they like this? According to Albert Bandura's social learning theory of aggression, aggression occurs after two conditions are met.

Firstly, some feelings like anger or envy need to stir up hostility. Secondly, inhibitions or contextual restraints against releasing that hostility would have to be overcome. Only then can the aggression erupt and flow. So let's discuss the instigator and releaser of authoritarian aggression. High RWAs are highly motivated by fear. Like, they have an extra dose of fear response in their genes, more than most people. They probably learn to be fearful from their parents about all kinds of things, you know, radicals, atheists, kidnappers, queer people, etc. etc.

They grew up in a scarier world than most, which is probably why they tend to score so highly on the dangerous world scale. That scale, like previous scales, provides statements and measures levels of agreement or disagreement with stuff like, quote, if our society keeps degenerating the way it has been lately, it's liable to collapse like a rotten log and everything will be chaos. And, quote, any day now, chaos and anarchy could erupt around us. All the signs are pointing to it. End quote. Everything, to them, is a sign of the times. A perversion corrupting society. In peaceful times, and in generally dangerous ones, higher WAs feel threatened. But what releases that aggressive

impulse to act? Altmeyer found, more than anything else, self-righteousness. Of course, almost everyone thinks they're a bit more moral than average, but higher WAs, they tend to think they're the holy ones, the chosen, the righteous, that empowers them to isolate, segregate, humiliate, persecute, harass, beat, and kill. That self-righteousness, combined with their high scores on the dangerous world scale, is what empowers their prejudice, their heavy-handedness, their mean-spiritedness, and their eagerness to crusade against the other. So how do high RWAs become high RWAs? Are they born that way? Possibly.

Do their parents make them that way? Somewhat but not completely. You see, no one's a complete carbon copy of their parents. So what determines a person's position on the RWA scheme? Experience. Our life experiences teach us lessons that our parents and peers may not. Our experiences with authorities shape our perception of authority. Especially when someone hits adolescence, they tend to chafe against authority, even if they're submitted to authority as children. Those hormonal urges, desires for autonomy, and new experiences could shake up their early lessons completely.

Experiences could either end up reinforcing their authority's teachings or contradicting them entirely. Naturally, it's easier for kids from authoritarian homes to remain authoritarian and vice versa, but ultimately, experiences do most of the shaping. Middle RWAs have some mix of experiences and upbringing that keeps them in the middle. When it comes to higher RWAs, their experiences were probably very controlled. Authoritarian followers usually live in a homogenous bubble of patriotic, traditional people.

An echo chamber apart from the evils of the world, safely kept on a short leash for most of their lives. But there's hope yet. Altamire's research has shown that higher WAs can change if they have some important life experiences. That's why university can be such a game changer for people. It's just meeting new people, leaving that small, enclosed world, and developing relationships with people of different walks of life.

And that makes a big difference. There are a couple traits that make high RW ears such good followers for would-be dictators. In short, those traits are illogical thinking, highly compartmentalized minds, double standards, hypocrisy, a lack of self-awareness, ethnocentrism, dogmatism. In long, well, consider this syllogism. All fish live in the sea. Sharks live in the sea. Therefore, sharks are fish. Logically speaking, the conclusion doesn't follow. Even if sharks are fish, and they are, the premises do support the conclusion. But if higher WAs were asked if the reasoning

was correct, they were more likely than most to say that it was. When asked why, they'd answer, because sharks are fish. In essence, because they agreed with the conclusion, they assumed the reasoning was right. That simple test shows that if authoritarian followers like the conclusion, the logic involved is fairly irrelevant. Reasoning is what should justify the conclusion, but as far as they're concerned, the conclusion validates the reasoning. Of course, let me not overstate. A lot of people have trouble with syllogistic reasoning.

Higher WAs just happen to be slightly more likely to make such mistakes. But higher WAs generally have more trouble than most people do, realizing a conclusion is false. They have a harder time determining whether empirical evidence proves or doesn't prove something. They more easily fill gaps in science with supernatural forces. And they have trouble being critical of anything unless they've already gotten their talking points from their authorities.

Regarding the highly compartmentalized minds, I mean we all have some inconsistencies now thinking, but their minds must be like oil and water. One second they're saying free speech, next they're saying ban critical race theory. One moment they're talking about individual freedom, and next they're basically throttling the boots of the state. They don't merge files in their brain to really see what fits, they tend to just pick up whatever their demagogues are saying. And if your mind is such a mess of contradictions, you're gonna end up with a lot of double standards, easily justified by whatever idea you hold that's most convenient in the moment. easily justify by whatever idea you hold that's most convenient in the moment. Principles are really irrelevant.

Keep in mind the excuses they make for those in power and how hard they are on victims. Classic example is the difference between how they treat a prisoner who beats up another prisoner versus a police officer who beats up a prisoner. Low-order WAs usually don't have such stark double standards. When it comes to hypocrisy, and we're going to keep using this example because it's still somewhat topical. Critical race theory. As much as authoritarians accuse the left of being anti-free speech politically correct

types, RWA's are far more likely to report a desire to censor ideas they don't like. This is also because they tend to lack basic self-awareness. If presented with a list of things right-wing authoritarians are likely to do, like be prejudiced, conformist, etc., and then ask how true it is of themselves compared to most other people, they really have no idea how different they actually are. And that's partially because of the bubble they tend to exist in. Us vs. them is a very hard line in the sand for authoritarians. Humans as a whole do have a tendency sometimes to fall into tribal patterns of thinking, but authoritarians see the world far more sharply in terms of their in-groups and out-groups in most.

We do tend to associate with people who agree with us on many issues, but authoritarians really do stick to their bubble of validation and ethnocentric reinforcement. That's why they don't realize how prejudiced or aggressive or submissive they are compared to most people. By avoiding challenges to their beliefs and holding fast to their authorities, they remain stuck in a circular logic of I'm right because the people I agree with say I'm right. Finally, in terms of dogmatism, higher WAs hold to unchangeable, unjustified certainty. Righteousness beyond a shadow of a doubt. They're more likely than most people to agree with statements like, the things I believe

in are so completely true I could never doubt them, and there are no discoveries or facts that could possibly make me change my mind about the things that matter most in life. I am absolutely certain that my ideas about the fundamental issues in life are correct. Meanwhile, they're more likely than most people to disagree with statements like, it's best to be open to all possibilities and ready to re-evaluate all your beliefs, and flexibility is a real virtue in thinking, since you may very well be wrong. When you receive or absorb rather than contemplate your beliefs, you have no basis upon which

to determine whether or not they're true. So you avoid challenges by staying in the bubble as much as possible, but when that can't be avoided, threaten out whatever talking points you got from wherever. And if that dialogue tree fails, you can always fall back on your group's assurance that you are right. Now you could challenge your beliefs, or you could insist you write and retreat. What option do you think higher WAs tend to choose? Double down.

Exactly. Dogmatism is by far the best fallback defense. But it's also the most blatant dead giveaway that the person doesn't know why they believe what they believe. Alas, higher WAs are only one side of the authoritarian coin. They're nothing without their leaders. So next time, we'll be talking about those leaders, those social dominators. Until then, wall power to all the people. Peace. Cheers, Andrew.

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Welcome to the Krabben here. I'm Andrew Siege of YouTube channel Andrewism. Once again, I'm joined by James and we're back in I'm excited to learn more about authoritarian leaders this time, right? Yes, last time we discussed the mind of the authoritarian follower, thanks to the research of the late Bob Altmaier. You should definitely listen to the previous episode, but in summary, we looked at his concept of right-wing authoritarianism, which refers to a personality type that features

three primary traits or attitudes. First is a high degree of submission to authorities who are perceived to be established and legitimate in the societies in which one lives. The second is a general aggressiveness directed against various persons that is perceived to be sanctioned by established authorities. And the third is a high degree of adherence to the social conventions that are perceived to be endorsed by society and its established authorities. We also speculated the roots of authoritarian aggression, and looked at the mind of the

authoritarian follower, which demonstrates traits such as illogical thinking, highly compartmentalized minds, double standards, hypocrisy, a lack of self-awareness, ethnocentrism, and dogmatism. Today, as promised, we're looking at the other side of the coin. We're looking at the leaders, but also what we can do to address both followers and leaders. So let's begin. In 1994, social psychologists Felicia Pratto and Jim Sedanius presented the Social Dominance Orientation Test as a measure of belief in social inequality.

Social dominators agreed with statements like, quote, this country would be better off if we cared less about how equal all people are, and, quote, some people are just more worthy than others. While this agreed with statements like, quote, if people are just more worthy than others. While disagreeing with statements like, quote, if people were treated more equally, we would have fewer problems in this country. Fellow social psychologist Sam McFarlane took their test and 21 others, including the RWA scale, to determine which would be the best predictor of prejudice. His research found that only two of those tests, the Social Dominance Orientation and

the RWA, could do the job well. But the thing is though, while both tests were able to identify prejudiced people, they were identifying different types of prejudiced people, with very little overlap. Social Dominators and High RWAs. Authoritarians of two flavors. social dominators, and high RWAs. Authoritarians of two flavors. They have some things in common though, besides prejudice. They tend to support the same political parties.

They tend to have shared economic philosophies. Usually conservative on both counts. But they also have some huge differences. Starting with a desire for power. Altamire conducted two surveys with students that included the question, how much power, as in the ability to make adults do what you want, do you want to have when you're 40 years old? In this sense, Altamire is using power in the sense of authority, as I would define it. They recognize right above others in a social relationship to give commands, make decisions, and enforce obedience. So the scale went from zero, meaning they don't care for it,

to five, meaning their goal is to have a great deal of authority. Social dominators consistently wanted to have much more power than most people did. Authoritarian followers did not. Now obviously, people often want authority for different reasons, some more self-righteous than others. But social dominators take thrill in authority in and of itself. Doesn't matter what the cause is, as long as they can control others in the process. There's another scale Altamire uses, the Power Mad Scale. On it, social dominators agree with statements like,

Is it a mistake to interfere with the lore of the jungle? Some people were meant to dominate others. And Do you enjoy taking charge of things and making people do things your way? They also disagree with statements like, Life is not governed by the survival of the fittest, and We should let compassion and moral laws be our guide. Social dominators have some of the highest scores on this scale, and high scorers tend to be intimidating, ruthless, and vengeful, with no care for nobility or charity. They despise empathy and have a dog-eat-dog mentality toward the world. They love the power to hurt in their drive to the top.

High RWAs just don't have that drive. And while authoritarian followers might highly value group cohesiveness and loyalty, social dominators don't. Because like I keep saying, they're in it for themselves. For their power. And they will betray their own group if push comes to shove. Another area where social dominators and higher RWAs diverge is when it comes to religiousness. Authoritarian followers are usually religious fundamentalists, while dominators don't tend

to be that involved. Some of them do go to church regularly, but that's for manipulative reasons. Because social dominators could lie. They lie a lot. All they have to do is pretend to be religious and say the right words. And boom, they get through the higher WAs. Reminds me of a certain politician. I'm just going to say, this is putting me in mind of like Donald Trump tear

gassing a massive crowd of people so he can walk to a church and then take photos outside and not go in. Yeah. Good times. There's another scale we could take a look at, and that's the Exploitative, Manipulative, Amoral Dishonesty or Exploitative Mad Scale. Unlike higher WAs, social dominators' anonymous responses indicate that they agree with statements like there's really no such thing as right and wrong. It all boils down to what you can get away with.

And there's a sucker born every minute, and smart people learn how to take advantage of them. Social dominators disagree with statements like, It gains a person nothing if he uses deceit and treachery to get power and riches. And all in all, it is better to be humble and honest than important and dishonest. In essence, social dominators admit to striving to manipulate, to being dishonest, to being amoral and treacherous. They see their followers as suckers, fools to be controlled. But what else makes them different? Well, we could go back to the roots of hostility.

Social dominators actually show greater prejudice against minorities and women than higher WAs do, but their followers are much more hostile towards LGBTQ people. Why? Well, it ties back to the religiousness point, and the higher WA respect for the law. Since attacks against minorities are less clearly supported by religious and civic authorities as they used to be, authoritarian follower aggression towards these groups, both overt or sneaky, had to be curbed a little bit. Meanwhile, social dominators are hostile because they already live in the apocalyptic jungle

that higher WAs fail. And they are the apex predator. They don't score highly in the dangerous world scale because they're not scared. They're the ones ready to weaponize that fail. Dominance is their first priority. For everyone they meet, they need a reason to not try to control them. They don't care too much about the law either. It's just about not getting caught. They're not as self-righteous as higher WAs because they're quite immoral. And higher WAs aggress when they believe right and might are on their side. Social dominators aggress

because might makes right for them personally. Higher WAs hate crying out of fear and self-righteousness in the name of authority. Social Dominators hate crying out of shared desire to intimidate and control. Lastly, we need to look at the differences in their thought process. Social Dominators, for the most part, don't have a web of contradictions, weak reasoning skills, compartmentalized thinking, or gullibility that define higher WAs' mental life. They're not particularly dogmatic or zealous about any particular cause or creed. They just want authority.

They say whatever they need to say to get ahead because they have no consistent values. They'll be hypocrites, like higher WAs, but they're probably aware of and fine with their own hypocrisy. For example, they're cool with wealth inheritance and corruption. They're opposed to welfare. They're unconcerned with income inequality or photo-disenfranchisement. They're apathetic to racial inequality and injustice. They believe that people should have to earn their place in society, and they don't care

if most of them can't. They still talk about how the only way to have a level playing field is to get rid of things like affirmative action, and part of what defines social dominators is their utter disregard for equality. So we have to ask again, what causes this? Why are they like this? And well, social scientists just aren't sure yet. If we look at the life shaping experiences of social dominators, they would probably report that deceit and cheating were good tactics because it led to what they wanted.

Taking advantage of suckers felt great. They enjoyed having power and having people afraid of them. Life boiled down to what you could get away with and of course, their experiences led them to believe that life is a jungle. Dominators were probably rewarded early in their lives when they cheated, took advantage of people, weaponized fear, overpowered others, or got away with something wrong. Whether or not their parents gave them that outlook on the world, because of the psychological law of effect, they simply learned that being amoral, unsympathetic, and exploitative worked well for them. So what happens when higher WAs and social dominators work together? In this field of research,

the lethal union refers to the combination of haply subservient hire WAs with social dominators who share their values in the driver's seat, eager to dominate and control. A death spiral union that develops all the time in the real world. As Altamire aptly described, quote, true, sufficiently skilled social dominators served by dedicated followers can make the trains run on time, but you have to worry about what the trains may be hauling when dominators call the shots and the higher WAs do the shooting. End quote. While most social dominators get fairly

low scores on RWA tests and vice versa, a very small percentage of people in Altamira samples scored highly on both RWA and social dominance tests. These are the double highs. If prejudice was a sport in the Olympics, higher WAs would get bronze, social dominators would get silver, and double highs would definitely get gold. Now you might be wondering, how do they manage to score so highly on both tests if social dominators and RWAs have so many differences? How can somebody be a submissive dominator?

So there are a couple of reasons why a wannabe dictator would score highly on both tests. One is because some RWA scale statements are open to interpretation. Take the statement, quote, our country desperately needs a mighty leader who will do what has to be done to destroy the radical new ways and sinfulness that are ruining us. End quote. A follower would be like, yes, please, and a dominator would be like, here I am, behold, I am your leader. Double highs still score highly on all the power scales like other social dominators

and unlike other higher WAs. Secondly, double highs are the religious among the social dominators. So they respond to the religious items on the RWA scale that other social dominators don't, thereby significantly raising their RWA score. I don't think I need to go into too much detail, I feel like I should be absolutely clear that double highs suck. Whatever the issue, they probably are on the wrong side of it. The worst of the worst, prejudiced, power hungry, exploitative, mad, religiously fundamentalist, dogmatic, dangerous, worldist,

a noxious stew of the worst of both social dominators and higher WAs. Regular social dominators might end up in charge of PTAs, HOAs, workplaces, local governments, and other personal kingdoms. Not all of them succeed in life due to the animosity they create, the obstacles they might face, or their lack of intelligence, attractiveness, or network to gain the kind of power they want. And some of them might even get caught in their lies and illegalities, and don't have the capital to get out of it. Do they see double highs?

They tend to have a head start. While regular social dominators have to fake their religiousness to get the support of higher WAs, double highs can more easily get started in their own churches, already part of the in-group, sharing their prejudices, economic philosophies, and political leanings. Even if they are faking it a little bit, a double high already knows all the code words, dog whistles, and Bible verses they need to get ahead. They know what stance they should hold about evolution, the role of women, abortion, school prayer, censorship, law and order, etc.

Double highs are on the show, you dig? So now what? Knowing that social dominators do whatever they can to hold on to power, and higher WAs are extremely resistant to change, how do we deal with a situation where social change requires dealing with these people? I mean, you can't debate them. Even if they were to intellectually wrestle with a double high leader and utterly destroy

them with facts and logic, their higher WA audience is not likely to change their minds. Trying to change highly dogmatic, evidence-immune, ethnocentric people is an exercise in frustration and futility. It's also hard to fight the sheer fair-mongering power of the likes of Fox News and Facebook, to combat the class and religious roots of ethnocentrism, and to reduce the self-righteousness of their followers. It's even harder to convince them that they are being systematically misinformed and played for fools by their leaders. Even if they listened to these episodes or watched my videos or read Altamire's books,

they would either get defensive or, honestly because a lot of them aren't self-aware, assume that this is about someone else. Find a way to compartmentalize, misinterpret, rationalize, and dogmatically deny anything I've said so far. So what to do? First and foremost, representation matters. It's important that higher AWAs see more of the breadth and diversity of human existence and experience. Their reality is skewed, and the visibility and representation of people from other backgrounds, not just in media but also in their personal lives, is very important.

One thing studies have shown is that higher AWAs who know a gay person are far less likely to be homophobic than their fellow higher WAs who know a gay person are far less likely to be homophobic than their fellow higher WAs. And the best exposure to different types of people is through access to higher education, or more broadly, just any space with diversity. College may not necessarily turn them into committed revolutionaries, contrary to popular belief, but the environment of higher education has a tremendously beneficial impact on higher WAs. Four years of undergrad experience can knock their scores down by 15 to 20%. Academic spaces need to be alive, vibrant, and most of all accessible. And we need people in academic and non-academic spaces to embrace

the power of influence. I don't mean this in a give them an authoritarian to follow kind of way. I'm not talking about like becoming a club president or ordering people around. I'm not thinking about hierarchical leadership, but rather the natural influence of individuals who model exemplary behaviour and provide an example for others to look to. People who freely lend their talents and knowledge and mentorship to others. In a conformity experiment in Harvard in the late 1940s, real subjects were surrounded by actors who deliberately gave obviously wrong answers to questions.

Usually the subjects went along with the wrong majority at least some of the time. But if, in another condition of the experiment, one other person gave the right answer, real subjects were much more likely to do the right thing even though it meant joining a distinct minority rather than the majority. So I'm saying that as the people who hold radical beliefs, it's important to stand up. You don't have to form a majority to have an effect. Two or three people speaking out can sometimes change the decisions of entire school boards, church boards, or other institutions.

Obviously, reform is not going to be enough, but we do need to present some opposition on that front in that sphere. Lack of opposition teaches Dominators to keep dominating, and it only takes one person to start the opposition with a domino effect that could potentially influence even higher WAs. Because at the end of the day, it's clear that they want to be, quote unquote, normal. In their bubbles and their echo chambers, they don't really realize how extreme they are.

They need to be exposed to the perspectives and experiences of people outside their tight circles. Mutual aid and other organizing efforts can show them the humanity of other people, finding common ground and common cause. But ultimately, in my view, the best long-term solutions require youth liberation and prefiguration. We need youth liberation both at home and at school and everywhere else. As long as we continue to reinforce the notion that children need to blindly submit to authorities, as long as we refuse to grant them humanity and

autonomy, we will continue to be without humanity and autonomy. We will continue to have adults, generation after generation, who do not know how to resist authority. We must prefigure those relationships in our personal lives and our social spaces. But we must prefigure our liberation. It's not enough to just campaign against social dominators. We have to dismantle the systems that allow them to dominate in the first place. The only way to keep social dominators from seizing power is to prefigure a system where no one person can so easily coerce and dominate. To quote Bob Altmaier one last time, we cannot secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves

and our posterity if we sit with our oars out of the water. If we drift mindlessly, circumstances can sweep us to disaster. Our societies presently produce millions of highly authoritarian personalities as a matter of course, enough to stage the Nuremberg rallies over and over and over again. Turning a blind eye to this could someday point guns at all of our heads, and the fingers on the triggers will belong to right-wing authoritarians. We ignore this at our peril. Social dominators want you complacent, apathetic, hopeless, and out of the way.

They want to control everything and everybody, and they have their loyal followers ready to mobilize. They are not the majority, but they are determined to win. Do not let them. If you know what's happening, if you spot these signs in your own spaces, it's your responsibility to do something about it. To organize.

To educate. Because one person could accomplish so much, and two people could accomplish so much more. Good luck. All power to all the people, because it could happen here. You can follow me on Patreon.com slash St. Drew. This has been Andrew Sage, Andrewism, make it happen here, Olajazz, peace. Bean Dad, The Dress, 30 to 50 Feral Hogs. If you knew what any of those were, you spend too much time online.

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We're just each other's pulse. I mean, it's molecular, you know? Listen to The Bright Side from Hello Sunshine on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about it happening here. And you know, when we talk about like, collapse, things falling apart, there's very few case studies that are more important for folks to be aware of than what has happened and is continuing to happen in Northeast Syria, in a region of the world known as Rojava or the autonomous regions of Northeast Syria. I'm here with James Stout.

He and I have both reported from the Rojava project and we are talking again with Arthur and Debbie Bookchin about what's going on there now kind of as the struggle continues, so to speak. That's right. Thank you very much for joining us, Arthur and Debbie. And you're both here in your capacity as representatives of the Emergency Committee for Rojava, right? That's right. And thanks for having us.

Yeah, thanks for coming back. So I think perhaps we should begin by explaining what ECR is and does. I've been very fortunate to be asked to speak at one of your meetings, so I'm familiar, but I think maybe some of our listeners wouldn't be. So could you begin with explaining what it is, what it does? maybe some of our listeners wouldn't be. So could you begin with explaining what it is, what it does? Yeah, absolutely. So the Emergency Committee for Rojava is kind of the only standing US-based organization focused on solidarity with the Rojava revolution. And what we do is we try to build a grassroots solidarity movement with the revolution in Northeast

Syria with the Kurdish freedom movement more broadly. And we do that a few different ways. One is like just trying to inform the public rights, so kind of public education. Another is advocacy, trying to sort of put pressure on the United States government to stop arming people who are trying to kill everybody in Rochevoix and to support the people instead. But another thing that we do is try to build kind of movement to movement relationships, not like finding social movements in the United States

that we think share a lot of affinity with the movement over there, try to put them in touch and try to kind of facilitate dialogue. Yeah, no, I mean, I in touch and try to kind of facilitate dialogue. Yeah. No, I mean, I think it's important to kind of start as we often do with the attempt to get the US government to stop arming folks killing the people there,

which in this case refers specifically to the Turkish military. I mean, we're all kind of dealing with in a separate part of the world how difficult it is to stop the United States government from arming people. Ain't that right? Yeah.

That's a great point, Robert. You know, I think sometimes it's hard for people to even comprehend just the massive flow of weapons from the United States to Turkey. Yeah. I mean, over the years, it's been, it's just, I think in the last 15 years alone, the US has sold Turkey something like $4 billion

worth of Patriot missiles alone, you know, and then billions, or at least millions in, you know, Chinook helicopters, the Cobra attack helicopters, there is just a huge flow of arms from the United States to Turkey. And as Arthur said, you know, one of the things that we really do try and do at ECR is to get people not only aware, but also into doing some advocacy on that. And one of the things that we're also trying to prevent right now is the sale of any more

F-16s to Turkey, which as I'm sure your listeners know are used in the bombing of people in Rojava and also in Turkey and in Northern Iraq. That's a very critical issue, in fact. Yeah, and it's a critical issue in part because what we're seeing is a, I would describe it as a pretty concentrated attempt to destroy civil society in Rojava, right? Not just through the use of airstrikes, through things like blocking off access to water, but the F-16s that Turkey purchases from the United States and the continuing armaments to keep those things flying and firing missiles are a huge part of how they're able to continue degrading the capacity of the self-administration to maintain civil society.

Exactly. I mean, there is really an aim, their aim to completely destabilize the society, to shake confidence in the autonomous administration, to break morale, to engage in psychological terror and frankly, you know, also to do physical harm, as I'm sure you know, and your listeners know, Turkey very effectively uses drones and other methods to take out leadership, particularly female leadership, women who are leaders of the movement. And there's not a day that goes by really that doesn't include strikes from Turkey into Rojava. I mean, I'm just thinking,

the Mambiz military council just has reported in the last couple of days that the state of Turkey has shelled various villages in Mambiz, that Kurdish neighborhoods in Aleppo are really subjected to continuous embargoes by the Damascus government, but also Turkey intercedes to prevent supplies from getting to these places. So it's really, I think there's something like more than 200 bombings by Turkey in Iraqi Kurdistan even since just the beginning of the year. So it's really ongoing assault.

No, absolutely. I think for people who are less familiar with it, it's easy to kind of get bogged down in the weeds because all the details, they change every day. But I think the broad strokes are pretty clear and they haven't changed for a long time. I mean, Turkey sees this revolution, rightly so, as a threat to its own power, to its own ideology. You know, the idea that local communities would govern themselves pluralistically through

autonomy is a direct threat to the idea of the Turkish state, which is basically a fascist nation state. And they kind of have a twofold strategy. I think you could see it this way. So for those who don't know, Turkey has already invaded northeast Syria multiple times. It's invaded Afrin in 2018, Serekhaniye, Talabiyat in 2019, and it occupies that territory still to this day. But when it's been unable to seize more territory directly, it kind of has this

twofold strategy where the other side of the coin is to just do everything possible to make life unlivable. Right? So that's where the assassination's come in. That's where the sort of information warfare, blocking of water, sort of economic embargo. The basic idea is just to spread fear, to spread uncertainty into every sphere of life. And like you said, Robert, to basically attack civil society itself. Yeah. I wonder if you could explain,

I think our listeners are maybe familiar with the campaign against civil society and civilian targets that we saw, like in October, November of last year, I saw some of while I was there. But Turkey's recently launched a spring offensive, right? Which isn't exclusively unlimited to bombing, but also contains, I guess, combined arms, infantry bombing. Can you explain what's happening there and what the sort of, I think the plan you've

sort of very well summed up already, right, which is to make life unlivable for the Kurdish freedom movement. But can you explain what's been happening in the last few weeks for people who haven't caught up? So for one, for people to understand the connection in the first place, right, it's important to understand that really, while there are distinct organizations which are autonomous and are place-based within the Kurdish movement, right? They have their own parties and self-defense forces in Syria and in Iraq and other parts of Kurdistan. It's important to see it also as kind of one

big Kurdish freedom movement in another sense, and in an important sense because Turkey sees it in that light. So for the same reasons that Turkey wants to crush the revolution in Northeast Syria, Turkey wants to crush the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers' Party, right? And the guerrillas of the PKK are based in northern Iraq. And time and time again, they've tried to sort of dislodge the guerrilla forces from the mountains, but it's pretty hard to do.

This is NATO's second largest military and they still, after decades, have not been able to crush this insurgency. And so what we're seeing in recent weeks is not necessarily so novel. Again, you can get into the weeds about the region of Metina and a particular road that they're trying to seize for logistics on their way to the mountain of Gara. But the truth is they're trying to crush the movement where it is and they're seizing an opportunity.

There's often like a weather window for the fighting in the mountains as well. And so when the snow starts to melt in the spring, you start to see an escalation of the fighting in the mountains, which often winds down in the fall again. But it's yet to be seen how this is going to go. I mean, y'all have, I don't have to tell you, right? Like you've done some recent episodes on technological developments with the movement and Turkey's been having a really hard time making gains on the ground. And also, I mean, as I think as Megan Bodet noted on this podcast recently, you know, the Turkish leader Erdogan tends to take out any insults he feels he suffered, and particularly

election setbacks has happened in the local elections at the end of March on the Kurdish regions everywhere in Turkey, Iraq, Syria. And so we're seeing also crackdowns, as has happened also for quite some time, but on journalists again, sort of cranking up again. It's funny that on World Press Day, which was May 3rd Kurdish journalist was a was a Arrested, you know strip searched a woman thrown in jail and this is you know, another sort of wave of Politicians being arrested just again on Monday

I think 13 politicians were were sentenced to six years plus in jail, in prison. So this sort of policy that seems to show itself every time Erdogan feels a bit threatened is one that we're seeing right now, in part, I think, as a result of those election defeats that his party suffered. Yeah, absolutely. And sinister as it is, whenever they lose in the mountains, they often hit harder in Northeast Syria and vice versa. So it's all just a big kind of ugly game that they're playing. Well, I want to get to some more here, but first we've got to take a quick break. We're going to throw to some ads and then we'll come back and continue this discussion.

All right, we're back. And I'm trying to get a sense of how the situation is on the ground right now, considering the challenges of the attacks on infrastructure that have continued to go on. What are we looking at from a daily life point of view in places like Kamishlo? One of the things that I think is important to emphasize is just how strong a lot of the civil structures really are, even in the face of these attacks by Turkey. I'm sure Arthur will have something to say about that and also about maybe some of the military side of this, but you know, the extraordinary thing about Rojava is just how deeply engaged they are on the civil level.

In our group at the Emergency Committee for Rojava, we're in contact with a lot of people in civil society, and it's, I'm always amazed at how many sort of requests we get for, you know, exchanges of information and scholars and they're building the university there to do more and more technical things, you know, whether computers or agricultural sciences or, you know, just a vast variety, a graduate program they wanna do right now in social ecology that I've been working with them on. And so even though there's this effort by Turkey to kind of terrorize the civilian population,

and I'm sure people can imagine what it must feel like to have drones flying constantly overhead and wondering if you get into a car, whether you might be the subject of a drone attack. Nonetheless, there is still this extraordinary sort of hopefulness and also energy towards building the society. And for example, one of the things that they recently did,

and it took a long time, but they rewrote their social contract, which is what we would think of as a constitution, to empower women even more, to empower various ethnic minorities more, and to make it a document that is truly inclusive in terms of how it was written and how it will be implemented. And so on the ground, I think even though they are suffering in a lot of ways, and they are because, you know, Rojava is also a region that is subject to terrible environmental dislocations because of global warming, there's still a huge sort of excitement, I think,

about the fact that they are self-governing and the fact that they are empowering women. And those kinds of activities, especially on the part of the women's movement, Congress, STAR, just continue to go on. They've built an alternative justice system. They are increasingly turning their sort of economy as much as is feasible, and it's a slow process,

but into more of a cooperative economy. So all of those things are very much underway there. And education is a huge part of that. No, I mean, that's also true. It really is. But just to speak to kind of the other side of that, Robert asked sort of what is life like, say, in a place like Kamyshla right now.

I think in some ways it's a lot like it was when I was in a place called Zirgon, which is another frontline city, where at the same time, Debbie's describing people, life goes on, people trying to build up civil society, they're trying to organize the communes and the cooperatives. At the same time, there's a tremendous fear and uncertainty, fear in an immediate sense around these drone strikes. I mean, you guys have been there too, right? Like I've been home, I think 11 months now. And I still, every time I hear a small airplane, my body just, even if my brain knows that it's

just a plane, like my body's convinced it's a Turkish drone. And imagine, you know, you live your whole life in a place like that, or you've spent the last 10 years. So a lot of people are living in this constant state of fear and uncertainty, even on a practical level. Say you're a farmer and you're going to plant your seeds this year. Do you know that you're even going to have your land in a month or six months? People are taking Turkey's threat of an invasion seriously. It hasn't happened again since 2019, but I can tell you I talk to people there again since 2019, but I can tell you I talk to people there almost every day and they're taking it extremely seriously. So there's kind of this idea of an impending invasion sort of hangs like a cloud over daily life in so many ways. And on top of all of that, of course, since I left

Northeast Syria, there was this major wave of attacks against civilian infrastructure right around the time you were there last, James, you know, and you can probably speak to it more. But I mean, we're talking about power stations and oil wells and hospitals and schools and food storage facilities. So they're still really reeling from these infrastructure attacks. So they're still really reeling from these infrastructure attacks. Cutting off electricity to a million people at a time and water supplies. Which is about a third of the population of the region. Yeah, I mean, you know, war crimes. There's no other word for it.

That's what they're called. Yeah. It's a very jarring experience, at least in my time there, which is much briefer than the amount of time both of you have spent there, to go out in the daytime and talk to people and see this incredible optimism for, we are building a different world. And it's there, and you can see it, and we're moving towards it. It's not like we're building a different world when

we have encampments on campus, too, but this is a tangible societal project. Yeah. Well, and that it speaks to that's why the attacks Turkey is carrying out take the form they're taking, right? Yeah, absolutely. Because the priority, the primary strength of the self-administration is not in its arms, in its ability to provide a functional civil society that people

are motivated to take part in, which is why their primary weapon is to try to destroy the ability of people to live. Yeah. Exactly. And that's what it feels like. My experience with a brief, we lost electricity every night. People are not willing, or people are less willing to go out and drive long distances after dark. There is very clearly damage to the infrastructure. You know, I was in a couple of different places. One of them was having issues getting, yep,

getting water pumped. There are massive funerals, right, for people who have been killed and you get to see this, what is a beautiful spectacle in a sense, but also like, you know, you can't spend a week in Rosier and not see a little baby say goodbye to their dad or just a dead baby. And that's terrible, you know, and like the one thing that I noticed, which I think people might not have picked up on just who consuming media, the presence of people who are like martyrs, as they call them, right? Shahid, it's so it's everywhere. Like from the first place, I stepped foot across the river. You know, there were these portraits, these yellow and green portraits on roundabouts in cities and people's homes.

Like the scale of the sacrifice, both to build this project and to defeat ISIS, I think is very hard. I mean, the United States has been at war for most of our lives, but it has nowhere near the same impact on our day-to-day lives as it has had there. Yeah.

That's so true. There's not a family really in Rojava when you spend some time there and you meet with different people. There's not a single family that hasn't lost somebody. I mean, it's 13,000 people in the fight against ISIS alone. And not to mention, for example, the 200,000 people who were displaced when Turkey's, you know, jihadi militias invaded Afrin, the westernmost region. So it's absolutely a fact of everyday life. Yeah, every time I spend a lot of time volunteering at the border, as people listening know, and every time we meet Kurdish people, often, they're from Northern Kurdistan, which is in Turkey, under the control of the Turkish state, I guess. Even the volunteers who are not super briefed out,

people who just want to help, everyone knows what it means when you talk to people and they have the little green picture or the little yellow picture on their phone. Which is, it's a profound part of the lived experience of being part of the Kurdish freedom movement or just existing as a Kurdish person in that area. And that's, it's really hard to grasp the scale of that. No, it's so true. I mean, it just makes me think that it's kind of related to this larger sort of spirit of sacrifice that's part of what the movement calls like revolutionary personality. You know, in a lot of ways, the families of, you know, what they call the martyrs, they also see it as their sacrifice. It's their contribution to the movement. And

it's easy for, I think, Westerners to kind of, I don't know, dismiss it or get really uncomfortable with it. We're not familiar with that on a cultural level as much. But I think it's a mistake to see it that way. I think there's something incredibly profound about it that has to do with the way that people really identify their whole lives, the meaning of their lives with the revolution, with the movement, that that's what that is the purpose of their lives.

That's the purpose of the life of their families and come what may. That's something that, you know, movements here can't really relate to in the same way yet, I think. Yeah. And I kind of want to talk a little bit more about that. We're gonna throw one last time to ads and then we'll come back and kind of flesh out this discussion.

And we're back talking about like what it means And we're back talking about like what it means to be part of a revolution as opposed to someone who has revolutionary sympathies, which it's easy to be. And we have a lot of those in the United States. I'm going to guess most of the people listening to this show have at least some of those, right? Whether or not you think there's any realistic chance of seeing that during your own life. Yeah.

It's a very different thing from living it, which people do, you know, about 3 million of them in Rocheva every day. And the sacrifice is a part of it. The kind of continual conflict is another part of it. Cause you know, it's worth emphasizing. We're about a decade into the project right now, right? If we consider that being from, you know,

the start of the self-administration in varying fashions. And that's not like, it's not a perfectly even process, right? Because it occurred as part of this series of broader conflicts. But what you've seen is both the retreat of the government that had formerly controlled the area, you've seen a successful war prosecuted against ISIS. You've seen what you could look at as one conflict or kind of a series of conflicts with both these Turkish backed militias and the Turkish military itself. And then this also this continuing conflict, both with the environment, you know, just because that is really a force at work here.

The Cold War, that's not even a really perfect way of describing the situation with the Assad regime and with their backers and their Russian government. It's a complex interwoven series of conflict, but the result is just a life of conflict for the people who are part of this revolution as just a fact of daily life. I think that is really hard to grasp. I think that's true and I think there's this part of it like you say that has to do with this sort of objective situation or the conditions that people are living in this perpetual conflict that you're talking about and at the same time I think there's also an aspect that's more like I don't

know like subjective you could call it that that has to do with the kind of movement that they've really actively been building for themselves and the kind of spirit that their movement has taken on that they've cultivated themselves sort of painstakingly for years. I mean, I think one of the things that I know Debbie and I really want to get to in our conversations in with the speaking tour that we're working

on, which is coming up later this month on the West Coast, is we really, while we want people to be inspired by this revolution, we really don't want people to just see it as this very other thing on the other side of the world. Even those who are really supportive, especially us anarchists or you could say fellow travelers, we have a tendency to kind of maybe oversimplify or romanticize what's happening over there and think, oh well, you know, if the state could just collapse here, I'm sure everybody would just sort of like melt into an anarchist utopia of statelessness. And that would be a mistake too. I think the truth is that what Rojava shows you is a real revolution is incredibly messy and they only were able to kind of face

the threats and the opportunities that crisis brought to them in Syria because of the kind of movement they had built for themselves. And they had these practical tools to kind of help local communities govern themselves in that sort of chaos, in the power vacuum that arose. And in a moment like this, the world over, especially here in the United States, where the crises that we're facing, the crises that we're looking down the barrel of, I think there's been no more kind of relevant

or urgent time to think about how those lessons actually could apply here and what it means for us, what kind of movement do we need to build to be ready for that moment. Yeah, you know, I really agree. And Robert, I'm glad you mentioned, you know, the fact that the revolution is over 10 years old, because I think, you know, and to follow up sort of just on what Arthur was saying, that sort of sometimes the crises that we face, environmental, ecological, global warming,

and not to mention democracy itself, you know, can seem almost paralyzing, or that we're constantly in a state of reaction. But one of the things that the revolution in Rojava teaches us is that, first of all, that moments of crisis can also be moments of great transformation, but really only if we're prepared for them. Exactly. And that's why, you know, whenever I talk about the Rojava Project, I feel it's important to remind people

that it didn't just spring miraculously out of nowhere in the moment of the Syrian Civil War. The folks on the ground there had really been preparing for years, I mean decades even, for the opportunity that opened up for them during the Syrian Civil War. And in various ways. Of course, they were educating themselves on radical history, in particular understanding the

failures of classical Marxism-Leninism, which had been embraced previously by the PKK, and putting also into practice clandestinely the kinds of grassroots democratic social structures that we see operating on the ground there today. So I think that that's one of the lessons that we here in the US can absorb. That we need to be able to exploit the crisis of legitimacy that's growing here today. Yeah. to exploit the crisis of legitimacy that's growing here today by thinking about what kind of alternatives we want to build and showing people that those alternatives exist. You know, those, yeah.

And that includes engaging in a kind of prefigurative politics that really focuses on things like dual power, cooperative economic project, but also local assembly, democratic politics. So that's one of the things that I'm also really excited about talking about as Arthur and I make our way from Seattle down to San Francisco and Oakland during the course of these six presentations and chats and talks and discussions that we're really excited about having beginning next weekend.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's provide people with a little bit of information on how they might be able to attend and take part in that. What should folks look up and look into if they're interested in where you guys are going to be? Absolutely. Yeah, thanks. I think the best thing people can do is go to defendrogeva.org. That's the website for the emergency committee for Rogeva, our group. But right there at the front page, you're going to see a poster for our tour that you can click on. It'll take you to links for all the different stops that we're going to page, you're going to see a poster for our tour that you can click on.

It'll take you to links for all the different stops that we're going to do. We're going to be making our way all the way from Bellingham, Washington, which is up near the border of Canada, down to the Bay Area. And you know, we really wish we could make more cities. There are a couple events that our comrades and colleagues are organizing on the East Coast around the same time frame. So be sure to look up the calendar on our website. But people can go to defendrogeva.org to hear more. But the basic idea, like Debbie said, is we want to talk to people not only about what's going on in Rogeva, why we think it matters, how they can stand in solidarity,

but we want to talk about what we're going to do in our own communities, to take those lessons and apply them to our own context. We want to help connect people who are doing, you know, real community organizing in local movements and to try to kind of inspire and strengthen what's already going on, rather than just

to see this as being strictly about Rojava. Because I mean, y'all probably were told the same thing when you're over there and you ask people what can we do to support, one of the things they'll tell you is you got to organize the revolution at home. And that's on us, you know, it's easier said than done, right? And we're not saying we have all the answers. But what we do want to do is to invite local grassroots activists, especially, to come join the discussion. And let's talk together about what it would mean to apply these basic

principles, not to copy and paste them, but to apply these basic principles and lessons, principles of direct democracy, local autonomy, cooperation, feminism. We haven't even talked about how central gender liberation is to the Kurdish freedom movement. How do we apply these things in our own communities? Yeah. And one of the things, by the way, if people are interested in getting some more detail and a real inside look at what is going on in Rojava in detail is that Arthur has two pieces in the magazine Strange Matters, which is also online,

which are just terrific and they're part of a series that he's gonna be doing, I think, monthly over the next few months. And so that's some great background as well. Aw shucks. Yeah, it's fantastic stuff. Yeah. And so that's some great background as well. Aw shucks. Yeah, it's fantastic stuff. Yeah.

Thank you. Yeah, check that out. Obviously folks, if you haven't, we've also got a podcast series, The Women's War, that covers the earlier history of the Rojava Revolution up to about 2019, late 2019, which covers quite a bit of the impact that this feminist lens has had on what's happening over there and how it's actually persisted under the conditions

that are really almost impossibly challenging when you look at what these people are up against, which is part of, again, I guess, ultimately why as we've repeatedly come back to, I think this is so important for people in the West to study as things get worse for a lot of folks here. As we attempt to arrest and take charge of the situation in our own lives, we have all these questions about how do we stop our government from arming not just Turkey, but all of these regimes around the world that are doing such terrible things. How do we stop? How do we arrest these problems that are continuing to affect really ultimately billions of people

around the world? It's taking charge of our own lives in the same way that these people have. It's kind of making that slogan of the Rojava Revolution, resistance is life, actually embracing that in a way that matters. When you focus on sort of the challenges, like the sheer amount of work that has to be done here, the very primitive state of any kind of meaningful resistance, the relatively primitive state of organizing on the left compared to, for example, the relatively primitive state of organizing on the left compared to, for example, the organizing that the right does in tandem with paramilitaries in the state.

It can seem like an impossible challenge, but 10 years on, the people in Northeast Syria are still fighting. I think paying attention to that makes it clear that it is actually possible to win. So true. Well, I guess that's kind of it for us today. Is there anything else we want to, I just wanted to go out on a better note.

I'm writing a piece for Kurdish Peace Institute. I'm manifesting this on the podcast. So I've actually write it about Myanmar Kurdistan solidarity, which I think is cool. So like- Great topic, yes. Yeah, I don't think we have a lot of time, but I think that one thing that I've learned

from the friends in Rojava is that like, even when you are going through difficulties, you can still stand in solidarity with other people. And God knows we're all going through difficulties in economic and political and state violence terms in this country. And I think that like one thing I really took from that was that it's never too hard for you to be in solidarity. And I hope that folks who are in this country

will appreciate that and be in solidarity with people in the Rocheville as well. Absolutely. Well, Debbie, Arthur, thank you both so much for being here with us. And thank you for continuing to do the work that you do to keep this topic alive in people's hearts and minds. Thank you all so much.

Yeah, always happy. Keep up the great work yourselves. All right, everybody, that's the episode. We will be back tomorrow, unless this comes out on a Friday, in which case we might not be back tomorrow, but we'll be back, you know, Monday. You understand how this works at this point, right?

Yeah. You understand how this works at this point, right? It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

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