Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 132

Episode Date: May 25, 2024

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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. Hello, and welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and how we try to put them back together again. I'm your guest host, Margaret Killjoy, and with me this week is one of your regular hosts, Gare. Hi Gare. Hello.

This week is one of those putting things back together episodes. The premise of this episode is simple. Let's say you're newly radicalized. Maybe you were a participant in the occupations and now the school year is over or you got expelled and you're wondering what the next steps are This won't be an all-in-one guide to how to become an activist, but it's sort of a sketch of one It's also not quite a complete summer 2024 guide to protests, but there's some of that in here, too

It's a magpies guide to getting started in activism. I It's a magpie's guide to getting started in activism. I want to start with my own biases upfront because it's going to inform everything that I have to say about all of this. I'm an anarchist. It's also been decades since I've broken into the movement. I've been doing this stuff since 2002 when I dropped out of college to join the ultra-globalization movement. So I have biases towards things like dropping out of college

because it worked for me. And I have, you know, a lot of my experience isn't recent, at least my direct experience personally, but I've been watching people come into the movement for a very long time. I also have biases against authoritarian organizing and electoral organizing and biases towards direct action and autonomy as models for radical social change. I believe this is how you build a freer and better world

by practicing freedom along the way. But you can adapt this to suit your own interests. That's not to say I have any interest in guiding people towards specific paths, specific actions, specific issues and movements. Exactly the opposite. This is my attempt to kind of give a big picture view of how one might get involved. Right now, I don't know if you knew this, Gare, the world's kind of in trouble. I have heard this before. I have I have heard this said. Yeah. Do you ever like think about how your job is to be a professional chicken little? Yeah, sometimes, I guess so.

Yeah, I mean, I'm definitely in the dredges trying to find what horrible things are always happening certainly. Yeah. I would say even though the world is always in serious trouble, it's like extra in serious trouble right now. And we are in desperate need of people who dedicate their time, whether a part of it or all of it, to trying to stop the terrible things that are happening and trying to build beautiful things and beautiful alternatives.

How do you get started? I want you to think about a couple different things that are separate from each other. I want you to think about, this isn't necessarily you, Gar, although you could, if you want. Sure. Why not? Yeah.

What do you care about? Like what issues are specifically important to you? It's the first thing to think about the second is what do you want to do about it and If you have a sense of that and like also kind of how far you're willing to go If you get a sense of those things before you throw yourself into the fight You're gonna start off strong those things before you throw yourself into the fight, you're going to start off strong. Those things can change. They will change over time. But getting a sense of those ahead of time is a good way to figure out which door you want to go in

and then also to avoid some of the dangers that lie on the other side of any given door. What do you care about? What movements and projects speak loudest to you? A ton of causes are interconnected, of course, right? The fight for Palestinian liberation is not, at its core, a separate project than the fight against policing in the United States, for example. The rise of a global police state is everyone's problem, and so is the US and Zionist imperial project.

Causes are interconnected, but you can rarely start by trying to fix everything. Usually you've got to pick somewhere to start working. You don't climb a mountain by just willing yourself to the top. You climb it by picking a place and then starting to climb it. Maybe you're concerned about the police state or surveillance or the erosion of rights or Palestinian liberation or fighting for prisoners in the US to still have access to books or for LGBT rights or for migrants at the border or for the protection of the remaining national ecosystems and stopping the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure.

Maybe you're concerned about something hyper local, like the destruction of a local park or the sweeping of homeless encampments. Maybe it's something a bit broader and more abstract, like you want to get involved in explaining the need for police abolition. But there's something, there's something that you want to change as a place to start. The second question is, what do you want to do? There's multiple questions embedded in this, there's how far you're willing to go, we'll talk more of that later. More immediately, what is your skill set or what skill sets do you wish you had? Like a lot of times I'll just be like, oh hey what are you good at

now go do that. But sometimes like what you're good at isn't what you want to be doing and it's also totally okay to be like, well what do I want to be good at? Like what do I want to be trying to focus on? What do you have to offer the revolution or what do you wish you had to offer? Are you in med school or have other first aid or medical experience? Maybe you wanna plug in with your local street medics. Are you studying law? Movement lawyers need paralegal help

and there are groups that use volunteers to get people out of jail or through difficult court cases. If graphic design is your passion, this is me referencing a meme from a million years ago and totally winning people over. Every group that exists needs help with their flyers or Instagram slideshows or whatever the fuck. That is certainly the case. Yeah. No, it's funny too, right?

Because it's like, it's one of those things where if you do graphic design, you sort of think like, oh, everyone sort of does this or whatever, right? And then I have been part of groups where people are like, no one knows how to do this at all and everything that we make is garbage, you know? Yeah. Although there is actually a careful needle to thread in this vein because if you've had enough experience, you can kind of figure out what type of action it's going to be based

on how well designed the flyer is. Yeah. And which way? If it's kind of corporate well designed, it's like going to tie into electoral politics and be boring. But if it's hip and well designed, it's a riot. Well sometimes there's sometimes there's some like very like well designed flyers that are not like very electoral, but they're like, okay, this will be a march. There'll be some speeches. We'll kind of walk around a little bit. Because it's like a very well-planned flyer versus when you have like a white background, a big block of text, maybe one poorly cropped picture, you're like, okay, this is obviously a riot flyer.

Yeah, okay, okay. It takes a degree of subtlety to get the instinctual difference when you're looking at a collection of flyers that are going out. No, see, this is interesting to me because in like about 15 years ago, the people throwing the best riots were like a bunch of graphic designers. And so it was the specific hip style. Yeah, not the case anymore. Yeah.

Okay. Okay. Well, you know, and actually as a good graphic designer knows the language that they are speaking with and knows what they are communicating. So that might be what you want to do is get involved in making the flyers. If you spend all day on Twitter, a lot of activist groups can't find someone to run their social media or they have people who run it very badly. Sometimes being an extrovert is a superpower. Building strong movements means building strong communities, and every meeting and party needs someone willing to introduce themselves to the new people and help them figure out where to go.

The best activist meetings I've ever been to have like someone who's there to sit next to new people and explain what's going on. Also, if you can plan a party, you can plan a benefit show to raise money for bail funds. There's kind of this like, like whenever I talk about this, like, oh, everyone has their place and people are like, why don't I'm a fucking bookkeeper? And I'm like, oh my God, we need you. Or like, you know, all kinds of different skill sets that people like don't think apply actually do project manager. Yeah, we're, we're not all instinctively good at that, you know? And so the quickest way to sum this part of it up is you think about what's wrong and you think about what you're good at and then you get together with other

people and apply what you're good at to stop being what's wrong. That is the like one sentence version of how to start getting involved in making the world better. But the last part of it that I want, the like question of it beforehand is risk analysis. It is very easy to get swept up in the moment and go beyond your comfort zone in terms of risk

in a lot of different environments. The more you have sorted out ahead of time about what kinds of actions you're comfortable with strategically, morally, and personally, the easier it is to stick to your decisions when things get hard. For example, you might tell yourself, I will risk arrest, but I will not get arrested on purpose because I have a massage license I don't want to lose or I have kids at home or I'm Undocumented or I don't like the idea of jail whatever your reason is there's plenty of reasons to make that decision You might be willing to risk arrest like being a hectic riot, but you're not willing to lock your neck to a bulldozer

so when you go to the planning meeting for the lock your neck to a bulldozer action and You're trying to figure out who wants to lock their neck to the bulldozer, you've already made up your mind and you're less likely to kind of pressure yourself into volunteering. Or feel pressured by others. Yeah, I'm imagining the positive version. Well, okay, because it's very rarely someone's like, hey, Gare, been a while since you locked your neck to anything. And it's usually more like, man, it just sure would be good if someone was bold and noble enough to just step up right now.

And then... Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I've organized some of my friends' arrests before and it's... It's not always... That's not always the strategy that people want to be doing anyway. I'm just using this as an example, like kind of earth first style thing. If you know what your risk models are, you can make better decisions. Maybe you're fine with a spirited march, but as soon as windows start getting broken, you're

like, you know, I want to leave. That's going to not be my scene. You know, I'm not mad that the people did it, but it's not what I am willing to get arrested in response to. It's also important to know your risk levels, which can of course shift because there are predators in the ranks of direct action activists. I don't know if you knew this, Gare, there's a shadowy unaccountable group that tries to get people to break laws. They're called the feds. They're called the FBI.

They have a history going back decades of entrapping people by coming up with bomb plots or arson plots or whatever. And we're not going to go into this in depth in this episode. But if you want to do more research, people should look up, they should read about COINTELPRO, it's an acronym, or read about the case of Eric McDavid, or read about how the FBI set up Muslim Americans in the wake of 9-11. But another thing you should go into all this knowing is that that doesn't mean that everyone who wants to do those kinds of actions is working with the feds.

Yeah, and you shouldn't go around accusing everyone you don't like of possibly being a secret federal agent. Because you know who likes accusing people of being federal agents? Federal agents. Yeah. And also our sponsors. They don't. They don't. They're all great. They might. They might. I don't know. I can't really speak to them, but here they are.

They can speak to you. And we're back. That is a thing that is absolutely worth anyone who's getting involved in activism, especially direct action activism, including above ground civil disobedience style action. It is really worth understanding the ways in which federal oppression works and how federal oppression works often by the fear of federal oppression and getting people to spread paranoia. And so as a general rule, the way that I've always heard it talked about is that it's like you never want to be like, hey, I think that guy's a fed.

Instead you're like, hey, guy, that kind of behavior is disruptive and leads towards bad things You know like yeah, and I think I even have something hesitation to just be like You should just just go Google co-intel pro and learn all about it because I feel like that can also lead to someone kind Of falling down like some conspiracy brained rabbit holes and like I have gotten the best information by just talking to older people who've like been in the movement for a while. And like just like if someone has like over 10 years of experience and they're like, you can learn a lot about what has happened before through just like actual like in person conversations. And I found that to be much

more useful than just like going down like a Google rabbit hole, because that can just kind of lead to I think slightly even slightly more like paranoid thinking or just it just becomes like less applicable than like, hey, you have like a friend of a friend who's like done this for a while and you just ask, hey, like, what, what do you know about this sort of thing? No, you're right. What are your experiences of kind of facing like repression in the past? This chances are some of them will probably know people who've either turned out to be

like informants has started informing or were were bad actors from the from the get go. Like it's it does it does happen. And there's even been it's not even just state stuff from 10, 15 years ago. There's a lot of that stuff post 2020. Some stuff in Chicago, some stuff in Colorado Springs have gotten decent news coverage. I think you can also look to articles specifically of the Colorado Springs infiltration that the FBI was running around 2020. I think that's a really useful case study for a more recent version as opposed to like the green scare stuff from at this point like 20 years ago. No, no, it's true. And there's a good there's actually a good podcast series

where I liked it called Alphabet Boys. The first season is about that case. No, that's a good point that you that random internet search is not the way to get this kind of information this information like you'll honestly it's kind of funny. I would trust a random zine in a radical bookstore far more than I would trust a Google search result Agreed, which is not true for everything like health care Well, you're gonna get shit answers no matter what if you do that Yes, yes, the internet is gonna tell you of cancer and the zine is gonna tell you that tea tree oil will fix it Yes, there we go. Yeah

And the zine's going to tell you that tea tree oil will fix it. Yes, there we go. Yeah. Yeah, no, that is actually a very good point. And it is the kind of thing that, yeah, the longer you're involved, the more you're just like, oh, yeah, the, you know, my ex who's a snitch. That sucks. Yeah. You know?

Anyway, now you have what you care about, what your skills are in your risk analysis. It's time to get started. How? There's two basic ways and they're not really a dichotomy, but you can plug into something that exists and you can start something of your own. And both are valid and both have advantages and disadvantages. There are structures and movements that are already in place that are desperate for your help.

There's a catch. Many, not all, but many of the more reasonable groups are challenging to break into. Very few groups have a truly open door policy. And those that do, honestly, sometimes are suspect. Yeah. Some of those people are just trying to use you. They're trying to suck you into a political cult or use your energy and burn you out for some vaguely progressive politician or activist cause. So either way, you're going to need to exercise some common sense and do some reading and

research about what you're getting into. The best publicly accessible groups and movements are the ones that are organized from the bottom up. Because the participants themselves have a say in what's happening, there is less ability to be sucked into a cult and used. That's not to say it's impossible. And there are such things as decentralized cults that don't do any, you know. Many such cases.

Yeah. But I know it's easy and convenient to join a group that'll just tell you what to do. It's very nice to imagine that there's benevolent people who will just do the hard part of making decisions and you can just show up and clock in and listen to what they have to say and make the world a better place. This is rarely, if ever the case. I can't point to examples of it being the case.

Movements that maintain everyone's autonomy instead, I think, are what are interesting. And they often do it by not being a group at all, just a movement. The uprisings of 2020, I think, are a brilliant example of this. There's not the group that organized. No, there's a lot of smaller, smaller groups, whether that be some like informal organizations, formal organizations, or just like groups of friends that it was it's made up of a whole bunch of these smaller groups. And I think a lot a lot

of times the best case scenario, in many cases, is if you have like a friend or two, because you shouldn't really show up to things alone, I would say, but if you have a friend or two, go with the friend or two, just like just go to things. And if you go to enough things, people see you, you can chat with people, you can start learning more about kind of what the different mechanisms in each different city and each in each of them seen how how they operate. It's it's it's kind of silly just to be like, No, you just like have to like show up. But like that is kind of a lot of how it works. You'll maybe hear about Instagram account that posts flyers for semi weekly like picnics organized by some of these same people and then you can go to events like that and learn to like socialize.

And it really just does require a degree of just showing up and you shouldn't go by yourself you should if you should ideally have a friend or two that you that is that they would be okay going with you. But then you'll you'll find people to connect and then you'll kind of maybe find a different group of people that you wanna start hanging out with more. And I think in general, that's kind of how the best case scenario works as opposed to like joining like a big above ground organization, which is just gonna use your body as a tool to get arrested as,

or just treat you as disposable. Or in other cases, just be actually kind of like abusive. I agree with that. And that's some of that we're going to get into also but yeah no and I will say overall absolutely it is better to do those things with friends. I didn't. I started going to things alone that has something to do with my temperament and that has something to do with my social standing when I was in college and decided to get involved in the

movement. But overall, that is the best practice. But if you're listening to this and you're like, I don't have friends I can go do this stuff with, there are more risks involved. And you're also kind of stuck. You're going to go to a lot of things where no one will talk to you. Yeah. You know, and you can't necessarily expect that people will talk to you immediately or like, and you're going to have to be a little bit more self motivated. Yeah. And if you're going to a zine fair, you can chow some people at like the tables when you're looking for zines.

Like it's yeah, not everyone's going to want to get into a deep personal conversation with a stranger they met at an event like this, because it also has like security risks. stranger they met at an event like this, because it also has like security risks. But yeah, I mean, it's going to require a little bit of. Uncomfortable social interactions, which for, yeah, for someone like you or me, who did go to a lot of these things just by ourselves, you know, it just it just kind of takes more time. No, totally. And I think actually Zine fairs and things like that and anarchist book fairs and all that are like really good examples of places that are publicly facing that are designed for people to interact with each other. And also like one of the main

pieces of advice that we have is be brave, right? And we talk about that in terms of like street actions, but like, yeah, okay. Also social anxiety. Exactly. Exactly. Because how much of social anxiety will become like an inhibiting factor similar to like the state? Not saying those things are equal, but they can both like inhibit you from doing

things. And it's both. You can you can kind of approach it via a similar means of trying to like overcome this thing that is limiting your autonomy. Yeah. No, totally. So to go back to if you're

joining an existing group. some groups maintain everyone's autonomy by being structured horizontally. Some groups that exist as a structure will do it by being structured horizontally. If you found yourself for exit, go ahead. Claim to be structured horizontally as well. No, it's true. But like, like if you join a local Earth first chapter, you're going to find there's absolutely informal hierarchies that exist within these things and they're like worth being aware of. But the decision about who's going to lock their neck to the bulldozer is going to involve everyone who might lock their neck to the bulldozer.

Yeah, it's not the same as like the DSA or the PSL. Like it's, it's going to be a very, a very different organizational structure. Yeah, exactly. And so, you know, you want to be part of the decision making about locking your neck to a bulldozer because it's your neck on the line. That's my best joke in the whole script. I'm sorry. We'll just move past it quickly. Thanks.

Plugging into an existing project is often a good first step. What I did personally, I started showing up to the meetings of this radical media project, Indy Media. I had film skills and soon enough I found myself in the film collective. I spent a year or two bouncing around from demonstration to demonstration coordinating with all the radical videographers to collect everyone's footage and edit together news videos about what had happened while we collectively fostered a culture of like respectful riot videography. I did not realize we had that similar background.

Oh yeah, no that um it's interesting because I't, I don't do that stuff anymore, but that was like my thing for a long time. Me either actually, but no, I did not realize we had, we had that, uh, we had that overlap. Yeah. No, and it was, it was great and it was fun. And we, you know, we taught how to not film people's faces. We coordinated runners where in order to get footage out before the cops could get it, we'd make sure everyone, you know, someone,

every videographer had someone next to them, like ready to run out of the situation. Take this SD card and run. Yep, exactly. And I started off by joining an existing group that was doing this, but within a few months I was doing it independently and coordinating with different groups that came together

at all these different summit protests because I was a known entity to people, you know? Sure. It was fun. I dropped out of school where I'd been studying film and photography and even before I would have graduated, a film I'd edited sold out a movie theater in Portland. We didn't have YouTube, so we organized in-person.

Okay, that makes sense. Yeah. We didn't have YouTube, so we organized in person. Okay, that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, when we shut the city down on like March 20th or whatever, 2003, to try and stop the Iraq War, I like didn't sleep and just edited everyone's film footage together and made

a like 30 minute documentary about the day of protest and sold out a movie theater and I was like damn this was way better for my career than going to fucking stay in school. I mean like my name isn't on it but that like didn't matter to me. And then everyone the the local news media got really mad because I um I didn't include the stuff that could have been used in people's court cases like the time that people attacked cops on the bridge because I was like nope that's too. We don't know what's happening there. Anyway. And getting into certain types of groups is kind of like applying for a shitty job. A job that'll take you without reference is going to treat you like shit. But jobs that are worth having

require you to somehow have already been doing the job before you got hired. And once people know who you are, it's easier to find folks to got hired. And once people know who you are, it's easier to find folks to work with. And I think Gare Suggestions is like the main way you go about that is you don't necessarily show up to organize, you just show up to participate. You show up to talks, you show up to radical bookstores and public events and zine fairs and protests

and whatever interests you, you know? And I would say that if you're going to actions and you're new, remember to be both brave and cautious. If you tend towards recklessness and being swept into things, maybe make sure you take less of a front line's role until you get your legs underneath you. But it really is okay to be brave. I think we're asked by the times we live in to be brave,

and sometimes we're going to have to step outside of our comfort zone. We should just always look to make sure it's us encouraging us to step outside of our comfort zone instead of political actors, whatever political ideology they call themselves. And also if you can another collective that people, you know, these are usually like medic collectives, maybe they'll have like a radical media collective. Another one will be a jail support collective is very common in a lot of cities. And not even if you don't want to take part in that, if you can at least get in touch with them to fill out a jail support form before going to things that will also be useful in case you do end up getting arrested so people can actually find you in

the system and help you get out of get out. Just another another quick tip, I suppose. Yeah. And if you want more quick tips, I've got some for you right now. [♪ Music playing. [♪ Music playing. And we're back. Don't do anything that you just got told by voices that aren't me, I care. They were trying to Psyop you. It is, it is, yeah. Yeah.

Another way that you might get involved in something is you, some groups are semi-open where you can contact them and express interest and they might do some basic screening to make sure you're not like a Nazi infiltrator or whatever. I'm in the process right now of doing that with clinic escorting. It's like funny because I haven't had to like prove myself to any group in a long time, right? Cause I'm like, I've been around forever. The clinic escorting group is like, we don't fucking know who you are. Like, and I'm like, yeah, that's fair.

Um, yeah, no, absolutely. I live in a place is not where abortion is like not particularly popular with the right wing. And so I submitted my name and social media accounts to the, um, to the abortion clinic escorting place. Um, and then we'll go to a training at some point soon. For folks living in Southern California or willing to go there, for example, there are groups that do border solidarity, working with refugees to make sure they're fed and housed.

If you listen to this podcast, you've heard James talking about this. Unless it's the first episode you've listened to, in which case go back and listen to James talking about border solidarity work. If you want to show up and distribute food and water, track border patrol activity, build shelters, do first aid, all of that, feel like you're part of something because you are and are like saving people's lives directly, that's something you can likely get involved with. But it's not something you just show up at. There are a few groups doing that work, any of whom you can reach out to and express interest. There's Border Kindness, there's Borderlands Relief Collective, and El Ultralado.

And there's other groups like this in different areas, but these are the examples where I asked James being like, hey, how do I explain the following concept? In general, you want to look for groups, if you're looking for groups, you want to look for groups that are grassroots and non-authoritarian. You want to watch out for electoral campaigns and you want to watch out for nonprofits. This is not to say that the people doing these things are necessarily bad. There are local political campaigns that matter and there are nonprofits that do good work. Some of the best political work I ever did was two years at a nonprofit, honestly, but I got, I was with one of the good ones. And structurally those systems, even the good ones, are set up to take advantage

of people's energy and then like kind of profit off of it, right? And to accomplish goals that are often tangential to, or even counter to the goals that they claim. For example, both politicians and nonprofits live off of donations. These donations are easy for them to get when those groups are seen as necessary. So a nonprofit has a financial interest in not winning. Some nonprofits manage to maintain their focus and make themselves work to make themselves obsolete. But frankly, those are the minority.

You also want to look out for groups that are front groups for authoritarian groups attached to communist political parties. You mentioned earlier like the PSL, the Party for Socialism and Liberation. Generally speaking, these groups will go to protests and run events primarily as a way to recruit people into a hierarchical structure. These groups are often trying to control broader movements that they're involved in. They'll tell people how they can and can't protest. And they're trying to essentially own movements that were built by others.

So those are things to be careful around. You can also just not worry about any of that stuff and start something yourself. It is not the easy mode to get into the movement by starting your own projects. We're gonna talk about affinity groups later actually was the thing that you kind of started to bring up. But it's very rewarding to start your own projects. It's like freelancing instead of looking for a job. There's no gatekeepers to cross and the only person who's trying to take advantage of you is you. If you wanna never not be working another day in your life,

you can freelance or start your own political project. It'll be what you think about every hour you're alive. In essence, the idea here is to say, okay, what's wrong and what are we willing to do about it? And then get together with your friends and start doing something about it. This can look like anything. You could start a mutual aid group, a radical bookstore, an anti-fascist gym to train to defend yourself from fascists, illegal HRT distribution in banned states, a direct action abortion collective,

a zine distributor that goes to shows and parties with free literature about anarchism, a podcast about how things fall apart and how to put them back together again, a clique of saboteurs who attack billboards, a group that draws attention to international movement prisoners and support them. Like, you can do anything. And that's one of the, like, things that people... Our society is designed to tell us that we can't just do anything we want. There's obviously things that if we do, we'll get in trouble eventually. But like, you know, okay.

Like if you make a podcast that's too good, they will turn on you like Jesus. Yeah, exactly. Or if you go around, you know, wanting to destroy construction equipment. Right. Not usually legal. I'm not a lawyer. I can't tell you whether or not any given bulldozer is illegal to destroy. That is the kind of research you might have to do on your own.

The difference between start something and join something is often blurry. For example, you can unionize your workplace. You probably should, but you might want to do that in the context of an existing union, like the industrial workers of the World or whatever union makes the most sense. Or the Writers Guild of America. Yeah, exactly. If you have a podcast about how the world's falling apart. Yeah, exactly.

If you're going to start something above ground, it's worth looking around and making sure that the need isn't already being met by someone else already. Sometimes it's better to figure out how to help an existing bail fund rather than start another. But also sometimes it is better to figure out how to help an existing bail fund rather than start another. But also sometimes it is better to start another. Like it's harder for the police to raid, for example, which didn't used to be an issue when you start bail funds. But is now an issue. Which is worth pointing out that like there's no true safety. You know, like when we talk about risk analysis, like running a bail fund is entirely legal

and is the kind of thing that often is done by the people who care about a movement and are like not front lines people. Yeah, wanting to do felonies in downtown Portland or whatever. Yeah. The more successful a movement is, the broader the state repression will reach out to the fringes, not the fringes, I mean, the bail fund isn't the fringe,

but the less- The periphery. The people who aren't committing the felonies are going to get tagged with felonies anyway, because the state being repressive is the reason we're fighting it. They will still get their houses raided. And it's the same thing at demos. You don't need to be the one breaking windows for the police to tackle you. Like at a certain point, it actually doesn't,

it seems to matter very little. I mean, if things get to trial, then things, you know, will maybe matter a bit more. But in like, how police display the power of the state, like out in the open world, it really doesn't matter if you're holding a sign or you're holding a hammer when you're getting tackled from behind by a big man with a gun. Yeah, totally. Which is why it's like kind of worth. I mean, that's like almost like what the the answer to that is like solidarity. And by recognizing that to a certain degree, if you were at a protest and people are breaking windows and it's like okay well now we're all in danger together and if that is a danger beyond what you

particularly feel like exposing yourself to that is probably the time to depart another pitfall to avoid if you're starting your own thing any group that involves money will at some point have someone from that group steal the money. Including bail funds. Unfortunately, it does. It does happen and it sucks. Yeah, I have lost count of the number of times someone who was an organizer has stolen all of the money from this or that thing. And that's because capitalism puts people in absolutely weird and terrible positions, right?

It's still not okay for people to steal the bail fund and we should stop them. But often the people who steal this stuff, if they're the organizers, they don't even necessarily conceptualize what they did as stealing. They're like, oh, I'm going to pay that back. I don't think anyone needs it right now. I just need it for rent. In order for the bail fund to continue, I have to have stable housing. So I'm going to use these two thousand dollars right now.

And yeah, right. Without checking with the rest of the group and like, you know, like. And so. If there's money involved, you should set up some best practices around multiple eyes on the money at any given point and making sure that it's accountable to the broader group. One organizing model that is worth considering is the affinity group. This is basically you and some of your closest friends that you feel like doing safe with actions with whatever the scale of actions you get together with your friends or people you're not even necessarily Like social friends with but people you feel comfortable working with because there's sometimes is a distinction Like you said sometimes you have a lot of close friends You don't want into your affinity group But sometimes there's people in your affinity group that you may not really want to hang out with like every week Totally, but they're good to work with. No, that's that's a really good point

It's about trust rather than like getting along with sometimes, you know? Yeah, it might function better if you know, you don't all hate each other. Have some affinity, yeah. Yes, you know, perhaps you have a shared affinity within the group, ideally. Yeah. It is, if you're in a riot, whether by choice or by accident, you are safer and you can feel more comfortable if you are there with two or seven of your closest and most trustworthy friends or frenemies. These are the people who are the most likely to de-arrest

you. These are the people who are there to notice if you are caught and will organize your bail. These are the people who will be in direct, you'll be in direct communication with during the protest so you can coordinate your actions together. It's figure out how you want to get into the area, get out of the area. Yeah. And so that's like a... Going alone is sort of expert mode, and so you should take fewer risks if you go alone

until you are good, you know? And most people do not prefer and do not are not better off going to protests alone. And then the final thing, kind of tying together the existing groups versus whatever else, existing protests. Movements ebb and flow. Protests are contagious, especially when they're rowdy and they show that they take themselves seriously enough to not just go along with whatever professional protest managers tell them to do and take themselves seriously enough to

resist the police and authorities. It's more or less impossible to know which protests like sparks will catch a bigger fire. It is good and useful to cast sparks and see what catches or to notice when something is starting to spread and to help it spread. Like what happened a few weeks ago with the campus stuff, right? Exactly. One or two places really start popping off and you're like, hey, I know some people in college who are in whatever town I'm in.

Maybe we can figure something out. Yeah. And so if that's if that was your involvement and you're like, oh, that's not currently happening where I am anymore. What do I do next? Things like that will happen again. And you can also make things like that happen. Most of the time they will not catch. However, sometimes they do.

And that is like kind of our job in a lot of ways is to organize things and try things and see what catches. I'm curious your take. There are two political conventions happening this year. The Republican National Convention will happen from July 15th to 18th, 2024 in Milwaukee. And then in August 19th to 22nd in Chicago is the Democratic National Convention. There are basically always protests at these conventions. To me, and I'm a little bit out of touch with it,

There's going to be more this year. Yeah, that's what I'm thinking. Yeah. There certainly will, I think, especially at the DNC. I don't have much to say on this at this point, besides read up on the previous ones that have happened. You can go all the way back to 68, if you want to read about Chicago and the DNC.

But also, like the RNC protests from the Iraq War era, I think would be really useful to look at. If you want to go back to like 2008, and see how those protests were. I would just recommend reading up on it. I don't really have much else to say on those in the moment. They're too far out. Totally to forecast. Yeah, and I yeah, I that's kind of all I'll say that at the at the moment. These, yeah, I, that's kind of all I'll say at the moment. These will become recurring topics on this podcast the next few months. Great. Yeah.

And so keep track of what's happening and get ready to go to what you feel comfortable with and don't be afraid to be brave, but don't let anyone trick you into doing stuff that you're not comfortable with. But we need you. We're glad you're here. Yeah, don't don't be so down that the school year is over. And these campus protests only had a few weeks to live. I know there was certainly people who were really hoping that after we saw, you know, what happened during April and May that maybe this would, you know, trigger things happening off campus around the summer. And maybe they still will. And at the very least, we have a lot of young people, listener possibly included, who like experienced their first

example of like, actual state violence like on them. And that can be a very radicalizing experience. So yeah, don't be so down that maybe your occupation didn't go as well as you wanted to, maybe you're protested in, but I think there's a lot of lessons to learn from what happened the past month and they will become applicable possibly this summer, possibly two years from now, who knows? Like it's hard to say, but yeah, it's... whenever you get that first hint of tear gas, you kind of become a different person in my opinion. So congratulations to everyone who did that. Hopefully didn't get arrested. And if you did, hopefully you have

a jail support crew that is helping you out. The other thing that I think that people never really recover from isn't the right word. The first time you see the police retreat, Totally. You recognize that this thing you have been taught is completely unassailable. The reason they're building cop cities is they know they are assailable and they want to be less so. Well, listen to this podcast and that's the only place you will ever find anything useful. That's the final.

I mean, I wouldn't say that. Yeah, I know. I get it. I get it. But there are other podcasts out there. There's a lot of books, there's a lot of zines, there's a lot of sketchy no-blog sites which may sometimes have misinformation

and sometimes have good information. Yay. And you could certainly check out. Margaret, I've heard that you yourself have a few other podcasts. What? I do? Well, if you want to hear a lot of the history around some of the stuff we talked about, including like the Co-Intel Pro stuff, for example, I run a podcast called Cool People

Who Did Cool Stuff on this very network, Cool Zone Media. And you can listen to it every Monday and Wednesday. I just finished a very long, but I swear entertaining, series of episodes about the Russian revolution and the Civil War. I did an episode about the burglars for peace who exposed Co-Intel Pro by robbing an FBI office in the middle of the night in the early 70s, and all kinds of other stories.

So you can listen to that. Or if you wanna know more about the end of the world, I help run a podcast called Live Like the World is Dying. So you can listen to that. Or if you want to know more about the end of the world, I help run a podcast called Live Like the World is Dying. Comes out every Friday. And that one is Prepper But Community. Yep. There we go.

And I have a book coming out. It comes out in September. It's called The Sapling Cage. And it's going to be kickstarted in June. And if you go to Kickstarter, you can sign up for announcements about that. And it is the best book I've ever written. So you all should read it. Very excited to see that.

That does it for us, that it could happen here. We will probably see you out there. Good luck. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

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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. Especially when it comes to black women, the way we lean on our mothers, our grandmothers,

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Nice. Recently, I've been researching and writing on education and anarchism. Honestly, it's one of my favorite topics to look into, and it's one of the topics I think I'm most passionate about. Yeah, that's definitely a hot topic within this political field. There's a large variety of opinions, one might say. For sure, for sure. I mean, consciousness does form the basis of revolution,

and there's a long history of anarchist struggle around education, whether it be in terms of critiquing its role in social control and socialization, or discussing youth liberation, or talking about the inequalities of the current education system, or the influence of statist, capitalist, religious ideologies, or the whole discussion around sex education. These are all things that I guess I've looked into discussed and so it's to wrestle with. No, it's interesting because anarchists have like, I believe the largest number of people who are like very like militantly like anti school, but also have a really high number of people who become teachers. So it's always kind of interesting when you're ever at like an anarchist gathering, you have like half the people are like school teachers. The other half are like, destroy the schools.

It's just always just a little bit of music. Yeah, for sure, for sure. So it's really, I think people have to deal with that sort of tension. I guess find themselves in those sort of tensions, but then they also find themselves, put themselves in those positions, in part because they see the potential of those positions, you know, in sort of shape in the future. But I don't mean to mislead anybody, this episode is only tangentially related to education. Okay. Yeah. So basically in my research on education, I stumbled upon this article called Anarchism in Education and Early Republic in Cuba from 1898 to 1925.

And also I found some other work on anarchist Cuba in general. And this is all thanks to the scholarship of Cuban R. Schaffer. And I mean, for some time now, I've been meaning to dig deeper into the history of anarchism in Cuba. Dare I say, I think it's been forgotten. And so I took a dive into it. I first started with Stephen Jay Hirsch and Lucien Rande Waltz's work in anarchism and syndicalism in the colonial and post-colonial world.

In my research, I also found the work of Sam Dolkoff and Frank Fernandes, both of whom were apparently highly influential in the scholarship, the historical research and the present understanding of Cuban anarchism. It's thanks to their research that we know what we know, bringing all those different things together, all those different sources together. So So here we go. Aqui vamos. Let's discuss the history of Cuban anarchism. And our story begins in the early 19th century. You know, the sun on colonial Cuba cast in a long and heavy shadow across the vibrant streets of Havana. The gentle salty breezes carried.

I'm trying a new thing. I see a facial expression. I'm trying to set the scene. Feel those salty breezes carrying the scent of tobacco and coffee and sugarcane. But let's not get too romantic. This was a plantation society where African slaves remained in chains and toiled under the hot sun, while many of their contemporaries gained their freedom and plantation owners navigated the web of politics and power. Cuba was among the last countries to abolish slavery, and the Cuban aristocracy, being

uniquely loyal to the Spanish crown, was primarily responsible for the persistence of that institution. They were dedicated to Spain long after much of Latin America had won their independence. And despite the aristocrats' loyalty, there were still whispers of liberation and revolution in corners of the city. In 1857, just nearly two decades after the French radical, Père Joseph Proudhon, declared himself an anarchist and a mutualist, the first Proudhonian mutualist society would be founded in Cuba, marking the early beginnings of the organized labor movement on the island. A decade later, in 1865, lecturers or readings, places where political ideas would be read

in cigar factories, became very widespread, considering the predominance of the tobacco industry. In the same year, the first strike threat would occur at a tobacco works in Havana, leading to successful negotiations for increased wages. In 1866, Havana-based artisans would establish the first evening school for workers, laying the foundation for worker-based education. Between 1868 and 1878, conflict would erupt into violence, as the sugar mill owner Carlos Manuel de Suspires and his followers proclaimed independence, beginning the first of three

liberation wars that Cuba fought against Spain. The first uprising, led by wealthy planters, would be known as the Ten Years War, followed by a second uprising, the Little War from 1879 to 1880. Meanwhile, the Cuba's anarchist movement would look to establish another workers school and a newspaper. These efforts were led by cigar makers Enrique Roig de San Martin and Enrique Mesonier in Havana.

Roig San Martin founded the Centre for Instruction and Recreation. Its purpose was to defend worker organisations and distribute anarcho-collectivist literature from Spain. The doors of the centre were open to all Cubans, regardless of their social position, political leanings, or colour differences. Greg San Martin also took the position of editor at the newspaper El Obrero, co-opting it from the Democratic Republicans and turning it into an explicitly anarchist newspaper. The anarchist and tobacco industry were pioneering the emerging labour

struggle, bolstered by the transportation of anarchist periodicals from Spain to Cuba and the transmission of ideas by Spanish immigrant workers. The first regional centres, clinics, secular schools, mutual aid associations, and free associations of tobacco workers, typographers, carpenters, day labourers, and artisans were emerging thanks to the influence of Proudhon's ideas. While some in the labor movement were preaching reformism and collaboration with capitalist interests, the anarchists stood firm in their rejection of submission to the feat of capital. In 1885, the Junta Central de Artesnos was founded to unite Cuba's workers in federations.

In the same year, Enrique Masonier launched the Circulo de Trabajadores, or Workers' Circle, which was focused on educational and cultural activities. The Workers' Circle became the largest labor organization in Cuba in the late 1880s. It hosted a secular school for 500 poor students to challenge Cuba's public and religious schools, it held rallies for groups of workers, and it led anti-nationalist and anti-racist education efforts. Anarchists were also challenging discrimination in labor and immigration policies. By 1886, Spain finally outlawed slavery, and the Cuban anarchists would attempt to welcome Afro-Cubans into their labour organisations. With mixed success, and we'll get to that

soon. In 1887, Rodríguez San Martín launched El Productor, a weekly newspaper that would become a must-read for the working people of Cuba, and to coordinate its publication and the efforts of the various workers' groups, the workers founded the Alianza Obrera, or Workers' Alliance. With the founding of the alliance and the sponsorship of another organization, la Federacion de Trabajadores de Cuba, or FDC, or Federation of Cuban Workers, the first Congreso Obrero de Cuba would be held in Havana. A majority of the members of the FDC were tobacco workers, but members of other trades also participated like tailors and drivers and bakers and barrowmakers

and dock workers. So that's a lot of organizations in quick succession. So to summarize, we have the Center for Instruction and Recreation, the newspapers El Productor and El Obrero, the Junta Central de Altesinos or Central Union of Artisans, el Circulo de Trabajadores or Workers' Circle, la Alianza Obrera or Workers' Alliance, and la Federación de Trabajadores de Cuba or FDC, which held the first Congreso Obrero or Workers' Congress in Cuba. All these organized efforts would spark another strike. Remember, the first threat, which did not lead to a strike, took place in 1865. But this time it was different. In July 1888, the tobacco workers called a strike at the Henry Clay Tobacco Factory in Havana. The workers' circle met and agreed to begin collecting donations to

support the workers out in the streets, and sent delegates to Key West in Florida to solicit aid from the tobacco workers there. The Worker's Circle was very much involved in a lot of these things because they actually had a large headquarters that coordinated the offices of many workers' associations in addition to the school that I mentioned they founded. They had their fingers in a lot of the associations and solidarity efforts that were taking place. By 1889, they founded yet another school, teaching over 100 men at night and 800 children during the day, alleging to the establishment of new schools across the island.

And also in 1889, those same tobacco workers in Key West called their own general strike, due to poor working conditions, low wages, and stark living conditions. And guess what? They stood in solidarity with the Cuban workers, and the Cuban workers stood in solidarity with them. The Workers' Alliance, also connected with workers' organizations in Florida, and fostered the solidarity between workers in Florida and Cuba. In addition to Key West, strikes would also break out in Tampa

and Yabor City. Despite some violence and the expulsion of the strike leaders, the strike in Florida ended in early 1890 with a triumph for Florida's tobacco workers, as the owners acceded to the demands for a pay increase. On May 1st, International Workers Day, over 3,000 workers marched through Havana, And in this time, the workers' circle was continuously expanding. But within this year also came tragedy, as in August, Enrique Roig San Martin died at the age of 46. And the last of the three conflicts against Spain would be the Cuban War of Independence, which raged from 1895 to 1898. Anarchists in Cuba, New York, and Spain debated support for Cuba's independence struggle.

But despite concerns, most anarchists did support independence, seeing it as an anti-colonial fight against Spanish imperialism and an opportunity to transform the island along anarchist principles. and an opportunity to transform the island along anarchist principles. Figures like José García, Rafael Serra, and Adrián del Valle promoted anarchist internationalism while also seeking Cuban national liberation. The final three months of that conflict escalated with US involvement, becoming known as the Spanish-American War. And following Spain's defeat, the US briefly occupied Cuba, with the promise of greater autonomy in the future.

Of course, we all know how that promise turned out. With repeated interventions came growing anarchist opposition. The US occupiers overhauled the Cuban education system and introduced a new model influenced by American principles, emphasizing liberal arts, manual instruction, and civic education to republicanize the children of Cuba and promote democracy. In spite of some reforms, the Cuban education system still suffered corruption, inadequate infrastructure, and overcrowded classrooms. In 1899, just a year after independence, the Workers' Alliance organized a Mason's Strike, which extended into the construction trade

and also led to several arrests and the overall repression of the anarchists. This is a persistent theme, of course. Yes. I mean, it's interesting how, like, in a lot of like the political stuff we learn about Cuba, it's more based on like the socialist and more communist struggles of the 20th century. And I knew that there were like anarchist sect of before that, and even during that time period as well. But there is a lot of this that seems to be not nearly as talked about or emphasized as the later, more socialist leaning struggles that came. Basically any of the pre-Marxist victory history of anarchist involvement tends to be diminished or erased entirely.

Yeah, yeah, like in literally every struggle all across the world where that's happened, that does seem to be the case. Exactly, exactly. When I found this information, my mind was blown. I had no idea all of this was going on. The fact that from as early as Prud'hans lifetime, there were anarchists in Cuba organizing associations. I mean, come on.

Yeah, in like the 1850s. And it gets bigger. A lot more takes place. I haven't even really breached the 20th century yet. That's when things really kick off. Let's get to that after this message from our sponsors. All right, we are we are back. Let's let's return to Andrew's discussion of anarchism in Cuba. Yes. So also in 1899, some new anarchist projects dropped onto the scene. You had the Liga General de Trabajadores, or General League of Workers,

which emerged with the backing of Messonnier and another anarchist, Ramon Rivero y Rivero. And also the publication, Tierra, which was founded by anarchists Abelardo Saavedra and Francisco Gonzales Sola. And the publication El Nuevo Ideal was also founded, but it only lasted a couple of years. Notably, it loudly opposed the US's plans for annexing Cuba and the introduction of the Platt Amendment to the Cuban Constitution, which would provide pretense for US intervention in the future.

The Platt Amendment was really that point in the Cuban Constitution that would justify US invasion and involvement for years to come. Here's a little easter egg, a little fun fact, a little cameo. In fact, you could call him a running cameo for the anarchists worldwide. A familiar face because he showed up in Havana in this year and he also showed up in Egypt during their anarchist struggle for those who'd remember that episode. Any ideas who? Trying to think of this time period who? At this point you could call him Mr. Worldwide. The anarchist Mr. Worldwide. Yeah I don't think so. I think I would only make a fool of myself.

Yeah the one and only Erico Malataster arrives in Cuba. Oh okay. Okay that makes sense. That makes sense actually. Yeah yeah yeah, okay. Okay. That makes sense. That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Mr. Woodwhite, of course, I didn't take long before he was barred from speaking in public and he very quickly had to leave Cuba, but he was there. He did show up and let me reach the, you know, the turn of the century, right? Just after the turn of the century on May 20th, 1902, Just after the turn of the century, on May 20th, 1902, the First Republic of Cuba was inaugurated with the recognition of the US. But despite the severe opposition, the US retained influence over Cuba with that Platt

Amendment. With independence, many Cubans aspired to build a more egalitarian nation. The Cuban anarchists continued to struggle even as they were becoming disillusioned by the continued prioritization of individual profits over society well-being, the repression of labor, and the terrible educational systems. They had their first truly general strike in 1902, known as the Apprentice Strike, but it was suppressed and failed, and with its failure, leading figures in the Liga General de Trabajadores like Mesonier and Rivero y Rivero retired from the labor struggle.

A year later, in 1903, anarchists organized in the sugar industry, which was met with a violent response from the owners, including the murder of two prominent anarchist figures, Casañas and Montero. The year before the US recognition of Cuban independence in 1901, just across the pond in Spain, Francisco Ferrer had founded his first modern school. Ferrer is an icon in the sphere of anarchist education for his pioneering efforts. As anarchists in Cuba were condemning public schools for their condition, pedagogy, patriotic indoctrination, and lack of critical thinking, they were inspired by the alternative education rooted in rationalism and free inquiry that was introduced by Ferrer.

At this point, is there like a decent bit of communication between the anarchists in Spain and the anarchists in Cuba? Because all the stuff you've been mentioning sounds very like reminiscent of some of like the anarchist-syndicalist models that would grow to more prominence in Spain in the coming decades. Oh yeah, for sure. And this feels very similar. There's a very large Spanish immigrant community in Cuba at the time of Spanish workers. That would actually end up biting the anarchist movement in the butt later on. And you'll see how. Okay. end up biting the anarchist movement in the butt later on.

You'll see how. There was a lot of cross-pollination between the Spanish anarchists and the Cuban anarchists. In many cases, they were both Spanish and Cuban. And so when Frere Popso with this school in Barcelona and in other places in Spain. I mean the Cuban anarchists had already been organizing education before as their program had always sought to raise consciousness and prepare for social revolution. But Ferrer offered that extra dose of inspiration. His modern schools introduced things like free play and individual liberty and really inspired the founding of educational experiments across Europe, Asia and the Americas. In 1905, Jovino Villar opened Verdad, a co-educational primary and secondary school in Havana, following

Ferrer's principles of free inquiry and individual liberty. In 1906, the CES school was established in Regla, embracing the advanced pedagogical perspective methods of the Spanish anarchist schools. And that very same year, 19 1906 the US intervened in Cuba again. You know they couldn't even let a decade go by of independence before they say nah we're stepping in. You know so of course in response strikes break out in Havana, Ciego de Avila and Santiago de Cuba. Anyway so that's going on and anarchists are also organizing speaking tours. Anyway so that's going on and anarchists are also organizing speaking tours. In 1908 anarchists formed the group Educacion del Porvenir or Education of the Future in Regla, which sort

of established modern schools across the island. The Liga General de Trabajadores also got involved in the group's efforts. Unfortunately, internal conflicts and financial difficulties undermined the initial wave of anarchist schools in this time. Meanwhile, private school options, particularly of the religious variety, were proliferating across Cuba. Eventually, in 1909, Ferrer was arrested and executed by Spanish authorities, which actually triggered a protest in Cuba and also triggered resistance elsewhere in the world. They would simultaneously seek to advocate his ideas further and to honour his memory.

Turning now into the 1910s, it was a very eventful period. The Mexican Revolution was occurring, which inspired Cuba's workers and peasants, the Mexican Revolution was occurring and that inspired Cuba's workers and peasants. There was actually, just as there was cross-pollination between Spanish anarchists and Cuban anarchists, there was cross-pollination between Cuban anarchists and Mexican anarchists. You know, anarchist Ricardo Flores Magón, a titanic figure in the Mexican Revolution, actually had a stand in relationship with the Cuban paper Tierra, as the paper was critical of the Mexican dictator at the time, Porfirio Diaz. So while the guns of the revolutionary

Emiliano Zapata were firing in Mexico, tobacco workers, teamsters, and bakers were striking in Cuba. In 1912, a congress was formed in Cruces with the aim to create an island-wide labour federation. But another significant event occurred in 1912. You see, all this time, Afro-Cubans were playing significant roles in the island's labour movements, particularly through strikes such as the 1899 Mason Strike and the sugar workers' struggles. Despite this, they were dealing with a lot of political and cultural persecution, and faced high illiteracy rates, job discrimination, and disenfranchisement due to literacy and

property requirements for voting. Naturally, Afro-Cubans wanted to fight against this, so they formed their own political party, the Independent Party of Colour, or PIC, and the government quickly outlawed it, which triggered several violent attacks on PIC supporter meetings throughout 1912. It was essentially a race riot, and it killed as many as 6,000 Afro-Cubans, and resulted in another 900 thrown in jail and charged with rebellion. And in this time, the anarchist response was weaker than it could have been. Writers like Adrian del Valle and Eugenio Leante pressed the importance of education

and the good upbringing of children to root out the racist attitudes that led to the massacre. Writers like Adrienne Delvalle and Eugenio Leante pressed the importance of education and the importance of a good upbringing of children to root out the racial attitudes, the racist attitudes that led to the massacre as those attitudes were still present a mere generation after abolition. The anarchists were, as would be consistent with their principles, critical of the PIC's political approach of bourgeois elections, but they did admire Afro-Cuban culture and recognized their contributions to Bukka's liberation movement.

But as far as I can tell, they didn't do much else beyond education to combat racist attitudes, likely feeling powerless to prevent the violence of 1912 due to their own repression by the state. And of course, it isn't a binary of Afro-Cubans and anarchists, as there were Afro-Cubans in the anarchist movement, including prominent figures like Rafael Serra, who remained active until the 1940s, the printer Pablo Guerra, and Margarito Iglesias, who was the black anarchist leader of the Manufacturers Union in the 1920s. Still, despite this overlap, the anarchists still couldn't shake their perception as whites and foreigners. Which is still a dynamic at play today with anarchists.

As people often frame anarchists all as like white teenagers, I guess, and will often discount the presence of black anarchists and other anarchists who are people of color. Yeah, I'm a bit at a loss as to what I could say, like from this armchair position that they could have done differently in 1912. Sure. They definitely could have stepped up and tried to defend those communities and to start with those communities in solidarity. But at the same time, I wasn't there in 1912. So I'm not sure what, how things played out.

But I do think that while their heart is in the right place with education to root out racist attitudes, you know, consciousness raising is one thing, but you really do have to, you know, put yourself on the line when it comes to defending marginalized groups, especially if you're coming from a position of relative privilege, being white or being Spanish in, you know, recently post colonial Cuba, barely even post colonial Cuba, you know? Yeah, I mean, I'm in the same position as you here or even further possessing an inability

to try to critique from the 21st century. But do you know what I do feel comfortable in calling? Is this next ad break. Alright, we are back. Let's return to our discussion of anarchism in Cuba in the 1910s. So in 1913, as was spoken of the repression of the anarchist movement, the food president of Cuba would step up, that is, General Mario Garcia Menocal. During his reign, the government would ramp up the repression of the anarchists with the passing of anti-anarchist laws and the closure of anarchist organizations. There were crackdowns against the radical activities from 1914 on, and the suspension of the terror publication and the deportation of many anarchists.

Of course, in spite of the repression, the anarchist movement began to recover by 1917, with the Centro Obrero or Worker's Centre being established in Havana, leading to a resurgence of anarchist education and organized activity. Between 1918 and 1919, four general strikes would break out in Havana, and the US sent a flotilla in response to the disorder. The government suspended constitutional guarantees, deported even more anarchists, and closed the Centro Obrero. Around this time, you also had the anarcho-naturists which I really didn't know where to fit into all of this so I'll just put them here to give you a

preview from the repression. Anarcho-naturists. Yeah yeah so take this as like a breath of fresh air from all of the repression against anarchists by the state you had the anarcho-naturists. That's what I haven't heard before are these like old-timey green anarchists I guess? Mmm no. I'll actually be the judge of that. I'll actually be the judge of that. It's like actual like naturist philosophy. Yes. Oh, weird.

Yes. The naturist movement was developed in Europe and North America during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And it focused on alternative personal health and lifestyle practices, such as adopting vegetarianism, exercise, nudism, and small village life to combat the effects of industrial mass society. Okay. So there is like little tidbits of like anarcho-primitivism, of like what would become anarcho-primitivism in here. But it's definitely not like a one-to-one overlap. Yeah, yeah, especially not in Cuba.

In Cuba, the anarchists aimed to shift the nature's movements focus away from primarily individual health concerns to an emphasis on social emancipatory themes. So by 1910, you had lectures on the Therese Moe, and although it didn't have the broader emancipatory dimensions initially, later in the decade the movement would gain momentum and the naturist association would expand to establish branches across Cuba and even Tampa, Florida.

Huh, okay. Now, Anacronauturism in Cuba wasn't too big on the nudism aspect of the naturism, but they did emphasize the vegetarian self-sufficiency against the reliance on capitalism and sought to learn and teach alternative medicine to help people deal with the health problems brought about by factory and field work and toxic living conditions. Okay. and field work and toxic living conditions. I know the Anaco-Naturists actually lasted well into the 1950s, so good for them. But let's get back into the timeline. If you know anything about history, you know what significant event takes place in Russia

in 1917. The Russian Revolution would reverberate across the landscape of workers' struggles for decades to come. In the next episode, we'll see how the Bolshevik's rise would shape the anarchist movement in Cuba, leading up to the rise of Castro, as well as how anarchists have endured since then. Until then, I'm It Could Happen Here, and this is Andrew at home. All power to all the people. Peace. Last season, millions tuned into the Betrayal podcast to hear a shocking story of deception.

I'm Andrea Gunning, and now we're to hear a shocking story of deception. I'm Andrea Gunning and now we're sharing an all new story of betrayal. Stacey thought she had the perfect husband. Doctor, father, family man. It was the perfect cover for Justin Rutherford to hide behind. It led me into the house and I mean it was like a movie. He was sitting at our kitchen table. The cops were guarding him. Stacey learned how far her husband would go to save himself.

I slept with a loaded gun next to my bed. You know, I'd just say I wish he was dead. He actually gave details and explained different scenarios on how to kill him. He to me is scarier than Jeffrey Dahmer. Listen to Betrayal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A new season of Bridgerton is here. And with it, a new season of Bridgerton the Official Podcast. I'm your host Gabrielle Collins, and this season, we are bringing fans even deeper into the ton. Colin Bridgerton has returned from his travels abroad. Is betrothal

written in the stars for the eligible bachelor? Meanwhile, the ton is reverberating with speculation of who holds Lady Whistledown's pen. We're discussing it all. I sit down with Nicola Coughlin, Luke Newton, Shonda Rhimes, and more to offer an exclusive peek behind the scenes of each episode of the new season. Watch season three of the Shondaland series on Netflix. Then fall in love all over again by listening to Bridgerton the official podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. every Thursday. Like our 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 Cut Out From Here. I'm Andrew Siege of the YouTube channel Anturizm. I'm again joined by Garrison YouTube channel Antrism. I'm again joined by Garrison. Say hello again. Hello again. See? See what I did there? Very, very good. Very original and very funny.

Fantastic. So last time we were discussing the forgotten history of Cuban anarchism. I mean, took you by surprise. It did. Took me by surprise. And I think it's taken some of the audience by surprise too. You know, the fact that from the very first cronium mutualist society in 1857 to the rise of the anarchist organizations, to the strike activities, to the schools, to even the anarcho-naturists, all of this was going on from the mid 19th century all the way into the early 20th century, even in the height of repression in the 1910s. And the cycle of US

intervention as well. I guess I'm kind of curious about in this time period is like, before like the socialist revolution, were like the anarchists more prominent than some of the actual communists? From my research, it does seem so, yes. Yeah, that's kind of what it sounds like. They were kind of the main political block for almost 75 years. Well, things do make a turn.

Yeah, the main political block on the left like the like the left specifically, I guess, like if you count anarchism as part of the left, which mean for the case of simplicity, let's say, sure. I don't know. Yes, but. Me personally, I wouldn't be caught dead adhering to like French political taxonomy, but. No, totally. But in terms of its relation to like labor especially especially in this time period of like what you mean I just like being difficult sometimes absolutely I mean yeah that it is I agree with you in a lot of cases

but from my like a historical standpoint it kind of makes sense when like all these almost all these people are like anarcho communists or anarcho-syndicalists oh I mean you did have the anarcho-nat did have the Anarcho-Naturists. And the Anarcho-Naturists, there you go. The three genders. And I mean, second, the mutualists as well. I mean, honestly, the divide, the stringent divide between the anarchist schools of thought wouldn't really come into play until we get into like the early 20th century.

So which we are entering right now. Yes, which we have entered. So where do we leave off? We left off on the Big Bang. There was the Russian Revolution. Remember, I said that things will take a turn. That is the turn. The Russian wizard has been killed.

Sad. Indeed. I promised to discuss how the death of that Russian wizard would impact Cuba going forward into the 1920s and beyond. So here we are. Once again this infolds thanks to the work of Cohen R. Schaffer, Stephen J. Hirsch, Lucien van der Waal, Sam Dolgoff, and Frank Fernandez. So in 1920, the anarchists formed a congress to advocate a series of immediate and transitory

economic measures to resolve the high cost of living brought about by the decrease in sugar prices. Because remember Cuba's economy was dependent on sugar, and tobacco and coffee. They also formed the confederacion nacional de trabajo, the Confederación Nacional de Trabajo, or National Confederation of Workers. Following the Bolshevik victory in Russia, it took a minute for the world to find out what happened to all the anarchists in Russia. I mean, it was the 1920s, they didn't have Twitter.

But in the meantime, the anarchists sent a fraternal salute to the brothers who in Russia have established the USSR. Which is interesting in retrospect. That is interesting. Yeah, it's like, the whole thing coming. It's exciting for the time though, right? Like you're seeing like this thing finally happen. You're like, oh, we have like a we have like a real chance. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I feel like it's like a two panel meme, you know, it's like the, the,

the victory before the, yeah, very much. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, I mean, they knew that the anarchists, what they did know, of course, was the anarchists had a visible and vital role in that revolution. Absolutely. Reality that is unfortunately forgotten today, but very well known back then. So with the rise of the Soviets, it seemed as though the dream of three generations of

struggles against the injustices of capitalism and the state had reached its conclusion. Again, they didn't know what happened to the anarchists in the Lenin yet. Their attitude of jubilation toward the success of the Bolsheviks would of course change very shortly. But the anarchists in Cuba still had some hope in unity though, despite some debate amongst themselves about aligning with the Marxists in Cuba. See, at the time, the anarcho-syndicalist movement was leading the formation of labour organisations and federations, with figures like Alfredo Lopez and Antonio Pinochet, largely in favour of cross-sectarian alliances and collaboration in the promotion of alternative education projects. After the Congress of 1920, Cuba's workers pressed their demands with renewed force,

in solidarity altogether, leading to bombings in Havana and another general strike on Médé. Figures like Péniché and Salinas were jailed and a bomb was set off in the Teatro Nacional in protest. Though initially condemned to death, Péniché and Célest were eventually pardoned and released at the beginning of 1921 with the fall of García Menocal's government. This is when Alfereo Zayas' moderate government came into power, and this is when the Anarcho-Cyndicalist Federación Oprera de la Habana, or FOH, or Workers' Federation of Havana, was founded.

The Workers' Federation of Havana inaugurated its Rational School and Library in 1922, aiming to counter public and private education's emphasis on religion and patriotism. In 1925, the Second Congreso Nacional Obrero is celebrated in Cienfuegos, and the Confederación Nacional Obrero de Cuba, or National Confederation of Cuban Workers, or CNOC, is founded by Anarchist syndicalists in Camagüey. The CNOC was a big tent organization, so although it was initially led by anarchist syndicalists, there were reformist and Marxist elements in there as well, and you'll see the results of Big Tent organization very soon. Also in 1925, the Partido Comunista Cubano, or PCC, was founded in Havana.

And in 1925, there was a strike among railway and sugar workers which would provoke government repression, and in 1925, Gerardo Machado would be elected to the office of presidency. Now, pay attention to the PCC because they become relevant again later on. They're gonna be a recurring character. Yes. So, President Gerardo Machado's administration vowed to suppress worker militancy, leading to another crackdown on foreigners and radicals, including the anarchist schools, and marking another decline of the anarchist movement's influence.

But despite repression under the Machado dictatorship, anarchists continued to agitate, with some fleeing into exile and overall refusing to cooperate with the government. They founded militant groups such as Espartaco and Los Solidarios and later the Federacion de Grupos Anarquistas de Cuba, or FGSE. They engaged in street fighting against the government and also in several failed assassination attempts against Machado. I don't know what it is with Cuban leaders, but they seem to have trouble getting assassinated. So while the anarchists, and I would like to give them the benefit of the doubt, presumably some Marxists were engaged in such resistance, and I say presumably because

I didn't… they were into focus of my research. But from what I could see was the anarchists who were engaged in such resistance. Anyway, that's tangential. The operatives of the Popular Socialist Party, or PSP, chose to make compromises with the various dictatorial governments in order to be allowed control of the labor unions as well as some other perks. Well that doesn't sound like it could result in any problems. Yeah so lock in here okay. The PSP would later be absorbed by the Organizaciones Revolucionarias Integradas which would later be absorbed by the Organizaciones Revolucionarias Integradas,

which would later become the Partido Unido de la Revolución Socialista de Cuba, which would later be refounded as the Partido Comunista Cubano, or PCC, aka the Cuban anarchist part, Cuba, the communist part of Cuba. So there's like this weird loop happening here. Yes, yes. So the PSP would go on to become part of the PCC, even though when they were initially founded, the PSP and the PCC were separate organizations. Totally. Okay. So coming into the 1930s, starting with 1930, a streetcar strike led to a general strike

Starting with 1930, a streetcar strike led to a general strike backed by almost all of the unions. The strike failed unfortunately due to poor planning by the CNOC which had come into the hands of the PCC. You see, with the continuous deportation, exile and murder of anarchists by the Machado government, the Marxists in the CNOC, who had been taking orders from the PCC the whole time were told, okay, now is your chance, take advantage of the situation, the anarchists out of the way, let's take over the CNOC. So in 1933, another transportation strike breaks out in Havana which leads to another general strike and further violence, and the PCC use their control over the CNOC to make a deal with Machado to end the general strike even though they were

not the ones that started it in the first place. Making a deal to end a strike that they didn't start. Indeed. Very very cool stuff. Now, they call this real politic power move the August era. But to me, that's way too soft considering what they did. You see, it wasn't a mere whoopsie. You know, the PCC ordered the striking workers to return to their jobs. And they tried to work with Machado's murderous secret police to make that happen. No, it's just like counterinsurgency. Thankfully, the PCC's attempt to sic Machado's dogs on the striking workers failed

due to the resistance of the anarchists of the Havana Federation of Labor and other organized labor forces. It's funny how, like, it's not the same things happen now, I guess, but very similar things happen. Well, you have like these like big, like above ground kind of orgs that will try to make concessions with, with like, whether that's like, like police or with like whatever kind of institution that people are like opposing. You'll have these big like, you know, big groups try to make concessions and it's always left to the anarchists to be like, no, we actually have to keep fighting. This actually doesn't the sort of the sort of like attempts at calling like victory or trying to end things actually is not what you claim it to be and we have to keep going. And it's is something that always falls back on like some of the more anarchist aligned contingents in popular struggles. Yeah. And I see why the why the old anarchists get a bit jaded and crotchety, you know,

because you see these failures happening again and again. Like, why are you cheering? You know, like you have not won. You know, this is not a victory. This is the precursor to squad wipe to like absolute defeat, you know? Yep. Game over. But unfortunately, some people have to burn to learn. It seems. Unfortunately, until we speak more prominently of the mistakes of the past, more honestly of the mistakes of the past, instead of this sort of whitewashed, oh, the glorious revolutionary

movements of the past, oh, you know, like, wow, so cool. Until we start to like engage honestly with our history and like the mistakes and whatnot, these kind of things are just going to continue to happen, you know? And that's why I also appreciate, you know, the sort of honesty that anarchists have where they'll be willing to call, I mean, not all, you know, especially new anarchists tend to be more defensive, but, and I appreciate the willingness to call out like what the CNT did in Spain that was wrong or what the black army in Ukraine did that was wrong, you know. We don't have to follow along like the party line. Sweeping like you have to defend their honor.

Yeah, exactly. We don't have to like follow along the party line in the same way that all these other groups seem to do. There is a much more open consideration towards critiquing things that even you feel like you can like learn from and you feel like we're like, like struggles like struggles worth learning from and struggles worth fighting for. But you don't have this the need to be like, you have to defend every single thing that X person did because it's like it gets it gets very weird when you have these like 19 year old communists who are like, no, Stalin's good actually. Which is a whole other topic, but yeah, even in like

smaller scale things, just the resistance to having to adhere to the party line on a lot of these topics when you just don't have a party. So it allows you to be way more open in your consideration of what has worked, what hasn't worked. Yeah. Free association for the win. I don't have a funny ad pivot based on free association, but here's some ads that you can freely listen to if you desire. Alright, we're back. So the very same month that the PCC tried and failed to call off a strike that they never started in the first place, Machado was forced from office by a military coup

backed by the US, working with several political factions, including the PCC. So the PCC was kind of playing both sides. They were like, yeah, let's, let's work with Machado. And then that's also like help overthrow Machado. Interesting. Huh. Very interesting. Yeah.

So that coup along with the 1933 revolution it was part of, resulted from the opposition of the Cuban people to President Machado's attempts to keep himself in power, with flames further fanned by the widespread misery caused by the economic collapse of 1929. Anarchists were of course participants in the strikes and the revolutionary actions during this time. Military forces and student activists were also very much involved. So Carlos Manuel de Cisperes y Quesada came to lead a provisional government, which led to the installation of a new government led by a five-man coalition known as the Pentalki of 1933. But after only five days,

the Pentalki gave way to the presidency of Ramon Grau San Martin, whose term became known as the 100 Days Government. For obvious reasons, it only lasted about 100 days because it decided to defy the US and remove the Platt Amendment from the Cuban Constitution, and it also introduced the 8-hour workday and tried to intervene in the American owned electrical and telephone utility companies. But before you celebrate that government as a champion of the working people, it also contributed to the suppression of the Cuban anarchist movement, which had a significant foreign-born labour base, with the introduction of the 50% law, which forced owners to reserve at least half their jobs for Cubans.

That law prompted many of the Spanish anarchists to return to Spain, where a civil war would kick off rather soon. So the leader of the revolt against the 100 days government was Sergeant Fulgencio Batista, who became the head of the armed forces and began a long period of influence on Cuban politics. The sum of 1933 obviously marked the end of the cooperative relationship between Cuban anarchists and communists. You know, because of the whole PCC sickening machinist dogs and the anarchists and all that. Yeah, I could see that being non-conducive to a working partnership.

It's a toxic, toxic situation, you know. They'll have to co-parent the labor movement separately. Anyway, so yeah, violence would erupt between the two groups. The Federacion de Grupos Anarchistas de Cuba, or FGAC, published a manifesto denouncing the treacherous actions of the PCC in collaboration with Machado. In 1935, the PCC exposed its alignment for all to see. See, after Batista basically told the PCC, yeah, don't call a general strike, after the PCC tried to call a general strike, the PCC was like, okay, we won't call a general strike. And then the PCC adopted

Moscow's popular frontline and basically aligned themselves with Batista. And what's interesting is, you see, but what Batista desperately needed to like secure his legitimacy was an electoral base. Basically, he needed a large group of people to say, yeah, we back his leadership. Sure. He needed some form of like legitimacy. Exactly.

And so the PCC, in aligning themselves with Partista, they created that electoral base for his growing electoral ambitions. You see, he started off as a president before he became like a full-on dictator. Many such cases. Many such cases. And one of the historians I was telling you about, Fernando Fernández, he wrote that the PCC actually offered Batista a deal, putting all of the machinery of Cuban and international

communism at his service, and it promised to deliver votes in the coming elections, which Batista badly needed. In exchange, the PCC was to be given the recently government created Confederación de Trabajadores de Cuba, the CTC, the Cuban Confederation of Workers, and the CTC was basically meant to be the largest, most centralized, labor organization in Cuba, one that would combine all of the existing factions. Okay, that, yeah, yeah, yeah. And unlike the previous umbrella organization, which as you may remember was the CNOC, the

CTC was meant to be ideological, it was meant to marry unionism to the state, it was meant to be under the control of Batista through the PCC from the very beginning. You know, the CNOC started off being led by anarcho-syndicalists, but it was big tent, it was like, you know, bringing all the ideologies, but no, the CTC is like, yeah, we are... Explicitly state aligned. Yeah. Meanwhile, you know, in 1936, the Spanish Civil War would erupt and you know, the Cuban anarchists who, in solidarity with the Spanish anarchists, would establish the Solidaridad Internacional Antifascista to aid them. And some of them even went to Spain to participate.

But by 1939, with the defeat of the Spanish Republic, surviving Cuban anarchists returned to the island. In the 1940s... It's interesting because when they returned they also returned with a lot more like experience as well. Indeed. I wonder if that will lead to anything. We'll see. Curious. So in the 1940s over 100 delegates met at the Mortazo Ranch to establish the Associación Libertaria de Cuba, or ALC. Since the Stalinist-dominated CTC had purged anarchists and other militant labour activists, the ALC was formed to challenge state control and Stalinist influence within the labor movement. The ALC held a congress attended by 155 delegates in 1948. In that congress, they discussed the creation of a libertarian society in Cuba, and they

established the Solidaridad Gastronómica, which was a publication meant to serve as their official organ. Carlos Prios Socaras assumed the Cuban presidency in 1948 following the presidency of Ramon Grau San Martin because he actually got another chance to be president after the 100 days government and then he had a few filler presidents after that and then you had Batistas run as president. But anyway, so Prio becomes president and the anarchists try and fail to create a new labor confederation, the Confederación General de Trabajadores, or CGT, and it was meant

to be independent of the CTC. But unfortunately, thanks to reformist elements, the Stalinists and the government, it suffered under an extensive propaganda campaign against the initiative in both the Cuban communications media and in the officially approved unions. But despite everything, the anarchists were enduring on the grassroots level, and there were anarchist militants scattered everywhere and anarchist propagandists in every provincial capital. By the way, it is interesting that the Stalinists would gleefully purge the anarchists to appease

their own thirst for power earlier in the decade, considering that they themselves would be expelled from their posts in the CTC by the government under US pressure. Preo declared the PSP illegal, motivating the Stalinists to ally themselves yet again with their old buddy, old pal, Fulgencio Batista. In 1950, the ALC would hold another congress, aiming to reorganize the Cuban Union movement against its control by bureaucrats, politicians, cults and religionists. The congress repudiated the CTC and dedicated itself to maintaining the CGT's struggle in spite of President Priot's repression. In 1952, Batista took power in a coup, and the ALC joined other revolutionary groups

in armed resistance to the dictatorship in the cities and the countryside. Despite facing imprisonment, torture and kidnapping, they challenged Batista's role through propaganda distribution, clandestine activities, and coordinated sabotage efforts. They even worked with groups like the Directorio Revolucionario, the Federation of University Students, and elements within Castor's group, the M26J. The M26J, by the way, despite taking credit for everything, had little to no involvement in many of the uprisings that took place in this period. They tried at one point to call a general strike, but it was badly organized and uncoordinated with other revolutionary groups, so of course it failed.

Meanwhile the ALC's meeting hall not only distributed information and coordinated sabotage efforts, but even taught some of Castro's fighters how to shoot firearms. Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. By December 31st, 1958, also it's very sad that they would teach some of Castro's fighters how to shoot firearms considering, you know, the direction those firearms would be shooting in very soon. Yes, that is tragically ironic.

Yeah. So, December 31st, 1958, Batista flees Cuba, marking the end of his regime and the beginning of a new era. As Castro's revolutionary government gained power, tensions would rise as he consolidated control and marginalized dissenting voices. Any hope anarchists had for social change following 1959 would be crushed by the increase in centralization and bureaucratization of the government. Further purges of anarchists from the CTC, which by the way they renamed the CTCR, as

in CTC Revolutionary, and they also militarized it. They forced a bunch of the workers to create militias. And with Castro's public alignment with Marxism-Leninism, the suppression, the revolutionary tribunals, and the exile of anarchists and other dissidents. In January 1960, the ALC held an assembly and expressed support for the Cuban Revolution while rejecting dictatorship everywhere. By the end of the year, they would publish the final issue of their publication, Soledad y Dad Gatsunomica.

The ALC fell under government pressure. And unlike previous Cuban governments, Castro's regime was extra bloodthirsty with the working class and peasant dissenters. That same year, the Grupo de Sindicalistas Libertarios issued a document criticizing the Cuban government's direction, fearing the increasing totalitarianism. They had to change their name to avoid reprisals, as the PCC's organ, OI, responded to the Grupo de Sindicalistas Libertarios document with insults and accusations. That same year, the Movimiento de Acción Sindical began circulating a bulletin critical to PCC and Castro. They too would be suppressed. After the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, Castro's government intensified its suppression

of opposition, including anarchists. The anarchist movement also bore a terrible betrayal, as Manuel Gaona Sousa, a prominent anarchist, betrayed his comrades by endorsing the Castro regime and denouncing the anarchists who opposed it. Some anarchists would end up in prison, some would flee to Florida, where they would unfortunately be grouped with the Batista supporters who had also fled to Florida at that time, and an international solidarity effort emerged, with donations from various anarchist groups worldwide to aid Cuban anarchists' escape.

The anarchists that fled to Cuba formed the Movimiento Libertario Cubano en Exilio, the MCLE, or Cuban Anarchist Movement in Exile, and continued to advocate for anarchist principles through publications like Guancarara Libertaria. The New York-based Libertarian League, led by figures like Sam Dorgoff, provided critical support to these exiles. But you know what really sucks? The Cuban anarchists had to struggle to garner support from their fellow anarchists around the world thanks to the propaganda efforts of the Castro regime. The Cuban anarchists were smeared

as CIA agents, which is, if you may recall, still a favorite tactic of campus authoritarians. Interesting. Yeah, interesting to see how it's literally the same. Yeah. In fact, one anarchist group in South America, the Federacion Anarchista Uruguaya even split between pro and anti-Castro factions. The pro-Castro majority went on to join the Marxist Leninist Tupamaros in Uruguay. Eventually, the Federazione Anarchica Italiana, the FAIT, organized a conference in Bologna in 1965 to address the confusion among anarchists globally regarding Cuba. They came out of that conference condemning casteurism and expressing support for Cuban

anarchists, but despite the efforts of Abelardo Iglesias to present the Cuban anarchists' viewpoint, many anarchist groups in Europe and Latin America still aligned with casteism, viewing criticism of the regime as opposition to the broader socialist revolution. But despite the skepticism of their peers and the refusal of some anarchist publications to even hear them out, the Cuban anarchists continued their activism in exile. They published works denouncing the casteism regime and sought to clarify their position within the global anarchist movement. Back in Cuba, the remaining anarchists dwindled in size, as most had either left or rotting in prison.

In the 70s and beyond, the Cuban anarchists faced isolation and defamation. They still accused this day of being in service of reaction. It's only with Sam Dolgoff's book The Cuban Revolution, A Critical Perspective, in 1976, that attitudes began to shift, leading to a gradual reassessment of the MLCE within the anarchist community. In 1979, the MLCE renewed ties with the Anarchist Confederación Nacional de Trabajo, slash Asociación Internacional de los Trabajadores, the CNTAIT, during a congress in Madrid. Subsequent publications and articles further

clarified the MLCE's position on caste-rism, marking the end of a long and damaging chapter of… derision against them. In 1980, Cuanara Libertaria emerged as a new platform for Cuban anarchists in exile. Initially cautious in its advocacy due to the hostile political climate in Miami, Guangara gradually became more explicitly anarchist and critical of both Castro's regime and the reactionary exile community. It played a significant role in challenging pro-Castro narratives and fostering international solidarity among anarchists. As of recently, as in the 21st century, the Taller Libertario Alfredo López Libertarian

Workshop has published a few pieces on anarchism in the Cuban context. They even took part in the creation of the Central American and Caribbean Anarchist Federation. And before anyone asks, I haven't found a way to get in contact with them yet. The recent decentralized protests in Cuba sparked a deluge of conflicting narratives from various sources. Where on one side, Cuban authorities and leftist supporters defended the regime, blaming the economic crisis and health challenges on the US blockade while treating Cuban critics with one broad reactionary brush. On the other hand, you had the right-wing media criticising the lack of freedoms under the communist government. While amidst this, anarchists sought a deeper understanding.

Seeking neither alignment with the US nor the Cuban government, but seeking understanding of the needs of the people frustrated by the pandemic and the failures of the government. The condition that Cuba is in now obviously is due to the impact of the US's blockade, which should be lifted immediately. But it shouldn't be missed that the government uses the blockade to divert attention from other matters, where it does deserve significant critique. Emergency measures were eventually implemented to appease the protesters, but it remains to be seen what the outcome of that frustration of the people will be in the long term.

As Francisco Fernandez wrote in Cuban Anarchism, The History of a Movement, hopefully there are those in this generation who will take up the legacy of their forebears so that the roots of anarchism that are now buried in the fertile Cuban soil will once again spring to life. Anyway, this has been the forgotten history of anarchism in Cuba. This has been It Could Happen Here, and this has been Andros Age. happened here. And this has been Andrew Sage. All power to all people. Peace. Last season, millions tuned into the Betrayal Podcast to hear a shocking story of deception.

I'm Andrea Gunning, and now we're sharing an all new story of deception. I'm Andrea Gunning and now we're sharing an all new story of betrayal. Stacey thought she had the perfect husband. Doctor, father, family man. It was the perfect cover for Justin Rutherford to hide behind. They led me into the house and I mean it was like a movie. He was sitting at our kitchen table. The cops were guarding him. Stacey learned how far her husband would go to save himself. I slept with a loaded gun next to my bed. You not just say I wish he was dead. He actually gave details and explained different scenarios on how to kill him. He to me is scarier than Jeffrey Dahmer. Listen to Betrayal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

A new season of Bridgerton is here. And with it, a new season of Bridgerton the Official Podcast. I'm your host Gabrielle Collins, and this season we are bringing fans even deeper into the ton. Colin Bridgerton has returned from his travels abroad. Is betrothal written in the stars for the eligible bachelor? Meanwhile, the ton is reverberating with speculation of who holds Lady Whistledown's pen. We're discussing it all. I sit down with Nicola Coughlin, Luke Newton, Shonda Rhimes, and more to offer an exclusive peek behind the scenes of each episode of the new season. Watch season 3 of the Shondaland series on Netflix. Then

fall in love all over again by listening to Bridgerton the Official Podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe to catch a new episode every Thursday. 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 where my old bookstore from college is unionized and I'm very excited about it. I'm your host, Mia Wong, and with me to talk about this tremendous event are Caleb, Theo, and Finn from the Seminary Co-op Booksellers Union. Yeah, welcome to the show. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having us. This is so exciting.

Yeah, thank you. Yeah, I'm excited too, both because I think somehow in the most that I got almost three years I've been doing this show now. Jesus Christ, that is terrifying. Somehow. I think this is the first bookstore union we've talked to, which is remarkable. I don't I don't know how it's taken this long, but I'm so excited that you all get the y'all the first.

I mean, as far as we know, we're the first in the city of Chicago. Hell, yeah. We're the only in the city. There are like past bookstores that have since closed, which were unionized. But yeah, as best we know, we're now we're currently the only union bookstore in the city of Chicago proper. God, maybe there's one up in Ed Evanston or something, but seems unlikely. This is I don't know. I've been I've been drilling.

I've been drilling the Evanston knowledge into my listeners heads now. So now all of you people in Rhode Island or whatever know about my hatred of Evanston. I think it's an extremely fair grudge. Okay, so speaking of grudges, all right, the Seminary Co-op is, it's an interesting bookstore in the sense that like, it is on the campus of the University of Chicago. Like, it's just sort of there. And there's been a lot of things happening on that campus in the past month or so. But yeah, I guess what I wanted to, I guess the place I wanted to start was sort of, okay, so UChicago is a campus that has a lot of union organizing happening on it in a bunch

of across a bunch of different kind of, they're mostly university unions, but a lot of different all different kinds of workers in the university have unions. How did that sort of impact the way this campaign started? That's a really good question. I feel like there's a few things I want to talk about. The fact that a lot of us booksellers who come to the Sem Co-op were coming from, many of us came from UChicago or had been there at some point and had been around that kind of organizing. So I think that that definitely us know people because so many of us are in the community. We all know a lot of people who are organizers, a lot of people in the grad student union, and having them to talk to and kind of like bounce ideas off of and commiserate all of that has been really great. the rate, all of that has been really great. Yeah.

And like, I think it's been very emboldening to know that we have that support, you know, because we have friends and comrades and roommates in GSU, in faculty unions, you know, the kind of the whole time we've known that like, if we ever need to draw on that external support for any kind of public campaign, that we have a connection to a broader labor of movement in the area that'll be there for us. This is something I guess you've already touched on a bit, but I think this leads into another question that I had, which was, yeah, I wanted to talk about the sort of the influence of campus and how the dynamics of that kind of change what these campaigns look like.

It's really interesting because our relationship to campus is a little bit unclear to us in terms of the way that the bookstore functions in relation to its university partners because we work with them very closely. They're our landlord, among many other things, but we are not directly affiliated with them and we carry course books, but that's by professor request and we can't always do it. And so it's a really close, really opaque relationship. I think the university really likes to have a bookstore that isn't like university affiliated on paper, but still very much is a part of the culture of the university. And so we see a lot of that kind of inform things like our stock and the events, the professors that we work with, and of course, like the students who come in and use the space and are physically in the space every day doing work, buying their books.

It's always weird to kind of doing organizing in these spaces because like, I don't know, you're dealing with this mixture. Well, UChicago especially is like this where there's this really kind of weird and volatile mixture of like a bunch of on the one hand, like a bunch of very brave, very committed, like people who are doing organizing, a bunch of on the one hand, like a bunch of very brave, very committed, like people who are doing organizing, a bunch of people who are just completely checked out and then a bunch of people who are going to go lead coups in South America. And I don't know.

It's so that was my experience back doing actually. God, I was I was on the GSU picket line like how kind of that was that was half a decade ago. Jesus Christ. All right. This is this is turning into the the the Mia thinks about our time at U Chicago, which it shouldn't. Yeah, but that's something that is notable, too, is that like we have a lot of community support when it comes to people who are theoretically in favor of unionizing and theoretically in favor of labor power. And that extends all the way through our management team.

Like they are very, very in favor of the concept of labor rights. And so it's really interesting trying to parse that dynamic sometimes of like, okay, these are people who are supposedly our biggest supporters, but at the same time, their actions do not very well line up with those ideals. I think having a section at our store that is devoted to critical theory and Marxism, while not paying us a living wage is a real funny situation. The irony stings real hard. Yeah, it's this real read the theory. Do not act on it, but read the theory. It's been real fun. During your course book rush seasons, we have Semcoop trading cards with pictures of different authors. It's always really fun handing out the ones that are like, Karl Marx like Semcoop trading cards with pictures of like, different authors.

It's always really fun handing out the ones that are like, Karl Marx, Semcoop's number one bestselling author. And no, it's definitely not because every freshman at University of Chicago has to buy him from us. Yeah, that's another that's like kind of unrelated really funny thing. But yeah, like all of the U Chicago econ dipshits at least nominally red marks like did they open it? Low odds, but yeah, I don't know that that seems like a psychologically destabilizing contradiction that you're dealing with all the time. That same kind of like contradiction between like spirit and practice, just like it's also

right there in our name where we're the Seminary Co-op bookstore and like two-thirds of that is not true. We haven't been affiliated with the seminary in decades. We were for a time a member co-op like REI, but we've never been a workers co-op. We haven't even been a member co-op, like REI, but we've never been a workers co-op. We haven't even been a member co-op since 2014. We are a bookstore, so there's like that, but... The old one in three ain't bad thing simply does not apply here. That is in fact very bad. Well, and I think that that is like a very big part of how the larger community sees

our stores as well and the mismatch there. Because yeah, of course, we're on the UChicago campus. We are very much connected to the student body and the faculty there. But we're also in the middle of our neighborhood where there are plenty of other people who are not affiliated with the college who are coming in buying their books. There's the fact that like our second location down the street, 57th Street Books,

which has like our kids sections and like a bunch of other less academic stuff, like that's very heavily trafficked as well. And the community's understanding of us as a like worker owned not for profit, which is a very confusing term because it's not a nonprofit, it's a not for profit. That disconnect between what the community needs and wants in its bookstores and what the management has decided our bookstores mean to the community is felt. That's like a very felt mismatch. Yeah, so I'm assuming that that's sort of the kinds of things that I mean, obviously the standard not getting paid enough, etc, etc. Are those those are sort of things that led into how the organizing started? Yeah, I think it's a lot the way that like the mismatch is so apparent to us. And it really

brought us together. Like we have such a unique sense of solidarity as a working cohort, I feel like there's a lot of commiseration because we walk a very weird line throughout our community and so I think it's a little bit just trying to assess what's going on in our stores and like what how does that compare to what management tells us on a regular basis and shouldn't we be doing something about that? Yeah I think that I I know that our first big pre-union meeting where we all got together in the basement of one of our houses and commiserated was after a pretty rough all-store meeting that we had had in which we had continued to get really no response regarding questions about a living wage

or how we choose stock for our store, how communication between management and hourly booksellers was just so lacking. And we just got the same kind of messaging that was being given to customers, which is we're working on it, you're all of these things that you're saying are so valid and we'll address them at a later date. Yeah, we were getting this great response of like, you know, we want to get you to not just a living wage, but a professional wage and we have a five-year plan, but we were halfway through that five-year plan. The five-year plan started right before the pandemic and had not been adjusted since. There was no information on how we were going to, in the last half of this five-year plan, you know, suddenly increase wages to whatever a professional wage is, let alone a living wage.

So that was just a very, a very frustrating, like completely empty answer. I think we were all very, we were all hurt. And we got like the very first message in our group chat, which was just like, so we're, we're gonna, we're gonna unionize, right? And that was the start of it. And that was like last, I want to say that was January of 2023,

was when that started. Yeah, thereabouts. Yeah, that's it. That's I guess a pretty fast campaign by the looks of it. Yeah, about about a bit over a year. Yeah, yeah. Congratulations to you all by the way. Thank you. Yeah. Congratulations to you all by the way. Thank you. Thanks. It's really thanks to the team that started in January though because they have been really really proactive about reaching out to people when there are new booksellers because I have kind of a weird tenure at the store. I've worked there two separate times but I wasn't

part of the January meeting but when I rejoined the co-op in August, I think within the first week that I was there, one of my co-workers came up to me while I was at the register and in the standard getting to know you kind of speech was like, and how do you feel about labor organizing? And I was like, very in favor, why do you ask? Yeah. That, by the way, dear Lister, if you're in a union, that is that is what is known as good practice. It is in fact a thing that you need to do whenever someone new joins your workplace and you have a union, bring them in. And if you don't do this, your unions will stagnate and die. And there are there there are like there are actually there

are unions out there who will get mad at you for doing this because it takes resources or whatever. And don't listen to them. Please stop. Simply do not do this. This is the only defense against turnover, which is huge in all of the industries that most need to unionize. We have really crazy turnover. Like I think that of the original people who started talking, I mean, and this was like,

there was a previous unionization effort too before our time that we know very little about, but of the original, like January folks, very few of us are left just because of the turnover rate, which is immense. And we get like groups of like three to four people hired at once every six months or so. And it's like, okay, how quickly can we scope folks out? How quickly can we like do like a one-on-one and talk to them about how they feel about labor organizing? How can we get a sense of like what their main concerns are with the job and what they want from unionizing. Yeah. Well, and the turnover is also one of the things that sparked this because we had a

wave of folks who were fired, asked to leave or quit on their own terms. And we had another coworker who knew that she was kind of reaching the end of when she could, you know, stay at the bookstore and was just very committed to like getting some momentum going in her last, you know, handful of months here and created like the other side of the group chat and was just very quick. Like, all right, everyone, we're in the group chat, like this message if you agree with the following statement. And then it was like, you know, statements about how much you care about the job and then statements about how much you agree that a union would improve things. And just about everybody agreed a

union would be a huge improvement. And that was also a really incredible resource because like before someone just created the group chat, we're in this really awkward phase of like three or four different groups of people trying to get a ball rolling and very like cautiously approaching folks. Yeah, I had approached one or two people and then like that same exact question of like, how do you feel about unions? And then there was someone else who was going around asking the exact same question. And I was also at reg one day when she came up and asked, asked me that and I was like,

Jesus, do I not have enough patches on my jacket? This is a question I need to fix something. It was a lot of like ships passing until the group chat got created. And then it was really quick. We had we started having like meetings. I want to say we had. One like every three weeks to a month in that first six months. We got together a

letter of demands that we all read and signed. It was I think at the time of the how many were working there. It was like all but one maybe. Wow. Person signed it. And we all went to deliver it and read it to management and got a bunch of stuff right away. This was like well before, yeah, well before we had like signed with a union or decided who we wanted to unionize with and we still just through that direct action got so much done. And I think that's part of the success that we've had so far too, is we do just have kind

of a large number in our cohort of impatient people, which means that once we figure out what we want, we're just like, okay, what's the fastest way we can ask for this and get it recognized? That first march that we did, that first letter was also just, I mean, it really like fueled all of the rest of this, I think, because the stuff that we won was so, I think, so immediately felt by everyone working there. What kinds of things?

What kinds of things did you win in that one? We won expanded health insurance. Oh, wow. Previously, very few people qualified for health insurance. We got that pretty tremendously broadened. I mean, that's I think how Theo and I ended up getting health insurance. We got things like improved maternity leave, improved bereavement leave. The definition of who you could take bereavement leave for was broadened. It was previously a grid of nine types of relation, and then it got just fully expanded

to include chosen family and just whoever you felt the need to claim bereavement leave for as well as just how many days, which was tremendous. It was like a week after the change got actually implemented into our leave system that I found out a relative was dying. Because we had gotten that expansion, I didn't have to choose between driving my grandmother to be by her bedside, be by this other relative's bedside, or going to the funeral. I was able to take time off for both of those, which meant everything to me, meant everything to my grandma.

And so, when we're looking at issues, when we're organizing, we talk about things that are widely felt, that are deeply felt, that are actionable. And like, those kinds of changes are very deeply felt. And so there wasn't, you know, there really hasn't been a point since then when anyone could remotely make the argument that organizing doesn't create positive impactful change Yeah, the handbook that I was on boarded with the second time that I came to the stores was significantly different than the handbook that I was on boarded with the first time and it was because this list of demands had gone out in the interim because the policies about like just our character

as a store and the way that we want to interact with our community were completely different. And it was very much that like booksellers who interact with the community on a daily basis had had a say in the meantime. Oh yeah. Okay. So unfortunately we have to go to an ad break, but when we return, I don't know, go back to what we were doing before? Question mark? I don't know. Not my finest ad pivot, but you know, look, if they paid me more, they'd get more good ad pivots, but they don't, so you're getting the media ones.

You gotta work your wage. Yeah. but they don't so you're getting the media ones. You gotta work your wage. And we're back. Yeah, so, you know, the organizing seems to have come together pretty quickly. I guess, do you want to talk about how you ended up being an IWW shop? Yeah, I mean, I'm happy to talk on that a little bit. You know, when we got to the point, we were deciding who we wanted to affiliate with. I sent out feelers to just a bunch of different unions. Two got back to me, a larger trade union that

I'm totally spacing on the name of or sort of commercial union. So you have CW? The term for like the really big one, the really big types of unions and the IWW. And I had meetings or phone calls with representatives from both of them. The two and I put together kind of a graphic to sort of comparing like the pros and cons of two very different options, right? Like a big international union or IW, I mean, IWW obviously international it's right in there in the name, but obviously a smaller, much more autonomous union.

And I wanted to go IWW. I did my absolute best to not let that bias inform the pros and cons lists and whatnot. And we sat around in this room here and just chatted it out, talked about our preferences, what mattered to all of us. And, you know, what we decided was that amongst other things, one of the really big sort of organizing principles of this has been increasing our own agency and autonomy

in the workplace. And the IWW's model just felt like it would give us the most control over our own campaign. And so that's how we ended up voting to become an IWW lead and then campaign and now finally shop branch. I think that the IWW really fit how our store and our organizing had worked thus far too. It felt like it matched the character of our organizing. It's definitely much scrappier. You know, the IWW having a history in Chicago definitely was a factor in my personal desire to be affiliated with them. I thought it was really cool to be joining that

long tradition of IWW shops in Chicago. I think that the emphasis on direct employee action versus contract bargaining fit very well for us as well, I think especially considering things like the turnover and how we wanted to make sure that, you know, if we argued a contract, if we bargained for a contract now, that it would be difficult to know, you know, even a year or two down the line, if those points and those things that we bargained for would be what folks would want then. And so getting to use more direct action and response to make gains in the workplace has been, I think, a really helpful strategy and one that the IWW facilitates really well with how it trains organizing. Yeah, that all makes a lot of sense. And I guess, you know, the question from there is how did management sort of react and what's been the kind of what's what's what's been the kind of relationship vibe since then? I mean, management voluntarily recognized us immediately, but they also had very clear

notice ahead of time that we had been organizing, like we had been presenting them with demands on a regular basis. We had been emailing them from an anonymous account requesting that they close the stores when the cold was too intense for most of us to safely get to work. They would be very, very deeply buried under the rocks if they didn't know that we were talking to each other. So I think that they had a plan and they also know the character of our community, which is very theoretically leftist. And so they knew that they really didn't have another option because like we were at critical mass and they would look really bad in the

eyes of everyone that they respect if they said nothing. By the time that we announced to management that we'd unionized something like 21, 22 out of 23 hourly workers were members of the IWW. We showed up in t-shirts. It was a lot. Yeah. Incredible. When you walk in, when you walk in in your IWW shirt to sit down at like an all-store meeting and then the next person walks in and they're also wearing that shirt and then the next person it's like yeah I we've got the numbers

something's about to happen. Oh yeah. And they knew they knew because we had heard them I think like not two days before being like yeah we think that they're on the precipice of unionizing. If we were like boy you have no idea. Yeah, they took it as well as we expected them to take it. As Finn said. We had been in an organizing meeting the night before and had been in our group chat that morning preparing for all manner of different scenarios if they didn't take it well. And then they did.

Soterios Johnson How have they been acting after? Because there's definitely, it can be a huge gap between voluntary recognition and then them actually doing anything. Lauren Henry Yeah, so the structure of management is real interesting at our store. Like I said, we had, we have 23 currently, hourly booksellers. And then that to how many managers? Six? At least eight. Eight? What? Yes. This is a fun quirk about our store. The manager to bookseller ratio is insane. And then we've got like our directors who are not counted in the manager number. Which is okay, so we've got five managers and three directors, five managers and three

directors for 23 hourly employees. Five to one? Yeah. And they do like to use that ratio in meetings. They talk about that a lot. Wait, is it a good thing? Wait, what? No, no. We talk about it a lot.

Oh, you talk about it. And I think that, well, it's interesting because in these store meetings, it is usually only the director that talks. I don't think we've ever heard managers talk in an all-store meeting. So when the director voluntarily organizes our union, we also have to really look at the faces of every manager to see what they're actually feeling.

And I think a lot of managers are have I, my suspicion is that a lot of managers share equal frustration, uh, with a lot of the ways that the store is managed even above them. And I think obviously they can't say anything to us about how they feel about our union. But anecdotally, they were so excited to take our picture after we announced that we had utilized. That's really funny. We did get management to take our photo. Which we had joked about in the group chat in the morning like, LOL, wouldn't it be hilarious if we made the managers take our picture and then they sure did. That's so funny. Yeah. On a day-to-day level, I think things have been generally no more or less awkward than usual. The vibe can be, yeah, bizarre on, uh...

And the vibe is also very highly colored right now by a lot of other big changes that are happening at the stores that have nothing to do with our union. And so, like, it's very difficult to sort of suss out which weirdness is which, but definitely I think the union weirdness is on the lesser end actually. Yeah. I mean, I think the only real indication we have in this kind of just little stretch since we announced is that we've been emailing with our director to schedule a announcement from the store side. And, you know, we sent basically a copy that we would like them to use and listed out what venues we would like it posted. And they've been just very accommodating to all of that. We haven't been getting any pushback of like how the store, how or when the store announces to the, you know, mailing

list and the community, you know, social media following and so on. So you know, there's that. Yeah. It hasn't really been talked about that publicly yet. It's about to be. I do know that, um, when at the, at the event that I was running or working at yesterday, the unionization, we got congratulated on our unionization. And one of my managers was just that was to my manager's face.

And I think her reaction was like, Oh, so you know, they're taking it. They're being very polite about it. I don't think they know that other people know yet, but yeah, if they, if they, when it happens, I'm sure they're not going to be weird about it. At least I hope not. I think the main thing, management wants to do everything in writing and I think that's correct in some ways and like that's about to happen. But in terms of how they will interact with us once it is fully public and fully announced

and fully in writing, I'm not sure. I also think that the reactions that we're getting now are the ways that they interact with us now that we have announced versus the ways that they may interact with us now that we have announced versus the ways that they may interact with us once we start really pushing for our demands, that could change pretty quickly, especially when it comes to the living wage demand that is very at the forefront of what we're fighting for.

That's also been the one that has the most tension behind it when we've brought it up in the past. And I think that once they realize that we're not just unionizing for fun, things might change pretty quickly. And so we're just going to have to be on... we'll be on our toes. Cause a big reason that we unionized was because we needed to have more weight behind that demand, because that was one of the core demands that has been made for the longest amount of time with the least amount of movement and the most empty promises. And so we wanted to prove to them, Hey, you have to listen to us about this.

And I think that they might not have fully cottoned on to that yet. Yeah, and I guess we'll just sort of have to see how how they react to the sort of hammer coming down on them now that they've spent all this time not actually doing anything. Yeah, I think I think that's a pretty good place to wrap up. Is there anything unless there's anything else that you want to make sure that gets mentioned? Yeah, I mean, I think one thing I would like to say towards the end here is that a big part of what's been motivating us through all of this is seeing the sort of rise of labor power nationally with, you know, the strikes in LA with like

the writers, the actor strikes, seeing, you know, teacher strikes going on with, you know, the union stories that you all have been covering on this podcast with folks like Friday Egg. And I just, yeah, I just want to say like, if for other folks who are working in a small space, in a retail space and thinking about unionizing, I mean, it's hard work, but it's deeply rewarding work. And if you put the time and dedication into it, it is absolutely possible to organize your workplace, especially if you're somewhere with 20, 30 coworkers

where you can get everyone into a group chat, where you can get everyone together in someone's basement, someone's living room. We're really at an incredible moment in labor as a movement We're really at an incredible moment in. Labor as a movement. And just if you're thinking about organizing your workplace, start talking to your coworkers, start talking to your friends.

It's doable. It's hard, but there's power in a union and we can win. Hell yeah. I think there's something to be said too, just for the like sheer morale boost that comes from organizing with your coworkers, because it makes everything better. Even as like your material reality doesn't change immediately,

your outlook and ability to manage it and to just feel like someone is in the same boat as you, unparalleled. Really worth it. It feels, yeah, it feels good. It feels good to have something to be proud of, something that you've put a lot of time into, like coming to fruition and seeing all of these people that you've worked together with to help make like tangible gains for your community. I think that when you have a job that is, when you're working a job that sometimes makes it difficult to feel proud of yourself and what you're doing on a day-to-day basis for whatever reason,

having organizing and having your coworkers there to make something really, really good, not just for each other, but for future workers and for workers at other stores who may see our efforts and go, I can do that too. That makes you, that makes me proud. And it feels really good to have something to be proud of. Yeah. Getting, getting to fight for your class is a great feeling. It's, it rules. Yeah. So I guess where, where can people find the union if they want to help support stuff? Gotta pull up our newly minted social media. Nice, nice. I had this ready to go earlier today and then I forgot to keep it open.

No worries. We'll put the links in the description. These are some fresh, fresh handles. Here we go. Yeah, so folks can find us on Instagram at Semcoop Booksellers Union, S-E-M-C-O-O-P Booksellers Union, or on Twitter at Semcoop Union, which hopefully we will start posting on soon.

And that's going to be the best way to keep up with our store, our situation from specifically the perspective of the laborers. Also, if you're in Chicago, come and say hi. Come to our stores. Come talk to the workers. We have a lot to say, we'd love to talk to you about it. Yeah, it's a great place and it's gotten significantly better now that there's, now that it's unionized

and hopefully one day, I don't know, fuck it, I don't know, I'll say this, hopefully one day it is a fucking actual co-op. Hell yeah. That's the dream. That's all we want. Yeah. So thank you all for coming on and good luck. And yet hope management folds like a fucking wet paper towel. Hell yeah.

Thanks so much for having us. Thank you so much. Thank you, Mia. This was amazing. Yeah. Thanks so much for having us. Thank you so much. Thank you, Mia. This was amazing. Yeah. Excited to have talked to you all and yeah, this is the Naked App in here.

You can do this too and yeah, well, we'll have we'll have exciting stuff coming tomorrow too. Yeah, go go organize your workplace and make your bosses visible and make your lives better. Last season, millions tuned into the Betrayal podcast to hear a shocking story of deception. I'm Andrea Gunning, and now we're sharing an all-new story of deception. I'm Andrea Gunning and now we're sharing an all-new story of betrayal. Stacey thought she had the perfect husband. Doctor, father, family man. It was the perfect cover for Justin Rutherford to hide behind. They led me into the house and I mean it was like a movie. He was sitting at our kitchen table. The cops

were guarding him. Stacy learned how far her husband would go to save himself. I slept with a loaded gun next to my bed. You not just say I wish she was dead. He actually gave details and explained different scenarios on how to kill him. He to me is scarier than Jeffrey Dahmer. Listen to Betrayal on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A new season of Bridgerton is here. And with it, a new season of Bridgerton is here. And with it, a new season of Bridgerton the Official Podcast. I'm your host Gabrielle Collins, and this season, we are bringing fans even deeper into the ton.

Colin Bridgerton has returned from his travels abroad. Is betrothal written in the stars for the eligible bachelor? Meanwhile, the ton is reverberating with speculation of who holds Lady Whistledown's pen. We're discussing it all. I sit down with Nicola Coughlin, Luke Newton, Shonda Rhimes, and more to offer an exclusive peek behind the scenes of each episode of the new season. Watch season 3 of the Shondaland series on Netflix. Then fall in love all over again by listening to Bridgerton the Official Podcast

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe to catch a new episode every Thursday. 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, podcast about things falling apart, how to put it back together again, made by iHeartMedia. I am your host, Mia Wong. So we have been, you know, this is this is this is going to be our first union doubleheader. We have two union episodes in a row. And part of why we're doing this is that we've been covering

a lot of very sort of very fast drives, very low to the ground drives in small shops recently. And today we are going to be covering a shop that is not like that. It is very large. It is quite geographically diverse, and it has been organizing for a very long time. And that union is the I Heart Podcast Union. And with me to talk about this is Tracy Wilson from Stuff You Miss in History class and Gnomes Griffin, who is a producer on many

staggeringly too many shows. And yeah, they are both on the bargaining committee of the iHeart Podcast Union. So yeah, Tracy Gnomes, welcome to the show. Oh, thank you. Yes, we're glad to be here. Yeah, I'm excited. I'm excited to talk to you too. So, Yes, we're glad to be here. Yeah, I'm excited. I'm excited to talk to you, too. So all right. First thing first thing about this I Heart Podcast Union,

we haven't covered many media unions on this podcast. We probably should do more, but it's been a sort of product of of. What kind? I don't know. There are certain there are certain kinds of stuff that we've been focusing on, but now we're doing media unions. So the place I wanted to start talking about the I Heart Podcast union is the sort of scale of it. I mean, there's people everywhere.

Like there are people who are where there's one union member in the entire city. So, you know, can we and it's also been going on for a very, very long time. So I wanted to sort of ask, can you talk about how this whole process started and kind of how long it's been going on? So long, so long. I I was scrolling through my phone today, trying to remember when when was the first time that I was contacted about unionizing, because the first thing that happened for me was being organized into the union

before iHeart recognized us and that was in the fall of 2020. The fall of 2020, I got a text from my friend Lauren that was like, can I talk to you about a kind of a work thing? It's a kind of work. And I said, sure. And the question that Lauren had to ask me was, some of us are talking about unionizing. How would you feel about that? And I said, okay, I need to check my agreement that I already have with iHeart because a

lot of us at iHeart have individual agreements with a company. I have worked in the job that I have now in some capacity for almost 19 years. So I've been here forever and I already had this, I was like, I need to find out, does this agreement prohibit me from doing this? It did not. And so I said, all right, if I'm eligible to be in the union, I'm on board. If I'm not eligible to be in the union, you have my full support. And that was in like November of 2020, which is eons ago at this point.

I came on to the company and the union was already in negotiations. It had been a union already. I started in January of 2023 and I came straight into the, we're in bargaining sessions process. Yeah, so the organizing process took definitely more than a year. And that was more than a year of people talking to all of their colleagues about whether they wanted to form a union, what would be the benefits of forming a union, all of that stuff. And so we have three main offices at IHEART.

There's New York, LA, and Atlanta. So there were people who were doing things on the ground with people locally to them. But then also, I think it's something like a third of our unit is not actually local to one of these offices. I'm not local to an office. I live north of Boston. We have like three unit members

in the entire Commonwealth of Massachusetts. So this is like a really long process of getting everybody on board and getting everybody to commit to saying they wanted to be in the union and then eventually to sign union cards. After all of that, that took more than a year, we informed management of our intent

to unionize in December of 2021, and they recognized us about six weeks later in February of 2022. That took longer than we would have wanted. There was some back and forth about exactly what roles would be included in the union. And then also the winter holidays happened in the middle of that, which just like those weeks

don't exist for business purposes in a lot of ways. We still got to do podcasts for them, but nobody's at work. And so, you know, we were recognized without having to go through an election with the NLRB, which was great, but it did sort of feel like it took a little bit to finally get the recognition. And then we started bargaining in May, so a couple of months after that. And that was two years ago that we started bargaining. Oh my God. Yeah, it's May now. It is almost June today. Yeah.

Yeah, it has been a really quite long bargaining process, which I think, I mean, this is something we've talked about on the show before that this is a pretty, this is a thing that happens a lot for, especially for first contracts is that companies will try to sort of just wait the union out and try these because you know the the if you look at like the places where unions fail it's they either fail in sort of like they okay there's there's there's the failures where like nothing ever gets started there's the failures where they lose, they lose an election or they, they don't have enough people to sign cards. And then the third place that they fail is contract is the first contract. And so this is, you know, a, a, a situation that I guess

is not unexpected, but is also negotiating a contract for two years just is not very fun. Yeah. No, it's not. Our colleagues at WGAE when we got ready to start bargaining tried to prepare us for the fact that 18 months to two years is fairly normal in the world of media to bargain a first contract. I will readily acknowledge that I was overly optimistic when we started.

I would not go so far as to say naive, but like I thought it was a really good sign that the company had voluntarily recognized us. I thought it was a really good sign that WGAE had successfully negotiated other contracts and that we were sort of drawing from a lot of that contract language as our starting point. And I feel like when you have all of the unionized podcast shops having similar language, to

me that language is now becoming industry standard. So I expected less of a fight over a lot of that than what we actually got. And then also management hired an attorney that has negotiated a lot of other contracts with WGAE, which is all stuff that I thought was seemed favorable. And then when we actually got into the bargaining process, it has gone on for so long. And there have been so many things that it has felt like we're just going around in circles at the table.

Yeah, so before we get into kind of what issues are being circled around and what management has been doing, I wanted to talk about what bargaining a contract is actually like, because I think most of the people listening to this have never done it and only kind of have a vague idea of what that means. So can you sort of walk us through the, I don't know. So there's a week that has a bargaining session. Can of walk, walk us through the, I don't know. So there's, there's a week that has a bargaining session. Can you walk through the process of what goes into that? Yeah, definitely. So in a week where we might have a bargaining session, say we have a bargaining

session on Wednesday and Thursday, as a committee will meet probably the Monday, the Tuesday to prepare whatever our counter proposals will be. So whether or not that's on economics, so we're getting back and we're adjusting our salary proposals that are going to go across the table or we're adjusting what we're asking for in severance, how many weeks of severance we're asking for. So we'll spend some time as a committee going through those proposals and basing our decisions off of like, this is where we have an intention of landing. This is where management is right now. This is what in our conversations with the other unit members we've figured out is

most important to people. So we'll make counters based on that. Lately, those sessions have looked like preparing to who in the committee is going to be presenting that contract language across the table. So we'll divvy up those presentations, and Tracy might present on diversity. I might present about the salary minimums. We might have another committee member present on severance and things like that.

So we'll sort out who is going to say what and we'll also plan out any other sort of editorializing that we're going to do across the table. Like this is why we're making a move here because it's important to our unit for this reason. We've also planned out actions that we're going to do across the table and having unit members read testimonials about certain contract items. So those are all of the things that we might prepare for ahead of the bargaining session. And then on the actual day of bargaining session, we'll go in and we'll meet as a committee in the morning. We're either presenting first our proposals or management is presenting to us. We, as a bargaining committee, will be there to hear the proposals.

There may be some sessions that are more important than others, so we'll invite the whole unit to hear those proposals. We will, over those two days, go back and forth presenting across the table what our proposals are and the counter proposals. And with the idea of like getting closer to a contract that is fair and like Tracy said earlier, industry standard. That sums it up. Yeah.

And I guess this leads us to the second part of contract negotiations, which is management's counter proposals. So, you know, what, something, something I think is kind of surprising when, when, when you do this for the first time is the extent to which management simply will not show up on time. Yeah. Yeah. So how has it actually been sitting across the table from management and, you know, hearing their counter proposals and dealing with whenever they show up?

All of my bargaining so far has been happening on the other side of a Zoom or a Teams screen since I'm remote to everybody else, which is a blessing and a curse, right? I have kind of a buffer. I'm not having to directly look at the faces of the people who are coming in with salary proposals that are dramatically less than what we proposed and what we feel is industry standard at this point. But it also means that, like, I'm by myself.

I don't have somebody near me to when, like, management leaves the room personally react with. We got to go around the circle in the whoever's in the room and on the screen to sort of say our reactions. But like it's lonely sometimes to do it from afar. I do definitely have to practice keeping my expression neutral because sometimes what we are hearing is not neutral expression territory. And I also really was not totally prepared to hear management justify their positions on things. Like I will feel strongly that the correct and most ethical thing to do is a particular thing. And then management will explain their position on something,

and I'll sort of be like, that's not the decision I would like you to be making at all. And I'm a little upset that I just heard you say that just now. Yeah, yeah. And I'm in Atlanta, so most of our bargaining sessions have happened in Atlanta. We also have them in New York or LA. So I have been in person for most of the sitting down across from management and waiting a few hours after when they said they would be ready to present their proposals. And it is tense and frustrating to sit in that. And to Tracy's point, like it is nice that we have the rest of the committee with us to,

or whoever's in Atlanta with us to sort of share in that together. But the energy does get really tense at times, especially in those situations where we've presented, hey, we would like however many days of bereavement leave so we can grieve our family members. And then management comes back with an offer that's like, well, what about just a couple of days to grieve your dead family member? And so in those situations where it's like, do you think of me as a fellow human being deserving of these like very basic things to make my life livable?

And then their answer sort of feels like a no, and you kind of just have to like sit in that in person while they say it to your face. Yeah. And I mean, it's especially when it's something that personal or it's that, or if it's something like parental leave, where, you know, this is your child, right? And you're sitting across the table from someone being like, Oh yeah, no, you actually, you should get like two days to deal with this. It is just really brutal. It was a few months ago, we had a session where we had a lot of testimonials that were

accompanying our actual contract proposals. And some of them were read by the person who had written the testimonial and some of them were read by a different bargaining committee member because somebody was just more comfortable remaining anonymous and having somebody do that for them. And we had testimonials that were all over the map in terms of things that we were still in the process of bargaining. So we had diversity testimonials. We had testimonials about parental leave, all of this stuff.

And one of the things that wound up being just enormously frustrating was that it felt like we went through all that and we presented so many things about why this matters so much to all of us. And the next round of counter proposals that we got were like the same negligible movements as from before we had all read all of the testimonials. And that was not my favorite day of bargaining by far. No, yeah, that one was not fun to be in on. And we are back. So, I mean, we've talked a little bit about kind of brief stuff. And, you know, we've talked a little bit about some of the issues that have been stuck in negotiations for two years.

But yeah, I wanted to sort of see, you know, talk about sort of the specifics of where of where the contract negotiations are right now and how far apart the company and the union is. And also just, and this is something that I think has been a theme of these negotiations, is the extent to which management is below industry standard. So yeah, I guess we could start with sort of wages there because that's one of the places where they're very much below standard. Yeah, I think we only have a TA on one, a TA being a tentative agreement on one title and only for the rate that they're proposing in New York City and LA. Another big thing with our minimums is that they're different for producers and other titles living in New York City and LA than they are for

people in those roles in other cities. So yeah, we are very far apart still on our salary minimums. Yeah. When we put together our proposals on salary minimums, like we didn't make them up out of nowhere. We did a lot of research on pay rates at other unionized podcast shops and other podcast businesses. We came up with numbers that felt fair and industry standard based on all of that research. And then management just came in so much lower than all that.

And then as Gnomes just said, there's this differential they're proposing between New York and LA and everywhere else. Most of our unit is not in New York or LA. A big chunk of the unit is in Atlanta specifically and the cost of living in Atlanta is just not that much lower than New York or LA at this point. We've also been way apart on annual increases.

Originally management was proposing not to have annual increases in the contract at all. And they've moved past that, but the current proposals are still way, way less than the rate of inflation. I mean, it's about half, like half of what inflation is. Yeah. Like it does, it's not even inflation amount. And I will say that like for many of the job titles, they're so far below what industry

standard is with the like very little incremental movement that they make every bargaining session. It's like clear that they, the company doesn't have any interest in getting to industry standard, despite the fact that it is like a large and well ranked podcasting company. Yeah. Yeah. We just got the Webby Award as podcast company of the year. Woohoo. And we continue to be like when rankings come out of the biggest podcast networks, like we're always at or right near the top of the rankings, all of that. We have a lot of shows that are really well respected in, you know,

whatever subject matter they are discussing, whatever broadly speaking genre of podcasts. And so it sucks to then look at pay scales that just don't line up with that in terms of like the minimum of what the company will commit to offering people. Yeah. And I think the percent increase thing is really frustrating too, because again, the way this works out with inflation and remember that so, you know, we started bargaining in 2022, right? Inflation in 2022 was like three like twice what it is now And if you're getting if you're not good and this is something I think that's important for everyone to understand Is that if you're not getting so for inflation right now is about 3.4 percent if you're not getting a 3.4 percent pay increase this year that means you you like you are taking a pay cut every single year right and the fact that you know this is this is what like management's proposal

is you take a pay cut every single year and you're supposed to be fine with this is incredibly frustrating. And I don't I don't think it's it's it's it's not really. Understood in terms of you literally taking a pay cut very much. It's just talked of like it's it's it's it's something it's something that's talked about is just like another benefit, but like, no, we're trying not to take a pay cut. Yeah. Yeah. I would like to, if my salary is going to not take me any further, at least not take me any farther back.

I don't need to lose money every year like I've done this year and starting my second year at the company. Right. There've been a lot of people who have not had a raise since like before the pandemic started. And like I'm incredibly lucky. I have been at my job forever. I'm on one of the biggest shows that we have in the network. Like I'm doing okay, right?

But a lot of my colleagues who work on shows that don't have as much power, don't have as big of an audience, like don't have as much of an ad budget, people who have been with the company less time, people who are like earlier on in their careers, especially like I've watched these folks go through the last four years with no increase in their pay.

And like I can see people struggling now financially in a way that they weren't struggling financially in 2019 because their pay has not changed at all, but how much it costs to exist in the world is so much more expensive. Yeah. We have some members right now who like would receive a pay increase with what's being proposed currently, but it is nowhere near the majority. Most people

are going to lose money with the numbers as they are right now. Yeah and that's one of the things that's just, you know, I mean, even the sort of industry standard in podcasting isn't great, but that's one of these things that's, you know, very much below industry standard. There's been another one of these things that I wanted to talk about. That's kind of baffling that I think everyone involved thought that this would be something that there wouldn't be a huge fight over, but that's at will employment. You talk about that.

Yeah. Yeah. Would love to. So, just cause employment means your employer has to have just cause to terminate your employment. Your employer cannot just do it willy-nilly. And it's a core part of, like, the rights that unions bargain for, is to have a process for somebody to be disciplined and lose their job. It's a very basic thing, basic union protection. And the management has held firm

that they basically want to not only have at-will employment standards, but like enshrine that in the contract. Yeah, meaning that they wanna be able to fire us for any reason at any time, regardless of whether or not we've done something actually warrant that loss of our income. Yeah, and that's something I think is really important that I don't think people think about it this way, but you know, both for if you're doing work that's politically sensitive or also if you are marginalized, that is a, you know, not not having your boss not be able to fire you for literally any reason.

Is it's a necessary piece of protection. And if you don't have that, you can have a situation where I don't know you have one boss is racist and one boss who's transphobic and and you and everyone like you's careers are just gone. Without that kind of protection, it's incredibly dangerous for marginalized people to be able to speak up about things that are happening like tech, technically speaking, retaliation is illegal. However, come on, I see the see the entire history of of labor in America. And tell me whether it tell me explain to me whether or not it still actually happens, especially when you can just fire someone for some other reason. Or again, in this case, you can fire them for no reason. Yeah. Yeah. And it's it's a thing that is so baffling because there's no union contract without just cause like there's a number of reasons why people unionize.

Obviously we want better salaries. Obviously we want better healthcare, but there's, you don't form a union and then still allow a contract that says, yeah, and also though we can fire you at any reason, because that is sort of the antithesis of what we're about here, which is that there's due process and structures in place that people who provide the labor for this company can't, at a moment's notice, be out of healthcare and income and all of that comes with that.

Yeah, I mean, politically, like it's it, you know, if you look at this as a political system, it's the difference between pure dictatorial rule where everything is just done purely by fiat, right? Where, you know, like the person who rules you can do whatever they want to you. And there being something like a functional legal process which constrains the power of rulers to just sort of enact their will on you. And that's, you know, an incredibly fundamental basic part of what a union is, is the democratization of the workplace. Yeah. Yeah, that's one of the things that I think is so important about just the right

to unionize in general, that I think is so important about just the right to unionize in general that I think a lot of people who have never been part of a union don't fully understand. I'm basing some of this based on comments I continually see on REI ads, which I am served all the time as a person who hikes a lot because currently their comments on their ads are a whole lot of people saying, stop union-busting REI. And then there are always people who are like, it's retail. If you don't like it, get a better job. Or they're saying something like, REI has always voted one of the greatest employers. Like you should just be thankful for what you have. And I'm like, the

thing is though, an employer has so much more power than an individual employee. Your employer has a whole HR structure and lawyers and way more money than any individual person working for them. And that's why employees have the right to come together collectively to just balance that out a little bit. Like a union is still going to have a power differential

between themselves and the company. We have a whole lot more equity and a whole lot more access to that power together than as one individual person going to their manager asking nicely to have a couple extra days off because their parent died or whatever. Yeah, as the old song goes, what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one, but the union makes us strong. Yeah. I think, I think that's a good sort of place to end on.

Um, yeah. Negotiations are still ongoing. Fly into Atlanta next week to be there in person next week already. Yeah. Yeah. It's a little scary. I don't know what to wear to an office anymore. To be there in person next week already. Yeah I don't know what to wear to an office anymore. Oh See and me either. I actually just show up how I am always in my normal life So I encourage you to do the same

Can I get a Union shirt from you when I get there? Oh, please They're literally clogging my home and I would love to give you one. So I have one. All right. So where, where can people go to find the union and to support us? We are on Twitter at iHeartPodUnion. We're on Instagram also at iHeartPodUnion. Yeah, that's where you can find us on social media. We're on bluesky at iHeartPodcastUnion.

I have the keys to that one right now and I have not been really active with it. I'm sorry. Yeah, we've made an update goes out on the Twitter so you can stay in touch there. Yeah. And in the meantime between now and bargaining, this has been Nick Adappen here. Thank you two so much for coming on and yeah, let's get ourselves a good contract. Yeah, we are going to get a good contract and it is such a pleasure to work with the both of you. Oh, yes, you too. Thank you so much, Mia, for having us on. Yeah, for sure.

Always happy to. All right. And this is also your daily Union episode reminder that you too can do this. You too can spend an enormous amount of time going through a spreadsheet. Then finally turn it like unionization is the process of turning a spreadsheet into a fighting organization But you can get lost in a sea of Google Docs But I promise you all as

as much as this episode has been about you know, the sort of stubbornness of management and how You know and how kind of demoralizing that process can be it is worth it I promise you all it is and you can you can do it, too you know, and how kind of demoralizing that process can be. It is worth it. I promise you all it is. And you can do it too. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It could happen here as 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 coolzonedmedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. Last season, millions tuned into the Betrayal podcast to hear a shocking story of deception. I'm Andrea Gunning, and now we're sharing an all new story of deception. I'm Andrea Gunning and now we're sharing an all new story of Betrayal. Justin Rutherford. Doctor, father, family man. It was the perfect cover to hide behind. Detective Weaver said, I'm sure you know why we're here.

I was like, what in the world is going on? Listen to Betrayal on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A new season of Bridgerton is here. And with it, a new season of Bridgerton the Official Podcast. I'm your host, Gaby Collins. And this season, we are bringing fans even deeper into the ton. Watch season three of the Shondaland series on Netflix. Then fall in love all over again by listening

to Bridgerton the Official Podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe to catch a new episode every Thursday. As important as choosing the right destination when traveling is choosing the right travel partner. But be careful, because! Gene, what'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! Gene, run!

Listen to Fodor's Guide to Espionage on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.