Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 23

Episode Date: February 26, 2022

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So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here along with Garrison and Chris. We are preempting the episode that will be airing after this because of events that happened in Portland, Oregon this weekend on Saturday, the 19th. There was a weekly racial justice march, the march. Again, it occurred.

It's occurred every week for a couple of years now. It is ostensibly led by the mother of a Patrick Kimmons, who is a Portland, a young black Portland man who was killed by the police a couple of years ago. This is a regular thing as a general rule. You'll see a lot of folks in the right talking about this march is like an Antifa gathering. This almost never gets any coverage whatsoever because as a general rule, it's just a march where people, you know, protest police violence. It's not something that that tends to to draw much attention even within Portland. This Saturday, a person who lived in the neighborhood where people were assembling for the march left their home confronted a group of women who were acting as corkers. Corking is a job at protest.

It's a traffic safety thing. It's people on a mix of usually bikes, motorcycle scooters every now and you see like a one wheel and their job is to kind of route traffic around the march in order to keep people from getting hit by cars. It is a safety thing. These folks were confronted by this person reports on the ground that have been covered in local news from people who were there say that he started out yelling at them, calling them terrorists. And according to one person who was on the scene within about 90 seconds began firing. He hit and killed one woman and he wounded four others. And he himself was shot by a protester who was nearby who was to all everything we know so far legally open carrying a rifle. He is the shooter is in critical condition in the hospital.

One of the people who was doing traffic security that night is dead. I believe at least one is still in the hospital. The others have been released. That's that's the the actual like that's those are the facts of the situation as they're known. The protester who returned fire quickly afterwards turned themselves and their rifle into the police. You know, the police did the stuff that they do in these instances and then released the person who had responded defensively to the shooting and that's where we are right now. Portland police have been very cagey in saying anything about this. They have framed it as a clash between a homeowner and protesters.

One thing we can say based on where this person came out of it does not appear that they were a homeowner. Looks like they left a would have been like a rental thing. Not that that particularly matters, but it's interesting the framing that the police are choosing to use here. And yeah, there's there's fairly little information as of right now the name of the shooter has not been released by the police. Neither has the name of the protester who responded to the gunfire, but we do know, you know, the number of the people who were hit. We know the person who is deceased. Avoid kind of spreading anything more specific than that until there's there's evidence there's not yet video of this. Although one of the people who was there says they have a GoPro that was taken by the police that may have something.

I don't know the extent to which we will get that information. Again, the police have been acting to kind of make this look like a clash rather than what the evidence that like reporters at OPB and the Portland Mercury and even the Times have have found the interviews they've conducted. It seems fair to say that this was a mass shooting that was stopped by a protester as opposed to what I would call a clash. Yes, but that's that it's obvious Portland police aren't going to want that narrative to come out. Very tellingly, the mayor of Portland, Ted Wheeler issued a statement where he talked about the shooting as a piece of the city's ongoing gun crime did not mention the woman who was killed did not mention the injured but expressed his sympathy with the police for being so tired. So, you know, that's Portland. Yeah, I mean, it's pretty sick and like you shouldn't like it's not like dismissing it by saying it's Portland saying like this is like no. There's been growing rhetoric from the city and people the past few years that have basically been encouraging something like this to happen.

And now that it has it is also pretty sick looking at different like media framing and police framing talking about it's a homeowner and how it was like yeah it was like a clash not like an outright attack on people. Yeah, so it's it's it's bad. It's pretty gross but what we can do right now is support the people who were there. Yeah, go fund me for for medical expenses and you know, mental health effects in the next bit. Some of the wounded were themselves plugging up the bullet holes of other wounded while they had also been shot because it was a lot of the people doubled as medics or had some sort of medical training. There were medics who were like threatened by police when they arrived on scene for not being willing to stop providing pressure to a gunshot wound like a bunch of ugly stuff happened. There's a mix of ugly stuff and like stuff that seems ugly but it's pretty normal like the ambulance did not move in immediately which obviously people on scene were very angry about that is standard everywhere for like ambulance is it active shootings and it's I mean it's not pleasant but it's also like they're not ever acting from as much information as the people who were there.

They have I'm not I'm not going to blame you know EMTs or whatnot for following SOP in the situation I will blame the police for their responses to stuff like this obviously and the fact that you know it's it's unlikely that a satisfying police investigation will be conducted that said it does seem like we already based on the early reporting that exists from again a number of different news organizations number two different local journalists that we have a pretty good idea of the basics of what happened. Obviously more will come out in addition to you know nothing but respect to the medics who responded. I think it's worth acknowledging that the protester who shot the shooter seems to have from the evidence we have handled themselves as close to perfectly as you can in a defensive shooting. They stopped the threat they went to the police they turned in the rifle they did not and there's a number of reasons for this including the fact that like. The last time there was a shooting that was involved a left wing demonstrator that person was hunted down and killed by us marshals. But it also I think helps when it comes to the legal stuff that's going to wash out on this the investigation it really helps that this person dotted their eyes and cross their T's to make it very clear that this was a. A very like legal self defense situation obviously I think a lot of the folks who participate in these things don't particularly care about the law one way or the other but in terms of how other people see what has happened and what the fallout to this is and maybe.

The degree to which people properly put some blame on the city for this I think it is helpful that the person who responded. A lot of respect for everybody on the ground a lot of hard decisions had to be made and it seems like in a a the worst case scenario situation the people who were on the ground handled themselves with a tremendous amount of thoughtfulness and encourage. I think that's everything. Yeah, I don't think there's much else to say at this moment right now. Be careful and again the go fund me just type type go fund me stand with Portland into Google it will take you to the go fund me and you can help folks out there. Hello welcome to it could happen here. I'm garrison and today we're talking about two of my favorite things which is unions and coffee joining me as a usual is Chris and Sophie. What do you guys think about about coffee and unions and the combination thereof.

Big on unions like that like like making them like having them not big on coffee it's too bitter I can't do it unbelievable unions great coffee great Chris bad. Chris gets the wall. No, it's the ultimate canceling that is canceling. More intense. We are coming down on the coffee issue. Don't ever tell prop that don't ever tell prop you don't like coffee. I worry for you and anyway to join us to discuss coffee and unions is a union organizer and also someone with a podcast so that's fun. But Kaley Shuler.

Hello. Hello. Thank you so much for having me. You know what they say about unionized coffee. That is better. It tastes better. Yeah, that is that is that is what I've heard. Much better quality.

That is true. Maybe that's the problem that Chris has been having. None of your. There are no unions here. Yeah. That's that's the thing that's a Chris jumped to jump to conclusions but you failed you failed to consider the coffee question. Anyway, we're going to be talking about unions and coffee and Starbucks today because there's been a massive wave of Starbucks location unionizations around the country. And I like to start by kind of discussing the origin of this like wave of unionization efforts all across the states.

Yeah, so, you know, I'll just say right off the bat, like legalities, logistics, the nitty gritty is still not my forte and all of this. So I might not do the best job explaining it, but I'm going to do my best. And to get into the origin story of the whole movement, I'm just going to get into my origin story a little bit with this effort. So I started working at Starbucks last year. And not long after I was approached by my fellow partner, my friend Tyler to gear and he's also one of our committee members here and he was like, Hey, did you hear about what just happened in Buffalo. And as you guys probably know, Buffalo was the first to unionize. And so he was really excited about it. I was like, Yeah, sounds cool. Probably not my thing though. And he was like, No, it is like just, let's talk about it. I was like, All right, fine.

We talked about it. I was like, Oh, this makes so much sense. We should definitely do this. So as far as I know, this started in Buffalo, they reached out to workers United, because they knew that this was something they needed and wanted. And then when they successfully unionized, I mean, it just sparked so much inspiration across the country and we hopped on really quick. Other locations in Boston also hopped on not long after. And yeah, it kind of spread like wildfire. Yeah, it's been wonderful to watch the kind of wave of of attempts. And in some cases, like in a lot of cases, like successful attempts, just kind of take a, you know, just go all like it how fast they've been happening in so many places around around the country. Yeah, I like to talk. I like to talk about like why the Starbucks unionization kind of effort is so important, like why why this is like, of course, like unions are obviously like generally a net good, but like why specifically is it is it important to unionize these Starbucks locations like what types of like issues is the unionization trying to kind of solve and give workers better conditions at these at these stores and cafes. So this great question. And first, I want to start by saying Starbucks is a great place to work.

I say that all the time. I reap the benefits. There are benefits, good ones. They pay minimum wage, or whatever, like the pay is decent. We have benefits. It's really a lot of people who work at our Starbucks say it's one of the better jobs they've had. And we deserve a union for it's, I mean, really, in my brain, it's kind of akin to insurance, right? You have it in case you need it. If an emergency happens, you don't have to pay the whole ER bill out of pocket, you've got some coverage coming from somewhere, right? That, at least in my mind, is what this union is for. That being said, we also just want to obviously democratize our workplace. We want to have a spot at the bargaining table, because we, you know, we have HR we have people to go to but unions are partners looking out for partners. And that's it. Starbucks looks out for partners and profit. You know, it's a business. It's a huge business. So this would just give us a stronger sense of empowerment. And again, I really think of it kind of like insurance. It's just us making sure we're taking care of at all times. And what type of kind of, I know, whenever the discussion of unions kind of starts at workplaces, there's always like an element of like secrecy. And, you know, being worried about, you know, different types of suppression. So what types of kind of things have people been doing when the, when the union is like trying to get, is trying to get, trying to get off the ground to organize, like as people are people using like signal chats, like what is, like in these stores, in these stores, how is, how are we trying to get more people to, like, be comfortable with this idea and get like, get started with the organizing process? That's a really good question. And we're still doing that work all the time. That work doesn't really end, especially because it's commonly known now, so I don't feel as scared to say it, but there are being, there is union busting happening, it's happening all the time.

And it's scary, and it's intimidating, and it's meant to be, and it's effective, you know, so we have a majority, yes, vote in my store, I already know that, but it also takes upkeep, it takes maintenance, it takes checking in with people and, you know, for my money, checking in and saying, hey, how are you feeling about this? Are you doing okay? Like, I know that this is scary. I know that you're hearing things like, do you have any questions? It takes us doing our due diligence and researching the things that they're saying. And yeah, I mean, it's, it's kind of a constant thing as far as like technically how it's done. I mean, lots of group chats, just like way too many group chats. That that has been most of my experience with most most political organizing in general is just way way too many group chats. Yeah. In terms of like, what Starbucks is doing to start their like union busting response is this website that they have launched. Yeah, I know you've I know you've tweeted about this about this site so I would love to love to discuss it. Yeah, I mean, I just went off I didn't really think much of it, you know, I just I saw it on there and just was like, this is lies. I mean, well, for one, I'm trying to remember everything I read and tweeted but the one that's coming to mind is when they say this may affect your relationship with your store manager, and it may make it difficult for to me that is that may depends entirely on how much Union busting Starbucks wants to do.

If you want to tell our store managers that this will negatively impact our relationship with them if that's how you want to frame it, then yeah, probably will. Um, if you if you want to make it more difficult by not negotiating the contract easily with us. Yeah, then that might happen it's not that's not a union problem. That's a Starbucks problem that they are framing as a union problem. Yeah, I can't what were the other things that I commented on. And to also explain like what the site is and what it's like trying to do. Oh, sure. Yeah, I mean, it's it's. It's you need busting it's it's giving it's giving partners the facts that they know, you know, like it's it's we want to make sure that you are informed before you vote no. That's what that is. Yeah, it's this like sleekly designed page that has the list of facts about about organizing and all the reasons why it's going to negatively represent negatively affect your relationship with the Starbucks Corporation.

Oh, this was one of the points said the Union may not negotiate for some things you're hoping for and some things you value now might go away. That is so ridiculous. That's a threat. Yeah. That's a threat that your well being will be changed. Like we might not negotiate this contract very nicely with you that the Union is us. They love to talk about the third party and oh your your store manager is going to have to work with a steward. The steward is going to be someone who already works in the store. Yes.

The steward is us. The Union is us. Why would we negotiate a contract that doesn't benefit us? That's so silly. Makes no sense. It's it's it's very typical Union busting kind of behavior and if you know if they can just if this type of propaganda, you know, can just convince a few people and scare and scare only only a couple of the people that'll be enough to kind of cause division and shut down efforts in the store. Right. So that that's that's all that their goal is is to prevent, you know, at least one more store from not doing it. That's like as long as they do that, then it's then it then it's like successful. Absolutely. You know, based on how many people work at an individual individual store, that's not like entirely unlikely.

Right. Is it'll you know, it will like you Union busting efforts do work in a lot of cases and that's why they still do them like that's Absolutely. Absolutely. And that's why it's it's really important for, you know, if there are any partners listening to this and partners, by the way, is what, you know, we call ourselves at Starbucks. Yes. The the social aspect of this within your store, the checking in with your partners and seeing how they're feeling about it and having as many face to face conversations as you can have and really, really sticking by each other is really important because, yeah, like I said, these tactics are tried and true, they're effective, they're intimidating. And so you have to really support each other through that and keep reminding each other like, No, there's a reason we're doing this.

This this is actually still a good thing, you know, because on top of our jobs and then a lot of partners are in school or they have families like we already have a lot going on and then we have to go into work and be reminded that our desire for a union is not valuable to Starbucks. And so they're going to make things harder by doing all the things they're doing. You have to really, really be there for each other through this process. Yeah, I mean, that's, you know, solidarity, the one of the key, one of the key tenants of this type of, you know, this type of organizing. Absolutely. I know Chris is a pretty big union appreciator. I mean, I, I, I like unions. But, but Chris, Chris really, really, really, really enjoys the union. So I'm wondering if you, if you have anything. He likes them so much. He'll, he'll even like unionized coffee, he'll be like this coffee is delicious. It will, it will. What's in this?

It will convert Chris. Absolutely. Some of the, some of the, there's some stores in Chicago that are unionizing and I'm like, hmm, maybe, maybe we should go check them out. Yeah, you should at least, at least check them out and say like, hi, it'd be like, yeah, good job guys. What's a great thing to do? Definitely go to those stores, go up to the counter and offer or order your coffee and then ask them to write like union strong or we love unions as your name. Um, because when the baristas are making the coffee and they see, like see that sticker come through, it's, we really love that. Chris, they have great tea there too. I scream. I drink a lot of tea. It's really good or the chai. Like, listen, that's really helpful information though about like, yeah, we have a, there's finally a store that's like somewhat near Los Angeles where I am. That, that has announced that their unionized language is exciting. Like, okay, California way to join the party late, but you know, it's, it's cool.

Go ahead. Yeah. Yeah, one thing I'm interested in is like, how, how big is the shop? Like, how many people are sort of like, well, I'm not, not just like, just how many people there like could potentially join the union? I mean, anyone could. I think we have about 20. I could be so wrong, but I think we have around 20 partners in our store right now. Um, and yeah, any, well, yeah, just about anybody could join. Not anyone who's salaried. Yeah. Okay. I mean, that seems, that seems pretty common across all the different stores is around that. It's around like 20 union eligible people per location seems roughly accurate based on the stuff I've seen from, you know, Seattle to Philadelphia to Boston to Buffalo to, you know, all, all places in between. And yeah, so part of, part of like the actual more organizational structure is a link to workers United. Yes. Part of the part of the service employees international union affiliate kind of a family of unions, who's kind of led the led the campaign, or you know, has been part of the campaign to unionize the, you know, thousands of locations through the states. And yeah, I think around like 80 locations, including two of the company's flagship ones inside Seattle and New York have have joined this this effort.

And it does seem like every day there's like more stores popping up who are who are who are saying, Yeah, this is a good idea. This is whether it be to, you know, be like, Yeah, some of our equipment is old. And it's like, you know, it causes like heat burns because it's not like being financed properly, or being like, Yeah, there's a lot of like sexual harassment caused by like some like some like patrons that never gets addressed by management. Yeah. Or the you know, saying like, Yeah, I maybe deserve to be paid more than $15 an hour with rent being, you know, as high as as high as it is, maybe we should be paying over $20 an hour. I don't know how everybody else is doing but my rent situation is interesting. So I'm definitely rent has been ballooning in recent in recent months, even it's been it's been really going up, which I mean, I'm sure we'll talk about that at some point on the show here. But yeah, like there's a lot of there's a lot of issues that are being like, Yeah, maybe people should be paid more people should be at the bargaining table. There's a lot of things to address to make it a safer workplace to make it a workplace where you're more respected. And it's, it's really nice to see people saying, Yeah, I'm not going to put up with the city more and we can do something about it because like there are mechanisms to do this right that's why it's happening. So that's that's very, very exciting to see taking place. It really is and it, you know, you make a lot of great points and bring up a lot of the benefits of having a union and it just like, it just surprises me how anti union Starbucks is, is period.

And because it's just, it's like, I don't know, yeah, you paint such a beautiful picture because it is a beautiful picture to have autonomy and respect and empowerment in the workplace, you know, they, they train us to work through the lens of humanity, you know, by their words, and it's pretty humane to let people have a say, a real say in the workplace, you know. And I think it kind of exposes that type of, you know, pretty, pretty corporate language. Performative. Yeah, exactly. It's, I am interested in like the other like, kind of union busting or soft union busting kind of stuff going on, even like before this website in terms of how like, like how like management spin responding. And how more like, like, what like, what like the local responses to win stores start talking about this. And another follow up to that is, I noticed that COVID was mentioned on this, on this website.

Is that being brought up within union busting at all? Or is that brought, I just, it was like a huge red flag for me that they used like, well, we helped you during COVID. Right. We were there for you. Yeah, that is so, which really did not sit well with me. That's like, that's like, that's like abusive terminology. It's pretty manipulative to be like, we, we helped you during a pandemic. It's like, well, yes, as you should.

Yeah. You're the place where I was employed. I give something to you. You give something to me. And yeah. And as I Twitter ranted in the comment, you know, like with peace of love, we had to beg to get our cafe closed, you know, like we, we, like it wasn't like we just cases rose and they came in and said, Hey guys, we're going to close it. Yeah. We were calling and making a stink.

And I mean, we were talking about striking, but then remembered we're not unionized yet. So we didn't, but yeah, I mean, it was, we, yeah, we were really fed up with people sitting in there for hours with their faces out, you know, as cases were rising. So yeah, great point. That's really pretty manipulative because like, you should be helping us through COVID. That's not like a, that's not a benefit. That's just, no, that's like, that's not murder. Yeah. It's not killing people. That's like, should be something that's just kind of always there.

Shouldn't, shouldn't be an extra, you know. Yeah. And I mean, as far as, you know, sort of local interference, I guess I'll say. I do want to say, in my case, our store manager, I really care about her. I have a great working relationship with her. I really respect her. She's done a lot of good for our store. And she's really just doing the best she can, having conversations with us. She has her opinions and feelings about it. And I just try to listen to them and she listens to mine. But they're definitely, yeah, I mean, as soon as we filed for an election, we started, actually, as soon as we started organizing and they sort of caught wind. We started having barista meetings, which are as vague as they sound.

And people who had worked there longer than me said, we've never had these before. Maybe once, you know, in a few years. So we started having all these meetings and not even talking about the union at first, but all of a sudden they wanted to hear from us. And fix things in the store and all this stuff and be super helpful and present. And then there definitely just was a heightened corporate presence in the store. People we'd never seen before coming in like, hey, how are you doing? Want to talk? It's like, no, you're a stranger. I don't want to talk to you. So that was weird. But yeah, yeah, there's definitely definitely just a shift in presence. Again, we have these meetings and yeah, it's been interesting.

And what what do you kind of how do you see like the situation resolving? Like, do you like how like, do you have has also like, yeah, what's like the state of of of your stores specifically? Yeah, so we are on our way to an election. We've requested an election. So we're really just like in a waiting period for that we don't know exactly when it's going to be we've heard soon. But who knows when that is. Yeah, we have some we had to like do a zoom hearing for some of the legalities for things here in Massachusetts. That was interesting. But yeah, so we're just waiting for the election at this point and the election is what will, you know, that's when we're going to cast our yes or no vote.

And we will find out whether or not we're going to unionize. And I think we will unionize. It's looking that way. I'm confident. And I really look forward to that. What do you think? Like, what do you see is happening after the vote is done? Like, like, assuming it is a vote. Yes, like, how do you think this will impact working at the store going forward? It's going to be interesting. And it's going to be an adjustment, right? Because from the time that we vote and we vote yes, let's say we vote yes, and we're going to unionize. There is it could take a long time. It could take a year. We don't know it could take more or less to get from that vote to, you know, what we refer to as the bargaining table to negotiating a contract with Starbucks. And in that time, there are things, and again, if partners are listening, you can do your research on this on the NLRB website. There, you know, there are things that will be different in that waiting period, right? So if Starbucks decides to release a nationwide spring raise, because why not? We love giving you raises. We would be exempt from that because we're in negotiations because we're in the sort of in-between spot.

There are little weird things that we might have to just be aware of, no going in, in that sort of interim. Yeah, and then eventually, you know, those raises and any other things that we've sort of been waiting on get brought to the bargaining table. Yeah, I think this is an important thing for people to understand when you're doing union organizing, right? You know, you have this giant push and you have, like, you have to have the push to get either recognition or to get the National Labor Relations Board vote. But most unions that go under, go under before the first contract, and you have to, like, that's something that, you know, when you talk to people who are professionally union organizers, they talk about this constantly, which is like, you have to hold it together during that period between your, like, between when you get recognized when your vote ends, that first contract. And it's hard in a lot of ways, yeah, because things we're talking about, like management will do, you know, they'll intensify the union busting because they're hoping the union will still fall apart. You hold it together, and if you get that first contract, your union, like, you know, you now have a union and you basically stabilized.

And at that point, like, you now have a seat at the table and you have to, like, take your seat at the table and fight. Yeah, it's a big responsibility. When you say hold it together during that time, do you mean, like, just through those changes and that interim and that sort of weird awkward phase, like, you have to, like, just hold it together, like, mentally and just kind of power through it? Yeah, well, also, I mean, you have to, like, you have to just keep making sure everyone's involved, which is something that is difficult because, yeah, especially after sort of the initial extension. People lose steam, you know? People have also have, like, a job to do this entire time, right? They're still making coffee, they're still making podcasts, they're still doing whatever. So you still have your work. Have you ever done, this is sort of beside the point, but it's fun, have you guys ever done, like, the 16 personalities, personality assessment?

At some point, yes. I've never done it. It's really fun. I just did it for school and it's the thing that tells you, like, I'm an INFJT and my thing is the advocate. Sophie, what's yours? You look like you had one ready to go. I don't remember what it was, but I remember having to do it, like, 15 times in school. Yeah, I also forget the one that I did for when I was in school as well. But I brought it up because I'm thinking I want to send it to my fellow organizers and be like, do this and we can sort of highlight what each other's strengths are. Sure.

And start playing into those, because like you were saying, Chris, like, it really is a team effort. And I think it only really works if you are utilizing people and respecting people's strengths, you know, because not everyone has the same strengths. Like, yeah, you might be a kickass graphic designer, but like, not everyone can do that. You know, maybe they're better at hosting get-togethers or they're better at writing emails or whatever, you know. I think, yeah, playing to strengths is so important in the long run because, yeah, it can take a year to get to the negotiating table, which like is terrible. Like that shouldn't be. Like it shouldn't be that long. And, you know, tactics such as like specifically, you know, raising wages around a unionization effort so that people in the union don't get it.

That is like another form of union busting. Like that is like, don't think they haven't thought that through. Like that is part of that whole process being like, oh yeah, you could have a union or you could get higher wages now. Like that is part of what's going on. It's because they want people to not sign on to have long term benefits. So they're going to offer these short term benefits. So like, it really is like, because of how elongated the unionization process can be, it gives a lot of time for people to get burnt out. And combating that and like combating being burnt out is one of the most important parts.

And yeah, it's really, it's really challenging sometimes. Oh my gosh, absolutely. I mean, I love that conversation. I'm like a mental health dweeb. It's, it's my, it's what my, my podcast is called your messy friend. And that's basically all I talk about is mental health. And yeah, the burnout, I mean, I'm recovering from burnout right now, you know, it's very real. You have to make sure that, you know, while you're taking care of everybody else and making these efforts, like you have to make sure that you are checking with yourself every day and making sure that you're doing well.

And making sure your needs are being met. Cause giving from an empty tank does not last long. Yep. As I'm sure you guys know. Yeah. If you, if, if you're, if you're, if the water in your espresso machine is out, then nothing can flow through to make this anyway. And well, Exactly.

See, it was what a amazingly crafted metaphor. I just did not torture it at all. Anyway. So what is the like turnover rate at the store like? Like how, how quickly are people coming in and out of, of jobs and how has that been affecting organizing? Oh, the cool question. Um, we haven't had a ton of people leave since I got there. I mean, and I definitely, I can pretty confidently say none of those had to do with unionizing.

Um, it was all for just like different reasons. Um, we've had quite a few more people come in recently. And I would say that, um, I mean, it's, it's weird because our current store manager, uh, who's great. She was hired around the same time that we really started amping up union stuff. And, you know, it's almost unfortunate because I think she thought it was, it was about her and it just so wasn't, you know. Um, but yeah, so it, it's, I, who knows if it was just cause she was there now or because of the union stuff or both, but, uh, they did start hiring quite a few more people. Um, around the time that we started organizing. And yeah, I mean, it's, you have to walk this fine line when you have new people coming in.

Of course you want to get to them and give them your info or at least give them resources to look into, uh, before corporate gets to them. Um, but then you also, they're, they're learning a new job. Yeah. It's really fast paced and overwhelming. Yeah. Like you have to be careful not to totally overwhelm them either. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, that, that's really something I've just tried to keep in mind throughout the whole process is like when my friend Tyler approached me.

I was like, I don't know what this is. I don't, I don't know if this is necessary for me. And now I'm on the committee, you know. Yeah. So I, you know what I mean? Like it's that thing where I'm like, okay, if I could be convinced, maybe anyone can. Yeah. All right. Well, um, is there, um, any, uh, direct action that people who are listening or any call to action you have for us.

That we can, uh, provide to our listeners or links or anything that you think would be useful for our people to know. That's a cool idea. Yeah. Thanks. Um, like we mentioned before, if you want to just like stop by your local unionizing Starbucks and get a coffee with the name, you know, unionize or union strong that like that in person support, especially when you're first organizing is really, really helpful. Even just stopping by to like drop off a card or say, Hey, good luck with unionizing. Um, that really means a lot. Um, you can follow, uh, SB workers united on Instagram and Twitter and just engage with us.

Um, reach out if you need info about how to organize the people on Instagram are so, I mean, on all the platforms are just like so on top of responding. Um, and, uh, websites, I think we have a website. I would, I would assume so. Yeah. I would assume at this point, yeah. I mean, we have a pretty pop and Instagram and Twitter, but, um, yeah, I don't, I don't think I'm forgetting anything. I think that's, that's about it. Um, and just making noise on online is also really helpful.

You know, I love when people comment on Starbucks posts and they're like, yeah, how about unions though? Yeah. The website is SB workers united dot org affiliated with the workers united and the Starbucks unionizing effort, which has ways to, you know, donate or buy, buy merch in support of the union and that kind of stuff, which funds all go to the, go to the campaign. And, you know, just in case it wasn't clear, like, and this is something you'll hear from Starbucks is all of this about the third party and workers united is going to do this and that and blah, blah. We essentially, you know, we work with that they, they promote our cause. You know what I mean? They're here to support our mission and our goals. I mean, you'd be amazed by how much partners do for this, you know?

Yeah. It does so much, but we, we do the nitty gritty every day, communicating with each other. We're communicating nationally now. We have a platform for that. Um, and yeah, it's really cool. And so like they are, they're kind of like, I don't know, the supporting beams of everything we're doing, you know, with us. Yeah. But like the actual makeup of it definitely is with Starbucks employees and all, and all the people I've been in like Twitter conversations with.

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GMs who are involved. It's like, yeah, like everyone who's like actively involved in doing it all has worked in a Starbucks before. And still and still are like it is. It is definitely being led by the workers. And yeah, that's really great and really crucial. Do you have any other plugables for yourself or for anything else in general? Plug your pod. Yeah. Thanks guys. This was really fun. Thank you for having me on. I love podcasting. So yeah, I mentioned SB Workers United on Instagram and Twitter.

Make sure you give them a follow. Follow Barista as you find along the way who are, you know, speaking up about this. Show them your support. My podcast is called Your Messy Friend. You can find me, I think, wherever you get your podcasts. Definitely Spotify. That's what I use. And yeah, that's about it. Well, thank you so much, Kaylee, for joining us today to talk about Starbucks and unions. Follow us online on Twitter and Instagram at happen here pod and coolzone media.

And I think that does it does it for us. Can't wait for y'all to win. Yeah, absolutely. Can't can't can't wait for you guys to win. As soon as as soon as Portland location start going, I'll definitely go in and support. But until then, I will make coffee alone in my my my lonely my own my lonely espresso machine. But yeah, thank you. Thank you so much for for coming on to talk. Thank you.

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Brought to you by the United States Forest Service and the ad council. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and even occasionally about trying to put them back together. Today, as is too often the case, we're going to be focused more on the falling apart thing, because today we are talking about the situation in Ukraine. It is as I type, or not type because I'm not writing, but you know, you get how I'm used to thinking. As I say this, Russian troops have just moved in to two regions in eastern Ukraine that have been occupied by what are generally called Russian backed separatists since 2014. Vladimir Putin gave a speech that we will be talking about a bit with our guest

and announced his intention to recognize those breakaway sections of the country as independent republics. And the area that he has chosen to recognize includes about 70% territory that is currently occupied and held by the Ukrainian government. It's a big mess. This is, some have said like a soft version of the invasion that people were expecting. I think it's probably more accurate to say it's a slow start compared to what is potentially possible and very likely coming in the future.

To talk more about this and about being an anarchist kind of trapped in between, you know, NATO and Russia and everything that's flinging around right now is Ukrainian journalist Romeo Kukratzky. Romeo, welcome to the show. Thanks a lot. Thanks for having me. Been a big fan of yours. So it's an honor to be here. And you are in Kiev right now, right? Yeah, correct.

And how is everybody keeps asking this all around, but how is the mood? As you know, to the extent that there's a way of saying that, like I've, you know, have things kind of taken a turn since Putin actually made his first big play? I mean, as much as journalists like to say there is no magic moodometer to check, to instantly pull every resident of the city to find out. Yeah, walk around and talk to everybody. Just like all the four million or whatever citizens of the city. Let me just, let me just ask them.

But like there definitely has been a turning point. Like one of the big refrains that I've seen like personally and everyone has been saying right is that Ukrainians are so calm. Look at these pictures of them like shopping in malls and like going to school. What else are you supposed to do? Honestly, what else are we supposed to do? But I mean, there is true people have been calm. But yeah, yesterday evening, there definitely has been a shift and even casual

conversation in Kiev, like I was sitting to paraphrase a famous columnist's usual framing. I was sitting in a cafe in Kiev and overhearing the waitstaff chat amongst themselves. And obviously the whole conversation is, oh, is Putin going to push into Kiev? And anecdotally were semi anecdotally, I guess apartment prices in western cities like in Lviv and Uzhgorod have really spiked up like incredibly. Oh boy. So people are, I wouldn't call that.

That's a depressing way to pay attention to that or reason to pay attention to that. Like I wouldn't call it a mass panic. There are no like bank runs, no like all the stores are stocked. No one's like hoarding. But at the same time, there is a steady trickle of people going west and kind of making plans at this point. Yeah. And so this, to kind of give people a little bit more context before we get into some of

the more political dimensions of this, right now, there has not been a massive escalation of violence outside of the areas where there has been fighting for several years. You know, there has been an escalation on the frontline that's existed since 2014. But there has not been like, you know, troops pouring across the border in other areas and stuff. And that's obviously probably the number one worry. It looks like what's about to happen is or at least it's hard to say because Putin has recognized the borders of this breakaway part of Ukraine as significantly larger than the

area they actually control. And he has moved troops, Russian active duty troops into that area. Russian troops from what I've heard about 3,000 have been in the breakaway areas for years now. But a significant rotating. Yeah. A significant number have been added now. And obviously the fear is that because he has recognized the territory of these, these

quote unquote in his terms, breakaway republics as being much larger than what they control that Russian troops are going to participate with the separatists in attacking and taking territories from the Ukrainian government. That's one concern. Obviously the concern attached to that is that it would be not at all inconceivable for a conflict that started that way to spread to a much wider part of Ukraine. This is all coming alongside a speech Putin gave that unfortunately is going to be one of those things people hear about in history books.

Out of his goddamn mind. And it's one of those things. We will talk some more about how the Western left sometimes. I don't want to be like, because this is also largely the online left, but how the online left talks about Putin sometimes. This was not a I want to return to the Soviet Union speech. This was I want to return to Tsarist Russia's borders type speech. The guy has the Tsarist imperial crest emblazoned on the gates to his palace.

So I'm really not sure what people would have expected. And unfortunately, he's better at his job than any of the last Tsars were because he's he's achieved a notable amount of success towards that goal already. And yeah, he he a number of things that were it's one of those like one of the things he said, which is a line that folks like him in Russia have been saying for a while is that Ukraine's the existence of Ukraine as an independent polity is a mistake. And as an anarchist, you know, there's this like, we I don't I don't like the Ukrainian state.

I don't like any state in particular. But if you're if your only disagreement is with the the statehood of Ukraine and you're fine with the statehood of Russia, you know, then then perhaps what you actually think is that people in Ukraine should not have any autonomy to disagree with the government in Moscow. And I think that's the case here. There's a there's similarities between how Putin and those like him in Russia treat Ukrainians with how, for example, the Turks treat Kurds in the southern part of the country.

There's this this thing you'll hear a lot from Turkey where like there's no Kurds in Turkey, they're they're mountain Turks who've lost their their language. And there's this denial from Putin and the Russians that Ukrainians are a people that they exist. This this is something that has translated most people have heard versions of this in just any of the coverage you've heard of Ukraine. If you've ever heard of it referred to as the Ukraine, what that is is part of a very old line that kind of exists to allow Russians to deny the existence of Ukrainians as a people

and make it make it seem more like it's just kind of a geographic region, which is not the case. And why you wouldn't refer to you wouldn't call it the Ukraine any more than you would call it the Canada. It just isn't the way you you say should say that. But yeah, so I think that's at least enough of a background to get into the real meat of what we want to talk about. And I'm just going to kind of open this up to you to chat about what you'd like to say

and what you think needs to be gotten across to the international left, because internationalism is something we value a lot here. And it has been hard to find in this conflict. Yeah, like growing up in New York in the 90s, one of the core values I kind of absorbed, I guess, through osmosis is the value that every single person I met, regardless of whatever corner of the world they came from is the exact same human being as me. And it wasn't and that kind of realization was one of the things that I guess I wouldn't say pushed, but conspired to turn me into a leftist, a socialist Marxist.

And part of that, especially when I was learning about what the hell all these isms were was internationalism, the idea that, well, our struggle isn't within the fabricated borders of whatever polity has decided to impose their authority. But internationally, every single worker is the same as every other worker. We're all struggling with the same issues. We're all fighting the same forces. And generally speaking, we have the same enemies. Now, fast forward to 2022, I go online and what do I see?

Well, Ukrainians are all Nazis, or Ukraine shouldn't exist, or how can we support either of those? It's two fascist states fighting each other. And I'm sorry, Ukraine's got a population of 44 million. You want to tell me that every single one of those 44 million are Nazis? Like people didn't even say that about Germany. They were literally the Nazi states. I mean, with the United States, for that matter.

For the US, we had four years of Trump, an openly fascist, authoritarian leader. And no one seems to say, well, I guess the US should be bombed. Well, I guess there are some. There's definitely people who say that. But generally speaking, that's not exactly the view that people take, right? So it's been a long process of disappointment. Well, I say long. There's always been the kind of, well, what do these people really think about Ukraine?

But bereft of such a strong impetus to take a side, I guess, hasn't been in the forefront. And now every day I see people that I would have considered comrades, that I would have considered friends and brothers just kind of turned their back on me because I live here, right? Any aggression, any action that's taken will literally affect me physically sitting here in Kiev. So it's been really, really immensely disheartening to see that every single value that I thought the left was supposed to value, that I thought the left was built on, be betrayed by people with rose emojis or hammer and sickles in their usernames or whatever the hell it is. And we should probably talk about some of why this is and what the history is here.

So the most kind of direct thing that people can point to when they call Ukraine a fascist state or when they talk about this is the existence of the Assoff Battalion. The Assoff Battalion is a paramilitary organization. That means it's not officially a part of the governmental military structure, but it has received arms from the government and it functions as part of Ukraine's defense forces for the purposes of fighting off the Russian-backed separatists. And the Assoff Battalion are Nazis. There's been a tremendous amount of reporting on that matter. It's a big problem and the Ukrainian government deserves a significant amount of criticism for the degree to which Assoff has been allowed to continue existing.

But there's also a lot that gets left out when people focus on that, including the fact that, for example, the political wing of Assoff right sector, which would be fair to call it the umbrella term for the far-right parties in the Ukrainian government, have been pretty effectively siloed away from political power through very active measures to about 1% of representation. They didn't actually pass the threshold to enter the new parliament. They're not an entity. Politically, they're just non-popular. Their campaigns fail. Their mottos fail. Their agitation fails. Ukrainians do not want to vote for Nazis. Yeah, and it is an ugly situation.

And I remember talking with, when I was reporting on the Maidan uprisings, which is when, again, for people who aren't up on recent Ukrainian history, they had a president who tried to do a dictatorship and people rose up and fought him in the streets. It was a very gnarly time. About 200 people were shot by government forces. And eventually, the president was forced to flee the country, which is what precipitated everything that's happening now, because that president was pretty closely tied with Putin and the people fighting him were not all... They were not pro-NATO rebels, but they were definitely more supportive of closer ties with Western Europe than they were with Russia. And that, again, those are kind of the precipitating events for everything that's happening now. And some of the people who were fighting the president's forces were fascists.

And it's one of those things I remember talking with protesters at the time who were like, how am I supposed to fight with them at the same time as I'm trying not to get shot by riot police? What do you expect me to do? And it is a nasty situation. And it's one of those things... I don't know. I don't know what to tell people about that, because it's ugly and it's uncomfortable and it's messy. That's also Ukrainian history. There's a lot of ugly, uncomfortable, messy things here. There's with every country's history. It doesn't mean that people in Kiev deserve to have their housing blocks pounded by Russian artillery. It doesn't mean that people in Ivdivka deserve to have their homes pounded by artillery. And whatever criticisms you want to make about how the Ukrainian government is handled as of, and there are many criticisms to make,

that's not really relevant to the people living in these areas having their homes destroyed on a daily basis by mortar fire. I just want to make like a couple of things really clear. The Asloff medallion is like a thousand guys. Yeah. Like Max. And the reason, one of the reasons at least, that they rose to such prominence in the beginning wasn't only their ability to mobilize in the early stages of the Russian war against Ukraine. It was also because they had very strong financial backing from the former interior minister, Arsen Ivakov. And Ivakov is no longer in power. And one of the things you can see immediately was the like almost nullifying of fascist street marches and fascist demonstrations in Kiev outside the president's office. That all vanished because more like in Ukraine, ideology is not very strong. And this is something that I've noticed a lot of people from the US in Europe have trouble understanding about Ukrainian politics. People here are not really ideological. Our parties don't map aside from a couple of outliers like right sector.

It doesn't really map to any left right access. People typically will always want the same policies. Like they always want a pension. They always want universal health care to be better. They always want the roads fixed. Generally, policy, something most Ukrainians actually agree on. As a result, most of our elections are purely personality based. That's one of the reasons Zelensky, Vladimir Zelensky, our current president, won was because he was a well known comedian. And people liked his personality and he put out a whole TV show as a PR stunt before launching his campaign. And people voted for that personality based on screen. And so when there was far right activity, and again, I want to stress that that activity, even the street activity has almost disappeared. It's because the far right is typically used in Ukraine as a political tool by one oligarch or one interest group against another. And that's why when the money disappeared, they disappeared, because the leadership of these fascist groups, typically speaking, were not that ideological themselves, but they did like having us UVs and they did like buying guns and hiring hookers and doing drugs. They liked the money, and that's why they did it. And they would convince a bunch of teenagers to go out and wave a couple of torches and march and chant.

But these guys were really purely in for the money. And again, you can tell that because when their financial backer disappeared, they're nowhere to be found. And it's one of those one of the things that is very frustrating to me. I can remember one of the earliest projects that I did that was like a forbelling cat as we were. There was a pride march in Kiev that got attacked by Nazis. This was a couple of years back and we were kind of trying to identify the individual fascists who were like beating people in the street. And it's spending hours pouring over that footage. It makes it incredibly frustrating that there are people outside of the country boiling it down to, well, all of those people are fascists. All of those people are part of a fascist state. And it's like, no, a lot of those people are quite a few Ukrainians have fought Nazis in the streets. That's a reality of the situation. And it's ugly in part because if you actually want to look at what's been happening with the Russian back separatists, there's a lot of fascists over there. There's a lot of paramilitary organizations and like far right groups that have been used by the Russian government. Like Wagner PMC. Yeah, yeah, literally, literally named because they're fascist leader. Yeah, like Wagner, like many Nazis. It's it's it's hard to to understand honestly from my perspective.

Because not only is Russian fascism have far more influence on Russian policy than any Ukrainian fascists has ever had in Ukrainian policy. And the Russian project and the narrative they use there, there's this joke they call or not really joke a slur. They call them that they call Ukrainians Nazi Banderas. For those who don't know, Bander was a Ukrainian nationalist leader, a partisan fought against the Soviets. And he his organization was implicated in quite a few war crimes. Yeah, significant number of war crimes, too many war crimes. So clearly, Bander himself, probably not a great guy. Yeah. But to delegitimize all Ukrainian kind of independence movements that I've propped up over the years, the Soviet government and now the Russian government has always always insisted that there is no legitimate way for Ukraine to be independent. All Nazi Banderas, no matter what. And that's why you had there's a picture a couple of days ago of a solidarity Martian Kiev with some of Kiev's LGBT community holding up Bander's flags, not because they're gay Nazis, but because it's a way of yeah, retaking this slur back from the Russians.

And it's all part of the complicating factor here is that because of how geopolitics worked out in that period of time, there are very uncomfortable but kind of inextricable ties between Ukrainian the basic idea of Ukraine being a nation independent from Russia and anti communism. And because of what was going on in anti communism in that period of time, we're talking the 30s and 40s, it means that a decent number of those early Ukrainian nationalists were either directly implicated with the Nazis like Bander or at least had uncomfortable ties. And that's a messy part of history that shouldn't be shied away from. But for example, the same thing is true of Finland. Like, you can say the exact same thing about fucking Finnish nationalism, Finnish sovereignty and whatnot. And people don't call Finland a Nazi nation, even though, yeah, the fact that they were stuck between the USSR and Nazi Germany means that there were a lot of Finns in that period of time who made some real fucked up choices. But also, there's a lot that has to be, you can't adequately discuss why those choices were made. If you don't talk about, for example, the Holodomor, which was the starvation genocide of several million Ukrainians by the Soviet government. And honestly, to go back even further and to, I don't know, burnish my leftist indulgence a little bit. If you go back to the Civil War itself, where a lot of this started, most of the national groups, I would say nearly all of them, there were one or two monarchist, minor monarchist groups in Ukraine. But the grand majority of them were, in fact, socialism or socialist. Yeah, they had like the hammer and sickle and wheat on their currency and everything, because at the time that was what one votes from the peasantry.

But when the Bolsheviks crushed every independent Ukrainian social movement in exchange for bureaucrats that they imported from the Empire and just shoved into Ukrainian cities. Well, then you had Ukrainians that wanted to be independent and wanted to have a better life than under the Tsar. Well, now suddenly they don't even have that support from the Bolsheviks. And obviously, as a Ukrainian, I can't talk about this without bringing up Nestor Makhnoe, who was an anarchist leader, the leader of the Ukrainian Black Army during the Civil War and what happened to them. Well, the Bolsheviks betrayed them and killed all of them and crushed the movement. And then smeared them all as how to file rapist cannibals, if I remember correctly. Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of disinformation you can find about that time, just like today, you know, only the names have changed. Exactly. So if there is no other outlet for Ukrainian nationalism and the group that you thought may be an ally in destroying the Empire and granting you self determination turns out to be a continuation of that exact Empire. Well, it's pretty logical, maybe not right, but it is pretty logical for people to go to the other extreme. And it's one of the things I think that should be noted more, as we talked about earlier, is that one of these stories of Ukrainian politics, particularly in the last, God, close to a decade since the Maidan,

is that mainstream Ukrainian political leaders and Ukrainian voters have overwhelmingly rejected that sort of nationalism this time around and have gone out of their way to silo it out of active political power in a way that one could argue is more successful than has been done in the United States. Yeah, absolutely. We didn't select Trump. Yeah. No, you guys basically elected John Stuart. Pretty much. I mean, that was his whole thing. He put on satirical political sketches. That was the entire show. We did basically elect John Stuart and, you know, I have my criticisms of Zelensky as a lot of people do. And one of the things we love saying in Ukraine whenever people are like, oh, look at all the look at all the Nazis there. We're so not. We're so anti-Semitic that we elected a Jewish comedian. Yeah, that's how that's how anti-Semitic we are that we have huge minorities standing in the middle of Kiev during the high holidays. That's how that's how anti-Semitic we are. Yeah. And Zelensky's prime minister is also a Jewish man, which makes Ukraine the second country in the world to have a Jewish president and prime minister.

Yeah, like we don't care because it's not. It doesn't even come up in campaigns. Like even when Romney was running, you'd see democratic campaigns. Painting is a scary Mormon or the ads implying. You don't even have that level of religious antipathy in Ukraine. It's it's it's just a much more complicated. We're actually talking about the problems of the far right and fascism, you know, in Ukraine. It's a much more complicated story than a lot of people on, you know, social media or whatnot want to give it credit to because it's just easy to sum things up in one sentence and not have to care about a looming humanitarian catastrophe. This is what we are looking at. If this invasion, it will be bad if Russia uses active forces in order to take the remainder of those two provinces from the Ukrainian government. It will be a nightmare of almost an imaginable consequence if the invasion proceeds on the wider scale that is possible at this point. I've been a. Oh, sorry. Go on. No, no, no, please. Yeah, I've been a doomer on this basically since I first heard about the buildup because Putin has made it very clear over the years what he considers Ukraine to be like you mentioned.

He doesn't think that Ukraine should exist as like a polity. And as a result, I have pretty much this whole time been pretty surely he's going to attack you. And now we're coming to a very definite tipping point. Just today, Putin's made a lot of moves. Like you mentioned, he authorized military force to be used in the Donbass. And actually, he's gone further. He's authorized military force to be used abroad, which I mean, obviously that means Ukraine. That's where he's like the about, I think, 70 or 80 percent of the entire Russian army is currently around Ukraine or close enough that they can reinforce without a lot of. Yeah, at least of the active duty because the Russian military, there's a smaller. Yeah, but actually competent. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Yeah, but the professional the contract soldiers. Yes. Yeah. And especially on the northern border, there are a lot of battalion attack groups that are basically sitting and waiting, I guess, or whatever the order will be eventually and in Belarus. And since Putin has given this authorization to operate abroad, and he stated that he recognizes these puppet authorities, as I call them, that he recognizes their borders as the entirety of the Donetsk and Lukhansk oblasts, which again, only a third of those territories are under the de facto control of the public authorities. Two thirds of both provinces are still under Ukrainian government control, including the critical port city of Mariupol.

And now that Putin has authorized force to be used abroad. Well, it's kind of, I mean, at least it is incredibly obvious to me what the next steps are from the Russian perspective. If I want to subject it. Yeah. And I think a big feeling here is people in the West, especially the Western left know very little of, for example, the Chechen Wars, especially the second war and what happened to Grosny during that war and what the Russians did to subject that population. And if anyone thinks that Putin treasures Ukrainian lives any more than he did Chechen lives, then I've got a bridge of the Nipro to sell them, though you should act now because the valley is going to drop real fast. Yeah. And it's one of those if you, as a good leftist, have spent a significant amount of time reading about the horrific crimes of imperialist nations in Africa and Southeast Asia in the Americas. What the Russian Federation did there is on that scale. It's absolutely on that scale. It was a titanically ugly war. And I mean, modernly, we can look at what they did in Syria. Yeah, or what they are doing in Syria. Yeah, what they continue to do in Syria. But as it turns out, Syrians learned this lesson that I am learning now about big portions of the Western left a long time ago.

Yeah, which is that if you can find, for example, some Syrian rebels who are shitty and Islamists or whatever, you can tar every single person who ever stood up against Bashar al-Assad as a terrorist, which is really easy, especially if you're getting paid Kremlin money to advance that line and your name has been Norton. Yeah. This brings us to the place where there really aren't clear answers, which is like what can be done. And it is one of those things where it's like, well, that's not an easy question because you do have to when you start grappling with like, all right, well, like, should what should NATO do? What should other European non-NATO nations do? Like what is actually capable of like potentially altering or disrupting the courses of action here? Well, we're talking about the Russian state, which has a lot of nukes. We're talking about a situation that could spiral out of control in a way that very few situations globally are capable of potentially spiraling out of control. And so it is a not a situation where anyone who tells you this is clearly the thing to do that will work is I think trying to is probably full of shit and a little unhinged, because this is a real fucking ugly one. But some of what has been done, we just got the news today that I think we both found surprising,

which is very positive that the Germans have canceled construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which is a gas pipeline from Russia into the EU, that a lot of folks were saying Germany was not going to take any sort of stances, solid stances on Ukraine's behalf because of that pipeline, because of how Germany, along with a lot of rest in Europe is tremendously reliant upon Russian gas exports for just like keeping themselves heated in the winter. So that's a positive move. I tend to be critical of the ability of sanctions to do much. And if we're looking historically at sanctions, particularly how they're most often implied, they have a tendency to just harm regular people more than they have to do. Like we can look at the sanctions in Iraq, which were part of why something like a million people starved. We are talking about different kinds of sanctions in general, and we're talking about the sanctions being imposed by NATO countries against the Russian state right now. They're largely sanctions against members of the Duma. It's not the same as looking at what was being done to Saddam's Iraq.

That said, I'm still very hesitant to say I think that sanctions are going to disrupt Putin's course of action. I'm curious what you think can and should be done here. Do you have any kind of clear idea in your own head about what might have a disruptive effect on what Putin is doing? Learn to teleport and shoot Putin in the head with a 9mm. I mean, that would be great. Had we that teleportation capacity, there would be a list. Unfortunately, unfortunately, I never put my skill points into that. But realistically speaking, the Russian state is authoritarian. It doesn't really care what its own citizens think. It definitely doesn't care what other people think. However, Russia has been, at least in the modern realm, relatively image conscious, which is why I think one thing that could work, for example, or not could work, but would perhaps force the Russian state to consider its actions a little bit more carefully.

And I want to be very clear. When I talk about the Russian state, I'm talking about Putin himself. Yeah, the government. He has no, there's no, like, other decision makers in Russia. And that was actually perfectly encapsulated during his speech the other day, where he just outright, like, eviscerated the head of his foreign intelligence service on live TV for the whole world to see. He just utterly humiliated the guy for no real reason, just because he can. And you could see that. And we're talking about Russia's top spy, I mean, beyond Putin himself, stammering like a frightened school child when Putin addressed him just with just a hint of sharpness. Yeah. So when I say the Russian state, I'm referring literally to the body and person of of of Vladimir Putin. And, like, honestly, yeah, I would love to see people picket Russian embassies and make demonstrations and marches and so on.

I think that will have a practical real effect. To be honest, no, same with the sanctions. I'm sure Putin's pet oligarchs and members of his party and the, the people that, in theory, keep him in power. The oligarchs, the parliamentarians, the mafia, Lord, and so on. I'm sure they're going to be premiffed if they're yachts and their multimillion dollar properties in Miami and New York and London and the villas and the French Riviera. When all that gets taken, I'm sure they'll be pretty annoying. But I don't think Putin cares. I think that he has a really irrational desire to subjugate you specifically. He sees Kiev as what we call in Russian, the mother of all Russian cities. Yeah. It's the. I mean, the.

The Kyivian roots. Yeah, the word Russian comes from Kyiv and roots, you know, exactly, exactly. Yeah, I just don't think that Putin. Is going to turn away from that goal. No, because a couple of his buddies are complaining that they're mega yachts that taken it by the British authorities or whatever. No, nor do I think they're going to care that, you know, there are a couple of marches outside of embassies in New York or something. But that may help spur the world as a whole, the international community into taking a harder line stance against because time and time and again. Like the guy's a gangster, he's he's like a security service dog. If you've ever like interacted with like a petty like Sergeant Police Sergeant or something that has just a bit of authority and pretty much total impunity that that's put into a T.

The dude thinks he's overeducated and the cleverest man. Yeah, I think the way he talks and the way he's acts, he's just a bully. He's he's he's got the same basic personality as like Villanueva, you know, the the fucking head of the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department. He's like not like a beat cop, but like one of the cops who rises to run a union or run a city police department. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, he's good at consolidating power. He's good at exercising or organizing others to exercise violence on his behalf. But yeah, at the end of the day, he is primarily a bully and it's one of those. I don't know, like when it comes to arms shipments, that is a historically again, if you look at the history of particularly, let's just say specifically NATO shipping arms places.

Most of the time that does not improve the situation for people in that country that that has been a historical reality of arms shipments, not just with NATO as a general rule everywhere. When you ship more guns into an area that that rarely improves quality of life. But we are not talking about a country that has had any kind of centralized political legitimacy or what not collapsed. We're not talking about a country that is in the middle of tearing itself apart between 30 or 40 different sides. It's not the same situation as well at ship a bunch of guns to Libya, you know, it just isn't there. Different histories, different political realities on the ground. I don't know that I actually think any amount of arms shipments would dissuade Putin from advancing either. But I don't know what else to do.

I certainly am not against the idea of like, OK, guys, have some AGTMs, you know, have some wire guided missiles, have some javelins. Because like, what else are you going to do? I mean, we're not going to and I'm certainly not saying we should send US troops in because, again, we have to consider the nuclear situation too. What do you think is where your thoughts there? Because this is something that I'm very, I'm very mixed on, although again, I'm broadly fine with. Yeah, I mean, at least give people the ability to fight back. Yeah, it's a difficult one, especially like you noted, the military industrial complex has very rarely improved any situation in the world anywhere. This might be one of the few exceptions, because the fact is that Ukraine doesn't really have the tools to defend ourselves.

We have, or at least our government claims that we have the strongest army in Europe, which to be honest, with all the defense cuts that European countries have made over the years, that may be true at least in the ground sense. Certainly the most combat experienced army in Europe. Yeah, absolutely. But what we lack entirely is air power and air defense. Yep. And what Russia has in spades is air power and air defense. And as we saw when the US invaded Iraq, well, you can destroy conventional army in a couple of days by just bombing the shit out of it. Yep.

And the Russians have quite a few missiles aimed straight at Kiev and quite a few planes waiting on standby, I presume to bomb the shit out of Kiev. And it would be nice to have some way to defend ourselves against that. But again, there's not much that can be sent. Yeah, of course, stingers and javelins and so on. That'll all help raise the cost of the occupation that follows the initial bombardment. But if Putin goes for the strategy that Assad has used in Syria, which is bomb the living shit out of every civilian residential area in the city until people just submit or are all dead. Well, there's not really too much we can do about that. And that is like, there is a lot that individual that trained and motivated soldiers with small arms and munitions like javelins can do even to resist a country with overwhelming air power.

The corollary to that is that in doing that a lot of stuff, everyone around them dies. The city is turned into a graveyard. I've seen that with my own eyes. And that's, that's, I mean, gotta be the thing. If you're looking at this with any kind of reasonable eyes and not just like trying to find a political angle to support, that has to be your main concern is that the potential here is for a tremendous loss of life. And also for the creation of millions of refugees. And this is something in another audio clip that you published a bit earlier on Twitter, you say, which is that like, if this goes as badly as it can, no matter what your politics are, this will become your problem. 100%. Yeah, I stand behind that absolutely because there are a lot of Ukrainians. And while most of us have no desire to live under the Russian yoke, the majority of us are not trained fighters.

We're just people, just regular people. And I know, especially in the US with our like out of control gun culture, imagining like they're the singular guy, you know, they're the macho man with all the guns. They take down the government all by themselves. I'm sorry. It's a fantasy. It's a fiction. That is not how things work. And quite frankly, most people are not psychologically suited to combat. That's why armies take so long to break soldiers down to teach them to murder people, because that is not something humans do naturally. And the majority of people subjected to that kind of violence will run.

And again, there are 44 million of us and they will run and run and run pretty much everyone in the world. You saw this with Syria, you saw this with Libya. You've seen this pretty much with every single place that has experienced massive violence in the modern world. That's the reaction. Yeah. And when we run, we bring all of our biases and problems and cultural predilections to you. And it's, yeah, I mean, that's, that's really the note to end on. And it is, you get a lot of folks, you know, who rightly, you know, focus on and think a lot about revolutionary struggles in places like Vietnam and in Afghanistan. And we'll point out that like, well, you don't need to have as advanced a military as your opponent to win.

And again, just the corollary to that all. Yeah, the corollary to that is that like, yeah, but millions of people die. Millions of people died in Afghanistan, millions of people died in Vietnam. That's, that, that is the reality. Yeah, you can resist an imperial power with minimal technology, but you're not going to leave that fight with a family alive still, you know, like that's, that's how it goes. So let's all say a little prayer for, I don't know, peace. I hope the worst doesn't happen. What has there been kind of mobilization that you've seen within the activist, the anarchist community in Kiev to, you know, any kind of mutual aid stuff?

Like, or is it just one of those situations where it hasn't started happening yet and nobody really knows what would even be useful to do if it does? I'll say this. It may come as a little bit of a shock, but anarchists are typically the best at organizing. Specifically, like a lot of my friends who are active in the anarchist movement in Ukraine have simply joined the territorial defense battalions or the regular army and will simply fight as soldiers. There has been a very strong, I don't know if you call denial a colleague of mine use the term doomed optimism. And I really like the sound of that. So let's go with that. There's been this really strong doomed optimism amongst Ukrainians that the worst will not happen.

And there's no real reason to prepare for anything because, well, things are going to be fine. And that's what our government tells us as well, things are going to be fine. They don't see any massive attack groups or, I mean, I feel like that's contradicted by the open source intelligence that I've been looking at. Yeah. But I am just one guy. I obviously don't have intelligence apparatus of a nation state. So I mean, maybe they're right. But generally speaking, people have just been joining the army, going to tactical trainings.

But this is all very basic stuff like going to the woods, learn how to set up camp and, you know, clean a rifle kind of kind of things. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver.

At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark, and not on the gun badass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space.

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Yeah, it's the kind of training that might keep in the event of a full conflict one out of 10 of those people alive long enough to learn how to fight. And that might be worth it. Yeah, I mean, yeah, if you're talking about like, yes, not to say people shouldn't be doing that because people should do whatever they can. How are you kind of to close out like as this. Like doom scrolling is the thing we all talk about and there's there's plenty I mean just sitting here in Portland we just had a mass shooting and a protest this weekend and so there's a lot of doom scrolling going on in my community. But we're not staring down the barrel of 190,000 soldiers, you know, potentially hitting us from the air and ground simultaneously. How do you how are you like focusing on the stuff that you can do anything about and the stuff that you can productively handle without losing yourself in that. Hopious amounts of cannabis.

That's good. I'm glad you guys have decent pot access. Yeah, I actually don't know what I'll do if if my current supplies got out to be quite honest. But I mean, it's been definitely a struggle in the past couple of days, especially my mental health has not been especially great. But again, I'm one dude, like, I'm not in very good shape. I have poor vision, one of my eyes don't work, I'm diabetic, like, I'm not going to go out and grab a rifle and start killing every Ruski I see, you know. But at the same time, I've got a job to do. I as an English language journalist in Ukraine.

I have this is your busy season. Yeah, it's my busy like one of my jobs is to counter Russian disinformation and to like tell people the truth of what is going on here. And that role will only get more important if the the conflict expands from from the the scope that it is now. So how am I doing? Well, I'm still alive. I haven't off myself yet. And I'm still I'm still working. So I think as as good as I can be under the circumstances.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I hope your weed supply stays stable at the very fucking Ross and my fingers. Yeah. All right. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show, Romeo. Do you have anything you want to plug kind of as we as we go out here? Just if you really want to know about what's going down in Ukraine.

I am co-host of the podcast called Ukraine without hype and find it on any podcast platform. And if you really want to get a look at what's going on in English with only a tinge of leftist bias, then tune in. You can follow us on Twitter at hype Ukraine. And again, on any podcast platform that you you so desire. Awesome. Well, check out Romeo there. Check out this podcast and, you know, just try to keep your eyes on the situation. And don't let yourself be overwhelmed by what some random person on Twitter tries to sum it up as, you know, people are more complicated than that.

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It's going to be great. We're talking about talking about gaming. We're talking about the military. We're talking about why the two of them crossing is extremely bad. And with us to talk about this are two people who are somewhat less clownish than we are. This is Katie and Chris from Game is for Peace, which is an initiative of Veterans for Peace. Welcome to the show. Hello. Hey, thank you. I take offense at being called less clownish than you guys. I'm just trying to live up to your standard. I'll have you know, I am very, very clownish and clumsy and all of those good things and they trusted me with weapons.

Oh, God. So, I guess, starting out, I want to talk about, I guess, very generally the history of counter recruitment because this is something that's been going on in the US military for, I mean, really is like, from what I could tell, like about as long as there's been, you know, recruitment for the military. But I was wondering if we could start, I don't know, maybe around sort of the Vietnam era when there's, you know, very, very serious and intense sort of left wing kind of recruitment and then we can go from there. Yeah. Yeah. So coming out of Vietnam, you have Vietnam veterans against the war forming. And there's a massive pushback on the draft. The anti war movement is pretty much at its strongest. And Vietnam veterans against the war over time becomes a veteran for peace.

Veterans for peace has a long legacy of sitting at the front of the anti war movement peace movement, participating in nuclear abolition work, kind of recruitment work. The escalation work out of save our VA helping veterans get assistance with disability benefits and making sure that the traumas that veterans suffer and the communities of impacted by the military suffer are getting treatment for the care. Deported veterans because Vietnam vets served and then got deported and that continues to this day. So veterans for peace had a multi prong approach to the anti war efforts. In 2000s around 2007 ish Iraq Afghanistan, Iraq veterans against the war later known as Iraq Afghanistan veterans against the war comes along and that's a new generation of veterans carrying along built on the legacy of veterans for peace and Vietnam veterans against the war. You know, there's a long history of coffee shops, GI resistance outreach, doing work with veterans trying conscientious objective objective work. GI resists to work in in there and there's a just a long legacy of just veterans sharing their experiences and coming back and really wanting to make sure nobody else goes through that and making sure that they get to help they need and kind of slow that that beat of the war drum that seems to me it seems to always be picking up and that's where we came in. That's definitely a good way to put it now.

Especially born out of the pandemic a lot of the recruiting had to move online they didn't really have if they wanted to keep recruiting they had to go online and that's where a majority of the newest generation is they are watching twitch twitch had a viewership like pretty much competing with Netflix as of this summer and I'm sure that hasn't really changed much I'm sure it is just as popular and the audience for twitch excuse very young so that's really what started to worry members of veterans for peace like okay we might need to ramp up truth and recruitment initiatives which is what came as for peace came out of because the thing is if you're forming a parasocial relationship with these younger kids by streaming and forming those relationships getting them on discord and talking to them. You're getting a one sided view of what military services about and you are definitely not getting the imperialist informed viewpoint for sure. So, but it was for peace kind of came out of that this like very insidious looking. Hidden and subtle way of recruiting using the video games that have already historically been used for recruiting purposes so it's like a double. They got on us there for those not inundated in the gamer warfare like we are how good let's I think we should briefly describe what twitch is because I know a lot of people probably probably isn't actually aware of twitch. Whereas we are down in these trenches fighting off the cyber net stuff.

Live streaming people playing video games and people kind of developed their own like brands and like personalities like parasocial relationships with an audience via them playing these games and kind of adding their commentary. Mostly chatting with people like inside like a group chat while playing a game or you know it's more focused on the game itself it kind of varies but yeah it's it's it's it's arguably the biggest live streaming platform think it was bought by Amazon a few years ago. And yes there is a there is a US there's a there's a few US like military channels on on there that are actually relatively popular. Like you mentioned you already kind of alluded to this like the history of the US military using video games for propaganda because they've been they've been one of like the earliest funders of games for this reason. I think getting into that history is like interesting and something that some people are definitely aware of but a lot of times can get overlooked despite you know Call of Duty being the one of the biggest video game franchises in the world. Absolutely the military is an involvement in video game video game design using as recruitment using it primarily initially at first it was thought of as a training tool and they started looking at it for training. If you think back to like early 90s doom the original doom had a mod released called the Marine mod. It was a modification designed for the Marine Corps to use to train Marines in as early as the early 90s when doom was at its height. And then then that grows from there. You have first to fight. What is it game called first to fight features Marine Corps Marines in Dress Blues where you're tactically fighting a battle and in which you never want to do.

If you know anything about the Marine Corps Blues you do not want to be doing anything in those that isn't getting drunk. Exactly just drunk and dancing and blues is all they're good for. Yeah so you have you have a first to fight and then it turns into Call of Duty America's Army which thankfully just got pulled down all its platform from its platform that's a huge win. But the army started design getting into development of video games for training and then got into it for as recruiting and America's Army is the perfect highlight of that where they just flat out had recruitment posters and training things in there with links to how to get to recruiters or get more information about joining the military joining the army. You have armor to you could you could argue and draw the line from military training simulators to PUBG underground which is one of the biggest battle royale games which is where you get Fortnite out of so you can draw these lines straight from the military's involvement in designing training and recruitment materials to what our kids are playing the most these days and really one of the most kind of sick factors of this is like how much games have been designed to push towards basically training people for like what trying to think of the term but like combat at a distance in terms of like drawing like drone combat. Like they started just using Xbox controllers for some like drone missions like like it's like they're specifically looking at the pipeline of specifically young males who get into this type of gaming and trying everything they can to push them into a career where they just kill people in overseas countries using the same technology using you know using video game controllers using like you know operating systems very similar to what were you being used in video games and I mean like in video games are very effective propaganda tool if you're thinking like okay

I mean I just enjoy playing more games it's not like what's the big deal like sure like I also enjoy playing more games sometimes they can be a fun you know I like this like tactics based games but these have been shown to be very effective at recruitment to the point that video game footage games were like one of ISIS's favorite recruitment and propaganda tactics as well like this is it's a it's a thing like it's not it's not just like oh it's fine like no these these things are actually kind of a problem. Yeah, they are very effective in that manner as a recruiting tool and there is a real synergy between gaming developers and the DoD because of how effective, you know that recruiting can be or that recruiting tool can be similar to movies. You know the military entertainment complex is a term thrown around a lot for good reason, you know you have there is a black box of politics, whenever you're watching a movie that pits. Yeah some sort of power structure against whatever the villain is doing there's there's always something there and video games are not too different from that you just have a little bit more say in where the story goes but maybe not even it depends on the development, but there's article in the Atlantic. Because it was actually like about a book from, because Dexter Thomas warplay, and it's all about video gaming and the relationship with the military and they said the Pentagon avoids pitiful expensive efforts to create their own training simulators and developers get fat government so they can help fund these new games new virtual reality things under the guise of it being a useful training tool for training in like virtual virtual reality environments which scares me already, and then game developers are like great I can get a government grant with these swaps. I still got the money out of it. That's not an uncommon phenomena. Yeah, I mean in terms of like filmmaking. Yeah, like there's been, there's rules for like Pentagon contracts with film studios, like if you want to use you know, US military

equipment or personality need to follow these specific rules to portray the military in this light, which often do get followed just because people want to use the cool equipment and stuff you know I'm still angry that my that my beloved transformers got cut by the US military films. And as a result, the films are pretty, pretty bad. Yeah. I'll have you know, they are film art. No, I'm sorry. I can't even keep restraining. I will. I hope I hope as a as someone with many, many Starscream action figures, I dream of one day of having good Transformers movies. I mean, you got the classic. You have the 80s classic. You've got you've got the touch and the

Bumblebee film was OK. But it's even still that one got that one got cut by the military and pretty, pretty severely. Yes. It's it's funny that you mentioned ISIS using your gaming. There's just a recent report came out. It's linked to the UN. I believe it's linked to the UN Council on counterterrorism or Office of Counterterrorism, talking about violent extremism and gaming, the link between video games and violent extremism. And what's really interesting is it's not so much that the

video games themselves are the issue. It's the gaming adjacent spaces. It's the parasocial relationship development. It's the meme and it's the what what we've what we've known in in the gaming world for a while as associated with like the behaviors and culture around Gamergate and things things like that, where we see this this toxic culture that is easy to cultivate inside these spaces and and be co-opted for more nefarious things. And that doesn't that's that doesn't mean that the military

isn't banking or utilizing those same principles to to get its recruiting messages across the military is another violent extreme position, right? You're whether it's you're the the violent arm of capitalism and the state or or violent like domestic terrorists or something like that, you're still opting into or your position is still getting mobilized towards potentially doing violence. And these gaming adjacent spaces are make it really easy for recruiters of all sorts to be

in there and push people to more that side of things. Yeah, one of the things I remember when I was like a teenager on Twitch was like, so I watched just like a lot of Hearthstone streams, right? And this was like these were, you know, like completely mainline Hearthstone streams. And there was that there was this artist who everyone called kebab the German. And yeah, so it turns out that kebab the German was a miss was like a shortening like abbreviation of his actual

name, which was remove kebab. And this guy's stuff was just being played on like every major like, like Twitch, like all the major Hearthstone streams were just playing remove kebab songs. And it was like, and this this was just like what like this is just what Twitch was in like 2014, 2015. And yeah, like there's so much like the the extent to which just this sort of like, I mean, just overtly fascist, like middle you would just seep into just like, you know, here's a bunch of people

playing a card game. And like, it wasn't it wasn't even like, like, I mean, some of these streamers were like really reactionary, like I've seen like, I've seen TFT streamers who like, will like watch videos of like cops doing rate like raids on people's houses on stream. Like, you know, you have those people who are like really far right. But some of these people were just like, I don't know, they're just a lot of them are just regular, like, a lot of them consider themselves

extremists. But yeah, yeah, but yeah, that's just sort of culturally shock value. Yeah, well, even then, like some of them just like, I think was like, like, with, with, with, like with the Germans, like they just didn't know, like they just they just like didn't know what was going on. And so they were just, you know, spreading all of this stuff. And it was, it was horrifying. Yeah, absolutely. And actually, I'm glad you mentioned that

because about a year ago, the the army eSports channel got in trouble, because one of the streamers didn't catch on to two there were two usernames that were explicitly white supremacists. One of them was 6 million was not enough. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, real, real gross. And I guess, like, just in the whole idea of multitasking between playing a game, trying to interact with chat and trying to make sure you're you're on screen and all of those things, they didn't realize it, or they

willfully didn't realize it. I don't know which one and I'm not going to make a judgment either way. But they did, they had to shut down that stream. And I don't think they stream for a couple of weeks after that, they had to like reassess some, some things, because they're like, Hey, actively, you know, white supremacists, people are on your stream, we should probably you should probably do something about that. Yeah, I feel like if you're the US military, streaming on

Twitch, that someone's job should just be to prevent that from happening. Like, yeah, but the resources. Yeah, but it's like, they kind of have this promise, though, because Twitch has a there's a huge just like, like core like a large enough base of Twitch users are just like fascist or like hard right wingers that do things like like there's been a persistent problem on Twitch for years now of like these hate raids, like people doing mass raids on like

anyone who's not white and anyone who's like not just white dude and just like hate rating their channels and like spamming the chat with like slurs and stuff like that. And, you know, when when that's, you know, and that that's to a large like, yeah, like those those are the people like, you know, that's a large enough part of Twitch that you like, even even even if you're like taking the most charitable thing, which is that the US like the army is not overtly recruiting white

supremacists, which like, okay, but like, even if you give them the benefit of the doubt, right, like that's a large enough part of just what Twitch is that they have an incentive to try to blind eye. And radicalization, specifically right wing and white nationalist radicalization in the military is well studied and well established as an existing phenomena. I knew someone personally who got caught trying to smuggle weapons for a

neo-Nazi group. And that's all I'll say on that. Oh, boy. Yeah, yeah, no, it is a thing and it hits really close. It is definitely a phenomenon that happens in the military. And these paramilitary neo-Nazi groups actively recruit from people coming out in the military because they have the trainings that they want. And I mean, I'm trying to figure out a way to tie this back to recruiting online, but it like with all of this in mind, it is very insidious that the

target is explicitly young kids. And I'm not saying that just to be like, oh, you know, because we've gotten a lot of we've gotten pushback with saying, well, the military doesn't recruit kids, they can only sign up when they're 17. No, absolutely. That is a kid. That is complete bullshit. Eglia tried. That is a kid. Second of all,

it's like, the thing is, it's, it's, it's just like grooming children. That's, that's what it is. Like you're it is. It's the same process of grooming. That's, that's what's going on. Yeah. What, what are my best friends growing up? Like because he was my best friend for like a decade. Like I met him in like first grade. He was my friend for the entirety of school. And then he got like, his parents sent him away to like one of those like, like summer, like, like military school

camps. And he was just never the same afterwards. And he's like a fascist now. And yeah, that sucks. Yeah, it does. That does suck. That there's not a better word for that. That, that sucks. Because yeah, they can't sign up until they're 17. But that's not the point isn't to convince 17 year olds. The points, the points to ingrain this idea in them when they're like fucking 12 years old on the internet. And that is just what grooming is

right? Starting it when you're when they're young. So when they're old enough, they will be able to sign up for the thing. Like that's, that's what the process is. And that's what like, you know, military propaganda recruitment's been doing for a long time. But the specifically the way it's being done on the internet around gaming is actually serious. It was literally, it is explicitly said by one of a recruiting officer, Dr. E. Casey Wardinsky, and I apologize if

I'm pronouncing that wrong, but he literally said, we have to confront this question of will we wait until they're 17 or will we start talking to them at age 12, 13, 14, 15, when they form the set of things they are thinking about doing with their life, literally saying we want to groom children is what he's like, yeah. So I think now would be the time to kind of get into the countering side of things is like, yes, this is this is a big problem as we've laid out the past 20 minutes. What can

we do about it? Yeah. So what can we do about it? There's a good deal that we can do about it, right? We veterans for peace, the truth and recruitment working group came up with an idea for the gamers for peace initiative, concerned veterans and gamers and, and allies because veterans for peace isn't just comprised of veterans themselves, it's also allies and accomplices came together and started forming the an online community of our own,

where we have kind of dropped some four channels of change this concept of four channels to change. One, do education, talking about sharing our experiences as veterans, talking about an unpacking recruitment tactics and techniques, start talking being extremely vocal and raise awareness around the the recruitment techniques that we've already been talking about, right? Second, we're doing some mentorship and leadership stuff, starting to develop programs in local

communities that offer alternatives to the economic draft, right? Like just throwing it back to where we started talking about coming out of Vietnam. It was already said that Sergeant hard times is the best recruiter and it posts posts of drafts, we went when we went to an all volunteer force, you have to have a reason to join and there's a thing called the economic draft and it's the impoverished conditions that many kids and people face that

force them to go into the military, right? You don't have healthcare coming out of high school, you're in an abusive home, you're not talking to a guidance counselor, no colleges coming to you don't know how to pay for college, you don't know where what you're going to do because you're 18 and on your own and that's what we keep telling kids. So you have the economic draft, which incurred gives an opportunity for recruiters go Hey, this this program will solve everything.

And what what people don't realize is what's being asked is are you willing to kill for a Camaro? Are you willing to kill just to have a roof over your head? Are you willing to kill for Medicare? Right? So we started to focus on developing mentorship and leadership programs, include helping kids in and young adults get into college or find mutual aid programs and within their communities start doing stuff locally because this the problem is pervasive, right? Not

everybody needs to escape abusive home and is fine staying in their community, but doesn't know how to survive within the community because they don't have the resources there. And we also look at the what's going on in the world today and and recognize that things must be done at a local level. And youth can be part of leading that change, right? And addressing some of the our world concerns. We ourselves do direct actions, we go to gaming conventions, speak out, try to

actually do counter recruitment right where the recruiters are. Yeah, we just it's really pervasive. If you if you if you go to any kind of con or any kind of any kind of like game fast or whatever, you know, comic cons, there will always be multiple military recruitment boosts there. Always like like Navy, Marines, Army, National Guard, like all of them, they will all all be there. And it's not not my favorite thing to see. No, no, no, it's frustrating. Yeah. Board games

aren't even safe, right? The the Army eSports team has a 40k team. So if you play Warhammer 40k, they have a nationally or internationally ranked 40k team playing in the major circuits. What's most insulting about that? Sorry, Chris. Most insulting about that. And I know this because one of the streams that we do I hosted is called ad slam because we started out as like, roasting military recruitment ads, but it kind of

morphed into just like general veteran and military depictions and media. And one of them was on the or at least reference the Army eSports, Warhammer 40k team. And you know how people will like take their figurines really seriously, they paint them, they look really cool. Army like spray painted them gold and called it a day. And I'm like, really, you have all of these resources. You are using the recruiting budget, which is ridiculous and astronomical and you spray painted them gold. Are

you kidding me? Come on. And it's just insulting that he was so low effort, but they still get the praise. A lot of people report like having positive viewpoints of the military after interacting with members of, you know, the eSports team or the booth or whatever. So I'm genuinely annoyed that it's also low effort on that matter. And they're still getting a positive response bothers me. And that's a perfect highlight because being there on like, the

hate using military terms nowadays, but being their boots on ground, you know, at these conventions, doing providing truth and recruitment, right, talking about alternatives, really just being there in front of recruiters and, and talking to the people that they're targeting and family members, letting them know like, hey, we as veterans, right? Don't let this be what shapes your child's future or your future, right? There's other opportunities for you. And, and, you know, whether

that's if you're into gaming, start designing games, right? Like there's, there's so many opportunities within the gaming community that doesn't want to put you into the military pipeline also, right? So it's not the game's fault. It's not like it's, it's that the state's using right now, right? And then we're trying to form our own eSports teams also, right? So we can compete directly against them, kick their ass in some of the tournaments that they host. You know, my dream is to see some

gamers for peace jerseys getting awarded like some trophy next to the Army eSports team and just dunking on them. So across all the, all the different Even if we lose, if we're up there, we still get to dunk on them. See, we had so much more fun. We don't have to go clean a barracks room after this. Like the ultimate goal being us being able to provide tangible alternatives. So a kid coming out of high school thinking like, well, I either go into a lot of

debt to go to college or I join the military. If we can get not ahold of them, that seems predatory. But if we can talk to them, or our organization can provide that alternative and say, oh, well, you don't really have to do that. We have a scholarship program that we can offer you or we can provide at the very least education about what they're really getting into so they can make a better informed decision. Because the main problem that I have with the way that recruiting works is

that you are not getting a view of what life would actually be like, you are not getting a view of what you're fighting for. They there's a whole lot of like these vague concepts that they tell you that you're fighting for. And that you're supposed to feel great about doing, but none of those are real in practice, liberty or protecting the homeland. None of that is what you're doing. You're helping Northrop Grumman create a profit, right? Like there's it. And so at least at the very least

someone who thinks that they have no other options. And in this country, that might not be too far off, right? We don't have a universal health care system. That was part of the reason why I joined the Marine Corps is that I knew I would get health care. And I knew I would get money to go to college and not be in this alone debt that I was in. So I'm definitely not alone in that. And if maybe we can even just provide a more holistic view of what decision that you're making, that would be

considered a win to us. So that was my soapbox. One of the important things is, is, is trying to push back on the motion of various things that we're seeing, right? Whether that's games that are becoming way to train some training simulator. There's another campaign that gamers for peace worked on and veterans for peace worked on, but the platform six days with care, the Council on American and Islamic Relations, pushing back on a game called six days and

fluja, which was delayed to order four of 2022 of this year. So we got it was pushed by a year, whether through our efforts or for whatever reason, but it was pushed by a year. And this game is dubbed Arab murder simulator. Because it is, it is. We look at other games like escape from Tarkov as as teaching fundamental skills through tried and true teaching methodologies for military skills. You know, we were talking about counter recruitment and truth and recruitment to give

people an opportunity to make informed, have an informed decision about their participation in the war machine. But also we're trying to push back directly on the war machine and and say, Hey, there's better uses of our money for for as as a government to take care of our people. There's a lot of fundamental things. There's the contributions to the climate crisis is the military is the number one impact, impactor of the on the climate war is never green, you can't

greenwash the military. The, you know, we have said just so much going on around all the ways that people don't realize that military is involved, we have the future of drone warfare, kill cloud technology, gaming technology, and the military and militarism is so tightly wound right now that just pushing back and trying to parse those two things apart is one of the things that is most effective for counter recruitment and also for mobilizing people to be like, Hey, we actually deserve

better, like get out of my gaming space, and like, get me some food sovereignty, get me get me like, let me be part of my community, get out of the gaming space and stop using what is fun and has actual educational value, mental health benefits, physical health benefits, communal impact, social impact, like this, this gaming tool, this gaming technology we have can be used for so much good. But we need to disentangle the military's usage from it and stop framing our time or time

enjoy that we enjoy with our friends and family through this lines of the military forces to view it through because there are so many great games out there, like we are in one of like right now we have the most amount of games ever released, most amount of good games, like always being announced and released all the time. There's so many great stuff to play. And yeah, if anything that can be done to push people away from stuff that kind of promotes this, you know, colonial imperial

is kind of mindset is great, right? Like, that's why I kind of appreciate the cartoony aspects of Fortnite, even though I hate playing Fortnite and will never really do so. I still appreciate it as opposed to like the heavily militaristic kind of aesthetics that other you know, similar battle royales show. Because I mean, because with with as many games out there as there is, yeah, I think any kind of attempts to push people away from the more problematic aspects of, you know, specifically

shooting games is great. Yeah. And just noting that when you're playing these games, especially if they are relatively close to reality, understand the impact that you can have by pointing out simply that your friend doesn't respawn in real life, right? And also keep in mind if you are playing a game that is close to a recent reality that you could be playing through someone's actual trauma. So I'm not telling you not to play the games. If they are, we've gone over a couple like squad and

others that are like very, very realistic in their application, just keep in mind when you're playing it that maybe look at it through that lens, like, would how would you feel if you were playing through a game, but it was the exact moment of your trauma. And I'm not even saying from the military side, I mean from from the people who are being bombed side, you know, so I just want to have more people be more mindful with what they consume and how and again, I'm not telling you not

to consume it, just telling you to think a little bit about it and what that type of media can do while having that baggage onto it. And there is a place for bets and the military experience in gaming, right? Like when I was in, when I was deployed to Iraq, I took an Xbox 360 over there with me in the bottom of my C bag. And we had on Camp Felusia, we had a local area network of Xbox is in all the camps when you sat there and

played Halo and Gears of War and when that dropped while I was there, right? Like, that's how we stay in touch with each other. It's how we process like auditory things and and and our combat experiences, right? That's that's valid sublimation and and processing of our traumatic experience is a thing. And games have that and that's not a military exclusive thing or veteran exclusive thing. That's for all communities. But what we have to do is add context and nuance to when we're playing

these games and go, Oh, there's another side to this story that's the local civilian that just had. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, alphabet boys. As the FBI sometimes you gotta grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover

investigation. In the first season of alphabet boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of goods. He's a shark and on the good bad ass way. And now nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to alphabet boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple

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man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on

shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to

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so focused on the competitive nature instead of the storytelling and the full scope of what that game is allowing us to process. And that's why I'm not blaming recruiters or blaming coming up to people in the military and going, you know, you're horrible. It's not the right thing. Hey, I was there, right? I did six years in the Marine Corps and you know, instead of going, hey, you're a horrible person or things like that, like we're trying to offer them the

recruiters and other military members community that go, hey, you're allowed to speak out against the things that you know are bullshit while you're in there because I knew it was a bullshit while I was in there and I couldn't speak out and know I had a community to speak out to or with and we're trying to offer community to them. And that's beyond beyond just video games, but that's drone operators and infantry guys and people that are just fed up with what they see in a system that is

supporting or crumbling infrastructure, right? Like you can only deploy so many times without developing either becoming completely dead on the inside or having developing some semblance of empathy that goes, hey, deep down, I know something's wrong here and I just don't know how to like, I don't know what that feeling is. Well, that feeling is just empathy for the human condition and not wanting to see people traumatized through war, right? That that idea of us going

into like even post 9 11, like immediate post 9 11, that's early on, they have they went there with the right idea. I want to defend my community. I want to be do do service, right? Like, I don't have another option. Yeah, I'm an economic draftee, but all in all, I'm really here to help defend my people. Yeah, it was it was it was a genuine thought like it was a genuine idea, right? You can very much disagree with like the intentionality, the propaganda that like governments

were doing to promote the war and the unjust reasons for that. But for the but for the regular people, right? Yeah, that it was it was it was genuine feelings that caused that to happen and overlooking that I think misses what makes the recruitment to work. You know, if you just look at all the people who join the militaries being like, oh, they're just like bad people who want to kill, you know, brown people, you're like, that's you can think that but that doesn't

actually do anything to understand how recruitment actually works. And then if you can't do that, then you don't know how to actually counter it. Right, exactly. If you are a veteran and you feel like we do this whole thing was bullshit, you and that can be an incredibly alienating experience. I've been there because it feels like with the amount of veterans we saw the January 6th events, all the veterans that you see that get through to the right wing side

of the culture for just want to say that we see you you're not alone. You are you are not crazy. I promise you we we are trying to build a community of people like that who understand it and promote healing through that community, political education through that so that you can create resiliency within your community and as well as at least put a little bit of pressure on the military entertainment complex and the military recruiting apparatus. Yeah, the fuck the

military. Fuck war. Fuck war. Yep. It's truth. All right, do you have anything specific that you want to plug? Yes, join our discord. We can find if you search the discord, you can look up gamers for peace and you will see us on twitch. We are veterans for peace all one word and we stream several times a week gaming content, content about different alternatives to military service, content breaking down propaganda and recruiting efforts as well as

other political education things. Sometimes it's just a random community game night as well. Actually, no, that's not random. Those are on Thursdays. So go ahead, watch us there. Chris, should I should we add anything? I got something. If one of the first things you can do besides going to discord and checking us out on twitch, we actually have an online digital direct action campaign going on that we're pushing to allow content creators on twitch as a

platform to be able to opt out of military ads on their channels. So that is our campaign that we currently have ongoing. There's a petition. It is bit.ly slash twitch military ad opt out is the URL. That'll take you right to the twitch petition that feedback through twitch. We're looking to hit 1000 at least ASAP on that petition to get some get a response from twitch and then go from there allowing content creators to take ownership of their of

the ads and stuff that are on their channels, at least when it comes to military recruitment and then going from there. We also are doing actions and planning things constantly. So be on lookout, join the discord, all that good stuff. Oh, if you need help navigating that, I'm a mod in the discord at plantipa she slash today and you'll find me. We'll try to put that link for the petition in the show notes so people can find that with

a with an with with an easy click. Awesome. Perfect. All right. Oh, thank you to you for joining us. We are it could happen here at happen here pod in the places in the places. The places, you know, all the places. They're all there. Well, thank you everyone for listening and yeah, go play. I don't know. Mario Kart 8 or something. Yeah, something something fun. I don't know. I I enjoy I enjoy the Mario Kart games as a as as someone of my age, very, very,

very integral to my driving education. So yeah, go go play Mario Kart 8. Fuck war. Fuck war. Fuck war. Not another generation. Hi, I'm Elizabeth Dutton and I'm Elizabeth Dutton. Oh, wait, sorry. Zaryn, do you want to say your name? No, I'm good. Go ahead. We're the hosts of ridiculous crime. People love true crime, right? The mystery, the intrigue, the human frailty. Totally. But what a lot of us don't like is the blood and the guts and the mayhem. Wait,

wait, wait, wait, some of us do like the mayhem. Okay, but let's be real. There's nothing funny about murder. Okay, that's right. Our show gives you stories like the kidnapping of Frank Sinatra Jr. and the Max Hedrim signal hijacking. Oh, so you mean ridiculous stories like the UK cat shaver and Pablo Escobar's cocaine hippos. Yeah, stories like the dudes who stole Buzzy the animatronic whatever he was from Disney World and the woman whose husband tried to kill her

but came back from the dead and surprised him at her own funeral. Yeah, that does sound good. You can find this new podcast, Ridiculous Crime all over the place. The iHeart radio app, the Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. I don't know how you live. Ridiculous crime. Hello and welcome to our show. I'm Zoe Deschanel and I'm so excited to be joined by my friends and castmates Hannah Simone and Lamorne Morris to recap our hit television series

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listening to. All right, Saint Andrew, that that's my job done today. Why don't why don't you take over? Good job. I'm proud of you. Thank you. Welcome everybody to another wonderful episode of It Could Happen Here. Today, hoping to take a look at another book. Well, two books this time. This time works of fiction and this time by an English, unfortunately, writer named Aldous Huxley, right? We'll be looking at Island and Brave New World. The sort of twins of

speculative science fiction, I would say. Aldous Huxley was like I said, an English writer and philosopher and he actually wrote a lot of books. 50 in his lifetime to be precise. He was also a French teacher who, interestingly enough, taught George Orwell. I did not know that. Yeah. But from what his past students have said, he wasn't a particularly good teacher. Okay. But he was a good speaker. He was also a very, very big fan of psychedelics and

mysticism and philosophy and particularly like Advaita, I don't know if I pronounced that correctly, but Advaita Vendata, which is like a Hindu spiritual practice. Yeah. I know he's even referenced a lot in like a cultist and chaos magic books written like post the 60s. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He's like that guy. Yeah. It's like his name again. Alan Watts. Oh yeah. That's kind of guy. Yeah. Also very interestingly, Huxley actually had LSD injected into his

veins. That's it. It's amazing. Yeah. He was like he he was dying as you know, one does on their death bed. Sure. That is the traditional thing to do. Traditionally, yes. But while in the process of dying because he had like advanced laryngeal cancer, he had to write to his wife, Laura. He was just like LSD 100 intramuscular and she just like just like okay. Hell yeah. She injects him. Hell yeah. And she doesn't inject him. Fucking muscles. Yeah. And she doesn't inject him

with one dose. She injects him with two doses and then he dies like several hours later. Incredibly based. What a way to go. Staggeringly based. And honestly, if if he was like speaking on his death bed, I would really love to know like what that experience was like. Like are you just like dancing through hell? Like what's going on? I mean, I could think I can see it being the most amazing thing and also extremely terrifying, slightly terrifying. Right.

As a general rule, when like Pete, they've done studies on like giving different kinds of psychedelics, usually psilocybin, mushrooms, to like cancer patients, people who are in hospice and it it it generally reduces their fear of death. Yeah. They could they go in peace. Yeah. Yeah. It just makes them like, ah, you know what? Everything is the same as everything else and yeah, we're the imagination of the universe. I'm going to go back into space. Yeah. Which

is fine. Good for them. Yeah. Yeah. Good for them. Good for them. If I were on my death bed, I probably wouldn't want to be thinking about death either. So yeah, I mean, that that assumes that you know, we get a death bed, you know, and that's the kind of the wild thing about death. You don't know when it's going to happen. But to return to the topic of discussion, Brave New World and Island, right? To summarize the plots of both, I guess I'll start with Brave New

World. It is the more famous of the two. I don't think a lot of people have heard of Island compared to Brave New World. Because I mean, Brave New World is like. Brave New World in high school, but I I have not read Island. Exactly. And it's like, it really says a lot about society that that we read about the dystopias, but not the utopias. But anyway, Brave New World, you know, it's really up there with like 1984 in terms of, you know, it's, it's notoriety. It is like one of

the quintessential dystopias. It's set like several hundred years into the future. Like, unlike 1984, which, you know, took place 1984, which is several decades ago, Brave New World was set in two thousand fifty four, sorry, two thousand five hundred forty CE. So yeah, we're several hundred years. Star Trek times. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But however, in the book, it isn't called two thousand five hundred fifty four CE. It's called six hundred and three

two AF. AF standing for after Ford, because in this world, and I'm sure we'll get into this a bit, Henry Ford, the assembly line guy, the Model T guy, he is basically God. He is the God of their world. You know, so yeah, that wouldn't be ideal. They say things like by Ford's name and that kind of thing, you know, and his whole sort of assembly line structure is basically extrapolated to society as a whole, right? There's this world state where emotions and

individuality are conditioned out of children and everyone belongs to everyone else and you know, there's children are created in in like factories and generated to be part of specific classes, whether it be alpha, beta, gamma, delta, or epsilon. So it's like it's kind of like what's what's what's happening today, you know, in terms of the Creek alphabet. Um we have the alphas who are bred to be like the leaders and stuff and you have the epsilons who are

bred to be like the menial leaders and you have the folks in between and like they are literally conditioned, you know, so like in the factory, in the baby making factory, which is in this case, literal and not a euphemism for the womb, um you know, they they like hold back on oxygen or they apply certain chemicals or certain hormones in order to like condition people. So they don't do like genetic, um like coding, whatever, they just they do

chemical concoctions in those sort of test tubes and yeah, I mean, the story of the world is really how it's affecting like some of the top level people within it and sort of contrasted with sort of reservations that exist in their world where people are a bit less restricted. Um and it ends pretty tragically but the next book also ends a bit tragically. The expert being Island, which is like the utopian twin for Brave New World

in a lot of ways in terms of mirroring a lot of the same themes that Brave New World explores, right? So in Island, there's this specific island called Pala, which is um fictional. I mean, there was an area in India called Pala but the island of Pala in this world is like it doesn't exist, right? And it's basically seen as this oasis of happiness and freedom and where it's inhabitants have resisted capitalism and consumerism and

technology, right? Then this journalist, another British guy named Will Farnaby, um pulls up on their island and he's basically trying to scope out the island for exploitation because he is friends with this industrialist who's trying to like extract oil from the region and while he's going through the island and really going through the society, going through the book, there are a lot of monologues and stuff. I mean, this book is kind of heavy unlike the monologues and

the discussions. It's kind of like Alice Huxley's soap box for all his ideas, just laying them all out there, right? So Will enters Pala as a cynic but by the time he comes out, he's like, he's had like layers on layers of epiphanies and I don't know, um for those who have been reading Dawn of Everything recently, um in chapter two, they're the authors David Wenger and David Grieber, they sort of outline some of the discussions that were happening that were

happening between Europeans and indigenous Americans at the time of arrival and how those discussions were shaping both um but primarily the Europeans view of society. Interestingly, it's kind of like reflected here because you know, I have this white man who pulls up with all his English ideas and it's basically these indigenous inhabitants in Pala basically deconstructing his ideas through dialogue and through debates and discussion and unfortunately, it doesn't

end very well despite, you know, being convinced of the purity and brilliance of the Palanese way of living. He already made the deal with the industrialist and Pala is has basically been sold by a neighboring country and so it's downfall is now sadly inevitable and that's how it ends. Oh and also um Wilfauna be kind of has like an LSD, well it's not really LSD but it's like a psychedelic trip. Yeah, it's like a combination of like men's, women's, psilocybin almost.

Yeah, yeah but in true Alasuxley fashion. Yeah. Yeah, there's like a lot of the tropes and like themes that were present in Brave New World exist in Island but as like their inversion so like in terms of like it's show like like Brave New World it's written before Huxley had uh psychedelics. It was like his his version of drug use is so different in that book because it's more like a pacifying drug um whereas the drug use in Island is more like an like

an enlightening drug so like but there's like a whole bunch of themes that like parallel but are also inverted on each other. Yeah exactly, exactly and we're gonna get into those themes just now but to summarize Brave New World is basically humans becoming less than human because of all these technological uh and sociological um efforts whereas Island is like the opposite where it's you know humans are able to come into the fullness of their humaneness

um while still using science except in a way to enhance their quality of life. I don't know if I missed any aspect of either plots that any of you want to like touch on real quick. No, no, no really. Okay, yeah I mean I will say the one thing is just because uh Brave New World also has this sort of like weird like going to a reservation plot that's like yeah yeah kind of a B plot but you see sort of it's another one of those things that's kind of like I don't know if inverted's the

right word but the sort of context of it is very very different in Island than it is in Brave New World. Yeah, yeah because I mean in a sense you have this outsider protagonist who is introduced to this alternate way of living um and is transformed by it you know except in Brave New World you know he ends up killing himself and in Island well he already sold out the Island

you know. I will say um one criticism that I want to get out of the way before we get into like the concepts and you know how they might apply to politics as a whole really is Huxley like a lot of authors and thinkers and ideologues of his time has this very unsettling fixation on overpopulation. It's kind of like what we were talking about with the last book we discussed here um there's sort of way of fixation on overpopulation and you know people dying out and that kind of thing.

Um in in Pala and in in Island there's a sort of acceptance of um overpopulation as something that needs to be you know avoided and so I guess it brings us to the first theme which is the use of contraception in both books right like on one hand you have in Brave New World where there's like mandatory con contraception and people are literally not allowed to like naturally give birth you know they have to have babies through test tube whereas in Pala you know there's

reproductive education and reproductive choice and expressive sex and it's really like a complete contrast so I guess I want to do something like I like speculating and and thinking about how anarchy would operate um I think there needs to be a lot more of that in terms of um creative works and discussions I mean like there was At the Cafe by Malatesta and there are some like utopian fictions out there but and and like less than utopian but still

interesting explorations of anarchist societies like Ursula Kiligwin's The Dispossessed. It is interesting to me that even in mainstream sort of imagining whenever there's an attempt to envision a utopia there's nearly always a lot of anarchist principles involved in that yeah it's basically impossible to imagine a utopia without aspects of anarchist theory making it into it. Exactly right there tends to be like some elements of anti-work in there and like you know like

use liberation or some kind. We want to be post-hierarchy you know freedom of association yeah there's yeah yeah yeah yeah and so I kind of want to look at that look at these works through that lens as well here mostly island considering island is a bit closer to anarchy than Rivenewild is. Yeah I'd say so. Just a little bit. A little bit. Yeah yeah like when you look at how sexual liberation is treated in island it is pretty much an echo of

what anarchists were saying about free love in like nearly 20th and like late 19th century yeah particularly like Emma Goldman like free choice and contraceptive access and that sort of thing reproductive choice free love. It's really in parlor I would say they have this sort of element as well of like communal child rearing I mean in which is another thing I spoke about that in like my video in December on the family like the fact that humans basically

evolved in an alloparental arrangement in a cooperative reading arrangement yeah because of capitalism we moved away from that. Yeah there's a lot of if you if you study how kind of different societies that were not capitalist handled child rearing there's a lot of like very interesting I think my favorite is some indigenous group in um South America whose like cultural belief was that um you didn't you didn't have like one man have sex with a woman and that like

leads oh yes yes yes it starts the process and so once you've started the process of making a child the woman then is going to pick out all of the guys that she thinks have traits that she wants to be like part of the child she's making and has sex with them because you're like gradually building the child by having like adding additional sperm to it which means that when they have the kid all of those guys that she had sex with pregnant have a responsibility to rear the child and teach it things which I think is

objectively the best way to treat kids I mean even on like it's that's such an interesting metaphysical concept in terms of like what constitutes like even like the the idea of genetic makeup because even though it's not like literally true it's still like if you can convince yourself of that in your head then it kind of is physically true and it will it will be true enough for the kid because like yeah because if they're raised by all these different fathers because we've all taught things that yeah exactly those fathers treats are gonna like manifest in the child

anyway because they were raised by them therefore I think we should all agree to just act like it works that way yeah but I mean like and also like in terms of like the group living in island versus like brave new worlds brave new worlds it's always like you don't you have group living because you've lost like the idea of individuality right versus group living in island is more like you know how like anarchists have like group homes and like that's it's very similar to group living allows you to be the best version of yourself because the best version of yourself exists in

the community yeah exactly there's like a barista or whatever there's a kind of like like a jokey version of this I think about a lot where it's like if you see a block and like you're looking at it like a black block right it's like the way you can tell that there are malice involved is if you see a bunch of people actually like legitimately wearing all the same thing it's like like it's like it's like it's really like it's it's it's extremely rare that like even even when you're doing this for security reasons that you can get a

bunch of anarchists to actually literally all wear exactly the same thing because it's like it's like yeah you have this sort of like I mean okay this is this is not like always true but like it's it's I don't know you you have this thing where even when you're like even when anarchists are like trying to sort of like fade into a single mass it's like we like you literally can't do it because everyone has this sort of like this individual street I've definitely seen people be bad at block more often than I've seen them be good at it yeah it's like I don't know which I

mean like the actual hiding part of it yeah yeah but I don't know like it's it's it's it's it's there's there's there's there's a way of sort of egalitarianism and sociality where like you treat everyone as if they were exactly the same and like and you know and there's models of this where it's like yeah it's like okay you actually try to like force everyone to be exactly the same or like everyone to be exactly the same in the class and like that sucks and you shouldn't do it and the alternative to that is everyone is just sort of like in a group but they're all

like I don't know I'm not entirely sure if this is making any sense but it's I don't know there are ways you can have within a group thing yeah yeah it's like like the the purpose of the group is to like maintain like you know make like maintain the differentiation of the individual yeah to foster what makes individuals really good at being like their own person and give them the tools that can you can set that up yeah I think exactly like culturally we have like problems thinking about that because

like the sort of American version of individuality has to do with like no no no you're you're an individual because you have no connections to anyone else it's like well this sucks it is bad yeah because and I kind of goes back to the whole spoon building a baby concept right I didn't think I would ever use that phrase but individuals only individuals because their combination of influences are unique to them yeah well not just that I mean obviously this is a genetic component and

I'll know a lot but I think a key aspect of it is that you know because we are raising these different environments surrounded by different people we have different experiences that's what builds us up yes you know like I can I can already name off the top of my head like a bunch of like defining moments from my childhood you know that basically changed my course you know like the one time I got cyber-believed not basically like shifted my perspective and my approach the internet and that kind of thing you know it's like it really

I really can't imagine how someone could come away with the idea that an individual is just an individual on their own yeah they just they just pop out to and are that thing yeah I mean yeah because like a large portion of you is built up of previous you and previous like exist like your previous existence is what makes a large portion of yourself and like sure you can say you have a little bit of like ego from the start like your actual self self that

in that you know contributed to the way you interpret events which then will in turn build your personality but I think these things are not opposing these things work in tandem but yeah yeah so there's like the whole group living component and also in that group living component you notice in at one point in the book um one of the children like basically in passing mentions that you know they don't want to go by a certain person because they're mad at them or whatever and so they basically have that freedom to remove themselves from that situation

and go and sleep at another house or another space until that sort of situation is resolved and I think that also would really be a crucial element of anarchist society particularly for children having that freedom of association and freedom of movement because imagine how many abusive situations could be avoided or remedied if children had the ability to come out of it you know you strip children of choice and also allows these sorts of dynamics to persist yeah which then leads to

dynamics that persist in the next generation and so on and so on it's this thing that's having a resurgence in the united states right now and is like at the core of all of the book banning in the anti trans legislation which is this idea that like kids shouldn't have a choice because that would interfere with parents having absolute control over the life of their child and that includes the control to like if a child says I'm this or I'm that the parent can say absolutely not yeah exactly

and if you had like this um if you sort of like tool with like someone from from the past or someone who lives in like a cooperative reading arrangement that the parent the child is the parent's property entirely they would look at you like real funny because the child is part of the community doesn't belong to anyone you know it's belong if it belongs to anything it just belongs to the community as a whole yeah like as we all do yeah but yeah another element I think I find

I find really interesting in the way that palmy society operates is that and I guess in comparison to brave new world unlike in brave new world where drugs are used like um like i was saying like how drugs are used for pacification and control and self-medication that kind of thing to sort of like chill you out and prevent you from basically going mad in a mad society um in parlor you know drug use is used for bonding and for enlightenment and for

social connection and social cohesion and it is really interesting that that he changes what drugs do in his books like after he starts doing them yeah exactly exactly yeah and I actually don't know you know I used to have because I had the opposite arc with with drugs where I started doing them when I was uh very young and had the belief that like they were kind of inherently this mind-opening tool that could be used to expand the the borders of reality within human beings and

as an adult in part through some of the research I've done on the far right come to understand like no you can also use them to reinforce the very limited terrible things you already believe yeah and there are folks who do that quite effectively like that sort of PLU esotericism kind of yeah I don't know if I just made up that too no I like I like that term it's it's it's an accurate it's an accurate it's an accurate term to describe the thing we're talking about yeah I'm taking it

okay well yeah yeah I mean that that is absolutely correct because I mean yeah like those sort of cycle psychedelic substances and stuff yeah they can open your mind but they are they are ultimately drawing from your mind yeah drawing from your past experiences and beliefs in some capacity the way I always describe it is that like psychedelics are an accelerant to the fire that you've already built and they can make it flare up and it can be really cool and awesome

and it can flare up and be utterly terrifying and be like oh no oh no no no no but it's always kind of amplifying the things that you've already built through like the kindling of yourself yeah it psychedelics do not create things within you but they can lead you to realize things you wouldn't already realize or they can lead you to reinforce things that you're already doing and it kind of depends on what you go into it with it's like you know leery said I think it was leery the set setting in dose

and like your mind set is one of the most important things for what's actually going to happen when you when you take psychedelics yeah and if you're a nazi you can get better at being a nazi from taking acid if you're a nazi you're gonna see Hitler pull up on you like yes my son continue the good work that's that's the thing a lot of people don't understand when i've tried to like when i've tried to talk to people who are like really obviously like pro psychedelics i'm like yeah they're so like freeing like you

think about new ways and then i explain to them there's like well again this isn't this is an easy segue but if somehow the conversation goes to the point of me talking about all the nazis who do psychedelics and and then like do like weird esoteric rituals while doing like psychedelic drugs it can like confuse these people because you're like how could you be a nazi while you're you know into that mindset and like well it's actually for all of yeah for all these reasons that we've discussed it can actually assist within that like

it's like fantastical genocidal conspiratorial thinking it can really it can really give that a lot a lot of credence in someone's brain because if it's actually if you spoke into someone who is taking psychedelics and have had a specific kind of experience you can't talk them all to that experience yeah as far as they consume that is that is solidified in their mind you know this is reality i just had a glimpse of reality kind of thing you know yeah absolutely yeah it's one of those like if you

want if you want an illustration of how psychedelics do not work the way some people claim uh just make a note of the fact that at every street fight between fascists and anti-fascists in portland both sides every single person had fucking weed on them like the the the fucking the the far right like smoking pot as much as everybody else they just also do cocaine yeah whereas whereas antifa does ketamine yeah yeah antifa does ketamine

the proud boys do cocaine and they both have weed everybody's everybody's got joints yeah and both people and people on both sides have dropped acid and taken shrimps yeah i i can i can say this from a point of journalistic certainty because during one of the rallies where there was a permitted event at the federal park the police were there and telling people they could not take weed onto the federal park because it was federally illegal and every like both sides people were like all right shit like we're turning back because they

couldn't walk on with the weed in their pockets that's gonna open up a whole can of wounds to me because i don't know if you all saw this tweet i put out recently like there's still this resistance to drugs and to particularly to like cannabis and you would think that you know after decades of research and decades of understanding and really decades not even decades centuries of its use in various you know religious and spiritual practices that by now you know in a

post-colonial country would reach the point where you know we let it go and we decriminalize it but although we're kind of in the process of it we still have this situation where the police are like constantly burning down like fields of cannabis like they pull up and they're like we just seized and burned down like one million dollars worth of cannabis yeah and arrested this is that and the others like why are we still at this point where

basic basic like plants and herbs and medicines and whatnot are still facing this stigma it's not grounded in any sort of reality or or logic you know it's just colonial era prejudice but that was a brief aside yeah yeah um i don't think i have much left to see about island and and brief new world well you know listeners go home put on some hitler speeches drop some ass absolute take you absolutely not that is the worst idea

do not do that go to the woods go do do basically literally anything else besides that specific thing it's that specific thing that is different different people can can disagree no no like that is like one of the worst things to do to your own brain and psyche absolutely not yeah just do whatever guys literally anything else watch star trek i'd put on put on off the air i have i've watched a lot of star trick while tripping see there's there's so many better things to do than that thing you said mm-hmm go watch the movie conspiracy starring

kenneth brandaw see that could take a shitload of mescaline that that could be funny they already wrote masculine is any there instructions to not compute if if acid made time different what yeah that's kind of mescaline i mean mescaline's like the uh the active thing inside peyote yeah mescaline is is a psychedelic the most intense time dilation i've ever experienced where like you will feel like weeks have passed and it's been like seven hours what um it's pretty dope matt i definitely recommend mescaline everybody go take mescaline

even wear it again um well you if you if you there is a way to get the cacti which are legal pretty much everywhere because they're just cactuses and a lot of people use them decoratively and then using a um what do you call the pressure cooker um you can you can get the mescaline out of the cacti i've known people who have done it i have not personally done it obviously that would that would that would be a crime yeah would never criminal we would never we would never advocate that yeah but but there are ways to there are ways that like a person with minimal resources can get mescaline out

of uh out of the right uh cactus and um people have done it you know so there's the criminals have done it bad people there's this thing called tour yes because it's obviously criminality criminality is morality anyway um yeah all right saint andrew that was awesome i'm gonna go read island now um it's it's a good new world and i haven't read this i would recommend i am kind of bummed i guess at the end of this i am kind of bummed that as as imaginative of a guy as he was his this was his final book too well in his utopian story had to end with it

being crushed essentially by industrial capitalism expansion yeah and like corruption i mean like it is it is it is interesting again this this was his final book this was like his like send-off um in like in a way there's a there's an interesting component i do right because like in island yet like utopian society but there is a king yeah and a queen mother but not they don't have like the kind of power that you know we were typically um we still upon kings and queen mothers you know yeah they're still they're still able to destroy the society ultimately by

collaborating with the military dictator neighbor and the industrialist oil guy but i mean they are not really that involved in the day-to-day running to their society you know like parlor would be the same with or without them and interestingly the reason they were taking part in the destruction of poverty society is because they were educated in europe by christians and then went back to parlor yeah it's interesting because he's kind of playing with it sounds like the

same thing token was because like jara token at the end of his life kind of identified himself as like this weird sort of monarchist anarchist where he wanted there to be he thought the ideal society was one in which people you know there was people could not exercise power over each other but there was a little hierarchy and that you had a king who couldn't actually do anything whose purpose was to act as a figurehead um and i i don't entirely get what he was going through here he wrote a lot on the subject himself and it's interesting

that huxley's kind of playing with the same idea but is is obviously being like well this is a bad idea you know it could only work for so long um yada yada i don't know i find that compelling again i want to read this and that's something i may dig into more is kind of like what how token conceived of the ideal sort of monarchy versus uh how how huxley was thinking about it i i think that's kind of interesting yeah well that's gonna do it for us here and it could happen here uh garrison tour dot com no

talk sponsored by tour dot com no just drop some acid and google hitler duke again absolutely like seriously don't don't don't literally do anything else don't do that the woods are lovely the beach is magnificent talk to the ocean it's so much better go up a mountain go up a mountain unless you yeah like you can go and role play as moana or something yeah yeah go to a go to a go to a comic con uh literally i see my suggestions i i will talk about that experience at a

later date all right that is uh that is the show hey we'll be back monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe it could happen here is a production of cool zone media for more podcasts from cool zone media visitor website cool zone media dot com or check us out on the i heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts you can find sources for it could happen here updated monthly at cool zone media dot com slash sources thanks for listening hey everyone last year i published my first novel

after the revolution um as an ebook and as a podcast series well now it's coming out as a paperback book through a k press and if you just google a k press after the revolution you will be taken to the page where you can preorder it and get a signed copy now so please go to a k press after the revolution and find my book preorder it uh and i will love a hundred percent of you who do that so thanks look for your children's eyes and you will discover the true magic

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