Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 3

Episode Date: October 2, 2021

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Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space. With no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

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Find the Gangster Chronicles podcast on the iHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Roxanne Gay, the host of The Roxanne Gay Agenda, the bad feminist podcast of your dreams. Each week, I talk to an interesting person about feminism, race, writing and books, and art, food, pop culture, and yes, politics. We can't escape politics. Listen to the luminary original podcast, The Roxanne Gay Agenda, every Tuesday on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's up, guys? I'm Rashad Bilal. And I am Troy Millings, and we are the host of the Earn Your Leisure podcast,

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This is It Could Happen Here, a podcast that I opened perfectly as a professional, as a man who makes all of his money from podcasts. No notes. No notes. Kavi, how is syphilis doing these days? You don't hear a lot from syphilis. Is it holding up okay? Yeah, it's around. It's fine. Thank you for asking. Good. I'm glad you know that. It's not the same thread it used to be. It comes back in waves every now and then. It had a good run for a couple of years recently.

It's kind of like Star Trek, right? Yeah, there's a... Kind of comes in and out. Well, I don't think there's like new versions of it. I think it's like the same good old syphilis pretty much. I don't think it changes drastically. So it's like Star Trek on Netflix? Yeah. Yeah, okay. Yeah.

Well, good to hear from syphilis. This has been your syphilis update. That's gonna do it for us this week. Until next week, I've been Robert Evans, Dr. Kabehota, and of course, Garrison Davis. All right. Bye, everyone. Bye. No, that's not it. It would be pretty funny to just do that, Sophie, to just drop a one and a half minute episode on syphilis. But only if we put in 15 ads. Yeah, we really, like every word we have a full ad break in between.

Yeah, then people would probably complain less about the 900 ads that are in our episodes right now. I could talk about syphilis. What are we doing right now? What is this episode about? Kabeh, what's going on? I'm assuming you guys want to talk about the coronavirus or I don't know. I could talk about whatever you want. But I think that's probably what you guys brought me on for. All right. What is this coronavirus? Is this a problem? It's a little problem. Okay, that's not good to hear.

It's not great. Sophie, why didn't you give me a heads up on this? Oh, yeah, that's me not giving you a heads up on the plate. Yeah, I didn't hear anything about this. Is this why all the masks? Yeah, this is the mask thing. That's why you got those two jabs in your arms and that random parking lot. Oh, I thought that was heroin.

Sorry to disappoint. First of all, can we talk about the use of the word jab? I don't love it. I mean, you're not James Bond. Let's not use jab. That's fair. I prefer what I think is the proper medical term, vein fucked. Yeah. But it's not really your vein either. It's really just intramuscular fucked. Oh, right. Muscle fucked.

What are the cool kids calling it? Is it a poke? What do we want to call it? What do the teens call it? Yeah. Are they calling it the tiktoks? Yeah, it's called the tiktok. I don't know. I've been working on all day today. I've been working to find this proud boy who's pretending to take COVID vaccines but is actually steroids. He calls them critical support.

He calls them extracurriculars. That honestly rules. That's extremely funny. I'm hoping an article will be out by the time this podcast airs. Who's the article for? I'm not sure yet. I'm talking with Opossum Press. Oh, OK. Cool. Well, that's funny. Garrison, what is today's episode about? We wanted to talk to Kava about both what the current plague situation is.

A lot of people seem to think it's over. A lot of people seem to think it's not over. And then also, how is COVID and all the stuff still affecting our hospital and medical system? Is there supply shortages for medical supplies? What's going on in different areas? Staffing. Yeah, because all of that, all that kind of stuff. Got you. Yes, is the answer. Yes, is the answer. Yeah, it's still a problem. I don't think. Don't listen to anyone who tells you that it's not.

Don't listen to anyone who gives you too sunny a forecast on it. But it, you know, it's different in different places is the long and the short of it. In places where the vaccinations are higher and where there's mandates and there's reasonable laws about things, the rates are going down. Shout out California. California, but also like Rhode Island, Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont. In places with high vaccination rates, the rates of cases are going down in those places. Places like Mississippi, West Virginia, Idaho, Alabama.

These are places where like it's 40 to 49% vaccination rates and the cases are going way up. You guys might have heard of a couple of things happening. Like there was that 46 year old guy named Daniel Wilkinson. He's like a vet who developed something called gallstone pancreatitis, which I could talk to you guys about for hours. But I won't, don't worry, but I could. I'm just letting you know I could. And there's, I mean, Idaho, they just declared it's not a total DNR, but like anyone who has cardiac arrest is on a DNR now in Idaho because they just don't have the resources to be. Well, that's not entire. I mean, that's what I get wrong there.

So that's not your fault that you got it wrong because there were doctors that were sort of spreading that story about. Now they are in what's called the crisis standard of care. But in part of that means that hospitals could go to putting everyone on DNR, which means do not resuscitate. Which means if you have a cardiac arrest, they won't do anything about it. That's not what's actually happening. It could happen. When they institute this crisis standard of care, what it means is that if a hospital gets so short on their ventilators, and they just don't have any more room, then they could implement that. I mean, I don't know. I haven't heard of anyone.

I was asking around to see if any doctors in Idaho could tell me of a hospital that's actually doing it. I haven't seen or heard of one that's actually doing it yet, but they could. The point is, it's that bad. That's a reasonable discussion where doctors have to discuss kind of like they were back in the day in New York, where they have to be like, okay, does this person, do we put the young lady on the ventilator or the old guy? Then we have to decide and they make those decisions. It's really awful. It's a position no doctor wants to be in. And now that's becoming a reality. It's brutal. It's brutal out there.

And that's bleeding into other states nearby. Is that what you mean by the Wilkerson situation because his doctor couldn't find an ICU bed for him? Is that the story you're talking about? That's the story. So he's this guy who had a problem that can be fixed. I mean, it's a procedure called an ERCP that he can get done at specialty centers and he didn't live far from Houston. Houston has plenty of those specialty centers that can do it. They have great gastroenterologists like myself, not as good, but same sort of thing. And they could do it if they had the availability to get him in, but they didn't.

And so he died is something that he shouldn't have. It's basically that example. And I'm sure there's more examples of that. What really worries me is the examples that you're not hearing yet, like cases that are delayed now, cancer screening things that are being delayed now in these hospitals that we're going to be paying down the road. That's the shit that really scares me. I like just people not going in for things in general, too. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. I have friends other than you who work in ERs and stuff, nurses and a doctor. Bullshit. It's up in the P and W. But the shit they're saying is like, in today's crap. They are working on building capacity and making sure they have things to treat their friends because the advice is do not go to the hospital. If at all possible, because there's just not capacity for you unless it's literally an immediate life and death thing. It's almost not worth trying because there's just nothing.

There's no slack. The system is, and it's starting to turn, it looks like, here in the Portland area, but it's frightening. These are not people who would be bullshitting or are prone to panic. They're ER professionals, but it's fucked up. It's this thing where the scary thing to me is not even necessarily where we are right now, because there is some kind of broadly positive news in a lot of areas about where the pandemic is going. It's just like this situation won't be fixed when case numbers go down. It's going to be permanent damage has been done to the system.

And I guess what I'm wondering, first off, from what you're seeing, what is the extent of the permanent damage done to our emergency medical system in particular and our ability to even get care at the moment? Yeah, that's a really good question. I don't know. It kind of goes back to, I think, what Garrison wanted to talk about, which is the collapse of the medical system. I think we talk about it a lot in terms of we're on the edge of collapse, we're near collapse. I think there are places in this country where it already has collapsed. I think that's pretty evident.

It's really, it's not homogeneous in any way across this country. There are certainly places that are better than others. And there's certainly places that have a lot more leeway and flexibility, but everywhere is strained right now. And in regards to your question about permanent damage, I'll answer that in regards to just the personnel. Because of the show that I have the House of Pod, follow us on Twitter at the House of Pod. I talk to a lot of doctors and nurses from all over the country, talk to them a lot, and it's bad. I mean, the stress that they're under, the PTSD that they're dealing with, the burnout, the level of burnout is just intense. It's intense.

And it's, I think we were talking about moral injury and burnout before all this started. And now it is to a point where I don't know what's going to happen to the medical system just in terms of the personnel when this is all over. I know a lot of people who are getting out of medicine, getting out of clinical medicine. I mean, out of like, I would say out of just my immediate friend group, I can think of a couple offhand, excellent doctors, really great ICU ER doctors who are already planning their exit. And one, I don't know. I mean, in the next coming years, that's going to be a major issue. And I don't know how we're going to address that. And our nurses in the ICUs, man, the stuff they have to put up with is insane.

You just see it in their eyes. Eyes are broken. Like I was, I volunteered on the wards a couple of weeks ago. And people, the doctors and nurses taking care of these COVID patients day in, day out, like they, there's like a little bit of their soul that's been broken. You just see it in their eyes. Like I was there for like just a week and it's terrifying. You're going into a room with a patient with COVID, it's scary. You know, even no matter how much PPE, protective equipment you have on, like you're always a little scared.

And I just think years of that, that weighs on the person in a way I don't, I mean, I am worried about. I don't know how we're going to address that. Yeah, that's cool. Yeah, and it's frustrating because like from the perspective of people listening, right? The thing you want to ask is like, well, how can I help? And it's like, well, you can't because you're already, if you're listening to the show, I assume you're masking. I assume you've gotten vaccinated if you don't have like a condition that renders you unable to get the vaccine. You're, you're, I think our listeners tend to be pretty responsible people.

It's just not enough because 30 to 40% of the country decided to like Leroy Jenkins a plague. And God. Garrison, do you know that reference? Is that what you get that reference? Garrison, I'm familiar with Leroy Jenkins. That's good. That's good. Were you bored when Leroy Jenkins became a thing?

I don't know. You would have been like three. I would have been young. Yeah. Yeah. Was it, it was Deadpool that brought him to your attention, isn't it? No, no, I, it came to my attention just doing general internet. Nothing.

Yeah, it was one of the first, it was the first meme that you could show your parents pretty much. I guess there were like badger, badger mushroom, a couple of others in that category, but like it was one of the first memes that wasn't a man's gaping asshole prolapsed. But I showed my parents that all the time. I don't know what you're talking about. Oh yeah, no. There was a beautiful moment back in the day with somebody goatsy to stadium. Yeah.

That's what brought you into medicine. This is when I saw it work. They were so proud of me. They were like, look at, look at our son. Look at our boy. Look at our boy. He can tell us exactly why that man's asshole looks that way. I have a weird job.

I guess one of my questions is with the assumption that people are taking the actual plague related steps they can to reduce their burden to the medical system. What can people realistically do? I mean, I think part of that is, and this is, I'm not going to have you to like explain how you can take care of your own medical treatments in an emergency on a podcast. That's not the time or the place. Although I do think it's probably a good idea for people to read up on first aid and basic life saving emergency.

Like it's always a good idea to have some training there. But yeah, I mean, do you have other advice? You know, you're exactly right. The people that are listening to this podcast are totally on board already. They're super supportive and we appreciate that. I mean, that is not unnoticed. I mean, you know, it's having people like outside the hospitals every now and then applauding doctors.

I know it's cheesy, but it's great. I'll take that over the blue angels flying overhead any day. Yeah. So that stuff is really important in masking and taking care of themselves is great. You know, the real practical things that people can do, I think, is help contribute to sites that will help get the rest of the world vaccinated. I mean, we can definitely talk about that. The question of boosters here versus, you know, vaccines for the first time elsewhere.

But that's the one thing I would recommend right now. If you want to help, let's put our money into places where we can get vaccines to other places. And I think that every little bit of that helps in the long run. And that's the sort of thing that we could use other than that. I mean, I just hope that people are still going into medicine and in nursing. You know, that's the only thing I can still hope is that people who haven't interested in it, you know, continue to do it.

And for those people who are just they're training those years of their formative years or during this time, I just want to let them know, I swear it gets better. It's not always going to be like this. And if you make it through this, you're going to be an amazing clinician, you're going to be an amazing nurse, you're going to be an amazing doctor. And I really want you guys to keep doing it. That's that's one thing I would say too. Yeah, I mean, and I'll certainly add that if you're someone who's contemplating a medical

career, please, please. I mean, just from a there's a couple of things on that, like just from a perspective of what the world needs, it's what the world needs. But also if you're listening to the stuff we're saying about the crumbles, about the possibility of the collapse, if you're someone who who foresees things getting potentially much more difficult in the future, not a lot of things more useful in a bad situation than somebody with medical training. I do count on that to getting me through the apocalypse.

Yeah, I'm soft. I am so soft. I went camping and I couldn't handle it a couple of weeks ago. I went camping. It was awful. There was so much dust. It was an awful experience, but I just thought if the apocalypse comes, I will hopefully get placed in a very nice tent because I'm a doctor.

So I'm counting on that to get me through. There are there are so many dumbass, boogaloo type, quote unquote, preppers who focus on the guns and the gear and the dried food. But and the throwing knives and the shirt. Throwing knives, but don't even have an ifac, an individual first aid kit or like a tourniquet. And like the talk to you talk to like, like, I mean, this is a little off topic, but like talk to combat Marines about like their favorite person. It's always the corpsman.

It's the guy who knows or the lady who knows how to like patch a bullet wound and whatnot. Like there's there's nothing more useful in any situation pretty much that that is dangerous than somebody who can do medicine. So please, if you're if you're studying to do medicine, if you're contemplating becoming an EMT or a paramedic or a nurse or whatever, good God, we need you so badly. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. We talked a little bit about just kind of the medical system in general.

And then we can also kind of discuss more stuff related to how covid's impacting certain areas more than others. And like, let's say someone who's someone who is listening who's in one of these areas that has only 40% vaccinated, you know, not a lot of people are going on with masks on. And, you know, schools starting back up, maybe they have kids are going to their school system. I know in Texas, they have, you know, child deaths are rising. That sounds very frightening to be that kind of person who like, you know, would like like to see that stuff happen in their state, but it's just not really possible.

And I don't know with so much of the rest of the world kind of slowly taking back restrictions. I'm sure it feels very jarring to be in a situation like that and kind of like there's really nothing that you can do, right, because you can talk to your family, talk to your friends. But like, overall, it's hard to make, you know, a big impact in a state, you know, like Texas, Alabama, like Idaho, all the ones that you were mentioning before. From a medical kind of perspective, is there is there any way people can kind of start to talk about those things with their family? And because the way we've been trying to get people to take the vaccine with the marketing we've been doing

has not been super successful in these demographics. Do you think there's other conversations that can get people to slowly kind of be more able to, you know, contemplate that? Yeah, that's a tough question. It's particularly tough if you're someone who believes in the importance of vaccines or the importance of masks and that sort of thing, and you're in a place where you're a minority. That is tough. The first thing I'll say is definitely know that the vaccine helps.

You're in a much better position because of the vaccine. When I was on the wards and I was looking at patients, they're almost all unvaccinated. Those are the people that end up in the hospital. You can still get hospitalized if you have the vaccine, but it's much less likely. Not that these people don't count, they count just as much, but if you don't have an underlying problem like a liver transplant or some immunosuppression, then you're less likely to have a really bad outcome with COVID if you're vaccinated. So just know that it helps.

You still might get it. It'll suck, but for the most part, you're going to stay out of the hospital. That really, I think, is something to have a little comfort in. It really does seem to work. Outside of that, the school's thing is a real concern for me. I'm going to feel a lot better. We're going to be in a much better position once we are able to get kids vaccinated. There's two things.

You guys probably heard that there was this committee that met to advise the FDA about booster shots. That's one thing. Booster shots are going to go out to people who need them, 65 and older people at high risk. People in high risk occupations, they're like frontline workers. So there's going to be booster shots coming out. And then the data is coming out now about 5 to 11. 5 to 11, yeah. And that's pretty promising.

It looks like they're going to do okay with lower doses. So they use about one-third the dose of the vaccine that the adults get. And it seems to work. We haven't seen much other than the pre-press release from Pfizer. But if you really pick at it, it looks promising. So that's something that makes me hopeful. That's something I'm definitely clinging to. I think there's no way we're getting out of this without vaccinating kids. That just has to happen.

I think once that starts rolling out, hopefully it will soon. I mean, I don't want to put a date on it, but I'm hoping within the next couple of months this starts happening. So once that starts happening, I'm going to feel a lot more comfortable. I think people in those situations are going to feel a lot more comfortable too. Yeah. The booster thing is an interesting question to me. From an ethical standpoint, particularly. I think it's not a fair narrative to say it has to be one or the other.

And I think people are saying that. I think we can do it. I think we can produce enough vaccine here for people who haven't got it yet and enough for the boosters and start supplying more to the world. I mean, we can do more. Our government and Pfizer, Moderna definitely need to do more in that regard. They definitely need to do more in terms of production. They haven't hit their goals in a lot of these places. But it's also not like they haven't done anything yet.

It's not like 200 million doses are being donated just this week, I think. So they are doing things that's happening. It's just we need more of it. We need more of it. We need to ramp up production. Yeah. It's weird because you're right. We could produce enough vaccines for the places that don't have them and enough vaccines for boosters over here.

And all it would take is a couple of months of our Afghanistan mad money. But we're not going to do that. But it probably will like, I don't know, contribute to an issue of that. There's a there's a chance that it will contribute to an issue of vaccine unavailability. But also it's not like if we don't get the boosters, those vaccines will be available because we're just not giving them out. Yeah. In the extent that we need. So I yeah, I don't know.

I understand what you're saying. I'll get the booster if they decide to give out boosters because I like not having not dying of the plague. Or getting long COVID. Yeah. Yeah. That seems great. And a lot of the vaccine hesitancy kind of relies tracks back to how we've been marketing at it. And I've been on the team that's like, we should stop using Fauci because every time Fauci goes on TV to talk about vaccines.

Yeah. More people are going to do like a backfire effect. You'd be like, no, I'm not going to get it because I don't trust Fauci. So there is a particular like marketing thing that I think we've failed on. Like America is very good at marketing when we can make money, but when it's not related to getting more profit, I think the government's very bad at marketing these types of things. And on the kind of the marketing side of things. I don't know. This is kind of old news at this point, but the whole swollen testicles thing, which you have not talked about on this show about.

But I'm sure you have thoughts about how this thing has kind of ballooned, which is that can be. Like the testicles. Exactly. Because it's friend. Yeah. So how the marketing and misinformation relates to this cool kind of current problem. Yeah. Yeah.

First of all, that particular story, I mean, that's hilarious. I mean, like this, I've never, I've never seen someone's excuse for venereal disease becomes such an international issue. Yeah. Contribute to the deaths probably of hundreds of people. Right. Yeah. You know, it's the marketing thing is a really great question. And it's been driving me crazy because like part of me at this point just wants to be like, get the fucking vaccine.

What the fuck's wrong with you? Get the fucking vaccine. Part of my language. And like, but then the part of me knows that that doesn't work. Like, I do believe doctors should be able to express their frustration. Yeah. They need to be able to do that. If we can't do that right now, I mean, it's game over.

They need to at least have that ability where doctors can voice their frustration with anti-vaxxers, but still give them the same high level of care that we're always going to give them no matter what when they show up in the hospital. But it's not working to do that. We need other approaches. I don't, I don't entirely know what they are. There are some people, they're, they're so far out there that we're just never going to reach the people, the microchip people. There's like a level of deep programming that will need to happen to those people that we just, it's too exhausting to do that. You really have to like, you can't scale that in any meaningful way for the country. I think, I think, yeah, I don't know.

I think calling it the Trump vaccine was the closest we got to having that be a possibility. And that fucking, I'm interested in your thoughts on the fucking Breitbart article. And if you're not aware, because you're less online than us, and God bless you if you are. Breitbart, the, which is, I don't know, CNN for fascists came up with an article blaming the Democrats for the fact that Republicans don't want to take the vaccine. And saying it's a secret liberal plot to exterminate conservatives because conservatives refuse to take vaccines because they're fundamentally oppositional defiant. And like it's, it's the fault of people who are telling them to take the vaccine that they're not taking the vaccine because obviously why would you trust a liberal on anything? But also they're trying to kill us and we're going to lose the election because we're all dying because we refuse to get vaccinated for a preventable disease. Anyway, how do you feel about that?

I don't, I don't love it. I don't love it. I'm vaguely familiar with Breitbart. I don't know that exact article because I have enough pain in my life already. Fair enough. But, but, you know, I do wonder it's like when they put out articles like this, when Tucker Carlson goes out and he does his thing questioning vaccine, just asking questions about vaccines that lead to vaccine hesitancy. Like what calculations are they doing? Is this just him being callous and not giving a fuck and just doing it?

Or is there some calculation that him and some sort of right wing think tank are doing where they're like, hey, look, this sells to our audience. They love it. Let's keep doing it. Yes, we are going to lose a portion of our audience because of this, but we still have plenty of audience left. I don't, I wonder how that's happening. Like it is hurting. It is true. It is hurting them more than other people.

It's hurting everyone. Everyone's getting affected by this. But it's those states that are being affected. The people not getting vaccinated who are listening to people like Tucker Carlson. So I don't, I don't understand what their end game is here. Like this is their market. Why not protect it? And that I do not have a good answer for.

I was hoping one of you guys would. You know, it's there's a lot going on there. I think a decent chunk of it is the assumption that whatever they lose in terms of dead followers won't be worth more than continuing the cash bonanza that is owning the lips. Right. Because that's all they that's all that's the entirety of the right wing media. It's just owning the lips. It's just oppositional defiant. It's just hating anything Democrats do.

So you you kind of can't you're a cuck if you tell people to receive basic medical care. If Democrats are taking that basic medical care, right? So it's a pride thing for a lot of them. Two things I love is when you when you use the word cuck or when you do Ben Shapiro's voice, like those are like two of my favorite things that you do. It's you say it really well far beyond anything rational on the right. And it's it's difficult to like I think the calculation is just like I think a lot of these guys is the same thing with climate change. Like they're smart enough to know that they're contributing to an uninhabitable world, but they want to cash in first. They want to get as much as they can out before it falls apart.

And I think that's all any of these people care about because I think you there are the true believers, the radio guys are true believers, right? The radio guys who keep dying because they don't get vaccinated. Those guys did believe that it was some sort of weird conspiracy. It was the communists, whatever, clearly because they died. Mid management level. Yeah, mid management level. They don't know all the stuff that they're being told from 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 heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.

I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories.

But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Above, and they kind of believe it enough to where they kill themselves for the company. I think for Tucker, it's more a matter of like, hey, I keep making money and I maintain my power if I continue to hold this line. You lose power, you get weaker.

It's like when Trump got booed for telling people to take the fucking vaccine, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, crazy. You can't go back with this shit. You just can't, and you certainly can't admit to ever having been wrong. Right. Oh, man. It's good shit.

What a fun note to end the episode on. What a good society we've built. Love us. Oh my God. Bravo. Well, Kavit, people can find you by looking up the House of Pod. Yes. It was slightly less depressing, but not super uplifting either at this point.

Follow us at the House of Pod at Twitter and you can listen to our podcast pretty much anywhere you listen to podcast. We'll talk about medical type things, but not so deep into the woods that it's not entertaining, I hope. Yeah, fuck the woods. Yeah, fuck the woods. We have fun guests ranging from the world's best medical experts to, you know, you guys. People like us, the world's best medical experts. You guys are right up there. I tell you, for medicine, right, there's no better medicine than just a big fat pile of cocaine.

And the good thing about cocaine is it's a sterilizing agent. So if you're worried about COVID getting in your nasal passages, just rail cocaine before you and after you go into the store. It's like getting a COVID test, but more fun. Legally, I have to tell you that's false. Well, we all have our opinions about how cocaine works. Well, you have your facts and I have my facts. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go pick up a single item at the grocery store. New murders tearing apart the town.

My mission put myself and my friends in danger. Though it wasn't all bad. I'm going to be real if you take. I like you. But now, all signs point to a new serial killer in Hollow Falls. If this game is just starting, you better believe I'm going to win. I'm Tig Torres, and this is Lethal It. Catch up on season one of the Hit Murder Mystery podcast, Lethal It, a Tig Torres mystery out now.

And then tune in for all new thrills in season two, dropping weekly starting February 9th. Subscribe now to never miss an episode. Listen to Lethal It on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. How would an interplanetary civilization function? Disfree will exist. Stuff to Blow Your Mind examines neurological quandaries, cosmic mysteries, evolutionary marvels, and the wonders of techno history. Basically, this show is the altar where we worship the weirdness of reality. If anybody ever told you, you ask the weirdest questions.

It is time to come join us in the place where you belong. The Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast. New episodes publish every Tuesday and Thursday with bonus episodes on Saturdays. Listen to Stuff to Blow Your Mind on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Look through your children's eyes to see the true magic of a forest. It's a storybook world for them. You look and see a tree. They see the wrinkled face of a wizard with arms outstretched to the sky.

They see treasure in pebbles. They see a windy path that could lead to adventure. And they see you. Their fearless guide to this fascinating world. Find a forest near you and start exploring at discovertheforest.org. Brought to you by the United States Forest Service and the YAT Council. Welcome to It Could Happen Here Pod, a podcast that is today about the fact that ten years ago it did happen. And when I say it did happen, I mean, we occupied an extremely large number of places,

and we did so in interesting and incredibly bizarre ways. And with me to talk about this is Garrison, as always. I like that you used the Twitter handle for our podcast, not the actual name, but that's fine. Where can it go for it? But hello, hi, I'm Garrison. With me, I have my special guest, Vicky Osterweil, who is an agitator, who is a writer, who has done many, many things, probably most famously writing the book, In Defense of Looting, in 2020 from Bold Press. Bold Type Press.

Bold Type Press, yeah. Very good book. People got very mad. Thank you. People got very angry. Yes. Thank you. I'm really excited to be here to talk about the anniversary of Occupy, which is basically when I got this whole train rolling.

Yeah, and the other thing that is probably relevant here is that Vicky was one of the first people at Occupy, and correct me if I'm wrong about this. I found an oblique reference to this in one of the things I read. You facilitated the first meeting? Yes. Yeah, I guess it's on the record now. Yeah, during the New York City General Assembly, it was called in August, there was, you know, Adbusters, hopefully called for a General Assembly, and a bunch of us sort of went down there,

and there was a tanky party there doing a General Assembly, which was just them on speakers doing their regular ranting. It hasn't changed much in 10 years. Yeah, so a bunch of us just went and sat down to the side of it and started an actual General Assembly, and by happenstance I facilitated that meeting, and it was the first and last Occupy meeting I ever facilitated. Yeah, okay, so I want to roll back a little bit to just before the start of Occupy, because... Yeah. The more I've been thinking about this, the more I've just realized that 2011 was just a profoundly weird time, and in a lot of ways I think people have forgotten.

The entire American security state is at this point being terrorized by a joint anonymous low-sec hacking campaign called Antisec, the symbol of which is a guy in a Guy Fox mask wearing a monocle and a top hat, and this was just like normal. Yeah. I was like, oh yeah, yeah, it's the Antisec top hat troll face guy in a monocle. Fun fact about that, just before we forget, David Grahmer, Rest in Peace, who was there in the early days organizing, claimed that he had heard and talked to some of the, like, overheard the police talking about. The reason they didn't sweep the Occupy encampment the first day when we were pretty weak, frankly,

or the first week was because there were a bunch of Guy Fox masks, and they were scared they were going to get hacked if they were attacked. They were scared they were going to hack them and steal their, yeah, so it was a weird time indeed, yeah. Yeah, and I think the other thing that's, you know, I think important about this time period, if we're looking back at what Occupy was, is that, so this is three years after the financial collapse, and, you know, so, you know, in the run up to 2011, there's been a few protests, there's been, there was a big thing in Greece in 2008 that was kind of related, kind of unrelated, but I think in my sense of, you know, I was like, I don't know, I was like 13, I was like an actual baby child,

but my sense of it was kind of just like, there's this sense that everyone's just kind of waiting for something to happen, and it just like hadn't, and it just like kept going, and kept going, and kept going, and then, you know, and then, and then Tunisia starts, and suddenly there's, you know, there's protests in Tunisia, there's protests in Egypt, there's like people fighting tanks in the street in Bahrain, and, you know, this is, you know, this becomes known as the Arab Spring, and it starts to spread to a lot of places, and Vicky, I want to ask you about this because you were in Spain, when it started there, I want to talk about what was going on there. Yeah, so I wasn't there when it started, but yes, basically, you know, and I want to shout out, like there were a bunch of like movements, like in 2008, right after the crash, there were a bunch of protests,

like outside Wall Street, they were very small, but they were like, sort of they like produced some images, and then there was, you know, in 2009, there's the Oscar Grant Rebellion in Oakland, and you have the Madison Occupation earlier in 2011, where the workers, the unions took over the state house in Wisconsin. Oh yeah, I forgot about that. Yeah, yeah, everyone does, it was actually really important at the time. But yes, so, you know, so I think I'm glad you brought up Greece, because I think actually Greece really, that sort of anarchist rebellion in 2008, 2009, really kicked off the cycle in a certain way, but also didn't quite, it wasn't quite the first domino, you know, it was sort of more of a like forecast.

So yeah, so Arab Spring, you know, is huge, it's this huge, huge event, and the US media is loving it, because obviously like these sort of old, you know, quote unquote Marxist dictators are falling, and so of course the US is like all about it, which of course later on the return of the tankies will use to confuse everyone on the US left and destroy all solidarity with Syria. Anyway, but that's neither there. So then then in then in that summer, you get this this wave of early summer like May and June. In fact, the 15th of May was when the movement started in Spain and then it starts soon again in Greece. And it was similar to occupy in that there was these people coming together in these sort of encampments in the center of the city. I don't know if people remember or know this history economically, but Spain and Greece had recently been sort of going through these like big, big booms.

Economic booms just for about five or six years that turned out to be real estate bubbles funded by their entry into the EU. And 2008 just smashed that and they were just like incredibly impoverished. I mean, like Spain was facing something like 50% youth unemployment. Greece was like similar. Spain has recovered more than Greece has in the intervening years, but it's still bad. So, so yeah, so you had all these it was it was, you know, predominantly young folks who were, you know, had been pushed out of the economy, who didn't pushed out of their homes, whose families had lost their homes, gathering together and it was all over both countries and it was huge. I happened to just be in Barcelona. I had been on a planned vacation with some friends, you know, that we had we had planned like sort of six months earlier when it all popped off and I had also just started my writing.

I would say career, but that's very generous. I had started technically being paid for writing things and they were like, oh, write about it like like cover it while you're there. And because no one in the US was talking about what was going on in Spain, when my article popped up, like, and this is like this is really strange, but it was like the early days of Twitter as well. 2011, like I guess Twitter started 2009 or something. And so like, so the, the, the one of the accounts from the camp tweets out my article. So I went there the next day, I was like, I wrote that article and then I was like embedded for a week and I was there for like kind of the height of the popular power of the movement in Barcelona only for a week, but I was there on the day when there was a two and a half million person March through Barcelona, just like still probably the biggest March I've ever been part of and probably ever will be was like that. And so, you know, so that goes on for a few months in Greece and Barcelona, it sort of hits similar limits that Occupy would eventually hit, which is that like, you know, that, that if you can take the space away from people, that's that's the common ground and like you can't really have the movement without the encampment, and also all the way in which the camps sort of force a kind of internal naval gazing and people like get really obsessed with maintaining the camp rather than the struggle with the city at large.

So all of those all of those contradictions sort of like came up in Spain and Greece as well, but at the time, you know, I was there for the height of it, I come back to New York, I'm like, this is going to happen in the US like it has to. I think a lot of folks who had been watching felt that way as well. I actually took part in this thing called Bloombergville, which was like, oh, yeah, 50 people on a sidewalk. It was Mike from Michael Bloomberg, right? 50 people on a sidewalk. 50 people was gender. And I was like, when we were doing really well, and mostly 15 of us like 15 of us on a sidewalk in the financial district, like getting yelled at by cops, you know, sleeping on cardboard, you know, Occupy style, but without any attention or solidarity. And but because I had been in Barcelona and I saw these comrades in Barcelona, I was like, oh my God, we're doing it in New York. So we had this thing where Bloombergville, which is like 20 people, like got to talk to a general assembly in Barcelona at the height of its power, like on a like internet link, like a really early internet link, you know. And, you know, so so so so there was all this energy that was happening and then I think really crucially the London riots pop off. And that doesn't get talked about very much anymore, partially because the UK left really stabbed. Yeah, here's the back during that and have repressed the memory event largely and have suffered ever since, in my opinion, strategically. But, you know, that was for us in the US that was huge. It was huge watching, watching those riots unfold like, you know, again, this was like early live streaming. So like we were like watching live feeds of the riots, you know, which like was not a thing that you could really do without a TV before.

There was just like there was a lot of stuff going on that felt exciting and and was and really important and inevitable that it would come to the US because things were so messed up over here. I think we should talk about what a General Assembly actually is because I think a lot of people aren't going to have like never actually ran into what exactly is going on or have sort of forgotten in the last 10 years after this sort of fallen out of favor. Sure, yeah, I mean, it's it was never my favorite either, honestly, but it's a it's a meeting style designed. It actually does largely actually come from from European anarchist traditions from from Spain and Greece. But as as many of us know, a lot of those traditions go back further and have crossed across the water. General Assembly is actually there's a long history of them in indigenous communities in Turtle Island, for example. So it's an old meeting style in which the Quakers also the Quakers famously also was sort of sort of co opted it from from indigenous folks out here on the east coast. But it's a meeting style in which, you know, with the exception of a facilitator, which is occasionally but not always present. Everyone is able to speak together. There is some there's an agenda sometimes but it's basically a meeting designed where everyone present in the meeting has like an equal voice and it's not really designed generally for decision making specifically or in with like really specific goals in mind often, although there will be sort of like things that are trying to get settled. But it's it's it's it's designed to allow, you know, a very, very multivocal approach and for everyone to sort of put in their their thoughts and their ideas, and often is connected, although not necessarily but is often connected to consensus operation where things can't get sort of decided on unless everyone sort of agrees. And in Occupy, that was the General Assembly was sort of was a bit controversial because it was just whoever showed up obviously participates in it.

So, you know, unlike, unlike, you know, an organizational meeting where you, you know, everyone knows each other and you have to have a, you know, you have to be there with an invite or whatever, you know, whatever cranky wing nut wanted to show up could, and that had pluses and minuses. It was charming sometimes, but it was also very frustrating. And in New York, where I was, it was made almost impossible to function by this thing called the People's Mike, which I think still happens sometimes people say Mike check. And then everyone repeats what was said, but that means that it takes four times as long to talk as normal. So when you have a wing nut, you know, like advocating for wrong Paul, and then you've got 30 people echoing him every four words. It makes it makes discussion completely impossible. And a micro history of the People's Mike, the reason that happened was because in the first week in Zuccotti Park, whenever we got on a megaphone, police would come and arrest whoever was on the megaphone, because you weren't allowed to use amplified sound in New York. And one organizer was like, Oh, no, no, we can like use the People's Mike, we can like repeat back to each other. And this is when we they're still mostly like 30 to 40 people in the park at any one time. It's very small. That didn't feel so bad. But then when the movement really got big, the People's Mike became completely unwieldy, and also was a response to a was a cowardly response to police repression, frankly, and was a way of so the People's Mike is is, in my opinion, a reactionary form. Anyway, that is it. So it's been 10 years. I haven't been able to complain about this in like eight years. Thank you so much. But anyway, so yes, the General Assembly is just a meeting form that often often associated with anarchy, anarchist practice or radical democratic practice, in which sort of consensus is aimed for by allowing everyone to speak their mind, I would say.

Yeah. And so this this this I think gets us back to where we open this episode, which is add busters calls an event with literally no plans to like do anything. They're just like, Yeah, everyone, we're occupying Wall Street. And then, yeah, and you know, as I was talking about the beginning of it, you guys basically hijack. Well, sort of, I mean, so ad busters, ad busters doesn't show up. Like you said, there's I've never met an ad busters person. And it was funny, like we would do jokes about it. But I think it's also thinking about this in preparation for this interview. It's also interesting because ad busters and their culture jamming is kind of like one of the results of the sort of alter globalization movement of the like late 90s and early 2000s, the summit hopping stuff, the anarchy movement of like one generation ahead of occupy. So I think it's sort of appropriate that ad busters sort of like, you know, was present in this legacy in a certain way and a lot of those organizers were as well. But yes. I'm sorry. Did I just jump in for you? No, no, no. Okay. The the yeah so so so so a bunch of people I don't actually know who calls for an August 2. You know, General Assembly to talk about the call for September 17 to occupy Wall Street. And at that, at that point, that's when the thing I was describing earlier like happens where where, you know, we, a bunch of folks and and I really want to underline this most of them were people who had been in Spain or Greece. David Graber was also there was like a lot of old heads there was like a, there was a comrade from Japan.

It was a very international crew who had like had experience in these movements over the summer came and had this General Assembly and sort of ran it that way and broke out we had we broke off working groups. And then there was meetings sort of once a week and then working group meetings within that and General Assemblies from August 2 until September 17 at which point, you know, occupy the date the date that ad busters had called for actually happened. My impression of this and I was I was very small. I had very limited idea of what was going on. The way I remember in the media is that like the media was weirdly interested in it in a way that I've never seen them. I've never seen them cover another social movement that wasn't like literally burning their offices down. It was like in the beginning it was I mean, you know, obviously the right wing media is losing their minds, but they were kind of kind of supportive of it. And I think I don't know what you think about this. One of the things that that happens in both in both Greece and in Spain is that the product movement of the squares is these electoral movements and these electoral movements just fail like catastrophically like as far as it takes power like like they they they they have they have they have like their finance minister is a left communist. He is like he is the most far left person ever like the whole office since like the Spanish anarchists in 1936 and they implement austerity anyways.

In Spain, you get Podemos and it's like, well, okay, you know, they had this thing called the electoral war machine. They're going to take over the Spanish political system and they just it collapsed. They've never like they've never they've never taken power. They've never really got anywhere. They they successfully evicted a bunch of squats in Catalonia. But yeah, but and I think this is my impression of it was that I think the US media thought they could they could do this to occupy. And and I think they kind of it's weird because looking so, you know, I come in and like to this kind of stuff around 2016 2017. And I think it it's like it weirdly worked, but it worked because they were able to recruit the anti occupy people. Yeah, so it's like, yeah, and so they did finally get their like cadre of like pseudo left organizers so they could use to build a Democratic Party. It's just it was like Jacobin and then all the whole the whole sort of anti occupy group. Yeah, so those folks were actually active during Occupy critiquing the people who now most loudly claim the legacy of Occupy.

You know, as you said, Jacobin, a lot of those sort of social Democrat groups at the time. And those of us who were there remember they hated Occupy, they would show up, but they like would critique it constantly. They would write all these articles about how it was terrible, how there were no demands, it was too disorganized. And then I think, you know, when Black Revolt got put on the table, they were like, bring back Occupy, we like that better. But but I think to be as harsh as possible. But I think like, you know, yes, there was there was a lot of media coverage. It didn't feel super friendly at the time. There was a lot of there was a lot of media coverage.

The media was very curious, was very interested. But a lot of that coverage was like, why do they have no demands? Like, why are they so disorganized? Why are they so smelly? Whatever. Like there was a lot of like there was a lot of slander in the press, but also a lot of attention, which, you know, it turned turned out was as good as you could get. But at the time didn't didn't feel very good, particularly, I think. Yeah. But yes, those those forces, those forces were already present in, you know, in in Occupy itself, you know, sort of denouncing it for its disorganization.

And then eventually claiming that it was the reason that Bernie Sanders happened, which isn't totally wrong. I want to be really clear, like, I think and I think we'll get into this more. But I think like the thing about the thing that was important about Occupy and the thing that the people who, in my opinion, like my comrades during Occupy, or people I meet who were like doing Occupy stuff like who I didn't know. But like now we, you know, I roll with them. Most of us have the have the, you know, the analysis like it was really important that we were doing politics in the street. It was really important that we were back together. We were talking politics.

And then there were really, really intense extreme limits to what Occupy could have done. And I think Oakland really pushed those. Yeah. And, you know, and got to those. But and I think the folks who were like, no, no, Occupy was good at the time were like, Occupy is terrible. And I think that's worth noting and thinking about. So I think, yeah, we've always sort of go into talk a bit about what happened in Oakland to talk about some of their stuff. So on a database basis, like, what is Occupy actually doing?

Because I think that's also been sort of lost in this whole, like everyone remembers like the slogans. And everyone remembers the fact that there was a thing, but, you know, like there's there's a bunch of working groups and they're doing things. So what was that like, like day to day and then sort of broader level? Yeah. So so so first of all, again, I was only in New York. I spent some time at Occupy Boston as well. But like, I don't have a sense of what other places were like. So I really can't I mean, other than having heard from people.

So I want to be very clear that I'm like mostly addressing that. I think the thing that was going on was that Zuccotti Park, like the park was like total chaos. Part of that was because there was a drum circle that basically was going 24 hours a day there, which meant that whenever you were down there and it was like a canyon Zuccotti Park is surrounded by skyscrapers. So it was just this incredible cacophony all the time, which I think was cool. It really ruined a lot of finance bros like like orally with an A there. But I think like, but it also was pretty intense and unpleasant. Sometimes you were like, please stop. Oh, my God, like that's at one point I general assembly, I think decided that drums were like only acceptable during certain hours,

like near the end of the movement, like the drum, the drum circle got reproached when in fact they were like actually the biggest agents of chaos in Zuccotti Park. Which is another important lesson. But yeah, I think so. So, you know, also because I had been in Bloombergville because I had been in Barcelona, I didn't invest myself very heavily in camp management stuff. So I mostly was doing work. One of the things that I think gets forgotten about is that there were snake marches basically three or four a day every day. After after the first week when we were really small, when it got big, there were just constant constant marches through the city, just like always going off like you would run in you'd be on one march you run into another march like on a Saturday or Sunday when like people were really like out there.

Like it was it was really like there was a lot of mayhem there would be big planned marches that would then be bigger. So there was like a lot of like what people now would call direct action what I would call largely like sort of symbolic practice for direct action. Mostly I don't mind I like marches I certainly got my miles in then like I need to do that again but but you know so then at the camp people were just living there. There were a lot of like a lot of punks a lot of like you know a lot of homeless folks obviously and some and some encampments had more at a higher concentration of unhoused people some in New York because of all the media spectacle and all the money that came in. We had a lot of nonprofit grifters by the end in the encampment. But there's also like a library a free library with all these books that like would be donated. There was a lot of like you know political agitation. There were people standing around the the the you know the corners of the park you know with with signs and yelling at people.

And it's also important to remember that like Zucati Park in New York is tiny. It's tiny. We had originally wanted to do it on this big plaza like city bank plaza and the cops had heard about that and fenced it off. So on the 17th we just like we just what's the word we get we we did a my god football metaphors called not so I shouldn't do this. We called an audible. Thank you. So we so Zucati is this tiny little park. It's incredibly dense and it's surrounded by you know like I said the skyscrapers it's in this really weird part of the city that no one would ever spend any time in if they didn't have to otherwise.

So that's sort of so there's all this stuff going on and they're all these their general assemblies twice a day which as I said in New York were particularly unhelpful. But I think anarchists in a lot of cities we have talked to you like I had a comrade down in DC one in Denver. They sort of said that the the General Assembly is either quickly like got shifted or got or became irrelevant. I think the General Assembly is we're not we're not in the end we're symbolically important but not but not really a driving force of my experience. There would be like I said there'd be a lot of organizing outside of the park there'd be a lot of like meetings and you know talks and direct actions and marches. And then there would be you know I guess that's kind of the extent of it right is that there was like a lot of direct action that but there was always this park where you could go and like run into people and like hook up with people meet people and like do a weird thing. I think that was really like the heart of the movement was the fact that there was this place you could go meet someone and like Lincoln to something weird and maybe cool and maybe not it doesn't matter but like there was always something to do kind of and it was constant was like this or 24 hour right like experience and I think that was really what what separated it from from other from other movement waves that we've had we've had since and was was was probably I think it's great as strength in many ways.

Yeah I think that was that was the impression that I got and part of us also was when I was in college like every once in a while you just get assigned like some person writing but occupy and it was like most of them were just extremely cranky about the whole thing but sure you know one of the things I think was interesting about it is that everyone seemed to agree at least to some extent that part of what was going on was that it's this way to do I don't know if identity formation is quite the right word for it but it's this way to sort of like rebuild social connections and rebuilds like social sort of bonds in a way that just had you know as public space becomes just the cops and there's a table in Chinatown that I like called the cop table I'm really mad about that like like this isn't Chicago Chinatown I would like go there certain from the library and there's a sign on the table that says if you loiter at this table you will be arrested it's like this is a picnic table like the cops are you this table is threatening that it is going to arrest you if you use it for what's using you know for what you're supposed to use tables for yeah yeah exactly and I think I think that's right I think like it was you know there was a lot of at the time a lot of people were talking about embarrassingly about heart and negris sort of like multitude stuff really a really a much better book that was important was also David Graber's debt but I think like you know and there was like a lot of like people saying things about like the Agora you know democracy the sort of political the political and count space of encounter and that stuff wasn't all wrong like I mean I'm sort of being a little sarcastic with a lot of it but I think like like there there was a lot of you know part of how we should I think we should understand the over discussed under and under you know like over analyzed word neoliberalism that like has largely become meaningless one of the things I should I think I think it's valuable for understanding is a process by which capitalism responded to the long 60s by disorganizing its production process such to the long 60s could never happen again right so like like the for the for the control the like the

concentration of workers within within production in such a way that they could be agitated by students and then like sort of radically unionized wildcat and sort of like almost overthrow government right like the neoliberalism is like you know it smashes the unions but it also it also like distributes out the act of production right so that so that that's not so easily done and I think one of the real problems of you know that was facing social movement you know in the in the period you know the long period like you know you had stuff like in the U.S. again that's where I know the best but like you know you have the L.A. uprising which is huge and you have you know the the the summit hopping movement and anti globalization which you know what could attack a target but there wasn't really a sense of like how it felt hard to do a local struggle beyond like literally like a revolutionary riot like L.A. which you know you can't really precipitate I mean you can't really precipitate a movement either obviously but I think like but like but like a political a political movement a form of political organizing that didn't require something on the level of George Floyd which is what the L.A. rebellion was right but that also didn't require like an action from capital that you were like striking against right like the the the you know the the summits or whatever and that that again and like the all of these areas are very important this is not to like you know obviously like this is with with respect for those movements but yeah we felt I think it felt like we were in a political wilderness and I think that that like occupy really and the movement of the squares globally I think really like demonstrated that it was possible to practice a kind of street politics even without you know a shop floor where you can organize even without you know a a capital P party to organize within and I think that was really important I think it also scared a lot of people who and continues to who are committed to those politics you know and to the 20th century workers movement or the 19th and 20th century

labor movement which they somehow fantasize will come back if they just wish hard enough and write books or whatever and I think like so I think that was powerful I also think like like yeah sorry we can move on to legacy later but yes I think that was like I think that was very much like an important thing was was just like and you know I graduated college in 2009 so I was like part of that millennial generation that like you know had gone into incredibly deep debt like we'd have a college degree and then like the the bottom fell out of the economy there were no jobs and like I think there were a lot of you know like people who like had anticipated a middle class life of some kind not that I really had at that point but whatever like but a lot of people like in my before like had suddenly facing you know proletarianization right and I think that was one of the strengths of the movement I think that was that you know like I mentioned the statistics in great in Spain and Greece like I think that was a global aspect of this kind of movement Arab Spring to like there was there was a lot of like that was really a response to the economic crisis obviously those folks were already more proletarian than the people who the young people in the squares movements but they they innovated they created the in Arab Spring right to rear square most famously in Cairo and I think like those creating a meeting place where you didn't require a pre constructed like political community in order to engage was a strength and a weakness and I think it also you know as a result of the the general assembly the dynamics of the sort of volunteerist nature of that what I'm describing it led to a lot of people who are already confident who are already feeling good being able to like take more power right like and I think it also was a very white certainly in New York but but I think I think across the country it was largely it was largely you know it was it was a majority white in a way that you know by higher percentages than any movement that we've really been part of since was and that was obviously

a limit for reasons that will be obvious to everyone including the idea that like a lot of people pushed that like the police are part of the 99% yeah okay so let's let's talk about the police because you know you listen like that's you know that's that's the one the other extremely important aspects of this is this immense militarization I mean okay so I think the militarization of the police as a phrase I think is somewhat misleading in that like it the cops have always like shot people yeah but you know there there's yeah there's there's there's still like there's an intense sort of ramp up of the prison sector there's you have this intense boom in the size of prisons you have yeah you have you have increasing parts of the economy that are just the entire towns that used to be sort of manufacturing sectors used to be sort of involved in sort of industrial production that are just like the economy is now just there's a prison there and right and I think this is also looking back one of the things that look like occupied kind of ran up into because you know occupies this attempt to like you know form a democratic space and it relies crucially on this this thing that is nominally in the Constitution but doesn't exist which is the like the right to freedom of speech and the right to freedom of assembly and freedom assembly like that is that is like that is bullshit it does not exist if you like if you actually believe that this exists like try getting like 70 people into a space and see how like just like I don't know like into a street or just just like into like have a bunch of people in a park and just like see how fast a cop show up because you know it turns out like yeah yeah first time I yeah that I was I was at any kind of protest cops immediately wanted to take anything I was holding you're not you're not you're not allowed to take the first thing if you have anything in your hands that that is a that is a problem

yeah it's like the first amendment is just it's super completely superseded by traffic laws like laws about like sidewalk maintenance like not it's all fit like none of it yeah like you're not you're not allowed to and this is this I think is partially why this is kind of a topic this is partially I think why there's so much focus on the right about the first minute because they want to they want to draw attention away from the fact that like the actual thing that's fake about it is that you can't gather people and meet anywhere and they want to draw it into these like inane like this professor like said the n-word a bunch of times in class yeah isn't it bad that people are mad at them but but I think also yeah go time to sort of back to occupy you know okay so occupy functions right in so far as there is a physical location where people can go and physically interact with each other and that's a problem because at some point the police are just like no and they serve 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 guns he's a shark and on the gun badass way and 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 happen

listen to alphabet boys on the I heart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast what if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science the problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price two death sentences in a life without parole my youngest I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday I'm Molly Herman join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI how many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus it's all made up

listen to CSI on trial on the I heart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called in sync what you may not know is that when I was 23 I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space and when I was there as you can imagine I heard some pretty wild stories but there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down it's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth his beloved country the Soviet Union is falling apart and now he's left defending the Union's last outpost this is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space 313 days that changed the world

listen to the last Soviet on the I heart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts clearing the encampments and I think this is this is the other thing with Occupy is that outside of like parts of Oakland and that that's a whole other thing that yeah but it's it's it's incredible like studiously nonviolent in a way that like nothing I've ever seen before since is yeah so so so there's a lot there I'm gonna I want to talk about it because that's there's a lot but yeah so I think I think the militarization of the police thesis is is incomplete if you don't also talk about the policefication of the military right so like part of what happens with with the great expansion of the of the carceral state part of that is also a response to the Vietnam war and and mass resistance within you know the troops there are like in the Vietnam in the in like the last two years when ground troops are there and in Vietnam there's like

1400 fragging incidents where where you know where where privates and recruits killed their officers the US army during the during Vietnam was on the brink of a collapse in the way that like like the Russian army was looking in 1917 yeah it was like like the numbers I think I think the number one point there was like 40% of the army by the end of Vietnam was either on strike or just like not following orders yeah no it was it was complete there was the reason that Nixon pursues Vietnamization which is when they just start doing air campaigns bombing and napalm is because they couldn't rely on ground troops anymore they just they were useless they were all high you know the talk about you know there's a lot of talk about like heroin but like that was actually kind of a form of resistance within the lines in a complicated way whatever okay that's all very so the military realizes that it can't function as a mass military in the model that nation states have done since the Napoleonic Wars right so the the the mass you know the mass recruitment of the citizen soldier that's sort of how war is fought between you know 1810 and 1970 and then it becomes clear that that's not going to work anymore because the because the aims of the countries and the power of nationalism have become too abstracted fascism has done too much damage that image there's just like there's it doesn't really work anymore so

the military turns into a sort of what it always was also which is like a colonial policing force and so the police the military drift towards one another informant function okay so in occupy one of the micro histories that I think gets forgotten is that like I mean because because it took a week and like who remembers this week except for like weirdos like me who were there is it like there was no one at Zuccotti in the first first week and one of the big things that happened was these these these you know young white girls got caught in a police net and pepper sprayed and there was this video that went around of them getting pepper sprayed and screaming this particular this woman on her knees you know screaming with with tears and pepper spray going down her face and that really outraged people because you know they were you know it was police repression and police violence so in terms of the question of nonviolence yes there was a lot of nonviolence it was a constant fight that took honestly took until the George Floyd uprising for the right side to win frankly but but but but during occupy there was you know there was a lot of nonviolence nonsense and I think like but but another thing that happened though was that like you know like I said people were marching every day so even in New York where I think the political height was kind of achieved October 1 when we took the Brooklyn bridge I think I think New York never really like had a big moment again like it was largely sort of like smaller things after that but but like and there was a mass arrest on the Brooklyn bridge we marched over the Brooklyn bridge

the Brooklyn bridge got shut down they arrested 700 of us it was the first big infrastructure shut down that happened in the US since the LA riots it was it was a big deal at the time now we can put a note out though specifically for the Brooklyn bridge if you're because people I've seen every every single time there's one of these movements people try to take the Brooklyn bridge and they all get arrested and it's like can can y'all like please I am begging you if you're gonna try to take a bridge make sure you have a way out like yeah you have to hold one of the sides otherwise that's the problem we're gonna get arrested yeah yeah exactly you gotta have a way out the bridge is designed to not have a way out yeah exactly please please don't all get arrested it's it's in fact bad and yeah sorry I have seen a few people successfully take bridges a few times but that's because there was like three cop cars and like 15,000 people yeah if you have like a block with 200 kids you're not gonna be able to hold the bridge yeah I'm Carolyn Asoria a journalist and lifelong resident of the Pacific Northwest I grew up near the banks of the Green River

and in the shadow of the killer that bears its name how many times did you bring the camera one time just one time he started fantasizing about having sex with his mother and he fantasized about killing her but this podcast isn't only about tracking down the killer it's about the victims we stayed in the woods he always liked to go in the woods do it to all of the kind of things do you know how he feels about prostitutes listen to the shadow girls on the iHeart radio app on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts Adoption of teens from foster care is a topic not enough people know about and we're here to change that I'm April Dinwoody host of the new podcast Navigating Adoption presented by AdoptUS Kids Each episode brings you compelling real life adoption stories told by the families that live them with commentary from experts Visit adoptuskids.org slash podcast or subscribe to Navigating Adoption presented by AdoptUS Kids

Brought to you by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Administration for Children and Families and the Ad Council After 30 years it's time to return to the halls of West Beverly High and hang out at the Peach Pit On the podcast 90210MG join Jenny Garth and Tori Spelling for a rewatch of the hit series Beverly Hills 90210 from the very beginning We get to tell the fans all of the behind the scenes stories that actually happen so they know what happened on camera obviously But we can tell them all the good stuff that happened off camera Get all the juicy details of every episode that you've been wondering about for decades as 90210 Superfan and radio host Sissony sits in with Jenny and Tori to reminisce, reflect and relive each moment from Brandon and Kelly's first kiss to shouting Donna Martin graduates

You have an amazing memory. You remember everything about the entire 10 years that we filmed that show And you remember absolutely nothing of the 10 years that we filmed that show Listen to 90210MG on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about a crumbling empire and planting seeds in the spaces between Here's part two of our interview with Vicky Bostowile about the legacy of Occupy Wall Street But you were saying that don't get arrested, it's bad So I think when Occupy really started, we were mostly people who had been educated by the co-optation of the civil rights movement which is that it was all nonviolent and that the whole thing was getting arrested

and Martin Luther King was the only voice that made any sense and that was what was effective, blah, blah, blah, blah We had all learned that in school, right? We had all been trained that nonviolence was the only thing that made sense and that worked And I think those of us who learned about it at all in school, which is certainly not everyone But I think the experience of Occupy of every day, just getting beat up by the cops every day Getting attacked, getting arrested, some people got really nihilistically nonviolent Some people really dug in and were like, no, there is nothing we can do except be beaten And in turn there is a real masochistic game But that happens all the time

Oh yeah, that's one common response But another thing that happened was that people started breaking through that shit People started on the ground, I remember a march, early on the police would attack and everyone would try to de-escalate And people would try to talk to the cops or whatever By November, right before the camps got cleared, I remember being on a march where we stole all of their orange bedding And we were just holding it over our head every March and trapping cops in it So even in New York where things never got that intense, in some ways in terms of direct action That lesson on the ground, you have to be very ideologically committed to get hit with a baton three times and still the police are on your side

You have to really be drinking the Kool-Aid And some people really do want to believe that But I think that was one... So during Occupy, those of us who hated the police were pretty lonely Even though the police were beating us up But by the end of Occupy, the seeds had really been sown for a lot of generational understanding of the police That didn't necessarily immediately sow fruit It wasn't immediately obvious, but I think folks who stayed in struggle from there grew more and more anti-police in general

My experience was less with Occupy and more with the 2013 stuff in Turkey I was brought up in that sort of Fogandian MLK civil disobedience I watched Turkey happen and it was like, hey, here's my friend just getting his ribs broken by a cop And then there's Rabah, and Rabah is sort of where the Egyptian movement dies And Rabah, they bring out the machine guns and they just shoot everyone And at a certain point, this is the limit of non-violence, right? What happens if they just shoot you? And Gondi, if you ever want to go down the Gondi rabbit hole, Gondi writes this letter to the Jews of Germany

Where he's telling them to throw themselves on the blades of the Nazis And it's like, this sucks This is ridiculous It's being complacent for abuse Any Windows Studios has a really good video on why non-violence helps the state And how basically activists that try to force other demonstrators to adhere strictly to non-violence That's them basically saying that if... That's them endorsing the police beating somebody up

It's not actually tied to any kind of movement and it doesn't actually help And we could actually see this last year with the first few weeks of abuse from the state Actually making headlines and actually changing people But after a while, it just didn't matter A cop could pin someone down and pummel their face in August And who gives a shit? Nobody It doesn't matter That's why I found it funny when you talked about people getting mad

Because cops were macing people when they surrounded them And if that happened, no one would give a shit Not at all anymore Yeah, totally I think part of it is the first time that you see it It's like, what on earth This I think has been one of the things that's been the core of the whole sort of 2019, late 2018, 2019 to 2021 sort of cycle revolutions

If you're just a dude in a grocery store And some guy runs in, is like running away from the cops And then like 15 riot cops in and just start beating the shit out of them Which is the thing that happens like a lot Like if you just see that, right, there's no way you can actually like Like if you ordinary person just witnessed the cops running up and just beating the shit out of someone Like there's no way you can't not be sort of radicalized against the police by it But like yeah, but there's a certain point where you hit it with like

The desensitization happens more quickly than what it should Yeah And we stop caring I agree with both of you that like both it is shocking and radicalizing And we get desensitized because there is so much spectacular pressure to naturalize the police And non-violence ideology is part of that, is part of naturalizing police violence, right? Like there's nothing you can do about police violence So all you can do is control yourself and therefore you should be better or whatever

Yeah, Gandhi had this whole fantasy about the perfect army would march unarmed into machine gun fire Yeah And would just be mowed down, he's a fascist frankly Yeah And you only need to look at his opinions about black Africans when he was in Africa to see that Or even if you just read like Like even if you just read like self-reliance it's like this is You know, there's not everything I want to talk about with the peace police though

Which is that like they're also like in terms of like fighting Like inflicting violence on other protesters Like they are the most violence like of the factions you see in a protest That does happen very often Maybe not the most That does happen Like they beat people up Like

Yeah, I was just gonna say like it ties into like protest security And when protest security is usually working with these more like peace police type organizers And then they use protest security to literally beat up people who are doing more radical action against the state That happens all the time, yes Oh yeah, protest security, when I see protest security or marshals I know exactly that we're in a bad, we're in a bad march The only time I've ever been physically assaulted by another protester was during Occupy actually The night after we've been evicted, which is like November 15th I think

And if people don't remember Obama and the FBI coordinated this nationally All the Occupy encampments got swept within a week of each other On that march, we're marching around, we've been marching around all night And I'm just dragging a trash can into the street because we're being followed by police cars And I'm literally attempting to like do some education at the same time I'm like pulling the trash can into the street and I'm yelling, you know I am doing this because I want to protect us from police violence Like if this is in the street then the cop cars can't catch us as much

That's why we build barricade, I'm literally trying to yell this Because pulling a trash can in the street is incredibly ineffective ultimately So it was literally just for education purposes at that point basically Anyway, especially since a lot of people would pull them back out of the street, whatever This guy runs up on me and grabs me by the collar and lifts me up And threatens me with his fucking fist and he says, if my mom can't get to work tomorrow Because of you, I'll beat the shit out of you And we're marching in Manhattan at 1am, I'm like, what the hell are you talking about?

And he would have hurt me pretty bad if a friend of mine had luckily had my back And deescalated a bit That's the only time I've ever been physically brought up into a fight By another protester Was a guy insisting that me dragging a trash can into the street was beyond the pale No pun intended I want to just talk a bit more about how systematic the violence was So originally, I was going to try to get someone from Occupy Oakland to come talk about this

And I talked to a lot of people and the biggest thing that I got was that no one would talk about it on the record Because Oakland had a blacklist And if you were in Occupy and anyone else found out about it People spent half a decade just not being able to find jobs Because they just blacklisted everyone And to this day, the thing I was told was, yeah, I won't talk about this Because if I talk about this, I will be fired, all of my family, everyone around me will be fired And I think this is the other thing, but when we talk about the collapse of Occupy

The extent to which after Obama and the FBI ordered the camps closed The policy is that the cops are going to torture anyone who attempts to gather in a place Yep For two years, you couldn't have a meeting outside without the police attacking basically Yeah And yeah, I think a lot of the people who now claim that Occupy is the reason that they do politics or whatever For Bernie Sanders or whatever At the time, they were saying that the reason it collapsed is because there was no organization

There was no structure, there was no political party, there was no whatever, there was no demands And it's true that it was poorly organized, there's no doubt But we got beat out of the streets We got beat out of the streets, and people tried for six months really intensely And for another six months after that less intensely to restart that energy There was all this work towards a general strike on Mayday 2012, which ended up not really working Which is actually exactly the kind of demand-filled, one-day-of-action kind of politics that they were demanding That they really failed, which I think is telling

But in the meantime, Occupy, Zucati got cleared, but for a while there was the thing No one remembers this, I don't think, but there was a thing up in Union Square There was an occupation for three weeks, there were all the Union Square freaks and a bunch of occupiers And yeah, the cops just, it was just like batons out on site for a few years in New York Like that everywhere else, or most everywhere else, and that came down from on high The police were just like, oh, what was dangerous about this was people gathering in public So we really need to enforce the Second Amendment being meaningless now We really need to stop meetings from happening in public

And that violence was super intense and super real, and a lot of people got beaten out of the movement And a lot of people got really demoralized and left, and I understand why It was very, and awful, and there was a lot of repression And that kind of repression has continued to escalate But what has successfully happened in our movements, I think, to our credit Is that we haven't actually formed the kinds of hierarchical organizations that allow For more effective police repression, all the police have right now against us for the most part Is batons in the street, they have a lot more trouble infiltrating

A lot more trouble, which doesn't mean they are trying like crazy But they have a lot more trouble taking down the movements in a sort of cointel pro way The modes of repression have changed a bit But that's also because we don't have, it's a combination of the fact that we don't have those forms of organization But we also don't have those forms of organization because they don't emerge spontaneously from our living conditions Like they used to, so I think you can't just give credit to any one thing There's a lot of different factors at play, I think One of the other things that I've noticed, and I think I'm pretty sure this is happening

I've talked to people who are talking about this at Occupy, is it like the first thing If you have a group of people who are just there, the first thing the cops try to do is appoint a leader So that they have one person that they can go to And this lets them sort of, this sort of like access point to which they sort of break the demands of the crowd Is that they find one person, they point to the leader and they get that person to sort of like be the liaison My favorite Occupy joke, I gotta give respect to Occupy Denver, this is the best joke that ever happened in Occupy They announced at the beginning of one week, on Friday we are going to announce our leader Occupy Denver has chosen a leader and the whole movement got so upset

And everyone was so angry and was like, what the fuck? And then like they had this like big press conference and their leader was a golden retriever And he was like, it was as amazing as possible Kudos to Occupy Denver, whoever organized that prank, I love you I guess, yeah, speaking of kudos to a place, the last thing I wanted to talk about was The giant like port occupation strike thing in Oakland Because I mean, that wasn't the first time people had done it Like I know during the anti-war movement, even till like 2007, 2008, there's one of people trying to occupy ports

But in Oakland, they like did it They put like 40,000 people like in this, in the port of Oakland and they shut it down And I think that was like, that was one of the things, one of the stories kind of been lost from this Because like, you know, like that was the point like, so like I know people in Oakland who like They got like drugged, repeatedly drugged by police informants Because particularly Oakland is also, Oakland is also way, the Occupy Oakland is way, way less white than any other movements And they get, like the kind of police oppression they get is like just like, yeah, you know, again Like people being repeatedly drugged by informants, like cops shooting people in the face

Like you have the blacklist, you have all the stuff, and I think, you know, part of it is, yeah, yeah And I think part of it is because, part of it is because it's a bunch of non-white people And that's, you know, that's just what happens And, but I think another part of it was also that there was this fear about, yeah, so the reason the Port Strike is able to happen is because There's sort of, there's a complicated game here where the Occupy people like sort of got involved in like longshoremen union politics But that's sort of like fusion of, you have all the people in the street and then they start shutting down ports And that like, like the cops like lose their minds over that Like that, that I think was like extremely scary to them in a lot of ways

Yeah, I mean, you know, I would defer to anyone from Oakland who was there during that You know, I have comrades there I've talked to, I've read about it since But, you know, I think part of the heightened police repression and the heightened power of the Occupy Oakland folks was the Oscar Grant Rebellion Like I mentioned in 2009, which had happened, which had, you know, it had been a few hundred people, but it had been really rowdy There had been like looting and smashing, maybe, maybe more than a few hundred, maybe near a thousand people on the big, on the first night And you also obviously have the legacy of the Black Panthers in Oakland So, you know, the Black Panther Party, you know, forms in Oakland, it lasts in Oakland a decade and a half longer than it does anywhere else in the country So there's a lot of like, and you also have the really, really intense justification of the Bay that's happening

So there's an incredible political and economic pressure in the Bay combined with this history of radicalism that really, you know But yeah, I think also the other thing that's really interesting, I think what you said, like you put your, you know, you hit the nail on the head Like it was largely like it was terrifying that it was the most effective direct action in the Occupy movement I think was that port shut down, I think without a doubt, like the biggest mass direct action that Occupy achieved Was that November 12th? Was that, was that, was the date of that? I don't remember, but 2011, near the end of the, near the end of the cycle And I think like the other thing about, about that, though, is that that was very similar to the ultra globalization movement, right? Where the unions had sort of teamed up with, you know, like in Seattle, there's a lot of trade unions on the ground next to all the black blocks, right? And I think like that, that image, I think really, it's really interesting, it really terrified the police and it really, it could be, it could have been a vector

For a certain kind of like labor first politics that could have emerged, but instead like the labor first people have turned out to be all electoralists Yeah, that's sort of a weird blip that hasn't really returned Yeah, and it's interesting too, because like, because now like, you know, like the AFL-CIO just like, you know, AFL-CIO is like, no, cop union is great And it's like there's this, there's this sort of like split between the street movements and organized labor because they're off doing like electoral stuff and like cop shit, which is this sort of Yeah, and have been now for seven decades, you know? I mean, really like the buying off of the unions and the New Deal, you know, with some brief, you know, with brief windows of like wildcat action in the 70s and the 90s The buying off of the unions has never really gone away. Industrial unionism in the US has long been, and in Europe, everywhere where those developed in the early 20th century, that labor movement, they've really been successfully bought off And I don't think there is, I don't think that those unions are like a big, easy route to power anymore

Yeah, I don't think they're gonna overthrow the government I mean, I will say, yeah, this is my also, the thing that I plug every time is that the AFL-CIO overthrew Allende Like, yeah, like they're people on the ground were like directing, like we're directing a bunch of the anti-Allende stuff and it's like And it was the union bureaucracies, like more recently in 2001, who are in the wake of September 11th, who transformed the anti-globalization rhetoric into buy American, which it turned out was often buying prison-made materials Yeah But like that was the union, the union sort of defanged, defanged ultra-globalization into buy American Yeah, I think there's a whole other story there about how anti-globalization turned from the Zapatistas to Trump, which is incredibly depressing And yeah, it goes through this line of sort of like the replacement of internationalism and nationalism and that kind of like by local stuff

And the fact that like, these people sort of just decided that, you know, partially after Seattle, partially after 9-11, they're just like, we're not doing direct action again And Oakland's like, Oakland's like, that's like the one big exception to that was that moment and then it just kind of just has never happened again And that's partially because that union, the ILWU, is ILWU I think out there is on the courts That was a particularly like radical union that had had some Wildcats and was like more democratic than many of the other unions in those years But yeah, that's also like a big story for another time obviously, the co-optation of anti-globalization over the 20-year period Yeah This is kind of corny, but like what can we actually learn from what happened there, what went wrong and sort of what the limits of it was? Yeah, okay, so the legacy, so I think one legacy that the legacy that is most widely accepted and known, which we can go over quickly, is that it reintroduced class discourse largely into the popular, you know, the 99%

Which is a very, very bad class politics, but like, you know, like reintroduced some of that sort of class war discourse and I think more important than that, but not that dissimilar It reintroduced street politics into the U.S. I think part of the legacy that gets forgotten because like the general, the globalness of the wave gets forgotten as well Like, is that when shit pops off in New York, everyone in the world knows, or at least they did then, right? Because America had been so successfully, you know, appeased politically for so long That I think that when Occupy popped off in 2017, like in 2011 rather, it really like signaled to the world, like the rest of the world, like, oh, like this is real, like even in the, you know, even in the center of empire, like people are rising up It's hard to remember and it's weird, but like there was an Occupy in New York in a UK, there was one in Tel Aviv, there was actually kind of like a pro-Palestinian Occupy in Tel Aviv briefly And, you know, I think maybe the most powerful sort of immediate tactical offshoot of Occupy was Occupy Nigeria in the first weeks of 2013, when President Goodluck Jonathan took the fuel subsidies away And there were like sort of two weeks of really intense revolutionary rioting in Nigeria that then called themselves Occupy as a way of being legible to the rest of the world

I think the other legacies, though, that are a little more sort of subtle, I guess, is like that a lot of folks still in the struggle now, like, I will still meet people, you know, my age who like, I have two comrades here in Philly who I didn't know at the time but who were organizing in New York, right? Like we probably hung out in rooms together, like we were probably in the same spaces, but like, so like a lot of folks, you know, each of these waves that has come has left, you know, some people leave, some people swing right, but like there's a residue of folks that like becomes the base for the next movement And I think like Occupy really did provide a lot of people in a way that the gap between ultra globalization and Occupy didn't produce nearly as large a contingent of people, although of course there are those people But I think also like really importantly, like the tactics of Occupy, like one of the things that was incredible about the George Floyd uprising was that every tactic that we have tried in the last 10 years reemerged, right? There was a prison strike, there were indigenous blockades, there were me too style callouts, which of course developed out of punk and queer scene callouts that have been going on for a decade, but there were occupations, right? You had the Chas in Seattle, which we can, you know, we will get to that one day. In any case, in any case, like, I think like that, that has remained in the repertoire of proletarian struggle, like as a result of Occupy, and if it had just been Occupy, maybe it wouldn't, but as a result of the global movement of the squares, which obviously goes until Terrier Square in 2013-2014 in Turkey. I think it's probably the, excuse me, Gezi Park in Turkey, which is like the last big moment of the squares really, but that five year wave, like, it was really, really important globally, really, really important locally as well, in terms of building activists,

building a class of, well, I don't, you know, whatever, building revolutionaries, whatever you want to call them, the good version of the thing, not the bad version, produced a lot of them. And I think like, in terms of its limits and like what we can learn from it, like, I think taking the police more seriously was really important. I think taking police violence more seriously was a really important legacy of Occupy. I think pushing towards the limit of what total democracy meant. And then a lot of people in Occupy remember that like a lot of Ron Paul people and like weirdo, like, and the Fed cranks and like right wingers, like, spoke in Occupy and like that, that, that total open populism of Occupy, I think was both probably its greatest strength and its ultimate limit, right, which was that like, it was never going to be able to really like sharpen itself into the, into the knife and it wanted to be to like really change the face of global capital or whatever, because, because there were so many white middle class involved. Like a bunch of the, like a lot of the like the current far right media people came out like Senator Fairbanks was like an Occupy streamer.

Tim Pool. Yeah. You're welcome for Tim Pool. Tim Pool was filming on the last day, a bunch of us doing some things, and Tim Pool did not manage to continue filming is all I'll say. And after that is when he started swinging right, so you're welcome. Anyway, sorry, that guy's a fucking asshole. He was an asshole then though. I think what's important to know is that a lot of these people were sus as hell back then to Occupy folks, like they were around in Occupy because of the nature of Occupy, like, but like they were, we already didn't like them, you know, like a lot of these people were already unpopular,

were already disliked in the movement. So, yeah. But yeah, I think I think so I think, you know, there is there there are all these different legacies from it that I think, ultimately, the legacy things that emerged are much more important than Occupy. I think Lena one of the things about it was that it really was just like the reemergence of street politics and like, like as the reemergence of street politics like it was pretty limited, and it was not that effective at changing things. And also it was incredibly effective at leading to those last decade of struggle in the US and I think you can't, you know, I think there's a tendency to want to judge movements by the immediate results that they produce, you know, and like, you know, I think, is this, am I about to quote Mao, I think I am, was it like when he gets asked, you know, what was the, what was the, you know, in the 20th anniversary of the Chinese Revolution, he gets asked, like, what was the, what was the outcome of the Chinese Revolution, he says it's too early to tell, right. Like, I think like that, maybe that's, I don't remember who that is. Yeah, I don't know, but they were right.

Yeah, they were right. They were right. A lot more people died than what we thought. Yeah. Yeah, it's like, yeah, they successfully transitioned to capitalism. Yeah, yeah, it was, yeah, so, so what was the result of Occupy? It's too early to tell. But I think like, I also think like the things that we've talked about here were core components of what, why it mattered.

I do think one other kind of effect that it's had, and it's hard for me to gauge this because I've only been around post Occupy, but I feel like now when people try to get stuff started, they really fall kind of into an Occupy mindset where they're like, the only way to make this successful is to hold this space. And I think that is really a default way that even more experienced, like both experienced organizers and new organizers really kind of just, I keep using the word default. It's because like, that's just, that's just really like what they go into. You saw this in a lot of different cities last year, really like people trying to set up spaces to hold. A lot of them did not work, you know, a lot of them, a lot of them were like, oh yeah, we're trying to hold this space for like an hour because then the cops pushed us out, right. And, you know, in a place like the Chaz, they got extended out a bit longer. Chaz had its own problems.

In other cities in the Pacific Northwest, this happened. It happened in a lot of places. I mean, like, I think George Floyd Square is maybe one of the more honestly successful ones for how they were able to actually kind of keep police away. And they avoided turning it into this big media thing like with the Chaz did. And I don't know, like, I think I grew very, I saw a lot of people kind of grow kind of frustrated with this like kind of occupy mentality because what that kind of results in is people just setting up outside of a police headquarters and trying to stay there for as long as possible, which is like, let's not do anything. You're just kind of waiting to get beat up. Yeah, yeah, but it's complicated though, right, like in defense of that tactic.

Like, I think like, like, that was also very, that was also very core to Ferguson, right? They held West fluorescent for a week and a half. Now, they did it much. They didn't do it by setting up tents and sitting there. And also, like, you know, like, like a thing that gets forgotten a lot in the lot in the history is, you know, Occupy Ice. It was pretty, it was big here in Philly. Yeah, it was it was massive here in Portland. Yeah. Yeah.

So, so like, there were moments when that tactic really does like it's important to have a space to meet in and I think we did learn that. We also agree that it has become like any tactic that works once it becomes a fetish, right? Yeah, it's always trying to balance space. It's like, you know, the two big things that have happened the past 10 years is Occupy in Hong Kong. So people try to balance these two kind of almost opposing things like hold this space and be water. That's kind of the two things that people yell in the street back and forth. And no one really knows what to do because we're just yelling slogans. And I was the other thing about this. So they're like the one time the people in Hong Kong got pinned down when they had this whole university siege.

It was a shit show. Like, you know, and I would say like the people in Hong Kong, like, you know, okay, like, even when they're like, they did not have by the time you're getting to the, the, the, the sort of decision universities like that. Like, you know, like they had like, they had like, like Molotov workshops. Like there were people like standing on the roof shooting bows and arrows and cops and it like, it just wasn't enough. And I mean, personally, it has to do with the fact that like, you know, Hong Kong is in a uniquely bad position in so far as it is one city. And it's like the only possible way that a social movement in Hong Kong, like, ever just doesn't get crushed by just the fact that they're outnumbered like a thousand to one is if it spreads. But like, yeah, it became this, you know, like that, that moments like, yeah, the whole problem with trying to hold space because really apparent there because even if you have an extremely large number of people, right, like, like, attack. 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 on the gun badass way. And nasty sharks.

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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. I think one isolated space in mass is the thing the cops are really good at, and the thing they're really bad at is trying to deal with, like, you know, like, 500 people, like, 700 instances of 500 people going through places because there just aren't enough of them. What was it, like, the head of, who was it? It was a big, big muck muck in the national police, in the national police, you know, whatever, said that, like, we can very easily handle one march of 10,000 people, but we can't handle 10 marches of 1,000 people. You gotta see this in Chicago too, like, this is how the police lost control of the Miracle Mile. It's like, yeah, there's people everywhere, everywhere. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, no, and that's how that's what, you know, I mean, certainly in Philly, where it was very, very powerful, that's what the George Floyd Rebellion looked like was what people were everywhere in Philly.

All the neighborhoods, you know, people didn't, you know, like, we were out there, you know, whatever, and like, people didn't know what was going on three blocks south, you know what I mean? Like, it was like, it was like that, like, there was just, there were fights happening everywhere, and under those conditions, the police can't, can't, no matter how militarized they are, they can't act. Yeah, effectively, anyway, they can act, they certainly will, they will act like pigs. But I think like, yeah, so I think that sort of dispersion, but I think the other, so there's, I'm going to promote a really, really weirdo crank book right now. Sure, go for it. This 20th century, like literary weirdo, this guy, Ilias Kinetti, Italian, wrote this book called Crowds in Power, where he attempts to describe the entirety of human history and anthropology in terms of crowds. This is obviously impossible and ridiculous, but that book has the best descriptions of crowd dynamics I have ever encountered anywhere. Interesting.

I like, I like people who take big swings because they end up, they miss, miss has lots of interesting stuff. I think that's why people like settlers by Jay Sakai so much, like I think the thesis wasn't great, but there's so much incredible stuff in that book that like it works anyway. Having a really wild thesis allows you to like really like get into some, yeah. So anyway, one of the things that Kinetti talks about in that book is that a crowd, an open crowd, as he describes it, an open crowd is must constantly be growing. And the moment it stops growing, it starts shrinking, right? Yeah. And like this, I think that dynamic in terms of both movement and like a momentary protest or riot, right, is like really real. I can totally see that, yeah.

And I think one of the things that particularly organizers are trained to do and like that, that we learn to do, especially in low periods and we're like organizing these little, you know, you know, these little crystallized groups of like hard cadre or whatever is that like you that like what we learn as organized is something that is defendable. But once you start defending something, you start losing it because we cannot take on the state or the police in a head on confrontation. And this is this can be confusing because sometimes you can successfully defend for a few weeks, maybe even a few months, you can defend a space sometimes. But once people get really interested in the defending, then they begin forming bureaucracies, governments, internal policing, security forces, whatever it is. They start becoming the like the the they start undermining the very thing that made it powerful, which was this sudden rapid growth, this sudden like, you know, like, like big explosion of power and self recognition that comes in the beginning of movement. And I think I don't think there's a way to will that problem away. Like I don't think we can just like think our way out of it. Like it's just a problem.

But I do think that like one thing that we could take from the experience of Occupy and the experience of the last decade is that like, if you do, you know, consider yourself someone who wants to participate in these kind of movements, which is probably why you're listening to this podcast right now. Don't try and defend. Like some things will need to be defended sometimes, obviously, but like if your main thing is like the thing we should never defend something we've achieved so far, we should never not be willing to destroy it in order to like build something bigger, right? Like we should never know movement thing that we have, be it an Occupy Park, be it be it like a taken space, defending that should never outweigh the possibility of expanding. And if that's our strategic mindset, obviously moment to moment, you can't just be thinking that constantly. But the strategic mindset is like what we have now is is only good to the extent that it can turn into something more rather than we have to defend what we have now. If you can think that way, I think it opens up a lot of strategic possibilities. And I think it's what has worked over the last decade that I've seen is when people attack, when people expand, when people try to do try to do new stuff, it doesn't always work and it doesn't always hold.

But that's when that stuff stops happening, the movement is doomed. I think I think I think that's a really good way to wrap things up. I think that's a nice, beautiful sentiment. I kind of view this type of thing in more than just protests and in different facets of life, I think you can always learn from past experiences, from past struggles. But if you try to perfectly replicate them, you're absolutely going to fail. You should always learn and move on, but you should not be focused on any kind of replication. Is there any of your books or writings you'd want to plug before we wrap up here? Sure, yeah. I mean, I wrote a book that came out last year called In Defense of Looting, came out in 2020 with Bull Type.

I am currently also writing, I'm obsessed with movies. I write a movie review column for the Al Jazeera Plus Newsletters. Yeah, the newsletter substack if you want to read. I mean, it is really movie reviews. So if you want cranky anarchist theory, it's not the spot for you. Otherwise, yeah, I'm on a pretty long social media break right now, but you can find me on there eventually. I'll probably come back inevitably. Unfortunately.

Yeah, I have writing popping up every now and then, and if you read it, I would appreciate it. Well, was that helpful? Yeah, absolutely wonderful. Thank you. And yeah, thank you for so much for coming on to talk about occupying stuff that I think a lot of people hear about, but I know at least all of my generation does not fully grasp it. It is literally my pleasure. I wasted so much of my life thinking about this. I'm so glad to be able to share some of it with some people. I'm so glad you're able to join us too.

I've been looking forward to this for a while. Yeah, it's very exciting. All right, that wraps up us today. You can find us on Twitter and Instagram at coolzonemedia and happen here pod. We'll be back in for a few more episodes this week. Adios. This podcast is exactly what we need to figure them out. It's going to be fun and formative and probably a bit scary at times because we're literally going inside the minds of men.

As much as we like to think all men are the same, they're actually very different. Each week, a celebrity guest host provides honest advice in his area of expertise. When I agreed to do this reboot, I had a few conditions, no sugarcoating, no mind games, and absolutely no mansplaining. Men are hard enough to understand without the mind games. Listen to How Men Think on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jake Halpert, host of Deep Cover. Our new season is about a lawyer who helped the mob run Chicago. We control the courts. We control absolutely everything.

He bribed judges and even helped a hitman walk free until one day when he started talking with the FBI and promised that he could take the mob down. I've spent the past year trying to figure out why he flipped and what he was really after. From my perspective, Bob was too good to be true. There's got to be something wrong with this. I wouldn't trust that guy. He looks like a little scumbag liar, stool pigeon. He looked like what he was or at. I can say with all certainty, I think he's a hero because he didn't have to do what he did, and he did it anyway. The moment I put the wire on the first time, my life was over. If it ever got out, they would kill me in a heartbeat. Listen to Deep Cover on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Eve Rodzky, author of the New York Times bestseller Fair Play and Find Your Unicorn Space.

Activist on the Gender Division of Labor, Attorney and Family Mediator. And I'm Dr. Aditya Narukkar, a Harvard physician and medical correspondent with an expertise in the science of stress, resilience, mental health, and burnout. We're so excited to share our podcast, Time Out, a production of iHeart Podcast and Hello Sunshine. We're uncovering why society makes it so hard for women to treat their time with the value it deserves. So take this time out with us. Listen to Time Out, a Fair Play podcast on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Uh, that was the introduction. I did it, Sophie. Sophie is saying that's an acceptable introduction. You know what podcast this is. You clicked on it. So I don't need to tell you the title. I don't need to say who we are. I'm just going to dive right into the fucking episode. No, I'm not. This is it could happen here. A podcast about things falling apart. And, uh, and what we're going to do.

To, to arrest that and do something better in its place. And, uh, you know, folks who are, are regular listeners who listen to the original scripted episodes of it could happen here. The first 15 episodes, which I certainly recommend to everybody. Know that one area in which I kind of separate from a lot of, uh, particularly more limited episodes, and even some folks on the left is, uh, an embrace of the fact that, uh, firearms are sometimes necessary tools, especially in times of collapse when things get bad. Um, now that said, we're also not, uh, uh, kind of, uh, gun culture people here. We try not to, for one thing, recommend that everybody necessarily pick a gun. There's a lot of people, uh, perfectly nice people who shouldn't have them, who don't need to have them, you know, if you're dealing with suicidal ideation or whatever. We're not, the point is we try to be very careful about how we, we talk about firearms as a potentially useful even potentially necessary tool in the times that we're in. And today, since we're a few weeks into this, we've covered producing food, we've covered some medical stuff, we've talked about, uh, community organizing and a number of other things that I think are priorities for most people before, you know, getting strapped. Uh, today we're going to talk a little bit about getting strapped. Uh, and my guest today is Paul. Paul, do you want to kind of introduce your background in briefs so people know why, uh, why you're on here?

Sure, Robert, uh, I was in the Marine Corps and Infantry and after that, I went to security consulting and then to, uh, the Federal Protective Service and finally the ATF, some of, uh, our funnest agencies. Yeah, all my favorite organizations there. Well, they're better than the, what is it, the FDA? Yeah, they, they beat the FDA. I mean, in terms of body count, they're certainly better than the FDA. Yeah. And what, what do you do now, Paul, that you're, uh, you're, you're out of that line of work? Uh, well, I do two things. I got a day job at Disney World and then, uh, the, the side gig is we run a explosives and machine gun supply company, also body armor, a handful of other things, but, uh, that, that's the big thing is destructive devices. Yeah. And, uh, you've, you've got, I think, experience that a lot of people, particularly on this side of the political aisle lack, you know, one of the, one of the downsides of, uh, kind of rejecting the federal government and the military and all its forms is that there's a lot of people who may accept the validity of being armed and don't really have much in the way of practical training.

Firearms are tools that to use most efficacily do require training and practice. You can't just, um, you can pick them up and be dangerous, but not in a way that is particularly protective to you and your community. Oh yeah. Yeah. Um, so I wanted to talk about kind of recommendations and everything we talk about, nothing we're, we're not talking in the context of forming a militia, uh, or in the context of, you know, showing up with guns to, to yell at people at a protest. That's the thing you're choosing to do. That's a whole different ballgame. We're talking about, um, kind of responsibly arming yourself and your community in a way that is not going to get you in legal trouble. Um, it is also not going to endanger them because one of the things you have to accept about firearms is that, um, there's a risk, you know, related to owning a firearm. Um, not just the risk that like, you know, suicide risk raises if you have a gun in the house, but just, um, if you don't use them properly, even carrying a gun, you know, it's not, uh, unheard of for people carrying guns to have those weapons taken from them and used against them. It happens to police and it happens to armed citizens. So it's, it's a matter of, um, you know, I think when you accept that you're going to be armed, there's something incumbent upon you to understand the risks of being armed. And I guess that's kind of where I want to start. Like, what are some of the big pitfalls you see people, uh, fall into, like, um, that I think traditionally training is supposed to, uh, uh, help allay to some degree?

Uh, well, probably number one is, uh, grandpa's gun in the closet that's been there for 40 years on fire and somebody just picks it up and throw some ammo in it to go hunt a deer and, um, you know, it's got a barrel obstruction or something. It just blows up, you know. Um, but number two, and, and the one that can be mitigated by training rather than just general, uh, not being stupid because it's kind of stupid to pick something up that's really old and just try to shoot it, is, um, not shooting yourself. And when you do go out to the range, not shooting other people and then not shooting people in your own home, um, you know, you don't, as much as you might want to say, defend your own home, do you want to, uh, shoot your wife when she comes home at 2.30 in the morning, uh, after work and wakes you up? Um, and there are ways to mitigate that and, and it's really easy and it's really cheap, so. Yeah, let's, let's, let's start with some of those. Just if you're, if you're new to, if you've decided I need a gun for whatever reason, you purchase a gun. Um, you know, I think the most basic first things are, are in terms of like actually making that relatively safe is number one, knowing which, which kind of firearm to purchase and number two. And these are not an order of importance. These are both very important. Number two is securing that weapon properly as opposed to just having it laying loose in the house, uh, which is never the best place to best way to store a firearm. Is it? Um, yeah, I mean, I, I own a number of personal firearms. Um, you know, I'm in my office right now where I got a locked door and nobody can get in and I got a gun safe back behind the monitors.

Um, and, you know, I'm comfortable with that. But if, if it was in a place where kids could get at it, you don't want to just stuff it in, in a sock in the closet, which is actually what my mom did when I was a kid. Yeah, I mean, safe storage. And I mean, really being able to identify your target is probably the biggest preventer of like an interfamily accident, because I know, you know, we do talk about safe storage kids and all that. But, um, back to the wife coming home, if you just put a light on your gun, $100 light, you can look at the thing that you're shooting in the middle of the night and, uh, not shoot someone you don't want to shoot. Yeah, I would go so far as to say that, like, if you've got a home defense weapon without a light on it, um, you don't fully have a home defense weapon. No, no, no, you don't. Um, it's going to be useless in roughly half of the situation, statistically, like if you're looking at when people are actually tend to be endangered in their own homes, the vast majority of the situations in which you might be in danger. Um, when it comes to weapon selection, uh, this is an air, another area where like if you go on maybe one of the worst places in the world to have this discussion is Twitter, because everybody has their opinions on Twitter. Um, I tend to say, because I think most people, when they're looking for a first gun, if they're, if they're committed, just like thinking of personal defense, they're going to go for like a Glock or something. And I think unless you're planning on carrying a gun, and you can correct me if you disagree here, but I tend to think a handgun, again, unless you're intending on carrying a concealed weapon is, is the last thing that you should own as a gun owner.

Um. I got a mixed opinion on that. I mean, yeah, I think that, uh, the handiness of a handgun can outweigh some of the issues. I know you guys dealt with fires up there. We have hurricanes. Yep. Yep. Um, being able to stick a handgun into a backpack, you know, it can go a long way. That is a good point. Keep, keep it on you in your car, because I hear we're not allowed to carry. And that will depend on state laws.

Everything you say depends on state laws. Yeah, there are states where you can, yeah. Yeah, if you're in California and you're in one of the counties that doesn't issue a concealed carry license like LA, it's really hard to get one from what I understand. Yeah, you got to get the San Bernardino if you want to get one of those. Yeah. I mean, first off, like, I got a short list of guns in like two thirds of the list, illegal in California. They're not on roster. But for what's most usable against or most handy, it's probably a handgun. But if you're expecting a threat more than, uh, like 30 feet away, have something other than a handgun. Handguns, they suck at hurting people. They suck at killing people. Yeah.

They're ineffective. They're hard to use. I mean, 30 feet away. But if you're not training regularly, hitting something reliably in a stressful situation at 30 feet with a handgun. It can be difficult. It's not easy. Yeah. Um, it's not easy. And I tend to recommend, number one, there are some options. Like, even if you're sticking with a handgun, there are different kind of, um, like, uh, options for that. Like, I'm a big advocate of pistol caliber carbines, which is essentially. Oh, they're cool as fuck. The size of a small rifle. So you can fit them easily in a backpack. Every backpack I've owned, you can, you can stick something like, um, like a CZ Scorpion in it without much difficulty.

Yeah, yeah. And because they're, so when you're talking about what makes a weapon easier to use, number, one of the number one things is size. So the longer the barrel, the more accurate it is. The heavier the gun, the less recoil is a problem. The easier it is to use at range. Um, and a pistol caliber carbine, you know, you stick a light on that. That's a really good home defense weapon. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, especially, uh, people will argue about the different types of magazines, but if you buy one that takes a Glock magazine and you have a Glock, you can build a full little loadout that just takes all the same magazines. One is more accurate. One is a handgun. And, you know, all the same ammo, you're not having to figure out and read a bunch on what kind of ammo you need and stuff like that. You just buy one and it works for everything. Yeah. And when you're talking about ammo, I think one of the most important things, like, especially if you're worried about a survival situation is availability, which is the nice thing about like what we call the NATO caliber. So the NATO calibers are 9 millimeter, 7, 6, 2 by 51, better known as 308. Your grandpa's hunting rifle is 7, 6, 2 by 51. Or it's 30 out 6, but whatever. And then 5, 5, 6 slash 2, 2, 3. And those are the rounds. That's like 5, 5, 6 is the standard. That's what's in your bog standard AR-15.

And so almost no matter what happens, including, you know, ammo crunches, you will be able to find some amounts of those calibers generally. Dig through your neighbor's drawer and you're going to find a box of bullets. They might not even own a gun and they got a box 9 millimeter. Yeah. Everybody's got 9 millimeter. And so, yeah, I think that the basics of like what to get if you're looking at kind of just a basic defensive arm, you know, how to store it safely, you know, those kind of questions are important. When it comes to training, what are some of, in your opinion, like the mistakes that you see people make when it comes to kind of practicing training with their weapon? Going to an NRA basic like four hour class and thinking that you are a god. There are people who have spent five days a week going to classes and doing training because there's practice and then there's training. Training is where someone teaches you something. Practice is where you go with what you're already taught, right? So there are people that spend all that time and they're still not the best in the world. There are people who do a ton of practice. Jerry Miclick, you know, I don't know if you've ever seen him shoot, but he's like the fastest gun in the world or something like that. Yeah, his videos are crazy.

Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, he'll out shoot a full auto gun with revolvers. It's just like, you know, it's just absolutely mind blowing. But no, he's like, he's like, he's like Michael Jordan or something, you know, you just get people who have a natural ability. Certainly married with a practicing, but yeah, continue. If you had a fight, a gunfight, which they really don't happen that much. But if you had a gunfight between a guy with a high point C9, which is one of the cheapest handguns, quote, reliable handguns on the face of the earth. If you had a guy with that that had had paid $500 for a training class over weekend and still went and went to the shooting range every week and practiced and or not even every week just every month and then did dry fire drills once a month in his garage or whatever, versus a guy who went out and bought a Wilson combat $3,000 1911 but had only taken the NRA class, I will bet on the guy with the C8. Yeah, or the C9 all day long. Even if he's only got one bullet, you know, yeah, don't don't care, he'll win. And often like for all of the for all of the guys you see, you know, with in all of their tactical gear and whatnot, and their spare mags taking a 300 rounds out.

If you actually look at most defensive shootings, it's very common. I think like, it's like three to five rounds, three to five rounds, three to five rounds, generally closer than 30 feet, sometimes closer than like 10 or 15. This sits in my pocket most of the time. Is that a Glock 19? No, it's a 43. Oh, Glock 43, yeah. So tiny. Yeah.

It has more bullets than I'll ever need in a gunfight, probably. I think I want to pivot from this point to we started this by introducing that you spent some time in the ATF, spent some time in the FPS. I haven't had any personal interactions with the ATF, but I have met some FPS guys on the street to support them. I'm kind of curious, especially as because I came in contact with you through your through your Twitter where you're you're very my personal Twitter. Yeah. And you're quite politically active now in a way that I think is surprising to people for someone with your background. Are you comfortable with kind of tracing sort of the broad strokes of your journey there? Because I think that's instructive for folks.

Oh, at FPS specifically. Well, just kind of what brought you from there to here. Oh, so I got kind of, oh, man, what's what's the word for when you just get a, I don't know, I just I got to a point. I showed up for for work at 430 in the morning. And I was literally shuffling through some some paperwork and and was getting ready to file a warrant and just kind of realized I didn't think that it needed to happen. And, you know, I talked to my supervising agent about it and was kind of told too bad. And I put in for some vacation time and ended up putting him a resignation while I was on vacation.

I mean, that that's the gist of how I became not a cop. Yeah. And I'm wondering kind of what do you think? Is there anything that kind of, I don't know, what looks different to you now as you've kind of left that behind? Was it like sort of a I'm guessing there's like a period like a goldfish, you know, in a new bowl of acclimation to life outside of being a cop? Like what were the first kind of things that started to shift in your perspective when you left that that thought space? I'll tell you what, watching or reading whatever an article or a YouTube video, especially now that bodycams are more and more prevalent is watching something, reading the press release and going, but that's that's not what happened.

Like I just watched it. And going from being able to justify it in your own mind and literally argue with people and be 100% convinced like that was a good shoot. Castillo was a Philandro Castillo. Yeah. Oh, God. And he was, I mean, if you've, if you've gotten lost track of this shooting in between all the others, Philando was a black man, a legal gun owner with a legal concealed carry permit who was pulled over with his girlfriend and child in a car and hands on the wheel told the officer he had a gun and got shot. Yep.

And it did the thing you're supposed to do. Although now actually since then you will get like some states will and some training classes will recommend if it's not legally required and you're carrying a gun. Don't say anything for that reason. But I mean, he went. The command to not reach for the gun to being shot multiple times in the chest was like under two seconds. Yeah. So I mean, I mean, the decision was already made as soon as as soon as he gave the command, the decision was made. Yeah.

Here's what that brings me to in terms of a question that's relevant to the topic of community self-defense of potential community armed self-defense. Because that's not, that is a that is a cop problem, but that's not just a cop problem. That's an everybody problem. In the chop in the chas in Seattle, the the autonomous zone is evidence of that. You had this situation where people after nights and nights of mostly inaccurate warnings about proud boys coming to attack got amped up. They had guns, some kids drove by in a car and they fucking shot him to death. And it is the same. It's the same mental thing happening.

You don't have to have a badge for that that mindset to to infect, especially when you're carrying a gun. How do you, in your opinion, fight back against that? Be fucking chill. You know, like, like, honestly, if you were a teenager, which we grew up in almost the same place, you're from Plano. I'm from Capelle. Yeah. So I would have argued with you about them being the same place when I was in Plano, but they're the same place. Yeah, they're the same place.

They're absolutely the same place. Yeah. One has Woot.com and the other one has Raytheon. Yeah. So, you know, and a bunch of hospitals. But you and I grew up in the same time, same place, same types of schools. How many times did you see in like high school or even middle school, just a guy hit on a girl and then the girl's boyfriend comes over. And just starts fighting him.

Yeah. Like, the guy had no reason to know. He didn't know he was doing anything wrong. And I'm not suggesting, or I'm sorry, what I'm pointing out is that it's almost ingrained in us at a societal level to react violently to maintain like our personal position. Yeah. So that means that I'm in my neighborhood and I don't recognize someone. It may seem like violence is the right way to go. That's actually what you're doing when like, what's it called?

Karening, you know, where you call somebody. The black kid selling water bottles or whatever. I know that was one in New York where the police came and harassed, you know, some like 12 year old black kids because they were selling water bottles. Yeah. It's the same thing. I mean, you know, in that case, you're not personally doing the violence. You're just calling somebody else to do it for you. You know, the police are kind of violence, violence of monopoly and all that. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And that's one of the most, I think, important things about that is the idea of violence is like when you're willing to accept violence to kind of maintain your social position or something. And I think that has a huge amount to do with with the kind of violence you see at protests with like, we've had, you know, protests, quote unquote, security here in Portland, people declaring themselves security. Yeah. What the fuck does that mean? Shooting other kids. I know guns for graffiti like that.

But it is it is a matter for it's they're not doing it to protect anybody. They're doing it because they've declared themselves security. Somebody doesn't listen to what they say and their ego is hurt. It's the same thing that again cops do. It's this. It's a human mindset. It's not just a cop mindset. And I think you when you're talking about like, I think there's a couple of things.

Number one, if you're going to be armed and if you're going to be armed in a community self-defense role, one of the things you have to accept is that like, you're not as a person who is armed and cares about the defense of your community. You're not a separate thing from them. I think that's one of the areas where in which policing goes wrong. Yeah. You can't view yourselves as separate. Yeah. And I know you guys have a big problem with that. We do here too.

I live in a metro and our metro police, like 99% of them don't even live in the county. Yeah. They all go the same here. Yeah. Yeah. They don't even not just the city. They don't live in the whole county. And that's despite they get a living allowance if they'll live in the city and there's a bunch of if they live in the city, they get a take home car.

There's a bunch of incentives to try and get people to live here and they still won't do it. They want to go live in the next sheriff over the next county where, yeah, we have a very vocal sheriff the next county over there who's really racist and all that shit. And I, yeah, I think if you're, if you're talking about like the potential of, again, of like armed community self-defense, you almost, I almost would prefer phrasing it differently. Community self-defense, you know. It should be the entire community. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean. It should be the community and you're not, the gun isn't what you are. You're not, you're not security. You're not self-defense because you're armed. You're self-defense because you're a member of the community. And if you personally choose to be armed, that is an option that is expanded to you specifically because you're armed. But it doesn't change, it shouldn't change what you are. And if it does, there's a phrase that I think is really useful.

The finger pulls the trigger. And if you want to avoid, or the trigger pulls the finger, sorry. And it's this idea that when you show up armed and you're showing up armed as someone like your purpose there is to be armed, you're at heavy risk of the weapon guiding your responses. And that's the most important thing in any circumstance to avoid if you're carrying a weapon. If you got a hammer, everything's a nail. Exactly. Yeah. Well, and the last 20 years, we've had kind of a, with the war on terror, you've seen a proliferation in media around making navy seals and all that shit look really, really cool.

Every other movie is about that, even though like really they're just drunk guys who yell at people a lot. Who occasionally commit murder to protect, or was that the seals or was that the green berets who killed that guy to protect a drunk trafficking rig? I mean, probably both. Oh, you know, that was the green berets in North Carolina. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it crosses all borders. But one thing that's come out of that is we've started to call those guys operators, right?

Yeah. So you've gone from a gun being a tool that someone trains there to use to, they are merely an operator of a weapon system. And it's kind of dehumanizing, like it allows you to get out of the thought on that. And it's exactly what you were talking about, where the triggers really pull in the finger at that point. Yeah. And it's, I think there's a number of, I don't know, there's a number of tactics and more than we can get through. And we'll be talking with some other community self-defense people at some point in the near future about this, because this is a big topic, right? And it's not one, I haven't seen anyone do it super well yet in the United States.

It's like any time you have kind of persistent... Right-wingers do every once in a while. Yeah. They take over BLM land. Yeah, yeah. But then they die. I forgot about that. Yeah, they did die.

They get killed. And I think that it's a really messy topic because of, you know, what you brought up is a valid point. Everything that all the kind of social baggage there is around weaponry in this country and in our culture, this kind of like worship of the gun. And if you think like the left is any more immune to that than the right, you're wrong. You see the same, you know, toxic behavior all around. You have to be extremely cognizant of it, even if you know it's something to risk for. There is weapons in general have a mental impact on us, carrying them. And there is a level of just like being around weaponry that is entrancing.

It's a human thing, you know, we make weapons. We're tool using apes and weapons are some of the first tools that we made that are responsible for why, you know, we get to tell the dogs and the cats what to do. And you have to really approach being armed from a standpoint of rejecting a lot of that if you're going to do it responsibly. And among other things, the idea that you might have to use a gun has to be you're very close to your worst nightmare. Because it would be, it would be if you ever actually had to use one. At minimum, you're talking like when you actually look at like legal self-defense shoots, you're talking minimum the next if you kill somebody at least minimum the next year of your life is dealing with the legal consequences of that. Sure. And probably hundreds of thousands of dollars.

I mean, if you're having, if file, if charges get filed, you're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars for like a capital defense case, if not millions. Yeah. Yeah. And that's in, you know, there's one of the gun YouTubers that I like to push people towards for this kind of stuff is a guy named Paul Harrell, who is certainly more on the conservative side, but who actually killed somebody in a self-defense and went through the whole legal process afterwards. And he has a couple of videos where he talks about it and he gives, I think, pretty good advice on that is, that is completely without ego because it was a nightmare for him. It was the worst experience of his life, which is what it's going to be if you ever have to use a gun. And that should be like, that should be the top of your, that should be the top of your mindset. You know, I've been in the situation a couple of times at protests where like someone pulls a knife and starts lunging at people and I have a gun and I'm 15 feet away.

And I never drew in part because it never quite crossed that line for me. And I knew that giving people the chance to deescalate was vastly more important than introducing a second weapon to the situation immediately. Sure. And if things had gone differently, perhaps I would feel differently about my choices in that moment, but they didn't and nobody got hurt. And that's always the best case scenario, even if it's somebody you really dislike who is who is threatening people with a weapon. I swear that happened up in Olympia like two weeks ago. Yeah. Well, the shooting in Olympia, which was a guy named Tiny who got shot and there's video of it.

It's absolutely not a legally justified shoot for sure. Like, yeah, he was he was like 40 feet away, you know. Yeah, but he's really tall. He is big. I think that counts for something. Yeah, he was tall. He was tall. He was chasing them.

He was armed. I'm not making a moral case here. I know. I think legally they would have had a trouble had they stayed around. Now, of course, they've got. I believe they've been arrested at this point. Oh, have they? I just heard visits.

I think so. Sorry. I don't mean to crash it for a second. I think I saw our best friend, Andy, post something about it. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe two days ago. Three days ago. I must have missed this.

Yeah. Okay. So they did. They did arrest the guy. Yeah. And it's, you know, it's another thing if you if you feel if you're involved in like a shooting that you feel is a justified legal shooting, you don't, you don't leave the scene. And in fact, one of the better videos you'll get on like what to do. And this guy's life has gone to shit because of the political nature of the shooting.

But the guy in Denver who shot that dude at a protest, the Pinkerton fired that dude. I'll tell you, you know, no matter what you want to say about whether or not it was a good shoot. Yeah. He dropped that fucking guy. He dropped that gun. I mean, he dropped him. He dropped him down on his knees. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it was, you know, again, the court case has not settled out. So I don't know if that guy's story is going to end happily, but in terms of if you'd want to not get shot yourself and you want to have the maximum chance of defending yourself if you have to shoot somebody in a situation that's legally justified, what that guy did after the shoot is how to handle it. Yeah. And I mean, the evidence for that is he did not get shot.

And obviously your mileage with that's going to vary depending on your skin color. Yeah. That's a big factor. Yeah. In terms of actual training, people can like pay for if they want to take that step, which I think is a good idea. Who do you have kind of like broad recommendations for how people can know if something's, you know, because this is certainly a space where there's a lot of grifters and whatnot. Yeah. I mean, most of the beginner level how to fight with a gun classes are two to three days long.

Like that's a good starting point is the fact that you're going to pay probably three to $500 per day. And it's going to be multiple days long. You can't because you're going from a baseline, you know, they know you already know how to point and shoot a gun, but they're going to go for everything on how to draw, how to move, how to reload. You're going to have some classroom time going over their specific safety instructions and stuff like that. But anything you can do in one day or four hours or 40 rounds or whatever, it isn't going to cut it. You need to go get something and you need to listen because they're going to ask you to do things that might not be the way you want to do it. You might say, yeah, that's not the way my dad taught me how to reload a handgun. A good example is actually tactical response in Tennessee.

A lot of people hate them, but they have a very specific way that they say everyone reloads this way in our class, you know, you put it in and you slingshot the slide. And then people argue and go, well, I want to just press the button. Well, the button's cool and all, but we want you to slingshot the slide. Just do it for this class. Sorry, I got a little off topic there. No, no, no, that's a good point too, because I mean, a lot of people listen. And you don't have to take everything away. You take what you saw.

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. The first 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 on the gun badass way. 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. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price.

Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories.

But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. As good usable information and merge that with what you already know, maybe throw away some of what you already know when you got this ball of goo that you can work with for practice. And to that point, when you're talking about training, one of the differences between handguns and rifles, shooting as always, there's a degree of perishableness to it, but shooting a handgun is a much more perishable skill than shooting a rifle. So if you're going to be armed with a handgun, it really behooves you to train, because you're only as good as how often you've been out there, really.

And having a good foundation like taking some real professional classes will help a lot in that as opposed to just kind of going out to the range every now and again. But yeah, let's talk at the last little bit of this here about kind of the gun that's always on the tip of everybody's tongue when you start talking about being armed and armed self-defense is, you know, the AR platform. It's a gun with a lot of baggage, a tremendous amount of cultural baggage, and it has become vastly more than just a firearm in our culture. What are kind of, because I am a big advocate of people who are open to being armed, getting an AR platform. I think it's a great gun to learn on. Yeah, it goes bang really well almost every time as long as it's from a reputable manufacturer, despite what some people say, they're very reliable. They're easy to clean, literally as long as you keep them lubricated, even in the field, you keep it lubricated, it will just keep banging out rounds. It functions, and we talked about this during the episodes on food storage and whatnot, where there's the cheap version, I like stuff where there's the cheap version that works and there's the expensive version that works, and you have that with an AR.

You can get a very inexpensive AR and you can replace every part of that AR over the next five years and have a $6,000 gun. I did minor price checking last night, because I was like, you know, I haven't checked the retail prices on stuff, right? So in like your budget tier normal price that's out right now, you got like a Ruger AR556, they're 700 bucks. That's dirt cheap and it's going to go bang just the same. And it's a great gun. Yeah, I have a friend whose AR is a Ruger 556 and they're very solid. Yeah, they go bang every time, you're not going to break it. I mean, as long as you don't use it like a baseball bat, you're not going to break it.

Yeah, especially now that the Russian steel case ammo has been banned. But then like the other end of the spectrum is you got a SIG, right? Yeah, I've got a couple. Okay, so you know what the Rattler is? Oh yeah, that's a fun one. I do not own a Rattler, but they are cute. Do you know how much? Well, first off, the Rattler, it's a short barreled 556.

It's not really an AR15, but like technically it kind of is. Yeah. And it's... Well, how about this? How much do you think that the Rattler costs right now? Don't go look. Just take a guess. Probably 2,500 bucks would be my guess.

2,800. 2,800. Yeah, that's good. 2,800. Yeah. Now, I actually put it in my category of honorable mentions slash meme, because it's kind of a meme gun. It's so tiny.

But I don't want to get shot with it. But that's kind of the spread we were talking about, which is you can get a $700 gun, and it'll go bang the exact same way as the Rattler. It fires the same bullet. And you can build up to something, not like a Rattler, but you can build up to a bunch of Noveski parts. You can throw a bunch of Noveski parts into that Ruger lower and upper that you bought

and build a really awesome gun that will be 99.9% reliable. Yeah. Yeah. And you can... I think generally if you're buying like a... Again, you're getting kind of a bargain basement AR. One of the first things that it's going to behoove you to replace is the optics. It'll probably start with iron sights.

Shit, these don't even come with anything. Yeah. Usually they come with nothing on them. You have to stick the irons or you stick a reflex sight. There's a whole world of optics. And I think one of the websites I recommend people check into if you're looking and kind of reading up on this and doing your due diligence is Pew Pew Tactical.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, I know. You're not written from like a super, you know, chuddy or whatever. Like you get a lot of very political gun websites that may have some good information but are frustrating to read. They're not that way. They're written, you know, for people who are not super aggro about guns but who are interested in guns and you can find really good reviews on stuff.

But as a general rule, modern optics beat iron sights every day. Oh, yeah. You may prefer... And I do in some... On my AKs, I vastly prefer using irons. That would never be the weapon I would pick if I was in a situation where I needed a weapon, you know? Yeah, I mean, I think everyone should learn how to use iron sights.

Absolutely. But if I can hand someone a $450 Aimpoint Pro, which is the budget version of a high-end optic, if I can put a $450 optic with the mount and everything onto a rifle and just go, hey, just put the dot on what you want to shoot, you're done. Now, there's a lot that goes past that. But we got rid of the entire proper sight alignment and all that. They just got to put the dot on the box and squeeze. Yeah.

I mean, even the Marine Corps, famous for fielding marksmen has gone, we're going to switch over to optic-based training. Yeah. They're just... I mean, you look at even guys in Idlib province, which is like one of the rebel provinces in Syria that's been persistently under siege for most of the last decade. They're all using fancy optics now. Generally, Alibaba versions of in-brand optics, but it does the trick, you know?

I mean, it's a SIG Romeo that never got the roll market for SIG on it. Yeah, exactly. And they paid $100 instead of $450. Yeah. All right. Well, I think that's most of what we can responsibly get through. I do want to end on the caveat we started with this with, which is that deciding whether or not...

We advocate firearms as an option, both as a legal option and something that can be for your community and for you as an individual potentially practical. I don't blanket advise people to buy guns. I think in many cases, it's going to be counterproductive. I think you should not own a firearm, again, if you're someone who struggles with suicidal ideation. They can be a very dangerous thing to have in your home if that's something that you battle with.

I do think that they can be owned and used very responsibly in addition to, I think, shooting can be a really enjoyable pastime. And I think more than anything, when a whole bunch of people who are talking about killing you all have guns, it can behoove you to own a firearm as well, if you're a member of one of those communities. So please don't take any of this as Robert Evans says, everyone go buy a gun. But if you're going to buy a gun, there's a right way and a responsible way to go about it.

And there's picking up a random 12 gauge and shoving it under your bed, which is... Oh, God, no. No more shotguns for home defense. Yeah, they're not ideal. Yeah, I mean, we could talk about over penetration and stuff. Yeah. I mean, just being able to move lead in a direction, they're very bad at it. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. They're not... I mean, again, something like an AR or a pistol caliber carbine is in a lot of situations going to be a much more practical and have less risk of hitting stuff you don't want to hit necessarily. Get the high point yeet, the yeet cannon. The yeet cannon.

Yeah. Well, we'll discuss that on our whole episode of About High Points. So you've shot yourself in the dick. Yes. The high point story. All right, well, do you want to, Paul, you got anything to plug before we roll out here? Well, give food to homeless people, well, houseless, I think is. And if you're in an area with a based DSA, join the DSI and then vote out the shit libs.

That's what's happening here in Orlando. But yeah, embrace anarchy. Well, I'm Robert Evans. This has been a podcast and remember as we sail out, there's a reason the episode talking about guns came after the episodes talking about storing and growing food. When PT Barnum's Great American Museum burned to the ground in 1865, what rose from its ashes would change the world. Welcome to Grim and Mild Presents, an ongoing journey into the strange, the unusual and

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you get your podcast and make sure you leave a review. Welcome back to the it could happen here. Yeah, that's the podcast we're doing right now. It's a podcast about how things are kind of falling apart, but maybe they don't need to or at least not as much as they have been. I'm Robert Evans with me as often is my co-host, Garrison Davis, Garrison, say something inciting to the audience. I'm on my second cup of coffee.

Yeah, because it is it is the early morning for you by which I mean 2.11 in the afternoon. Also with us today, our guest for this episode is David Van Dusen. David, you are the president of the State Labor Council for the Vermont AFL-CIO and there's a bunch of stuff that's interesting about your organization. We'll dig into it in more detail in a second, but first, I just want to say hello and thank you for being on the show. Pleasure to be here with you, Robert. Now, David, the big thing, I mean, the Vermont AFL-CIO has been in the news a couple of times

recently. The second one is y'all issued a statement making you, the coverage I've seen has said the first labor organization in the US to like support gun rights. I mean, like as is stated in a lot of the stuff you've put out, like Blair Mountain, there's a long history of labor organizations making use of the Second Amendment. But I certainly haven't heard of a labor organization stating it the way you did, which is basically the case you've made is because far right fascist organizations are so heavily armed and all of the gun control policies being heavily debated at least among liberals are

likely to ignore those people while restricting the ability of working class and particularly marginalized people to arm themselves. You do not support those regulations because you support the rights of those groups to be able to defend themselves from fascists. That more or less correct? Well, look, we believe in the right of a people to defend themselves. But our policies, including that one, are not adopted by the elected leadership, including myself.

They're adopted by our members. We believe firmly in democracy, participatory democracy. So with issues like this, we're happy to bring it to our convention, which we recently did and facilitate a full debate on the issue. So that's exactly what we did. We talked about it. Our rank and file members talked about it. They made amendments.

They debated passionately, different sides of the issue in a respectful way, in a productive way. A number of amendments were made, they were adopted, and then ultimately the resolution was passed with over a two-thirds majority of our right to file delegates in favor. So that's where we are right now. Yeah, I've read a bit about this, including there's been some critiques from a representative from the AFT, which is the local teachers union. But there was also a member of the Vermont AFL-CIO who essentially stated like, hey, I

didn't actually agree with this amendment, but or with this resolution, but it was made democratically. And I support the process by which it was done, which is one of the things I think is so interesting here that this isn't a group of activists at the top making declarations. This is an organization that has really dedicated itself increasingly to, I think, a kind of progressivism that we haven't really seen in an organized way in a lot of the American labor movement until recently. Well, when you're talking about democracy with the labor, I mean, we can be just as

well talking about democracy in society as such. The fact is, is that organized labor today is not particularly democratic. And we're looking to change that. And our world is not particularly democratic. Now, the vision that we hold, our slate, our progressive slate called United, is one where we increase the means for direct participatory democracy, both within labor and within our society. So, of course, we're going to go to our members in our rank and file and ask them to debate

the issues of our day and ultimately to make a decision on these major political and social issues. This was one, we again, we do believe that people need to have a right, the working class needs to have a right to defend itself, and we can't bury our head in the sand. Today, that's even followed a little bit of the news lately. We'll know that between November, 2020, up until late January, 2021, we were one general shy of a coup in this country. In the upside down world that we're now living in, it was because of the joint chiefs' staff

and the head of the CIA not supporting a coup, that a neo-fascist coup didn't totally infold materialized in a more mature form. Let that sink in for a minute. Our democracy or the vestiges of the democracy we have in the United States right now is precarious. Just because they've been there for 200 years doesn't mean they're going to be there tomorrow. The new playbook from an increasingly far-right Republican Party is to limit as much as they possibly could a people's right to vote and to participate in the political process.

We see this happening in Texas. We see this happening in Georgia. We see this happening in Florida. We see this happening in red, I shouldn't say red, but I should say Republican states all throughout the U.S. These are dangerous, dangerous times, so dangerous that our top generals were trying to decide what their position would be and make plans in case a coup, a full-on coup, not just a hint of a coup, came into being within the last year of our Republic.

Given those realities and giving the rise of the far-right, given that our former President Donald Trump told the neo-fascist proud boys to stand, what did he say? Stand back and stand by. Yeah. That's right. Now, at least they claim to have 40,000 members around the United States and they are armed. We can't just rest in our laurels and pretend that the state as such is going to keep us safe.

It seems prudent and reasonable for us to have taken the action to say we defend our constitutional right to bear arms, as intended, to defend our communities, to defend our unions, to defend the working class. One of the things that, because we were just talking about the coup that very nearly got pulled off, your organization at least, I believe it was right after the election in 2020 issued a statement that if the President illegally attempted to stay in power, the former President, you would participate in an attempt to help organize a general strike. Now, that's something we talk about a lot on this show, where big believers in the potential

of a general strike. We're also big believers that the kind of general strike that we need to potentially get climate justice and a number of other major things is an undertaking on par with the space race. You're talking about an enormous task. I'm really interested in picking your brain on, when we talk about a national general strike, what is the kind of infrastructure that's actually necessary to make something like that feasible?

Because there's a lot of talk on Twitter and Facebook of like, let's just do a general strike on this day in October. Six months doesn't go by as president of FLCIO for a month, where I don't know if I left this group of some kind contacting me to endorse their general strike. I'm going to shut down on data acts, and it's yet to happen, at least in our country. So that's a great question, a couple of things. When we voted, and again, this wasn't a decision of myself, the leadership, this was a decision we went back to the rank and file with to one of our conventions, 87% of our delegates

after our long debate voted to authorize the elected executive board to call for a general strike in the event of a coup, in the event that there wasn't a transfer of power on January 20th, as the Constitution requires. It was our feeling that in that very specific space and time, in that very specific political climate, we would be able to call for such a strike, and with a serious amount of work and a serious amount of organizing, pull that off and make that happen. And the thought was, if we could do it in Vermont, because the call was for a Vermont general strike, then it could spread to other states, which would be absolutely necessary

if our country descended into a fascist dictatorship of some sort. But generally speaking, when we talk about climate issues, when we talk about the fact that millions of Americans own up health care or aren't paid livable wages, all of these issues, or at least these issues together, certainly weren't us looking at things like a general strike. But it's a bit pine the sky to think that, hey, we got 10 great issues that we want to see progress on. We're going to call for a strike.

It's going to happen. The infrastructure is not there, nor is the political will within the large labor bodies at this present time. Without participation from organized labor, first of all, I don't think anything's going to happen. So you're going to have to achieve buy-in at a certain level. But even with buy-in from key leaders or even a localized shop stewards, you still need to have infrastructure in place.

So one of the things that lacks in AFL-CIO as a national organization, we don't have an effective network of local union contacts in every shop, at every shift, in every factory that's represented by a union, let alone the majority of workplaces at this point that aren't unionized. So what our top priority is as far as the Vermont AFL-CIO goes over the next two years is to build a network of local union contacts in every single shop and every single shift that we represent folks here in Vermont. So we see this as a way to increase communication.

Without communication, you're not going to be able to pull off mass mobilizations. And also, you're not going to be able to conduct mass education on issues x, y, or z. So over a period of two years, we're looking to build this network that would function not as a one-way means of communication, but almost a two or three-way. Imagine that this is a way for the rank and file to communicate up to the leaders. This is a way for the leadership to communicate down to the ranks, I mean down to the lunch room level of what it means to be in a union shop. And also, ideally, it's going to be a way for local union leaders to horizontally communicate

with each other with such a structure in place on a grand scale, on a state scale, on a federal scale. Then things like organized general strikes over political issues and social issues become feasible. And even when they're feasible, though, then we still have a political question of, you know, will they be supported by the internationals? Will they be supported by the executive board of the National AFL-CAL? And that's a huge conversation, you know, so.

Yeah. It's interesting to me hearing your perspective on this because my experience with kind of activism has been much more of kind of the decentralized and kind of much more recent groups, you know, since Occupy, you're dealing with these structures that in a lot of cases are, I mean, the AFL-CAL goes back like, what, like a century, right? One way or the other. Yeah. You know, I think because of kind of how, shall I say, online, a lot of the discussion

about this stuff seems to be organized labor often gets left out. And one of the things that I think is most important when talking about the value that organized labor has in any kind of discussion of a general strike is what happened during the budget negotiations or whatever you want to call them in 2019, where you had airline workers threatening a general strike that effectively brought an end to a president's saber rattling over the budget. Like it's. President Sarah Nelson.

Yeah. Headlines over that. And that was the right thing to do. Absolutely. So, her and would love to see her in a stronger position of leadership in the national level. Well, I'm interested because I see a lot of potential in, obviously, organized labor has had a lot of problems, particularly in the last, you know, during my lifetime. And I think part of it is what you said earlier.

It's not as democratic as it should be at most levels. What you guys have done with United is attempting to reform that, you know, within Vermont. I'm wondering first, how did that kind of come about, you know, 2019 is when you first got, got put into office when, when the United Slay got put into the office in Vermont. What was kind of the back story to that? And then my second question is kind of what do you see as necessary to, like, what, what's, what's the fight as you see it to get stuff like that done on a larger scale around the country?

So our story in Vermont is probably a lot like the story of organized labor in many different places, our starting point. So in 2017, not that long ago, we had a convention with something like 20 or 25 delegates there. Imagine that 20 delegates representing 10 at the time, 10,000, we've grown since 10,000 members. And that's called a democracy. So there was a problem, an existential problem. Now I come out of AFSCME, local 2413 in Northeast Kingdom of Vermont.

So when I got together with a number of other leaders from different unions, different AFSCME locals, but also United Academics as part of AFT, the building trades, a number of folks, there was a general recognition at the leadership level that something was very wrong. Member participation was weak as can be and things had to change. And we continually, as an organization, with some exceptions, hitched our wagon to the shortcomings that are the Democratic Party. So all of these things together led to inactivity, apathy, and lack of democracy. So we started going around, we started talking with workers, we started talking with shops

across the state. And one of the first things that was striking, people would say, they would know what union they're in, be it APWU or AFSCME or whatever it was, but we'd say, listen, we're thinking about running a progressive slave for office to take the AFL-CIO in a new direction. The next thing they would say is, what's the AFL-CIO? Think about that, right? Workers involved, some of which were union stewards in their locals, didn't even know what the AFL-CIO was.

So that was our starting point. It was an existential crisis of labor. And mind you, during these, what I would call some dark periods, we would often endorse a hundred candidates for state house, nearly all of which being Democrats. And then they would win. They would win their elections, like largely our candidates win. And then we'd get nothing in the state house, right? There'd be no labor bill.

There'd be no advance in a card check, differently supported organized labor. And yet we'd keep repeating the same mistake year and year out and not figure out that something was wrong. So when we formed the United Slave as a coalition of a number of different unions to recognize it was time for change, we really brought the discussion to the grassroots level. We developed a 10 point program called our little green book. It's now the policy and the platform of the Vermont AFL-CIO. And we ran an organized campaign based on that, right, at a very local level.

And here we did all the things that you should be doing, the phone calls, the emails, the shop visits, all of this and created a sense of excitement going into our 2019 convention. Our 2019 convention with over, if I recall, over 105 delegates and alternates was the largest convention we had up here in something like 30 plus years. So that was an exciting atmosphere where something was going to be different and something was going to change, right? So we swept, we essentially swept those elections. We won all the seats except for one.

We had a follow up convention in two, I'm sorry, election in 2020 where we won every single seat. And then in the last election, we won all seats except for one where one person who's a good person from the building trades ran but was not part of our state. So the real question is what have we done in the interim? How are we changing that direction and how are we trying to seek to change the capacity of labor and what lessons does it have to the national agreement, I would suppose. So on that front, one of the first things we did is we took money out of our lobbying

operation and put it to an organizing department whereby we would hire and we have hired on-call organizers to assist our affiliates in either new organizing or internal organizing, therefore delivering an actual benefit to our affiliate unions. Now mind you, we represent just about every sector of workers all across the state. But forever, they very rarely got a concrete, measurable acts of solidarity from the Federation as such, right? Because a lot of too many of the resources were put in the lobby. And we also took a critical eye towards the Democratic Party and recently we've instead

endorsed the Social Democratic Vermont Progressive Party Slates in their runs for state house and state-wide office in many cases. So we've done a few things differently, we're continuing to do things differently. We've expanded the size of our executive board so we elect more leaders now. We've more than doubled the size of the delegates afforded to each local so we could have more rank and file voices present when we're meeting at a convention. And we've taken a strong social justice position where we think that organized labor must work very closely in an alliance, form alliances with groups like migrant justice or black

perspective or environmental organizations like 350.org. And we've done those things, worked on their issues, where we have common interests and we've asked them to support us on our issues where they may have some common interests. So those are things that are very different that the National AFL-CIA is not doing. Other state labor federations largely aren't doing them enough. And we're hoping now to build that out and we're engaging conversations seeking to form a national progressive caucus within the National AFL-CIA. And I think that's so important when you talk about kind of on the national level for progressives.

Number one, to not continually kind of reflexively support the Democratic Party when the Democratic Party is failing progressives, which we have a perfect case study right now in Congress with the reconciliation bill. It often does seem like such an insurmountable task just because the inability, like a bill, the $3.5 trillion infrastructure bill is so widely supported by Americans, but it just keeps coming down to this tiny number of folks with financial interests and donors who are pushing against something that's widely supported. And I feel optimistic when I look at state organizations like what y'all are doing and

the fact that I can see something building. But I also, it is such a titanic task to imagine translating that on a national scale in a way that actually gets us the things that we really can't wait for when you're talking about some of this infrastructure stuff, when you're talking about health care, when you're talking about climate justice, like I do feel the clock ticking. And I'm wondering what you see as the hope on the national scale for actually putting some muscle behind the progressive movement. Well, look, it's not just the issues of the infrastructure bill and the budget bill.

It's also the pro act, right, the pro bill that is languished in the Senate. And let's not lose track of the fact that those efforts are all stalling and likely, very likely to fail, and I hope they don't, because of Democrats, because the Democratic Party is not united. They ran on a platform saying they were going to do X, Y, and Z. And now when they're in a position to carry it out, they're not going to do it. And Joe Manchin, as far as I'm concerned, I call him a class trader, but I don't think he's ever was part of the working class.

He claims to support the pro act, but in the same breadth, he won't get rid of the filibuster. So I mean, that's absolutely bullshit as far as I'm concerned. So how do we change that? Well, the National AFL-CIO puts millions and millions and millions of dollars into elections. We have gotten so many of these people elected and backed them in Arizona and West Virginia, you name it, and then we get nothing back. If we were to take that money instead and put it into a robust new organizing department or a recrafted organizing department and actually assign real on the ground organizers in every

single state in the country to help our affiliates, to help our state federations and their affiliates, to internally organize, to build the kind of network I was talking about before, and to be active and build alliances with the social justice group, our power would be amplified five million fold. This is the way we do it. Politicians aren't going to do what's right because it's right. Politicians are going to do what's right when they feel so much pressure that they have to do it.

Now, the victories that we saw for working people during the Great Depression under FDR, that wasn't just because FDR thought, you know, this is the right thing to do. It's because people are going on strike because people are organized because they were scared of revolutionary change in this country. So turn to meaningful through major reforms as a way to blunt that perceived threat that they have. And that's what we got to get back to. Our power is never going to grow from people who are wearing ties in Washington.

Our power is going to grow based on our solidarity on the shop floor and in our communities. So that's the direction we got to go and we got to do that rapidly, very rapidly. It's been clear to me for quite a while, both that the reason workers gain so much in the wake of the Great Depression and the only kind of hope we have for doing that now is they have to be scared, you know, to an extent. They have to be scared of what's arrayed against them, both in its organization and in its ability to disrupt things. And I'm wondering what you think people listening, people who maybe are not involved in organized

labor, what do you think people can do to further those ends? This is like when we start talking about national level AFL-CIO politics, that's not something I think most people listening feel like they have any kind of ability to influence. What do you think they can influence? What do you think people can be doing to build that kind of capacity? Well, you got to be active and you got to engage in the political and social movements, but also most folks, you know, they're going to have a job of some kind. And a lot of folks aren't getting treated the way they should in their job.

I don't care if you work in a coffee shop, in a restaurant, or in a gas station, or in manufacturing. And you could start by organizing with your coworkers to form a union today. You know, you could reach out to a local union to ask for help or you could do it on your own, frankly. But if we're not organized as working people, and we are the 99%, we are most of the world. If we're not organized amongst ourselves, we're not going to be able to become that expression of power that we need to be in order to create the change.

If we're just a collection of individuals, then the ruling class, the wealthy, the powerful, the elite, they're going to have all their ducks in a row to keep us divided and to keep their foot on the pedal of the status quo. So we need to come together. We need to organize. And the natural place to organize is in the workplace, in my opinion. Yeah. I mean, it is the natural place to organize.

It's also become an increasingly difficult place to organize. We all watch what Amazon did in Bessemer this year. And that fight is still ongoing to an extent. But it is a continuing challenge to actually effectively unionize in a lot of the industries where it matters most. We have some choke point industries, like we talked about aircraft employees that are heavily unionized, thankfully, and that do have a lot of power, as has been demonstrated recently when they go to the mat.

But I'm interested in kind of, we've got, Amazon employees is really one of the areas that I'm looking at where, my God, if something significant could actually get off the ground and a significant number of those workers could get organized, it could make a real difference. But you've got, effectively, what are community organizations, for the most part, going up against Amazon at this point has more resources than most nation states. Yeah, but so do the Carnegie's and the Rockefellers and the folks like this. Absolutely. And it's always been hard.

Too long ago in our country, maybe during our grandfather's day, where there was a very good chance you'd be shot or at least beat over the head with a club from the Pinkerton's, if you tried to organize. Organizing has never been easy in such as Columbia today, trade unions are killed at an unbelievable clip, almost on a daily basis. And yet still they organize. So I'm not suggesting to any of your listeners that any of this is easy. What I'm saying is that it has to happen, it has to happen.

And there's different models too. Like in some places, one of the models that's been effectively used is forming worker centers. So that's not a traditional union. It's a center in a city or in a community or in a town where workers come together and strategize in a location to strategize how to be effective as a group, as a whole, as a class on issues that are important to them, be it economic, be it social, be it fending against racism, whatever it may be. That's a model that I suggest folks could look into as an alternative way if for whatever

reason you don't feel that the time is ripe for a union in your shop today, although it needs to be tomorrow. Take a look at worker center and see if there's one in your community get involved. If not, get together with a few people and see what it would take to start one where you live. But one way or another, we have to be organized. We have to come together. We cannot just be a collection of individuals.

That's a great point and useful information. I think kind of the last thing I wanted to get into was one of the things I first learned about your organization that you issued a solidarity statement back. I think it was 2019 with the YPG and Jay in Rojava. You've stated your solidarity with Black Lives Matter, with the Zapatistas, currently what they're undergoing in Mexico, which is massive repression from the government yet again, and your support of Palestinian rights and of against the US occupation, or not occupation, but a blockade of Cuba.

What do you see when we're talking about this struggle, this broad struggle we've been talking about all day, what do you see as the role of internationalism in both organizing people and organizing resistance? Well, our starting point today is capital is international. So if we're going to have a foundational challenge to the power of capital, we also have to be internationalists in our album. We supported the YPG, the YPG and the newly elected government in Rojava because they are struggling for economic equity and a direct participatory democracy in that corner of

the world. We see this as the most significant revolution in the world in generations. This, in our mind, is on par with the Spanish Civil War and what we saw around Barcelona and the CNT then, or the Paris Commune of 1871. If this was happening in Europe, a day wouldn't go by where this wouldn't be front page news. But in the Western world, we often, the corporate media turns a blind eye to many of those struggles. So they're doing their part, and we have to do our part in our country too. The Zavatistas are doing their part in Chiapas and in broader ways in some regards in Mexico

as such. But we need to reach our hand out in encouragement and say, hey, we're here to support you. One of the things we sought to concretely do in the Vermont Labor Movement is, in 2019, one of our Central Labor Councils passed a resolution in support. We said, look, if you go over to fight and volunteer with the YPG and YPG, because there's thousands of volunteers right there who are volunteered to go over, if you return and you're American, we'll hook you up with a union job, and we'll hook you up with three months of room and board.

So you could get reacclimated, you could get back into the community, and get back into the local fight through the labor movement. And we were proud to actually have an opportunity to do that for one returning American fighter. In our latest resolution in 2021, and this one was broader because it was the whole Vermont AFL SCO, not just the Central Labor Council, we again offered, we encourage folks to feel so inclined, if they're in that place in their life, to volunteer with YPG and YPG. And if they're Americans and they come back, we're happy to hook you up, we'll do our best to get you a good union job when you return.

So we felt that was a very small, least we could do kind of thing, but concrete way to provide solidarity. We all have to stand together. It's really one fight, but the place we're going to be effective is where you live locally, in your town, in your city, in your state, and in your country. Yeah, I think that's a great note to end on and a great thing that you all are doing. And I really do appreciate that. And I appreciate you, David, coming on and talking to us today.

Is there anything else you wanted to get out or anything you wanted to, like any charities or mutual aid funds or whatever you wanted to push before we kind of roll out today? I'd just like to push for folks to go to work tomorrow and organize. Organize with your fellow workers and let's change the world. Solidarity. Thank you, David. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to ask for your help. There is a Portland area woman, Ruba Tamimi.

She's an Arabic interpreter and a Palestinian liberation activist, and she is trying to save her home at the moment. She's got to go fund me if you go to Save Ruba's House. R-U-B-A on GoFundMe. You'll find it, Save Ruba's House on GoFundMe. If you've got a few bucks, she could really use it. Again, Save Ruba's House R-U-B-A at GoFundMe. Thanks.

Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It could happen here as a production of CoolZone Media. For more podcasts from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for it could happen here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening.

When PT Barnum's Great American Museum burned to the ground in 1865, what rose from its ashes would change the world. Welcome to Grim and Mild Presents, an ongoing journey into the strange, the unusual, and the fascinating. And our inaugural season will give you a backstage tour of the complex and unusual artifact that is the American Sight Show. Listen to Grim and Mild Presents now on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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