Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 33

Episode Date: May 7, 2022

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode.

So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Hi, welcome to It Could Happen Here, the show where we just spent a few minutes not recording by accident and also trying to shoot my cat away so they would stop throwing old grenades off my desk. So that's the vibe that we're going for today. Yay.

And oh, do you know what today is? Today is May Day, famed one of the best holidays. So in the May Day tradition, I'm not doing my job today, so we're not doing a real episode. But don't worry, we still have other content for you to listen to. Speaking of content, a friend of the pod, Marker Kiljoy. Hi, do you have anything that we can listen to today? No, was I supposed to prepare something? Oh, wait, what if I released the very first episode of my new podcast today?

And what if it was a May Day themed episode? Would that sound good? That would sound, as the kids say, very based of you. That would be so cool. Because if you like May Day and only working eight hours a week, which is still too many hours, but if you enjoy that as opposed to more hours, you should probably thank the anarchists. And you can learn more about those people at Marker's new show, Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, here on Cool Zone Media.

Also featuring friend of the pod, Robert Evans. Yes, Robert Evans is the guest on that episode. So if you're familiar with that guy, then you could also listen. So yeah. Episodes dropping every Monday and Wednesday until the world burns. Yay, so like three months? Three months, well actually, they said like what, like 46 weeks? Oh yeah, I math it out.

It was nine months that the UN says we have to turn everything around. But as my friend pointed out, we're going to waste a month of that just trying to do the math of calculating the weeks into months. I do love optimism. Well, that does it for us today. Go enjoy your May Day by not working or at least just kind of fucking around. That's what I'll be doing. Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is out now, so check it out wherever you get your podcasts.

Oh my God, I just realized that wasn't recording. Oh, we are not doing this again. We used to zoom audio, it'll be fine. It's like a bunch of different illustrations of dictators all done as like little anime chicks. So they're all hot. So like polepots, this like sexy girl on a throat of skulls, but Tito, they made into a milf. Like she's got all of her kids around her.

It's the only one with kids. I don't know why they picked Tito for that, but it does kind of work. This is It Could Happen Here, a podcast about which anime war criminals are hottest. And it's Idi Amin, actually. The Idi Amin in that book is pretty, pretty, pretty smoking. How's polepot depicted? As a like wearing black lingerie on a throne of skulls. Okay, nice.

Just kissing to make it in. No, no kissing. You're all all like like world leaders. He's a world leader in some things. I would. I would argue that, but he does not make the book. No, it's sad, tragic. Anyway, this is It Could Happen Here podcast.

Things falling apart and other stuff. I'm here again with my buddy James. Now, James. Hi. Hi, everyone. Which dictator do you think would be hottest? They were like genderbent. Yeah.

Yeah. I don't know. I'd have to go for like one of the old timey ones. Press one of the, one of the, one of the, one of the stars. Yeah. I think cause our Nikki had nothing to do but like look hot. And he was a big workout guy. Yeah.

Big workout guy. Nice to rip. Nice outfit. Tight trousers. I think I'd probably go with him. Yeah. That scans. Which is the most fuckable war criminal.

That's a tough one. I'd probably have to think about that. I'd know. None are coming to mind actually, oddly. Who do you know? That Stalin picture is a fake. Oh yeah. Yeah.

Not nearly actually that sexy. No. Joseph the stallion. I gotta go. I gotta go with Saddam Hussein. Yeah, that's true. He has a sort of lustful mustache. Yeah.

That mustache fucks. Yeah. Yeah. We should probably talk about something that's not which dictators are most fuckable. Today we're going to chat about he fat courses and about emergency and particularly like combat medicine, which is a more relevant topic for a lot of people in the wake of a couple. There was a mass shooting at a protest in Portland. There's been a whole lot of threats made against LGBT people.

Jack Pasobiec launched a t-shirt that was basically threatening a mass shooting at Disney World. All sorts of fun shit's been happening. Yeah. It does seem like we're spiraling towards the end of times. Yeah. It certainly seems, if you want to be less apocalyptic than that, it certainly seems credible to say that there's a pretty good chance there are people listening to this who have not been presented a shooting, who will be presented a shooting at some point in their lives.

Yeah. It doesn't make sense to like, I'm joking about the end of times, right? Like we shouldn't panic and things. We should think about ways we can protect each other and keep each other safe. Yeah. So what is a he fat course? Because you recently went through one. Yeah.

So he fat is an acronym, right? Hostile environment first aid training. It's a British thing. I think the syllabus, I believe is standardized by the government in the UK. So most of the courses you'll find are in the UK, clustered around Hereford for pretty obvious reasons. But there are a couple in the United States and there are some in other countries too. And it's for journalists, aid workers, NGO staff, and anyone else who's working in an environment that would be considered like high risk or hostile.

And out to your point, that includes most of the United States at the minute, right? Yeah. Well, I mean, we are in this fun place where literally any moment could turn into a situation with the intensity of a low density war zone. Yeah. I mean, we have more weapons than most war zones and also people who think it's okay to kill other people because they like Mickey Mouse. So it does seem like, like you said, it is more likely that we will see more shootings,

even bombings and that kind of thing like we can't say for sure. Yeah. Now you have done some of the same kind of work that I and some other colleagues of ours have done, you know, in hostile environments, difficult places prior to going through this course. Obviously, when we're talking about like what sort of first aid skill should people have, the most basic stuff is like how to apply a tourniquet, which we'll talk about a bit more later, how to, if it's not, because tourniquets are really only for extremities,

you know, you can't really tourniquet a gut wound or whatever. And so for that, it's more like packing it. But outside, so I'm going to assume you had more than your share of experience with that kind of stuff. What did you learn new going through this course? Like what was the stuff that emphasized that's kind of beyond the basics? Yeah. So the stuff I've done before has been some of that basic stop the bleed stuff and then

a fair amount of wilderness medicine stuff. So some of the improvised stretches and stuff I was familiar with. I enjoyed some of the releases they did. Like I'm not talking about necessarily like hand to hand combat or open hand combat, but like ways to release yourself in a nonviolent fashion. I thought that was very good. Ways to move through crowds. I found that very interesting.

And we did a lot of around how to move under fire, how to react around explosives, how to react around indirect fire. And most of that had already covered. And then some of the stuff around hostage situations to include a simulated hostage situation where you're blindfolded or hooded and sort of ask questions and poked with a blank firing weapon and such. I think it's really good. You can't really have enough.

Well, you can have too much experience with that, but to simulate that in as realistic a setting as possible, I found was super helpful. So I think, yeah, I think that was probably the most interesting thing for me. Now, when it comes to what kind of training people can get, because the Heathat course is a couple of thousand bucks, which is beyond. I know we have some colleagues listening and I think it's a good thing for people who are going to do this kind of journalism to consider or if you're in, you know, an aid worker or someone who is going to be going into these situations for a living.

That's, but for a normal person listening, it's probably more than you're likely to want to get or have the resources to get. So what what people because we, especially in the wake of shootings, pretty much anytime there's a mass shooting or violence at a protest, I will tweet about ifax again and ifax is an individual first aid kit. It's what like every soldier is supposed to have on their belt or on their plate carrier. And it generally consists of what are called. And this is when people ask like, what should I get to be ready for a shooting?

Generally, it consists of consists of two chest seals. These are called occlusive dressings. They're basically like kind of sheets of adhesive plastic. I would say that you like put over if you get shot in like the lungs, you, your lungs kind of depressurize and that's bad. I'm not a, I'm not a biology expert, but you're not supposed to have a hole through your lungs. And one of the things that you do to treat that immediately is you put this kind of addressing over it, which stops the lung from collapsing basically.

So that's one thing you'll find in an ifac. You'll also find what's called a combat tourniquet. There's a bunch of kinds of tourniquets. I was doing a stop the bleed course. We'll talk more about that in a bit, but that's the thing everyone should do. Like in terms of, you know, he fat is kind of more advanced and for people who are going to professionally put themselves in shitty situations. Um, stop the bleed is for everybody.

And one of the things I was having a chat with people who were teaching them, we were doing a little meeting. Um, and one of the things that was brought up, people always talk about, well, I wear a belt in case I need to make a tourniquet or this or that. And virtually never works like close to 0% success rate. Um, even when it's someone who's trained and experienced providing tourniquets, like random shit does not make a good tourniquet, tourniquets make good tourniquets. Yeah.

They're small. They're easy to carry. They aren't cheap, right? But on the same, uh, you shouldn't cheap out on them either, right? Like we've, I know we've talked about this on Twitter and I know like, uh, Amazon sells them. They also had a problem with selling fakes. Uh, so like North American rescue, uh, I think it's called emergency rescue.

I'll, I'll give you some links so we can tweet out. Yeah. North American rescue is really good. One of the, so yeah, rescue essentials. So what a combat tourniquet is? Cause there's different, some tourniquets are just like a plastic band almost almost like if you go to a gym, those things that people like wrap around their legs to do squats or something or lifts, it's kind of like, it looks a little like that.

Um, and those, yeah, obviously like those can work, but they're not near a combat tourniquet is basically it's a little, um, like kind of nylon-y fabric belt thing that you strap around and you tighten it, um, and velcro it tight. And then there's something called a windlass, which is basically a metal or plastic stick that you then twist around, uh, and that twisting action, when you twist it, that's going to tighten it and that's going to stop the artery from bleeding. Um, and then you lock it into place. There's a little place to lock it.

And so when you get a cheap tourniquet, it generally means the windlass is made out of something flimsy or the fabric adhering the windlass to the belt thing is not very good and it will break when being tightened. Yeah. And you don't want, what you don't want to do is not have enough pressure or have sort of weird pressure because what you're going to do tomorrow, I'm not that kind of doctor. Yeah. Right.

Is you can cut off the Venus return and not the arterial flow and that's where you can give yourself compartment syndrome. I just wanted to backtrack quickly and we were talking about how expensive he facts are. If people are listening and they are in that kind of line of work, uh, the International Women's Media Foundation is, is doing free he fact courses for women, gender non-conforming non-binary people. And I got, I got a grant from the Rory Peck Trust, uh, to go and do mine. So for journalists, uh, both of those are really only for journalists and media.

I would really encourage people to apply. Yeah. Um, and that's, that's great information because if you can, even if like your journalism has been sort of like citizen journalism where you're showing up at a protest and, you know, taking pictures or whatever, um, give it a shot. Like if you could, like the more people who have this kind of training, um, as a general rule, the better. Um, when it comes to, I mean, stop the bleed courses are generally going to be much more

available. Some of them are operated as charities and we'll give out an iFAC or something at the end. Some of them have a nominal fee. It kind of depends on where you are. I've seen both. Portland has a lot of stop the bleed courses, which is why when we had our most recent mass shooting at a protest, um, more people didn't die because folks had equipment and were ready.

Um, you should expect to spend about 30 bucks generally on a combat tourniquet. Um, sometimes 20, but like the good ones are all about 30. Um, I would shoot for something with a metal windlass that's generally a sign. Again, there's like rescue essentials and, um, a couple of other brands that are reliable, but, uh, It's called the tactical committee on combat care, which is a government-finding thing. It's like, if you let them do the research so you don't have to, they provide a list of chronic tourniquets, uh, tourniquets, the one that most people have is it called a cat,

right? Called the application tourniquet. If you get that, even if it's not the best one or the smallest of lights or whatever, that's the one most people train with, they know how to use. And I think you've said this before, like even if you don't know how to use it, if you're in a situation where it's needed and you just say, I have this, I have a tourniquet, someone might take it and use it. So yeah.

And it's, it's like, it's okay if you panic as long as you get that into the hands of somebody who can use it, but it's also important if you're going to carry it to train with it. I heard when I posted about this recently, someone said that they and their friends have a game where when they're like hanging out, somebody will toss a tourniquet at someone else and say like, you know, right arm or something like that, right arm above, uh, elbow or something like that, and they'll have to apply the tourniquet and get it on as quickly as they can in that place, uh, which is a good game.

You're not going to like in 20 or 30 seconds, like, you know, you don't have to like injure yourself doing it, but you can, you can get it on and get familiar with the motions and build like a competence with it. Yeah. Work out when you're going to lasso the limb and when you're going to take it off and go all the way around. But I think standardizing one thing, certainly among you and your affinity group or your friends is, is probably a good move.

Um, yeah. Yeah. And it's one of those things, the kind of injuries that tourniquets are most needed for our, like arterial bleeding, um, which is the kind of thing that if you don't get a tourniquet on that you're dead, um, very quickly, but people will bleed out in seconds sometimes from like a, a femoral. Yeah. You've seen an arterial bleed and I'm sure that, uh, I know, I know, I have, I'm sure

you have. You know that that person has an arterial bleed. I bet it's a pressurized gushing of blood. It's like bright. The blood for arterial bleeding, it comes out in spurts and it is like bright. It is not, it does not look like when you cut your finger, the blood tends to, unless you're really cutting the shit out of that finger. Yeah.

Yeah. You, um, and one of the things we did at this course, which is cool, actually, was they had like a simulated arterial bleeds that a person was wearing, well, like a camel back and then they had like a hose pipe and it was just gushing out and then you could actually cinch down on it right with the strap and that actually stopped it. Now, I mean, when it comes to like more advanced bleeding care, cause there's some wounds where number one, if it's like, for example, too high up in your like crotch or something, you know, you're not necessarily going to be able to get a cat up there.

Sometimes people will literally hold the artery closed. Like that is a thing that, and that is more advanced, certainly, um, but it is, it is also like the physics of this are very basic. If you can figure out where blood is coming from and close it, blood will stop coming out, right? Like that's the principle of all immediate wound care for that kind of thing. Yeah. There's an acronym that you use, right, Dr. March, uh, which we can go over, uh, uh,

danger, right? So, uh, and I think this is a thing that often gets forgotten, actually, um, especially if you're doing like somebody's starting to bleed, which is focused on first aid rather than specifically in kind of combat care, but if you get hurt, not only are you useless of that person, not only are you hurt, if someone comes to help now, they have to think about which person they're going to help, right? Cause how much harder to carry two people than one person. So don't fucking do that.

Uh, uh, and then response, right? Yeah. So Robert, I see you've been shot. It doesn't look great at you. Okay. And then massive bleed, airway, uh, respiration, uh, check head to toe and then hypothermia. And you know, one of the things that is so like a combat tourniquet, you just generally, you can keep it in like a kit.

It's also fine to keep it loose in your pocket. You are not worried about sterility when you are applying a tourniquet. It does not matter if you get shit in the wound, like because they will die, they'll be dead in a minute. If you don't get the tourniquet on, um, yeah, yeah, you're not putting it in or whatever. Like it, so yeah. So that's, that's one kind and that's again, you're talking about extremities, right? You can't put a tourniquet on a neck cause that would kill the person.

Um, you would use an occlusive a lot of times on the neck, especially if like the airway gets cl... Again, this is stuff that you would, you would get in a stop the bleed course and I recommend people for that. So we're not going to go over treatment outside of like these basics, but we'll talk about like you should have an occlusive dressings. Who is what most IFX come with, people I know who have responded to shootings say you want more like four because they are a lot wind up getting used.

Yeah. I think about, I think those especially chest seals and something that I've been told by people with a lot more experience than me. It's like when you're dealing with a military setting, most people will have their chest covered with plates, right? And plate carriers and a civilian setting most people won't. So you're going to see a lot more of those like a sucking chest wounds or penetration of their thoracic cavity.

So yeah, and in that setting, and they are very small, right? You could put them in the back pocket of your skin and no one would notice. So another kind of thing that you'll find in an IFAC that's useful is combat gauze. So there's two types of gauze that you'll get in kits. One is just gauze, which you know what gauze is. Most wounds, if they are not life threatening, packing with gauze and wrapping is perfectly sufficient at least for immediate care, but combat gauze is impregnated with a thing called cellox, which is our little granules.

You can actually get them just as the powder. You shouldn't because it's not going to be useful to you as a random person. You should get it in gauze, like impregnated into gauze, but it's made from ground up crustacean shells and it basically makes blood clot very quickly. Survivability of arterial wounds in combat, which was extremely low before cellox, jumped to something like 70% or so. Like it's pretty remarkable, the degree to which it's made certain, particularly like femoral bleeds, survivable, and it can be used.

If you've got like a serious arterial bleed, it'll often be used in conjunction if it's on an extremity with a tourniquet, but you can just use it to pack a bleeding wound. And if you pack it and apply pressure, sometimes you'll pack the combat gauze into there and then add other gauze outside of it. But it's most wounds that are bleeding aren't going to require cellox gauze and it's pretty expensive, but it's another really useful thing to have if there is like an arterial bleed. Yeah.

I think actually where we first, I think Kailin might be what the stuff is called. I believe it comes from indigenous practices using it to stop bleeding, but yeah, it comes in a small package. Quick clot is a normal brand and yeah, it's a lot of what we've learned about stopping arterial bleeds has come from 20 years of war, right? And there are obviously a lot of downsides, but yeah, learning about how to stop those things is one of the things that has got a lot better in the last decade or so. So that's another thing.

And you can always buy these kits pre-made. Yeah. A lot of people make various pre-made kits. Yeah. You can Google iFAC and make sure it's rated well. Do your research. We've mentioned some brands here, but like it's not hard to find iFACs. They're made constantly and it's one of those things.

We talk on this show about being armed and whether or not people should have firearms. I'm broadly supportive of particularly threatened people having guns, but there's downsides to having a gun, a number of them. We don't need to get into the statistics, but there are a bunch of downsides to being armed. There's no downside to having an iFAC and keeping one in your car. Keep one in your backpack. There's absolutely no way you will have a negative experience as a result of the fact

that you keep an iFAC on you and it might save somebody's life. Yeah. I have an ankle holster that I use when I'm working in places where it wouldn't look very, you know, it would look off to have it on my belt and I don't want to carry a backpack maybe. I need to, it's wrapped around my ankle and it has a tiny combat dressing, which you haven't really talked about, chest seal tourniquet. It doesn't have the quick clot, but then the combat dressing has its own gauze.

Yeah. We can talk about that in a second, but like I just have, like I have a couple of iFACs, but also just in all of my light jackets because, you know, Oregon, usually you can wear some sort of jacket. I just have a bunch of cats and quick clot gauze packets just kind of scattered around. Like there's nearly always something just in my pocket or in the center console of my car in addition to the actual packed iFACs and yeah, it's handy. It's just good to have around.

Never hurt to have more of that stuff or you have the means or, you know, if you are in a situation where something horrible has happened, like what happened in Portland, if you in your truck have three or four of those and you can just be like, go, go, go, does anyone know how to use these, use these, if they're in your backpack when you're at a protest, like you could potentially save several lives. So if you have the means, like we said, give them to strangers, like it's not like a, it's not like a gun, right? Like you can't end your life with a quick clot.

Yeah. So yeah, I would, it's a thing that everyone should feel good about having you stock me up on. We should note again, you wouldn't want to use quick clot on a wound that was not serious because there's some concept, like it burns, it's, it's kind of nasty stuff in some ways. It can cause some complications for, for like when the EMTs get there. It's often recommended that you keep the packaging and give it to them. But if it's, if someone is clearly going to bleed to death, like that's, then that, then

that's when you use quick clot. And if you're questioning whether or not a wound is serious enough that someone might bleed to death from it, assume they will, right? Like err on the side of that. If you're wondering, is that a deadly bleed? You're probably, should probably treat it as if it is. Yeah. I mean, you're always better off keeping more blood inside the person.

Right. And yeah, with that. Yeah. I've been told to tape that to the person. And the same with the tourniquet, right? We should say that. Yeah. There will be blood around.

You can put a T on their forehead with the blood. That's pretty normal. And that works in almost any language. And then you want to write the time it was applied to. And again, you can do that with the blood, but I, I have a half size Sharpie that often comes in, in those kits. Yeah. Write that on it.

Yeah. And it's one of those things like it, assuming it kind of is dependent on your situation, whether or not you'd likely to have the time to mark that before the EMTs arrive. But it is one of those things, even if it's, even if your first responding is a minute and a half or two minutes with a serious bleed, that can be the difference between life and death for somebody. Yes. Absolutely.

Yeah. And it's different what you do when Kerry is coming to what you do when Kerry is coming, but the first steps are not, right? Stop the blood coming out of the person. So we should probably talk about combat dressings a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. There are several types.

The one I've had suggested that I prefer, I think, I don't know how it's pronounced with O-L-A-E-S, O-L-A's dressing, it has a little eye cup in it as well, which you can use for eye injuries, like find someone more qualified than me to teach you how to do that. Yeah. Don't need to get into that. Yeah. But it's a pad with gauze in it and then a sort of ace bandage, right?

And what that does is provides compression and obviously like an absorbent gauze. You can also pull the gauze out. A fun thing to do is to find an expired one and pull all that gauze out and there is just an unfathomable amount of gauze there, so you can use that to pack a wound. Practicing packing a wound is also something that you can do. There are like little bottles. Yeah. The team I know who does stop the bleed courses will take foam rollers and cut holes in them

and use that as like a, so you can, and you can do different sizes, right? You can actually just like get a knife and like jam it, stab it a bunch and like use those as different practice wounds. Yeah. That's a good idea. Like two fingers, you know, more than that, even one finger, people can pack with one finger. So like what this dressing does is it's sometimes they're called Israeli bandages, Olay's bandages.

They often come in like a tan package. The Israeli ones. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Again, like I would buy that from a reputable source and they come in various sizes. Emergency dressing is another name. And yeah, those are great for things where you don't need to use quick clots, where you

may not need to use it. Yeah, significant bleeding, but not like immediately life-threatening. Yeah. And in some areas where like sometimes in the forearm, right, like it can be hard because of these bone structures to get the 20K to work. So like you might be able to use that and stop the bleeding. You might have to use quick clots, right? But like having those options is important.

And again, they're pretty small, probably the cheapest of the things we've suggested so far as well. And again, they've been that they make giant ones from abdominal wounds too. And so like I actually have one of those in my truck. I have a bunch of more stuff in my truck. I wrote a piece about a first aid kit for your vehicle, which might look slightly different, right? If you imagine again, like we've talked about shootings, but car accidents.

That's when I, the only times I've had to use those dressings have been car accidents. It helped pull a fucking dude out of a truck that flipped on the way outside of Los Angeles during a rainstorm. And he's like whole fucking like right here in his hand had been gouged open where like it wasn't quite a bit of blood. But yeah, like that, that's a bit, it's not all just like action movie shit. Like it's something you should keep on you because there's a wide variety of things that can cause people to bleed a lot.

Yes, exactly. Yeah. And I think we, we always underestimate the risk that is driving. It's one of the most dangerous thing most people do. And yeah, having that in your car, you know, you don't have to worry so much about carrying it. It can just always be there. Don't leave it where it's going to bake in the sun if you're in a hot place.

But yeah, again, the potential for you saving a strangest life or a friend's life. Yeah, keep it in a center console, keep it in a trunk, you know, keep it in a trunk alongside a machete in a golf club, you know, you're always ready for anything with that. I'm never ready for golf, but aside from that, I'd be. Oh, I wasn't saying for golfing. Okay. Yeah, for crime. Yeah, exactly.

For crime. Medical actually make a read. Yes. Yeah. They make a lovely vehicle first aid kit. And they're very nice people too. So yeah, that's one to look into and they also do the bags. I have a mystery ranch bag that also clips onto, it replaces the hood on my backpack.

And I have that in my truck. And then if I'm going out, especially when I'm going out climbing, I'll just click that on and have a slightly different kit that I take just for climbing. But that's one of those scenarios where like you could hurt yourself climbing and even if people are coming very quickly, it's going to take you a while, right? Yeah. And thinking another thing. Be prepared to self rescue.

That's part of why you bring that kind of stuff. Self rescue is a massive part of climbing, right? Learning the lots, learning the transfers, learning the ways that you can get yourself off a wall if you hurt yourself on a wall. And the American Alpine Club actually publishes a thing called accidents in North American climbing where climbers, oh, okay, this person fucked up like this and they did this and this and this and they were okay. Or they weren't okay.

So I think that's a very good practice, learning from other people. And with that, a big thing that you focus on in wilderness medicine is rather than what can I bring with me? What do I have to already have with me and how can I use that, right? So for instance, you need to split a leg where you have a broken leg using a sleeping pad or something, which already has those reduced sleeves to do that. That's something that like, I don't want to obviously advise people too much. Yeah.

I don't want to, like, because again, so the different, this is useful. People should be thinking about this. When it comes to emergency first aid, like somebody was a broken leg. If you're not, like there's no real response that you should, like that's not what stopped the bleed is for, right? Like, one of the nice things about emergency medicine like this, like when you're talking about someone is bleeding to death is that, one of the ways I guess that you can separate the two kinds of like first responding, because there's the first responding where you can

make it worse. And if you like, somebody like breaks a bone or something and you can make that worse. And I need to not hear your bleeding. Yes. If somebody has an arterial bleeding, you can't make that worse. They're good. It's the same thing with like chest compressions, right? When you get trained as an EMT, one of the things they'll point out is that like you

shouldn't use an AED on an infant, but you do because if they need it, they're dead. Yeah. And in that case, yeah. I think it's important also, and the thing I didn't mention that I found very helpful about this course, some of the sort of psychological aspects of this is to remember that if you do find yourself in a situation and you try and help and that person dies anyway, then you did your best, right? And that is of value.

Like I've been in situations where I've tried to help someone and they've died anyway. And I think just remembering that like that person had something terrible happened to them and that your help didn't, you know, like you tried your best to give that person another chance. Yeah. It is not, if you are responding to somebody who has this kind of injury, there is a, you know, a pretty good chance what you do won't matter. Like it's the same thing.

If you are giving someone chest compressions, that's very unlikely to save their life. Like a fraction of the time when that happens, does it save anybody? But it can't make it worse. If they're not breathing, they're not breathing. Yeah, they're going to die. Yeah. And I think it's, you know, it's not like the movies on television, like sometimes it doesn't work.

It's important to talk about that in the context. Yes. Actually, much, probably much more likely the person will survive if you're doing this stuff, right? If you do this one again, you do it, right? You will stop that person. Yes. Yes.

And, and, but, you know, again, it is a lot of times what you might be doing is keeping them alive long enough to get to the hospital. And you can't guarantee anything other than that they don't bleed out right there. Right. And there may be other injuries. You haven't seen this while we do the check head to toe, right? Yeah. And stuff like that.

Like especially in blast injuries, you might not notice injuries to the back. Yeah. Shrapnel is a hole. I mean, but all you can do is like try to treat what you can see. Yes, exactly. And make sure that you don't miss anything by going through that doctor march procedure, right? Which you'll learn in a course.

But yeah, having a procedure that you do where you make checks so that you don't miss something that you could have stopped because then I imagine you will feel bad. Yeah. None of what we've said, we should probably bring this to a close should be seen as like the end all be all or our attempt to give you comprehensive training on this is a no way training. This is advice on number one, the equipment that's necessary for stopping someone from bleeding to death.

And number two, the kinds of training you should get in order to use it. And you should seek training. You should find a stop the bleed course. You should take a wilderness medicine course if you can, if you if you are someone who is in a field that it's relevant for you should try to get a he fat course. Don't don't just like be, OK, I listened to a 30 minute podcast. I'm ready to stop a bleed. Go go get some training, but definitely get a tourniquet and practice with it.

You can do some training yourself. You can find videos online by reputable people who are affiliated with different rescue organizations talking about and showing how to apply tourniquets, how to apply dressings like that. That's available and you can provide yourself with a useful amount of education and some of the basics that way. Yeah. I think just to give out some resources on how you can get the education right, stop the bleak.org should be free almost anywhere you are and you'd like to get more training.

Each community colleges have an EMT course that is very affordable. Yeah. A he fat course can run you a couple grand if it's not subsidized. The last time when I took my MP training was a thousand dollars. Yeah. I think it's less than that now. I know people that have many students who are going through MP training and it's pretty affordable, free.

Often during California, it's often free. The other things you can do are wilderness medicine that is expensive. The American Alpine Club has grants like more a more diverse group of people should apply because all of the outdoors could do with a lot more diversity and encourage people to apply. Yeah. So, for all of these training, there are grants and I would encourage more people to apply to them.

But yeah, you can learn a lot for free or online. You can and should try and educate your friends like we were saying, some of this stuff is hard to fuck up. Even if you don't feel confident using stuff, rescue essentials, North American rescue, Chinook Medical, those are places where you can buy a pre-made iFact, carry that around and someone else can use it. And again, for talking about like the benefits of this versus the cool looking tactical gear and guns and stuff, it's entirely possible to have a bunch of military equipment that

is worse than useless if you don't know how to use it is actively a danger to other people. If you have a bunch of medical gear and you don't know how to use it, but you have it on you, you can always shout like, I have a tourniquet. I have like a combat dressing or something like, does anyone know how to use it? No one is going to make fun of you in the wake of a mass shooting for trying to hand off your gear to someone who knows how to use it. Yeah, exactly. And like, you don't have to carry around a little green multi camp pouch or something

like you can get a bum bag, put it in a fucking purse, like whatever. It doesn't matter. Yeah, it doesn't matter at all. They're very small, they're very compact. And like a bum bag or family pack is very handy because you can switch it from the back to the front, get to all your stuff. So yeah, you don't have to be all like tactical fucking Sammy savior, just be sensible and safe.

And if you don't, even if you panic or whatever and can't be the one to use it, you can still help save somebody's life by fucking having the shit because it's it's irreplaceable when it's not there. Yeah, I would just encourage people to not use the elastic corner. Yes. Don't go and buy mill surf stuff because you know, you can probably pay the same price to get something that's not expired. And so yeah, just be conscious buying from those reputable people.

They often have sales, especially around holidays. You can you can hold out and wait for those. There are pretty good results. It's on Reddit as well. Actually, there's a tactical medicine subreddit where people will sort of list their kits and often posted that's a sale. So something's worth cruising that if this is something that's interesting to you. Yeah, do some research.

You may find right now, especially in places like rescue essentials, it is harder to get combat tourniquets because the war in Ukraine has caused a shortage of the good ones. But you can still find them. You just may need to search around a little bit. Yeah. What I found was that because you posted about this after New York shooting was that they were out of the straight tourniquet, but they were not out with the pouch. The pouch costs like six or eight dollars.

I know that that's more of an expense, but if you can, if you can afford that, then getting that's not a bad idea anyway, because you could put it on your belt, put it, have one on my backpack. Well, when I'm hiking, right? So that's definitely something that, yeah, to know to look for. All right. Well, that's going to do it for this episode. James, you want to plug anything?

Anarchism. Oh, good. Yes. Absolutely. Yeah. Go find a hierarchy and like throw rock at it. Yeah. Just look after other people and don't resort to the state to do it.

Be kind to each other. And, uh, get, get EMT training if you can, oh, yeah, oh, that's a beautiful sound. This is, it could happen here, a podcast about things falling apart and sometimes putting them back together. I'm Robert Evans. Uh, I'm here again with Dr. James Stout, James say hello to the people. Hi people. We are in an undisclosed location.

Is that going to get you in trouble with your immigration stuff? Almost certainly. Yes. Yeah. Okay. Well, let's just bleep out the rest of that, but keep the thing with me asking if it's going to get him in trouble with this immigration officer, that'll be fine. This is a podcast that all too often as Garrison and I say, winds up us being like, here's

a problem. Goodbye. You know, talking to people about problems is important, but it's also important to talk about solutions. Uh, now there's been a discourse, not just on the Twitter, but on the subreddit for, um, it could happen here, uh, repeatedly over the last few months of people talking about like, how would anarchists handle things like large scale distribution of food, um, an industrial base, you know, how, how would anarchists, how would an anarchist society

handle infrastructure in any meaningful capacity? Um, and I think there's kind of a wide spread idea among some people that like you have to have intense centralization, um, to do that. Um, now James, you are, I wasn't joking about the doctor thing. You do have a PhD and your specific area of specialty is the Spanish civil war. That's right. Yeah. Uh, even more specific than that, actually, my, uh, my very specific area of, uh, a specialty

is, uh, the second republics are a period before the civil war and really like the first week, uh, of the Spanish civil war, uh, but yes, uh, Catalonia, specifically like revolutionary Catalonia and, uh, I guess my thing is the anti-fascist popular Olympics in 1936, but more broadly Catalonia and Catalonia before and in the civil war. Yeah. And one of the things that's interesting about this period is you did have one of the fairly rare times in history where a significant number of people were living in an industrialized ish nation, um, with, with anarchist under anarchist principles, um, and a number of

things were done in an anarchist fashion, including the production of armored vehicles, the maintenance of large amounts of agriculture, you know, power and whatnot. Um, so yeah, how, how, how do, how do James? Yeah. Uh, how do anarchism? Let me tell you, um, I should start by saying like, I'm not like a big, big theory guy. I'm more of a sort of doing things guy, um, person. But yeah.

So if we look at what we had in Catalonia, right? In 1936 at a Spanish civil war, if you're not familiar, starts on the 19th of July, 1936 with a coup, right? Um, some of this will sound familiar. Maybe you should listen to our podcast about Myanmar, uh, but we have a military uprising against a leftist democratic government that has just been elected in 1936, um, after two years of a right wing, it's called the biennial negro, like the black biennium that, you know, you've lived through the Trump shit.

You understand? Yeah. Right. We have this coup that happens and in cities across Spain, the coup is largely stopped. Uh, the, the differentiating factor is, oh, we talked about this in our podcast is where the people are armed, the coup is stopped, where the people are not armed, where the government says, no, we won't release weapons to you. The coup, the coup succeeds, right?

Um, now in Barcelona, the coup is stopped almost entirely by the anarchists with a little bit of help from the police. The oddly, right, um, the, the one classic allies and the police fighting together. I mean, it is also a very different kind of, uh, situation with, uh, I mean, yeah, culturally, like how does that happen? How does that happen? Well, in Spain, you have various police forces, right? And, uh, some of them are created by the second republic.

So they are police that exist really to protect, uh, the republic from things that would attack it. Uh, it does not mean that they do not attack workers, right? The republic was often called the republic of order because they violently put down strikes and the anarchists killed them. Uh, but in this instance, they remained loyal, the cops, uh, yeah, that's, that's a pretty steady thing. Uh, but in this instance, uh, the republic was under attack from the right, right?

From the military. And in some towns, the police split for the military, but in Barcelona, they largely did not, right? You, you have various police guards, police groups in Spain, uh, federal and, and local, but, um, the assault guards and the, um, civil guards in Barcelona largely remained with the republic, right? And it's important to maybe if we, if we step back a second to explain the concept of a popular front, then we can understand that more easily, right?

Yeah. And we do, for, for more detail on this, we talk about a decent amount of this in our behind the insurrections episodes on the Spanish civil war and the popular fronts, which aren't just a Spanish thing, they exist in France, they exist in a number of other countries. It's the thing that gets tried on several occasions, often successfully, at least from an electoral standpoint. Yeah. Yeah.

It's very successful at this time, right? And, uh, it's important to understand that the ERC, uh, which translates as Catalan Republican left had more or less been a popular front since 1931. Yeah. And a popular front is basically this thing we keep talking about where what if everybody on the left could get on the same page about stopping fascism? That's the basic idea is like, you've got your libs, you've got your commies, you've got your anarchists, you've got other weird chunks of the left and everybody agrees, let's

all work together to deal with this specific right wing threat right now. Yes. Yeah. Exactly. Like we can put our differences aside and move forward. Um, so that's what you have in the second republic is explicitly called the popular front, right? And so that is why the police in Barcelona split with the anarchists.

And what happens in Barcelona is that the military march into town from outside of town and just pretty much get, get their, their ship pushed back in by the anarchists, right? Uh, all around town, gunfights break out. In one instance, um, the anarchists are able to persuade the soldiers manning a machine gun that their class solidarity is more important than their obedience to their officers. And then they turn the machine gun on their offices and kill their offices instead. Unbelievable, exceptionally fucking cool, right? Uh, the Spanish Civil War has all these amazing stories like that, but that, that's one of

my favorites, right? Um, doesn't happen often. It's great when it does. Um, so what we have by the end of the first week of the Spanish Civil War is a situation where in Catalonia, the city is in the hands of the anarchists, there's this meeting that happens between the president of Catalonia and the anarchists, it may or may not be apocryphal or the exact words may or not be apocryphal, it doesn't really matter. What happens is that the anarchists go to the president of Catalonia and, uh, they,

he says to them, you're in control of the city, the city's in your hands. I've been, he actually, the president, he was liberal, but he'd been a lawyer for the anarchists when they kept getting fired. Um, he said, if you want me to be another foot soldier in the fire, I will quit my job. I'll just be another fighter. But if I can be useful to you as a politician, I will as well, right? So it's a submission, a mission from elected bourgeois politician that like the city belongs to you now, to the people, and it's up to you what we do next, right?

What they did was they founded this, they didn't actually sort of go, right, it's all anarchist, right? The two salient anarchist groups of the CNT and the FAI, uh, the anarchist federation of Iberia and the national confederation of labor. Um, he didn't, they didn't sort of be like, okay, we're under anarchist control. They founded the People's Committee of Anti-Fascist Militias, uh, and they said, this is an anti-fascist Catalonia, right? And then they began, um, to control the industries according to the principles of anarcho-syndicalism,

right? Which is the idea that, uh, the way to move towards a more libertarian society under or moving from industrial capitalism is through industrial unions, right? Um, and they were extremely effective. I see this discourse a lot on Twitter or on Reddit or on places where, uh, um, I don't want to just like dismiss people as tankies, but where, where, because like, you know, maybe those people can, can listen and we can talk and we can understand each other. But where people go on the internet to talk about politics and say that like, it's impossible

for anarchists to do supply chain. It's impossible for anarchists to do logistics, right? And sometimes I think they think of anarchism as like, uh, like only able to work in groups of five people or something. There's this broad spread attitude in part because of like some social attitudes among a lot of American anarchists, certainly American anarchists who are very online that like anarchism is when you live on a farm with four of your friends, right? Like that, that it's very pastoral, it's anti-industrial.

And a decent amount of American anarchists are, it's not uncommon to find people who are like anarcho-primitivist or whatever, um, but it is important to note that there's a very long anarchist tradition as we're talking about now that's deeply industrial. Yes. And like the anarchist A, right? The anarchist symbol that we all see that comes from America, right? The industrial workers of the world come from the United States. The raised fist popular salute comes from the IWW goes to Spain, right?

Uh, we have this long tradition, but yeah, I think a lot of American anarchists, because it's easier to live and work cooperatively in a small group, somewhat detached. But what we have in Catalonia that we don't have here is the majority of the working class committed to anarcho-syndicalism, right? So people return to work and work very effectively when they're not also volunteering, also fighting in something like a Daruti column, right? Um, these anarchist militias, which we can also talk about because I think they're very interesting.

Um, so for instance, one example that I'd like to cite is the Hispano-Suita factory, right? Uh, Spain-Swiss. It's just an automobile manufacturer. It's like the GM factory. In three days after the revolution, and bear in mind that most of them have been out shooting at soldiers for most of that time, right? Um, big thing they had to deal with was, uh, the soldiers often used to use the churches.

They would burn the churches. Uh, so like it, it was an extremely, uh, vicious urban battle. They were, they had converted their facility to go from producing automobiles for rich people at a time, right? In 1936, when everyone had a car, to producing technicals, armored cars, right? And you can see them. If you Google CNT technical, CNT armored car, you can see some amazing, like, uh, hodge podge technicals that they'd welded these things on.

And they were able to turn those around and produce weapons for the front. Uh, another good example is the Ascaso pistols, right? So Ascaso is a famous anarchist leader, um, and Ascaso was killed on the first day of the revolution, right, when they were fighting the coup, um, so there weren't, there wasn't much weapons manufacturing in Catalonia, right? And we're very familiar with that from our work on Myanmar. Um, what they did was they set up a factory in Tarasa to make weapons. Uh, they made copies of Ruby pistols, actually, but then they named them after Ascaso.

So you can still buy them. I'm sure you can Google them. You can find them, uh, um, but these, they set up a weapons factory, right? And then under anarcho-syndicalist principles under the principles of sort of unions controlling this production system, unions controlling the supply chain system, which let's be honest, they do largely anyway, right? Like it's not Tim Apple who buys a circuit board for your phone. It's someone else.

Uh, this is a slightly more globalized system with, with Apple phones, but, um, the, the unions were able to set up and change their production, right? Now just keep doing what they were doing, but also pivot without the need for people exercising authority over each other. This important understanding, cause you asked me like, how, how would anarchists continue industrial production? And it's like, well, have you ever had a job that had had you work in a factory or an assembly liner and some sort of other industrial way, have you ever been a contractor and had a

boss who sucked? Would it have worked better if that boss hadn't been there? That's the basic. Like it's entirely possible for large groups of people to coordinate in a way that is not a capitalist system where you're all accountable to a shareholder, right? Like there's, there's a number of different ways to do that, but there's a long tradition and in fact some corporations that are still around today and quite large, you can look up the Mondragon corporation in Spain that have a lot of anarchist principles in their

organizing. Um, not that like it's an anarchist company or whatever, but like there's significant degree, like significant amounts of anarchist theory in why that operates the way it does and has been significantly successful. There's some other examples and I think it's Brazil, um, there's a large like steel corporation or whatnot. Um, but yeah, like there's, there's, it's not, there's nothing about anarchism that means you can't have a factory producing armored cars.

It just means you're not producing armored cars for the profit of the Lockheed Martin corporation or whatever. Yeah. You're producing armored cars because you are fighting in a conflict that you hope will liberate other people, right? And that is arguably a more important motivation than wage labor and certainly they, in some cases increased productivity, but they were able to sustain all the functions of an industrial society and Catalonia was very industrialized, much more so than the rest of Spain, right?

And that's perhaps why anarchism was so, so important there. And yeah, there, it doesn't require the arbitrary exercise of authority for that to happen. And like you say, there's plenty of examples of that. I think both of us really enjoyed David Graber's book, but this idea that we move from one phase of society to another and that necessitates a different form of political organization just isn't borne out by the historical record. And I think that Catalonia is a really good example of that. Yeah.

And a further example of that is in a pretty similar timeframe. You're talking an earlier, but not, but maybe like less than 20 years earlier, you have Nester Makhno and Makhnovia in Ukraine, this kind of independent, autonomous anarchist society that is extremely successful in war, that the Soviet Union does not exist without Makhno fighting the whites as successfully as he did in stopping in advance on Moscow. And that's a rural that we're not industrialized. And in fact, their anarchism was very much based in kind of the traditional methods of organizing rural societies in Ukraine.

And you have that a lot in other, like you have a lot, there are a lot of areas in which anarchism is common in rural areas, and it's more of like a state socialism in industrialized areas. But you can have, you also have this deep history of industrialized anarchism. And there's, it shows that there's a capability for anarchist principles to function with infrastructure. Yeah. And if you want to look for rural anarchism, you can look in southern Spain, right?

Because if you want to look at a small case study, the anarchists of Casas Viejas is a great example of that, right? People can find, I'm sure it's free online, it's a PDF now. But yes, it doesn't have to just exist in urban or rural society, or between the two, right? Like when the Derruti column went south, okay, the Derruti column is an anarchist column. There were a number of other anarchist columns, but this one is the sort of the preeminent one, the one that was most successful because they tended not to get bogged down as much

in fighting in rural environments where they were not skilled, but they were extremely skilled, much more so than the military in fighting in urban environments, right? So they were very successful. They went to Zaragoza and then fought there, while they were there, they were collectivizing the farms, right? And I'm sure some of that collectivization was forced. I don't want to be like everything was rainbows and unicorns, but it's a war. There's no site in a war whose hands stay clean, right?

That's not minimizing or ignoring it. It's just stating that you have to sometimes talk about the broad strokes of what's going on without pretending to whitewash the fact that I'm certain ugly things happen there as well. Yeah. Yeah. As you say, ugly things happen in war. And I think if you want that not to happen, maybe, I don't know, you live on the internet.

But the Derruti column then goes to Madrid, right, in the seat of Madrid, which was also the first conflict in the international brigades, the first battle, the international brigades 14. It was a very successful battle for the Republic. It was a battle that allowed the Republic, if we look at the two battles that allow the Republic to exist, right? It's conflict in Barcelona, the battle for Barcelona, the first days of the civil war, and it's a battle in Madrid, right?

Now Madrid is not as much of an anarchist city. It is a city with anarchism, but it's also more salient of the socialism. So when the Derruti column arrives and takes part in the combat there, because they have been successful, because they're very good at urban warfare, and a lot of the people in the Derruti column didn't want Derruti to go, but he decided it was important to go as part of this popular front, right? To fight this huge push of Spain's most professional soldiers, right? And that's where Derruti, you can read, I know somebody's working on it, unlike a graphic

novel about him. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you could give them your money if you have some, but Abel Path's book about Derruti is very good. It's an amazing book, because you turn over the line of notes, and he's like, oh yeah, this book has taken me a long time to write, because I was involved in resistance against

Franco and spent 25 years in jail, solitary confinement, but what a chad. But so you can read about Derruti there, right? And Derruti dies in the battle from Madrid, but it's also kind of important to look at what Spain is effective, anarchist Spain is effective in fighting fascism. What stops it being effective, to my mind, is not anarchist principles, military organization. The other thing that was impressive about Derruti column was that they had embedded army, loyal army officers, and they listened to them and they learned from them. And they said, okay, we don't, we're good at some stuff, not good at other stuff.

We will learn from you. Other anarchists didn't, didn't tend to do as well. Yeah, this is a common misconception, because anarchists are very much against hierarchy, which doesn't mean being against professionalism or competence, right? Like, it's the idea that like the hierarchy, for example, that led several million young boys to get machine gunned in World War One, because the people who were in charge of them had not learned how machine guns functioned was a problem. But if you've got someone who has been training their entire life as a soldier and understands

very effectively how artillery functions and how machine guns function, and because they have professionalized in that, it's not against anarchist principles to listen to that person in a gunfight. Yeah, yeah, expertise is not, it's not, yeah, it's not incompatible with liberty, right? And so, yeah, they were very willing to listen to that. And in the same way they would be in a, like, yeah, again, these people have worked in factories, right? They understand that if you don't know how to use a lathe and you exert your liberty to

use a lathe and your hand's going to end up in the lathe. When I go to a doctor and say, I have gotten this horrible infected wound, what do I do about it? I am not yielding to a hierarchy, I am accepting their expertise, you know? Yeah, yeah. I think sometimes people, I think your listeners are much better informed than this, generally, but people confuse anarchism with a predilection for chaos and violence, and it isn't that, right?

It's a desire to be more free and to not be controlled, and I have a boot on your neck. But to wind up that thought, like, the reason that Spain, that the Republican Spain starts to lose is not because there are anarchists, and you will definitely see this discourse on the internet. Many people will tell me that I'm mistaken about this, so it's my fucking degree. But yeah, I would argue that it's because the whole Western world that did quote unquote democracies abandoned them, right? Yeah, this is like, there's this, we talk about this a bit in the episodes we did on

it, but like, there's this whole argument that I'm sure you'll get into more between, like, the socialists, the communists, you know, and the anarchists, but a huge part of it, probably most of it, is that, like, the fascists are getting guns from other fascists and tanks and aircraft, often flown by professional fascist pilots who are training for what's going to become World War II, whereas Republican Spain has some old bulked-action rifles that got smuggled in through France. Yeah. The Mosins, it was sold by America to Russia, from Russia to Mexico, and then from Mexico

back to Spain, right, like, and, and yeah, these old mouses that Allwell talks about that are rusted and they can't open the bolt after they fire them and they reload their ammunition and it's shit. But yeah, the, and on the other side, right, like, the coup doesn't work, if how does the army of Africa get from Africa to Spain, it doesn't swim, right, it, how do these generals get from Africa to Spain, airlifted by other fascist nations, right? We don't see that, right, actually, France wanted to sell planes to the Republic in the early days of the war, but Britain pretty much put the kibosh on it.

There's an interesting parallel with what you're seeing in Ukraine right now, because in Ukraine, you have a Republican government and a military that has a fairly wide selection. Jake Hanna-Huntress posted, like, a vegan extremist who's fighting on the front lines of the kind, because it's like, yeah, there's a whole bunch of different ideological tendencies fighting on behalf of the broadly Ukrainian side there, including some very nasty ones. But you're kind of seeing what happens when a fascist power invades a country like that to stop a Republic and Democratic powers send them the most advanced weapons on the planet. Yeah, right, which is all it would have taken to roll back fascism in Spain and then perhaps,

you know, there were a lot of German-Italian exiles fighting in Spain, right, because the Second Republic had relatively liberal silent policies. And then you're the only way to stop fascism in Italy and Germany was to roll it back in Spain and keep going, right? I often have this, and I've had this as we've reported on Myanmar, this weird thought of like, I'll be reading about the Spanish Civil War in my office, and I'll look at my gun collection. I'll go, if I could go back in time with everything I have in my house, all of the ammo and guns,

there are a couple of battles that might have been turned around by just that, for one thing, because modern semi-automatic arms are much more effective than bolt-action rifles, but just like the level of armament that those people had was, there were 18th-century armies better equipped for combat. Yeah, I mean, you see people with muzzleloaders and stuff in the Spanish Civil War, right? And then the only place they can turn for arms is the Soviet Union, right? And they don't just get arms, they also get these generals, right, who are quite and quite inviting, but they're not.

They're commanding units. There's a lot of Soviet politicking at play, right? And as much as anything, and you can read, like, Peter Carroll's book on the Abraham Lincoln Brigades, or something, a brigade battalion, sorry, they weren't actually brigade, that will give you a better idea of, like, exactly how this strict authoritarian communist control really sapped the spirit out of the Republic. And you can see this in May of 1937, right, which is what George Orwell writes about in his book, right?

In May of 1937, when we see a conflict between the non-Stalinist communists, they weren't Trotskyists, the poom, right? Very often, portrayed as Trotskyist, Trotsky himself, like, you can see the letters that he wrote to them where he had strong disagreements with them, if you care to look. But yeah, we see this conflict, a shooting war, right, between the anarchists and the non-Stalinist communists and the Stalinist communists. And what comes out of that is this idea among people on the libertarian left, right? This broad spectrum of libertarian leftism that we saw in Spain, that it's not really

worth fighting for the Republic or for the fascists. Because either way, we're just going to have the boot on our neck, right? The secret police, as they were like, the secret police spent far, far, far more time going off to anarchists in the Republican army than they did after spies. Oh, no. Really? Yes. The authoritarian left spent more of their time fighting anarchists than the fat.

Wild. Yeah. Crazy. And it's never happened again. We've become better people. Yeah. Yeah. It's great.

We're fine now. We've fixed it. For a lot of the people fighting for the Republic, what are you fighting for? And I think that's important that we remember that even in times when things are bad, right, you have to think about what things should be like. And you have to try and muddle that in what you're doing now. On an economic level, when you're talking about like, they come and they collectivize these farms, there's like anarchists, like the anarchists in large chunks in like in

Catalonia in particular are kind of running what at the time is a fairly modern industrial economy. How does that, how does that work? Like do you, do you have any kind of like overall state like during the period of time where, you know, they had reasonable control and also weren't completely overwhelmed with a fighting? How did it function? Yeah.

You kind of have a state, right? You have this sort of People's Committee, anti-fascist militias, but not really because things are somewhat chaotic, right? It's not a state as we would maybe understand it now. So what we have instead is anarcho-syndicalism, right? These unions going to other unions and organizing among themselves, right? Like, you know, the steel workers need X from the miners, right? The miners, then the, the tube makers need X from the steel workers and the gun company

need X from the, from the tube makers, right? And so organizing along industrial union levels allows things to continue, right? It allows the trains and trams to continue, allows them to continue manufacturing munitions, right? So it's, it's, it's anarcho-syndicalism, it is, it's a type of libertarian leftism. And then we see these collective or sort of cooperative, I should say, farm farming arrangements, right? Where again, people, people are farming, people are sort of joining together, they're industrial

small holdings and then delivering those, contributing those to, to the city, to the war effort. And there's something, as you see in Ukraine, right, relatively special that happens in these times of conflict, where people are, I think, more willing to just step aside from like the, the, and I think that's always been, that was a thing for a Spanish working class for a long time, but to step aside from the accumulation of stuff, right, from the accumulation of individual goods and wealth and to say like, yeah, well, let's go get stuck in together. And I think that helped to allow that to happen, helped to allow it to continue.

But yeah, these organizations between unions and collectives worked, right? They functioned. You can't argue that they didn't work at the Republican Army didn't starve in a week or run out of fuel and things, right? These anarchist columns were able to, to travel from Barcelona to Zaragoza and from Zaragoza back to Madrid. Like that doesn't happen if you're incapable of organizing, right? So yeah, in the factories, these people had already been organizing together, right?

They were on strike often, right? They knew how to, they had an existing system for organizing things because they already organized to pay strike funds. They already organized to look after other union, other parts of the C and T when they were out, right? They organized to have policy statements on various things. So they had these existing means to organize, they just didn't have authorities that told people what to do.

They knew how to work together to decide what to do. Yeah. I had this beautiful moment during the 2020 uprisings where I was in a city and I was hanging out with members of a medical collective. And the building that they were in, there was a couple of thousand square feet of, they were producing by assembly line, Kim wipes for clearing Mesa out of your eyes. They were producing like iFax medical kits. They had racks of body armor that had been donated or purchased with donated funds.

And it was all, it was a substantial amount of equipment that was being and respirators and stuff that was being organized, assembled, put together, distributed, put in people's hands, put in the hands of people who were going out and utilizing it on a regular basis. And it was being done like within the principles of kind of like a number of things can be organized that way. It is handling the collection, the distribution of equipment and the collection disbursement of funds, like for potentially like thousands and thousands of people. That's perfectly doable under anarchist principles and anarchists have done that kind of thing

a number of times in the world. Yeah. Like if you look at the example of the soup kitchens, the proletarian diners or restaurants they called them. And in Barcelona, they took over the writs and sourced food from rural anarchists to feed people rather than saying like, oh, you have to buy food, you have to buy food, you have to buy food, you come here and anyone can eat if you're hungry. And yeah, you see people doing that.

Look at the unit that we spoke about Myanmar, the Kareni Generation C Army. Those guys, they didn't have like no one was wearing rank, no one was a general or a captain or a sergeant, right? They talked and to our point before about expertise, some people. We found out that the person we were talking to, Zah, who was killed, was seen as a commander by people because of what they wrote about him after he died, but he never talked about himself that way. No.

In fact, he told us, right, that if some people knew more of they'd been in the fight for longer, they knew the terrain and then we'd listen to them and they have a bit more weight in that conversation. But we all just decide together what we want to do. And that works, right? Those guys were very well respected among the anti-Koo forces in Myanmar because of their willingness to fight in their effectiveness. And those guys have a good battlefield record against the government troops.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And like it wasn't just, again, like it's not just five guys fighting, right? It's also, they were able, and in Myanmar, we still see this with like the underground, I think they called it the development committee or something, the people who are, they were the people who fought, they did the shield walls and that kind of thing. And people will be familiar with the George Floyd uprising. For them, they went underground and they're developing ways to make weapons now, right?

So they're the people you'll see making 3D printed guns, so the people you'll see making improvised explosive devices, fertilized bombs, working out how to make handmade 2-2 rifles we've seen, right? Like, again, they don't need someone in charge for that, right? And in times of difficulty, we revert to taking care of one another and getting things done. We don't, contrary to, I think, what we led to believe, sort of revert to, we don't need like a strong leader, dear leader. We are capable of looking after what another outside of authority in the state.

Yeah. And it also stands to the point that like accepting the authority of someone with expertise in certain situations, like the fundamental way in which effective militaries are organized and to involve the existence of an NCO corps, right? Every military that is good at fighting has an NCO corps. Part of why Russia has acquitted itself so unbelievably poorly in the fighting in Ukraine is that that does not functionally exist in the Russian military. It is absolute, and the basic idea of an NCO corps is that among fighting units, there

should be dudes whose job, and I say dudes in the non-gendered sense, there should be people whose job is to make the functioning of that fighting unit be their whole life, and they stay at that job for a long time. They don't just like move up and shit, they're just, they're there to keep that unit functioning. And from the perspective of like someone who is an anarchist, I mean, as an anarchist who's been shot at a number of times, when I'm hanging out and there's like some grizzled ass fucking veteran in the unit I'm embedded with, I'm gonna do whatever that fucker says, right? Absolutely.

It's crazy not to, because that's just good sense. It's the same thing as like if you're in deep bush or whatever with somebody who knows wilderness survival and they tell you don't eat that plant, or they tell you, you know, this is a bad place to camp for this reason or whatever, you listen to them. Like that's, again, you know, factories function the same way, having been on building sites, they function the same way. Somebody tells you don't do that, it's a bad idea, and they clearly have been doing it more than you.

You listen to them. Accepting that you have a boss that's accepting that you have people who are more experienced and competent in certain things. Yeah. And if you look at what ineffective armies sometimes have, it's in the officer corps, right? It's people who are in charge, maybe ought not to be, but it's because of their status of that wealth or something else, right?

And you see like very effective fighting in the anarchist units, right, with men and women and actually people who were non-binary as well, or people who we'd call non-binary and didn't call themselves that then. But we see that because they were willing to elect officers, right, but then listen to them. And it wasn't, it was listen to not obey, right, but that was an extremely effective way of doing things. Yeah.

I was having a conversation with a buddy of mine who was a Marine and saw some very heavy combat in Iraq years ago about like the way in which certain anarchist units had worked over time and talked about the fact that they elected their leaders. And he was like, well, we didn't do that, obviously, but there were people you knew you shouldn't listen to and people you did. And you understood who you wanted calling the shots when bullets were flying, right? Like regardless of what the actual hierarchy was, it's just like, you know, in the U.S. military, you have a platoon leader who was an officer, who's been to college, and you

have a platoon sergeant, and they do somewhat different things. But every reasonable person who has an interface with those units will agree that like, any good platoon leader, even though they're an officer and of higher rank, it's going to listen to whatever the fucking platoon sergeant says, because they've been doing that job a lot longer. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

You're a fool and you're arrogant if you don't, right? And that arrogance will find you out if you're in a difficult situation pretty quickly. So yeah, I think it's important to look at those anarchist militaries, right? And then there are lots and lots of accounts of the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War. Julian Casanova's book is one of my favorites if people want to read one. Murray Bookchin, of course, has written the Spanish anarchists as well. So there are a lot of books you can read about. And some of the micro case studies are really fun, right?

If you want to look at like, what is it like to live on an anarchist farm in 1936, in rural Catalonia, Yale or something like that, like, and I would encourage people to read them like with an open mind and understand that like the world was different than it is today. But to look at those historical examples and realize that like, what people were doing then was fundamentally the same, right? They were trying to take care of each other and make the world better for their children and they didn't want the boot on their neck and they were all prepared to work together to do that.

And that was an extremely functional way and what didn't work for them was being controlled by people from the Soviet Union who maybe didn't understand their struggle because they often felt it wasn't worth fighting anymore. And that's true for communists too, right? Like if you look at the American communists who went and fought and they were overwhelmingly communists who went and fought for the international brigades, the international brigades were not the republic's army per se, they were the common turns army. And if there is one group of people who was hated more than anyone else, it was commissars,

right? These people who were sort of there to enforce this very strict interpretation of what they saw as Marxist Leninism. So even those people, right, who were communists, might have had a more slightly more libertarian understanding, didn't really take that well to be bossed around and lost a lot of their wills or what they were fighting for because of that, right? Cecil Elby's book is another really good book about that, if you want to read that. Well, I think that's going to bring us to an end here.

James, you have a book about the Spanish Civil War that you should probably plug here. Yeah, yeah. It's called The Popular Front and the 1936 Bartholomew Olympics. It's about the Antifa Olympics that were held as an alternative to the Bartholomew Olympics. It explains how the Popular Front used sport to build 90 fascist identity in Catalonia and it used sport to bring together anti-fascists from around the world. The Popular Olympics actually happened on the 19th of July, which is the same day the

Civil War started. So they never occurred, but many of the people who went to take part in the Olympics decided to stay and fight. So that's what my book's about. It's quite expensive and I understand people can't afford it, that's fine. I keep saying I'm working on another book, but I'm not working very hard or very fast. Yeah, yeah, look it up. Someone's probably bootlegged it.

Actually, the e-book is often free at universities and other libraries. So you just go to your library and I'll see them to get it. And where else can people find you? On the internet. At James Stout on Twitter. Same thing on Patreon. Those are my two main things. You can find my writing on muckrack, just Google my name.

Yeah, and again, help us. Dan will please bleep that out for the sake of James immigration cases. And yeah, that's good. That's an episode. Despite it being past midnight, you can still see through the dense forest. The moonlit sky combined with the urban light pollution make traversing the messy woods easier than you thought. You're relieved that you don't have to use your headlamp, which could have drawn

unwanted attention. The company of a few of your queer friends makes the walk through the confusing woods less intimidating. Dressed in gray and camo, you make your way through overgrown trails and hop over a small creek. Saved for the occasional train, all you can hear is the croaking of frogs and chirping of cicadas, crickets and grasshoppers. The night air you breathe through your mask is noticeably cleaner than the air from downtown

that you spent months riding in during 2020, not even counting the tear gas in the air. As you and your pals slowly trek through the forest, your feet squish into the grassy wet ground. You avoid the areas caked in clay and stick to the cover of trees, brush and the soft wetland. After a short walk, and with only a few wrong turns, you reach an artificial break in the embrace of the forest. You look at your masked up friends, and for a brief moment during the moonlit night, you

can't quite tell who's who, which is a good thing you suppose. Everyone exchanges glances, but no one says anything. Everyone already knows what to do. As you approach the barren mound of dirt, you get angry, a jarring crack in the beauty and mysterious allure of the forest. You're no longer in the woods, you're at the site of destruction, a clear cut that seeks to expand its radius. Without the tree coverage, you can see the harsh blue light of LEDs in the distance.

There among the mounds of dirt and fallen trees are several unguarded machines of destruction. With no cell phones in sight, you and your friends get to live in the moment. Your gender becomes the sound of shattering glass in the cold night. Hammers meet windows, and serrated knives cut the inner tubing of bulldozers and excavators. The undoing of the mechanical monsters that have violated the forest has begun. No tool of the evildoers goes unharmed. Rattling cans of spray paint leave antagonistic and proclamatory messages with rebellious hiss for those who intend to continue destroying the forest.

And the forest, no cop city, no Hollywood dystopia. In little time, the light pollution, moonlight, and distant LEDs are accompanied by a bright orange blaze emanating from the machines, lighting up the area around the sad mound of dirt. A splash of gasoline acts as the extension of the blood that fuels the burning fire in your hearts that became a light with the rage felt at the site of the decimated woods. By the time the fire department took notice, you've already disappeared into the night like a spectre, fading like the curling black smoke that drifted into the midnight sky.

As you exit the forest, you go about as if what happened tonight never did. You never tell a soul, you never talk about it with your masked up queer friends, since they were never there either. Details fade in your memory like a dream, but deep down you still remember the feeling, the peak moment of true freedom when the fire engulfed the machines. It was upon broken, unusable machines that the fires were extinguished, laying incinerated, the excavators and bulldozers who are rendered immobile, worthless piles of trash. Fires aren't only temporary and can be undone, but the connection between those who live

in a forest, who breathe its air, and who drink its water filtered through its wetlands, is not so easily broken. Many further attempts at destroying the forest were met with a similar response. The forest was here long before us and will be here long after. You and your friends, among many other anonymous strangers, will see to that. Welcome to Kedepin Here, a podcast about things falling apart and how we can put them back together. Today we'll be spanning that entire spectrum.

I'm Garrison Davison, the story I just read isn't merely a fictional one. It was inspired by over a year's worth of communiques and report backs coming out of the Defend the Forest movement in Atlanta, Georgia. So excuse the pretentious poetry of anarchist as you speak. In early 2021, it was revealed to the public that mainly four entities, namely the City of Atlanta, the Atlanta Police Foundation, DeKalb County, and Blackhall Studios, had dual plans to devastate two complimentary sections of the South Atlanta Forest. The City of Atlanta and Police Foundation plans are to turn the area of the forest known

as the Old Atlanta Prison Farm into the largest police training facility in the country, complete with a mock city, helipad, and bomb range. Meanwhile, Entrenchment Creek, of a public forest land, will be traded by DeKalb County to Blackhall Movie Studios to clear-cut the land on which they plan to build America's largest soundstage. This project lies at a horrific intersection of police militarization, gentrification, copaganda, and exasperating the local effects of worsening climate change by clear-cutting hundreds of acres of forest.

In the last year, activists, ghosts like saboteurs, and open-source researchers have vulgarized together into an anonymous and diverse movement that's brought the plant to destroy the forest out of the shadows of secretive backdoor corporate deals and into the public spotlight, forming the Defend the Atlanta Forest movement that's consistently been able to get ahead of police and media by breaking news about the forest destruction plans and setting the terms of engagement and what's deemed as acceptable direct action, all while being able to foster a relationship with the woods that they are defending. I've been really interested in this project since I heard about it last summer, along

with the intersection of police militarization and climate change. On the flipside, there's this unique intersection of urban city protest and classic forest eco-defense. The mix of tactics have produced a movement unlike anything really seen before here in the States. Not to get ahead of myself, but ever since last fall, when the Atlanta City Council approved the plan to build the largest police training facility in the country, dubbed Cop City by activists due to the plans to build a mini version of Atlanta within the facility to practice urban combat, I figured that I would eventually find myself inside the forest.

So this last April, when an opportunity presented itself to travel to Atlanta, stay in the woods, and talk with some forest defenders, I could not pass it up. I packed a tent, sleeping bag, and some microfilms, and made my way to Georgia. The first thing I noticed upon arriving in Atlanta is that when they say Atlanta is a city in a forest, they really do mean it. The amount of continuous tree coverage throughout the city was astonishing, and that's coming from someone who lives in Portland, Oregon. As it turns out, the city of Atlanta actually has the highest amount of tree canopy of any

city in the United States. On top of the city-wide tree coverage, there is the South River Forest, which makes up the largest continuous section of woods, and serves as Atlanta's first line of defense in the face of rapidly accelerating climate change. The forest in southeast Atlanta is said to function as the lungs of the city. The canopy offers shade and traps carbon, with some of the more heavily-forced areas acting as wetlands that filter rainwater and prevent flooding by collecting runoff. Its marsh is one of the last breeding grounds for a lot of amphibians in the region, as

well as an important migration site for wading birds, and serves as a home to a lot of local wildlife. The 500 acres of this forest is under threat by the Atlanta Police Foundation and Black Hall Studios. If plans succeed to develop this precious strip of forest into the massive police compound and adjacent movie soundstage, the entire metropolitan area will face much harsher effects of climate change, including worsening floods, higher temperatures, and less clean tree filtered air.

Not to mention the increased police militarization and gentrification. Speaking of, the second thing I noticed once I arrived in Atlanta is how much gentrification is currently underway. The amount of hideous 501 apartments that are being built was impossible to overlook. And as we'll see, the way police feed off gentrification, which feeds off the corporate and movie-making sides of Atlanta, is not merely a coincidence. Last fall I interviewed Jamal from the Atlanta chapter of the Community Movement Builders, a black-led collective of community residents and activists serving poor, working-class

black communities. They focused on responding to encroaching gentrification, displacement, and over-policing. Here's what Jamal had to say on the intersection of issues orbiting around the cop city and defend the forest project. Just to piggyback off of that, I think it's extremely important for us to recognize the connections between all of these things, right? Cop city is a perfect blend of environmental justice issues, just flat-out racism, police brutality, and also gentrification, right?

It's not a mistake that they're building this cop city right at this moment when Atlanta is also becoming, for the first time in, I don't know, how many decades, a no longer majority black city. Because neighborhoods like Pittsburgh, where we're located out of, and all across Southwest and West Atlanta, the black people have been being displaced from our communities, right? So a perfect example is that with my organization, Community Movement Builders, we've been doing work in the Pittsburgh neighborhood for a while, but we purchased a community house in the neighborhood about six years ago, right?

At that point, we purchased the house for $50,000, right? Pittsburgh has been historically a poor, working-class community. It was founded as a black community, which is different from a lot of other neighborhoods in Atlanta. It was founded as a black community from freed Africans who were trying to escape some of the more rural areas of the South and found work in Haven in the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Atlanta, and it's been a poor and working-class black community ever since. But now, because of the gentrification that's been going on, a house just sold maybe about

a month and a half ago for $750,000. Wow. So we purchased this house at $50,000 six years ago. A house just sold just a few blocks away from that house for $750,000. Now, it's not that every house is selling for that amount, but that just shows you the rate of gentrification that's happening, and we know that cops are a necessary part of being able to defer to displaced people from gentrifying communities. They play an integral role within gentrification.

Yeah. I'm just wondering, does any of you have any anecdotal experience with, like, based on basically Marvel and tons of other industries invading Atlanta, how is that affected specifically? You already talked about how increasing the film industry and other things has made more gentrification, but how has that even affected other types of stuff, including policing? Has this type of growth affected people or people you know in other ways? Yeah, absolutely. So I think a lot of this kind of got, I won't say it got started, but a lot of it went even

escalated when Tyler Perry Studio opened up in East Point. And a lot of people were praising us like, oh, look at this, you know, it's a black man that was able to move down and be able to start this thing within Hollywood. But no, that is one of the things that also spurred the gentrification in East Point, which is, you might not be familiar with Atlanta, but East Point is like literally right next to Atlanta. So it's really close proximity. And so that also spurs over to the gentrification here in the city as well.

Property values have gone up since that point even more. Even my tax bill has gone up $1,000 a year for the past like three years. So it's, yeah, it's definitely, we definitely see the effects and, you know, and just talking to, you know, we do, we do do a lot of work around gentrification. And I think this is in tandem with, you know, because we have COVID-19 out here now with the eviction moratorium, which has now been, you know, denied by the Supreme Court. But even when there wasn't eviction moratorium, there were still people that were getting evicted from their homes.

And I think all of this in tandem when Atlanta specifically has already been going through gentrification crisis and with COVID-19 where people have been losing jobs left and right or not been able to go to their jobs that they've had and having salaries cut, people have been hurting. And the response from the city has not to been, has not been to provide more resources to people. It's been to fund cop city, to be able to get more of these out who are the ones that execute the actual evictions themselves.

And I think it all, it all, it all is connected in that, in that type of way. I arrived in Atlanta a few days before the Muskogee summit, a weekend event where the original indigenous people from the area of the South River or for the native name of the set land, the Wulani Forest, traveled back to their ancestral homeland to discuss indigenous environmental philosophy, what land back and rematriation means and theory and practice. Several indigenous authors were present and led workshops, including indigenous feminist scholar and community planner Laura Harjo from the University of Oklahoma, author of

Spiral to the Stars, Muskogee Tools of Futurity, and Dr. Daniel Wildcat of the Haskell Indian Nations University who wrote the book Red Alert, Saving the Planet with Indigenous Knowledge. In the less academic portions, there were forest walks, community meals, and singing of old Muskogee songs, including ones that were performed two centuries ago during the Trail of Tears. Muskogee Creek attendees also gathered around a sacred fire to perform a stomp dance, recreating rhythms heard and sensed in the forest long ago to rekindle the relationship with the earth and connect back to the ancestral presences.

This was the second ancestral migration the Muskogee Creek tribal members have done since being forcibly removed two centuries ago and displaced to Oklahoma. The first one took place just this last November, and both times the particular section of land they gathered on in Transferent Creek Park is one of the areas under threat of being ecologically destroyed and clear-cut. Over the course of a few days during my week-long stay, I sat down in the woods to record with two groups of forest defenders. One group sitting around a campfire at night next to a high-security child prison, and the

other group during the sunny, bird-chirping day outside the Black Hole Studios movie plot. So if you hear campfires or bird sounds in the background, just embrace our forest punk aesthetic. Upfront I think it's really important to first talk about the history of the land that is under threat. Because on top of issues regarding gentrification and the plans of this police training facility as a response to the George Floyd uprising and the false, manufactured, crime-wave media narrative intended to re-justify American policing in the wake of the uprising, the fact that the Atlanta Police Foundation chose this plot of land in particular is particularly

gross. The history of this small section of land in the South River watershed is deeply scarred and desperately needs time to heal. There are centuries of oppression and state violence tied to this particular spot of land, and now we're seeing that trying to be continued with this cop-city plan. Local tribes were expelled for millions of acres in the southwest region of what is now known as the United States during the early decades of the 1800s. Forest removal and displacement of the Muscogee Creek people began in the region in 1821 through

a series of treaties which then eventually led to a quote, melee of removal. More on that from one of the Forest Defenders I spoke to, and I'll note we'll be using a mix of voice distortion and voice actors combined with other audio distortion to help protect the identities of the Forest Defenders that I spoke to against possible state repression, so enjoy our cool voice distorted audio. Yeah, I think it's important to let the land heal because a lot of our comrades, Muscogee comrades and extended relatives that are identified as Muscogee, that were pushed off as lands in the early 1800s.

A lot of them did not go quietly in the night. I think that's important to remember because I feel like a lot of people are just like the trail of twos or like they were pushed out, but they're, they fought against being pushed out, and then when a lot of them were pushed out or killed off, then it was used to incarcerate and house mostly black people. So we're taking it back that is most of the people that I have seen involved, it is a diverse group of people, it's not just like white anarchists in the woods that is a misconception. There is all kinds of folks, which really I think is interesting and makes the struggle

unique and important, but there is also a lot of white anarchists that are using their privilege to help take the land back for our comrades that want to see it back and it feels, things feel like they're in a good way. There is good relations that are existing between like the anarchists and indigenous alliance down here, where like obviously no one person speaks or represents any one group, but the alliances that we do have are very informed of the variety of activities that have happened down here, including the worsens of machinery, and we were positively told to quote unquote keep on going.

So that feels empowering and it feels beautiful and it feels important to note that some of the comrades that have ancestral ties to this area, it's such a dark history and they're still here is something that they're mentioning and they're excited, the people that we're close to obviously, we're not close to all of them, they're excited that people are choosing to use their privilege to help make sure these facilities don't get built. Continuing with the scarred history of this land, shortly after the lands at the south river forest were stolen from the Muskegee Creek people, plots were distributed to white settlers in the fourth Georgia land lottery of 1821, which made available landlots of

202.5 acres. Many of these white settlers established slave plantations on which cotton and other crops were produced through slave labor. Through archival records, we know of at least 12 plantations that were on this land that existed from the 1840s up until 1865. And then in the early 1900s, the very same land started being used as a prison farm, now known as the Old Atlanta prison farm. The Old Atlanta prison farm was originally bought in 1917 to incarcerate prisoners of

war, but this plan was abandoned within two years and the land was converted into a prison farm where inmates, including moonshiners, public drinkers and just loiterers and really anybody were sent to and forced to perform unpaid agricultural labor. This shift from plantations to prison farm marks the rebranding of slavery into for-profit prison labor. This labor included washing cows and arsenic laid in water, which led to the early deaths of countless prisoners. The facility ran up until 1998 in which it was shut down, and then two child prison facilities

were put on the adjacent land. And the Atlanta police department already currently uses sections of this hollowed ground as a firing range, tear gas canisters and bullet casings from profound throughout the forest. For more on that, here's some other parts of my sit down with the forest defenders. And then I guess like fast forwarding a little bit from this land where indigenous people lived to the prison farm. And then how this has like a long and carceral history and history of being tied to policing.

But with the child prison that's still here, the prison farm and then now trying to build this militarized training facility, just like continuing on this legacy of state violence. Which is like just another massive aspect in terms of like they're trying to take this very like land that needs to heal from the centuries of violence and just tear it all down and build more of that. And I know there's like, there's a firing range that we've been hearing shots from. It's like just this never ending thing, it just like keeps happening. It's a pretty weird surreal experience, makes me feel like we're all like an endangered

species living in like the last part of the forest in fucking South Atlanta. I remember when I was explaining it to one of my relatives, they're like I was reading the internet about defending the Atlanta forest and not sure quite what's all going on, but sounds like you're living in hell. You're between two different child prisons, one's a high security, one's a low security, a large massive power line cut up for an old prison farm on two sides of the road. At least three different police firing rangers and a wastewater treatment plant that doubles as a firing range and pseudo training facility for police.

Another interesting facet is this particular piece of land where they are trying to build top city. It's like a really important turning point in the history of slavery in the US and like this is where a lot of things went from like shadow slavery and transitioned into what we now have as prison slavery. And as we're sitting here on what was literally a prison farm, even people in pretrial detention were here and used for unpaid labor, even people who had not been convicted of any crime. And so it's kind of like a very visible stain on the history of what used racist policing,

but it's harder to cover up and harder to pink wash. And so even as there is a place where children are locked in cages over, if not 300 yards from me, so too is this a place where people were brought for being used as slaves and like died and were buried in unmarked graves. Yeah, could I talk a little bit more about that? This was the transition, this is like the intermediate transition between child slavery and mind day prison slavery. And it was especially horrific, like there is two lakes on the property that were at

one point said to be filled with arsenic where the slaves were not only washing cattle with arsenic to remove them like bugs, but also in those in those lakes and like suffering horrible diseases and like dying from this. The reason the prison farm actually got closed down was because of the amount of people going in and out of like the reason why the city pushed to close it down was because of the amount of people being sent to the hospital week after week and day after day like actually overloading the medical system in the area. That's a publicly recorded information.

It closed down like the 1980s or 1990s and like during the Civil War escaped prison prisoners from here would be, sorry, escape slaves from here would be like going across battle lines and feeding information to the Union side in order to like serve their forms of liberation. I mean we like this land also exists right next to a major or like major road that serves as a carceral center, it has both like the Metro Reentry facility, the Metro Youth Detention Center and like a couple other buildings and like it's not just like the 80 lands that they plan to clear cut here, it's also the like 300 that they plan to continue with the

carceral legacy of like terror and horror from going from like chattel slavery and indigenous displacement to the intermediary horror that the prison farm was to this new legacy of like cover up of it all and then yeah. The continuation of this land being used by the state, by police, by all these like oppressive groups to further their causes is a really interesting aspect of this and for going to prison farm and then police trying to now turn it into a militarized police training facility. Yeah, yeah, so first I think you know this is Muscovy land and it's during the Muscovy

summit and it's cool you know Muscovy people have been displaced in Oklahoma for the most part and they're trying to participate in this migration back and so they're on the land right now and it's been really special to have them here and to be able to express solidarity and like work together with them has been really amazing and learned a lot and it's yeah it's cool to understand that and you know what you're saying that interaction of like settler colonialism displacing people like early slavery, prison slavery and this specific land has always been a place that I feel like has been almost like the vanguard of how like policing has and like settler colonialism has experimented with how to reproduce

itself in sustainable ways with like just in general the like domestication of humans and the domestication of animals and that's like what APD is trying to do on this land and it's a direct reaction to the George Floyd uprising which caused a crisis in policing because it actually bit back with like serious power and so they're trying to figure out and experiment with ways of reproducing policing for the future in the exact same way that when slavery took a serious L they said how can we recuperate and how can we reproduce this in a way that's sustainable and that's why we have a modern prison system that lives on to this day and that's why they're realising as we're gaining and threatening that oh we

have to do something good and this land has always been a site for doing that and they're going to keep trying. Atlanta is a heavily corporate city. It's been dubbed the Silicon Valley of the South by people who surely must be insufferable to be around but it is true that Atlanta and Georgia's economic policies have attached a swath of corporations to either start, grow, or migrate to the city. It's home to Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, UPS, Home Depot, Chick-fil-A, and multiple media conglomerates as well as having headquarters for Google and other tech companies as well.

The city serves as a massive transportation hub and in fact Atlanta, the city, started off as a train hub and now it boasts the world's busiest airport. And tax credits for the film industry have made Atlanta and Georgia the new hot place to shoot high-budget Hollywood movies. There's a whole effort to make the city effectively the new Hollywood. But like all economic growth, this comes with some heavy consequences, most often affecting those at the bottom. Atlanta is also the most surveilled city in the United States and the city with the most

wealth inequality. All the corporations and film industry stuff moving to Atlanta has indeed created jobs, but many of those jobs go to workers from out-of-state. On average, less than one third of new film industry jobs have gone to people who were already living in Atlanta. The result of this out-of-state economic migration boosts cost of housing, cost of living, and pushes lower and middle-class residents of Atlanta out of their neighborhoods, disproportionately pushing out to black people.

And this is all while the increasing corporatization and gentrification is actually pitched as quote-unquote providing opportunities to the city's black population, which is certainly something because the state of Georgia has the fourth largest incarceration rate in the entire world if you put US states on the same level as like every single other country. The other top three states or countries with the highest incarceration rates are Louisiana, Mississippi, and Oklahoma. So yeah, but Georgia is number four. Those in Atlanta's top income bracket make nearly 20 times those who are at the bottom.

And if you map the wealth disparity onto the layout of the city, it's a one-to-one match for the city's old segregation lines. The entire city runs on these like Reaganite neoliberal policies, but under this mask of woke identity politics. And who enforces that wealth inequality and gentrification? That's right, police. Which leads us to the origin of this plan for so-called cop city. I'm going to quote a crime think article that came out last month called The City in

the Forest, reinventing resistance for an age of climate crisis and police militarization. I recommend you guys read. I'll have it in the source notes. But yeah, here's the quote from Crime Think. Quote, the government of Atlanta has developed a few tentative solutions to the dilemmas they face. To follow through on their commitments to their backers, city politicians need to continue sacrificing public assets on the altar of the economy in order to attract more major investors

to the region, especially the film industry and technology companies. To maintain control in a period of rapid displacement and rising cost of living, with chronic tension between the conservative state government and the liberal city administration, they need to funnel more resources towards law enforcement throughout the region. Finally, to appease the increasingly rebellious lower classes, they need to frame this process of restructuring and repression in the language of black empowerment, social justice, and progressivism. The bureaucrats are not in a good position to handle this.

Decades of tax cuts and deregulation have created infrastructural failures and breakdowns of all kinds. Among other concerns, Atlanta lost the bid for the second Amazon headquarters, because the public transit, one of the least funded in the United States, was not even operable when the corporate scouts came to visit. At the same time, it's precisely the low taxes and absence of regulation that attract capital to the state of Georgia, so cultivating a social democratic governing strategy may now be impossible without creating a flight of wealth to other parts of the country.

It seems that the current plan is to give over as many public contracts and resources to private developers as possible, to allow them to incur the costs of social disintegration and anger, to use police to control the blowback, and to use images of Martin Luther King Jr. to preempt any meaningful resistance. Thus, the plan to transform a wild space into a police training compound is dubbed the Institute for Social Justice. That's right, the plan to make the country's biggest militarized police training facility, they're planning to call it the Institute for Social Justice.

Ignore the bomb range and urban combat moxity section. Anyway, here's Jamal again from the Community Movement Builders. I think one thing that's also really significant is that, so my city council person for is District 12, Joyce Shepherd. District 12 is where Pittsburgh is, where Summer Hill is, where several of poor and black working class neighborhoods of Atlanta are located. They're also the areas where they're the most gentrifying areas of the city as well. In City Council District 12, Joyce Shepherd, she is the person who brought this proposal

forward, right? She is over the quote, unquote, public safety, you know, they ain't keeping shit safe, quote, unquote, public safety, you know, commission, and she brought this forward. And since she's been in office, she has been a champion of gentrification. Right? She's been a champion of overpolicing as well. And I think it's a tie between even our city council or even our representation has in their interest of being able of gentrifying the city because that gives them more tax

dollars. It gives them a way to be able to say that they are decreasing their crime rates, et cetera, and all these different types of things when it's really just de-placing poor folks. And so I think that's an important, about talking about how this kind of was established, that's an important topic to be able to address is that even, and she's a black woman, right? So even, you know, even how, like, when people, when people might, you think they might be representing your interests, when they get to be in these positions, we have to recognize that they are not necessarily for the people.

In the aftermath of the George Floyd uprising against police violence, the city responded by striking down any police reform measures and restricting opportunities for public input while increasing the police budget and upping citizen surveillance. On a national level, a media manufactured crime wave narrative has been used to re-justify American policing in the wake of the 2020 uprising, and the city of Atlanta is using that narrative while wrapping their increased militarization plans in a nice woke social justice package, i.e., a militarized police training compound being dubbed the Institute for Social Justice.

Joining up this effort is the Atlanta Police Foundation, which is a non-profit police advocacy organization that claims to have, quote, united the business and philanthropic community with the Atlanta Police Department. It's backed by an array of Atlanta-area corporate donors, including Delta Airlines, UPS, Chick-fil-A, Cox Enterprises, which owns the Atlanta Journal of Constitution, which is, like, the city's biggest newspaper, and they were formally, formally backed by Coca-Cola. They Coca-Cola dropped out this last November. A leaked promo video for the Institute for Social Justice details some of the features

of the Atlanta Police Foundation's, quote, world-class training campus. With an estimated cost of $90 million, the space will provide a place for recruiting, training, mid-career education, and practice with new technology and equipment for police and fire department personnel. The renderings show the campus will house a, quote, mock city for real-world training, a canine training center, and 40 horse stalls for police horses. 12 acres of forest land are slated to be converted into an emergency vehicle operations course. And the whole compound will be located across 300 and 80 acres of the old Atlanta Prison

Farm, which is a city-owned, but technically outside of city limits, located just east of the city in unincorporated DeKalb County. The police foundation has proposed funding the training center through a public-private partnership which will leave taxpayers to pay an estimated $30 million for this out-of-city police training facility, one which is one-third of the early estimated cost. According to the land use ordinance, the property will be leased to the police foundation by the city for $10 a year for 50 years. That's almost 400 acres of forest land for $10 a year.

The ground lease will, quote, provide that the city will be able to have input or approval on the stages of construction along with the development of the property, and will allow waiving of certain code requirements. Such a facility would be three times the size of the New York Police Department's training facility, and four times the size of the LAPD's. It's worth noting that the NYPD and LAPD are the two largest police departments in the country, while Atlanta is only the 19th largest, yet they'll have a facility that's like three times the size of New York's.

According to the mayor of Atlanta, during the time of the facility's announcement, the massive training complex would, quote, raise morale among officers and hopefully bring more recruits to the department. And importantly, the whole project was initially supposed to be totally under wraps, approved by the sponsors, board members, funders of the Atlanta Police Foundation, and the Atlanta Police Foundation, unlike most police unions, is a foundation that is made to funnel corporate money into the hands of police. The cop city side of things is just one part of the Defend the Forest project.

The other big aspect of this is pushing back on the movie studio, Blackhall, from being able to clear-cut more forests to expand their soundstage. Projects shot on their current lot include a Godzilla King of Monsters, Venom, D.R. Evan Hansen, HBO's Loved Craft Country, and Amazon Prime's The Tomorrow War. On the east side of the forested land, the part that's referred to as Entrenchment Creek Park, was bought by Home Depot co-founder Arthur Blank in the early 2000s with a plan to combine that section of land with 300 acres of the prison farm to create a 500-acre park. A project that never came to fruition, and now the park is currently under control of

DeKalb County. On top of the heat insulation and air filtering that the tree canopy provides, Entrenchment Creek plays a crucial role in maintaining the South River watershed being a partial wetland and marsh that mitigates flooding in South Atlanta. Quoting that crime thing article again, quote, the plundering of public assets for the benefit of a movie company and real estate mogul is described as an opportunity to create, quote, good jobs for local Atlantans, not as a criminal expropriation of infrastructure. The clear cut that Blackhall Studios plans to trade in exchange for a section of forest

is to be renamed Michelle Obama Park, unquote. So yeah, that also clearly demonstrates the type of gentrification wrapped in this nice woke package by doing this really sketchy land swap and then building a park on it and calling it Michelle Obama Park. Cool stuff, guys. Hall Studios is currently a 150-acre complex about 10 minutes south of downtown, and they seek to add over half a million square feet of soundstage, 200,000 square feet of offices, 420,000 square feet for warehousing, and 22,000 square feet of catering space, according

to a filing made through the state's development of regional impact program. The DRIs are filed when the project's size is large enough that it's likely to impact the infrastructure of neighboring communities. The DeKalb County Board of Commissioners in October 2020 voted to approve the land swap deal with Blackhall Studios as a part of the planned expansion. The county would give approximately 40 acres of mostly wooded land around the South River Forest, and in return, Blackhall Studios would give the county around 50 acres of nearby land as well.

The project has faced some legal and construction issues ever since then, and we'll discuss those details of those shortly. Also worth noting that Blackhall Studios was sold to a private equity firm in LA just last year, and this last February announced that they purchased another 1,500 acres in Newton County, Georgia, which is about 40 miles east of downtown Atlanta, and they planned to shoot productions there for an upcoming, quote, action-oriented streaming service dubbed Blackhall Americana, which sounds horrible. Here's a quote from Blackhall CEO Ryan Millsap, quote, this is the kind of space we need to

fly in Blackhall helicopters and drive Humvees at speed. We have lakes, we have swabs, and rivers, and forests, and fields, and hills, and dales. That's the nice thing about 1,500 acres. Yep, so look forward to Blackhall Americana, the new hit streaming service coming out of Georgia, destroying the forest for Blackhall Americana, oh boy. But yeah, if this project succeeds, it would cement Atlanta as the new Hollywood, along with Tyler Perry Studios and all of the other movie studios moving to Atlanta, and it would continue the skyrocketing cost of living in Atlanta and accelerate gentrification at an

even more horrifying rate. So actually the Blackhall service, as being defended as well, is also in the Wilani Forest, which is what the name for the South Atlanta Forest is, and it's actually right across the road from where we currently are. So the, and it's like, I want to believe 300 or 400 acres by itself, and that is actually under imminent threat as well, they are waiting on the land destruction permit to pass, and that can happen any day or any week. On what you were saying about the gentrification issue, that's something that's been really

noticeable to anyone that lives in Atlanta and has for any amount of time, just looking around them, like the filming that is just regularly happening here, and all these kind of new companies popping up around it, Blackhall was sold, maybe a little over a year ago now to a hedge fund out in California. They're getting funding for all of these projects, and rent here in Atlanta, I'm sure, across the country, I'm not sure what the trends are elsewhere, has been skyrocketing. Like, you'll see homes that sold during the financial crisis for like $80,000, $120,000, selling for like half a million dollars today, and you know, I'm not like a fucking economist,

but the way that the film industry has been exploding, and other industries like Google and Microsoft have been building these massive, expensive new headquarters, while people literally go out on the street because they can no longer afford to pay rent here, and people just get displaced. It's like the opposite of white flight, back into the suburbs, when you know, folks are moving into the city for economic opportunities that only very wealthy people can get. I mean, it's difficult not to see Blackhall as ushering in just another huge wave of gentrification. Yeah, Blackhall explicitly says they're making movies to support the American way of life.

We hear gunshots from the police firing range all the time, and we hear almost as many gunshots from the Blackhall filming sites. And yeah, it's very much about creating propaganda that makes people think they need police, and that's like a huge part of kind of what they're doing while they're filming. And on the gentrification thing, like even just driving through the city the past few days, I've noticed so many different things. Already the past few days, I've noticed so many places that used to be wooded totally torn down, and they're putting up these horrible quote unquote luxury condos, which are like,

you know, $2,000 rent per month for a tiny studio. And I've even seen things that were used to be sectionate housing turned into luxury condos. Like, it's been absurd driving through the city and watching so many places that used to be wooded just turned like so much like active construction sites building these exact same, like these identical apartment complexes that are the most hideous things you've ever looked at, and completely unaffordable for anyone who's not like someone who's working for a tech company.

Yeah, so currently they're like destroying a section of a land called Chosford Park, and it was like a large green space that was largely like unmarried and in Lakewood, and creating quote affordable housing, which is really just the like legal term for they have a certain amount of like available housing. Like like like 10 units and like like a 100 unit thing is affordable housing. Affordable just means market value or like like the median market value low income is things that people that aren't like average money makers can afford. Right.

And I think one of the like, I think it's has kind of kind of gotten lost about the struggle that the actual Defend the Atlanta Forest struggles like not specific to just cops that are black hole is actually the entire forest as a city. And that like part of the reason why it has been so focused is because of like how pressing these current things are and how like stretched thin people kind of are who are working on it. And like yeah Chosford Park is an example. There's also an area that's like near a grant park and like the zone three old zone three

precinct and this or like the zoo. They were like actually in the same property area. They kept the pigs near the zoo. And like it was an entire forest and like absolutely massive. The clear garden yard and disgusting condors all along the road. And it's a continuation again of a distinctive political pattern in Atlanta back when Mayor Jackson was elected as the mayor. He at first tried to build like affordable not affordable like low income housing and

do community projects and stuff. But the business end of Atlanta fought back against those efforts and that is what saw projects like the 1996 Olympic Games which destroyed an entire community in Atlanta. You should look up people's town here in Atlanta was just and Summerhill completely raised to build arenas and all of this shit. And it feels like a continuation of the pattern where politicians decide what is best for the city, the Olympics, a new police training facility or whatever business measures on the table today.

Not to mention that like during the 96 Olympics they like specifically built Atlanta City Detention Center for the for a place to put houseless people who had been sleep doctor streets and like criminalize them and during the George Ford uprising in 2020 that was used to as detainment and overnight stays for protesters were like going to get low bail just as a form of oppression is regularly used to get like that. Jail's regularly used specifically against protesters and isn't used for anything else is a like absolute scar on the face of humanity. Keisha Lance Bottoms said during her term that she was going to turn that into a social justice

site or what it's still a jail. It probably already it probably always will be until we fucking destroy it and like now the Fulton County Sheriff wants to take over the jail and use all of those beds because the jails here are so overcrowded with bullshit charges that they are just expanding and expanding and expanding and there's no sign of stopping for every one time that they promise that they're going to be closing jails repurposing shit doing all this liberal reform bullshit. There's a new training facility. They're selling jails to people that are using them or the system just continues to expand

and expand and expand until we fight back and destroy it. Need black hole. Police need black hole just as much as black hole needs the police and these are the symbiotic relationship between the two of them. Police are instrumental in gentrification and also police need gentrification to capture poor black and brown people and lock them in cages and so these are two things that feed each other in a relationship so it's very important to do our best to attack both. Is Atlanta, was it the Atlanta police who had like the point system for us?

Yes Atlanta police had, oh sorry, yes Atlanta police has actually a point system where among the highest points is capturing a child and arresting them or alongside felony charges, felony warrants and other things. Along this point system they use it as a rubric to measure how well an officer is doing. Yeah. Yeah, I mean in terms of like needing gentrification to continue your job, yeah, that's the exact same thing is let's have this point system so we can get raises and arrest all the people who are on the street and it's a mask off moment as they say.

Yeah and I also think it's this funny thing like, I don't know, right they're building this fake city to train in and I wouldn't be surprised if Black Hall ends up renting it out from time to time to shoot films, right? Absolutely. But also at the end of the day even if they don't it's literally the same exact thing, right? One is training people to actually do it and the other is performing it so people think it's cool.

Exactly, yeah. Yeah, so I just pulled up the, actually my friend just pulled up the like chart which we use, it's a 1 to 5 scale and it's 5 for juvenile arrest, 5 points for felonies, 4 for a misdemeanor charge, 3 for a city charge, 4 for DUIs and it goes on and like... The fact that juvenile arrest is the top one is fucking monstrous. Shocking but it shows the extent of like the horribleness of what their job is, like that is their job. That's what they do, that is the entire thing.

One thing that's given the Atlanta Defend the Force movement an edge is being able to consistently set the terms of engagement and establish a media framework regarding the destruction of the forest and the development of Cop City to stay one step ahead of the enemy. Like we've mentioned, the Cop City project was never actually initially announced by the city or the police foundation, it was brought to light by activists digging through open source data and public records. In April of 2021 when activists discovered the proposal to destroy the south river forest,

first news spread via word of mouth for several weeks about a large information sharing session at Intrenchment Creek Park, one of the areas under threat. On May 15th, over 200 people gathered for a barbecue and info presentation night on the threat of the forest and the broader campaign to defend it. The city government had yet to announce its plans publicly, so the activists and forest defenders were able to craft the public narrative first and lay the media groundwork. At the information session, presenters were able to accurately contextualize the development within the cross-section of racist and authoritarian backlash against the George Floyd protests,

the increasing gentrification and urban displacement, and the devastating climate effects such a project will inflict upon the region. Having activists and forest defenders break the news of such a development denies the city and the police the opportunity to introduce the development to the public with a distorted narrative, assuming that they were going to announce the plans and make the public at all. Then on May 17th, less than 48 hours after the info-sharing barbecue, seven unguarded machines at the forest destruction site, including excavators, tractors, and other pieces of

heavy machinery, were targeted by sabotage. With smashed windows and severed inner tubing scorched by fire, the destruction equipment was left inoperable. An anonymous statement appeared online detailing their motivations and methods of attack, while tying the actions to the struggle against colonialism, authoritarianism, and the history of this particular land as the site of horrific abuses, of the site of displacement, chattel slavery, and prison slavery. The communique ended with, quote, to the developers, governments, contractors, corporations,

and politicians that perpetrated the heinous deforestation. Any further attempts at destroying the Atlanta forest will be met with a similar response. The forest was here long before us and will be here long after. We'll see to that defend the Atlanta forest. To date, no one has been arrested for these actions. The presence of such a targeted direct action campaign this early on in the movement is important for a few reasons, one of which being it cemented sabotage as a part of this movement from the very beginning, like it was woven into the genetic fabric from the

conception. So any debate around the validity of these tactics was virtually non-existent, because they were there from the beginning. That's what this movement is. And that's been super interesting to watch, because usually this type of sabotage or direct action happens later on in these movements. You escalate to that point. But in this case, it's been happening since the first week people knew that this thing

was existing. Over the following weeks, there was meetings, posters and flyers that spread throughout the city, people organized public forest walks through areas of the woods that were under threat, even a few candidates for city council adopted the struggle as a component of their electoral campaigns. The movement's consistent ability to break the news on the development and the destruction of the forest has been crucial in the efforts to gain public trust and setting the terms of engagement and the ground rules for the conflict.

The type of public discourse regarding the forest was successfully established by anonymous activists, not by politicians and not by police. People are not afraid to fight back physically. And this was occurring at the same time as the more electoral tactics is how I'll phrase it. And I think that we've seen neither of these being able to successfully stop the movement, but when it comes to being able to measure that the police and their allies have slowed down, the electoral tactics have been a complete nutter failure.

And physically harming the property of the police and of the Black Hall and all of the fucking forces that would destroy the forest, that's been shown far and away to be a tactic that's not only acceptable in this movement, but is something that's seen as one of the go-to strategies. We haven't had to work our way to that, people were there from the get-go. Yeah, it was like a day or two after the end of the night, but the very first public-facing event where bulldozers were set on fire in Michelle Obama Park, which is funny enough another recuperation tactic of destruction of the environment and ongoing gentrification,

where that's actually Black Hall Studios' old planned site for their new studio. And the idea of the land swap was they take this shitty land where they destroyed forests to replace it with an earth mound, and as long as they turn into a park, they're allowed to build and construct on public forest land. Which is like a bonkers idea. Yeah, yeah, no, it's actually like a new precedent that has not been done before. I think that one of the other things, along with the fiery start kickoff, is that the folks who, in my experience, most big, broader campaign type things, the people who are doing

jail support, the people who have a broad reach, the people who have access to resources, etc., kind of the backbone, life-sustaining things of a movement, tend to be folks who have really rigid, moralizing ideas of what is acceptable, etc. And you know, people in Atlanta have been, there's a lot of credit due to folks who have been putting in a lot of work and are a little wiser than to have such a limited narrow view. So most of the folks that control, or not control, most of the folks who like, backline and are working really hard to do the more reproductive things, like jail support and get food and things like that, are also people who have a really creative and accepting

view of what kind of things are okay and really don't want this movement to fail and aren't going to limit themselves based on abstract ideas. And so that's something that is really special and, you know, and gets excluded for doing things that are effective. When talking with the Force defenders, the other thing that was really emphasized is that instead of waiting for distant politicians to save the environment, and instead of dedicating tons of effort into petitioning companies with moralizing rhetoric to make them feel bad in hopes of them dropping into the project, you can instead have immediate material attacks

that hit them where it counts. And where it counts is their pockets, because you can't expect companies to be swayed by moral decisions around harmful policing or the environment, but you can attack their physical and social capital. If it's framed as, hey, this is something that is not a good look, fam, and this is going to hurt your bank accounts. That is the type of general language that these corporations do understand. I feel like this is the most intersectional thing I've been a part of in a long time.

There's just like so many different ways to oppose the facility. And there's so many different people involved. And I'm really grateful for all of the comrades, especially the anarchist comrades who've been holding it down for years that have helped push the struggle in a certain direction. I think other people are touching on this. We want to keep bringing it up because it's important. In other struggles we've been a part of, like the Liberals control a lot of the money for jail support or bail funds or food district.

And a lot of those mutual aid aspects of the struggle that helped maintain an occupation, which has really turned this place up, are in the hands of mostly anarchist folks. And that has also really set the scene for what we're able to do and not able to do, like no one's getting thrown under the bus for alleged behavior. Like when I was reading about this before I came down here almost exactly a year ago, there were like machines are on fire and I was like, holy shit. It's like usually that's like way later in the struggle. And that was like right out the gate.

People whoever they are were attacking the machinery. And I think to be honest with you, that was drawing a lot of people here because people are tired of the NVDA or nonviolent direct action. It's not about like let's criticize something to death that makes us feel bad. It's like people are tired because they're losing a lot of comrades to long prison sentences. They're giving three different felonies that are like the same amount of time or more than if you would allegedly arson something. So these are things that are coming up for people and people are realizing that old

tactics aren't working anymore. A lot of the comrades that were burned into a weird shape from the green scare are aging out or the things that they're afraid of are very valid, but we're living in too dire of a time to neglect those tactics at a larger level. And people are just are seeing how terrible things are. And it seems like more people are down or just don't care anymore ever since the George Floyd uprisings. They've just seen an uptick in a lot of this behavior.

There's a campaign that launched publicly that mentions all of the subcontractors that Reeves Young, one of the construction companies on the project, has to employ to make the Atlanta Police Foundation's project here possible. And a lot of that could be home visits. It could be going to where they, I don't know who else to do this obviously, but I'm just saying long story short, everybody knows this, but you find where they store the evil equipment. That's the best way to stop the project. Long story short, they usually don't listen to what we had to say, but actions speak

louder than words. And if you really want to hurt them, you hurt them in their pockets. And if you cost them enough money damage, they may pull out of the project. They shut down. And even if there is other subcontractors that they could get to rent machinery from to cut trees, whatever the fuck it is they're going to do, we want them to be afraid. If you look at very romanticized struggles that have largely been successful in their own ways throughout the world, I'm just going to mention a couple because people talk about

them constantly, like the Zod in France or the Humbach in Germany or no TAG in Italy. A lot of it revolves around property destruction and defending your area. Another strong point of the movement to defend the land of forest is that it's not simply coalesced around a single coherent strategy, whether that be sabotage or above ground organizing. For over a year now, force defenders and movement participants have employed several parallel strategies in tandem. The strategies of one approach can fill in for the shortcomings of another. Often these differing strategies can be mutually beneficial.

As the sabotage was happening, opponents of Cop City also organized a continuous stream of educational events on the land, as well as pressure campaigns aimed at pushing city and county officials, investors and contractors to drop out of the project. As summer began, more traditional political activist organizations, like ones connected to nationwide socialist organizations, abolitionist networks and ecological advocacy groups, began doing more direct community outreach by knocking on the doors, talking with people in the neighborhoods next to where the forest was being slated for destruction. Forming connections and allyships with the local community in the vicinity of the South

River Forest is crucial, especially since they would be among the first of those impacted by deforestation and the close proximity to such a militarized police hub with explosives testing and helicopter pads, plus local community outreach is useful for learning what might help mobilize more regular folks. Other tactics and strategies emerging during early summer included getting those involved in the planning of Cop City to realize that they don't get to operate in some safe, politics-only realm. Their political decisions have real-world consequences and real-world effects for those

people that they allegedly represent. So perhaps they too should be forced to feel real-world consequences. On June 16th, there was a City Council meeting which was supposed to vote on the Police Foundation's land lease ordinance sponsored by then-Councilwoman Joyce Shepard. At this point, back in 2021, the meetings were all virtual due to the COVID-19 pandemic, so the City Council members hosted their conversations from inside their homes. With just a little bit of work, activists and researchers were able to locate the home address of Councilwoman Shepard.

A group went to her home and displayed a banner during the City Council meeting. Most protesters just chanted from the public sidewalk, and one individual approached their house, knocked on the door, and rang the doorbell before returning to the street. Turns out, Councilwoman Shepard did not like this very much, and went into a bit of a panic. Also, one of the movements that have been kind of effective in terms of City Council or other targets has been whenever the first time they were going to vote on this Institute for Social, actually, Copsity, when they were going to vote on Copsity, someone went up to Joyce Shepard's house and knocked on her door.

There were a handful of protesters outside, and someone just knocked on her door, and she went to a frenzy, freaked out, called off the vote, left the meeting, ran to the precinct during the public comment section, and then gave a long speech to a bunch of police and press, which effectively called off the vote for another three months or so, just because someone visited the house of a politician because they had names and addresses, and that's also happened with Ryan Mills that happened with Dean Reeves, the CEO and Chairman of Reeves Young. There's this whole idea of politics as existing within this political astral space.

It's the same thing with corporations. It exists in the corporate space that's removed from people's actual lives. It's removed from actual personal consequences. People in positions of power assume that their actions occur in this political or corporate astral plane, and that means that consequences of their decisions won't directly impact them. But we don't need to play by those rules. After a friendly knock on her door, Joyce Shepard called off the vote and left the meeting

early to call the police, who arrived after the protesters had already dispersed. Immediately after, Joyce Shepard held a press conference from the newly constructed Zone 3 police precinct, where Shepard stood surrounded by police officers and news media, and described in detail the aims of her land lease ordinance, the nature of the Cops City project, as well as the efforts of protesters to stop her. By doing this short public statement, she catapulted the movement and the story into the mainstream, out of the political backdoors that it was existing in previously. And Atlanta City Councilwoman says protesters came onto her private property to speak out

against a piece of legislation. Joyce Shepard says while she supports the right to protest, this time it went too far. People have a right to come out and say whether they for or against it, I have no problem with that. I've been doing this for years and know that people have that right, but what they don't have a right to do is come up on my private property, knock on my doors, protest on my lawn, on my porch, they don't have that right. So I'm saying tonight that I'm still supporting the Academy, I'm not scared, however, there

will be no right for people to come on my property and protest. The next day she made another statement, which you just heard a little bit of, where she also claimed that she would be pushing through the ordinance no matter what the city residents that she ostensibly represented had to say, and her and her fellow city officials took a stand against the protesters and rejected their tactics, falsely implying that the methods like going on a sidewalk were illegal. But by showing up outside a politician's house and knocking on her door, just a few people were able to achieve an early goal of the movement, to transform the cop city

and black hall developments from backdoor agreements into big public scandals. It got out of the shadows and into the spotlight. As a bonus, the vote was delayed, buying more time to develop further strategies in defense of the forest. It was an effective demonstration of the potential of direct confrontation with people in power, and it led to the emergence of another strategy that's become a big part of the genetic fabric of this movement, pressuring decision makers directly and dissolving their notion of a safe political or corporate astral space.

During this time of showing up at politicians doors, more sabotage and direct action were also taking place. Signs appeared in the forest, warning that trees in the area had been spiked, making it possibly dangerous to attempt to cut down trees, with the risk of saws being damaged and possibly injuring unlucky workers. On June 10th, three more excavators were burned at the Black Hole Studios site. Neither action appeared much in the local news media, but anonymous communicates and photographs of the incidents and damage circulated online among the radical anarchist milleus.

In late June, there was the first planned week of action. There's been another one since then, and there's another one upcoming from May 8th through May 15th. We'll talk more about the upcoming week of action in the next episode, but I strongly encourage people to travel to Atlanta as soon as possible if you can make it for any of this upcoming weeklong event. Again, that's from May 8th through May 15th. If you can make it for any of that, please go to Atlanta.

It will be fun, I assure you. The June 2021 week of action featured guided walks through the forest by day and by moonlight, discussion and conversations on ecology, abolitionism, colonialism, and queerness. There was nightly bonfires and safe open sections of the woods. At a nearby radical venue, there was a hardcore punk show, during which hundreds of concertgoers repelled the Buzzkill police, who were trying to shut it down, and there was a night rave deep into the woods, where 500 people were dancing with glow sticks late into the night and early into the morning.

In all, throughout the week of action, thousands of Elantans got to gather under the banner of Defend the Forest. They were able to learn about the project and get plugged into taking action. During the week, people under the cover of night visited the home of Black Hole Studios CEO Ryan Millsap in the Atlanta suburb of Social Creek. They also visited his second home in Tuxedo Park, and the UPS he frequents in Edgewood. According to an anonymous online statement, quote, Flyers were distributed to all his neighbors' mailboxes as well as plastered on his front

gate and the streets that he frequents. The Flyers let fellow concerned community members know about the harm he is responsible for, and nicely provided the address to his 100-acre farm so that grievances could be addressed there. The Flyers, placed all throughout his neighborhood and investment properties, were also distributed in hopes that it would, quote, inspire others to research and take the fight to those directly responsible for the destruction of the forest.

Two days later, on the final day of the week of action, around 50 protesters marched to the headquarters of the Atlanta Police Foundation, quote, As the crowd emerged from the five-point metro station, a small contingent of officers attempted to arrest somebody. The crowd engaged in hand-to-hand fighting with police and successfully repelled them. Advancing past security, they marched straight to the Atlanta Police Foundation's office and smashed the glass doors and windows before overturning tables in the tower's lobby. According to police, on Friday around 4 p.m., multiple protesters stopped the flow of traffic

on Peachtree Street and Andrew Young International Boulevard. Photos taken by a local freelance photographer shown a group called Defend Atlanta Forest, shattering glass doors, and also holding signs that say are woods, not Hollywoods. CBS 46 reached out to the group, but have yet to hear back. Atlanta Police believe the protesting ignited over the building of the New Public Safety Training Center. When officers arrived, protesters quickly fled the scene, but the damage still remains. At this time, we know no arrests have been made and the investigation continues.

In Atlanta, I'm Barma Lyons, CBS 46 News. Momentum was growing throughout the summer. Police and corporate press had failed in crafting a counter-media strategy. Meanwhile, the Defend the Forest project brought together police and prison abolitionist organizations, environmental justice and preservation organizations, civil and human rights nonprofits, and even neighborhood associations near the proposed site, including the East Atlanta Community Association, the Grant Park Neighborhood Association, South Atlantans for Neighborhood Development, and the Kirkwood Neighbors Organization, each of which passed resolutions opposing

the proposal. Grassroots organizations that mobilized against the proposal included Defend Atlanta Police Department, Refusal Communities, the Atlanta Sunrise Movement, Community Movement Builders, the South River Forest Coalition, A World Without Police, and the autonomous organizers working under the banner of Defend the Forest. Protesters spread informational flyers and online graphics, conducted interviews, knocked on doors, and organized phone-in campaigns during subsequent city council meetings that were still held on Zoom because of coronavirus-related restrictions.

Third, August and September, the Stop Cops City Coalition and others worked to introduce tension and clog up the city council process. Taking cues from the protest outside the home of Joyce Shepard, which resulted in the vote being delayed for over two months, protesters gathered outside the homes of possible yes-voters on the nights that the vote was slated to take place, causing further delays in the entire process. It got pushed back from August into September, so again, another delay. Briefly it seemed like there was a possibility that the Stop Cops City campaign might be

victorious before the end of summer. Those on the ground these ordinance were repeatedly delayed because of these objections and demonstrations at the homes of Atlanta Chief Operations Officer John Keane and City Councilwoman Natalien Archibong. Eventually, September 7th was set as the final vote day. Seventeen hours of pre-recorded comments from over 1,000 Atlanta residents delayed the discussion due to the sheer number of public comments. The vote got pushed back another day, as city council members spent most of Tuesday and

Wednesday listening to the playback. After months of organizing, community outreach, and public education efforts from the Stop Cops City organizers, approximately 70% of the callers fiercely opposed the proposal, explaining in great detail why their quote-unquote representatives should vote it down. The minority of callers who supported the Cops City project either self-identified as residents of the disproportionately white and wealthy Buckhead and North East Atlanta area, or were just like actual cops, at least 30 officers called in to say that they support the destruction of the forest and the building of Cops City, so big, big shocker, the Cops

What Cops City pro-Cops City callers invoked the false crime wave narrative propagated after the George Floyd uprising and used the language of so-called white flight by threatening to leave the city if something wasn't done to stop the growing crime wave. And yet, when the 17 hours of public comments ended and the council's discussion began, council members largely failed to acknowledge the hours of public comments that they had just spent two days listening to, much less acknowledged the far-ranging movement that produced such overwhelming public discontent. Coding crime think again quote, as those who study revolutionary movements know, the police

perform an essential function in class society, without which many other hierarchies and exploitative relations could not exist for very long. This is not simply an economic or civic issue that can be worked around with some clever ideas and a bit of pressure, unquote. Despite the efforts of organizers, which culminated in 17 hours of primarily oppositional public comment, the ordinance was passed on September 8th, while the police arrested protesters outside the home of councilwoman Natalien Archibong about an hour before the final vote took place during the council's final session on September 8th.

The city council voted by a margin of 10 to 4 for the creation of the $90 million facility, handing over almost 400 acres of forest to the Atlanta Police Foundation. Obviously, many folks were pretty disappointed and kind of demoralized about this. Some turned their frustrated energy into the upcoming local elections, hoping that the city government may be stacked with abolitionists or progressive candidates that might strike down the project. Mayor Bottoms did not end up running for re-election, and the former mayor, Mayor Reed, lost to the now current mayor, Andre Dickens.

I do think it's really funny that the old mayor of Atlanta was Mayor Bottoms, and the new mayor is Mayor Dickens. Anyway, city councilwoman Joyce Chepard, who introduced the Cops City Plan, also lost her campaign for re-election. But since the elections in November, nothing has actually changed regarding the Black Hole and Cops City developments. Nothing has changed on the electoral front. There's no indication of electoral strategies being impactful.

And thankfully, not everyone focused their efforts on electoral reform. I'll leave you today with this sentiment I kept hearing during my stay in the forest. When you criminalize non-violent direct action, the end goes away. On the final day of the vote, people went and protested outside a city council member's house, and 11 of them got arrested despite the fact that they were already dispersing and following orders. During the Stop Line 3 movement, people were receiving felony theft charges for using lock boxes to attach themselves onto construction equipment, which, of recent, hasn't really

been an effective strategy resulting in any material wins. But if they're going to arrest you for standing outside of a politician's house and give you charges, you may as well consider doing something a bit more spicy. If you're going to get felonies for basic non-violent direct action like locking yourself onto machinery, you may as well light that machinery on fire. If non-violent direct action results in felony charges, if they're going to criminalize standing outside of a politician's house and holding a sign, then going into the forest and doing monkey-wrenching suddenly becomes a very similar consequence level.

And the action that can be done in secret turns out to be actually a bit easier to get away with. The funny thing is, is that this is the state's fault, not anyone else's fault. When state repression against public, non-destructive tactics increases, then what happens is the less public and more fiery tactics, which in this movement were already present, will just end up becoming more and more prominent, and even more integral to keep the movement going. In the next episode, we'll hear about how the more radical folks continue to defend

the forest after the vote, and you'll hear a lot more from the force defenders that I interviewed. And finally, if you can, please head to Atlanta if you're able to for the upcoming week of action from May 8th through 15th, more boots on the ground are crucial as the large-scale destruction of the forest is becoming more and more imminent. You can go to defendtheatlantaforest.com and scenes.noblogs.org for more information. See you on the other side. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here.

I'm Garrison Davis, and this is part two of the two-part mini-series on the Defend the Forest movement in Atlanta, Georgia. Last month, I traveled to Atlanta to stay a week in the woods and talk with some of the forest defenders. In the previous episode, I covered the movement from its inception to where the City Council approved the Cops City project near the end of last summer. I went over a lot of historical background between the land itself and the history there, the increasing gentrification of Atlanta, how the movement pulled the veil off the secretive

plans for Cops City and pushed it into the public spotlight. We talked about the early days of sabotage and the targeting of individuals in positions of power. Basically, I did a lot of talking, maybe too much talking. This episode will be more led by the discussions with forest defenders that I had during my week-long excursion to the woods. We'll learn about how the movement evolved in the wake of the City Council vote up until the current state of affairs.

One thing that makes the Defend the Atlanta Forest movement very different from previous ICO defense projects in recent memory is that it's right in the middle of a sprawling metropolitan area. Right outside the forest is an Amazon facility, downtown Atlanta is just a 10-minute drive away. We'll be talking tactics a bit later on in the episode, but just the simple nature of doing a forest ICO defense project while still inside the city gives a lot of pretty interesting tactical opportunities.

You have to selectively use some of the older, more rural ICO defense strategies while having the backing of a city-based mutual aid network. There's the option of rapid response popular mobilization that city-based protests can have, but are more challenging for ICO defense stuff that's like three hours into the middle of nowhere. For the people camping in the forest, they can easily get supplies, or switch out who's staying in the woods and who's living in the city. The combination of forest and urban prompts and necessitates the crucial experimentation

and innovation that's been badly needed in ICO defense projects and protests for the past decade. Multiple enemies in this area has been chewed up, spit out, shadowed and burnt over because we're kind of doing something that doesn't really happen a lot. Something similar I can think of is the sacred oak grove that was being protected in Minneapolis in the late 90s, maybe early 2000s, and it was another kind of anarchist indigenous alliance at the Big Earth First presence, but that's kind of one of the more urban in this part of Turtle Island.

Struggles I can think of like this, but this is unlike anything I've ever done. I think another interesting part is like a lot of forest defense stuff is focused on like old growth, being like we should defend it because it's old growth. Yeah, this is not an old growth, this is like a messy, dirty, confusing, I've gotten lost so many times. Yeah, there's tires, there's barrels, it was built on the prison farm, you'll find like old portions of the prison which is incredibly fucked up and haunted, right? In terms of like haunting, there's the specter of what used to be there, the police are trying

to build over it with more like a bomb range, right? It's like that's very much like they're just building over the thing, but it doesn't need to be old growth to be worth defending, and that's an idea that I think people need to understand more is like it has value even if it's not like 500 years old, like it has value despite, not even despite being 100 year old forest, it has value because it is in 100 year old forest, like it has value because it is a forest in a city, and that's something that's worth like emphasizing. Yeah, I also think that's cool and like people talk a lot about like invasive plants and

there's, like I think the branch repairs in this forest are a really interesting example, there are these trees that are like feral, they used to be like planted here when it was a farm plantation or whatever, and those trees are fucking spiky, they're sugar-fine trees, they're spiking as shit, well, but you know the good news is they're awful and the bad news is they're awful, like I know where there are, when I haul ass to the forest, I usually don't get bad repair in my eyeball, but someone chased me and they like hop well, yeah, and so it's just, it's cool to kind of interact with all these things and get to choose how you want to interact and like, yeah, it is a, you know, I think it's interesting, it's

not, yeah, like a traditional forest or like whatever forest that people would value in that way, but for me, I connect to it, I think even more than that because it's not this like held up as this thing of like purity, like they fucking build those and like a month later that shit was overgrown, you couldn't see it again, that was all quote unquote invasive plants, like whatever the fuck that means, which is often, that's a whole thing, they're often racialized plants, you know, it's, it's almost like a punk forest, it's like, we're surrounded by enemies and there is, the problem is, they see this as a cesspool and something I talked to a lot of liberals about like, when they're taught, we're telling

them about to defend the forest, like, oh is it a pristine wilderness with large, old growth trees and like, you know what, that would be cool, the problem is this forest needs to be allowed to return to that because there's been so much abuse and part of like whether, I don't know what it means to quote unquote win or lose, but there's a lot of like little wins and losses all along the way and we've had a lot of wins, there is some big trees that are left in the forest, they're legally supposed to leave all the big trees by the creek, but from what historical, um, precedent do we trust the cops to quote unquote be accountable to anyone, I don't know where we're thinking that'll happen,

and I've heard a lot of people be like, oh, some of these tree houses are strategic, they're in the spots they can't get, and I'm like, you know what, friends, I've looked at the map and it looks like this whole motherfucking place is slated for clear cutting. Exactly one month after the city council voted to approve the land lease ordinance for Cop City, the defend the forest slogan was put to the test. On October 8th, 2021, contractors and land survey workers showed up around the forest and appeared to be clearing land to take reference photos and collect soil samples. Two dozen forest defenders emerged from the woods and confronted the workers. The people hired to destroy the forest fled the worksite

and after they left, a police surveillance tower in the area was toppled and the forest defenders were able to disperse with no arrests. 10 days later, a similar turn of events took place. A group of survey workers and construction teams were on site again. A small group of rapid response forest defenders disrupted the surveying and ground clearing at the old Atlanta prison farm. Simply the mere threat of an onsite protest shut down construction for the whole day. Key access points for machinery were blocked using available materials like piles of nearby tires, preventing vehicular machinery from moving freely through the destruction site. No construction occurred despite the attempts of the DeKalb County police and

the Atlanta Police Department, who mobilized 20 vehicles in the vicinity of the forest, in an effort to prevent the protest or punish the participants. By the end of the day, no one was arrested and yet again, select monitoring systems and police surveillance towers were toppled and dismantled. A statement released online from anonymous forest defenders read, quote, This war will be one, one battle at a time. Pressure must continue in a variety of ways to halt all construction. It became clear that for the next phase of the struggle, to defend the forest, people would have to directly target and oppose the contracting companies hired to decimate the woods and build the facilities. To date, we know of

at least three companies that have been contracted by the Atlanta Police Foundation to do work on the old prison farm land. Some of the surveying work appears to be done by long engineering and two companies, Reeves Young Construction and Brassfield and Goree, were hired to do grounds clearing and early construction. It is not yet clear who will be contracted to clear the land in Entrenchment Creek Park, where Blackhall Studios hopes to expand their soundstage. Again, quoting the Crime Think article, the city in the forest reinventing resistance for an age of climate crisis and police militarization, quote, The information that is known to date was hard won by diligent activists on the ground. Shortly after the

City Council voted in September, surveyors and small work crews began entering the site near two key roads. The trucks and uniforms revealed the names of the contractors, which once again gave opponents of the Cop City project a chance to initiate a struggle on their own terms. Had the force defenders utilized only virtual or bureaucratic channels to collect information, they might not have learned that Reeves Young were being called in to do the actual destruction until it was publicly announced much later. The ability to break news to the public before the city government has been a consistent advantage. In trying to keep the momentum of the movement going, post-City Council vote, a second week

of action was planned for November, albeit with some new twists. From November 10th through 14th, various groups organized a wide range of cultural events, info nights, bonfires, and meetings. For this week of action, many of these events occurred in or near a publicly advertised encampment on the Entrenchment Creek Park side of the forest. Days after the second week of action, 30 people converged on the Reeves Young construction headquarters in Sugar Hill, Georgia, 40 miles outside of Atlanta. Holding banners and demanding that the company sever their contract with the Atlanta Police Foundation, the group was able to walk right into the offices, disrupting a board meeting involving company president Dean Reeves and

CEO Eric Young. Initially, the executives tried to keep their cool, but in short time, the businessmen started getting more annoyed and eventually violent towards the protest. Would love for more cop fights with cops to just be WWE-style? Disrupting the board meeting was another successful step in the goal of applying direct confrontational pressure to the Atlanta Police Foundation's contracted construction service providers. Days later, two more bulldozers were lit on fire. This equipment was located on the land swap parcel by Blackhall Studios, the planned future location of, quote, Michelle Obama Park, unquote. These

were the 11th and 12th pieces of heavy machinery to be sabotaged. And I think now we're at like around 25. Uh, which is a lot. Um, the anonymous communique this time was short and to the point, quote, we burnt two bulldozers in the South Atlanta Forest, no Cops city, no Hollywood dystopia, defend the Atlanta Forest. On top of the more publicly advertised encampment at Entrenchment Creek Park, around the second week of action, a small cluster of forest defenders set up a secondary, more secretive encampment on a stretch of woods in the old Atlanta prison farm. Again, quoting the crime think article, quote, a few dozen people pitched tents, erected tarps and makeshift kitchens, hung banners and constructed a bona

fide protest camp in the woods. Establishing a semi-permanent presence in the forest was a way to gather information on an ongoing basis and to provide an immediate deterrent to developers. So I was involved in the original occupation of the forest. There was a group of autonomous individuals who, many of whom were housing insecure and were like, we need fucking housing and like, there's this struggle and we believe in it and we want to fight on it. And so we moved to the fucking woods and we lived in these woods. I lived the official time is six weeks that we were in the woods and we had a higher quality of life than like many

people who like lived in houses and apartments. We had the nicest kitchen of anyone we knew. We had, you know, we had armchairs and couches and fire pits and we, you know, we had more food than we knew what to do with. And so we just started feeding people and like we created a social space that like allowed the movement to grow simply because we're like, well, we need these needs met in our lives. Why don't we go do that? And that like evolved over time. Several over a month after the more secretive encampment was established, about a dozen protesters, some bearing witch hats, marched to the gate of Black Hole Studios on Constitution

Road and blocked the main entrance. A communique posted online, read, quote, iconic spells for destruction were loudly chanted at Black Hole's general direction as the witch block held hands, cackled and skipped in a sunrise direction, blocking Black Hole Studios' main entrance, smoke torches were lit. Approximately one hour post witch block antics, DeKab County police responded to a call made by Black Hole Studios saying that they, quote, followed the protesters into the woods and deduced an encampment they came upon must belong to the apparent witches, unquote, which is quite the sentence. Shortly after a large contingent of police raided the forest, evicting the protest camp established there.

There was at one point a group went and held a demonstration outside of Black Hole's, outside of Black Hole's site near the woods and they expressed their discontent at the front gate where employees leave and enter, and generally doing stuff like bringing American flags, holding signs, and just taking up space and making the actual entrance and leaving of the facility less doable, and their response was for Black Hole to lie and say that the camp encampment wasn't trespassing on their property, which was actually in place in like a public park, and orchestrated with the police to evict. And they orchestrated with the police to do a pretty intense eviction for what it was. Essentially, we were what amounted to

a homeless camp living there, and they had two helicopters circling more police than I could count. They were throwing our shit into dump trucks and actively pursuing people through the woods. It was like an absolute, I mean, it was like a very like visible show of force against us. Quoting the Crime Think article again, quote, At the urging of Black Hole, DeKalb County police entered the forest en masse, mobilizing police cruisers in the parking lot, officers on foot, helicopters and drones overhead, and unmarked vehicles in the streets. The officers were likely intimidated by the low visibility terrain. In any event, all of the forest defenders based in the encampment

escaped without being detained. This was the first time a concerted effort was made by law enforcement to engage protesters in the south river forest. And to be honest, it was a fucking pain in the ass. And it was a traumatizing event. And like, that is all true. But it's also an event we learned from. And like, we got a pretty good idea of like, APDs and like DeKalb County's like capabilities and like how they are like, surveilling thing, protests and how they're surveilling camps and like, how they figured out where we were and like, what triggered them to act against us and like, that's allowed us to move in far more confident ways that are also far more subversive.

And it's really interesting that, you know, just like when they make it, you know, illegal to do NVDA, whenever they attack like that and do these really violent raids that put people in like awful positions and like traumatize a shared of people, they are teaching us how to fight back. They are showing us their weaknesses. And in a really ironic way, the next time they come in and they fuck it up because people know what to expect, it'll be a monster of their own making. Because like, for every one step of aggression that they take, that's two steps further, we can take towards them with everything that we learned from the struggle. Yeah. And obviously this forest is really beautiful. And the more time I spend here,

the more I feel connected to it and driven to like protect it. But also a big part of it for a lot of us is for me is like, you know, they're doing this for their own morale. And so my goal is to make sure they are unhappy. And so yeah, even if I, yeah, even if they win, as long as we come back and you learn from that and we keep pushing back, you know, it is a war of attrition. And it is about their morale. And like, it doesn't matter if they build the police facility, what matters is that every single time the police move to recuperate, that their losses, which they just took a big one, they are faced with just unyielding hostility. And I think that like, that's something that's really important is

that we don't expect to not take a lot of L's. Like in the forest occupation, we understand the nature of this thing. We're in a static position and police are moving around us. But like, it's about making them fight for every inch the best we can. The encampment was just one part of a large ongoing fight. Over the course of those six weeks, hundreds of people were able to circulate through this camp, enjoying meals and performances, making art together and spending time around campfires, building and sharing a life in the woods. After the camp was attacked and structures were destroyed by the Cab County police, land offenders and Atlanta residents mobilized quickly to recover camp supplies and belongings

and continued on with efforts to defend the forest. A great thing about these types of free autonomous zones is that they can directly demonstrate to people what a free life outside of the confines of regular society can look like and what it can feel like. It's not just like we want to save this woods and we want to go back to our regular ass lives. A lot of us are realizing that we're living in the apocalypse and we're just going to we want to keep living like this. It's not just this woods. It's not just this police facility and we want them to not have any more space or platform to organize as police. But we want a lot of us want to be free. We want other people to like join the idea

of like, whatever the fuck it is, hitchhiking, train hopping, living in the woods. The fact that it's a fucking crime or considered crazy to be the people living in the woods is insane. And that's kind of the vibe we got from the Muskogee folks yesterday. They're like a whole world. Like we're here trying to reclaim our culture because there's a lot of hope for saving the land from like an indigenous perspective if people would respect them. And the whole point is the US government doesn't actually want them and doesn't actually respect them and reservations are literally a prisoner of war numbers because they're hoping by blood client and if they kill these people off they can take their land back. So the whole land

back idea fucking freaks them out. Anyway, we want to save this forest but it's not just about this forest. We're kind of endangered species. We've talked about ourselves feeling like deer. Like how deer like they'll be chilling. They'll be like, all right I'm being a deer, I'm getting food and they're like, I was on guard, you know, to do something else if there's an enemy around. It kind of feels that way. Like it will be chilling, nothing's going on, else and there's cops. But the whole point is if it can happen here, haha, did it. It can happen somewhere else and we hope to spread the vibe that people not like Occupy would have a horrible name for a movement but it's cool that that happened at the time

that we had made sense. We all, nobody knew any better. We know better now. That's great. But we're getting this vibe to like continue this kind of stuff. And obviously there's people in all kinds of places that squat buildings and do all sorts of shit. But the more territory that we occupy and control and can help re-matry back to indigenous grassroots comrades, not IRA, Indian Reorganization Act, government-sanctioned indigenous groups, right, if they can't. Not everyone's an ally. They have to be allyships that make sense. The Muscovy comrades that we're close to. Obviously not all of them. That's some romanticized generalized bullshit. They said the same shit that when we talk to them they're like, even our own people betray

us sometimes because we're not all the same. That's some homogenous bullshit. And I've seen that play out poorly in other places. They're like, we gotta give the long back to the natives. I'm like, which natives? Like people were all on a spectrum of colonization and decolonization and sadly some of us are further along the lines and others and it's very much on the colonizer's fault for doing that. But where we're at is the people, the people that feel the call, the energy, the people that feel the call to some kind of radical left orientation that can find it in their hearts and in their patience to tolerate each other. We need to band together to come up with better plans because we're all we

got and it doesn't get better. It's getting worse. So hopefully this can be an inspiration for people to do other shit. I'm inspired. I'm not from anywhere fucking near here but I've been here for a year now and I don't want to leave because I'm tired of the same old tactics and I have been a part of stuff that has been successful before and I have nothing to do with nonviolent direct action and I have to do time for it. And I know people that have done time for it also and if there's any message I can give to the young generation is there's no future and it's worth it. And like if your future is just like working in 9-5 and like watching the earth slowly like shrivel into nothingness I would argue it's

not really life. Might as well be dead. So I hope you live. I hope you choose to live. I think it's a really like interesting thing the psychological aspects of this because the first time you do the way we're socialized in a society is to be obedient and fearful and the first time you do something it legals the first time you do something that you know is against the world the first time you steal some food the first time you smash a window the first time you do any of that you're scared but then you get away with it you realize that this is a thing you can do and I think that the state can't stop you from doing and you realize oh I can do so much more and once you get over that initial fear once you smash

that window and you've gotten home and you're like oh I didn't go to jail for this but when you like get home you're like I have all this food now that I didn't have to pay for you start to realize maybe I don't need to work a job maybe I don't need to work 9-5 or you know 5 to midnight every day to you know get a job and pay rent you realize wait maybe I can just steal the food I need yeah I've been wanting to talk about that for a while for I want to make another hyper-objects episode and talk about the anarchist properties of Klein bottles and I described this type of freedom as like it's like how a Klein bottle works or like a fourth-dimensional object it's like you need in order for there's like this

extra degree or extra dimension of movement that we usually don't think is possible but it is actually there if you know how to and yeah it's like we're domesticated in so many ways to view here's what's possible here's what isn't possible I have to exist within this framework and only doing these things which are seen as correct and there's actually more degrees of freedom than that we just don't often like acknowledge them but you can totally phase through things and you can totally find that extra degree of freedom and once you do that's a super interesting feeling as opposed to like waiting for gay luxury space communism you can instead do like fourth-dimensional like hyper-anarchism

which gives you so much more freedom right now instead of just waiting for the communism that will never come and the relationships you build the relationships you build that are based on a trust that is I trust you to have my back I trust you to work with me and do this thing is so much deeper than the trust of I guess I trust my co-worker but like I really trust them not to snitch on my boss like the trust that comes from a relationship where you're like hey let's like we need food let's go steal it together that kind of trust is not something that can be recuperated that kind of like relationship where it's like our relationship is built on the fundamental we will do it we have to to survive it creates

an intimacy that you can't find anywhere else and a criminal intimacy you might say um yeah and that that was the point as somebody else picked my ear yeah just to double down on that too like I think it's um it's cool too because uh when you also come to a space like this like you can live like that on your on your own or with your friends but then there's something wild when you come to this space um and then all of a sudden it's like when you start attacking something that a lot of other people want to see attacked all of a sudden all you have to do is attack that thing and food's there yeah and like you have all these resources and you can focus on that and so like it's like yes I'm like it's like

a joke to some degree but like if you want to be a lifestyle anarchist like if you want to actually be an anarchist right now and do anarchist shit you can come to Atlanta and do it and like it's not easy it's fucking scary it's sketchy it's hard there's freaky ass bugs but like yeah you don't have to wait and like yeah it I think that that's something that like for me is really magic is that like actually the more you attack and the more you like position yourself to be antagonistic towards the world the more this like fourth dimensional like when you shoot on you know like which I immediately understand like starts to kind of like self actualize and um yeah I think it's cool it's in and like it freaks me out to think that there's

mad people who are probably probably pretty cool like waiting for some opportunity like waiting just teaches waiting and we don't have that much time yeah you can live anarchy now you don't need to wait for the collapse tm because turns out that already it's already happening and that already happened we're just waiting in the liminal space until the climate change catches up with the the emissions are already there we're already living in it we just don't realize it yet or some of us aren't denial of it yet but the collapse is like now we it's already the thing we don't need to wait for the one big collapse that's a myth but you can live anarchy and do stuff you don't need to to wait for the next communist president who's gonna run and fail there's no coming social

movement there's no coming collapse there is nothing to wait for to keep on waiting as madness right aside I think a really interesting aspect of this movement about like how we are attacking a popular target and how like in attacking a popular target we've built this like thing is we are we're not just here and attacking this thing that doesn't exist in isolation we're here and we've built a movement and we've built uh we've through attack we've built a built this like popular idea that like actually you know like if you want something to not be there instead of like talking to a politician you can set it on fire vote harder vote harder just just just just one more vote I swear now I like to talk more about tactics since the city council vote on the ground tactics

have gained a much more integral role and grown past the basic sabotage and house visits although both of those still are crucial aspects in keeping the movement going different ways of preventing physical construction surveying of land and destruction of the forest made up most of the on the ground direct action efforts inside the forest I think a really interesting aspect of the way that the struggle has happened here is that because it's so decentralized there are people and no one really knows who but there are people who will just show up and like you know it's like there were people who were like getting the cops called on them in the woods and shit and then like a bunch of fucking anonymous people showed up and like toppled all the camera

towers and people stopped getting the cops called on them in the woods for a really long time and like that kind of decentralized thing especially where it's like you know regardless of even like if the people in the woods were like you know like into doing shit it's like it's really useful when people who have more skills and people have more knowledge and more ability to do things and more ability to take risks it's really awesome when those kinds of people can come and make things safe for a larger mass of people and I feel like that is like a strategy and like the insurrectionary space that can be truly like expanded on where people who know their shit can make things safe for large groups of people to generalize revolt yeah I look at like a lot of

like how the struggle has been framed from the very beginning as like there was no call to action do x y z there was a bunch of people pursuing their own individual desires and what they saw as a forward-facing like a projection of their own ideas into the future and made that happen and it was underneath this framework where there was no limit there were no boundaries and there was no idea like us all having to be on the same page about that yeah you don't need to like attend a march to be to like do effective things in fact it turns out doing things that are not attending a march can often be way more materially effective yeah and to double down on that like um so many times there's just like a script that people follow oh this is how we do it and

then there's and there's like this action that's applied to like everything that people don't like and holy shit that's a crazy book it was a wild fight um I don't even think about that uh but yeah that there's these like things that are applied to everything and this struggle very much has no script uh which is really exciting and but but what's even cooler about that is that it's not it's also not reinventing the wheel and so there's people who are taking from you know like kind of like classic insurrectionary anarchist uh like approaches there's people looking at eco defense stuff from all over the world thinking about um uh there's people looking at some successful like nonviolent direct action there's people looking at uh ALF struggles and like how like

those campaigns targeted campaigns secondary targeting how things like that work the contracting and subcontracting companies hired by the Atlanta police foundation made up the new targets of the pressure campaigns and direct confrontation methods that threatened physical and social capital bringing back the house visits mentioned in the previous episode in late December banners that read Reeves Young out of the Atlanta forest were hung in the backyard of the private residence of Dean Reeves in Suwani Georgia. Dean Reeves serves as the chairman of Reeves Young Construction and was among the board members present at the November action and he personally allegedly uh shoved and assaulted protesters inside the uh brawl after the backyard banners were hung uh an

anonymous online statement read quote we hope this action gives but a minuscule dose of what the creatures in the South Atlanta forest you want to build those might feel unsafe in the place they call home. A month later on January 18th Reeves Young Construction and representatives of the Atlanta police foundation entered the forest with a bulldozer. They started knocking down trees to complete more surveying work and determine the construction supplies needed for a laying of building foundation. Forest destruction was halted when approximately a dozen protesters approached the workers and Atlanta police foundation representative Allen Williams and demanded that they leave. Workers were safely escorted out of the woods and the bulldozer was

left at the scene and was subsequently taken out of commission. In my interviews with some forest defenders I believe one of them referred to this as the bulldozer tripping and falling so that's fun. The day after autonomous groups of people finished construction of multiple well-built tree houses up in the canopy near the site of the previous day's confrontation. People climbed up into tree houses and announced their intention to remain there in order to delay further construction riffing off the old tree-sit and bipod tactics. From October 2021 to this point in the struggle which is like mid-January 2022 work was consistently able to be stopped by small dedicated groups of people without resorting to force. Throughout the next week attempts at land

surveying in the area of the old Atlanta prison farm continued but now with workers being accompanied by the Atlanta police foundation, Atlanta police officers, and a cab county police. With the backing of cops workers were able to accomplish more of their tasks including tree felling and soil boring. Per crime thing quote, in some instances only a handful of activists were on the scene behind makeshift barricades. Reinforcements cannot arrive rapidly enough to assist those on the ground unquote. Reportedly undercover cops surrounded the forest intimidating those who would park nearby as such some outside support did show up but not in mass. Meanwhile in the forest it was a game of cat and mouse between the workers, forest defenders, and cops. Police went so far as to start chasing

people on forest trails while riding on ATVs. Barricades and the tactical removal of land survey markers did slow down work on some days but ultimately efforts were unsuccessful in halting the destruction process entirely. This week of land destruction and cat and mouse culminated on January 28th. Around 60 people the largest crowd in months gathered to march into the south of her forest and onto the old Atlanta prison farm to directly confront construction workers who were boring holes in the ground doing soil sample collection. DeKalb County police attacked the protesters tackling multiple people and arresting four. The first arrests inside the forest within the context of the movement. Quoting crime thing again quote, police attacked the march tackling

several people. The other demonstrators did not mount a proportional response to this aggression despite outnumbering the police. Perhaps some of the tactics popular during the 2020 rebellion such as the mass use of umbrellas or makeshift shields could have equipped the participants to feel more capable of decisive action. Allen Williams of the Atlanta police foundation was filming protesters looking a little anxious as he did so. A statement on the defend the forest scenes.noblogs.org site concluded their report back with this sentiment quote, at this point we are in need of two main things more people to help support tree sits and defend the forest from destruction and legal attempts to delay construction. Yeah always you want more

people to be on the ground in the woods in the city chaos we need chaos we'd like the right the chaos star we'd like that shit for a reason um you want to wear out the enemy in a lot of different ways and the enemy is a lot of different people the enemy is resuring the enemy is their subcontractors the enemy is the police the enemy is Georgia Park Georgia power owns quote unquote owns the power cut and that divides both entrenchment creek and the whole pf side there's a lot of different people so if there's a lot of and we also have a lot of different people involved in a lot of different ways there's people living in the woods there's people living in town so in reality people already know these things that's already happening we should be visiting the

offices we should be visiting these fuckers at home at the goddamn church we should be visiting them in the forest there should be there should be no peace for the enemy and i believe that's how we can win because we need to make it unpopular and unsavory and hopefully next to impossible for them to make these choices because even though this is a small part of the forest they're just gonna continue on to the next thing i want to briefly go into some details about a method of protest that combines pressure to both physical and social capital in hopes of resulting material changes from businesses corporations or people in power it features many of the actual tactics we've in fact already discussed we'll refer to it as the shack method for reasons that will be

shortly explained house visits targeted vandalism phone calls and hanging banners and backyards all have a place in this methodology it's a focused drive to dissolve that safe political or corporate astral space that i talked about in the last episode the cramp think article contains a really good summary of the shack method so instead of just like regurgitating their explainer i'm gonna i'm just gonna narrate certain sections of it uh because that'll make my job easier and i'm i'm a hack and a fraud blah blah blah blah quote the goal is to hold those responsible for these projects personally liable for their decisions and the decisions of the companies they own because the entire system of rules and norms we live under dictates that

exploiters warlords mass murderers and those that destroy ecosystems must not face pressure at home as a consequence of the decisions that they make at work this strategy is bound to be controversial it rejects the entire logic of limited liability that forms the basis of corporate rule in our society at the beginning of the 21st century animal rights activists in the uk and the us set out to take down the biggest animal testing corporation on the planet huntington life sciences the campaign to stop huntington life sciences was called stop huntington animal cruelty or shack it formally disbanded in 2014 and is best known for its period of ambitious international participation in the early 2000s the methodology of this movement

which encompassed direct actions symbolic protests cultural events sabotage pranks and more included many features that had been since used in a wide range of campaigns the overall strategy of shack involved mobilizing a few hundred people to maximize their effectiveness against a major enterprise by focusing only on their ability to function economically the shack model is centered around tertiary targeting i.e. isolating service providers from third-party contracts in order to limit their ability to provide services to the client which is the actual target okay now i'm just going to pause here because if that sounds confusing let me let me briefly provide an example so the actual target here would be the atlanta police foundation since they're the ones with

plans to build a cop city the police foundation has contracted a few companies brassfield and gory for one and reeves young so these companies are the service provider the shack model attempts to isolate the service provider so reeves young from all of their third-party clients and contracts which will in the end go back to hurt the actual target which is the atlanta police foundation back to crime think the service provider so in this case reeves young the service provider depends on many third parties third parties provide the service provider with insurance materials equipment security catering cleaning mail service data maintenance and more all of those third parties can be pressured to drop the service provider furthermore the service provider is likely a

company with more than one client and those other clients can also be pressured to drop the provider any company or contractor that is able to move their money away from the service provider because they have other economic opportunities can be pressured to do so essentially this strategy does not directly challenge the bottom line of any of the third party companies it only isolates and demoralizes the service provider and therefore the end target to date it still remains unclear who is the service provider for the blackhall studio's development although that information will come out sooner than later in considering the limits of the shack strategy in actions outside of the forest it might be more difficult for activists to maintain a sense of urgency targeting

individuals at their offices and homes will chiefly bring out those who are excited about such confrontational methods rather than those who prefer to maintain welcoming spaces of encounter to build treehouses to or to clean campsites to cook for others to cultivate the kind of collective imagining that is needed to transform society also if people fail to do proper research or mapping activists could waste their time targeting minor institutions and companies that are unwilling or unable to drop their contracts they could spend months facing down insignificant companies with many possible replacement subcontractors oh sorry that was a lot that was a big info dump but i think it is useful information so the goal isn't to sway companies with

moralizing arguments but to frame their association with militarized policing or ecological destruction as a bad look that could hurt their reputation and ability to secure future clients combined with economic incentives inflicted on the service provider like acts of sabotage the resulting targeted campaign attacking physical and social capital can lead to pressure on third parties to influence the decision of the service provider on whether or not to stay on the project methodologies can be put to the test through practice and be judged by the outcome the proposal to employ the shack strategy to defend the forest is just built on the symbol hypothesis that if Reeves Young is forced to drop the contract with the lana police foundation the lana police foundation investors

will then lose the confidence that's required to find an adequate replacement and the project could stumble or fail the same goes for the black hall project if activists defeat Reeves Young by means of direct action and self-organization even if the project finds a new contractor the sophistication and confidence that the movement will have developed in the process will likely help it evolve once again also like one thing that we that people have figured out because like for the first two after the first two are since you could literally just walk up to during daylight up to the like area of michelle obama bark and like touch take pictures of like uh half sex around like make out with uh the construction equipment that had been burned

and you could see the stickers of where they had rented these like construction equipment um destruction equipment and like after the first one it changed it was no longer rented from the same company and after the second one it changed again and there is reason to believe that with every arson or attack that they are changing construction equipment companies because rental companies tend to not like it whenever their equipment is destroyed it costs them a lot of money and oftentimes they cannot afford hundreds of thousands of dollars going down the drain beat to support a plot project that's highly unpopular yeah and the other thing what we're talking about with the modified like a policing modifying itself is it's interesting because

we're at this point where policing is highly unpopular and so it's kind of hedging its bets and it's doing two things first it's calling itself like the social peace and justice cute bunny rabbit center for your racist if you don't like us or whatever and then it's also just like mask off doubling down buying mad guns like like yeah just becoming increasingly more militarized increasingly more violent and like moving mask off like an occupying force so there's this split where there's no and people are well aware of this there's there's no like public uh chance of convincing um a lot of companies that this is wrong right there's it's it's well it's very divided so the people who are committed are very committed there are fucking enemies and

where their enemies and that's it but then there's other people who are doing this for economic reasons and kind of understand that policing is not cute right and that it's at least unpopular going out of fashion to some degree and can make money in other ways so yeah it's this interesting thing where like being able to like fight battles for public opinion maybe doesn't super work and all you have to do is um kind of try to like cut away the people who are supporting people who are ideologically committed to our destruction and we are you know feel reciprocal if you look at the photos of what was happening with Michelle Obama Park the land swap site they were trying to build on you can tell that heavy yellow equipment LLC of Marietta Georgia stopped

providing them equipment after like the first or the second time that their machines got lit on fire and now it's alif alif of i don't know where georgia so you know these are photos that you can see like you can look at these communicates and just tell like i'm like like if there's a photo attached like there is a traceable like trend of companies are dropping the fuck out because they for whatever reason just cannot take the heat no pun intended on june 12th 2020 while fully in the throes of nationwide revolt against police after the murder of george floyd two atlanta police officers killed ray shard brooks a black man who had been sleeping in his car in the parking lot of a wendy's not long after the restaurant was burnt to the ground by determined crowds in the time period between

june 2020 to the end of the year more than 200 atlanta police officers left their jobs including their chief of police local sheriff's deputies state patrolmen and transit cops also resigned during the year of the uprising at a higher than average rate as the entire system of policing and capitalism faced a crisis of legitimacy corporations business owners landlords business associations and international real estate companies demand a public pacification and a reassurance of a future with stable consumerism profit incentive and police need each other in a symbiot like relationship um i'll do one of my last crime think quotes here quote forces in local and federal government business associations police departments and our militias have continuously

worked to make sure a popular uprising does not reoccur a large part of the institutional reaction to the 2020 popular uprising has focused on managing public perception industrial interests and private investment companies have conducted influence campaigns using local news outlets 40 of which are owned by cinclair broadcasting group of a right-wing news organization between cinclair next star gray tega and tribune this coordinated reframing of events has damaged the way that many sectors of the television viewing public perceive the 2020 revolt and its consequences in the wake of the uprising a false narrative circulated to the effect that police what while demoralized and underfunded cannot control the crime waves currently sweeping the country this

orchestrated narrative has shaped the imaginations of suburban whites smelt business owners and many urban progressives the crime wave framework implied that police departments around the country had in fact been defunded or had their powers curtailed and were consequently unable to assure social peace or free enterprise in reality the vast majority of police departments received an annual increase in their budgets as they normally do if anything they accrued more power following the events of 2020 so it's no coincidence that the alana police foundation and the alana police department are pushing to build a militarized urban warfare training center in the wake of the 2020 uprisings by leveraging that crime wave narrative and the fears of future

social unrest they want to have the tools to bring down the inevitable upcoming revolts for racial environmental and economic justice and now more than ever including reproductive justice cop city is leading the charge as a part of a new effort to adapt american policing strategies to our new era of societal decay and the ever crumbling that will define this century as we face the escalating consequences of industrialization and climate change i think another really like important thing to look at with this also is like when you look at the george floyd uprising and the crisis it brought in policing when they realized that oh holy shit people are so angry about this that they will pose a threat to the sovereignty of the state which is the first time

that has happened in an extremely long time when that finally happened the state the morale of police departments around the country was broken cops everywhere were like it was a demoralizing thing and when you think about cops as an occupying force as an occupying military force it thinking about the fact that we broke their morale is really important and then thinking about this place as they intend to build a training facility to increase morale which is a classic military tactic of create cool and interesting ways to train your soldiers to do a murder is like that is a classic military tactic and when you think begin to think about this as social or when you begin to think about this as not just a struggle against cop city but like as a struggle for like

disabling and destroying the police when you think about this as a material struggle against the occupying forces that are the police this becomes like way more contextual that that is the best way to contextualize this movement yeah so one interesting thing is like after Raychard Brooks was murdered and the two cops involved were um subsequently charged um what was it 600 cops went on set out hundreds hundreds um and their morale was broken a land police has always been understaffed for like as long as i've known um and not understaffed by like any media propaganda spend standard standards standards but like every single day they're facing backlogs in every zone where they cannot answer calls and that's a good thing this is a war of attrition

where their current training facilities have broken toilets have leaky pipes have unmanned and operable sinks have like have undeniably miserable conditions their cars are out their cars are like continually on their last legs and we that's that is a path to abolitionism making it so it is so undesirable to be a cop in this city or any city that no one would dare do it it is crucial that police are not the only ones that seek to evolve their tactics for a new era and moving beyond the kind of nonviolent action that's become so common during protests during the trump era and the poached green scare and even like post occupy there is this looking for a new form of anarchist or radical resistance i want to really emphasize the learning things

here is that this struggle like took all the different rule books tore them up set them on fire and used the ashes for their shitter like everyone here is learning things people who have been been doing things a long fucking time are here and learning new things we're we're not just like tearing up and like destroying the rule books we're like we're like a lot just out of them we are we are we are like put them like it like tore all of them up make a lot just out of them and like is trying to create this like weird paper machine mesh of a experimental path into the future i mean and like we wouldn't when we say we are experimenting with new forms of rival new new tactics new strategies we truly mean there aren't existing models to do what we're doing we are writing

the book as we do it and yeah we fuck up sometimes but we've also got some really cool shit happening shit that hasn't happened in 20 years is happening and shit that hasn't happened ever is happening here i think that's like a really the really important thing to touch on is that like much of the yeah much of the like eco defense shit that's happened in north america for quite a while has like not done you know at least not released communicates about like shit that happens here seemingly every couple weeks you know like the shit here is crazy and wildly on your dreams it's also scary and hard and traumatizing and it's beautiful and terrifying and like yeah that sounds great you should come yeah this is a step away from us actually evolving

out of the i look at this is like a huge step in what land defense looks like after we have after we have faced green scare repression and now we are moving past the post green scare repression movements and figuring out how to move forward and regardless of that this like lands in a really repressive like boots down at the roads like situation i don't think anyone should ever stop experimenting i don't think people should go back to the old ways i don't think that we should be resigned to not experiment i think that everyone like we are in a situation where there is no future there like the collapse is now we're probably not going to avoid 1.5 degrees warming our police are only further male it's rising and the like reality of resistance

is that we just that we desperately need experimentation yeah if there was a winning strategy that was proven to be effective then it would have it would have been effective in therapy we would have a winning strategy there's a popular meme in the forest which is the are you a winning son meme except instead of are you a winning son it says are you experiencing the joy of attack son um and i think that is an important one the same way cop city is a part of the new evolution of american policing defend the atlanta forest can be seen as kind of trail blazing for future movements a look at how they might develop post the george floyd protests for my last final crime think quote quote this campaign represents a crucial effort to chart

new paths forward in the wake of the george floyd rebellion linking the defense of the land that sustains us with the struggle against police the movement opposing these developments mobilizing around the watchwords defend the forest and stop cop city have passed through several phases of experimentation using a wide array of tactics and strategies to keep pace with the current course of events it represents an important effort to revitalize eco defense and police abolition strategies in the wake of the george floyd rebellion so considering the possible wide-ranging impacts of both the evolution of policing and the evolution of resistance tactics the defend the atlanta forest movement is extremely relevant to all people who want to

improve the world whether or not they live in atlanta atlanta has for a very long time been a testing ground for new surveillance tech and like in like experimenting with new forms of struggle here in atlanta there are things that not only are we in many ways on the front lines of experimenting with new tactics and integrating new strategies and how they work but we're also on the front lines of like different kinds of both like like in-person and digital forms of of repression that don't have to be worried about other places and like it also provides a proving ground for ways to struggle specifically against those forms of surveillance and understanding the different ways that sometimes the most effective thing in protecting yourself from

repression isn't some super high-tech shit it's a ski mask a pair of gloves and not bringing your phone and like people don't seem to like think about that so speaking of surveillance we actually have like not we i don't claim that um the police here and the state here has like the video video integration system which i believe is like one of our like integration center video integration center where they take where businesses and homeowners of like green cameras can volunteer their video surveillance equipment to be plugged into a network um that can be monitored and pulled up at any time by the police um in a downtown location and they and that is like one of the largest surveillance uh network systems in the world i believe um and it is actually leading

to charge in like new forms of surveillance in other cities are looking at this as a model of how to how to better surveil their own cities which obviously makes line of police defendation trying to create their own little mini city a very interesting prospect in terms of like establishing new you know this means this was mentioned before in terms of like establishing new ideas and how to take policing forward into 2020s 2030s um after we've had these wave of social justice like uprisings and uprisings for black lives matter um with you know i mean not many places actually got defunded but the propaganda has to be different and like the way the police optics work definitely needs to be changed from their perspective or they're trying

to have them be changed one of the strongest things i feel like came out of this movement really puts ahead was our ability to have the game on like the narrative and then never being able to recuperate that narrative is their plan was this institute for social justice is a new way of training police to quote be better or like not murder people as much and like more refined and i don't want more refined like police that like murder quote the right people or beat the right people or cage the right people that's not my desire i want end to policing yeah i think that there's a lot of projects happening in the forest and you know i also just want to emphasize like i'm not from Atlanta but i feel like it's really important for me to be here you know i think a

lot of people who felt inspired by the george fluid uprising like um this is an attempt to recuperate like i've said this a million times this is an attempt for the police to recuperate from that i'm trying to finish what we started i also think that we need to understand that this isn't just about Atlanta like one of the buildings that they're trying to build and like one of the points of this training facility is that it is like a hub in the same way Atlanta with it with a movie theater the same way they're trying to make Atlanta this hub right it's there's the infrastructure for being a hub from shipping and stuff like that and so now they're trying to make it this this economic hub in a white color way and so they're trying to make it a hub for police

in Atlanta but also to train police to do fucked shit and to mutate like nationally and i know that the police from the you know whatever city i live in are probably gonna come here and go back and fuck that up so i'm trying to make sure that they can't come here and that you know police are demoralized in every city and they're having trouble in every city and this isn't just about the apd if you live pretty much anywhere on the east coast there's a high chance that your police are gonna come here and then go back to your house and fuck you up so come here and make sure they can't and the other thing i want to say is like um yeah they want to make this a training facility for police uh right now it is a training facility for anarchists if you come here i promise you you

will leave with more courage and with more skills and knowing a lot of fucking people who are really fucking down all over the country um and i think it's worth it so i'm sorry i wanted to jump in and say like this is about you um an hour or two hours south of here is the school of the americas you might have heard of it it's here in georgia it's where a lot of awful fucking dictators and their henchmen learned how to do really awful shit a bunch of war crimes and here in the city of Atlanta uh a local school the largest the largest university in the state george state university hosts something called the georgia international law enforcement exchange or ghillie which is where they and the idf get together to train local police forces here in atlanta and around the country and

if you don't think that cop city is going to play a huge role in your police department learning from the idf how to beat you up you have another think coming you should come here to atlanta and join what's going on because this is about everyone here like this is about the whole country they are coming to atlanta to learn how to brutalize people and it's going to take all of us to stop it a funny thing about this project is that there's these sort of dual intersections and dual microcosms on one side there is the intersection of policing gentrification racism ecological destruction and climate change and on the other side there's the intersection between the tactics of urban city protest and rural eco defense but there's also this dual microcosm on the side of the state

they're trying to construct this police facility with a mox city to train in microcosm for protest suppression and practice urban combat against people who live in american cities and on the people's side there's this microcosm not only for how resistance movements can evolve post 2020 but more importantly for the people involved in the struggle a microcosm for how you can live a life free of the oppressive societal mechanisms that we claim to oppose and another really interesting thing about this being like such an ungovernable space is that because it's ungovernable because it's impossible to control it allows us to create these like new ways of relating to the trouble that can't happen other places like where else are like people and their

everyday lives just can be able to walk around as gender fucked as they want and like just it's fine like you know if they're if a queer basher comes into these fucking woods like it's gonna be a bad time because literally everyone here is queer like we don't that's the thing is like when we exist in these spaces in this ungovernable way we like are like creating mini versions of the society we want to see it large yeah this is something I want to talk about this is something I wanted to talk about in terms of like the microcosm microcosm idea of after 2020 uprising looking for new paths forward the defendant of forest thing can be viewed as this microcosm like this microcosm of how we can approach different struggles going into the 2020s going

into the 2030s and stuff because yeah like it is like this small version of what we want there's also the whole idea of like what I've seen here in the forest more closely resembles like an actual temporary autonomous zone than like the chas ever did in terms of like people actually like actually living free actually living like not relying on like city water like not like not living in like the downtown metro area it's like it's an actual free space where people can be queer and be all of the things and climb trees and talk with the deer and like that's people are actually allowed to do that like this there's not all of the stigma that even I think like chas had like so many problems right like extremely extremely a hashtag problematic in terms of how that resulted and

yeah this is such a microcosm of like like an autonomous area where people are able to do those things I also kind of want to talk about like the like ideas of safety and security don't reside in like the ideas of say a safety or security force it doesn't reside in our trust in ourselves and each other it resides in like we actually keep each other safe we have each other's backs we like we'll fight for each other and any threat to any one of us is like taken seriously we have this like intimacy this criminal intimacy that like allows us to build more genuine relationships with high highs and low lows than anything ever could and like the deafening that society puts on us this like chemically induced regulated median of gray and terrible is that's not what we live

yes some days here it sucks to wake up and everything you own is wet and you've got to go shit in the hole but it's flooded but also some days things here are fucking awesome and I get to wake up to the birds calling and go like have a party with my friends I don't like exist here in a way that is like comprehensible or legible to like a wider like society I don't exist in a way that people look at this and be like ah that's what you need but I have never been happier than when I've been in the woods with people I trust and care about and no have my back people people don't have to worry about working to pay their water bill because you can go just get the things you need from places you don't have to pay for it and like you don't have to worry

about all of these things all of these societal pressures there's not this constant threat of oh I lose my job oh all this things all those things all these mental constructs that can troll us aren't there anymore because we've built a world it doesn't doesn't rely on that in the slightest and I think that's like a really powerful thing that like we've already met our own needs and so we can fight back in these beautiful and fiery ways pun intended that like allow us to just experience things that like have been stolen from us generations yeah I was gonna say we're not safe but we're free and I think that anyone who makes that decision is an active decision to not be safe but to be free I may not like but by definition I'll ride for them because I hate that decision

we're now nearing the end of the episode but before I finish I need to go back to talking about tactics for a bit and end with some actual good news from January 2022 to present time of recording there's been an increase in solidarity attacks in cities across the country some targeting Reeves Young and long engineering equipment in other states a third-party service providers of contracted construction companies or locations and offices of corporate sponsors of the Atlanta Police Foundation this past March six machines owned by Reeves Young including two large excavators and a bulldozer were destroyed in flowery branch Georgia the online communique reads quote so long as you continue to contract with the Atlanta Police Foundation for the destruction of the South

Atlanta forest and the construction of a cop city in its place know that your equipment is not safe your offices are not safe your homes are not safe unless your company chooses to pull out of the Atlanta Police Foundation's cop city project of its own volition we will undermine your profits so severely that you'll have no choice but to drop the contract unquote subsequent solidarity attacks have happened in Portland San Francisco Salt Lake City Minneapolis and Highland Michigan to name a few many of these attacks were targeted at atlas technical consultants who own many smaller companies such as long engineering which has done work with Reeves Young and brassville and gory for the cop city project in the vein of shack style methods

this past April on the ninth a website called stop Reeves young calm launched onto the interwebs the site listed some of the various third-party clients and subcontractors under Reeves Young Construction and ways to contact them to voice concern about their relation to the deforestation and this urban warfare construction project as well as including the names and addresses of executives within Reeves Young and some of their affiliates on the day I was set to leave Atlanta and say goodbye to the forest for the time being activists got word that Reeves Young Construction might be dropping out of the project this would obviously be a big big win and an indication of the possible effectiveness of the shack method combined with sabotage and the forest encampment

tactics at a stakeholders meeting for the cop city project the next day it was publicly confirmed that Reeves Young will not continue work on the new police training center in the public statement addressing Reeves Young's lack of future involvement the Atlanta police foundation tried to frame the situation as Reeves Young simply have quote finished their role in the project this is a laughable deception as Reeves Young is one of Atlanta's major construction firms and has even built massive quote-unquote public safety facilities in the past they do not merely do preliminary subcontracting survey work they work on projects from start to finish taking lead contracting roles it was speculated that Reeves Young itself may have been the main subcontractor

hired to do complete construction of cop city by brassfield and gory who have more established ties to the Atlanta police foundation quoting from the stop for Reeves Young website quote the Atlanta police foundation would have us believe that Reeves Young was contracted to do nothing more than hire a bulldozer and walk alongside long engineering work crews as they planted a few surveying stakes ended some soil testing police and their corporate backers don't want to let it be known that a focused group of activists have delivered a devastating blow to the cop city construction while the Atlanta police foundation tries to save face we are celebrating a major victory pressuring a main contractor out of the project we are pleased

that the movement has built up so much momentum and that the cop city development continues to face setbacks because of the intelligent actions of regular people however the struggle continues brassfield and gory another large general contractor remains with the project a georgia open records request from april confirmed via paper trail that the Atlanta police foundation has been working on the cop city project with brassfield and gory another major general contractor in the southeast region of the united states brassfield and gory is an llc and a multi-billion dollar general contractor ranked as a top contractor in the southeast by engineering news record based on recent Atlanta police foundation emails requiring through public records we can now assume

that brassfield and gory act as the sole contractor for cop city quoting again from the stop reeves young website quote brassfield and gory are dependent on subcontractors to complete their projects now they must hire a new entire set of subcontractors in order to build a cop city we believe it is in their best interests for brassfield and gory to follow the lead of reeves young and drop Atlanta police foundation as a client rather than remaining complicit in the destruction of the forest it is up to all of us to make that clear to them we can pressure brassfield and gory out of cop city by complicating their ability to do business this does not have to be limited to the cop city project their various construction projects and third party service providers

are numerous if brassfield and gory begin to feel like they must choose between all of their contracts and their cop city contract we are confident that they will choose the former by working to convince subcontractors consulting firms surveyors architects etc around the country that brassfield and gory are not a good business investment we can make it easier for the construction company to do the right thing and dump the Atlanta police foundation for good this has been an incredible period of momentum and research but nothing is over yet now that we have made a decisive victory it is important to remain more focused than ever in the coming weeks and months we will need to continue pressuring all of the contractors associated with the project to create economic

incentives for them to simply move their time and resources to other endeavors the stop reeves young website will continue to serve as an educational hub for this ongoing campaign on top of confirming that reeves young was dropping out of the project a few other interesting pieces of information came out at the recent stakeholders meeting held on april 26th allegedly there will be a bid for the next contractors or subcontractors in the coming weeks and that will be publicly announced it was also announced during the meeting that the cop city planners will keep construction timelines secret and may surround the construction site and future facility with an unwanted fence in response to the quote law-breaking protesters atlanta assistant police

chief and site security chief darin shear bomb said quote we are working with de cab county to address any criminal acts related to trespassing and vandalism unquote he also stated that police were also concerned with protesters targeting those who work on the project at other locations here's an interesting note from our forest defender pals on how the atlanta police department function and are allowed to operate well inside the old atlanta prison farm and entrenchment creek park this is something that's true of city police departments in general but as soon as a cop is you know out of like streets and things like that that cop is uncomfortable and like cops here are carrying 20 30 pounds of gear on them at all times and not only are they

carrying that much gear but they spend most all day sit running around and sitting in a car and like you know that cop not only doesn't want to chase you through the woods but they also probably aren't capable of it and aside from the obvious like you know their infrastructure issues them being away from their cars not being on the streets having all of their gear we're also not in this city of atlanta in this forest we're an unincorporated de cab county which means atlanta police department doesn't have legal jurisdiction as police here they only have legal jurisdiction as agents of the city of atlanta because the city of atlanta owns this property which is outside of the city so in any time when they're conducting an arrest they have to have de cab county police

department officers present with them there there can be an atlanta police department and has been major like one of their huge like high ranks who has no legal authority here except to represent the city and that relationship is kind of like tenuous at best they hate each other they hate each other yeah and you know so if you're if you're headed in the town like bear in minds that is a huge place to drive a wedge because they they fucking hate each other yeah no there's like um um there was like one thing one time where like a land police officers right inside the forest um with like a specific goal in mind and the cab county police cruisers not only did cap the cap police not want to gather their cruisers and go into the forest because they have they didn't care

they didn't want to do this so the atlanta police uh were screaming into their radios saying give this person they're walking out of the forest give this person they're walking out of the forest and it would just be like five or ten minutes before the cab police like cruisers to just roll down the road and like you know there are like people who like ran into the woods and like ran from them into the cab police like we're like i'm not going into this what these woods and i'm also not calling to let the atlanta police to let them know that this person just ran from me into the woods because then they'll have to actually go in after them also during the april 26th stakeholder meeting security chief shear bomb announced that the fbi and the georgia bureau of investigation agreed to

an assistance request in mid april from atlanta police chief rodney bryant and will be assigned to the site while attempting to work with neighborhood watch groups he noted that quote we look forward to working with those agencies to ensure that this is a safe project that is occurring here and addressing any criminal acts that may be occurring on site to try to stop the project from proceeding unquote the co-chair of the stakeholder advisory committee sharon williams invoked the term ecoterrorism as relating to the forest defense marking the first time that word has been used by the government officials to refer to this batch of protests she also thanked the cop city planners for quote transparency in explaining why they cannot be transparent on the

construction timeline emails between the atlanta police foundation and the city of atlanta obtained via public records requests do give a possible look into the future of the development in a january 2022 email police foundation representative alan williams said that we quote plan on enabling work possibly in the may 2022 and june 2022 time frame our project will last until the last quarter of 2023 and our contractors are currently working on an overall site logistics and safety plan unquote although at the time their contractors still included reeves young so there's no telling how accurate that timeline is now other emails detailed plans for homeland security to obtain ring camera subscriptions to monitor quote criminal activity at the new academy footprint unquote

in general when involved in any level of protest no matter of the alleged legality security culture considerations should always be among people's top priorities especially with more eyes being directed to the defend the atlanta forest project each person should be responsible for themselves and like i think that that type of action you're interested in taking should severely inform the type of personal security precautions that that you're taking um i think that's that's been a recurring theme as the movement builds there are folks that come in to a movement not having heard the term security culture or whatever you want to call it and so that can be really jarring for folks that are just first trying to get involved but people

pick it up surprisingly quick once you have built as a community like norms and customs around is this a phones on or phones off meeting are we talking about this on signal is the call for this action going out on social media are we just sharing this amongst friends where that hadn't really been a thing and where frankly a lot of people face significant repression here in atlanta during the uprisings because of security culture decisions that were made i think that a security culture is being built here that where it didn't really exist before or at least wasn't widespread before is going to survive long past this movement i think like one of the biggest aspects of these things is like the social aspects of it and like like the generalizing of the norm of

if someone answers you vaguely and seems uninterested in community and continuing the conversation she's understanding that they have your best interests in heart when they don't want you to know and like quite frankly you just can't accidentally share information you don't have and so like you know when we sit here in these woods and people say you know like you say like so you know you know where have you been blah blah blah i'm just like you know places or something like that i just don't ask questions and i understand that i don't just not only do i not need to know but i probably don't want to know and like you know when it comes to like more like material technical things those are important but like the social aspects of security culture

are so so much more important than the technical aspects it's like like i know as everybody talks about security culture as like take your phone out of the room but like you know if you take the phone out of the room and talk about doing crazy shit with complete strangers you don't you know and have a reason to trust them and like coming here to Atlanta like if you want to do crazy shit don't you know if you want to do if you're coming to Atlanta let me rephrase that if you're coming to Atlanta and you want to do crazy shit like you have to think about like how to do that in a safe way or as safely as possible you know don't don't come to us and be like hey i haven't met you before but like do you want to go do some

federal felonies because no i don't i don't want to know that you're doing that either like we have if you want to do crazy shit that's cool just like i don't want to know you did it and like if you're like coming here with the intention of creating like with the intention of like doing shit because it's like cool and fun if you're coming here with the intention of like i want to gain social capital because i did crazy things like maybe rethink that like if you if you want to do crazy shit and you do want to come here find your closest friends plan a road trip and don't tell anyone in a recent interview atlanta police foundation president and ceo dav wilkinson estimates that defend the forest quote unquote group members

have done hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage to utility equipment and has brought up plans to add offense around the entirety of the site as construction begins saying and anyone on the site will be arrested and as we move forward the enforcement will become stricter and stricter unquote also stated in an interview is that quote the police foundation also hopes to build separate museums on site dedicated to police officers and the labor prison that was once located there so that's that's what the kids call mask off moment of building a dedicated museum to cops and the labor prison aka slave labor prison anyway the first phase of the project had the initial 90 million price tag attached with tax payers being forced to pay 30 million dollars of

that and it's still unclear what the final cost of the facility is slated to be or what the estimated operating costs are or really how many phases of construction they really plan on doing the past few weeks the site of cops in the woods has become a more and more common occurrence whether to do scouting or just apparently detonating explosives for funsies at their current makeshift shooting range like they did a few days ago one morning when i was there i woke up to people yelling cops in the woods which by the way is a very effective substitute for caffeine in terms of making you very awake and alert quite early in the morning and then while running through the forest i saw a beautiful deer and a hopping rabbit so nice a clash of a of feelings and

sensations there in terms of closing sentiments based on conversations and observations i had from my brief time in the woods it's this play to your strengths don't play by the enemy's rules utilize the intersection of urban city based tactics and resources while taking inspiration from classic forest based eco defense attacking from the cover of the woods and ensuring that the terrain is as unwelcoming as possible to vehicular machinery can help buy time for rapid response popular mobilization from people living in the city uh if and when that time comes ten five zero go ahead hey i'll be careful coming down key road they throwing bottles at the police and all that

bottles and smoke bombs so be careful they in the woods um throwing at the police cars and stuff like that so i'll copy appreciate it yeah and despite like the defensive nature of defending the forest there still is a large amount of making sure that as often as possible you can do the prep work to set the terms of engagement so that they're fighting on your terms you're not always complying to theirs which is can be useful for defensive stuff obviously the whole aspect of defending a forest like this that you i think defenders can have this almost like spectral quality of like cops don't know where people are what they've built what's in the forest what's in the woods and that's like spooky like you like you don't know who's who's up in a treehouse you

don't know who's behind what tree you don't know what things are in the woods and that spectral quality of the forest defense is a really interesting aspect of it that you don't see in you don't really see that and then like pipeline protests as much you don't really see that for like protests in the city um because the city very much is like a kind more of like a cops terrain um so i really do like that aspect of like cops are kind of scared to go in the woods because they're spooky they have openly testified like in court testimony that said that when this forest defender was arrested the police officer that gave his statement to the judge was shaking physically shaking because he was so afraid from being yelled at like that was all that

had happened is a bunch of protesters were yelling at them and he was shaking the police are really dependent on their infrastructure they are dependent on all of that kit that they carry around they are not mobile they are meant to be attached to that squad car and every further step they take away from that they are more and more uncomfortable and when they look around and realize they're in the middle of the fucking woods that's terrifying for them and that needs to be like taken advantage of and it is woods that like they that their drones and their police helicopters have problem even with their thermal tracking of seeing through the canopy woods that like and i want to say like it was really funny to me that um in that like it was said that the protesters were screaming

we know where you live we know where you live we're coming we're coming yeah which is like the whole the whole ghost thing um because i mean i i mean in terms of in terms of thermal stuff i brought a thermal camera of mine here and the woods are very hard to see through with my thermal camera i cannot see more than like 20 feet away i've i've tested it on people it's that's a super interesting aspect and yeah like it's the whole like fern gully princess princess mononoke thing of like when people come out of the woods wearing ski masks like that's freaky like it's like we are you like you can be the thing that goes boo in the night like that actually that is you um and that's something that should be taken advantage of when there's people invading the forest and

trying to destroy it i think this is a really important thing to catch on is that for a lot of us even though like many of us have been like socialized to think of the dark and the night and the woods as this scary thing this is where i feel the most safe this is if you give me a bunch of camo and like send me off into the woods there's no where i'm going to feel more safe and more capable both of safety and attack when i'm out here i feel like i can do anything you give me a bunch of woods a bunch of hills like there's so much we can do because we're not in this position of you know entering hostile territory to you know do things this is territory that we control and this is territory that we are using to fight back and we're weaponizing not just

you know the cop sphere but we're weaponizing the terrain itself we're weaponizing the trees we're weaponizing the hills we're weaponizing the ruins and we're weaponizing everything here here has like literally a thing to use to attack the state if you give me a ridgeline i can hide from the cops better than any fucking you know high tech thermal scattering ghillie suit is ever going to give me you know out here you don't need a bunch of fancy shit to like engage in conflict with the state you don't need thermal cameras and all that you can walk into a military surplus store and buy you know for 50 bucks you can buy everything you need to like do just about whatever you want out here and that's like that's like a really important and beautiful thing is it's not it's

not hard to do what we're doing you just have to break down the mental barriers and do it yeah we we do our best to protect the trees and the trees protect us too it's uh it's cool living here and it's like obviously something everyone most people probably like think about is yeah how important wild spaces are but it's cool to really fucking feel it and it's like like yeah this this place is super important because of how it interacts with the ecosystem and how it filters the water and that it's a safe haven for a lot of like really beautiful animals and plants but also this place is important because wild spaces are fucking uncontrollable and i want to live in an uncontrollable way and like you need those things and um it is it's really cool that this is a wild

space it's also a forest in a city which is cool it's fucking weird like there's there's city people who come here who are fucking weird and do weird shit and it's sick um and like it is an uncontrolled space and like sometimes that means that there's like fucking shit chemicals that are like fucking plants up but also sometimes that means there's people who like are doing things that are free and doing things they couldn't do in the city and and um and it doesn't matter if i like it or not it makes me yeah it makes me happy to just know that those people can act on their desires um and yeah it's not always fucking convenient or good and sometimes i antagonistic relationships with that because it conflicts with my desire but there's no mediation and there's there's there's no one

getting in between and um yeah it's just it's really important and i think like the the slogan that people say of not was it not one tree not one blade of grass like is like an inspirational thing but it's also like a strategy you know like it's like a tactical assertion that is important for us like yeah if like this forest and these wild spaces are essential not just for us to physically stop the police but like essential to be an anarchist like if there are not wild spaces spaces that they they can't put security cameras up here because they there's no electricity and the trees are too dense for solar panels and they get smashed anyway like you know like it's important to have those things if there's not places like that there's not places where you

you know like and and so that for itself is cool and the other thing is just living here with the fucking animals like um it's cool the deer if you want to find a good hiding spot in the forest pay attention to where the fucking deer sleep they sleep in different places most nights you won't fuck them up as long as you don't pick the exact same one they're sleeping and they're really fucking hard to find same thing with the coyotes like same thing with the snakes and like it's just very cool to like get to observe and live with all these animals and um you know uh there's that owl there's barred owl in such fucking screaming five o'clock every day it's like a nice little marker and that's for me that's better than you know looking at my watch it's pretty cool

this leads us up to our present day and the upcoming week of action in Atlanta Georgia happening from sunday may 8th to sunday may 15th if you are anywhere near the Atlanta area you have no reason to not check it out it's a week's worth of events spanning from early in the morning to late into the evening every day for seven days you can find the calendar of events on defend the atlanta forest dot com and if you are not near atlanta i would still recommend you make your way there post haste if you are able to whether that's during the week of action or later on down the line more boots on the ground is almost always a plus here's some more info on the upcoming week of action from may 8th through may 15th so generally in the past the past two week of

actions have been like really above ground really like giving people comfort with forest getting people into the forest like community events uh like um and just like public gatherings info nights uh skill shares other stuff like that and i believe that this one like will like we had a lot of that those events but i also believe that like due to the nature of what's going on um that it's much more urgent that people uh come and create their bring their own ideas bring down incentives their own desires and yeah week of action it's it's gonna be weird it's gonna be crazy it's gonna be all the things i think there's gonna be family friendly we're like hugging trees kind of shit and i'm excited for that and i think there's gonna be some like what

the fuck is going on in the woods kind of here's a bunch of cops kind of shit obviously we don't know what's really gonna happen but anyone that has been reading stuff that oh man i want to go through down with the crazies you should come and do that and we have some stuff to share and hopefully there'll be so many people here that don't know how to deal with it the problem down here is the alina police force um they there is a lot of them but honestly they're also they're stressed out and they are run um what's it called not run dry respect them they really they don't know how to deal with all this wood shit from shit that we've heard them talking about they don't know what to do they're not totally prepared i think it's gonna be a really fun and crazy shit show and we want

y'all to come to our shit show in a good way and no you better go you shouldn't use those words but in reality nobody actually knows what's going to happen we know what we're gonna do we have plans that people can plug into some stuff you can bring your kids to you and some stuff you should not bring your kids to you and there will be more to be honest but you really gotta just be there in person because there's some you can't put everything on instagram we're doing our best to like communicate to folks what's going on down here but there's just some things you gotta come to whatever the week of action it's always a week of action but this is like we're hoping people get really turned up for this week of action and maybe we all just become a roving nomadic war machine

together that would be the dream so you have a thing in your hometown or whatever the fuck is going on or your territory and we nomadic war machine over two years back and we just keep doing that that'd be cool a few resources that some of the forest defenders wanted people to know about is a first obviously defend the atlanta forest dot com which has the week of action calendar to keep up on news regarding the movement you can follow them on twitter and instagram at defend the atlanta forest or defend atl forest there is the forest justice defense fund at opencollective.com slash forest hyphen justice hyphen defense hyphen fund where people can donate to support the work of the broad coalition dedicated to saving the forest there's of course

stopreevesyoung.com which has information on subcontractors and third party service providers related to the cop city construction very useful even just for simple calling campaigns the website scenes dot no blogs dot org hosts other news relating to the movement anonymous communicates and stuff like maps of the area and random other useful information resources for info and guides relating to direct action there's a website titled warrior up dot no blogs dot org and people can go there or to a warrior up dot no blogs dot org slash guides for various interesting information i'll say and that last one is really best viewed on tour with via the tour browser just as a heads up also probably with like a vpn and i don't know

anyway be be careful with that last one but all of these all of these sites will be linked in the show notes the future lies in your hands you have more freedom than you know if you can find the unconventional ways of expressing it see you on the other side and i'll end with a word from our forced defender friend there's no future that's nomadic war machine together hopefully we're going to stop the police training facility i think we really are looking forward to people hopefully some people sticking around after the week of action because we are hoping that it doesn't die down too much to the point where a smaller entity than that was here for a week of action gets attacked we would love it if some of y'all would stay stay a while and exactly that if it can happen here i wasn't thinking about that but it's funny enough it's it could happen where you live and maybe we can just keep the idea is we share enough skills we make ourselves absolute no one

should be integral enough to the movement that you can't die off or leave and i can't continue people should be reading manuals sharing skills telling stories howling at the moon we're doing all this stuff to make each other just aware of the different things that are possible for us to win because maybe we don't have all the you know the guns and the steel and the gold but if we have enough people like being creative and doing some guerrilla shit we can get a lot done and at the end of the day if you you can do you have to be careful about how many hats you're wearing if you don't know about the iron sea eight that's a long time ago now look that up they're wearing they're a really great community organizers but they were wearing too many hats it was the first

time the patriot act kind of new laws after 9 11 was like utilized on people a lot of it didn't stick but if you what we really need is more faceless saboteurs because honestly if they that's what we need we need people to be there's just in reality there's not enough people willing to do night work it looks like there's an uptick in that behavior which is great but be safe be smart act alone or act as little and that's that's what we need more than anything there's a lot of people that um are willing to do above ground staff there's a lot of people that like want to be known and that's great but we have enough of that we need something else it could happen here is a production of cool zone media for more podcasts from cool zone media

visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeart radio app apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts you can find sources for it could happen here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources thanks for listening hey we'll be back monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe