Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 35

Episode Date: May 21, 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. If I know one thing about diseases, it's that they're homebodies. No, it's fine. We make a deer corner. They just want to Netflix and chill. We just line up the entire population of the U.S. in a line across the U.S.

and we shoot any deer that tries to cross the line. I think we should do the reverse and have deer shoot people who try to cross the line. It's the only thing that can protect us from the dangerous east. No, no, no. Look, look. Well, I guess it works in the east. In the west, we have to maintain the right to arm bears. Yep. I'm of the opinion, given how dry it is in New Mexico,

that we need to sink every part of the country east of New Mexico to give it a coast that can keep it moist. I wonder how much of this is going to get in the final cut. Well, if you live east of New Mexico, welcome to the ocean. That's my suggestion. Speaking of people east of New Mexico, this is It Could Happen Here, a podcast where some of the listeners are east of New Mexico, even though I don't recommend that. I'm Robert Evans.

On the call with me is Christopher Wong, Garrison Davis, Shereen Lonnie-Unis, and then our producer Sophie. Today, we're talking about terrorism. We do it in a little NPR voice. Recently, the same week as the Supreme Court leaked a document stating that they would be taking out Roe v. Wade and ushering in an era of theocratic fascism in a number of states, an individual or individuals unknown in Wisconsin

attacked an anti-choice headquarters building with a Molotov cocktail and spray-painted graffiti on the side saying, if abortion isn't safe, then you aren't either. That same group or individuals claiming to be from them later reached out to me through an intermediary and sent a manifesto of sorts about the attack, promising follow-up attacks within 30 days. But they wrote in cursive.

Who can say if this actually happened? I want to just go over first what happened in factual terms, and then we'll talk about the discourse around it. Basically, there's this attack on this anti-choice advocacy organization's headquarters in fucking Wisconsin. It seemed to be a pretty good Molotov. Garrison, you and I have watched a number of people fail to properly utilize Molotov cocktails.

I've watched a few people get ignited by Molotovs. It is easy to fuck up. I've watched one not-cop get ignited by Molotov. I've seen a couple not-cops get ignited by Molotovs. People can fuck them up easily. Whoever did this did not fuck them up. It seemed to be, at the moment, no one has been arrested. Now, it's possible by the time this drops,

Wisconsin police will be like, oh, no, there was totally surveillance footage, and they fucked up, and we just caught them. But at the moment, it doesn't look like that's the case. So it looks like this is somebody who carried out, or some buddies, because it's entirely possible, was multiple people, but carried out a very effective action that did material damage to part of kind

of the physical infrastructure of the anti-choice movement and ended without anyone getting caught. So that's the fact of the actual attack itself. A person who, claiming to be affiliated with the individuals or group who did this, reached out to a source of mine who I'm keeping anonymous, somebody who I've known for a while with a very good track record of being accurate,

and said, hey, these individual slash individuals have a communique they would like put out. And I was sent an on-files link, which is a link, if you view it in a normal browser, you'll get some fucked up shit. Don't put it in a normal browser. If you put it in Tor, it will download a text file. And the text file is the communique.

So using the Tor browser for that link, you can get a text file in which they lay out, number one, they name themselves. And the name they've chosen for their group is Jane's Revenge, which is a reference to the Jane Collective, which was a pro-choice group in the late 60s, early 70s, that provided women with access to contraception and abortion. Illegally, a bunch of them went to jail.

They were pardoned after Roe v. Wade, if I'm not mistaken, or at least otherwise go out. I want to know more about it, listen to Margaret Killjoy's cool people, the cool stuff, two-parter on the dink look. Yeah, yeah, very well timed. So they're calling themselves Jane's Revenge, and they basically said, hey, if you are an organization in the anti-choice movement, you have 30 days

to close down your operations, otherwise there will be follow-up attacks. They specifically noted the long, and it's at this point like a 40-years-long history of terrorist attacks from the anti-choice movement, many of which have assassinated doctors, something like 16 people have been killed, dozens of bombs and bombing attempts,

something like 100 acid attacks. So they made a note of all that and said that, basically, we will be responding in kind, and attacks after this initial attack will be correspondingly more severe. They also claimed to have a pretty wide geographic reach, said they had folks in a number of cities, and that, yeah, there's going to be follow-up attacks,

and they're prepared to defend their bodily autonomy with violence. So that's the gist of what was claimed in the communique. In terms of what I think about its legitimacy, I don't have any reason to believe they're not representing the individual or individuals who carried out that attack in Wisconsin based on the timing of when the communique was made

and based on the fact that the communique was pretty consistent with what we saw from the actual action, right? So among other things, what you can tell from the physical action that was taken is that the individual or individuals who did this were pretty well organized. They carried out a competent action,

and they thought there was a value in very clear messaging, because there's clear messaging surrounding the attack. The communique is very clear messaging. It does not sound like a right-winger writing up a fake communique. It takes great pains to both connect itself to history, to frame its violence within the context of the violence perpetuated by the anti-choice movement for decades.

And just in general, the communique seems consistent with the action that we saw in Wisconsin. Now, we cannot say, I cannot say to a statement of certainty whether or not it's legitimate. One helpful thing they did is state that there would be either more attacks in 30 days. So we're kind of waiting if 30 days pass

and there's never any kind of follow-up attacks by this group, then we can probably assume that this was either somebody bullshitting or that the heat got too much for them and they decided not to carry out follow-up attacks. But we're all kind of in this holding pattern now to see what happens. My personal speculation is that they were exaggerating a number of things.

I think that their claims about having members in a number of states and a capacity to strike in a number of states was more aspirational than literal in that I suspect the people behind this attack and this communique are hoping that by carrying out attacks they can inspire other people to carry out attacks and credit it to the same organization, right? Which is not an uncommon tactic in the history of terrorism.

And again, this is terrorism. I mean, I don't think they have a point or that it's like fundamentally unjust. Terrorism is just like a set of tactics that different groups can use and it can be ethical or unethical depending on how you choose to do that. You can attack purely infrastructure in a terrorist manner and I don't think that's necessarily unethical

and you can also attack civilians in a terrorist manner and I think that is unethical. At this moment, these people have not done anything I view as inherently unethical. They have burned a building which I think is often justified and is in this case justified. So that's my opinion on the matter. Let's open it up.

On the point you kind of closed with, I mean, yeah, they showed effective direct action. They did a physical thing. Molotovs are not the best way to like arson a building but they are good for a very quick attack. It caused this whole media thing, right? There's a lot of people talking about it and releasing the communique through someone

who can give it a lot of visibility and then by doing it with this name, Jane's Revenge, and saying in 30 days there will be more attacks in different cities, the message is that, yeah, you can... One way to look at this is if they don't have tons of, you know, members or allies that they know across different cities is that anyone can do this.

Like anyone can do this and call themselves by that name and be a part of this larger thing. Like if you spread it around, then it can become like this thing that anyone can glom onto. It doesn't need to be... You don't need to be a part of a member of a specific group. You can just do stuff and release communiques safely

and add on to the specter. Yeah, it's not hard to set up like a text drop in the same manner that they did. It is relatively secure. Like there's no perfect... If you are committing terrorism, there is no perfect manner to issue a statement. But of the different things they could have chosen,

this is relatively secure, especially doing it through an intermediary. I haven't had direct contact with any of these people, but we should probably note that there's a huge discourse that started before the communique came out, arguing that this is like a false flag attack. Yeah, that's... Yes, in a long line of calling

pretty well-planned out direct action, when it actually happens, people will default to calling it an AWP or calling it a false flag from a variety of people. There's like limbs who say, oh, this is a staged thing to make our movement look bad. There's tankies who think it's like the CIA planning something.

There's random other folks who are like, eh, I don't know if it's legit. I think maybe it's like some... A lot of people get various justifications for calling pretty effective acts of direct action and questioning their legitimacy. I think some of this comes from... Because obviously there's the bad faith elements of this,

but I think the good faith folks who question it, there's a lot of learned helplessness there. This idea that because somebody did carry out a pretty successful direct action attack that kind of did what its intention was, then it has to have been the FBI or whoever, right? Because obviously the left could never have pulled off something as cunning as throwing a single molotov

at a building and spray painting the side of it, you know? And I do think that that's a problem, whether or not you think the solution to issues like the right-wing attack on reproductive health care come from direct action. The fact that folks almost can't conceive of effective action being taken by the left without the feds being involved is really an issue.

Yeah, and this was a huge thing during 2020. One of the things that we saw... There were so many just weird conspiracy theories, and then the other thing that happened very quickly was people became convinced almost immediately that anyone doing anything was a fed or an infiltrator, and you got crowds turning people over to police, you got people on Twitter trying to track down

who was throwing molotovs in videos, and one of the people they caught and turned over to police, it turned out, had been the girlfriend of someone who got killed by the cops. So this stuff has real-world consequences. It has already sent people to jail. It has this enormous demobilizing effect. I don't remember people...

Two people remember the... Okay, the two big 2020... The two big Twitter conspiracies were... Bricks, who's dropping off the bricks in the protest? Yeah, yeah. People would see a pallet of bricks, and they were never seen in a major American... Right next to a construction site.

They'd be like, how are all these pallets of bricks showing up? There's a construction site a block away. You're like, okay. Who's distributing the fireworks? How do these fireworks get here? Never mind, it's June 29th. If you look at the history of the FBI,

some people will mistakenly throw the CIA in there. The CIA doesn't really tend to do the domestic fuckery. They're international fuckery. But if you look at the history of the FBI fucking with left-wing social movements, it's not by handing out brick pallets. That's not what they do. We have a lot of documentation about what they do,

and it's not bricks. And if there is some secret group who's maliciously giving out bricks, they'll throw them through windows or throw them at cop cars. Who cares? Bricks are getting thrown at cop cars. It doesn't matter where they come from. People are still choosing to do action.

The best example of this is the Russian Revolution of 1905. The Russian Revolution of 1905 was started by a guy who was a police agent. His whole thing is he was working to create unions that could be controlled by the state, and he marched a bunch of people into a square, and they really shot them, and that's literally how the Russian Revolution started.

There's two layers of this. One is that there almost is never a conspiracy going on, and two, if the conspiracy is we want to push people towards doing things, there's a point at which it stops mattering because... A lot of people forget about Occam's, or when we're talking about these types of things. Usually the more simple the answer,

the more likely it is. The less involved parties, the more likely it is. If there's a choice between rad people fucking up an anti-choice headquarters versus a government conspiracy to do false-leg operations to make the anti-choice movement... to make the abortion movement look bad, one of those is much more simple and much more likely,

and it's people just deciding to do stuff. Guess what? You can actually do that. You don't need to rely on these weird narratives to justify your uncomfortableness at forms of radical direct action, because people use that false-flag idea so they don't need to actually engage with what direct action will mean,

and if it is someone's moral imperative to physically attack physical manifestations of these sources of oppression. I think you're right on the money there. I think one of the things that's most frustrating to me about this is it kind of suggests that a sizable chunk of people who ostensibly consider themselves on the left are like focusing their time not on doing anything

and not on taking any action to materially change the conditions they're angry at, but are instead looking for reasons to disavow other folks on the left and that that's like the primary, which is, again, if you look at what we know Herbert Hoover was saying about the FBI's COINTELPRO program

was the goal of COINTELPRO, right? Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking. I'm just like, I feel like this promotes, I don't know, a morality-like race or just like competition, where the only thing it does is just promote infighting when you're on your morality horse, but I think if you actually support real change,

you have to come to terms with like, you have to do illegal things and like holding on to like these made-up laws that someone made up about like how to achieve change is useless and there's, I mean, like dividing up a side that's supposed to be going for the same thing, like that's exact, yeah, it's just, it's missing the whole point and people don't really, yeah.

If you look at the right, you've got all these folks who were like legal and whatnot, the proponents of ending reproductive healthcare access and then you have the folks who were doing repeated acts of terrorism and the folks who were on the legal side of things didn't disavow those people. They were often affiliated with churches that did shit,

like auction off the possessions of like extremists who had murdered doctors and shit. Like they were, like even the most they would do is just not directly talk about those people. They didn't disavow them, they didn't like attack it because they understood that a diversity of tactics was going to be how they achieved their goals, that it was a mix of pushing for these legal changes

and carrying out so many terroristic attacks that it frightened people away from supporting abortion service providers and other kind of reproductive healthcare service providers. I think that's the biggest difference between the right and the left though. Republicans are really good at uniting on this big picture and I feel like Democrats are not.

I feel like they just, I don't know. It's too, there's too much fighting and that's why it's always fractured. Part of it is that on the Republican side, you have Republicans and you have the far right who are also Republicans. And even though a lot of folks on the far right bitch about the centrists and they're up,

like the folks who are closer to the center, they all get in line for really radical stuff. Like the center of the Republican party always yields to the radicals. Whereas Democrats do not acknowledge leftists as having anything to do with the Democratic party or Democratic politics other than to yell at them when they don't vote.

And on the other hand of things, there's a lot of folks on the left who hate liberals more than they hate fascists. And it's, I think one of those is a bigger problem than the other. I think the failure of the Democratic establishment to like deal with the left at all or make any kind of progress that could be seen

as actually left wing is much more of the problem. Yeah, but I think there's, I think there are structural reasons for that too, which is, okay, if you look at what is the basis of conservative alliance, right? If you're conservative, you know, okay, if you're from the sort of like moderate business wing at the party, if you're from the fascist wing

at the party, right? You can have one judge who gives both of you the things that you want, right? Because if you're like the Koch brothers, the thing that you want is deregulation, right? You want to be able to just like dump poison into the environment. If you're on, if you're an evangelical,

the thing that you want is, you know, no one can ever have an abortion again. And, you know, if you're like a fascist, I don't know, maybe you want like, we don't give food to immigrant children anymore so they start to death. And one judge can give you all of those same things because the sort of the class and social issues

of the Republican base can all be fused together without harbing each other. But the problem with this, with the Democratic Party is that like the Democratic Party's basis is like, what's left of the union movement, but then also like a bunch of corporations and banks and like weapons manufacturers and stuff, but then also like a bunch of angry students

and also like a bunch of people from different minority groups and all of these people like have different interests. And, you know, in the Democratic Party, ultimately, like the thing that they care about is keeping capital isn't going. And, you know, if they have to like, if that means that, yeah, I mean, well, okay, if your thing is you want to keep capitalism going,

like, of course, you're just going to throw your left wing out to the wolves, right? Like it makes sense for them to do this because the part of their base that actually matters isn't like the labor movement. It's like, it's Goldman Sachs. I think that one of the other things that causes people to have this like,

immediately, anyhow, someone does, people remember like when Nancy Pelosi's driveway got graffitied. Oh, yeah, yeah. Now, see, that was, like, that's never, never, that's horrible. Don't graffiti Nancy Pelosi's driveway. That's evil.

That's an ISIS. You did an ISIS there. Yeah, everyone lost their mind and was like, oh, this is obviously a false flag. And it's like, what, you know, but the reason they do this is because they have, they have like Democrat optics brain where like, instead of anything being about politics, everything is just about optics and optics.

How does it look? How does it look? How does it look? And like, the only people who care about this are like weird pundits. But because everyone's so sort of absorbed in like the Twitter media sphere, like they think that like the actual general public

cares about the things that pundits care about because the only thing they're seeing is pundits writing angry articles, but like nobody cared. Like zero people. Especially the graffiti thing, because man, people like dissect how someone sprayed an anarchist A.

Yeah, yeah. If you're not aware, like a big chunk of the discourse, R.E., it being a false flag or whatever, was that the graffiti had been spray painted? Yeah. And that they did, they did like, they did like the anarchy A inside the circle. And it's wild because I mean, spray painting,

what they said, like if abortions aren't safe, if abortions aren't safe, then you aren't either. In cursive is a genius move. It's great because if you spray paint it in some like random punk font, that's easy to be ignored. You're like, oh, it's just people doing like whatever. People spray painting stuff. But doing it like methodically in cursive

is actually a really good choice because you're like, oh, it's like we're dealing with adults. It's like the type of things that people will go through their minds when they look at it is great. And it's just a weird denial to assume that no one takes radical direct action, whatever, right in cursive. It's just the most brain worms thing. And it's also like, it's also very clearly like,

like, okay, so I am very bad at spray painting, right? But like, I have used a spray paint can. Allegedly. And because I used a spray paint. Well, this isn't alleged. I was making banners for stuff. So this wasn't even like, this wasn't even crying spray. This was just like regular spray painting.

It's like, that is hard. Like writing that in cursive and having it look that nice spray paint can is like difficult, which, you know, if you think about this about five seconds, this makes it more likely that it's actually left is doing this because it's like, what? Okay, hold on. So the anti-abortion people have one person who's really,

really good at graffiti. And this is the person that they've assigned. Yeah, they sent him to the anarchist school in secret. It's like, it's nonsense, but it's like people, people just, people want everything to sort of like, like, and I think this is the other angle of this is that people think that like, have this wild over-assessment of the capacity of the state.

Yeah. And they think that anytime something looks slightly weird, it's like, oh, it must be the state. Like, like one of the, one of the things that happened with the Brooklyn shooting too was like, you had all these people, there was this tweet going around that was like, oh, the cameras just happened. All, all the cameras, all the cameras in New York

were working except the exact one that would have caught the shooter. And this is like, everyone circled around this and everyone was like, oh my God, this is a false flag and then no, it turned out that like, the guy had literally called the police but the police were so incompetent that like, other people like, saw him on the street and got to him before like the cops did.

And the camera it turned out wasn't even like, the camera that was out wasn't even the camera that like, like they had him on camera. It was a different camera. But it was like, everyone, everyone just immediately has this like conspiracy brain thing where they see like, one thing out of context that looks slightly weird and they go, oh my God, this whole thing is a,

is a state like CIA, like false flag cover. It's so depressing, it's so depressing because it's such, it's so depowering. You're specific, you're like, it ties into the learn helplessness thing that Robert mentioned. Like you're convincing yourself that we don't have power to change things, that we cannot take any physical action to change things.

And that's a not great mentality to have if you want to improve the world or if you want to, if you want to destroy the things that harm you, you do, you don't want to fall into that, that specific like, I don't have any power mindset because you can, turns out you can do stuff. Things happen. You can, people threw them all off and broke windows

and did graffiti for the center. Shall we say cool people sometimes do cool things. Yes, just like the podcast. If you're gonna plug the show, plug the show. Sophie, Sophie, Sophie, Sophie. That's my name. Sophie. One of the things that's interesting to me,

and it might hold some lessons for folks thinking about radical direct action and what gets attention and what doesn't. So obviously this attack has garnered a lot of national attention, right, the fact that, and I think it's because there was both an attack and a message, there was another attack and it's not 100% that this had anything to do

with the pro-choice movement, but I suspect it does. The attorney general of Virginia, Jason Meares, on the 10th of May, there was a somewhat a shot into his office, like a bullet was found in the office. It was probably fired when no one was there. We don't really know more than that. It is unclear as to whether or not this is involved with things, but three days before the shot was fired

into his office, he had basically, Catholic groups had been planning big masses to celebrate the leaked draft opinion, and protesters had been organizing to protest the Catholic masses, and he had threatened to charge people who protested masses because he believes the right to freedom of religion trumps

the right to free speech. So it was kind of like a fucked up situation. People got angry at Meares. And it seems kind of noteworthy that someone shot into his office three days after this. Also, there's been a lot of stuff. On May 8th, there was an attack on the Oregon Right to Life building.

Yes, yes, yes, which was certainly a pro-choice action. Yeah, there was at least two Molotov cocktails thrown, and there was a break in inside. So it's like, you could do things. You don't have no power. You can interact with politics in a physical way. People do interact with politics in a physical way. Yeah, and people have this assumption

that this is going to be incredibly unpopular. And again, I want to point out, burning the third precinct had a higher approval rating than both presidential candidates. Which, I mean, I again, tend to advocate in 2024 we should elect the burning of the third precinct in Minneapolis as president. Look, the way that works

is the burning of the precinct takes office and then every day you burn another precinct so that you can actually have a president. Well, that is how you fill the cabinet. There needs to... That too. Yeah, you have to... All the staff positions filled with...

Yes, all the staff positions. The Health and Human Services Secretary will be the West Los Angeles police station and so forth, yes. I'm really excited to see which one gets picked for the housing secretary. I'm just on my toes. It's exciting.

Democracy can be quite fun. Electoralism has some really cool points. Yeah, hey, you too could go in front of the National Labor Relations Board and the National Labor Relations Board is just seven on-fire police stations. You'd really win. So, yeah, we wanted to at least talk about this

because whenever a cool thing happens a large swath of people who are ostensibly leftists or even anarchists default to calling anything cool, a false flag or an op, it's like, well, what do you want? Do you want people just to stay at home all the time and not do anything? What's the end goal here

if you're calling everything that happens enough? Yeah, and also just like if you're going to... If you're worried about ops and thinking of suggesting that something might be, what is your line? Is it just that people broke a law? Are you saying that if people do illegal things, that's always like a government op

because that doesn't seem... The illegalists will have a word with you. That doesn't seem like a good strategy, yeah. I mean, especially when it comes to reproductive rights, like, you're going to have to do illegal things. People are going to have to break a shield. Exactly, Shireen, yeah. So it's very pick and choose, yeah.

I'm 100% convinced that all of these people, if they'd seen John Brown, would have been completely convinced that John Brown was... Oh, John Brown was for sure the FBI. He founded it. The original op, John Brown. I think that there's an aspect there of also like... Okay, if you're on Twitter, right,

mostly you're not doing politics, and the thing that you're actually doing on Twitter is trying to feel smarter than everyone else, and if you're the person that's like, I really sheeple believe that this thing wasn't an op, or like, oh, all these people believe... Yeah, it's like, yeah, okay, you very quickly spiral into just like...

All the sheeple who are... I, a smart person who finds this suspicious. It's just a bad... Looking at an element of events and going, oh, this is weird, but in a way that is, oh, huh, isn't this weird? It must be the government. Like, that's just a bad way of thinking of things. Like, in the mere hours, in the mere minutes,

after anonymous people broke into the Portland Police Association headquarters back in, I think, was July of 2020, just in mere hours, people were calling it a false flag, that the police were dressed up as a black block breaking into their own buildings. The feds, the feds. People had started protesting the feds, yes. They alleged that this was like, I guess,

the FBI or Homeland Security trying to get protesters angry at the cops again, which is, I mean, for one thing, if that ever would actually happen. That sounds great. If there were to be a point where the left wing had the FBI fighting, or the FBI or Homeland Security whatever, fighting with local police over who was getting protested, that's a win.

That's a big, solid capital dub for the team. But no, people thinking like, the FBI is in block breaking into the police union building and trying to light it on fire. You're like, well... Doing less physical, let's be honest, doing less damage to that police union building that I have seen my friends do when attempting to deep fry French fries.

I have watched people do more damage to their living rooms than that protested to the PBA. It's astonishing, because there were so many people at that action and so many people using the moment to actually gain physical political power. A brief moment. And to take that away from them is just a bizarre impulse. And I would like to see it end,

especially as we're going to see, hopefully, see that people realize that direct action is going to become more and more important for securing your personal rights and securing your personal freedom. And also, I would say to these people, if you want to be completely sure that something is happening, it's not an off, do it yourself. Stop yelling about it on Twitter.

Do it yourself. Then you'll know it's not an off. As a general rule, look at France. What do the French do whenever something they consider a right gets taken away from them? They burn downtown Paris down. They light banks on fire. Paris, everyone who gets elected to a position of power in France

knows that if they cross certain lines, the capital will be ungovernable. And there's a reason why French people have such quality healthcare. Well, with that note, I can't believe we're ending on the note. Be like the French. Look, the French have made a lot of good calls, a lot of bad ones too, not trying to whitewash France, but there's a number of things they got spot on.

Anyway, we will be counting down the days until that 30-day marker. And who knows, maybe other attacks will happen with people also calling themselves Jane's Revenge. And obviously, this is something that we as journalists have no opinion on one way or the other. We're just reporting. Just pure reporting. Anyway, listen to cool people who did cool stuff

to hear about the Jane Collective. And maybe also recreationally read about what different civilian groups are doing in Ukraine and the degree to which a wide variety of incredibly available tools can be repurposed in neat ways. All right, I think that's the soad. That's a good soad. That's the soad.

Hey everybody. Welcome to It Could Happen Here and it continues to happen here. I'm Robert Evans. This is a podcast about things falling apart and what to do after that happens. And we are all currently dealing with the falling apart of the so-called so-called so-called so-called so-called so-called And we are all currently dealing with the falling apart of several decades of progress

on reproductive justice, the Supreme Court leaking that they are coming for Roe v. Wade. And yeah, today I'm here with Christopher Wong and Shareen Lonnie Unis, and my producer Sophie. We have two guests from the Bridget Alliance and the Midwest Access Coalition. We're going to talk more about what they do in a second. Broadly speaking, both seek to attach people who are looking for reproductive health care and abortion access, but cannot get it easily in their area with clinics and the things that they need in order to get to the clinics, including transit and, you know, time in hotels,

whatnot, in order to make it easier to get access to that kind of health care in places like the Midwest, where folks have been spending decades making it much more difficult, even prior to this recent ruling to get that kind of health care. So I'm going to let our guests introduce themselves. You've got the floor. Well, hi. I am Odile Shelley. I am the executive director at the Bridget Alliance, and I'm going to introduce my counterpart

here. I'm Diana Parker Kostoff, I'm the executive director of the Midwest Access Coalition. And yeah, so you all have been in some ways kind of dealing with elements of the post row world, because obviously, like, you know, we're all focused on the Supreme Court decision that's in the pipeline. But anti-choice activists have been working very hard to essentially create a post row world in chunks of the United States prior to this point. So you all have been kind of dealing with the reality that a larger number of people

are going to be living under for a while, right? Yeah. Yeah. Missouri has been able to effectively ban abortion in its state for years now. I think there is maybe a handful of abortions that the one clinic there are able to do because of all of the trap laws, which is the targeted restrictions for abortion providers in the waiting period. So people have to go to another state, Kansas, Iowa, or Illinois from Missouri.

And we've been helping those folks for years. And I'm going to guess this, I mean, just because you've been living in with this for a while, I'm going to guess the announcement last week did not come as a total surprise. The timing of it certainly did, which for Diana and I came at the heels of a conference that we were at thankfully together, which was kind of just pure luck for us so we could actually commiserate together. But no, ultimately, this is not a huge surprise. I mean, I think we're all still waiting to see what actually happens in June that the

writing has been on the wall for months or in years, if not longer. And as you were just pointing it out, essentially, for organizations like the Bridget Alliance and the Midwest Access Coalition, we have been existing already because the protections of Roe are insufficient to actually secure abortion access for all in this country. So this has been our lived experience. And preparing for this moment has been a long time coming. And I'm sure there have been a number of conversations that have been going on about what to do and how to prepare for this, right?

Because the primary change is going to be at least initially until they make some sort of federal push that states that have some sort of functional access to abortion are going to be flooded with an even higher number of people in need of care. Could you kind of walk us through what sort of steps have been taken to in order to kind of brace for that impact, so to speak? Yeah. So I think a couple of things. And the first to sort of pull back on that for a second is to say that part of preparing

for what's to come has been our orgs in the community that we exist in this incredible expansive landscape of different types of organizations that have existed for decades to secure abortion access, where the laws were insufficient, where people were faced with barriers like income and equity and geographic equity and the unavailability of providers. This network, though, has existed largely unseen. And so a lot of preparing for what is to come is really embracing our existence, feeling affirmed in that and in our value, not shying away from the expertise within this community, which is held both by volunteers as well as staff.

And so I think a lot of the last couple of years has been focusing on really trying to harness that expertise and that knowledge and compassion. And the fact that many of the people who are leading a lot of the efforts in the reproductive justice movement are people who have had abortions themselves, which is an enormous and valuable part of how this movement moves and hopefully will continue to center the people most impacted by the fall of Roe. I think more specifically for Bridget and orgs like Mac, preparation means deepening our relationships with the clinics that we work with.

They are critical, of course, and their sanity is critical to abortion access is making sure that we have the sufficient funding to continue to staff, train, vet volunteers systematically and mindfully and ideally do so in a sustainable way so that we're not all overwhelming ourselves with the sudden surge of need and the sudden surge of impact. And then for Diana and I, even personally, it means deepening the relationships that us practical support organizations have with one another because no one organization is going to be able to help every single abortion seeker who will need to travel. It will rely upon really strong and transparent collaboration.

So those are some of the things that we've been focusing on. One of the things that strikes me as a problem that's going to be, if not immediate, then pretty imminent for y'all is we've already seen threats and promises from legislators in some states to attempt to criminalize leaving a state where abortion is illegal in order to get access to health care. What kind of preparation is even possible for that sort of world? Because it does seem like we're staring down the barrel of that. Yeah.

I think the only preparation we can have right now is to expect that the courts will allow them to do that. They're very creative now that they've seen SB8 go into effect and hold on as the law of the land, even though it's in direct violation of federal law, stowed us the highest court of our country is the one that has been allowing that to happen. And so that sends a huge message to all these force-first legislators that bring us your worst take on the law. We will find a way to let you keep it.

We're working with you on this, and you just need to get bolder and bolder and see what you can get away with. So we can't really predict how they're going to do that, although Missouri has indicated that they're going to consider an A, I guess, as soon as it's fertilized, a resident and a resident of the state that they have responsibility for protecting, completely ignoring the fact that it's growing inside a complete human being that has rights. But that's the latest that I've heard of them figuring out how to restrict someone's travel, but it would require a significant shift in how we understand constitutional

law and the basis for our legal system. Yeah, and that seems like something that, I don't know, really genuinely seems to be on the table in this moment. I mean, we have, I think it's Louisiana who's trying to, part of their bill is that they, literally it says that they can disobey the federal government, which we had a civil war about that. We had an olivocation crisis about that. So yeah, I guess I'm wondering what your impression is on how far this can go.

Do we get to the point where states can just, like, tell the federal government no? Yeah, I mean, that's what the architect of the SBA law essentially told the court is that they don't have jurisdiction and all the laws that they have passed in the 1800s are actually enforceable and the federal government has no authority to stop them. And there, the Fifth District and SCOTUS has indicated that, no, maybe you are right. Maybe that is the correct way to interpret our constitution. So I feel like all of that, all of our decades, centuries of figuring out what the law means for this country is just up in the air.

And we may be looking at laws now that are just more and more bizarre, as long as, you know, the GOP and the right have control over so many bodies of our government, you, it really is, I can't even fathom, I don't think we can predict what's going to come, honestly. I mean, I'm also wondering, to put it crudely, will legislators in states that are currently committing, because we have seen a number of states, California kind of leading the pack committing to maintain access to abortion and other forms of reproductive health care that are being threatened right now, do you, like, do you feel like you have a good chance that they are going to back you, especially in the event of, you know, laws that would

potentially open people like you up to criminal charges just for trying to support people in getting, you know, reproductive health care outside of their state? Is your question, do you, do we think that elected officials that are pro-choice are going to back us? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you, like, it's entirely possible that we're going to see some sort of federal law that not just criminalizes abortion or even, like, prior to that criminalizes aiding people in seeking abortion outside of states that have banned it, right?

Like, that's on the table. How does that change the landscape for you? Do you suspect that, like, in kind of a similar way to how some of these, some of the legislators in states trying to ban abortion have said, like, we're just going to ignore federal law if it contradicts our state law? Do you think that, do you think that pro-choice legislators in states, you know, like California, are going to be willing to go to the mat and protect you? Or are we, I mean, yeah, I guess, I know this is kind of an unknown, but I'm kind of, these

must be conversations that y'all are having, right? I mean, I really freaking hope that they are, and if they're listening, please, please prepare to do so. And it's been really heartening to see states like California and Oregon and Illinois and New York and Connecticut, for instance, come up with really clear language around their support of not just choice, which was the language of the past, but abortion and are saying that and are starting to invest in things like abortion funding and travel to themselves actually, you know, put forth their own efforts to contribute to the people who will need to

travel into their states. And, you know, Diana was just speaking the other day with a bunch of elected officials in Chicago. So I think this is also why what I was talking about earlier in terms of orgs like ours coming into the light is so important is that we're going to need those relationships with those politicians. We're going to need them to know us and see us and understand that we're a critical part of how we're going to serve their constituents and that, yeah, we're going to need them to

back us. Well, I can't say definitively, but I'm really freaking hope so. Yeah. Yeah. And hopefully those, you know, as Odile said just now, I was in a press conference yesterday, the city, the mayor's office announced this fund to support abortion procedure funding and practical support. And my hope is with municipalities will talk to each other and give each other the models

for doing this protective, preemptive support for people traveling to our states for abortion care. And yeah, I'm in with talks with the ACLU in Illinois to talk about potential bills that are floating around to even further protect abortion in this state, specifically, I know of one that wants to explicitly protect providers from being extradited or sued or shut down by prosecutors in other states that want to claim that they have jurisdiction because like I said, they figured out a way to give residency status to fertilize eggs or something, you know.

I still think it over that. Just completely fucked that that's kind of what we're staring at, right? That that's that's a thing that you have to be concerned with is like out of state law enforcement. I don't know. And that's the thing. No one knows what it's going to look like, right? Like we know that they have a vested kind of interest already in in doing parts of this

through bounties, which is kind of like the thing that I'm worried about. Are we going to see like out of state law enforcement bounty hunting people trying to folks up with reproductive health care? And I guess that's just kind of an unknown at this point, but it's right. And it really depends on like our local protected state jurisdiction, like how far are they going to go to protect us from those entities that are going to try to come in for us? Just this just today, one of our staff members tweeted about practical support funds and who to support throughout the country that provides the sort of travel logistics for

people and they got followed by a sheriff department in Missouri. Oh, fun. Yeah. So they're already, you know, targeting and surveilling abortion seekers and the people who support them. Yeah. And of course, I'm sure that there's a degree to which some of these folks are working with, shall we say like non state actors in order to like, I know they've been prepping with

that for a while as well. Absolutely. What is, I mean, one of the things that I know, because I've been having some conversations with friends of mine who are in like, I guess we could say, adjacently, adjacent organizations to where y'all work and who are at, in some cases, the convention you were at, who are concerned that as providing people with reproductive health care becomes illegal, there's going to be a lot of fair weather friends kind of revealed. And I am interested, like, is this a thing that in order to be engaged in providing people

with reproductive health care, you have to be willing to engage in illegalism at this point? Like, is that really where we are? That's a really interesting question. Yeah. As a member, like as 501c3s, you know, looked at by our state governments, our federal governments, we can't engage in anything that's legal. But people have forever, on their own, done things that the state has considered illegal

in order to have bodily autonomy. There are people who can't afford it. There are people who are just so far from the nearest clinic that they can't even fathom how to make that trip. There are undocumented folks. There are people near the borders that can't even physically move past a border checkpoint because they're just trapped there and can't get care in other parts of their state where it's available.

So that will be a thing. I think that is going to increase because the need will not decrease. I do not, like my organization can't really say anything about that, but, you know, personally, I'm like, you do whatever it takes to live your life and thrive. Laws are made up, especially now. Yeah. That is nice to hear. Because, you know, I try to keep abreast of the sides of this fight that are, you know,

working through 501 C's and the like and engaging in electoralism. The people who are, you know, doing stuff like trying to figure out ways to provide access to, like, MISO pills and whatnot to people, because that's just where we are. We've talked about the degree to which you guys have already been living in some people's future, you know, just because of the specific nature of what your organizations have been doing and the degree to which, you know, you knew some of this is coming. What has surprised you outside of just like the fact that it got leaked ahead of time about kind of what we've seen in the last week and change?

I think I am not so much surprised by the response from folks. I'm a little frustrated that it took this moment for people to realize what has been happening in this country for the past decade, few decades, honestly, this is this is a very long game for the anti's, but ever since Trump was put into office and started just flooding the federal courts with very young, very anti-conservative judges, and SB8 was a huge flag, but I think I was surprised that there was a mass amount of people that were going to step up when the decision came out, it gives me hope. I hope it's sustained for the many, many years we're going to need practical support and

abortion funds while we fight for our legal rights. Yeah, so I guess the surprise is a mixed, it's a mixed bad for me. Yeah, I was going to say something similar that I think I've been pleasantly surprised at how well educated and informed a lot of our supporters and newer supporters are about, as Diana mentioned, the existence of abortion funds and practical support organizations that practical support is even being talked about is huge. We couldn't get this conversation into the media a couple of years ago, so this is really remarkable and important, but what's more, there seems to be also a different understanding

of why we have to exist. It doesn't seem to be shocking people quite as much, although there certainly are still tons of people who are shocked by this, but for many, they're not shocked that for some abortion has simply been inaccessible and what those reasons are. That's thanks obviously to a lot of the really hard important conversations that have been had over the last couple of years about racial justice. I think that it's a silver lining for sure, but I'm grateful to find that the depth of the conversations is there now, and hopefully that means that the commitment is going to

be sustained in long term because this is a little bit of deja vu for us in the sense that we've had little moments like these ever since our organizations existed. When a single ban goes into place or is threatened to go into place, this swell occurs using my hands a lot, which obviously you can't see if you're listening to me right now, so I'm going to put my hands down, and that brings out a lot of really incredible donors and a lot of really incredible offers for volunteers, and then they tend to go away. Especially when Biden was elected, there was definitely this moment where everyone was like, okay, we're cool, right?

We're chill. This guy hasn't said the word abortion, but we're still fine, and we're not. We're like the furthest from fine. So yeah, again, pleasantly surprised that people seem to have a sense of why we're here. Yeah. I just wanted to bring up that website, didbidensayabortionyet.org, I think. Oh yeah, one of our colleagues made that. No, it's so unfortunately hilarious to me, but I'm just really glad it exists.

And then someone reached out to someone in the Biden administration to make a comment on this when the draft was leaked, and they said, well, we tweeted it, or whatever. He said it once in a tweet and once in a statement or something. So I just think it's very funny. Well, there you go. There's a lot more we want. I just think it's important to what you were saying earlier how legislators in Oregon or California, it's so important they're saying the word abortion, not just pro-choice, because

I think a lot of people are scared about that word for some reason, or it sounds scary to them if they're not that educated about what pro-choice means or what abortion means. So I think I have a little bit more hope seeing more people even saying that word because it's not just pro-choice. Yeah. I think the statistic is something like the anti has been using the word abortion three times as much as we have, and that is why it's so stigmatized and difficult to talk about.

And I definitely try to encourage people to say the word abortion, to talk about abortion with everyone they know, just so we can stop hiding. I guess kind of the last thing I'd like to ask, and we can cut this bit if this winds up not being something you want to get into, but have you felt an additional need to worry about given how public you are in your advocacy, personal protection as things kind of have heated up? You know, we were recently at the conference that you mentioned before, and it definitely, with all of my colleagues in one place, it definitely made me feel a little vulnerable

for myself and them, but honestly, the people who are targeted are the providers by far. I'm not worried about my physical safety. I'm worried about the physical safety of our providers, and the fact that our government is responding to peaceful protesters outside Cavanaugh's house and talking and asked for I think Susan Collins on the sidewalk outside her residence results in legislation being passed. Immediately. Immediately.

They all somehow got together for once in their lives to do something about the terrorists who chalk sidewalks outside legislators' homes is it's really demoralizing because we have, our providers have seen violence and yeah, they've seen violence almost every day. Murders, acid attacks, bombings, yeah, Chris, Shareen, do you have anything else you wanted to get into? Yeah. I'm going to ask one thing. So, you know, okay, seeing this sort of increasing fecklessness of our politicians even by their

standards and, you know, the response to this being let's give more power to the US Marshals, which is maybe the worst idea I've ever seen. What can just people do about this in, you know, I mean, we talked about like giving to abortion funds, but how can people get involved and how can people get involved in a way that's sustainable over the long term? Yeah, I mean, definitely give to abortion funds, give to practical support organizations like the Midwest Access Coalition and the Bridget Alliance. If you are interested in volunteering, reach out to your local organization.

There are a couple of really great resources for lists of those organizations and where they are like the National Network of Abortion Funds. And you do bear with all of us because we are handling a flurry of emails. And that's incredible, but we won't be able to plug you in immediately. It might even take a little bit of time. But then I think that, you know, voting is still critical, especially in local, in any local elections, especially if we're thinking about how we're going to prevent the possible criminalization of abortion seekers and of abortion providers.

We need to make sure that we've got the judges and good local elected officials at the very least. So do not stop doing that. Yeah, I think those would be the things that I would say focus on. And the thing that I always say, which is just like, talk about it, like I am totally that person who is like the downer at the dinner party talking about abortion, but be that person and go and talk about it and share why it's important and how it's not just about abortion and it's not just about women.

It's about families. It's about parents. It's about queer folks. It's about immigrants. It's about minors. We've got a lot to be worried about right now. So don't stop talking, listening, reading, consuming, whatever you can. Yeah.

And just to jump off that, if you are in a safe state, you're not going to be safe forever. They're going to come after us. They're going to come after the legislators, the Supreme Courts of those states. They're usually a thin margin as far as conservative versus progressive judges on state Supreme Courts. So find out who your local org is that is leading that voter turnout to make sure that people are voting for the right judges to go in. And also I want to lift up escorts.

Escorts are on the ground many days of the week. They will put you to work and they're going to be needed more and more. Yeah. I think that's all very important and a good note to end on. Does anyone else have anything else or should we let y'all get back to your very important work and thank you again for making the time for us? Absolutely. Thank you for covering this and talking about it.

Yeah. I appreciate it. Happy to do so. We'll be continuing to do that. And I hope you all, jeez, I don't even know what to say. I hope you fuck shit up for the people who are fucking shit up. We'll try our very, very best. Absolutely.

I hope the support doesn't dissipate as the trend goes away or whatever. I think that's so disheartening if that happens. Like hopefully the flood of emails, but not necessarily remains a flood for you, but like I hope that people are actually serious about doing something. And I think this time they might be just because I keep being surprised about little things. So I'm not going to expect anything anymore. Maybe people will surprise me. But I really appreciate the work you do.

So thanks for coming on to talk to us. Thank you. Thanks for having us. Talk to your Zoom H6 about crack cocaine abuse. Some amount of crack cocaine is perfectly normal for a recording device to use. It is part of the recording industry, but everyone can overdo it. And if your Zoom H6 starts not reading cards or for example, stealing from you in order to pawn your stuff to buy more crack cocaine, you might need to do an intervention.

This has been Robert Evans and a public service announcement about the Zoom H6 Handhold Recorder. How was that? Are we good? Yeah. Is that a good way to introduce a podcast? What podcast depends on your answer. That's a great question, Sophie. Scholars have debated for decades which show this is, but personally it is the opinion

of myself and a large body of researchers at Oxford and Cambridge that this is it could happen here. A podcast about how things are falling apart and how maybe putting it back together one of these days, figure it out. I'm here with Garrison and Chris. How are you all doing? Just absolutely splendid. I'm extremely excited that every time I leave Twitter there's a new mass shooting.

There was like 20 the past weekend. It's been a lot. There have been quite a few mass shootings in the last 48 hours and there's a non-zero chance there's been at least one between when we record this podcast and when you listen to it. Yeah. I'm not trying to be flippant. That's just a reality.

So I think we're going to talk about the two most recent ones, one of which was the mass shooting in Buffalo, New York by a four-chan motherfucking white supremacist, very much patterned after the 2019 eight-chan shootings, particularly the Christ Church massacre. And then the day after, I guess it's not technically a mass shooting because only one person was killed thankfully, but there was a shooting that was certainly an attempt to be a mass shooting because he attempted to close the exits and stop people from leaving at a Taiwanese church in Southern California, which was stopped by the congregation before nearly as many people could get killed.

It appears to be, it's just come out motivated by nationalist hatred of Taiwan by a Chinese man. That's the broad understanding of both. It's complicated. Yeah, I'm sure we'll get into that. But we should probably deal with them chronologically. The Buffalo shooting is, it's one of those things. I made a big chunk of my bones as a journalist in the field that I used to spend most of

my time reporting and covering the eight-chan shootings. And after every one of those in 2019, I had an article within about two hours. I haven't written anything about this one I don't plan to because there's not much to say. It is what we've seen before. I know there's some debate over how much of the man, as there should be over like how much of the manifesto you can take at face value, which is none of it. And as to whether or not there might be something more going on here.

But it is kind of my opinion from the information we have that this is the kind of attack we've seen before and the kind of attack we will probably see again more than once before the years over. This is someone who was radicalized primarily against the immigration or the existence really of people who are not white in the United States and believes that the best way to cleanse the country of people who are not white is to carry out mass shootings that will radicalize other people. And that will lead further to the breakdown of civil society in the United States by pushing

it kind of like hot button issues like gun control in order to further, you know, it's an accelerationist sort of attack. So yeah, that's that's what I'm seeing here. Yeah, I mean, it's, yeah, like, like we said, it's very, very much riffing off of the Christ church, I mean, at least over half of his manifesto was like specifically plagiarized manifesto, which of course that manifesto itself was was ripped from a lot of other manifestos. It's kind of just a series of like launching the medic language from one shooting to another

just kind of compiling into this massive conglomerate. That's all based on trying to convince more people to do the same act. That's really that's why when people are like talking about this and people try to limit the attention on the manifestos and that kind of stuff because it's all crafted specifically to get other people to do the exact same thing. It's filled with memes filled filled filled with in jokes full of like in group out group stuff to convince people to kind of go down a similar path and all of its carefully crafted that way.

The one really interesting thing about this is that there's not only manifesto but also like almost 700 pages of diaries that he posted as well and logs from like over like from a long long time tracking his inner thoughts but also like again he posted it and he knew he was going to do this. There's no telling how accurate that is. It's all in this package that he wants to present to people. So a lot of the nitty-gritty are not even worth talking about in a lot of cases. No, and I'm not I think there's broadly speaking things you can learn and I'm also to be clear

I'm not against researchers study and I think it should be absolutely absolutely I am against just finding a thing in there and like posting it like when I when I made my post I was pretty careful to note a couple of things that seemed consistent based on other aspects of the like things that he claimed about his radicalization that seemed consistent with what we were seeing like he noted that he was primarily radicalized online that seems plausible to me because of how fucking online the manifesto is yeah like and it's one of those folks are not entirely wrongfully bringing up the fact that the the great replacement white genocide sort of conspiracy theory that seems to have motivated this fellow is basically identical to shit Tucker Carlson

says that's not not relevant that's not what radicalized him though but that's not what radicalized yes this is not a dude who was watching Fox right that's something I've been frustrated by looking at the discourse because yes obviously Tucker shouldn't be talking about this because he's normalizing this very rhetoric that you find in these manifestos but he did that he did not find this from Tucker this is like it's a whole whole different ball game and when there's that conflation I do find that to be slightly frustrating yeah and some of the problem with discussing this is the problem with discussing basically any of these attacks is that the mass media coverage of it is nearly always going to flatten it

to a degree that works in the favor of the people who are using this as propaganda of the deed yeah and we can talk about maybe are there ways to deter that you know I've I've definitely that's something that I've spent a decent amount of my career kind of struggling with it's it's a tough thing to do because one of the things that's very frustrating that we've we've seen in the wake of this attack and that we see in the wake of basically every politically motivated attack is a whole bunch of people from a whole different bunch of belief systems and sides immediately trying to spin it in order to push the narrative they think is useful for the attack to have and some of them believe legitimately what they're

saying like the I think most of the people who are like this is you know Tucker Carlson's doing are generally just folks who have not spent as much time in the fever swamps as we have and see oh Tucker Carlson's talking about this this guy carried out of shooting they must be related right I don't think that's like that's wrong but I don't think that's malicious and then you get folks who are malicious with it right like you have all the days of Italian stuff is the folk yeah right one of the one of the narratives we've seen form particularly from what I like to call the shit head left is folks being like well there was a son in rod the black son it's a Nazi occulti symbol the people who are more nerds

about Nazis will even quibble that but that's that's the broad strokes of what it is and it's it's a symbol that's definitely on some as of gear it's also on a has been on a bunch of shit well before there was an as of battalion the 30s since the 40s yeah it's all over the fucking place and the reason he did it the reason he had a black son on some shit was not because of the as of battalion it in fact he talked about wanting to break up NATO a bunch but it was because the son in rad was on the chest of the plate carrier of the Christchurch shooter yes yeah there's all of these big fan of the Christchurch shooter there's all of these people who are like yeah authoritarian left or whatever who are being like oh how

can Americans condemn this attack when this guy is using as of imagery and they're there's no telling how genuine they are with this like there's no telling if they actually know what they're doing or if they're just or if they're just being like if they're purposely misinformed or what's going on it's like he doesn't he doesn't matter but yeah my marriage my my assumption with those folks is that they are doing it because if you are a competent paid propagandist you want to always be pushing the narrative in a way that furthers whatever it is your job to push and if your job is connecting Ukraine to every bad thing that happens and a mass shooting that has nothing to fucking do with with Ukraine or the Ukrainian

government if you can connect it back to them then you're back in your wheelhouse right because maybe you're not so strong talking about the fact that you and some of the people around you who have been friendly with fucking Tucker Carlson and he pushes a similar narrative to the one this mass shooter used maybe that's uncomfortable what is comfortable is saying no this guy who did this bad thing is tied to these other bad people who are tied to this group that my entire career is about attacking that's a much stronger position to be in you know if you're you know a propagandist it's just like you see folks on the right who don't want to grapple with the fact that this was a right winger who carried out a

terrorist attack based on an ideology that even motherfucking Ben Shapiro has pushed elements of you don't want to deal with that so you call him a leftist because we saw the same thing with Christchurch yeah he made a couple of vague he's not a leftist he repeatedly identified himself as right wing and as a fascist as a Nazi as an ethno nationalist but he made like a couple of vague comments that they're taking out of context and being like see he was on the left what she wanted to happen that is like what she wanted to happen that's why he put it in there right it's it's like it is all part of the bit it's all this it's it's it's all of this like I like irony poison thing that they do on purpose

to give anyone a propaganda out or give anyone a propaganda in it's all yeah if you'll remember it before it's not that's not new but it's frustrating yeah in the Christchurch manifesto Tarrant who said that he'd been radicalized by Candace Owens yeah who's like a person who says a bunch of shitty fucked up stuff I don't like Candace Owens but like had nothing to do with that guy's radicalization right like that's not that's not where he's fucking coming from but he did it because he wanted to because it's fucking it's shitposting you know it's to muddy the water it's to get people like it's to it's to reduce the ability of people trying to grapple with what has happened to accurately see what has happened

and accurately identify the problem and respond to it a big a big motive for the stuff is to cause this kind of social and discourse chaos right they want people they want everyone to be confused and they want everyone yeah to be fighting each other and disagreeing on basic terms right because the whole point of this is to like encourage gun control legislation which will get the right match will cause people to be more willing to do mass shootings or to do attacks against government right it's all part of the very basic accelerationist of like talking points and tactics so the confusion is not accidental it's all it's all no if you I think a good way to look at this if you like fighter planes and helicopters

in a combat zone will have a type of countermeasure they will launch if someone's shooting a missile that's like a tracking missile heat seeking whatever at them it's called chaff and it basically it looks to the missile the same as a helicopter does you shoot a bunch of these out and the missile goes and hit something that's not the fucking helicopter but to its sensors looks like a helicopter that's what they're doing they're shooting out chaff they're getting you to like box with shadows rather than potentially landing a blow against like the central problem and the central problem is not an easy one to grapple with without all that stuff around it right because the the issue here is how the way in which the

internet enables radicalization the way in which online communities are prone to radicalization the way in which the conservative media and aspects of like just basic American history play into this specific people who want to do violence in this way for this reason which is why the cops don't notice them even when they're on their radar which is why that like the the warning signs don't get spotted and the ways in which I think more than anything the ways in which the internet has created a perfect incubation chamber for radical violence and that is one of the stories here right you know people are focusing on gun control which this guy bought his gun in the state of New York which has the most restrictive

gun laws in the country was more relevant even if you're on that end is this guy was deeply involved in like tactical reddit this guy was heavily involved in tactical videos and training videos in talking with other people about the best weapons the best ways to use them and if you watch the I don't watch the video but he was competent he engaged competently he did he maximized his ability to do damage he took out somebody with a gun who was attempting to stop him that shit the stuff that he did to prepare tactically worked and the kind of tactical chunks of reddit of the internet which are not all right wing but a hell of a lot of them are in a hell of a lot of them have gone in very scary directions

in the last couple of years not only do I suspect contributed to his radicalization but I can say certainly contributed to his ability to effectively kill people yeah I mean he had like over five pages just on what helmet he picked out he had pages on what socks he was wearing which is not which is for multiple reasons it's one to make the actual act more effective it's two to inspire not like discourse like this but also to to get people to replicate what he did right it's crafting all of these symbols that people can replicate be like oh he picked out these socks that means I'm these socks I'm gonna get these socks it's all this branding thing um we should take we should take a break and

then I want to come back and talk about some mimetic language stuff you know who else can give you good advice on socks oh boy all right here's ads okay um I want to talk about some mimetic language stuff because this was all heavily riffing and I specifically use the term riffing um off of the Christchurch shooting uh which itself was riffing off other stuff right but he he went so far yeah I mean the Christchurch shooting was a copycat shooting of the uh Anders Brevek shooting or at least descendant of whatever term you want to use but that's what inspired the Christchurch shooting and it's I mean he was the for for the Buffalo shooting he was testing out different live streaming platforms he was doing all

the stuff to craft a very specific image and like images are very are very powerful we've talked about like me magic before if we want to get silly about it um but he was very very much involved in crafting these things that could be replicated visually um that's that's why he wanted to live stream it's so bad it's just the same way the same way uh Christchurch was and this is like really important for why we don't share this type of stuff and why we why we specifically clamped down on this on this on this style of propaganda and why we really encourage people not to share it not to look at it not to do that stuff because he he does in the few parts of the manifesto that he did write um he does he

did say like watching the Christchurch video was very impactful for him which I don't disagree with I'm sure I'm sure it was he he did change the course of my life yeah even and he did great lengths to recreate it um and this is why we the people who are like researchers and people who kind of hand try to handle this kind of stuff um in like in their time on earth uh are so particular about this like a thing last year like a year and a half ago there was this film company based in New Zealand who wanted to make a Christchurch film uh and they want they were gonna film a recreation of the shooting but they said like oh but it's to show the horror and to show the impact it had on the victims doesn't fucking matter

it matters zero amount because once you put that language into cinematography you are giving them basically ammunition to help create propaganda which will get more more people killed this is why the same thing we see the same thing on fucking um roblox we see people recreate the Christchurch shooting on roblox there's actually a major problem like a year ago specifically it was a huge problem of people recreating the footage inside this game engine and it's it's specifically it's it's very it's a very powerful tool that they use to spread around uh it's targeted specifically people ages 12 to 18 this this guy was 18 years old um it's he was heavily involved in online gaming he was a really

heavy um reddit user specifically um he loved discord so it's these are the places where it spreads even more so than hn now to yeah and i would say we know and i called him like a four chin shooter because number one he definitely was familiar with with pole and number two he was on there he announced his livestream there i do agree with you reddit was a bigger part of his radicalization i suspect and and a lot of and discord probably and i suspect he did purposefully minimize the extent to which conversations on discord were part of his radicalization journey in particular that would be my assumption at the moment but for for countering this type of rhetoric in this type of propaganda right

because they're they're trying to make themselves look cool they're trying to make themselves look tactical they're trying to look they're trying to make themselves they look like they're in a video game they make it look like they're in a movie right they're trying to be cinematic like they're the he was he was testing out different cameras um he tested like a go pro he just he tested on his phone camera right trying to get a specific look um and we just we just talked about how he was tactically proficient in some ways but in handling this type of thing we have to when we're crafting counter stuff to make this to make this thing less likely we need to not even focus on that we need to make them look stupid make them

look juvenile make them look like they're pathetic make them look like they're stupid and silly like their larpers that's one of the things that saved god knows how many lives at kind of the high point of the eight chan shootings in 2019 was that fucker in hall germany tried to carry one out and got the piss beat out of him by a dude at a mosque yeah um and was photographed the next day in court just covered it's like beat to shit um that image probably saved some lives they they want to be cool they want to be mimetic they want to be spread around as a symbol and we need like culturally needs to yes this is obviously very scary this is a very real threat for many for many people many people of color many black people many

many muslims people of different religions jewish people queer people but we need to win when specifically crafting rhetoric and propaganda against these things we need to make them look pathetic right that that's what it needs to be framed as because if you make them look scary and competent that's actually going to make these things worse um because they they they love that right like if you film the christ if you do any kind of like movie about the christian shooting no matter how you shoot it they're gonna love it if if you're showing people in pain they they want that they want that it's that's the that's what they're looking for you need to specifically frame this as these people

arping and these people being pathetic and people being terminally online um and having bad social skills like you need to you need to frame it in this way that makes them look not desirable because their whole point is to craft this desirable and visually stunning propaganda um and I think yeah that's that that's I haven't been thinking about this for the past yeah because there's just been so much but like I identify these people isn't the problem right like this guy he was he was talked to by by counselors last year because they were afraid he was he was going to do a school shooting um like there was a lot of the red flags and stuff and like he was he was talked he was talked to by people before

this happened like he wasn't an unknown factor he wasn't an unknown of the vector to make to make this to make to you know to be this a person that can do this but there's there's no way people are very people are good at finding these people before they do it uh but we're bad at actually stopping them from doing it once we find once we find them uh there's there's really no power to stop it um and interrupting any kind of radicalization pipeline is really hard so it's more about laying the groundwork to make the pipeline look pathetic so it's harder to happen again but always kind of stuff is frustrating because if there's a good strategy you wouldn't be here be be deeply I want to move on to the shooting in

California but at the at the end of this to close out be deeply suspicious if not outright contemptuous of anyone who posits a simple solution to these shootings whether that solution is gun control whether it's expanded police powers whether it's fucking arming everybody so that they can shoot shooters anyone who proposes a simple solution this this is a deeply complicated problem um because we let a number of horrible horrible obvious problems go on for way too long and the solution to this will be painfully agonizingly difficult and will take time and there is there is not a simple all encompassing way to deal with this um one of the things that you can do right now to better prepare yourself to potentially

deal with this problem is take a stop the bleed course carry an ipad ipad and a gunshot wound kit um as often as possible and that continues to be my best immediate advice to people um because that there's no downsides to doing that and it it could and does save lives in other shootings all right let's move on in other news in other news the next shooting yeah hooray yeah okay this is a weird one um and i i i think the thing we need to make clear up front is that this happened yesterday um as the time of recording still yeah time of recording details are still emerging and it's weird there's a lot of potential things so so for people who don't know um a presbyterian church in california was attacked by a chinese

guy this is this is a taiwanese church um it's mostly senior citizens and i think there's there's a few important things up front that people should probably understand about this one is that okay so taiwan taiwan is ruled by military dictatorship but for like basically the the the better part of the post world war two period it is ruled by military dictatorship run by the nationalist party the kmt the kmt is extraordinary in this period it is extraordinarily violent they assassinate people all over the place they kill people on american soil they kill they train death squads in latin america and you know they're they're known for the sort of human anti-communism but eventually they're sort of toppled by revolution isn't

quite the right word but as you know the the kmt as a party is still around today and is one of the two sort of major like taiwanese political parties but they're not like the sort of desks they're not exactly the sort of desquad mafia party that they were through most of the 20th century um the the sort of the the sort of progressive forces that worked overthrow the dictatorship a lot of them coalesce into a party called the ddp and one of the things about the ddp is and there's a lot of sort of complicated taiwanese political stuff here but they are very very closely connected to the presbyterian church in a lot of ways and this i i i don't know the specifics about this church but there is there

is a very strong connection between and then the the ddp are okay pro independence is putting it too strongly but if you're a pro independent like you you want taiwan to be an independent country and you don't want them to sort of like either continue well okay this is the problem with taiwanese politics it's enormously convoluted uh there's a lot of stuff going on at some at any time and people are going to get mad at you for the simplifications i'm making but yeah the the short version of the story is that the sort of anti ccp pro independence e forces are and the sort of like progressive movement is sort of lumped into the ddp and those are the people who are getting shot yeah like because yeah because

again there's there's a very strong connection between presbyterian church and dp um and the kmt who again i mean okay they've had an extremely complicated relationship with the communist party over the last 100 years it's incredibly baffling but they've basically swung around towards being more favorable to china and there are there are some fact extremist factions of it that are that support you like just unification um what seems to have happened here is okay so this the the shooter's family seems to have been like deported from china to taiwan and he like did not like it in taiwan and and this is where it starts to get very murky um the police statement we have says that it you know it's

about sort of racial like it's it's it's it's anti taiwanese animus but that can mean a lot of things and yeah this this again i keep saying it's murky and it's because it's it's genuinely murky there's a chance that this is one of the things that's been happening since the hong kong protests is a solidification in mainland china sort of anti of anti taiwanese sentiment has sort of lumped in in in this sort of like nationalist anti hong kong thing there was there was a hardening of rhetoric against yeah taiwan but also there's a lot of there's a lot of people in taiwan like like especially kmt hardliners on the hard right who like really really really intensely hate like the sort of like the the sort of progressive

anti ccp pro independence people sure and you know and this is something we don't we don't know what his affiliation is he was like in his like he was like in his like his 60s right yeah well and this is this is this is weird because like there's a lot of things that could be true about this because of how old he is like again you know i mean he he is around when the kmt is is straight up a desk lot party right yeah yeah so it could be that it could be he's sort of like independently radicalized there's been some like rumors might be too weak of a word but there's been some kind of sketchy reporting that like his ex was leaving for taiwan and that that may have played a part in it but you know violence

between the kmt and people who don't like the kmt is a thing that there was no there was a very large amount of in the us for a lot of reasons and even though the kmt is sort of like i mean their alignment to china has like flipped in the past about 40 years i i don't know i'm really really desperately hoping that that's this isn't going to set off i mean there's already been a lot of especially around hong kong there's been a lot of physical violence like people attack each other at protests about between for example people who support their hong kong protests and uh chinese like ccp nationalists but this is something different very weird very embedded in the taiwanese context and i don't think we fully understand what's

going on here um the everything again is like this guy like he lived in taiwan like he was speaking taiwanese like when when he was essentially like going into this church to infiltrate before he shot everyone so like he this isn't like this this this isn't and i think people are reporting it like this because they don't know what's going on but like this this isn't a case of like a guy who is from mainland china who like decided that he hated taiwanese people like this he was there he like he speaks he speaks taiwanese he like understands the taiwanese political situation very in depth which presumably is why he targeted the specific church but other than that it's it's the motives are still kind of murky and this is the other

problem with it which is that like the sheriffs like there's no way that the sheriffs have any idea what they're looking at like they've apparently reading his personal notes and it's like i don't trust their analysis of it good lord no yeah like these if you weren't here we would have to find someone else who understands that conflict in order to talk about it i don't feel comfortable like trying to figure out or analyze that guys notes i sure as shit don't trust some fucking sheriff's deputy to do it like yeah i don't know yeah and i think that that's i don't know i will say like i this i think was like the worst possible scenario for what that shooting is about because this is a kind of this is a

kind of violence that was really intense like right after world war two and sort of like you know there's been periods where like yeah i mean people have been like people have gotten killed here but it hasn't been that violent in a long time and i don't know i'm i'm hoping this is just one guy who had a particular grievance who i don't know like was was pushed by sort of external factors but if this is a sign of like if this is a sign of sort of anti-tauanese like national why okay so there's one other thing that that we need to talk about because that's unclear because there's two kinds of potential right wing chinese nationalism at play here and it's unclear which one's happening because there are there are people who are

right wing chinese nationalists who are like pro ccp right but there's also a kind like a kind of like it shifted but there's also like a a like a a kmt nationalist based right wing chinese nationalism which favors sort of like reunification with china but is is not the same thing as as the sort of mainland nationalism and has its own particular like very local political grudges like with with the ddp and with the sort of like progressive e movements in taiwan and i don't know and anything beyond that is kind of like trying to figure out which one it is like we just don't know unless the police unless the police actually decide to like show us this guy's notes or like give us recordings of what he's

been saying we're not going to know and maybe maybe by the time this is out like there will be more stuff but right now it's very muddled very bad the fact that this guy also i think was an american citizen but was born in china has gotten every like even even the chinese media outlets are saying extremely weird stuff because they're confused by it so it is a it is a muddled is a muddled mess i mean everything about this last weekend's been muddled there's been so many different mass shootings this weekend yeah there's been people being paranoid about copycat mass shootings you know yesterday there was reporting that a gunman entered a church in buffalo um that was not actually true it's someone someone in the church yelled

like there's a gunman or something or like um or like get the gun down or something um and it caused people to create this this the kind of rumor but that there wasn't actually someone with a gun it was it was this someone was like reacting to the sermon that was that was being had um but yeah everyone's been super paranoid about every stuff and all this kind of stuff as as they should be so sorting through sorting through all this stuff is very complicated and uh not a great time because it's not it's not fun um and we shouldn't have to do it but it sucks i do you think it's also worth noting that uh the police did not stop uh i i i know specifically they did not stop the one in the church um the the uh the past

a pastor a pastor uh hit the hit him with a fucking chair yeah hit him with a steel chair and then the and then they hogtied him with an extension court and then the police came which is pretty which is so dope um i'm sorry they were ever in that position but they should never have to be in that position but it's turns out more and more people are having to do stuff themselves because it it's not also the first time that a mass shooter has been stopped by someone hitting them with a chair if i'm not mistaken that's how the gifford shooter was stopped eventually or part of how he was stopped is somebody fucking decked him with a chair it's yeah it's really worth yeah it's really useful to have something

beyond just your limbs yeah if someone is trying to shoot you with a gun ideally you get away but if you can't get away trying to hit them in the face with something heavy is certainly a choice that has saved a number of people's lives god what what an absolutely dog shit country it's not a great when i you know i i noted earlier anyone trying to sell you like simple solutions and i mentioned gun control on that which is not to say that like the outrageously easy how how ridiculously easy it is to get any kind of gun in this country obviously that's a factor in these shootings my my hesitance to take gun control as a if you'll forgive the term magic bullet to fix any of this is number one the sheer

number of guns that are already propagated number two the fact that a lot of gun control measures boil down to making it harder for poor people to get guns and neither of these shootings seem to have been poor people shooting up folks and just also the fact that while some states are capable of passing additional gun control number one new york's basically done everything it's constitutional to do re restricting gun ownership and federally biden and their dims can't protect roe v wade they're sure as shit not going to pass any federal and that's what these people want as well like they're specifically doing this to get this stuff started so that it increases political tensions whether or not to agree

with my fundamental claim you don't have to you can believe that if gun control were to be passed it could be the solution but it's not gonna be and so like as as regards those of us trying to survive we have to look in other directions because you're not gonna get an assault weapons ban it's just not happening yeah I mean the one good I don't say good thing but it has been nice to see people slowly dropping the whole like lone wolf terminology yes that is a positive development because these are not alone wolf it's it's part of a very it's a part of an intentional effort to cause these things to happen it's part of the the groups may be decentralized but they are not yeah but they are yeah they are

decentralized and a cephalus but they are deeply deeply sophisticated and connected yeah just not in a way you can drone strike easily well yeah and I think I I would have some target suggestions cares anyway get an i-fac do stop the blade and don't don't feed into their propaganda in the way that they want their propaganda organize with folks in your neighborhood yeah okay well kids adults boys and girls and individuals of non binary or other gender identities cats who happen to be listening in airwolf the helicopter if you're listening in everybody every sentient creature listening you know I do believe that things can get better so part of that is not letting the the crimes that these the things

that these people do like part of the purpose of an attack like this is to make people feel hopeless and overwhelmed it's to black pill you you know to to to utilize some of their terminology so the way to fight against it is among other things if you're talking about immediate things you can do go out and do something nice to help people yeah and you know I would say like as a sort of like one brief last note like yeah like in Taiwan they overthrew the dictatorship and oh hey it turns out people stop getting assassinated by the KMT American soil so you know over overthrow your governments and YouTube can make peace with your enemies yeah yeah overthrow your government overthrow another government you

know it's all good it's all good baby hello everyone welcome to it could happen here the podcast about things falling apart and sometimes have become put them back together today it's me Garrison Chris our producer Sophie and Andrew joins us once again I love that guy oh me too me too hi everyone another episode of Andrew talking about whatever he feels like talking about today's episode I am happy to announce that I finally finally finished dawn of everything it took it took a while you know there were some points in time some weeks I just went by where I didn't even like make a dent um you know life got in the way and stuff but I finally finally finished it

and now I get to talk about it and say you know with some authority that I've read dawn of everything you know yeah it's a very dense book but um it was 100% with it I mean there are some critiques that I've been taking into by some um authors in the field um and so I highly recommend people look for critiques as well not just you know taking it and consuming it who will sale but the in addition to those critiques like armed with those critiques um such as by people like um what is politics on YouTube and also a couple academic writers as well I think you could get a lot out of the book and I certainly have yeah this is a this is a this is a very good book I'm excited to talk about it because I read it like oh

it was a while ago now like it's like five months ago or something oh wow I feel like being able to talk about it I've been like waiting for the chance I've been I've been I've been picking up bits and pieces of it but unfortunately my book list to get through is uh way too long at the moment so I've not been able to actually dive fully into the text itself um but it is definitely on my list after I get through my 20 other books I need to read for myself yeah it's a lot it's a lot um at least we got to read books for living there was something adjacent to that um and I mean it is a difficult book I would say to like discuss in its entirety and I didn't I don't intend to not to read

any a parade or anything Chris but I don't intend to talk about the entire book you know because that's like several hundred pages yeah you know and each chapter covers like so so much um but I actually wanted to talk about chapter four in particular um where the authors explore the concept and the origins in a sense of cultures um in one particular segment I mean there are a lot of mysteries of the upper paleolithic that we don't know right I mean that's why the mysteries um but you know we've come to learn you know through the course of the book that you know this assumption that everything was just these small tight knit bands um and that was just the entirety of the human social arrangement

until states you know at least it's new to the layman to realize that this is not necessarily the case you know um that there is a lot more um political structural you know diversity in that time period we don't know at that point in time you know what languages you who are speaking you know of course linguists have been able to like reconstruct like proto languages and stuff and I mean I'm just a hobby linguist just like I'm a hobby everything else but I think it's been really cool to see how linguists are just able to do that like can we just take a second to realize that like linguists are able to take scraps of existing languages and just kind of piece them together to get a sense of like how they're

related like how do y'all do that um um there's a lot we don't know right we don't know about their language and about their myths you know um their conceptions of the soul what their favorite foods were I mean we know they ate but we don't know what like Joe Skeleton thought about his breakfast that morning but what we do know is that you know from the Swiss Alps to out Mongolia in the Upper Paleolithic people were using a lot of the same tools um playing a lot of similar musical instruments carving similar rather interesting female figurines um wearing similar ornaments and conducting similar funeral rites and there's also reason to believe that people actually traveled a lot more than we would expect them to do and

actually traveled longer distances than we would expect for that time period I mean we don't have they didn't have rather you know like cars or or chariots or trains or planes or anything like that so to think that these long distance um journeys were occurring you know places like Australia or in like North America is just really interesting to think about yeah I was wondering if you can talk about like one of the things I thought was really interesting about this is the way that they talk about culture areas where you have these yes yes yeah you have these like very large I mean like almost like like half continent sized areas where people are speaking similar languages like the same language and you have

these like you have like these clan structures that are like you know you you can go from like go from like Missouri and you can end up in like Mississippi and you'll be in a place where they still have like you know the the sort of like four basic like clan lodges are still the same you'll meet people who are like from your clan and he has this really interesting line about how like sort of kind of intuitively like the world's gotten like the world like even when there was like people spread over geographic distance like the world sort of got larger as technology progressed and not sort of like smaller in the way that people sort of think about it because like in I don't know instead of there being these

sort of like mega like culture areas you can go from one place to another and you'll there'll be people who speak the same language and you can sort of slot into the like systems that are there you suddenly have this like incredible diversity of stuff right right so I mean specific to like North America you know we had all these different clan structures we usually tend to think of you know these groups as and you know especially like your immediate relations with people that you know it's like close skin family that kind of thing but there's actually at least in some studies of hunter gatherers there's some suggestion that their composition can be quite cosmopolitan so you know you have these these groups and

biological relations might only make up a small percentage of like total membership they actually drawing from a wide pool of individuals of a larger stretch of area I know not all of them even speak necessarily the same first language this is youtuber on indigenous anarchist youtuber named twin rabbit and he had this excellent excellent video I need to rewatch it on planes assigned language which is this method of communication that indigenous americans used across you know the planes to conduct trade and diplomacy and discussions even if they didn't share the same language in aboriginal australia people were able to travel halfway across the continent moving across people who spoke entirely different languages and

still find you know camps that had people of you know their same totemic moiety you know and those people which we treated like their brothers and sisters you know so like no hanky fanky but you know they had this this you know cross continental bond of like hospitality from the great lakes you know to louisiana bayous you can find settlements of people speaking entirely entirely separate languages unrelated to their own and yet still you will find you know bear clans or elk clans or beaver clans that will oblige the host and feed them you know and we could only really guess as to like what kind of systems were like and how those systems might have worked 48,000 years ago you know in the apocalyptic

but what we do see with the you know similarities in material uniformities and stuff of these different tools and musical instruments and stuff suggests that there might be a bit of a similar system in place at that time roughly around like 12,000 bc we start seeing like new pottery you know getting dropped we starting to see the outlines of more specific cultures in specific areas new stone grinding tools new ways of preparing and eating wild grains and roots and other vegetables different ways of chopping slicing creating grinding soaking draining boiling and storing smoking and preserving meats plant foods and fish and so we start to see something that really brings people together and that is cuisine

and cuisine you know being the birth of cuisine being the birth of like really more specific cultures you know the kinds of soups and porges and stews and broths and basically what they were talking about was the way that people who like wake up and eat fish stews every morning tend to you know develop a different sense of themselves in relation to their world compared to people who might wake up in the morning and eat some porridge with like berries and wild oats you know and then from there they start to develop different tastes in clothing you know in in dancing and drugs and hairstyles um I remember later on the book um the davids point out that some indigenous um native american groups were actually known

for specific hairstyles and I kind of knew that based on the fact that you know we tend to associate mohawks with people you know mohawk hairstyle mohawk people but I didn't realize that you know other groups also had their own kind of like culturally specific hairstyles right and there's also like courtship rituals and forms of kinship and styles of rhetoric and so of course you still have these large cultural areas in the mesolithic larger than some nation states but you're starting to see a bit more specificity and a bit more diversity in shorter um spans of area if we look at now for example where you know we have in the amazon all these different languages and cultures that coexist merely kilometers

from each other I think the overall trend of human cultures you know over the past tens of thousands of years has been the opposite of marginalization and it makes me think a bit about the whole concept of the nation states and how it tries to like bring people together to just like one narrow conception of what it means to be you know x y z and how humanity naturally seems to like resist that and naturally seems to like split all from that like even when you have situations with the forceful spread of english in you know the cribian colonies you still see like a diversity springing up with a bunch of different unique creoles and dialects making the language something different you know if not for the

enforcement of language standardization through the you know school system I think we would actually see an even more rapid um explosion of you know linguistic diversity developing out to these creoles and dialects you know like a couple centuries from now you know patois and trinidad and creole and british english may be entirely incompatible even in britain itself you know you might have a case where london english and i don't know sussex english or whatever starts to sound like entirely different and we already have that with accents but just to see how you know even in short spaces of time as short as a century or two because for example trinidad um was not always an english-speaking colony

um we actually spoke french creole for most of our history and only in the 19th century did we have that period of anglicization where english was you know brought in um and to see that in that short space of time in that handful of centuries that you know trinidad already has its own unique english-based creole you know it's just fascinating to see um there's something really interesting to me about the way this process plays out because it's it's it's almost like okay so you have this sort of like like you have this period in was the mesolithic um all the period names are blinking out of my head but like like 40 seconds ago yeah so like you have this period where you have kind of like you have a lot of cultural

standardization like spread across a long period like a bunch of places and it's used sort of as a mutual aid thing it allows people to travel because you can go to a place and know that like there will be people who are like you there and they will take care of you and it's interesting to me it's like okay so this breaks apart as sort of like these these new cultures like as people develop local cultures around like food and around just like graver has this thing that he loves talking about these we're talking about for ages called uh schismagenesis which is like you have two people you know it's like i think i think the original example is like a few people who are arguing with each other and they like disagree minorly over like one thing and

then by the end of the argument like they're they've they've taken like completely mutually opposed identities to each other based on like right an incredibly minor disagreement and you get this with yeah you get like you get cultures to sort of like define themselves against each other and like they have things that they like and things that they don't like and it's interesting to me that that you see you see the state trying to sort of like reimpose that kind of like like 40 000 year old cultural homogeneity on all of these places that are like incredibly not homogenous but they're doing it for like the opposite reason they're doing it because they need standardization in order to sort of like make their make their bureaucratic like systems work

better and make their sort of like yeah seen like a stage kind of thing yeah yeah and also like like i mean this was a huge thing everyone in like the early the late 90s and early 2000s thought that like the extent of capitalism on the around the globe was going to make everything exactly the same there's only one culture and that like kind of really didn't happen but there was this real sort of i don't know like there was this real sort of fear that that it wasn't just going to be the nation-state spreading like homogenization but like capitalism was going to sort of like spread homogenization and i guess i guess the thing that they wound up doing instead was like figuring out that you could just sell everyone in their individual cultural niche which to some extent yeah because

like we see mcdonald's in the u.s and mcdonald's in bankladesh and mcdonald's in japan and they sell all the same mcdonald's stuff but they've also like sort of specified to their you know specific country yeah we have the worst version the u.s is the worst version of it by the way the the uh the like taiwan has one that has like they have like rice sticky rice patties it's so much better than the u.s yeah i mean i will say though if i did end up traveling to taiwan i mcdonald's would probably be the last place i would want to go yeah we we wanted to be in there and we we were we had to catch a plane so we wound up eating like um taiwanese taiwanese mcdonald's yeah taiwanese mcdonald's airport food because we had like five minutes it was a you know what they say

what airplane food um but yeah that's exactly what to get into actually the whole idea of cultural differentiation you know um and this this tendency that humans have to subdivide and to distinguish themselves from their neighbors and i mean it's natural to assume that you know this differentiation comes from like differences and like language you know with you know language splitting off over the centuries and people associating with their native language and ethnicity but that really tells the full story you know like for example in northern california in the early 20th century the ethnolinguistic map uh had really a jumble of languages that drew from um entirely different language families you know it's distant from one another as like arabic and

tamil and portuguese and yet these groups still shared you know broad similarities you know how they went about gathering and processing food you know their most important religious rituals how they organized their political life um and they also managed to keep themselves distinct you know you had the urok and the hoopa and the karok and so forth and i mean to some extent these identities did map on linguistic differences but their neighbors who spoke different languages still had more in common with them than people who came from their same language family in another part of north america of course you know european colonization had like a severe impact on like how native americans were distributed um but we still tend to see this trend of how like these

modern nation states they'd went around at the time to you know order populations into these neat ethnolinguistic groups you know this idea that the world should be divided into these like homogenous units with their own history and everyone has a claim to like a certain territory and all that it's been it's really a concept that is born onto this mythology of the nation state and you know of course we had to be real careful before we project those kind of uniformities back in time yeah it's something really like 200 years old like it's pretty young yeah exactly exactly but um there are some concerns you know with the concept of culture areas because that whole notion of culture areas came out of north american museums who wanted to arrange their stolen

artifacts to illustrate their theories of the different stages of human adaptation you know like lowest lower savagery and upper savagery and lower lower barbarism and so on and so they had to determine whether they were going to organize these artifacts based on like language family or regional clusters or some sort of like traced history of of regional of ancient migrations right eventually they realized that you know this way of organizing to regional clusters seemed to work best where the art and technology of different eastern woodlands tribes had some very similar things in common compared to like trying to group people based on like say the atabaskan language or all the people who relied on fishing or all the people who cultivated maize um

and they were able to find similar patterns in the neolithic villages of central europe you know finding these regional clusters of domestic life and art and ritual and so like this whole cultural area concept was kind of a way of pushing back against this way of you know talking about human history that like ranked populations into higher or lower anything you know this this idea of claiming that you know people were of a certain superior genetic stock and have reached an advanced level of technological evolution and so rather this there's been there was a shift in anthropological focus to look at the diffusion of more cultural traits like ceramics and sweat lodges and you know the treatment of young men or certain sports um as they wanted to try to understand how these

different tribes of certain region came to share this mesh of culture traits so one of the people who were thinking on this you know whole culture traits cluster idea um was a guy named boss right and he wanted to figure out why it is that like geography seemed to define the circulation of ideas you know it's like mountains and deserts forming these natural barriers and how basically the diffusion within those regions was basically historical accident a lipo hypothesizing that there was some sort of like way to eventually develop a kind of a natural science developing how and even predicting the ebb and flow of styles habits and social forms and eventually master mouse pulls up you know and he's basically talk he basically like write a bunch of essays on nationalism and civilization

and he says basically this whole idea of cultural diffusion is nonsense because it's based on a false assumption and the false assumption is that the movement of people technologies and ideas is some sort of rarity something unusual instead mouse argues that like people in past times traveled even more than people do today and it's just that when people interact with people of other cultures and they see their cultural traits they reflect on that and find a way to relate that to their own cultures right so like people who were traveling back then obviously all them you know were aware of basketry you know or or or featherworks or whatever the case may be that other people were using a couple miles away seem to be said for like certain drum rhythms or

certain you know games or like for example he spent some time focusing on the distribution of the ball games around the pacific ocean around the pacific rim from japan to new zealand to california and what he realized is that whether people pick up certain ideas certain traits from other cultures comes down to how they want to be defined against their neighbors against their closest neighbors the question becomes less about why certain culture traits spread but why other culture traits didn't because if you are aware of all the things that your neighbors and stuff are doing all these foreign customs and arts and technologies i mean we know that the silk road for example even we talk about the silk road you know we had a silk route going from china all the way into europe

and all across the silk route all across central asia and west asia and despite that constant you know sharing of ideas not every idea that you know came from china or came from puja or i don't know if puja was around during the silk route but you know what i'm saying like not every idea that was along the silk route everyone necessarily picked up on even if it was a technology that might have benefited them because cultures are effectively structures of refusal so for example um there's this guy on youtube um religion for breakfast he did a video recently on the pork taboo in certain cultures and certain religions right and one of the things he pointed out was that the taboo tends to be strengthened in times of like repression so for

example or in times of cultural um definition so for example he was pointing out that in the period of roman conquest the jewish people were more inclined to define themselves as you know against the consumption of pork compared to the romans you know for example the chinese or the people who use chopsticks you know they don't use knives and forks or you're the tiger the people who use spoons and so on you know it could just be said that you know it's like aesthetics like styles of art or music or tibetaners of course those things weren't different but even like technologies that have like adaptive or utilitarian benefits might still be might still be refused by people who might even benefit from them like for example the athabascans in alaska refused to use inuit kayaks despite the

fact that they are a lot better suited for the environment and their own boats and the inuit for example don't use athabascan snowshoes um at least in the time that master mouse was writing and then of course this is a self-conscious process you know this is a process where the debate and discussion of all these different customs would have been occurring you know for example in the chinese courts when different foreign styles and customs would you know come into the lands there would be debates and arguments put forward by you know the kings and their advisors and their vassals you know discussing you know whether they would ride the horses or drive chariots or adopt like the manchu dress codes and and and customs and so societies mouse said live by

boring from each other but they define themselves by the refusal of boring than by its acceptance the question of how culture areas form and how cultures split off is definitely a political one the decision to adopt um a certain form of agriculture or to cultivate a certain crop more specifically or to adopt a certain style of dress it's not just like a matter of like mere utility of mere or caloric advantage or material efficiency or it's also a reflection on a questioning of the values that that group of people holds or purport to hold who they consider themselves to be i like to think about the development of cultures you know i like to think about how our ancestors or distant ancestors even consider themselves you know it's easy to

just fall into this trap because it's a very common cultural trope that you know once you go before the invention of writing whatever all of our ancestors are just like uga booga cavemen kind of thing but to think of them as self-conscious and politically um conscious politically considerate thoughtful actors not you know static or passive props um it's just i think it's it's i think it's just very cool i think it's very cool and i think we should keep you know these developments these this recognition in mind as we you know in the modern time look to try to transform the cultures we live under and to try to develop new values new values of like anti-authoritarianism and anti-capitalism and of you know a greater priority on

mutual aid and on egalitarian social relations yeah i think there's a lot of very interesting political consequences of thinking about this because like i think that there's sort of like two tendencies that that we sort of get stuck in when we think about like our social structures which is there's there's there's one which is the sort of like i guess it's called like capitalist realism which is the assumption that like nothing else could possibly like this is the only system that works nothing else can possibly exist and that's unproductive and you know you go back and you look at like any other culture or society and it's like well no like there's there's like an unbelievable like nearly infinite number of ways you can recognize

your society but then i think i think the second one is that like yeah if you look at this sort of cultural diffusion and cultural refusal stuff you you see a lot of examples of people doing stuff that like under sort of like classical economic or like sociological laws they shouldn't be doing right like there's no reason why you shouldn't use a more efficient canoe if you're in a place of the part of the world that's like extremely hard to survive in right and and i think that there's this tendency to sort of like reduce culture and reduce just all of the ways that our social and political systems function to these sort of like oh they're the product of these like abstract historical forces and like ah it's all like there's all determined

by technology and like how you farm and stuff it's just not true yeah i mean not to say the material conditions on you know very important in understanding um you know how these cultures develop and that's one part of um not everything that i found was a bit lacking i think not all the time those dots were clearly connected i'd say but i do think people put too much stock in solely material and materialist um explanations and that kind of ends up precluding or leaving out the more messy human realm of explanation yeah and i think i think part of why this happens is that like it's much if you assume everyone is like behaving according to historical forces or like the thing that they're trying to do is like maximize um they're trying to like maximize their

utility they're trying to like maximize the amount of calories they have that that's a very easy thing to like you like think about numerically right like it's a very easy thing to refuse the numbers it's extremely difficult to refuse the numbers like to reduce to like reduce to numbers a society that is like i'm going i'm going to intentionally make my life harder for myself because this is the way we do things and we've decided we don't want to do things like other people we've decided that we have some kind of political value that we have that makes it such that we're going to like induce difficulty into our lives and like that i don't know like that that kind of stuff the the the fact that culture is not just a sort of like super structure that gets that's

like a product of like some kind of economic base like that that is very important and something that that gets ignored or downplayed constantly that i think i don't yeah and like i think like yeah i think i think you can argue that don't everything like maybe goes too far in the other direction but i'm i'm sort of okay with that just because we've been so far on the side of like everything is historical forces for so long that you need something to remind people that like societies make conscious political choices and not only have they made conscious political choices for like tens of thousands of years i like we also can make conscious political choices that are not just sort of like peer reflections of like however many tons of iron have been extracted

and like what percentage of like workers are currently working in hospitals versus like making cookies or something great thank you for that oh analysis chris really i agree that that's a joke like 12 people will get i i i love you if you if you understand that joke also i'm sorry yes you can wrap it up garson um all of this has been very fascinating what what i've learned the most is that i need to finish reading all my books so that i can read the dawn of everything like um i know i like i like got it from my dad for christmas because um because i i knew that it would be uh at least i think i did my memory could be i could actually be wrong i could have

only intended to get it for my dad for christmas and then forgotten to actually get it but i've been reading it to i've been meaning to both buy it for myself and get it for other people um because i've heard a lot of interesting things about the book so it is definitely on my list uh it's been a pleasure listening to uh y'all discuss it um andrew where can if people want to check out more of uh your your work where could where could they go about that right so you can still find me on twitter at underscore strew when i'm not um hiding and you can also find me on youtube andeurism youtube.com slash andeurism where i post videos about also stuff random stuff you know that i'm thinking about politics history all that jazz a few days ago as of time of recording

um andrew put out a wonderful video on solar punk stuff um i have no idea when this episode will air so this it's probably been like a month or two or something um but definitely check out the andrewism channel it's one of my favorite spots to uh watch something when i feel like i can't put any words on the page i go watch your things because it's very helpful um yeah so that does it for us today uh you can find us at twitter and on twitter and instagram at happen here pod callzone media you can find me posting about hyperobjects and liminal spaces at hungry bowtie and i heard that you have a twitter chris yeah it's at it me chr three uh you can find me mostly complaining about other people who are doing communism wrong i guess that's most of

what i post about love that for you you too will be able to differentiate between the 16 different four actually that's not even sure there's not even 16 they're used to be long ago in a galaxy far far away and made a decision and that was that uh i was going to sacrifice my brain to understand the different kinds of Maoism and if you two want to understand why it still exists and all 20 000 varieties of them uh yeah go there if you don't want to do that do not you'll be happier well what a riggy endorsement uh goodbye everyone go uh i don't know oh should we should we plug up we've plugged the other shows yeah i guess everyone's tuned out at this point i hope they've all stopped the podcast player so i think i think uh that's go be free yes go outside and be free

there i can you can you can edit that into something that is more concise sorry daniel slash i don't care it's well it it it is the podcast it could happen here but for once it is not about the world falling apart it is entirely about putting it back together again uh and and joining me to talk about putting it back together again is uh zero of the other people who are normally on the podcast but i'm joined by shannon and john heronimus who are part of the team of organizers working on the dual power gathering uh shannon john welcome welcome to the show hi thank you hey so i guess the first part of the dual power gathering is dual power and i think we should walk through what actually that is and what our sort of visions for it look like

because i mean i know we've talked about this on the show before but that was a very very long time ago but which i mean like probably only like seven months but you know feels feels like ancient history so yeah i guess do you want to talk about what dual power is and how how to do yeah sure i'm gonna stop trying to think about what happened seven months ago and i'm trying to okay never you said that i was like oh wow okay no never mind um so dual power john how about i go ahead and share with our audience what is sort of the poetic language that we have up on the website from the organizers and then we can kind of like break it down and talk about it yeah that works for me all right so the website text is such dual power is a way to imagine the

moment just before our movements converge as the possible becomes the actual when the seeds of social transformation we have sown for generations bloom when the old world begins to wither and new worlds can be born is a way of thinking about how we got to that moment and beyond it dual power is the project of building self-determination mutual aid solidarity and direct democracy in our communities by creating spaces that empower us all and from which new emancipatory institutions can emerge it's a pretty yeah so what does that mean so what does that mean um first off i want to say like give a shout out to i a lot of people have been working on this vision of what dual power is for years and years now and that includes a lot of groups um that we are either in conversation

with or have been taking inspiration from um one of the biggest and i think most developed groups that's doing that work is cooperation jackson jackson jackson is sippy um and i i think the goal is i people went out oftentimes when people just like hear dual power if they don't have any other um context for it but they are maybe from the left they've heard about this moment in the russian revolution when there were these two competing like uh you know bases of power in like uh russian society while they're undergoing this like revolutionary change and uh lenin wrote like a pamphlet about it calling it the dual power and looked at it as like a thing that needed to be like overcome by you know workers in russia um to like establish a worker's state um which they

kind of outlined in a book called state revolution and but when we look at what they were describing we kind of look at this as a thing that emerges in any time when there is a social revolution and kind of unfolding in a society where you have various classes who are like changing like social relations so workers peasants um different groups of people who like have like a class they have come together around a class interest and overthrowing their oppression and they they have to go through stages of building their collective power their collective identity they're um and they're uh kind of like overall strategic movement in a particular direction and they create this tension between the existing state order and a newly emerging

like uh like social revolution that's like overthrow challenging uh and overthrowing that like um power so we want to ground that we want to ground that a little bit in a like less historicized uh context or whatever we could say maybe that's the work that we're doing to build up the institutions and relational structures that we need to care for ourselves in each other um as we move through uh sort of like different stakes of like institutional organization in the society right so when we're thinking about how do we meet our basic needs together in ways that are not dependent on the oppressive institutions that we're trying to overthrow we're talking about dual power yeah and it's like anytime working class folks and

I'd say like in a broad definition communities people who aren't necessarily working but like depend on like uh taking care of each other or who do the work of reproducing every you know society um basically build their own independent power like uh to like to be able to fight back and to challenge the you know the status quo so like there's a lot of things they're kind of percolating that we've been like uh that have been happening in North America that takes inspiration from areas of the global south um but also our own homegrown like traditions um so that could mean anything from like your local mutual aid network to uh your local tenant union to like a rank and file um union of like amazon workers or teachers or care workers um you know whose

existence puts them in conflict with the state capital um and like patriarchy settler colonial relations um you know like indigenous water protectors um folks who are building up places where the more developed it becomes the more it kind of builds its own momentum and you have spaces that are like autonomous fully like autonomous regions from like state power and to begin to like pick apart at capital and like reconfigure our um like relations of like how we make things and do things and take care of each other in like fundamental ways and we have lots of beautiful examples of this from the like organizing history not even that long ago and people will be familiar with some of the black panther programs or some of the programs that were integrated into the uh farm

workers movement and some of the programs that were put together by the anarchist feminists who were trying to uh support women's bodily autonomy and secure abortion rights through things like things like um mutual aid health care and things like that so we'll see there's like a lot of really beautiful examples of this work happening over time around successful organizing movements and we're all really excited about what's going on now and we want to see that just to sort of come together and flourish i think it's important to think about dual power or something that's like i don't know like i i think there's a lot of people who look at it as sort of like dual power is planting a garden it's like i mean sort of yes but like there's you know there's there's

there's sort of two components of it right there's there's this sort of there's a defensive component and an offensive component there's a component that's about taking care of each other and there is a component that is attack right there's there's there's a component that is the people who are preventing us from taking care of each other need to be stopped from doing that and so yeah i think i i think it's important to yeah i think about different kinds of like different kinds of institutions that you would not normally think of as doing the same thing as being part of the same struggle and yeah i guess that brings us to what you two and a lot of other people have been working on for god this has been this has been in the works for a long

time uh yeah which which is the which is the this uh dual power gathering and yeah i guess you want to talk about what what that is because yeah yeah well you know we've all been sitting around the past couple of years dreaming about being together and so i think this is kind of the fruit of that dream right coming up at the end of july uh we're inviting everyone out to the indiana dunes for a camping trip uh and during that time and we're hoping to see a collaboratively produced uh event that incorporates everything that the participants can bring to it which we know far exceeds the uh sort of even the scope and vision of the organizing body so we're like really trying to um just create a space for people to come together who are interested in these ideas

who have various levels of experience working with it that will be valuable to everybody from people who are brand new to this stuff and just want to learn more about it to people who have have been doing it for years for decades even um and yeah that's sort of the the underlying ambition of it is to get people together in space so you know a lot of us have been to these kinds of events before and felt like the most important thing that we got out of that was the relationships that we were able to build and the people that we were able to meet that we could then carry on ongoing dialogues with and that we could find inspiration uh in in those dialogues and in those connections that would birth new projects that you know we don't yet know are even possible

and so this is kind of at least for me like that's the really important and exciting force of the of the the plan yeah i think that like they're cool the some of the things about this i think are really like it's been like really a collaborative effort to come up with this thing like we had the discussions about this is the thing that need that we thought need to happen because at the end of like by the end of the middle of 2021 we're like look clearly we've all been through so many different experiences over the last 10 15 20 years at this point some of us are getting to be elders and um we uh and we need to like um it feels like it's now is an excellent a really great time to have like a actual conversation about where we've

where we're coming from and where we're going and how do we translate these experiences into to like networks of like trusting relationships and sharing a sharing of all this knowledge is like we need to debrief like the like the past five years i think in particular have been like it's like crammed it feels like you know the whole saying like some some years nothing happens and some you know and some months decades happen or phrasing or whatever and it's like so much stuff has come we've all gone through so many things and come to like uh and we're seeing people who didn't have like maybe uh a stance on various political things or are like seeing their communities torn apart by like the the real lived experience of like climate change and wants to and need to do

something about it that sort of thing like bringing in people who have lots of experience with people who have maybe are just now figuring things out and really kind of like using and taking this as a opportunity to maybe to generate new knowledge so that we're going to be like kind of like clarifying what we've gone through and where we're heading and um get people like in the same space who like might as a like i do a lot of union shit so i'm always thinking about how do i get like rank and file union radicals in the same space as like a uh like a neighborhood abolitionist or a tenant union organizer or a community land trust and getting all these like different groups because together and then like thinking about how they overlap and support and build off of each other

because we i think the operating theory of many of people who are involved in this is that every context is different where we're organizing but many there are many kind of principles that can kind of translate across contexts but the context will shape very like like the i was just talking with one of the organizers who's like 20 minutes away over in northwest indiana and you're like in gary and you know those areas and their context for building something like a an ecosystem dual power organizations is going to be very different from my context where i like down the street from this big global center of capital that's like university chicago and like and it's doing all in my neighborhoods being gentrified by two billion dollar corporations

and i've got a big nurse union whereas they're in the middle of like a neighborhood community that's being actively divested and destroyed like just like eaten away at by like because capital is just pulling out and has been doing that for basically as long as we've all been right but then at the same time y'all are dealing with the same like biosphere complications and climate change implications and so yeah we're thinking about the ways in which like the kinds of affiliations that make sense for us to be successful in our projects are like you know they're not just they're not just local they're not just national they're not just continental there's like a lot of different things that are going on there and that's the only way for us to

really like sort out who uh we need to be in coalition with on any particular issue is to know everybody uh and to try to understand better their their specific contexts and their specific experiences and i think there's like you know i think you know to to john's point about you know how much has changed in the last you know handful of years or whatever i think one thing that we've all come away from is the pace of change is pretty humbling you know um i think we definitely all we got we got we took in a bit of the of humility around around that what is it that we actually need to do we are definitely not prepared for it you know and it doesn't matter how many decades we've been doing this organizing work we just are not ready uh for how quickly things are changing right

now and the only way for us to get ready is to make sure that we shore up and strengthen the networks of people that we can rely on to produce kind of positive interdependence um as we move forward with the continued chaos that is the contemporary world yeah i mean and part of this is also like thinking about um because the way this is structured this isn't just like a series of panel discussions where we've like the organizers have curated like you're going to listen to you know uh so-and-so who's like you know a prominent tenant organizer or so-and-so is like a prominent like uh like in like climate change direct action work like the goal is is that we like specifically chose a format and like officially it's called like like an unconference but the way I think of it

is it's like which it which comes out of tech which I find kind of irritating but that doesn't but the the core of the idea of the thing is is that we're coming into this space in generating new knowledge not necessarily sitting there and receiving a bunch of knowledge from people who we designate as like movement leaders or experts that doesn't mean that people who don't have a lot of experience and a lot of like skills aren't going to be there it just means that we're going to be because one of my things is popular education coming from the tradition of like Paulo Freire and like everybody learning together is like it's like taking those principles and kind of like doing them in parallel in various circles where there'll be a circle here of like

cooperative organizers or people who want to get co-ops off the ground there'll be a circle here of people doing land trust work there'll be a circle here of like unionists there'll be a circle here of people doing like abolition work and or interest or people who are interested in all those things are getting those sorts of things off the ground and as they work through like a like they present tell stories share ideas do debriefs on like the various things that we've all been going through over you know whatever how far back our timeline is depending on how far which elders decide to attend but then taking that knowledge with our facilitators and then being like you know what I think that these two conversations are happening kind of like in parallel would be

better if they were merged together and beginning to kind of like build that sort of like and so the idea isn't necessarily come away with like a pre like we're not setting up like a like a predetermined set of conclusions for people we believe and based off of we've been having monthly community calls for people who are going to be attending all the different groups of folks who will be coming to this is going to be I think like the depth of experience is going to be really phenomenal and people coming from we definitely have people confirmed who are coming from Canada people who we may be having folks with experience the indigenous communities in Mexico we may be having we're I'm fairly confident we're going to have people who are like just come from

areas like northern Syria and Iraq and taking all these different ideas and experiences and then generating next like coming to new conclusions maybe unexpected conclusions or things that we didn't quite uh that we weren't anticipating but I mean asking new questions right like this is a kind of intended to be a prefigure of space for engaging with things where we don't know what the right answer is and I think we all need to really sit with the fact that we do not have like a clear right solution to the problems that we're facing right now like I've been kind of pulling on the slogan a little it's like no gods no masters no right answers you know just like get used to it we need to be more creative and we need to be more open to experimentation

and you know there's just a lot of there's a lot of stuff that's going to be coming at us fast and you know this is a we hope this can be a space where we can kind of take some time to slowly get square with what it is we're going to have to be thinking about even if we don't know what to do exactly yet so I had a I had a really good experience where I was listening to like one of the like a person who came out of act up uh giving a talk in my in my neighborhood and she was saying because we had had questions is this going to be about a lot of theory are we going to be talking about a lot of abstract stuff and um this organizer was like you know act up had no theory right they did they took action and the theory followed afterwards and

so the idea that we're like necessarily having coming to this with like the right answers already figured out is just not like something that I think it's going to be a super generative discussion the idea of coming up with like coming up with orientations and thinking about like where we are heading kind of in a general sense and then seeing how that unfolds and builds is I think um a big key a key aspect of what we're trying to do when we come to come together which is not to say yeah which is not to say that there won't be theory because that's not up to us that's up to y'all so you know um I probably you know like I what I'm really interested in is having conversations about like community mental health care you know and like for me the theory is less interesting

than you know like talking about what we actually need in the spaces that we work in but that's you know that's where I'm coming from and everybody else is coming at this from their own perspective too so I'm really excited to see what people bring to that space and what we can get out of it um by just thinking that we all are contributing something constructive to that conversation and well then also there's going to be a lot of discussion about like literal practical skills like here's how you like here's how you uh this has always been the perennial thing this is how you pick a lock this is how you uh this is how you organize comms at like uh at like a uh like on a picket line this is how you um pull together uh a demand letter for like a list

for like tenants like you know these are the sorts of things that like we're going to be talking we're going to be doing concrete skill shares plus these discussions about our experiences and sharing our stories and you know hopefully we're going to come away from this a big goal of it is to um come up with a lot of like different like um just like content we're going to be recording videos and uh like uh audio and like also and then transcribing things and writing things up but we're hoping that once we're done we're going to have a big report that we can share out with people who can attempt your privacy concerns obviously considered so yeah for sure yeah consent is a big is a big uh thing with us as organizers

I should hope so yeah you would think but you know not everyone is down as you would imagine okay so basically we're building a perfect little utopia for like four days and you all come out because we're going to fix the revolution so okay obviously on on on a more concrete level like what what does like a day here look like like what are what are what are what are what are what are we doing oh that's fun that's a fun question uh if i may john yeah yeah go for it um what we're thinking right now basically is that a day it looks like we get up in the morning we drink coffee we have breakfast and we have a little assembly check in to see how things are going if we need to make any major adjustments and we put up a sort of schedule for the afternoons

events that was populated from the conversation that was happening in the evening the night before and anything that anybody wants to bring up to that schedule that happened between yesterday and this morning uh then we're gonna roll off into um basically what would be some of the kind of like things we already know for sure that we wanted to see happening that we could get on a on a sort of schedule ahead of time so some of these skill shares that were planned that would require kind of like pre-planning or maybe some discussions that people reached out ahead of time that they definitely wanted to have so that stuff would be happening earlier in the day um that you know where we're talking about having sort of just like sandwich bars and you know make your own

lunch kind of situations going on there should be a lot of different things happening in different geographical locations on the site so you kind of get get a choice of where you want to go it's not like there's one big event um we're going to try to group things that are sort of thematically similar in so that they're nearby each other in case you want to go around and see um what the different kind of stuff is going to be and then in the afternoon it's going to be like I mean you know okay of course this is like how we're intending right now the afternoon would be the um discussions and skill shares and events and circles and spaces that um were generated out of the conversations that have been happening in the space so that people came and thought you know we had this

conversation yesterday that really inspired me let's talk about this and I'm going to make space for that so we're going to have big math where you figure out where you want to go and you're going to be able to wander around and meet people we're trying to incorporate a lot of events that make it easier to meet other people that you don't know yet um where there's going to be tables where you can do arts and crafts there's going to be game space for whatever kind of games you want to play there's going to be places for kids to hang out there's going to be a quiet tent where you can take some contemplation time you know at some point we want to do it like a kind of brief circle for people to deal with what they've been kind of going through in the world and you

know some uh you know utopia envisioning arts space you know these kinds of things like where you know somebody wants to teach someone else a dance like that's the kind of thing that we're really hoping can go on in the afternoon uh then we would be feeding everybody dinner and we kind of had this idea we've been playing with that we would have two campfires after dinner and at one campfire we'll have kind of an open forum where anybody can talk for like 10, 15, 20 minutes you know whatever however long people need who are there depending on how popular that is and just kind of air everything that's in their head and we'll have a note taker so we can try to incorporate what comes out of those discussions into the next day's agenda um and

so that's sort of like what we were what we were envisioning and then for the other campfire it's people who don't want to do that. Don't forget this the other the other the other campfire for people who are like I'm done with talk I need to just sit and stare at some flames for a little bit. I imagine I'll be going back and forth between the fires so you know that's also an option but the idea is to get kind of like somewhere between I think what are we calling this like somewhere between a conference and a music festival you know what I mean like where you're able to sort of move around and you don't have to go and sit in one place and do like okay for this hour this is where I you know it's like it's it's meant to be a bit more informal and we're hoping

that that makes a lot more space for people to sort of explore and people to meet other people that they don't already know. I don't know if that if that if that sums up sort of like what I'm imagining because that's like you know that's the spirit so I think if that's the question like what does the day look like well hopefully it's fun you know that's kind of the main the main thing we're thinking here is to make it a sort of low stress and low stakes place that we can talk about some of the highest stress and highest stakes questions that we have to deal with so. Yeah and like that being said like because we're modeling it this way specifically based on people's experience with like the symbiosis federations founding conference that sort of thing where

there were a lot of stakes and people were trying to kind of like funnel different discussions through different ways and this is not a necessarily critique of how that all went down it's just like based on our our experience and our experiences with those sorts of things the goal is to for this to be if it's successful the first of many of these sorts of things many of these kinds of gatherings and discussions and to provide a model for how it could happen but to keep we deliberately decided that this we're not going to make like a bit we're not going to have a big points of unity debate and discussion and voting on assembly sort of thing we will use assemblies for you know certain things like setting up like our community agreements and that sort of stuff and

kind of like getting the days rolling and kind of getting the days closed but the goal is like to not is to bring people into conversation who haven't who maybe don't have the basis of trust for those bigger collective just like discussions yet but maybe they will later but the the goal is for now is we're we're getting we're building and expanding our networks we're building and expanding our trust with different people and building and expanding our knowledge so that we can go out and do the kind of work that we think we need to do to I don't know survive as a species on this planet so that's one of the reasons why if there are some people are like oh I don't know that seems really kind of wishy washy it's very it does a very deliberate decision based on previous

experience from organizers who'd been to these sorts of things and the goal is really to to have a place where we can have discussions about high stakes issues without being so invested in it that we feel like if our concept of how to solve that problem doesn't come out as the like solution that we somehow failed so it's like yeah I was to say that I think one of the one of these things that you that you brought up that that's really important is like not even just in these previous conferences or congresses or gatherings that we've been to have we seen this be a problem but basically at least I can speak for myself in a lot of organizing spaces that I've been in over the past you know like 15 years that I've been pretty active in in the organizing universe

basically that one of the main problems that we have with this kind of like space of trust that we definitely know that we need to be able to work together moving forward is that we don't really have shared language a lot of the time and we think we do because we use the same words but we often use them to mean different things or we often use different words to mean the same things as well and then we come from kind of different organizing cultures and a lot of different places like that some are more or less we should say that maybe that there there are different places where you show solidarity in a different way you show good faith and you show that you're committed in a different way what it means to be democratic in a space seems different depending on this on the

tradition that you that you maybe come from so what we're really hoping to do is kind of make space to incorporate all of that so we were was joking it was a camping trip where many camping trips fit you know that like that there should be an opportunity for people to kind of like learn to talk past those those barriers that we might have to to understanding each other and like that success would really look like people coming away like believing in other people's commitment to get this done and with the kind of contacts that they need to support each other moving forward as things come up in different places as opposed to just like here's a solution like here's a blueprint for how to get this done you know that relationship that you have with a person who's had that

experience in the past is going to be way more valuable than any document they give you based on their experience because you're going to be able to say well shit I wasn't expecting this to happen like what do we do and then you can talk through that with them and like that's really I think that's really the foundation of our being able to share this knowledge with each other is that we have the opportunity to kind of engage in these ways that are like more focused on the kind of just sort of dynamism of the of the challenges that we're dealing with right now so emergence is a big thing things are always kind of like things are always going to be changing like we are we need to be prepared to deal with a world that's going to be throwing challenges at

us that like we haven't like we haven't had solutions for and like because we're going through this like really kind of like catastrophic like moments of like climate change and I mean I don't know how else to say it but like in and so it's like engendering the idea the idea that we're constantly evaluating what's happening around us both like at our local level and across the regions and globally and then taking new knowledge in and coming up with new solutions in a real like in like a truly experimental way like thinking about things like experiments and how we're going to like come up with new solutions to these problems because it's just well like as we kept telling people because when we were out there

trying to bring groups in everyone's telling us our capacity this sounds great our capacity is incredibly low and that has just been across the entire like spectrum of organizations and that includes huge big put together organizations like you know unions versus little mutual aid groups everybody is dealing with this like feeling of exhaustion and like capacity our goal is to get people together so that they can build capacity through these discussions and be prepared for things because capacity is always going to be an issue and our goal is to get people to this point where because their their mindset is okay new challenge let's think about it critically and come up with solutions that fit this moment as opposed to keep

trying to force things into preset like easy I mean I don't want to say easy but like I think that sometimes like everyone's trying to mine history for the like the one weird trick to solve all these problems and I think that the one weird trick is that human beings are creative critical thinking machines like our brain is like this thing for taking in information and generating new new thought and action and we need to embrace that because if we don't I don't think we're going to be very successful certainly in the yeah in these times of just increasing uncertainty that kind of humility and flexibility and like continued building of comfort with that uncertainty is going to be super essential to our being able to maintain even sort of like the basic ability

to take action I think so we're going to have to like continue to like to lean into that uncertainty and to sort of I think you know like kind of historically the being comfortable with things changing and being comfortable with uncertainty is actually one of our great strengths right because we can actually start to get moving while everybody else is still going what the hell okay now and so I think you know that's going to definitely be something that's going to serve us and yeah anyway I have I have one last question on an extremely practical level which is like what is the like facility situation here like how what are what are people sleeping in I so like in right now we like we have a camp space reserved for 200 people

and so we understand that camping is not always super accessible but we are very fortunate that like the nationally shore has specific accessible facilities for folks and we do have disabled like comrades coming to this event and we're working on making sure that those with their particular needs don't keep them from participating fully in the events there's the discussions and circles themselves will be at like shelter space a bit away from where the camping is happening so we're organizing transport between those two spaces for people who cannot camp we are working on organizing some hotel space for folks and then for people who can camp but don't have any equipment our goal is to we're going to basically acquire like enough camping

equipment for a sizable chunk of folks to come and it's like literally today walking through Walmart with my daughter looking at their camp equipment and pricing out things like sleeping bags and camp like sleeping mattresses and tents that sort of thing so yeah if people have have stuff they want to donate to the cause too like I think we should be able to take some of that in I think we were just talking yesterday about the possibility of having like camp gear repair zone so if you have things that you find at the thrift store that like a tour intent or something like that will help you fix it you know we just want to make sure that everybody has these supplies as well because they're they're broadly useful I know I've used my camping gear in some

politically motivated ways in the past I think that it's not bad for people to have it if you need it just say also you know the camping aspect of it is also it's more of a feature than a bug like there's like a like so to so to speak like the pandemic is not over yet as we're like seeing right in spite of everything that like our ruling class is desperately trying to get us to agree to and so having the accommodations outside and doing the doing the actual events like out outdoors where there's lots of ventilation we think it is like right now one of this event so that we're not going to get so that people aren't going to come away from this getting sick which is really important from I mean as a person who's recovering from COVID

COVID round two and as a health care worker that was one of our big concerns because we when we started making these plans we really weren't sure what was going to be happening in terms of the pandemic and having it out outdoors was just like a surefire way that we knew that we could at the very least we could minimize the chances that people would be getting sick from just showing up and being in the same space together absolutely and we're definitely encouraging people who are coming together with friends and comrades in little groups to self organize their camps as much as they would like to do that to sort of make plans together to limit the you know the the need for for spaces you know we're sharing up tents and

all this kind of stuff which to the extent that people are comfortable with that that you know people if you need to get in touch with people from around if you don't know anybody you can reach out to us if we know anybody else who's looking for somebody to try to coordinate with we'll definitely put you in touch just something we want to be able to do is like offer some of these connective services to help people kind of link up with people who are coming from from their areas or people who are interested in the same kinds of things and so we're kind of thinking of ourselves in the organizing body as facilitators of those connections and trying to like imagine how what we do will make those connections most likely to to happen so in

terms of the of the facilities as well I think we talked about trying to get some camp stoves together for people who need to use sort of a kitchen space to try to limit the amount of things that people need to bring for that but definitely feel free to bring bring your own stuff and and and set up whatever whatever you need and let us know if you need help from us we'll we'll do our best to accommodate that and people are getting fed like so we're planning to have meals arranged and that'll be vegan and with the caveat that folks who want to have separate food can like do their own self-organized like cooking if that's a thing that they're really committed to um and we're planning on having like all the necessities of like lots of water

making sure that like we've got first aid lined up there's going to be street medics who are participating in the work of organizing all that harm reduction um and just generally like uh like some of the other things that rim really mentions like we know that we're bringing a bunch of people with a lot of big ideas and big personalities together and that means we're probably gonna have to deal with some conflict maybe I don't know so uh having um conflicts uh like people who are good at moving in conflict we're gonna have a crew of people who do that we're working on um like child watch training because this is going to be with the family from space um making sure that we know how to take care of each other in case like shady people from outside try to do something

like whatever like our goal is to just make sure that like this is um as safe as it can be bringing people together and as successful as it can be understanding the limitations of who's gonna be you're gonna be outside so there might be you know all the some of the fun of having like a collective group of people all outside together which can be a lot of fun I like I'm I'm waiting for karaoke and for um like our open mic and people bringing out like instruments and like just having like you know uh we were people discussing like um you know some soccer uh potentially being a thing um determining uh like placing bets on who's gonna be more into soccer based on various ideological opinions and past experience and um yeah hit us up if you want to play some

music if you've got an idea for something fun that sounds cool to do and just to come to circle back to this I think like with the point about conflict mediation I just want to make that like super clear just because we're not going to spend half a day trying to come up with community uh the points of unity does not mean we don't have expectations about how you act in the space so our plan is basically to say like don't be an asshole and then that means you know like in all the ways that we know uh that those things can happen and then if somebody accidentally is being an asshole or somebody's are accidentally being an asshole like that those are things we can we can manage because we all know what it is that we're doing here um so it's definitely not

a free for all you know it's a this is a space where the normal things we would expect in space are expected you know explicitly yeah oh well oh man I'm excited yeah me too um yeah I'm looking forward to people I don't know I don't actually know how widespread bonfires are in the US but we do a lot in the midwest and bonfires are a great time I'm excited people to experience that it's it's love it um yeah so I guess um do you have anything closing that you want to say and also where can people find this and attempt to go to it also when is it happening because that's that's another important it's going to be July uh 29th through the 31st um and attendance is free there's no there's no charge but we are soliciting donations so we're doing

a fundraiser um through open collective um and we've been very generously uh given uh an offer of matching donations from uh one of the organizers who got like a got a little bit of a chunk of change to kind of contribute to that sort of thing we're very um excited about that so uh if you go on to you can follow us on twitter and I believe that's at uh dual power uh 22 let me go and chat I think it's at dual power gathering uh is our twitter and um the website is dual power 2022.org yes um yeah if you go on the website you'll find the links to everything you need to know you can get in touch with us you can like you know give us your your feedback if you love it if you hate it if you you know whatever we're we're probably not going to change the whole thing right now

but show up and we can change it at the time so I'll also say we do have like a organizing discord and people who are like serious about like getting involved and want to have things like want to come to this and with things that they have specific visions for now it's like absolutely time to get engaged with that because we're like we're working towards making uh getting people into the like who are the participants to really own the event itself so um that'll be like that's something we have I believe we're going to do probably two more community calls one in June and one in July every one of those calls has been really amazing lots of great people um and during those calls we're going to be doing some training on because you got to do some prep work when you're

doing this kind of like generative discussion like popular education like uncomferenced style events like coming to them with a little bit of an understanding of what that looks like like is really a key to being successful so um we encourage people who want to come get signed up and then we'll get into our mailing list our mailing list is where we disseminate like when those calls are happening and we can also hop in our discord and as long as you're cool and agree your community agreements group like bring you in and like get all sorts of shit together and we're very excited for people to come in there's still a fair number of slots open for the event itself we're like almost happily full so yeah I mean definitely we've been trying to think about

this as an event that we would want to go to and we wanted to be an event that you want to come to also so help us make it so yeah that that's yeah this is really exciting I'm gonna be going to it uh yeah so yeah thank thank thank you thank you too both for joining us for talking about this and I'm excited too I'm excited to see lots of people there hey hey I mean we've all been wanting to see each other for two and two and a half fucking years right so I miss your I'm missing your face with dimension yeah I'm sick of your flat face for real yeah thanks so much for having us on to talk about it and really looking forward to it I mean we're getting closer and closer it's just like it just gets more exciting and also a little nerve-wracking but thankfully a lot of

people have been stepping up and I'm very I'm confident it's gonna be really like a really great thing yeah and we will we will have links to everything in in the show notes um yeah this has been a good happen here you can find us in the usual places that happen to your pot and stuff all right goodbye have fun hey we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe it could happen here is a production of cool zone media for more podcasts from cool zone media 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