Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 45

Episode Date: July 30, 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 got to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Alright, hello. It could happen here. Oh boy. Yeah, we've conned Robert into being here. For Civil War Week, no less.

We're also joined by special guest Margaret Kiljoy and Sophie and Gare, who are less special. Now, we're here whole week. Yep, that's right. We're here to start a Civil War, right? That's what I've read on Reddit, yes. Start a Civil War, Sophie. We cleared that with corporate, right? Yeah, I can either confirm nor deny.

I can either confirm nor deny. Officially backing the start of a Civil War? Yeah. Yeah, essentially, corporate said, you know, go ahead, coolzone media. Start a Civil War. Start a Civil War. We will be civilly and criminally liable for all violence that occurs. And we've been listening.

That's the iHeartRadio guarantee. Yeah, and we've enlisted the people on this call who are Margaret Kiljoy, Robert Evans, Garrison Davis, James Stout, and myself, Sophie. They are also all civil and criminally liable. Yeah. But do we get to collectivize a huge, maybe like 70% or so of all the industry? Yeah, obviously. I mean, some of us do.

Okay. It's like any Civil War, you're going to find out who later. Okay. We're going to find out who today, Robert. This is my in-depth guide into how to beat a coup, start a Civil War, and win the first part of it. Oh, good. Well, that's the only part of it you really need to win.

Yeah, it is. You don't want to get too bogged down in the later stuff because it's just depressing. So we just want to focus on how to win the first 48 hours. And from there, you can taper off. And then take the weekend off. Yeah, break off, chill out, be fine. Or just go down as a hero and let everyone else sort everything else out afterwards. I think that's probably the best option.

We're going to learn about a guy who dies within 24 hours of the war, starting as a hero and gets a gun named after him, which is all we can really want for ourselves. Oh, that does sound like the dream. Yeah, that's the way Robert Evans needs to go. Not suggesting that anytime soon, of course. All right. I'm sure. Imagine, would it be the Robert or would it be the Evans?

Death of Robert. Yeah. Definitely the Robert. Just give him a good old bobbin. It would be named after my nickname, the Jesus Christ of podcasting. Right, Sophie? 100% no. Yeah, no.

Sophie says yes. If there's not already a gun named after Jesus, I will be shocked. Yeah, it's probably not a kind of company you want to. We've really gotten off. And I think in all fairness, it's not my fault. I think it's Garrison's fault. Yeah, that's who I was going to blame. I think we've all agreed on that.

What are we talking about, James? Talking about the Spanish Civil War today. We'll be desegrating the name of Jesus Christ a little bit later as well. Oh, I love desegrating the name of Jesus Christ. I'd gathered here. We'll do that just for more for you today. I'll send you some pictures afterwards that you will enjoy. All right, so we're talking about the Spanish Civil War.

We're not talking about all of it because that's a lot. And because I think it's important when we talk about the Spanish Civil War to talk about the moments when revolutionary things happened because they are as important as the moments when terrible things happened and the moments when the people in arms defeated the coup because that's both instructive and inspiring and interesting. Wait, I have a question. Yeah.

What's the Spanish Civil War? That's a great question and one I've failed to address thus far. It is a war that happened in Spain. It wasn't very civil, so only two out of three. Remarkably uncivil actually. So we're looking at 1936. Today we're looking at July 19th and 20th, 1936, right? But you can see it as like the precursor to the Second World War.

You have people who are fascist or fascist adjacent. You have people who are explicitly anti-fascist and they are killing each other from 1936 to 1939. And the anti-fascist win, right? Not entirely. Unfortunately. Yeah, they have some wins along the way. Yeah, there's some moments.

The friends that you meet along the way. Yeah, what is civil war if not the friends that you make along the way? Don't answer that at home because it's sad. But yeah, these are some friendly times. These are some good times. These are the first 48 hours of the Spanish Civil War. We're going to start with an anecdote about the popular Olympics, which you probably have never heard of unless you're me,

because it's a thing that I've written about. Shipton, but not many folks have read about. It's the Antifa Olympics. It's the best way to understand the popular Olympics. It was a gathering held in 1936 in Barcelona in opposition to the Berlin Olympics. So the Olympics are given to Weimar Germany in 1931, right? They're not given to Nazi Germany, but when Germany...

Yeah, Weimar Germany is the pre-Nazi. It's before Hitler takes power. Yeah, when they were actually pretty cool in some ways, pretty progressive for the time period, right? In lots of ways. It's the woke Germans. Yes, it is the woke Germans. It's like if AOC was running 1930s Germany, that's what you get.

I bet they had a whole institute that trans people got to hang out at and learn about themselves. I've heard that yet. What happened to that institute? I can't remember. The Nazis came and killed the first woman to medically transition in the Western Hemisphere and burned all of the books and then stole the records that the people had been keeping about all the gay people and then rounded up all the gay people

and murdered them in camps. That's what happened. That's disappointing. Well, good thing that'll never happen again. No, we've learned our lesson. Yeah, there's absolutely no echoes of that in current political discourse, so that's fine. Hey, let's learn how to kill fascists.

Let's talk about that. Okay, so we're talking about the popular Olympics, the Antifa Olympics, the Olympics that happen because the Nazis are shit and you shouldn't play games with shit people. To include the Olympics, even if you very much want to win a medal, take note athletes doing sports and dictatorships. A lot of people, about 20,000 people, instead decide to go to Barcelona,

where they're going to host this alternative games. The subtext of the popular Olympics is not just that Hitler shouldn't have the Olympics. It's that gasp shouldn't exist. The anti-fascism is strong and youthful and perfectly capable of fighting a war and killing the fascists. George Orwell called sport war without the shooting. This is a war with the shooting.

It's a good quote. George Orwell pops up a few times in this one. Not always right about everything, but he was right about that. We popped up at the wrong time, never mind. I'm trying to make George Orwell get shot. Shot in the throat. No, I just feel bad about it because... At least that's the least.

I mean, before podcasting, the throat was the best place to get shot as a writer. That's true. That's true. Yeah, it didn't go well for him in the end. It sort of did end his life prematurely, I guess. But he got some bangers out in terms of books first. Yeah. But it can't fault him.

All right, so we're talking about the popular Olympics, talking about the night before the popular Olympics. You're going to learn why you haven't heard of the popular Olympics. So I guess keep listening. 86 years ago in Barcelona, Paul Casal, the father of modern cello, was leading the final rehearsals for the opening ceremony of the popular Olympics. They had already practiced the hymn of the popular Olympics. It was a song co-written by a Catalan composer and an exiled Jewish one

who had fled oppression in Germany. Now they moved to Beethoven's Night Symphony. You might know it as Yo to Joy. Casal's recounted what happened next in his memoirs. I just called the chorus on stage to sing the chorale when a man rushed into the hall. He handed me an envelope saying breathlessly, this is from Minister Gasol.

An uprising is expected in the city at any moment. I read Gasol's message. It said our rehearsal should be discontinued immediately while the musicians should go straight home and that the concert scheduled for the following day had been cancelled. The messenger told me that since the message was written an insurrection had started in Madrid and fascist troops were now marching on Barcelona.

I read the message aloud to the orchestra and to the chorus and then I said, dear friends, I do not know when we shall meet again. That's a farewell to one another. Shall we play the finale? And they shouted, yes, let us finish it. Then the orchestra played and the chorus sang. That's never before.

I could not see the notes because of my tears. So that's how Pal Casal starts a civil war. They finished that concert in 2016. Incidentally, they came back to the same place and yeah, it was very... Were they the same people? No. Well, the same institutions, right?

These are called or fails, like I guess popular, chorus is popular kind of city orchestra kind of thing. So they finished it in the same place because in the intervening 80 years, there was a little issue with the Franco dictatorship, which there still is in Spain, incidentally, but yeah, Barcelona is very much reclaimed.

Its memory is an anti-fascist city following the dictatorship. I could really see myself in those musicians. It just feels like a very possible thing, unfortunately, to just be like, okay, well, we're going to do this thing and then, well, I guess, I don't know, should we finish? Yeah, fuck it. Right, like, at some point, I don't know, maybe not. Like, all of us were doing something else

when we learned that a bunch of chuds had stormed Congress, right, and that the yak hat man was inside the Senate chamber. Like, and some of us finished, I was on a bike ride. I kept riding my bike. Like, there's not much I can do. Sometimes you have to take the moments of joy because there might be much joy available for the next little while.

So yeah, I think it's easy to see myself in a lot of this stuff. Perhaps that's why I'm drawn to it. All right, the following morning, the city woke up before dawn to the sound of gunfire. To most of the Catalan working classes wasn't a surprise. The cure had begun two days earlier in Morocco and word traveled quickly among the anarchists. By the time the men of the 4th Division

and General Fernandez Buriel began their march to the central plaza de Catalunya, the people of the popular front were ready. The uprising had begun in Morocco on the 17th, an all-day tension of the building. Union radio had called a general strike, and despite the refusal of the Republican government to acknowledge how deep of trouble they were in,

their unions were under no illusion as to the stakes. By lunchtime on the 19th, Spain had gone through three prime ministers since breakfast, and Barcelona had defeated a coup. So what happens to the prime ministers like, okay, you be prime minister, and you're like, oh, fuck no, I don't want to be prime minister. Or are they getting killed by the fascists?

No, Madrid is very, well, it's not very safe, it's safe. Basically, your first guy is like, ah, I don't fucked up here. I should have seen this one coming, given that I was explicitly warned about it for weeks. He's like, peace, I'm out. Second guy pops in, he's like, don't worry guys, we can fix this, what we need to do

is call the generals, talk it out. And it's interesting. Call the fascists. Yeah, give them a reason with them. It's interesting because what happens is in that conversation, it's the fascist general, I think he's capable of yelling all he calls, I can't remember, oh god, maybe, maybe good, anyway.

He says like, you have your people, and I have mine. And in that moment, what's happening is a fascist general who is leading a coup is reminding an elected politician that he has an obligation to serve the people who elected him and not just to make like unilateral compromises with fascists, right? So that's the... What a country, what a time.

At that moment, that second prime minister's also doomed, so then we move on to number three. And at that point, we open up the armories to the working class, what they should have done earlier, in every city where the working class is armed, the coup is defeated, in every city where it's not armed, the coup succeeds. Well, that doesn't have any ramifications for today,

so keep going. No, absolutely none. No, and it's something that we can't learn from, so we shouldn't try. And obviously, it's not direct parallel. There are some really interesting moments in this particular arming of the working class, one that I like to come back to is that the soldiers,

obviously the weapons are in the hands of the military, and obviously the military has just done a coup, but not all the military has just done a coup. So you have some generals or colonels who are in charge of barracks or armories, and they will be like, yeah, okay, I've got the order, that's what I'm going to do, I think this coup is kind of bullshit, like it hasn't succeeded yet, it might not succeed.

Here are the rifles, Union members. But in Madrid, you have another colonel, who's a diehard coup guy, big coup person, who is in control of the bolts of the rifles. So the rifle doesn't work without the bolt, right? The bolt plugs the hole and makes the bullet go bang. I've explained that properly, right, Robert? That's a technical terminology.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's just the piece that makes the gun go bang. Yeah, so the bolt critical to defuncting the rifle held by another guy who turns out to be a fasc, and so he doesn't issue them the bolts. So you have all these working class militiamen being like, how rifle work with no bolt? And just entering the streets anyway, right? Slapping on the bayonet, now you have a pike.

You have other people who have never operated a rifle before, so like allegedly everyone's calling the socialist Union headquarters in Madrid, being like, do this, do that, and they're like, I can't hear shit, there's just hundreds of people behind me trying to operate the bolt on a bolt action rifle, trying to learn how to do this, and like they're taking their newsprint

from their Union newspaper, right, and trying to wipe the cosmoline off the rifles, because they've been in like deep storage. It's just very evocative scene, like you can smell it, you can hear it of these people being like, well, we never used these before, they've been in deep storage for a long time, they're covered in grease, but fuck it, like it's now or never.

Yeah. And it was, right, so if we go back to what happened in Barcelona, they had radios in public places, right, this is very common, whole books about how Nazis use radios, but it was common in the 30s. Parts of the city, the paving stones have barely been relayed from October 1934's fighting, but they were quickly pulled up again,

barricades were constructed, old rifles and pistols, and the bombs that the anarchists particularly loved were dragged out of the bottom of drawers. These people fucking love throwing bombs. Yeah, there's a lady later on in the war called Rosa Ladina Miterra, like Rose of the Dynamite, who just becomes the legend, right, for just throwing dynamite at fascists.

She loses fascism. Yeah, there's so much awesome shit that happens, that gets lost, because ultimately, Hitler and Mussolini win the Spanish Civil War, basically, right, spoiler. So actually that night, before the troops march on the city, the UGT, the socialists control the dock union, the dock workers' union, and they're like,

hey, hang on, I'm pretty sure there's a ship in the harbor that has dynamite on it, let's raid it. So they raid the ship, steal the dynamite, and drive through the city distributing it to union members to spend the entire night making bombs. I'm sure that that went badly for several of them. Yeah, it went badly for fascists, too. Yeah, almost undoubtedly.

Robert and I have talked to some people in some other contexts who have made homemade bombs, and don't smoke is what I will say. Do not smoke if you're in the process of making bombs or explosives. Whatever, that's the same people who say that you can't smoke while you're fueling up your car. Yeah, cowards, go down like a chad. Yeah, this is my message to you.

The other thing they did was they put on their monos, so a mono is like a onesie, like an overall blue mono is kind of the militia uniform, because they weren't an army. They were just working-class people who worked at factories who were not taking any shit from the army that day. And they put on their little union hats, which you can see in all the photos, they look very cool, very quaint. So, to understand where the conflict they fought that day began,

it's probably beyond the scope of this podcast. And to understand where-end of the way it did will infuriate just about everyone listening, which is fine, but we don't have all day. Okay. If you want to know more about some of the people involved, Kiljoy's podcast on Hispanic, Anacist is a great place to start.

What? Yep. I thought it was wonderful. I'll have to check that out. Yeah, I do. Yeah, great podcast. It's really, really great. I love it.

So if he listens to, look at that. Yeah. Yeah. Post sign. Yep. You should like and subscribe. Is that still a thing? What was that title again?

Cool people who did cool stuff? Yeah. I think so. I've heard of that. Yeah, the host is brilliant. Yeah, she's amazing. I'm trying to make me clever, but instead I'm probably blushing.

No. You deserve. Okay. Yeah. If you want to read some books, I'm going to list some books at the end, probably far too many, because this is my shit,

but I've also written more books written about the Spanish Civil War than... Well, I guess war in general, but I think Anarchists have written more about the Spanish Civil War than maybe... Undoubtedly. Anything else combined. Yeah.

The device we are speaking on is currently propped up on a large stack of them, actually. Most of my material possessions are Anarchists' books. So war in general. Yeah, it's nice. It's a way your life should be, kids. I've written one too, and it's heinously expensive,

but I'm happy with it. If you struggle to obtain it materially, please just shoot me a direct message, unless you kind of have some kind of gross disagreement, because you're a fascist or something, in which case, please don't bother. OK, I don't know how you got this far, if you were a fascist, I guess.

For now, let's get back. Yeah, I probably have some. I don't know. Fuck off, Nazis, I guess. I think fewer people hate... OK, my theory, I know that we wanted to hear my theory about why podcasting took off, is because it's harder...

People don't have the attention span to hate listen in the same way that they can hate skim, or hate read tweets and reply. And so, I've made a lot of different media in a lot of different ways over the past couple decades, and I get less hate mail about podcasts than most other forms. So, that's my theory,

is that people podcast, because no one wants to sit there and hate listen. I mean, people hate listening to clips, but we all listen to those clip shows where they take the right-wing person and show them saying something that we all think is not an intelligent thing to say, and then we laugh or whatever.

So anyway, if you're the person who has been put on this earth to hate listen, it could happen here in order to, I don't know, make fun of it to your audience. Thanks for the listens, I guess, I don't know. Yeah, we're getting that sweet revenue. I know.

Where does that revenue come from? It just appears. It's like lichen that grows on the side of a wet building. It doesn't come from ads? No, I don't think so. Ads do organically grow a lot like lichen. They just start showing up and replicating. We really have no choice, but yeah, anyway.

Yeah, it's a fact of nature. If you are that person, I will say that my message is stop being a Nazi. That's me being polite. On the night of the 18th, some assault guards, members of an elite paramilitary police force that was founded by, and sometimes, mostly loyal to the Republic,

went against the orders of their officers and sneaked rifles out to members of the CNT, an anarchist union. That's pretty, that's pretty based. It's the one day, as you will learn, this is the one day all cops took off from being bastards. Some of them, it turns out, are capable of doing the right thing,

or were in 1936, I should say. Yeah, if cops were handing out rifles to anarchists, that would be not a parallel that I can easily imagine in the modern context. Yes, somewhat unique. It doesn't mean that these people had not spent the past decades killing each other. It does not mean that they would not return

to doing so within less than a year. But just for a day, everything was hunky-dory. It's leftist Christmas. Yeah, it's more or less is leftist Christmas. Because there's gifts, they call them proletarian shopping trips, but what they do is

requisition merchandise from stores and distribute it to people who need it. Are you referring to armed robbery? That's a different thing. Yeah, it's only armed robbery if somebody tries to fight back. Otherwise, it must happen to be shopping with a gun. That's it.

What if there is no law? Is it really a crime? I don't know. No one can say. It seems like they only robbed the shopkeepers who were turds, people who lent a lot of money at a very high interest rate, things like that. And these proletarian shopping trips...

I'm not being against what happened. I'm stripping away some of the niceties. Yeah, if people hadn't gathered, if they weren't picking up what I was putting down, yes, it is going into a shop with guns and taking things and giving them to people who need them. Whether or not that is bad, who can say? Robin Hood. Famous villain in history.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, bad, bad dude. Sheriff of Nottingham, on the other hand, would have been big into crypto, I'm sure. All around legend. So, when I said if there is no law, I wasn't really joking. At this point, Luis Companche,

who's the Catalan leader, he's a liberal leftist politician. And earlier that evening, he refused to open the armories. He realizes that things are out of his control. And so he sets off for a walk. He walks down the Rambler, right? If you've been to Barcelona, it's this big old street.

Now, it's full of the kind of restaurants that have photographs on their menus so that German people can understand what they're going to eat, which is much of Barcelona. And American people, but yeah, people who don't speak Catalan or Spanish who go to Barcelona can eat very well there

for lots of money. I did not eat very well in Barcelona. Really? I had almost no money and was vegan and Spanish was abysmal, and my Catalan was non-existent. So I mostly hung out and cooked pasta. There are not a lot of cities

I've been to where it's harder to eat vegan than Barcelona. That is a challenge. Maybe Belgrade? Where the national dish is 30 pounds of meat on a plate? Yeah.

Sofia, no. I can't remember how to pronounce the name but it's a little bog area. Also a hard place to eat vegan. That was hard for me. Oh yeah, that does not surprise me. Surprise meat is a big part of the Catalan cuisine.

You'll be like, oh yeah, I'm having some lentils. And then there'll be like psych. There's a pig in here. We put a whole fucking pig in this thing. We did reverse vegan. We made lentils out of pig. I just ate falafel. Everywhere I go, I just eat falafel.

One of the Catalan national dishes is called cappipotta. Which means head and foot. Because those are the ingredients. Nice. And it's a bit of a pig that no one else wanted. She's one of the American citizens. One of the national dishes is also the head and face

of a pig. But they call it a hot dog. At least the Catalan's honest about it. That's true. But yeah, it's better now to eat vegan. Because in 2019, you have to move among the right circles. But yeah,

on the rambler, it would be hard. So that night, Compagnes is walking down the rambler. He's got his hat across his face, so no one could see him. And he's pulled up his collar, kind of like an old timey, private eye.

And up and down the rambler, anarchists and socialists are stealing cars and welding armor plates to the front of them. Another time-honored anarchist tradition. Yeah. King of War is the improvised technical. So what they do here is weld these steel plates,

and then they write the name of the union on top just so people can know who's killing them. Well, and so they can keep track of their stolen cars. Yeah. That's right. You don't want anyone stealing your stolen car. Yeah.

There comes a point in the next couple of weeks that some of the more ideologically committed anarchists will stop or take down traffic signals because they feel they're an unwarranted restriction on individual liberty. There's Twitter discourse.

Yeah, yeah. Get on that, Tankies. Time was a flat circle. Yeah, it's very funny. I bet there was a contingent of them that were taking down libraries too for gatekeeping knowledge. Libraries are cops.

Yeah. Libraries are pigs. Fuck pigs. Fuck pigs. Yeah, they burned them just in the classic anarchist fashion. Or we all know that libraries are better served under a free market system like that one guy tweeted.

Yes, Amazon should run the library and every book should cost you $10. Yep. That's the only way we can grow as a society. And if you don't like it, weld something to front of your truck. Also, if you have an idea

that's based on a book and Amazon owns the copyright, they now own the idea. That's the only thing that's fair. No thinking without proper copyright. Is it okay to use words if Jeffrey Bezos already owns words? No. Does that mean that we're going to be fighting the next one of these situations

with, instead of spray painting C&T, someone's going to come by and spray paint Amazon basics then with a flow of choice. I'm doing that tonight. I will be up armoring my truck as soon as we're finished. And spray painting Amazon basics

and then just going to the beach after that. Actually, what they spray painted on them, there was C&T, there was UGT, there was PHY. These are C&T, Confederation Nacional de Trabajo, National Labour Confederation. This is an anarcho-syndicalist union.

PHY, Federación Amarquista Iberia, is the Iberian Anarchist Federation. They're a group within the C&T that is more committed to a hard-line ideological anarchism.

The UGT are a socialist union. You have other groups too. The PUM is probably any other one you need to know. They're not Trotskyites. Anyone who tells you they are either doesn't know what they're talking about or is consciously misleading you. They were in open beef with Trotsky.

They are writing letters to Trotsky beefing about whether they should exist. Which Trotsky is a no on that question. So, yeah, they're not Trotskyists. They just get called Trotskyists by Stalinists because everyone who they don't like is a Stalinist.

They are anti-Stalinist Marxists. That's what I will call them. Okay. What some folks do though is they paint UHP on top of their cars. Unidos hermanos proletarios

I think it stands for United proletarian siblings I guess. And that's important, right? Because these groups had been fighting among themselves and with each other for a very long time. And having like

what appear today to be kind of comical beefs about inconsequential things. But they were important and then this ideological commitment is what gets them through this period of time. But the UHP comes from Asturias where anarchists and socialist

had come together to fight against the state, right? To fight as part of a minor strike. Miners particular love for dynamite by the way. That's how they Yeah, kings of the dynamite throw. That's how they dealt with the local garrison really. And actually the first use

of a combat helicopter was against the popular front the UHP in Asturias. And that strike was eventually put down by one Francisco Franco who we'll learn about later. Nice guy. No problems with him. That's a lie.

What? Yeah, shocking I know. Turns out to be a total turd of a human being. But he was a... Oh no, I'm going down a rabbit hole. Wasn't he like some sort of vaguely, wasn't he like a right-wing syndicalist for a while?

Yeah, he had all kinds of sort of I don't think Franco had any convinced political views other than like that he wanted to be in charge, but yes he was. A radical syndicalist. I said right-wing syndicalist. So a number of officers, I don't know if Franco was with them,

but there were like a group called the radical party who were radical. I'm not sure if Franco was one now that I think about it. I try not to learn too much about the person of Francisco Franco, because he is a turd. He does pivots, and he pivots when he's in power, right, from like

a sort of more totalitarian project to this national Catholic project to this sort of... Yeah, he's a problematic dude with no clear ideology other than he should be in power and he doesn't care who he has to roll over to get there. That's a common political ideology.

It is, yeah. It pops up a lot on the right. Something there with dudes on the right that maybe we should think about. No, it's never happened again. And never in this country, of course. Fortunately. That's not saying it could never happen right where we are.

Yeah. Not in my backyard. That's the real name of the show, right? Yeah. America is different, I think, as the subtitle. And... And special. So...

Sorry. No, no, no, I'm just... The people in Barcelona that day were even more numerous and diverse than the already bustling city was used to. The 19th of July was slated to be the start of the largest anti-fascist spectacle the world had ever seen.

That's a direct quote from a publicity article about the popular Olympics, right? As I said, these games aim to show the strengths of the popular front with a series of events. Some of those events are the ones you might expect. But some of these events were designed to reward nations

with a healthy working class rather than nations with a few exceptional athletes, right? We look at the Olympics today. Having one or two exceptional athletes, especially in certain areas, can like vault you to the top of a medal table, right? Mm-hmm.

Medal table, of course, invented by the Nazis to illustrate eugenics. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah. Before 36, there was no Olympics table. Not in the formal way that we see it now. So much of the pageantry that we associate with the Olympic Games

was invented by Carl Diem. The torch relay. The parade of flags in the opening ceremony. The Olympics are fucking Nuremberg with the rainbow rings.

It's wild how much of that shit is cribbed straight from Nazi pageantry. Cool. The book called The Nazi Games, pretty good on that if you want to read it. Lots of books about the 36 Olympics, but yeah. I should just acknowledge that the

International Olympic Committee did fund a lot of my research. For reasons that may be becoming clear have since ceased. Also, I just didn't think I was very good, I guess, but anyway. Institution that has some shit to deal with

that it hasn't dealt with, I would say. And yeah, it was on its bullshit heavily in 1936, right? So one of the things they did at the popular Olympics was they had a 10 by 100 meter relay. And it's just like I don't know, do Americans have school sports days?

Yes. I don't remember anything about public school sporting events. Okay. At the risk of sort of unveiling more trauma. What happens here? No, that's fine.

What happens here is you line up in groups of five and you just run back and forth passing a bat on to each other. Much like school sports day with the caveat being that the people in this event had to already be entered in other events at the Games.

So you just get weight lifters and there was a chess event at the Games, so you get the chess athletes and they're just hauling ass as fast as they're chess playing. Legs can carry them back and forth to prove the like superior

health of their nation's working class. Can we call them chess? Chessleads. Chessleads. Chessleads, yeah. Thanks. I really saved that one. Yeah, you pulled it back. I'm proud of you. Yeah, they didn't have

any mathleads, sadly. Yeah, they did have people who built human castles, so it was another event. Really? Wait, wait, wait. A castle made out of humans? Whoa, wait. You are not familiar with Castells, the great castle and tradition of building human towers.

No. No. Okay. Like, pivot. So it's just fucked now. One of my friends wrote her PhD on these. Holy shit! Something that they just made up just now. Listen, okay.

A, you can write your history PhD about literally anything as long as no one else has written it before. That is the sine qua non of history PhDs. I wrote my PhD about the Antifa Olympics, right? I wrote my masters about proletarian shopping trips.

That's cool. Yeah, I thought so. At the time. Yeah, so Castells, right? They were people at the bottom, right? And they sort of wrap a ribbon around their waist and then they often bite the corners of their shirt. I'm aware that I'm biting my shirt

and this is mainly an audio medium. But they'll wrap their hands over the other people, right? Men and women. Non-binary people, I'm sure too. They form a big old circle. And then the next layer, climb up them, right? And stand on top of them. There's slightly fewer people. And the people get smaller

and the layers have fewer people in them, like concentric circles, right? As you get higher and higher. And then a small child wearing always a horse riding helmet for reasons that are not entirely clear, ascends. And this shit is high. If you're standing on your balcony,

like you are eye to eye with this fucking toddler who climbs up the top, get to the top, arm in the air and then climbs back down. And these groups and people do this. People do this all the time. Yeah.

It's this thing where like young men give each other brain damage. Oh, I'm not anti this. I'm just I'm actually impressed by it because we do the human pyramid thing, which is the same thing only not nearly as impressive or interesting.

No, check out Custos. The cool thing about them is they exist within communities, right? These calls, these groups of Custillers are groups of people who do this from a neighborhood, right? So they'll all come from a certain town. The Talagana group was the one near me.

And my friends, dissertation, I do reports a name, you can probably look it up. It was about like how this practice has been integral into incorporating migrants into Catalanness, right? Like Catalan identity

by being like, yeah, come and stand on us or be stood on by us and you too can be Catalan. Oh, that seems like that would bring a community closer together into a heap on the ground. Yeah, it has all kinds of other uses, right? A cat stuck up a tree,

just call those guys. Yeah, want to rob a house. Yeah, famously ladders are banned in Catalonia because they're for cowards. Yeah, just all day Custos. But yeah, this was part of the popular Olympics, right? Human castles.

I'm glad we went there for everyone who didn't know. People Googling that. The UN United Nations Protected Human Patrimony or something. It's a bit important. So do you ever just like make up stuff to tell Americans about?

And then we believe you because you have an accent? I mean, we have an accent too, sure. Luckily, your accents are all neutral and vanilla. Yeah, exactly. The unmarked voice. Yeah. Let me know.

I think I've told this story on the internet before but one time I was giving a talk about diabetes in the Bronx and I asked if this kid wanted to... Ask these kids if they wanted to ask any questions and this young woman itching to ask a question just goes, do you guys really

have pies with meat in them? Like, as if she'd been misled her whole life. I was able to confirm that for her. I... Savory pies like fucked me up when I was in France. I was completely unprepared for the existence of these things. I volunteered to cook

for a bunch of activists who were busy having their meeting and I was like, sure, I'll come cook for you. And I figured I would just like show up and make pasta or burritos because I'm an American. And they gave me a la menu and on it was a tart de legume.

And I was like, I know what those words mean. That means pie, vegetables and that doesn't exist. I don't know what the fuck you're talking about. This is not a very interesting story and now everyone's heard it. But I learned how to make a vegetable pie

on no notice because that was what the menu insisted upon and yeah. I feel for this person in the Bronx who wasn't convinced that you were telling the truth about meat pies. Yeah, if they're listening I was, I promise.

Look it up. Now they got Google. Yeah, the lesson we've learned there is don't cook for French people. So at the games, one of the cool things is that nations competed instead of states, right? We can fucking go off on the difference between nations and states. The state is the entity that has political control

and exercise the monopoly on legitimate violence in the geographic area. A nation is an imagined community that exists across space and time. That's the shortest I'm going to do that and I'm not going to say anything. What's a country between those? A country is essentially, it's a geographical area

that the state controls. Okay, cool. But sometimes it's mapped onto nation as well, right? Like Catalonia being a good example. But for most of time people use it synonymously with state. Yeah. So countries aren't competing. Nations are, right? The exiled Jews of Europe

are competing, right? Because if you're Jewish and it's 1936, you don't want to fucking get like marching there with the German flag, I would imagine. It doesn't feel good. Negative vibes. So they don't do that. They are the exiled Jews, right? The

anti-fascists who are exiled from Germany and Italy. They also come in with their own different flags, right? Initially there was some rumblings about the NAACP sort of competing. But in the end the United States team, which is made up of trade unionists, had black and white folks on it.

The organizers were actually so invested in like the, I guess including oppressed black people from the United States within the remit of people who sort of anti-fascism wanted to

advocate for. They threw this whole Olympics together in like three or four months. It was shoestring budget. It's funded by the French government, the Spanish government, the Catalan government, individual donors and some trade unions from Norway. And they took their very sparse money and were like,

we will pay your way if your black people from America want to come over here, because we understand it's shit over there. If you want to come and play with us, then that's fine. Which is a cool like fuck you to the fact that because the whole Olympics is a fuck you to Nazi Germany, right?

And so it's cool that it also was like, and fuck you to racism in the United States also. Like I like that. Yeah, and it's also worth noting actually, while we're saying fuck you to the Nazis, the people at the popular Olympics ran faster, jumped higher, were stronger.

The Olympics are extremely gate kept by class. We see that kind of crumbling like with your man Jesse Owens and stuff like that. At this point, there was still worker sports and bourgeois sports and bourgeois sports went to the Olympics.

The Olympics still had an amateurism rule. If you got paid for exercising, you couldn't go. So yeah, which meant that like working class people, right? Like if you don't get paid time off and don't get fucking paid time off, it's 1936, then they can't go and compete, right?

Like if even if you work full time and I say, hey, Margaret, I'll pay for a couple of weeks, you know, I'll make sure I take care of your rent so you can go and do the Olympics. Nope. If you run a benefit race after the Olympics, they will take your medal away. Holy shit. Tom Longboat who they did that to. They do that a whole lot

to people who aren't white, shockingly. Yeah. So yeah, Olympics not great actually, maybe we'll do a whole earth bird and we'll have the Olympics do some bad shit. But yeah, these people come from America, right? On the team is Charlie Burley.

Charlie Burley goes on to be kind of a legendary boxer, right? He's biracial man from Pennsylvania and Doc Tucker, she's a black woman. She ran her union in the Bronx and she ran 100 meters as well. Yeah,

fucking plan that one out. Yeah. I love a good written into the script like planned out. It's good. Don't we? It sounds sarcastic, but I actually mean it really honestly. No, you can appreciate the joy that I'm feeling right now. So

that games brings 20,000 antifascists to Barcelona, right? Some of them are watching, some of them are competing, some of them are staying in hotels, the Hotel Olympic is where most of them stay, but they ran out of space so about two weeks before the games they went around random houses and were like, hey, can you

have someone to stay? So lots of the athletes are just like crashing with people and it's kind of cool. If you go to the archive in Barcelona, you can see the little forms where they'd go up to a house and be like, okay, this person has two beds and they can take care of breakfast and that's two athletes who can stay here.

They went door to door. They were heartbreaking seeing that shit and then knowing what happened. I was thinking it was like a better way to like that's what Airbnb should be, you know? Yes, yeah, anarchist Airbnb. If we compare this to the Berlin Olympic village

where the Condor Legion stayed before they headed off to bomb people in Spain. We will see that one side is better than the other side. So these people are staying all across Barcelona, right? It's trained in the stadium the day before. They distributed all around the city. So on the morning of the 19th

at Aquetes, these are kind of hardcore Catholic conservatives. They report to the San Antonio barracks outside of Barcelona. Meanwhile at the Pedro Albeis barracks officers get their troops up at 4 in the morning and serve them a ration of rum

for breakfast and tell them that there's been an anarchist uprising in the city that they have to put down. And so they send them... This is a lie. The uprising is in fact what they are doing as they march into the city. It's telling them they lie

because the troops are conscripts and are not really bought into their nationalist crusade at this point. And it's worth always remembering that working class people get trapped up in wars often not by their own choosing. Well, so it's kind of like how they're like you have to go out and fight antifa.

You have to go out and do a coup against the United States because otherwise antifa, who are all Stalinists are going to turn the US into the USSR. Yes. Yeah, yeah. There's no parallel.

That's not a parallel, sorry. It could never happen here. That's our big message for today. So these guys, they start heading down Avignula Diagonal, right? Towards Pláthica at the heart of the city. The cavalry are on a different street from Avignula Diagonal.

They leave a little later because the Spanish army's something of a clusterfuck and they all plan to join up but they never did. Instead, all across the city sirens sound the alarm in factories and where these troops have been planning to meet up with one another,

they met up with sniper fire and those homemade bombs we talked about. Yeah. This is where shit gets good. At the barricades they met men with everything from modern machine pistols to blunderbuses and slingshots. Yeah.

The blunderbuses are pretty cool. You can find some pictures. Many troops were forced back into their barracks. Some made it as far as a telephone exchange and the hotels reached some cologne in the middle of the city. What the troops who were incredibly poorly trained

conscripts with little or no combat experience and even less willingness to fight ran into was the most unlikely of alliances. Catalonia s nationalists had governed the Autonomous Region since the declaration of the Republic in 1931. They formed a broad leftist alliance called the Escala Republicana de Catalunya.

That means Catalan Republican Left. I just called them the ERC to avoid the... It's a bit of an alphabet soup but I'll try and explain where I need to. So before the Popular Front existed, they're kind of a proto-popular front. They combined liberal and leftist parties

who share agreement on autonomous and progressive Catalonia. They tend to be either aligned with or to the left of the government in Madrid, most often to the left of. They don't have the support of the anarchists. That's important. Luis Companz,

the Catalan leader of the Generalitat at that point, has been a lawyer for the anarchists before. He may have more personal support than a party as a whole has among the anarchists. For decades, the police in Barcelona have acted on behalf of capital against labour.

They do violence for the people who own stuff against people who make stuff. And even under the Republic, this has continued, right? They called it the Republic of Order. But Marguer, I think you covered the Pisto de Rismo, right? The years of the pistol in the 1920s.

Yeah, yeah, but it was... Yeah, they liked shooting the anarchists in order to bring about order. It wasn't like a legal thing. They weren't like, oh, it's our legal strategy. It was just a like, we're in charge, so we will assassinate the anarchists.

And then the other thing that like, I feel like is like, we're thinking about, because if someone's hearing, you might be like, well, why does the government care if the anarchists are on their side? And it's to my understanding, and correct me if I'm wrong, the anarchists are like a huge chunk of the working class of Barcelona

at this point. So it's like, they actually do care because the anarchists, by the end of the night, will own the city, right? And they have always been the majority of the Catalan working class in this period. They control the way elections go,

when the anarchists abstain, then the right wins, when the anarchists... They don't say don't vote. Like, they don't like, they're not like, yeah, go vote. They're like, they don't maybe consider not abstaining. Then the popular front wins, right? Yeah, it's very funny

how they use words. But yeah, the anarchists are the working class for the most of the industries, most of the unions are anarcho-syndicalists, right? So you don't have to support the anarchists, you don't have to support the working class. So yeah, in the 20s, the cops killed the anarchists,

the anarchists killed the cops, right? This is how we get the famous affinity groups, right? Los Solidarios, Los Quijotes del Ideal, and Nosotros, being some famous ones, right? And we'll talk about them a little bit in the next episode,

how that works and what they mean. So, in 1931, the declaration of republic was a massive boost for the anarchists. More people joined anarchist unions, they felt safer doing so. Primo de Rivera, the previous dictator, had been very harsh on anarchists.

They actually briefly, in the Altiobrigat, secured like, libertarian socialism. They took over some towns, and they seized weapons from the cops and abolished currency for a week. And it was just like, yeah, it's on, it's

anarchism, and so for five days, Fugoles belonged to the people of Fugoles. And this is before, we're talking about before the coup and all of that. Yeah, this is in 1932, so republic begins in 1931, so there's a number of these, early on in the republic, when the state is less violently

postured towards anarchism, the anarchists really fucking send it. You see it in Casas Viejas, you see in Fugoles. So, yeah, more people joined because they feel safer joining, and that leads to more open conflict with the sort of civil order, I guess.

But with the threat of fascism looming, the CNT establishes defense committees. And these become like a quick reaction force for the city, right? So by the time the troops leave their barracks, activists within the CNT were ready for them. Barcelona's Raval,

a densely populated district just off the Morteurus-friendly Rambla, have become known as a barichines. That means Chinatown. Not because Chinese people or people of any Asian extraction live there. That's because they watched gangster movies about Chicago's Chinatown, and they were like, ah, yeah, we can go

that hard. So they just called it that. Chris Elam has a great book on the construction of Chinatown. Now, people have been shooting each other in those streets for decades, right? But for once, everyone in the Raval was pointing their guns out.

Every balcony in the Raval becomes a sniper's nest. By the time the sun came up, it was an impenetrable fortress of the working class. And at this time, the state would find itself begging the anarchists for support, and not the other way around. And I think that's maybe where we'll end it

today. So that people can be sort of teetering on the edge of their seats to know what happens next. Thank you very much for joining me, Margaret. Yeah. Would you like to plug anything? Do you have any plugables? Well, I have a book that's available for pre-order. It's called

We Won't Be Here Tomorrow, and if you like Trans Woman who robs guys and then feeds them to her mermaid lover, or you like the dead in Valhalla coming back and joining

in an American Civil War to fight against Nazis, then you might like this book. Actually, I think I read that story on this podcast. You did. It fucking ruined the next episode, because that's what happened as well.

I know, I know. Well, actually, there's a different story that I didn't write, I think. Oh, no. There's one about velociraptors in the Spanish Civil War that anyway, that's completely unrelated. Okay, so,

that is where the book is currently available for pre-order, and if you get it from AK Press, or a couple other different independent bookstores, then it comes with a free art print that comes from the book. And so, if you like that, you could consider getting it, or ask your library to get it.

And you can follow me on the internet at magpikilljoy on Twitter, and smarterkilljoy on Instagram. That's my plugables. Do you have any podcasts? I have a podcast. I do. I actually have two podcasts. I have a podcast called Live Like The World Is Dying, which is an individual and community preparedness

podcast. And I also have a podcast on this very network. Really? Amazing. Yeah, you all haven't noticed it yet. I've just been kind of uploading my stuff without checking with you all, called Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, which is all about

history, but in a fun way about stuff that cool. Yay. I'm excited to get this to it right now. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. Go. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here.

This is part two of James... It Could Happen Here, the podcast that fucks. All right, that's my job done today. Okay, part two of James' episode. Congratulations, Robert. The Spanish Civil War and the Antifa Olympics. That's right.

Civil War Week, closing out with this one. Why did the Antifa Olympics hate freedom, though, is my question. The Antifa Olympics are going around and destroying all of the balls. Yeah, they are taking your children.

Busloads of black-clad athletes are showing up in New York City to play sports. This does make me think back briefly to win a couple of different antifascist groups in Seattle and Portland played soccer. And it became a whole thing because, yeah, there was...

Oh, I used to play Anarchist Soccer in New York City. Yeah. Oh, that got cancelled hard. Well, in Portland, it got cancelled hard. And also, because it was in New York City, there was a bunch of semi-famous actors who would come

and play Anarchist Soccer, but then couldn't be visually associated, so people would all mask up in solidarity whenever camera people would come by because some famous actor was playing Anarchist Soccer in the park. That's very funny. Yeah, that's outstanding. More of that

needed. Yeah, these Anarchists, of course, were just busy doing the traditional antifascist thing of starting forest fires before... Oh, okay. Before the Civil War. So, anyway, picking up from the last episode... Where we left our heroes? Yeah, we're talking about the heroes, right?

So, with the military marching towards the city and every balcony in the working-class convoy, quickly becoming a snipers nest, every rifle was needed at the barricades. With Spanish and Catalan tops, took an unprecedented break from being bastards, and instead, significant elements of the Mossos de Squadre,

Guardia Civil, and the elite paramilitary assault guards, grabbed their handy carbines, rifles with names like Tiger and Destroyer, and took... Yeah, none of them are called Robots, sadly, and took to the barricades in defense... What a missed opportunity. Right, yeah. See, this is why the

Spanish lost. Get me my Robert. I can see it now. I'm prepared to help you with the advertising at no cost. Just gonna bob them right up. That's why they called them Barbies. Yeah, famously. I think we need to make... I think it needs to be

some sort of like nine-barreled electronic volley gun. I want to... Yeah. Something that could take out at least two Japanese prime ministers at once. You only need two barrels for one prime minister, so you could get up to four. Yeah.

Yeah. True through space and time. Yeah. Alright, so there you go. Go back and get Genshiro Koizumi. Finally. Bring him to justice. With a nine-barreled pipe gun. Okay, so these people... Alright. So the cops and the anarchists

are fighting alongside each other. Is that what you're telling me? That's correct. Yep, the anarchists are pulling up paving stones, building barricades, which they had learnt in previous conflict with the state could stop light artillery, and they are welcoming the cops. It's worth pointing out that they

hear us a day or not cops, and they hear us a day are very rarely cops. Instead, it's the ordinary people of Catalonia, right? Everyone from liberals to left libertarians runs to the barricades, but the anarchist affinity groups, the anarchist defence committees

are the mortar that holds together the resistance, right? They are experienced, they have plans, they provide impetus and inspiration to the working class. They are ready when their liberal government is not. They had a pretty good handle on fighting in the streets of Barcelona, too.

This is their home turf, right? They see this shit a lot, like people who are good at fighting the cops become integral in fighting the state. It happened in the Maidan, happened in Terria Square, both with, like, Ultras, right? Like football fans, people who go to football games who also like fighting cops.

So, like, it's not unprecedented that the folks who are good at fighting the cops become integral in fighting the state when the state turns bad. Turns bad. In many cases they also have more experience when it happens than the poorly trained conscripts

because it would be pretty hard to have less. There's a little bit of a debate, a discussion about causality here. Does the coop fail where it does because the cops remain loyal? Or does the beach head established by the working class allow the cops who were sympathetic but not convinced

to safely remain loyal, right? So across Spain, it's, like, not quite the same as the US, the cops are better trained and better armed than the military. But they often hung back until the working class had taken decisive action, right?

These were the winds blowing. Yeah, exactly. Like, they, sometimes, like, occasionally they will do some sort of king shit. Like, in one city, the couple of the assault guards are their officers side with a coup, so they get shot by their own men.

Just, you love to see. In other places they sound to nothing. In some places the soldiers come for them where they're like, fuck it, it's on now. But in other places they join with the working class as they do in Barcelona. The Civil Guard is older and the Civil Guard tends to be in more rural

places where the coup tends to be more successful and the Civil Guard tends to be less loyal to the Republic. The Civil Guard in Barcelona waits until noon and the coup is really defeated by noon. By noon, the soldiers hold up in a few buildings and it's very clear that they haven't won.

And then they come in on a horseback clip-clopping down the street doing the raised fist salute, like just milking it to announce loyalty to the Republic. They did have better guns and better marksmen, so they were helpful in assorting the buildings that came next. Alright, everyone

we're here, we saved the day. Here we come thin blue line. So, what happens all across Barcelona is that the tremendously poorly organized army meet well organized when in trans resistance and they're killed a turn back.

So, I want to give one example of this from Avenida Icaria. It's related by Bivor in his book. Now, what they've done in Icaria was taken out huge rolls of news print, like the stuff that you put newspaper on and rolled them into the streets to make a barricade, right?

So, the degree to which people were like ready in like amusing ways is a great part of this. You know, that was what they had available to them, seemed to be stopping bullets. So, they roll these out. Lots of layers

is the way to stop bullets, so. It is, yeah, lots of layers of newsprint don't make bullet proof. Paper armor is a thing. Different places, so. Yes, it was, yeah, yeah. It certainly seemed to work here and they had big old guns, like Spanish mouses. So, the fighting stops

for a second and a small group of workers and an assault guard close the distance between themselves and two 75mm fuel guns. But they're holding their rifles above their heads. They signal they wanted to talk and not to fight. And so, for a few minutes, they give a passionate speech informing the soldiers they'd been lied

to, that the anarchists were not in revolt, that they were in fact part of a coup, and that they should not fire on their proletarian brothers. It's not exactly clear what they said, but whatever they said it worked and very slowly, the seed of class consciousness was planted and it bloomed in about the time it takes to turn

a 75mm gun 180 degrees. Load it and fire it at your offices. Again, it's just so good. These powerful anecdotes of like someone just being like, huh, yeah. Now that you phrase it like that, we're on the same team. Let me turn this artillery gun around.

I also just love to think of the guy who's just been like previously like forgotten country that gets vaporized by a 75mm gun. Truly magnificent stuff. So, the popular

Olympians are still in town, right? They turned up to show off as antifascists, but they didn't really expect to be showing off their antifascists bona fides quite like this. But lots of them were winning participants. The Americans were down by the

bucket of your market. You've probably been there. You've been to Barcelona. You've probably bought an edible arrangement. That's what tourists like to do. And they watched the streets around them turn into battlegrounds. You can see the bullet holes in the hotel where they stayed and some of the cafes

around there. But some of these bullet holes that should be mentioned are from a sadder and altogether different battle a year later. But this day they popped out of their hotel rooms and got a shot at and they went back inside and then

popped out of different balconies. They had this thing of popping out of different balconies. I don't understand what the fuck is going on in their heads where people keep shooting at us. Let's continue to try different balconies. I could see doing that. Just being so curious.

And they'd all made friends with Spanish people. They were not the athletes of today. They were out late drinking every night. They were really bummed very quickly and very upset. They were like, we need to get stuck in. We're young, healthy people

and their diaries are also right about seeing the Spanish women at the barricades. And just being like, oh fuck yes. This is outstanding. Yeah. Because they're very committed. These antifascists are very committed to gender equality.

They really are. And it's demonstrable in all the communications about the popular Olympics. When they send stuff to unions and unions like, here's a team, it's 10 dudes. They're like, well that's fucking disappointing. Where are the women? What are we doing here? How are we making the world better

with just a bunch of dudes exercising together? So it really is, I think, a very genuine commitment for them. They're just so pumped. So when the fighting lulls, these guys come running out and they saw those cavalry horses. The cavalry horses they'd expected to parade down

the Rambler in a victorious coup had now been stacked on top of each other as barricades. The horses? Yes. They used the horses as cover. You can find pictures of this, actually. Yeah, okay.

The horses didn't want to be fascists. Yeah. But I think we can take some solace in knowing that the people who were riding them also got killed. That's true. You say the horses didn't want to be fascist. This is in the intersection of shit you enjoy, Robert, actually, yeah.

Yeah, shitting on horses and hating fascists. Yeah. Which are the same. No, but see, horses would be very good at shitting on fascists. From a great height. Well... Yeah. Yeah, I know.

R.I.P. horses did nothing wrong. Yeah. Paul went out for the horses. So, Charlie Burley runs down to the street, right? He's pretty accustomed to fighting. He's a boxer. He's a mixed race kid who grew up in Pittsburgh.

He's refused to go to the 1936 Olympics because he doesn't want any of Hitler's bullshit. And he doesn't speak Spanish. So, all he knows how to do is pick up a crowbar, start levering up paving stones and helping to build a barricade. Yeah.

Universal language. Yeah, breaking shit. And so, he just gets stuck in and now I'm with them do, right? These barricades they built, like I said, they were so strong that they would stop like Art Hillary. Across the city, whipped and snaps of bullets

cracked across the wide boulevards. They cut through the regimented grid as the exemplar. Snipers were stationed in the bell towers of churches. They picked off the newly formed people's militias. They dashed between the barricades carrying ammunition of food. A French athlete.

That's correct. Yeah, yeah. So, you will definitely read that they were priests, but they're not, I don't think, just a... If you're going to put a sniper up there, you want to put someone up there who knows how to use a rifle. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, so they probably weren't priests.

That doesn't mean the priests were not abetting them, should they were at some points. But yeah, this is why the churches get burned. Yeah, it's one of the reasons. A group of German exiles suspected their company's diplomat might be involved. So, they raided their homes and found massive stashes of weapons.

Which is great. The Republic had very liberal asylum policies, so you have a ton of German, Italian antifascists already in town. Elsewhere, people found each other in the streets, were joined up with pre-existing affinity groups to form Centuria. Centuria was a latter word for units of 100 soldiers.

They're broadly based on language, and they're named after some famous leftists, like Tom Mann, Karl Marx, or Ernst Salomon, their founder of Antifa, with a capital A. Later, these

would become the nucleus of the international brigades. But the international brigades were the army of the common turn, and the Centuria weren't. They didn't have offices. Common term is basically like under Soviet control. Yes, that's right. There's Soviet controlled communist international,

so they were doctrinally Stalinist more or less. Right? And certainly, you can read a shit ton about the international brigades going from a broad, popular front leftist alliance to a straight-up Stalinist, and what that does to their desire to fight,

and their ability to fight. I would suggest that it's not great. It's a story as old as time. Yes, it is. Draw your own conclusions. Cecil Elby is very good on that, if you want to read his book. So, these Centuria don't have offices, and they certainly don't have commissars, right?

And off they roll to fight the Nazis. By 11 a.m., General Goddard has landed from Mallorca. He was hoping to command the city, which the nationalists thought the bathburner would be the easiest city for them, right? They thought it was a soft target.

They were wrong. I don't know what, again, yeah, not smart. It was only through the intervention of Caridad Mercader. Her son, incidentally, killed Trotsky. That his life was spared. He holed up in the headquarters.

The headquarters was overrun. They wanted to execute him immediately. She intervened. She says, no, you know, we got to do this pretend to justice. So, we put him on the prison ship Uruguay, and then he's killed a little later after a court martial. He's executed a few weeks later in the Montchouis castle.

That day in the Montchouis castle, the troops had shot their officers. And the NCOs certainly did a raid on the armory where they began distributing guns to anarchists. Again. Yeah, very cool. Oh, yeah. Yeah, love to see it. The Cadillac left and the Catholic church

had some historical disagreements, right? The church had a long history of violence towards the left, and the left had an equally long history of violence towards the church. The church had been part of

brutal oppression of the working class, the right victimization of people, especially of working class women. And as troops withdrew from the city in July 1936, anarchists began to take revenge against the churches. Nones corpses were disinterred. Priests accused of

collaboration were executed. By the afternoon, the sky began to fill with smoke as churches burned all over the city. Sometimes they had these things called checkers, which were like revolutionary tribunals where they put the priests or the churches themselves. After outside Madrid, there's a famous photo of them

executing a giant statue of Jesus trice after putting it on trial. That's what's in the future for Robert Evans, his execution. That is a pretty funny bit. Oh, it's good. There's a firing squad and everything. That is like a pretty good dedication to the bit.

Whether or not you agree with it, you have to respect it. Yeah, it's a good t-shirt. Maybe we could return to Merch and have that image. But yeah, some Catholics rebuilt it. It's no longer riddled with bullet holes in its face.

Well, that's time to do... Yeah! You know what that means! Yes, it's time to kill God. Storm heaven. And redistribute all the

stuff. Harps for everyone. Yeah. People will robes, actually. This became a bit of an issue because people will be like, lol, look at me, I'm wearing a robe, I pretend to be a priest. And then other people will be like, fuck you priest and shoot them. Yeah, I don't do that, actually.

Robes for everyone, bad idea, at a time of anti-clerical violence. What you can do is drink all the communion wine, which is what they did. Sorry, all the blood of Christ is what they drank. Yes, I'm sorry. In the stomach. Yeah, no, I'm a bad Catholic. I don't remember any of this.

It's just wine until they do the thing. Yeah, okay. And say the words, and then something special happens. That's the Eucharist. So it's the pre-blood. Yeah, it's pre-blood, it's just sweet wine. By the 20th of July,

the military was all but done for inner city, right? But some of them had retreated back to their barracks immediately. They came out, promptly got shot up by a shit ton of people, and went, nope. And polled the 180. Returned to the barracks.

So smarter than the tourists at the hotel? Yes. Although, I don't know about that, because these guys end up dying there. And the tourists do not. Well, that's because they're side one, but... Yes, yeah, yeah, true. Well, I would be lying

if I said the tourists do not. Because one of those tourists does. A guy called Albert Alchakin. They called him Chick. He was the coach of the team. Community college professor, actually. And he leaves,

goes back to America, and just can't deal with, like, missing. It's not so much at the guilt of not being there. And I think some of us maybe can relate to this in a way, right? Like the missing of being there, too. Yeah, the farmer. Yeah, and how special it feels.

Robert's off. Robert can relate to this, right? Sometimes it's the time you feel the most alive is when you're trying not to be dead. But also, like, this was a fucking awesome time, right? The cops have joined the working class, the churches are on fire,

the bosses are running for the hills, and the army has just had its ass handed to it by, like, a bunch of men and women in blue overalls. I can imagine it felt pretty cool. So he goes home, he comes back with his wife. His wife runs the first art therapy

program for children traumatized by conflict. Yeah, the pictures are at UCSD. I used to go sit with them all the time. Just kind of, I don't know, it feels like a special place, like a nice connection. Yeah, that's the kind of stuff that gets left out of history too much, too, right?

Is these contributions, and these developments that come from political radicals that are, like, not just the the gun, the Robert, you know, or the, you know, seizing of workplaces, but the developing of art therapy

for people dealing with traumatic event, that rules. Yeah, absolutely, right? Like, these people made home-made bombs, but they also, like, made it easier for kids to process their trauma. And, like, that's what anarchism is, folks. But, yeah,

Jenny Berman, they hyphenated their last names, Berman, Chakin. Yeah, advanced. Yeah, highly progressive 1930s. Yeah, his wife, Jenny, was definitely the radical, and she sort of bought him on, and he was like, yeah, fucking, you got it.

So, yeah, he goes back, you can see the pictures at UCSD, they're online too, but Al dies in a sort of chaotic retreat to the International Brigade. No one knows where, right? I'm trying to write a book about him, I have some of his diaries,

and he's an exceptional guy, in a lot of ways, a very nice guy. He's also, like, he sort of draws a lot of disdain from the other passengers on the boat when they're crossing the first time, because the passengers keep getting mad that the black folks and the white folks

are eating at the same table at dinner from the popular Olympics team, and he's just, like, super mad at this, and he's like, why would you be that way? So he just keeps, like, getting, he is a wrestler, right, like, just keeps getting in people's faces about it, I guess.

Which, like, yeah, is, I guess, being an ally or something, but, um, yes. Yes, Jenny Berman is in, there's a film called The Good Fight, which is about the American volunteers, and you can see her talking about him. Cool.

Yeah, I think it's obviously a pretty difficult experience for her talking about him, but, uh, and I'm sure the whole thing is pretty rough, given, you know, the, uh, things that happen afterwards, but, yeah, uh, again, a wonderful person. She's passed away now, but, yeah,

actually, it's the interview, it's the full interview with her that I'm waiting for, so I can write about him. And, but, yes, she does. Uh, look up The Good Fight, it's a good film. So on the 20th of July, the anarchists are assembling outside these barracks, right? Uh, they had to support the police, but they didn't want it anymore,

and so they assembled their own troops instead, right? Garcioliver, Abad de Santillon, Nascaso, and Dorruti, uh, on some charred shit. And, uh, they do what the anarchists did at this time, which is, uh, they lead a frontal charge

on the barracks, where there are still machine guns. Um, so, uh, they are brave, but perhaps not tactically astute. I've, I've read about this where basically one of the problems that people had, like, strategically

about the anarchists is that the anarchists in Spain were so, uh, fervent in their beliefs, that they basically were like, hooray, soon I will be a murderer, and, like, all charged at machine guns, and, like, weren't always the most strategic. Is that map to your understanding?

Yeah. In the early days of the Civil War there, like, because they had been raised for decades of propaganda of the deed, right? Uh, and, like, propaganda of the deed is just saying, like, you know, like, you can die as a hero and become an example to the working class,

and you will elevate the cause. It's as close to martyrdom as you can get in an atheist political belief, I think. And, yeah, so they would just, uh, I don't, like, like, Ascaso, right? Ascaso is a famous anarchist leader. Uh, Ascaso is a guy who dies, uh, like, literally leading the charge

frontally on a machine gun, at this time, at this barracks, right? He dies in less than 24 hours after the war has started. He's a member of this Nosotros group with Daruti and others, and Garthi Oliver, and, uh, he's the one who gives his name to the pistol, right?

So, uh, in Tabassa, uh, the CMT, the, um, the anarchists, anarcho-single guests, take over an arms factory, uh, take it over, the workers run the factory and they start making these pistols with his name on it. So it's like the only gun that is not,

in some way, morally compromised. So I guess in that sense, they kill a lot of fascists. Yeah. But, yeah, they don't want the help of the police. They don't want the tactical advice. Daruti, actually, later is very good at this. He has regular army officers

embedded with his column, and he listens to them. And that allows him to be more successful than the other anarchists. Okay. Um, but, yeah, he, uh, they're battle cries, atlante hombres del CMT, which is like, you know, forward men of the CMT.

They took the barracks along with 30,000 rifles. Wow. Pretty much all of those would be in the hands of working people within a couple of days. Wow. Yeah, that's a vast, like, this is a decent slice of the Republic's weapons, right? Yeah. Uh, until they get

resupplied later, and interestingly, like, the Soviet Union and Mexico supply them, but they, the Republican government in Madrid doesn't want people supplying the anarchists. So only, um, CZ, or Vazor, the Czech uh, gun company, are willing to illicitly

violate two different arms embargoes to supply the anarchists later in the war. Yes. Yeah. Based CZ. Yeah. Maybe we can have them be the advert for this episode. Finally, a case, a solid case for the hammer fired arm in, in, in modern

days. We have to honor the legacy of CZ. Yeah. Yeah. Again, the only, direct firearm to buy. Glock wouldn't have done that, mother fuckers. Nope. No. Yeah. Don't see any Glocks in the anarchist hands.

Yeah. Buy a 32 ACP because it also killed Hitler. It's the most anti-fascist gun that you can do. You can own. Hitler killed Hitler, but, you know, we don't have to go there. The real if you can fascist. Critical support to

Adolf Hitler. Or you could say, well, you know who else tried to kill Hitler? Hitler. He did once before in 1923 after the failed Munich Putsch. But his friend puts the Hans Stangels wife who he had a crush on.

Killing himself. Which was, which was a mistake. Yeah. Yeah. She let the team down. So see, that's where CZ came in, giving him an efficient way to kill himself with no wives around. I did have a wife around, didn't he? Well, thank you, CZ.

Hitler's dead. And with that, let's go back to Spain. Catalonia, I guess. So the French popular Olympics team left that day. They sang the International Isle from the deck of their boat as they pulled out the port. A few days later

on the Rambler parade was organized. The various nations of the popular Olympics marched down the street, led inexplicably by some bag pipers who had arrived with the British team. Hell yeah. That's how you know they're international. Bagpipes. Yeah. Yeah. Why not?

I love that like, yeah, some antifascist bagpipers had been recruited by this point. And they all sang the International in their own languages. Did the race for salute that would become the popular French salute. And they heard a speech

and in the speech they were told you've come for the games, but you've remained for the greater front. You've been struggling in triumph. Now your task is clear. You'll go back to your countries and spread the word the news of what you've seen in Spain. So some of them went back

and some of them stayed. All in all about 200 of them actually stayed to fight or came back to fight. Some of their names are Bill Scott. He was an Irishman who came for the games. He went back and forth between Spain and Ireland a bunch, wrote some

letters to newspapers to encourage other people to fight. His big slogan was a victory for fascism in Spain is a victory for fascism in Ireland. That's the same slogan that the other side used too, right? Yes, but the Irish volunteers who fought for the fascists

were fucking exceptionally useless. Yeah, yeah. And may have excelled more than Irish volunteers who fought for the antifascist or killing fascist. Which I guess critical support to them. He

fights in the battle of Madrid, Bill Scott where he gets shot in the neck. Orwell style. So there you go, Robert. Maybe they really were sticking their necks out. You got Otto Bosch. Otto Bosch was a lover of novelist and poet Muriel Ruckeyzer. He was a cabinet maker, a sprinter

and an actual car-carrying antifa member. And now he was a soldier. He also died. The sad part about this part of the war is everyone dies pretty quickly afterwards. Yeah.

It's really sad. These people are as good as people come and they all end up dead. But let's not talk about that. I want to focus on the victorious part. So, that evening, right? Dorucci, García Oliveira and Abad de Santillón go and meet

with compounds. Ascaso is dead, right? Because he was on his heroics. They're still in their monos. They're still covered in blood. And they're still carrying their weapons. Which is the way one should meet with a politician.

So, he gives them this little speech. Some people say it's apocryphal. I don't really give a fuck. I think it's nice. I'm going to read it. It's not very long. Firstly, I must say that the CNT and the PHY have never been treated as their true importance merited.

You have always been harshly persecuted. And I, with much regret, was forced by political necessity to oppose you, even though I was once with you. Today, you are the masters of the city and of Catalonia, because you alone have conquered the fascist military. And I hope that you will not forget

that you did not lack the help of the loyal members of my party. But you have won and all is in your power. If you do not need me as president of Catalonia, tell me now, and I will become just another soldier in the fight against fascism. If, on the other hand, you believe that I, my party, my name, my prestige

could be of use, then you could depend on me and my loyalty as a man who is convinced that a whole past of shame is dead. So that's nice. That's cool. I mean, it's interesting, you know? Right. It's fascinating. I think it's the clearest we get to a person at a time being like,

in the last 24 hours, I have gone from president to a guy who has to ask the anarchist for a rifle so I can fight. Yeah. And like, it's, you know, people get on the Zelensky stuff, but this is kind of different, I guess. You know, like, it's good to find someone

who cares about a cause more than power. Yeah. As a rule, if it's your job to be in charge of people, I'm probably not a fan of that job existing, but if when it comes down to it, you throw down rather than hide in a bunker or flee the country

to live in exile in, I don't know, whatever friendly country, then that's better than the alternative. Yeah. Yeah. I'd agree. And I think, yeah, being more attached to this and to your self-preservation or your power, I think, is admirable. For example, if Joe Biden

had burned down the third precinct himself, I think a lot of people would feel more positively towards him. He did, though. Robert, we're not supposed to talk about this on the podcast, guys. You're right. This is... Yeah.

The midterms really start to heat up. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. We've released the video of Joe Biden with a firebomb. I was told that he had a kind of axe body spray and a lighter. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

That's how he normally rolls when he's in block. All right. Sorry. That image is, like, so cursed that I'm like... Joe Biden in block. Yeah. I smile like he's in the Camaro, but we're just holding the axe body spray

and a CRL lighter. But everyone can figure out it's him because he keeps touching people and everyone is keeping... He's sniffing everybody's hair. Ask him if he can smell the inside of their balaclavas. Yeah.

Uncle Joe. A hero. True anti-fascist. Are you going dark, Brandon, on us? Oh, God. Are we going to have to explain what dark Brandon is on the pot eventually? No, I don't think we need to.

I don't think that's ever going to be relevant. No. I think we'll just say let's go, Brandon. Look it up, kids. Just type dark Brandon into your Twitter search bar. And see what happens. And educate yourselves. I'm going to do this right now, but please continue.

Yeah, please do, because I don't have a fucking clue. No, I have no idea what they're talking about. I don't think I'll ever want to be. So things go differently on across the country, right? The Navy. I'm waiting to hear Margaret squeal or scream or cry.

I just don't understand. I think it's that he's a vampire. Yes. Go ahead. Tell us about dark Brandon. No, I don't know. It's just weird memes. It's scary. I don't want to know.

It's a good time. It's a good time on the internet. That's all that dark Brandon is. All right. The Navy doesn't fall for the coup, right? This leads to this spectacular exchange between the crew of

Jaime Primero, James I, and the Ministry of Marine. Crew to Ministry of Marine, we have encountered serious resistance from the commands and officers on board. Crew to Ministry of Marine, by force. Urgently request instructions as to bodies.

Ministry of Marine to crew, lower the bodies overboard with respect to all solemnity. What is your present position? So what they've done there is the officers have declared for the crew, for the coup, and the sailors on board the ship have killed them and thrown them over the edge. Subdued by force.

What do we do with the bodies? The people we have subdued. Just the most amazing radio message. The officers turn out to be chuds and then like brief pause. What do you want us to do with their bodies? Again, kingshit.

So it's a few days before the battle lines really get drawn as to who is where, who is on what side of the Spanish Civil War. It's a few days before it becomes clear that this is a Civil War. Because without boats, their rebels seem to be in trouble. But the fascists came to their aid

with planes to airlift the troops from Africa. The Republic had more troops and more access to supplies and it looked like they were going to win a war of attrition. That doesn't work out because France, the UK and the United States abandoned Spain. And the fascists do not abandon Franca.

They don't really want to finish there. I want to backtrack and think about how many times in the past or the present the working class of a city is spontaneously organised to prevent an army from entering that city. And especially in the age of the tank and the bomber, I can't really think of any.

I don't know if you guys can, but I couldn't come up with one. I got nothing. Yeah, anyone? I mean, other than Kiev kind of spontaneous, some of it was at least spontaneous, but yeah. Yeah, it wasn't against their own army. Like they had an army.

No, that is, yeah. I mean, you could, there are pieces of that and it was not as organised or clearly successful in the Holy Week uprisings and the Watts riots and stuff. Yeah, yeah, true.

Pieces of it. Yeah, I mean, even like in Minneapolis, right? Pieces of other Minneapolis. Where the state didn't exist for a while. But this revolution is somewhat unique, at least in that, right?

And what happens afterwards and what happened in the Civil War, and what I want to end on, you can see this kind of idea in Ken Loach's film, Land and Freedom, that this was a romantic failure.

And I don't think that's true. I think that the only way for the Civil War to succeed was doing what it did well with harnessing the enthusiasm and passion of the working class people to build a better world for themselves. When it became not worth fighting

and dying for something, the war was already lost for a lot of people. Trying to mask behind a conventional war effort doesn't make sense when your enemy has every advantage in a conventional war effort. But I don't want to focus on that. I want to focus on the last weeks of July 1936.

When the city's in the hands of the people. When there are no cops and no bosses. People go back to work as collectives. When there's no money, but people distribute food to people who need it. All across Spain, there's a barrel of a gun.

People collectivised. They collectivised in Castile and they socialised industry in Valencia. It's a remarkable moment in human history. It doesn't last more than a year. But I think it shows us that this other future was possible. The path we took from 1936

to the present day was not the best one. But I like to think that just for a little while we could have done better. And I think that's where I want to end really, thinking about how we could do better. If people want to read books, this has already been a long episode,

I will say Helen Graham's very short introduction is very good. Anthony Bivor's newer book is good and you can get an audio book. Julián Casanova is one of my favourite writers in Spanish and some of his stuff is translated into English. Augustín Guillermod's

book, ready for the revolution on the affinity groups of the CNT and Chris Elam's stuff on Barcelona is excellent. If you're in Barcelona, Nik Lloyd's walking tours are excellent. But yeah, I hope that's enough there. You can watch Ken Loach's film.

You can watch, I think it's called Parallel Mothers. That's on Netflix. A couple of good films. Yeah, thank you so much, Margaret, again for joining me to hear me drone on about the Spanish Civil War for an hour. I'm into it.

I didn't know. I've only been learning the details more recently. I've always just heard about it in broad strokes and a lot of people talking about what it means, right? But talking about what it means is cool.

But the stuff that's really interesting to me is the stuff that actually makes it matter is the person who shows up and develops ways to deal with trauma by art therapy and the people who bravely

steal Dynamite and become named Rosa the Dynamiter, what was her name? Yeah, Rosa La Dinimitiera. She loses a hand. Yeah, it's better than Rosa the Riveter. No offense to Rosa the Riveter, but Rosa the Dynamiter

is doing well. Rosa the Dynamiter, go after all of the libraries keeping the books in prison. Free knowledge the road to gatekeepers of thought. I really like librarians.

Taking away it canceled, but I like libraries and librarians. You all aren't ready for this discourse, Margaret. You live the Margaret Killjoy take. Librarians are problematic. That's how we know your CIA

asset because of your pro-library stance. Yeah, exactly. Classic capitalist infrastructure. Look, where did the CIA train all those people to overthrow governments? The school of the Americas. What does every school have? Books. See, I think school is the problem,

because that's the school of Americas. There's two things wrong with school of Americas. It's school and America. Most of the problem is the school part. I think the real problem was the school of the Americas with the name and we can't have that.

That's an oppressive hierarchical system of learning. Unbelievable. If America or Vespucci never came here, maybe things would be different. Maybe even better. Wow, anti-Italian slander. I'm here for it. Well, let's all end on that note.

Fuck Italy. And fuck traffic lights. Margaret, do you have anything to plug? I do. It's all about why traffic lights are bad. It's called We Won't Be Here Tomorrow and it's written from the point of view of a traffic light that knows it's about to be abolished.

It's out from AK Press who uses the red and black flag as the logo and much like the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War who developed the red and black flag, which is to reference, of course, the negation of the red, because the red in the traffic light is what stops you. And so the black

is the negation of the red in this case. And that's what happens when you disconnect a traffic light from power. It goes black. No one's disconnecting shit, Robert. People are shooting the traffic light. Do you know what AK Press sells? Books.

Books. And books. Where do books get kept? That's right. That's right. Everyone is in on it. If you don't want to be part of the evil world, you can do what is clearly good,

which is listen to podcasts and create parasocial relationships with people right now. And if you want to create a parasocial relationship with me, you can listen to my podcasts, one of which is called Live Like the World is Dying. It's an individual and community preparedness podcast. And the other one is called

Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, which is all about people who defend libraries from people like you and anti-learning nihilist radicals. Anti-libre action. That's right.

That's what the ALA is, isn't it? That's why I fly the black and gray. I'm just making fun of people now. Never mind. Thank you, Bargain, for joining us. Did once make me an anarcho goth flag that was black and then black lace.

That's great. Thanks for having me. I would fly that. Well, thank you for listening. James, where can people find you online? I'm all over the internet. You can just put in my name at James Stout on Twitter. Sometimes I write things

I will talk about in there. Great. Well, you can find me at I Write OK. You can follow the show on Cool Zone Media and happen here pod any complaints to sorry, no, send No, send any

complaints to I Write OK. OK. Yeah, it's OK. I don't read responses. Bye bye. It could happen here is the podcast that this is where we talk about things that are happening

here. Generally, things fallen apart. Sometimes things getting put back together. Today, we have a story that I wasn't sure if we were ever going to cover in brief. We're going to be talking about a group called Black Hammer that is

on its surface, a leftist anti-colonial political organization and in reality is more or less a cult. The reason we're talking about them is that someone is now dead connected with them. The story is

interesting and messy and says a lot about the way social media works today and the way that the United States is essentially like 40 different cults in a trench coat. So today I'm here with James Stout and we are talking with

journalist W. F. Thomas Thomas. What are you? What are you? What are you? How are you doing today? Today is the day and this story is

stuff is still coming out about an hour ago chargers were finally posted for the cult leader but that's further along

in the story. If you hear chirping in the background, those are four live chickens, so my apologies. Aw, little babies. I just got rabbits that I have now living in my chicken facility and they seem to be thriving. It's nice.

I like having little animals around. Alright, so who are Black Hammer and how did they get to the present position? So I think we should probably start with like, I don't know, 2019 is kind of when these folks sort of

start to come on the scene. Yeah. You know, you could take this story back a lot further. Okay, let's do that. So sometime

in the late 80s Augustus Romain Jr. is born. This is the person or commonly known as Gazikazo. They use they them pronouns who

would go on to be the leader of this group. You know, Codzo grew up in Stone Mountain outside of Atlanta and in the early 2010s had kind of a lifestyle blogger YouTube thing going on

was a self-professed Cosmos biggest fan and generally seemed like they were trying to get famous. Yeah, like influencer style famous, right? This was not at all political at this period. Yeah. That's going to be kind of the red thread

through this story is Codzo. I'm going to refer to them as Codzo Augustus Romain Jr. Wanting to be famous is kind of unfortunately the main thing that drives most of what has happened at some point, you know, in the mid

2010s Codzo took this turn and started making more incendiary videos. I don't have them directly in front of me so I don't want to misquote them but kind of like going pushing this concept like white people

are evil going for this very specific type of leftism and Codzo gets taken under the wing of and I'm going to mispronounce this name Omali Yashitella

and this is a person who was leading a group in St. Petersburg, Florida called the African People Socialist Party and African People Socialist Party was part of this larger thing called the Uhooroo Solidarity Movement

this, I don't know if they're still around but their ideology was Third World Communism African Internationalism that type of thing. What is, let's talk a little bit about the word Uhooroo because that's something

if you've ever been in and around Proud Boys, first off I'm sorry, it's not a fun experience generally but they like to shout Uhooroo and I understand that that's kind of related one way or the other to this. Yeah, so

I don't have it directly in front of me what Uhooroo means but the reason Proud Boys say that is because of Codzo there were times several times when Codzo spoke made appearances with Gavin McInnes

founder of the Proud Boys and Codzo generally became and still is treated as a lalkow kind of this target for derision to poke at to see what is this person doing

which is still happening right now unfortunately Yeah so Codzo rose through the ranks of this group and then eventually found out that this is basically a cult the

African people socialist party had a specific focus on membership from colonized people, people of color but it turns out this was being steered entirely by a group of white people so it's out of

the ashes of this experience this abusive experience this Kullite group Codzo along with some other people leave this group and they go on to form Black Hammer in February of 2019 which originally was the Black Hammer organization

and there's some really good write-ups especially Red Voice Yeah, yeah, yeah definitely recommend that I think you broke out for a second so the title of that article is the devil wears a dashiki it's like six, seven parts

but it's really good and that gets into a lot of what I get a lot of this information from and there were additionally what would happen to some of these people who founded this group Black Hammer organization who are also parts of the African people's socialist party

would disavow Codzo Black Hammer and have kind of their own statement about here's what happened, you know, in which they say hey, we never recovered from this experience in this traumatic group in this Kullite group and instead it went on to found this new one and we're very

you know, it was kind of failed from the start to become this other Kullite group So just to clarify on the Huru thing it comes from the African people's socialist party, right? and then they have taken it and run with it in the

Black Hammer organization So the African people's socialist party was part of this umbrella group called the Uhuru Solidarity Movement and this group is still around if you look at like the Channel 5 with Andrew Callahan has a video

where they go to this march for reparations and that group is the Uhuru Solidarity movement Got it, okay If you're familiar with that So we get this organization founded and kind of from my perusal of

because I've also, you can go to their website Black Hammer has like a new site They are kind of for now For now They kind of build themselves as like an anti-colonial

organization that is specifically like One of the things they do is they have like a white people's auxiliary that like is for the purpose of people paying reparations They have, you know, they carried out a couple of actual direct actions during 2020

including like handing out masks and whatnot But for the most part they seem to exist primarily to drive attention to themselves and thus donations to social media Yeah I think if you've personally interacted

with Black Hammer propaganda at all it is probably because you've seen someone on the internet talking about how Anne Frank is a Karen or something like that Let's get into it Yeah, let's talk about that Great

Yeah, so I want to touch on something real quick that you mentioned in these comments from the people who founded the organization where these are still true believers who believe in this cause of decolonialization of African internationalism and who do want to build a better world and do good things

You know, in talking with people who've survived the cult it sounds like Codzo probably never was a true believer but there weren't true believers around Codzo who believed in this cause and because of that we're able to be abused, to be profoundly abused by Codzo

and the people working directly under Codzo at Codzo's behest So April 30th 2020 in a tweet I believe Codzo calls Anne Frank a Becky, follows it up by how she's a Karen

which one, is a ridiculous statement two is entirely meant to cause this kind of uproar around that back at this time there was acceptance of

the Black Hammer organization in leftist circles in that kind of online communist community and there were people who came out kind of like, oh no let's hear what they're saying about this you know, talking about how

victims, you know, the term genocide was invented to describe the Holocaust but that term wasn't used to describe slavery that kind of thing which to be clear is not the conversation Codzo was trying to have

and that is a worthwhile conversation to have why is that not why is the enslavement and mass murder of a huge number of African people not seen as an act of genocide certainly a valid conversation to have but also should not at all intersect

with Anne Frank or how we think about the Holocaust yeah and because we were living in hell this fake you know, kind of propped up not a real discussion, it's meant to just piss people off is back again

oh good, what a great time yeah, based on documents that have come out that are purported to be from internal Black Hammer documents this was part of their operation storm of white tears Jesus Christ

which was seemingly this and again don't know for sure if these documents are from them but these documents that are purported to be from Black Hammer lay out this strategy to cause division to kind of bring other groups down to elevate

Black Hammer's own status by putting themselves as the center of attention in all of this that is happening in this online fiasco because again the ideology is not the point the attention is the point

the control is the point along this way there are a lot of allegations out there there are for example allegations that false allegations of pedophilia and sexual assault were used against people who left the group

people who spoke out against the group that they were recruiting people that were on Tinder oh cool yeah so along the way some more chapters form there's one I believe near Aurora, Colorado

or at least in Colorado there's a New York City one and kind of the group continues to rise as almost you know your typical revolutionary communist soul that we have

in the United States going on right now yeah they purport to structure themselves around the tenets of democratic centralism as some of these other groups do to dump things down a lot and there's probably going to be left

screaming at me right now was this idea from Lenin where a group takes a vote and then if that vote passes they all agree to go along with that platform with usually about 50% so that there's not kind of the splitting

off of faction so it can lead to this very centralized and hierarchical control structure that's certainly what happened in Black Hammer there are other democratic centralist groups that have been in the news lately who use a similar strategy

but you know what this meant is it allowed Codzo to run this group with an iron fist you know on paper there was a group of people leading the group

someone else was in control of the money but in fact it was Codzo controlling all of this they also had you know shared living spaces where members of different chapters of Black Hammer lived

Hammer houses and that's always going to end well generally it's a good rule not to go live with the revolutionary cell you just joined yeah if you are joining a political party and they want everyone to live in the same space that is controlled

by that political organization you may in fact be joining a cult yeah and you know there continues to be kind of trying to get more attention at one point you know Codzo starts beef with a local

anti-fascist crew in Colorado you know another thing to mention about this group is it's a lot of queer people in the group you know Ghazi identifies as non-binary there are you know several many members who love people

of the same sex you know one of the things that happens as Ghazi is beefing with the local anti-fascist crew is something that people are probably thinking of when they hear the name Ghazi Codzo is this bizarre video

of Codzo running around in Joker makeup talking about white anarchists and anti-fascists which the background is actually even more fucked up than you would think having just heard that outline red voice goes into this

specifically there were members of the group who were practitioners of Yoruba an African religion and one of them was a trained I don't know the correct term so I'm just going to say practitioner

of this religion had gone through an education process and that that took some time and this video of Ghazi running around in Joker makeup was Ghazi's idea to channel the deity

and my apologies I'm mispronouncing that which is a Yoruba deity and before this happened apparently Ghazi had brought this up to the person and the person said that is extremely disrespectful of my religion don't do that and Ghazi did it anyway

and this is another one of the things where this gets sent around all the time is treating Black Hammer as a lull cow but even as this was going on there was this abuse that was going on as well and people being preyed upon

by this group in 2020 Black Hammer announces that they are planning to build Hammer City which is supposed to be this utopian settlement in the Rockies you look like you have something to say well I mean look

it's a perfectly normal dream to want to build a utopian settlement in the Rockies there's some downsides to that one of them is that the Rockies is actually a terrible place for a large number of people to live and this is why repeatedly

I don't know there's been a lot of utopian settlements out in that part of the world and they don't tend to last very long or they turn into normal towns but it's it's always interesting when folks try when folks want to do a commune type situation and then they immediately

go for a place like that because like the mountains is the hardest place to do it if you want to have a self-sufficient commune like fucking Kansas you know Arkansas like somewhere where the soil is good for growing stuff and you can get like a flak tract of land that can grow

food as opposed to high alpine elevations where very little is gonna anyway whatever this is compound talk so yeah if there's one thing you take away from this episode don't build your compound in the Rockies

don't build your compound in the Rockies look okay that's all I got yeah that's the message of this podcast unless you're the tenacious unicorn right in which case go right ahead they're thriving well but yeah and then you gotta think which is raising alpaca as opposed to relying

on like growing crops which makes a lot of sense yeah I didn't actually see any advanced I was just looking at their at the Hammer City website they just talk they just say sustainable farming I can't see advanced plans but Pratt's there weren't any

they did raise a hundred and twelve thousand dollars so far according to their website they raised a hundred and twelve thousand dollars so far okay yeah educate us more about this project yeah really interested to know

how much money they actually raised maybe it was that much the point is we don't really know because there's no there was no kind of open record keeping within this group and it was Codzo it was in control of the money

so the group found land to buy and they actually began the process in early May 2021 and this is some information now coming from a fantastic color Colorado article about

the whole Hammer City thing that I also recommend if someone wants to read more in depth about this so as the land deal was in the process of going through a portion of the group moved out there so about two dozen people this was

this wasn't you know it was remote but it wasn't on top of a mountain this was in a subdivision that had parcels for sale which leads to some problems this is a subdivision with a homeowners association

and strict limits on land use as well so they didn't have water rights for one thing yeah exactly they didn't have water rights to land which I have not started a compound but I imagine water rights something you want to have figured out

if you just want to live on a plot of land in the middle of nowhere it can be fine if you want to grow crops then yeah having the ability to irrigate said crops is kind of important yeah so another thing at this time is

Black Hammer tends to be a pretty heavily armed group you know the group moved out to this land they were camping out they're basically squatting on the land that they did not own and brought their armed security along with them and we're also

like blocking road access for residents of the subdivision so they they had neighbors you know and at one point this leads to an altercation with a neighbor with three armed Black Hammer

members and a neighbor driving his car who you know according to this Colorado Sun article gets out with an unloaded shotgun and there's a standoff this could have been one of those things that went really bad it went

about as good as you can hope a situation like that can go where nobody got killed but while this was happening the member of Black Hammer who was responsible for the land deal

forgot to sign or didn't sign the paperwork on time and after information comes out about the standoff the land deal completely falls through there is no hammer city that is going to be built

and CODSA was maintaining and Black Hammer as a whole is maintaining a super active social media presence at this time as well so you know what are the other things that gets brought out this bridge on our land

which is kind of a bunch of 2x4s across a ditch are they planning to buy it as like an organization or is CODSA planning to buy it themselves as an individual

do we know? this is actually something I did some research on they did this fun thing they created a front group organization to buy the land nice which they called Hammerstone Industries Incorporated

yeah stealthy one of the prominent members was responsible for that so the power of google yeah I also found their bitcoin wallet while we were talking and it just never had any donations and remains empty

oh my god that one hasn't gone well so after this land deal falls through, Hammer City is not being built a lot of people get really fucking pissed but also it sounds like they

shot through the real estate sign on their way out of the subdivision so on the 17th of May 2021 is when the group leaves Hammer City so going back to what Robert mentioned earlier the group took a very interesting approach when COVID-19

started which is the belief that COVID-19 is real that people should wear masks and be protected but that they should not take the vaccine and that Fauci was a liar which comes out a bit later so they were doing

for example there's a news article with a video of them doing mutual aid distribution of masks in food in Colorado so lots of people are really fucking pissed when Hammer City falls through there's also been

you know these allegations that have been coming up again and again and at this point several chapters break apart from Black Hammer break away from Codzo and kind of go off and do their own thing

and Codzo is left with this core group of members and says fuck it we're moving to Atlanta so the group does a marathon drive from Colorado

to the southern suburbs of Atlanta and outside of Atlanta is where Codzo grew up on the east side from the northeast and they keep going they rent a house where everyone lives together

another one of their Hammer houses I believe at this time there is another active chapter that is still connected with Codzo and the Carolinas as well but this is a when prophecy fails moment for Codzo

and the people that are left behind are these true believers and Codzo doesn't take this well doesn't take the failure of this deal well becomes even more paranoid than they already were more controlling and more abusive than they already were so there is

the red voice gets into some of the really wild allegations that come out at this time allegedly Codzo has members sign over control of the bank accounts to them at gunpoint as people reveal

personal information at gunpoint again these are allegations I'm not saying that we get some of these classic cult techniques coming out forcing people to sit and listen to Codzo

kind of preach having people constantly working not getting enough to eat having love bombing where Codzo makes deep eye contact with the person and talks about how important they are how much they love them

the consumption of psychedelics as well cool that's good you love to hear that just a bunch of heavily armed people being cops for each other and drugging each other in support of

charismatic seems like a weird word for Ghazi but it must be clearly it works on some people I think they are charismatic I think it's necessarily good to be charismatic some people seem to be

responding to their I don't know the way they present themselves it's so I guess that's always the way with cults to the outside the cult leader is always an obvious cult leader but everybody's got different things they're vulnerable to

for some people that's I think a lot of it is they have presented themselves differently in different periods I've been reading it sounds like a decent chunk of the folks who are kind of most deeply wrapped up and have been with it for a while

so they've kind of followed along with Ghazi as they've this is a group that preyed upon young people preyed upon queer people preyed upon unhoused people preyed upon people of color who are at the intersections

of oppression in our society and like most cults it offered them a cause a purpose, something to fight for something to do, friends a roof over their head even you know

which is a huge part of it because if this place is not just your social circle but also your safety net and how you keep a roof over your head and how you stay fed and you don't have close ties to family

with people that you can trust I mean again, it's not a different story than you get in a bunch of other cults but like this is it's a very frightening situation for those people to wind up in and of course one of the things that is unfortunate is that

so much of the stuff that the Black Ham organization said and did is so absurd that like it leads to this kind of mockery of anybody who gets wrapped up in it and the people who are very much victims of it which I think is also one of the things that I believe is that siege mentality for those inside

that's where the term cognitive dissonance comes from specifically people you know when things don't go according to plan stick with this group and have already given away so much of their time so much of their life so many of their connections that they just roll with it

yeah and then there's I'm just thinking back to a story I wrote years ago where I was fortunate enough to interview someone who had these small cults and they had actually been a survivor of I think it was a Trotskyist cult so they were very familiar

and this group exhibits all those patterns like the charismatic leader that you mentioned the use of their own language the control of their relationships and their contacts inside and outside the group yeah and then they mirror this like very positive it seemed to just look at their aesthetics

after you mentioned it they're definitely sort of seeking to mirror that their party aesthetic right which is obviously something that has for good reasons very positive associations for a lot of people so I can see they've constructed this very appealing package

and now there's a body right now a person has died let's get to this so yeah let's talk about this so in Atlanta is where things get really wacky basically as is often the case with Atlanta

often the case with this beautiful beautiful city owned by Coca-Cola and Home Depot with I have to admit it as a Texan the best barbecue in the south that's true excellent Ethiopian food as well I was there this weekend

fucking amazing fucking amazing Ethiopian Ethiopian food big refugee population that's besides the point so cards I was found themselves in this city without a ton of money

and so needs to get more attention needs to appeal to more people so this is when Kazu announces that Black Hammer is forming a coalition with the Proud Boys which is one of those things that comes out in really sensationalized headlines but doesn't actually happen what happens

is Kazu goes on a podcast with Gavin McInnes and they talk about we have so much in common and there's you know a little most evidence of actual organizing or work together between the two groups but with this group like this no especially because

Gavin doesn't do organizing anymore on paper don't involve the Proud Boys anymore yeah what was the podcast they went on set of interest Dan'll cut that and add in the entire audio from B movie condensed into a two second blast like we talked about

you know the group gets more attention to that they start talking about how great Trump is how much they love Trump how Fauci is evil because again ideology is not the point the attention is and this is how you continue to get

attention by acting ridiculous by asking Trump voters to donate money to you at this time they also begin an extremely aggressive fundraising campaign in the city of Atlanta so

there's a park in downtown Atlanta called Woodruff Park that has a huge unhoused population because our city is bad at being a city and it's just bad but Black Hammer there are other groups there are other leftist groups that do mutual

aid that help people out in the park Black Hammer says we're going to do this too you know so they'll go there and have these sessions where they're screaming into a megaphone about whatever and you know handing out

clothes and some food to unhoused people and they also start sending their members of their group pretty much every day of the week to go out into the city of Atlanta and ask people for money on the streets in their

matching branded Black Hammer t-shirts and masks a site to see and so this is what they call their Robin Hood campaign they specifically target college

campuses Georgia State University and Georgia Tech especially with the idea that college kids have a lot of money to give away not a great idea but

they do this aggressive fundraising where they follow people and if they don't take no for answers oh you don't care about homeless people you don't care about unhoused people you know you just have so much white privilege and really attacking people

which is great when you're coming home you're riding your bike home and then you keep passing Black Hammer members outside of on your commute home not fun

and they appear on the bell line which is this public green space and shared walking space in Atlanta they do this outside of concert venues I went to see the Dead Kennedys

and as I was walking in the venue a Black Hammer guy asked me for money I have to explain to the guy he's handing them $5 this is an anti-Semitic cult you don't want to do that and they're also taking in unhoused people

you know there's this video of one of the lieutenants saying we want to get you the unhoused people to come fundraise for us you know if you come fundraise for us you can keep half of it 50-50 split

and whoever fundraises the most in this week gets to come live with us at the Hammer House so it's pretty fucked up there's a case where a professor at Georgia State University

because the Black Hammer members are out there every day all day this is what they do this is their job this is how the group makes money calls them out and says and a member follows

the professor and films her specifically films her license plate and says we got you for example the members are arrested for having a megaphone in Woodruff Park and get some of their guns taken away because they're in the park with a bunch of guns

cool you can just have guns out yeah yeah it's Georgia which sometimes is cool when the proud boys show up and anti-fascists have guns but it's not great when Black Hammer's doing that

definitely tracking following people who criticize you in taking pictures of their license plate to try to dox them online is not at all cult behavior it's like low rent Scientology stuff they leak the addresses of the family

of ex-members and their social security numbers as well because they had them give them all this information yeah they seem to get very close to encouraging people to shoot cops in a couple of pieces on their website as well

yep they talk about killing white people a lot eventually in early 2022 they have this rally outside of the CNN center in solidarity with the January 6 political prisoners along the way in 2022

Gauzy claims to have found Jesus and Black Hammer becomes a religious group they turn their mutual aid distribution into what they're calling the revolutionary church

which of course is filmed and live streamed they have several live streams that they do regularly throughout the week that are mandatory for members to attend you know there is corporal punishment going on

within the group of people living at the house and the people that they're picking up off the street it's not just adults it's kids as well Gauzy claims to have this 16 year old that

they have adopted and you know Gauzy posts these videos of them giving the 16 year old guns and money and clothes to wear the kid gets taken into state custody before

the current thing that we're talking about and this is going to be important later on in the story yeah so there are also these stories from members who have escaped who have to do these elaborate escape attempts to get out

and are allowed to leave who have to kind of run away in the middle of the night with none of their stuff to a thunderstorm to get out so this is what we're dealing with alright everyone it's James here and I just wanted to correct a couple of things from the episode

or add to them one of them was the date of that shooting be it murder or death by suicide that was the 19th of July not the 19th of February so it happened about a week ago at the time that you will hear this if you hear this on the day that we put it out

secondly I also just wanted to give some context to the word uhuru it's a Swahili word it means freedom or independence and it was used as part of a a Bacchrenym which is when a group has a name and then they create an acronym

that fits to that name and the word uhuru was part of a Bacchrenym for a group called the Mao a revolutionary anti-colonial group who existed in Kenya and the word uhuru was used a decent amount in anti-colonial struggles in Kenya

in the Bacchrenym the Bacchrenym is the word uhuru let the foreigner go home Africa should be independent will be independent I suppose and I just wanted to give that context

and obviously it's been appropriated now by the proud boys as part of the etymology of the word and then we get to what happened on February 19th 2022 you know

this is an ongoing story the facts what we know might be changing but early in the morning someone calls 911 and talks about being held hostage by an organization by a group they don't give the address

or the authorities are able to track the number to this house in Fayetteville south of Atlanta and show up and they see someone is outside walking a dog

who runs away, that person gets arrested that's a member of Black Hammer they see someone kind of waving from the garage seemingly in distress and the police are able to get that person out they ask that the rest of the people in the house come out as well

about 10 people come out and one person remains inside now by about 2pm with the use of explosives with the use of an EOD

a bomb robot the police enter the building the SWAT team goes in and they find one person dead of a gunshot wound to the head which at this current time

we don't know the full details on that it might not ever, hopefully something comes out Codzo is being held the group is kind of like sitting around outside not in handcuffs but being held by the group

and Codzo does what and starts the live stream so here's a clip from this 30 minute live stream Facebook Live that Codzo does look there's a lot of media out here girls

so this is just going to build me up at the end of the day so thank you for that so if you think that I know I am concerned anything like that

at the end of the day there's still breath in my body I still run an amazing revolutionary party our community is effing with us and now all these news channels are going to want to interview us and we're going to get to communicate about all the great work that we are doing here

so this is great at the end of the day so if my chicken is coming home to me it's more more media more followers more advancement of work

more movement, more greatness and so be it sweetheart things like this have not stopped movements or readers before so not even overcome

this is a great moment right comrade this is a great moment a moment where our voices will be amplified and our mission and cause will be informed well that's cool I like that

he clearly understands the gravity of the loss of a human life so I will say this is probably before depending on what happened it became clear that someone was dead but the point is this is exactly what Kata wanted

was this attention yeah they seem pumped they seem pumped and also deranged yeah yeah that wasn't how I'd envisioned them speaking at all it's sort of very calming

they seem very calm in their tone of voice yeah I mean calm but like maybe an edge to them yes so do we know more detail about like what happened with that person who died

so I don't want to mention the name of the person this is a minor too right this is so the person who was killed, who's dead now was not the 16 year old the 16 year old was already in state custody

he used to go I believe this is an 8 according to what the group has said and other survivors that I've spoken with this is an 18 year old the group took in off of the street this is a kid who wanted to be a rapper who had dreams

according to Black cameras own media they made this person their minister of defense that's a good job for an 18 year old he was dead now because of this group potentially from a self inflicted gunshot wound which

that is the case came about because of Kodzo putting that 18 year old in this situation so dirty south right watch broke the news they have a really good thread that I also recommend about this happening

it seems like the local news they started covering the story in the a.m when it was happening but didn't quite make the connection there's one article that's out there from a local news site that just interviews

Kodzo homeowner of the house oh no yeah so that happens one of the members of the group is immediately charged and booked it's a really fucked up situation you know there's like an unhoused individual

who other good activists were in touch with who are at the house this happened because this person had no other choice but it was live outside or go with black hammer who went through all of this happening

and then it was still unhoused after all this happened Kodzo was arrested and booked the charges didn't come out until about an hour before we started recording

the charges are two accounts of participation in streaking activity two accounts of aggravated assault two accounts of kidnapping two accounts of false imprisonment two accounts of conspiracy to commit a crime and I'm going to talk about this one

one account of sodomy which in Georgia the sodomy law refers to non consensual oral or anal sex or oral and anal sex performed with a minor they are being accused of sexual assault

yes the other person arrested was charged with the same crimes except not sodomy officer obstruction instead presumably because they fled

and that's where we're at that's where we're at right now cool that's rough it's a pretty bleak story but I don't know at this point we will probably be hearing more as this case blows up and there's always the chance

that the rights going to wind up adopting it to try to make it into a left wing bad kind of deal everybody have we'll see what kind of legs it gets but it's important to understand both what's happening here

because a person is dead and a lot of people have been hurt and also kind of broadly the trends that are at play here like cult dynamics can intersect with radical politics I think is important for people to be aware of because this kind of thing isn't going to get less common as shit continues to unravel

yeah and if there's some takeaways if someone can leave this with a few points that the people who were in this group were victims in this situation they were preyed upon by this abusive person

because they were in a vulnerable state um anyone this could happen to anyone who falls on hard times who has a bad enough day and then someone comes in and offers them this that they say yes

you know the other thing is to know about groups that are out there before you get involved do your research listen to voices that might be critical of the group um

and know what you're getting yourself into there are other ostensibly leftist groups out there who while not as abusive as black hammer have cases of abuse coming out of them that gets covered up

yeah it might be good for us just to just to suggest that if folks find themselves in a difficult situation on someone they know is in one of these situations like maybe we can link to some resources in the notes or something

yeah um yeah go ahead yeah there's not a whole lot of books that was recommended to me that I've been trying to find it's probably Steven Hassan's book which um

Hassan is also an expert in the field but he's also the guy who talked about how Tranny had no mind control porn yeah he's got he's problematic yeah look I mean part of the reason that this is such a problem

is that there's very little in terms of good resources or good writing one of the things that is like there's good writing analyzing coats very little of it will give you much that's useful in terms of how to get people out of coats for a couple of reasons including the fact that as we talked about earlier what makes people vulnerable

people aren't vulnerable to coats broadly usually I know there's there's a certain subset of people but like as a general rule people who get trapped in a cult get trapped in a specific cult because it is something that they are specifically vulnerable to and so if you don't

like it's more or less a matter of like if you want to get someone out of a cult um are you close with that person like are they someone that you know are they someone that you have a deep relationship with because if so like that relationship and the care that you have for them is primarily

the thing that is most likely to eventually help them get out which doesn't mean it's a magic bullet but like there's no reliable way to get people out of coats yeah I'm a I do 12 step recovery stuff

for different reasons but the closest analogy that I can think of is dealing with someone who's abusing drugs and alcohol in your life you can't force anyone to stop you can't make anyone leave and talk about culty programming what that entails is kidnapping someone and then putting them through

more abuse so there isn't a magic bullet yeah a lot of extremely problematic shit gets offered to people who understandably are concerned for their friends and family members and just want to help the best time to get someone out of a cult is before they join you know is to

raise awareness about abuse in communities and share that information and take these things seriously I truly believe so much of how this was able to happen is because people were just laughing at them and didn't take it seriously

that this could get someone killed that this was ruining lives that's still happening people are treating this as a joke not yeah and I think that's one of the things if you're like I don't know a parent or somebody who otherwise works with their interfaces with

there is raising young people and you're trying to think about how you can make them less vulnerable to this it is a mix of educating them about cults and not in a way that's like laughing or mocking or talking about how silly it is but actually discussing the very

real reasons why people fall in for this stuff because that's that's the important one of the most important things is the same as covid really one of the most important things for protecting yourself is not thinking that you're immune which is a natural thing most people

who have fallen into cults earlier in their life when they heard about cults said well that's stupid as hell I would never get trapped in something like that and then they did and that's basically a hundred percent of cult membership you know because yeah

if I can recommend some resources for parents of course Shannon Fully Martinez who is on twitter is you know in extreme right skin head stuff unless it has committed her life

to helping people leave extremist movements the same things you know that are going to make someone easily preyed upon by a cult and by an extremist group those are the same things and Shannon has some good resources out there

she has a patreon as well the resources are available for free don't need to join on her patreon awesome yeah Shannon is awesome and other than that don't try to avoid falling for a cult

except for this podcast keep listening to this podcast make it the center of your life have no friends other than us form parasocial relationships with us well we're the only people you can trust I think that's clear

yeah would you like to plug anything before we cut you off here Thomas yeah I'm at twitter at w underscore f underscore Thomas don't be weird on twitter

have empathy for the people around you I'm also going to plug ask to unhoused people because they know what best can help them yeah fucking provide people with options for housing so that they're not left having a cult

be the best thing they can do but yep I'm not a happy note thanks for having me yeah check in on your friends and people when they're in difficult times it could happen it could happen here

that was my robot Evans impression nice job Andrew hopefully that wasn't an assault on your ear drums but here we are here we are I am Andrew

and this is it could happen here and this is the podcast where we talk about stuff that happen in places and I'll be guest hosting this episode this is the Andrewism segment

about whatever comes to mind crushed it so I'd like to open up this episode with a question honestly genuinely how are you all doing well there's a lot of stuff going on right now

you know not the best time inside this country or really around the world so yeah I would say not ideal yeah everything bad is happening

and also being compounded I have been once again awoken at a genuinely egregiously early hour by someone pounding a hammer about 8 inches from my head which is fun and good and cool so

without context without context that'll be a wild thing to say I am giving no context about this this is literally true so yeah basically it's like that but for everything

yeah I respect that not ideal is the perfect explanation yeah not ideal not ideal personally I feel constantly being pulled in a bunch of different directions and it's exhausting

just to say up front I do have the privilege of having more control over my work day than a lot of other people do and that's not something I take lightly I'm very appreciative of that shout out to my Patreon supporters but between all my

online responsibilities and offline responsibilities and obligations and demands on my time it really is not easy and that's not even getting into the social and political state of the world it's a cool JN Smith that's something I think we can all relate to

on some level some weeks are much harder than others but the through line has been stress and that is the subject of today's episode that's so stressful that we're going to talk about stress

let's do it yeah a discussion about stress it really could happen here stress is not something that's new to me or really to most people me personally, my personality is very much

lending itself to that sort of outcome because I'm constantly spinning a bunch of plates at the same time and every time I drop one or I put one down and I pick up the next one I'm not very good at relaxing

usually I've basically been going nonstop for a long long time and I'm not alone because 43% of adults suffer from chronic stress and 75% to 90% of doctors

visits are stress related and it's trash you feel it in your skin, in your muscle, in your bones I remember this one time when I was working at that same winery I was talking about in a recent episode I was in and I was just sharing my experience

it really felt like my blood was running to water I was barely eating, I wasn't getting enough water, I wasn't perfectly hydrated, I was just going we call that a reverse Jesus when you're I mean

I think when Jesus was stabbed he did bleed water for some reason sure did yeah tree rings, you know, they tell a story and I think our bodies tell a story as well and for a lot of us

that story is stress whether because of events or thoughts or circumstances that leads to frustration and anger and nervousness we do them as stress what would you guys say is something you're like mean stress triggers ah

I was gonna say family most of it's probably work related based on the type of things I surround myself with for over 12 hours a day yeah, I think for me it's work and then it's a lot of

just sort of like personal life stuff I have to do stuff which is just like I'm trying to move right now and that's like incredibly stressful and yeah medical stuff, that's been a

medical stuff for sure holy hell, yeah we are excited that Chris is finally moving out of the hammer factory into the into the electric drill factory so the audio will still be a bit weird I mean look if it's anything like college

it'll be 12 hours a day of a guy with a jackhammer directly below my window which you'll all get to hear in an incredibly large amount of it, it's gonna be great that's fantastic I mean I think that's a perfect encapsulation of exactly the topic we're talking about it's like a jackhammer on your brain

constantly I mean that's not the only form of stress, I mean there's a stress that comes from like loss stress that comes from like social drift stress that comes from like this consumerist rat race you know

mental illness just general uncertainty and change and grief and guilt and trauma you know the 9 to 5 dictatorship that a lot of people are subject to and of course climate change

good old climate change I think more and more people need to realize though is that stress is a symptom of like systemic violence

you know when we are dealing with these headaches and sleep problems and muscle pains and digestive problems and sex problems and blood pressure issues and moodiness and restlessness and demotivation and irritability and substance abuse and all these other

responses and consequences it's just the outcome of daily systemic violence of the way that this system deprives us of support and care that how it atomizes us

how it controls us and really squeezes us forward with I mean this is not to say that like there's no stress outside of capitalism or that stress is a capitalist invention absolutely not

I mean stress in small doses could be a good indicator in certain spiral situations that need to change the situation motivation to act you know but

capitalism is really pathological and yet you have to keep playing normal you have to keep on pretending that everything is okay and we all know how deeply unhealthy the society is how deeply unequal the society is

how many people are dealing with stress related illnesses how many people are dealing with like hyper vigilance how we are constantly scanning this urban jungle for threats for of insecurity and decimation

of public life and of entire economies and sectors and it's like we're held in captivity I will say one thing that is that while capitalism produces a lot of stress it also alleviates stress by producing an economy

organized around the production and circulation of addictive substances and practices of all these different vices that people pick up I mean if you look at the roots of capitalism and how capitalism really funded itself

initially through the plantation economies and the Caribbean and the rest of the Americas you know growing like sugar and tobacco and producing all these spirits and chocolate and coffee the thing that

helped bring capitalism to fruition and helped fund industrial capitalism is the thing that people are using to self medicate in response to the effects of the now global capitalist dominance and people love all of their chocolate and their coffee personally I'm not a big fan of coffee

I think it tastes disgusting but yeah you know yeah I tried it once and it was like it tastes like the sensation of burning you know I just wasn't having it I like the smell for some reason like the smell of coffee beans

but the actual taste is like nah and surprisingly I actually used to not like chocolate as a child it was only when I matured my taste buds that I actually came around to it ironically and of course we don't think of these things as

you know vices or medications but they're like small pleasures that help us get through our day practically everybody is some level of alcohol these days and of course their social media which is like

algorithmically tailored and tuned to keep us on it to keep us like it basically like a puppet master controls the highs and lows of all emotions on a deeply basis basically functions as an addictive drug

the drug is caused by chemical reactions in your own brain but it's manipulating your brain into causing that to happen but it's a very similar addictive process that has like a reward system

around a decade ago a lot of social media companies changed their loading style to be like you like scroll it down and it flicks back up which was specifically it was specifically copying a slot machine because it's like

an addictive pattern that's ingrained into what we find pleasurable so it's all none of this probably isn't new information to a lot of people but it's all obviously very intentional the way it's designed to be extremely addictive yeah and this is just like

what most of gaming is now too where it's like you're playing a video game right? lootboxes now literally the revenue model of the gaming industry is selling gambling to children that is my one complaint about casinos is that 8 year olds couldn't spend

thousands of dollars of their parents money on skins but now thanks to the wonders of gaming 8 year olds too can basically just live in a casino in their own bedroom all the time modern society okay there's conflicting

accounts about this but there's a new free to play Diablo game and well yes I heard about that the amount of money it would take to get like a max level character in this game I have seen okay

the latest calculation I've seen is saying it would take over $500,000 the lowest range calculation of how much it would cost I've seen was about $50,000 it's probably at least $100,000 to literally get the highest level character in these games

it is like this problem is exactly why this problem is exactly why the only mobile games I play are Sudoku and Minesweeper and even those have ads yeah

I did have a brief for it until Among Us though but that period has ended and plus this is also why I tend to sale the high seas if you know what I'm saying the funny thing is that we don't have to do this

and I mean it's kind of obvious it's kind of like what's the phrase I'm looking for like it doesn't need to be said but we built we built this society and

as people within it we do have the power to change it we don't have to work as much as we do we don't have to structure and attend school the way that we do I mean even under capitalism there are people who are starting to shift from that 8 hour

work day which we had to fight for a lot of people died for to 3 to 6 hours a day which 4 hours per day it depends so an experiment was like

6 hours a day 4 days a week or something like that but despite studies coming out and saying that humans currently so productive in a certain period of time uninterrupted it doesn't matter

despite the fact that productivity decreases it's not like productivity rises with the amount of hours you work it doesn't matter I mean I remember when I was working in an insurance company I was a paper pusher just like

scanning documents and uploading documents and then scanning some more documents and then uploading those documents and then every once in a while I got to print documents exciting but I was dealing with like a backlog of documents

and I was typically able to get like a decent chunk of the work done within like the first 2 to 3 hours as in like having it fully sorted scanned

uploaded completed you know but unfortunately I had to be there for 8 hours and so I had to drag out my day you know typically by listening to like the communist manifesto in audiobook

you know or the conquest of bread in audiobook I had to find things to do is like make myself look busy or to like divvy up my tasks and extend them and artificially stretch them out because instead of

doing this BS job instead of not doing this BS job at all or instead of doing this BS job based on tasks completed rather than time spent I had to rely on the time spent in the contractual hours and of course the pay was terrible

but I mean that was expected at this point but the whole point is really to like squeeze all our time and energy so that we're stressed out so that we don't have any leisure so that

we look for convenience and convenience is profitable I mean who really has the energy to fight for their rights when they don't even have the energy to cook a meal when they get home you know it wasn't always like this

the social bond was broken by capitalism and replaced with the bond to money and until we like sever that bond nothing's going to change so the question is how can we address stress

right and so capitalism has an answer and there's like an actual proper real systemic answer I mean personally I deal with stress by just not thinking about it

but I mean what do you guys do be really sad I'm talking about like like mitigation strategies you know I don't know like when it's nice I go take walks

walks are nice yeah I have a a shark that I got from somewhere that's like it's like the the squishy foam material but it's a shark it rules do you have an IKEA shark Chris I don't know it's one of these

it's like a stress ball but it's a shark about to just like yeah that's very funny I don't have a whatever the like the long jaw I don't know how to say it either I don't know

I've been trying to get back into doing more parkour training when I'm stressed but honestly it's a lot of the time I just do stuff that I know I'm capable of which often times is the same things

that kind of cause me to get stressed in the first place looking at nonsense propaganda writing about it writing about like different like philosophies around doomerism and like because those are things I just my brain

can just do with little effort so it's almost peaceful in a way almost therapeutic yeah it's bizarre in some ways you would think that these things are what's causing me to have problems but also in a lot of ways it kind of calms me down to look at a whole bunch of

this type of thing or to write about it or to like try to you know just do like formatting inside like a google doc about it I don't know it's like sorting out the stuff it's almost like there's this idea this is like

called a knowling it's when you get a whole bunch of stuff out on the floor and you sort it into piles it's done with like Lego a lot if you dump a giant like box of Lego if all these different Lego pieces if you're gonna know them you're gonna take all the pieces that are like the same color or size

and sort them into their little places so I kind of do that but with like ideas and like with writing projects I dump out all the things I'm currently thinking about into like a spreadsheet or a google doc and sort them into related topics be like okay here so this thing leads into this thing

and it's like that kind of like organizational thing so like how organizing is kind of like a therapeutic thing so it's like I can do that with all of the random stuff floating around in my brain sometimes I'll try to like just sort it out even if it doesn't get turned into like a work project

it's still like an external way to sort out my thoughts right Sufi I have a dog very good dog have a dog, we listen to music we go outside

we like to go to the park and listen to music outside you know that's the basic, I work a lot but work is also like if I don't work I'm more stressed yeah I definitely relate to that which is

which makes me sound like a lap dog for capitalism I know right it's not something I'm like proud of but also like you know I'm lucky enough I think that's indicative of the problem right like it's not like people don't necessarily like to

don't necessarily like to labor yes it is like not having autonomy over it because I mean if I most of the things I do for work now are things that I've been doing for years unpaid because I was just interested in them

so you know if we're talking about theorizing about like a post-work world yeah people are still gonna do all kinds of shit obviously there's questions around you know tasks which are not like not the most fun to do as we've had discussions on like anti-work stuff before but for

a lot of stuff everyone has little interests and little skills that they find kind of slightly therapeutic and also like you know it's in terms of tasks that no one wants to do like I fixed my own plumbing in my bathtub a few weeks ago because my landlord it's not gonna do that so like you know people when you when you have to do

something you kind of become capable of it that's fair I think one of the most popular responses like the stress capitalism imposes is like this concept of self-care you know this way of escaping from the grind of it all and dealing with you know

with issues by like getting to bed early and eating well and physical exercise which I've been doing a lot of lately you know of andrew arc and all that we're gonna have to change your little drawing into like into like the chat version

well I actually did that recently oh that's great yeah it's lovely you know this thing also things like like doing learn and meditation yoga and all that jazz I mean I've really gotten to meditation

because I tried it a couple of times and every time I do I kind of fall asleep I definitely do some meditation stuff but that's kind of slightly part of my like metaphysics interest and I mean also in terms of like self-care practices in that vein that can help you kind of

relax there's obviously stuff like you know mushrooms or MDMA which if done and you know proper you know spaced out not doing them all the time but doing them at certain intervals can definitely be be therapeutic

in their own way Audrey Lord one of the foremost black feminist scholars of our time one said and I return to this quote a lot caring for myself is not an act of self-indulgence it is self-preservation

and that is an act of political warfare self-care used to mean preserving yourself in a world hostile to very identity community way of life it meant not weakening yourself to an early grave in a practice in saying no

and being mindful of your sensitivities and triggers and then you know as white corporate feminism does corporate feminism appropriated it and turned it into industry now with a star grant

11 billion dollars yeah I mean now self-care when people think of self-care it's all about intelligent cosmetics and luxurious spades and overpriced candles and expensive holidays and subscriptions to social media apps that are about

it's turned into this own like grifting industry almost like the self-care industry there's like self-care influencers and self-care content creators and like it's just like it just gets it gets the same icky

derealization feeling that everything else under capitalism is slowly getting yeah I mean they even have like their own self-care funds like if you notice a lot of self-care content has a very specific visual style I mean hashtag self-care on Instagram just like a bottomless scroll of

products and products it just makes me feel kind of unsettled it kind of has this like uncanny aspect to it yeah because it's almost as if self-care is inaccessible to do as it was created to help the most yeah yeah I mean there's that

the fundamental part of the uncanny is that disconnect where the gap between the phenomenon and the thing is really big and you can't really understand why it's uncanny but if you think about it it's because that gap between the thing what it's supposed to be doing is so large

so yeah this thing that's supposed to help all these people is now a white millennial like middle upper class like aesthetic now and that sucks

exactly I mean these days the people it's mostly a salve for like white color workers whose jobs also suck them with their time-managing creativity but the people who are actually the blue collar workers they often don't have the time or money to be able to invest

in themselves in that way self-care and work haulism are basically two sides of the same coin right it's preserve yourself so you can produce more it's a solution to capitalism within capitalism the solution doesn't actually alleviate the conditions and stress but

lines pockets and fuels the economic system that creates it in the first place I mean if you're selling self-care it helps that you've got a constant supply of customers living in perpetual anxiety

and wellness rather than a means of resistance to the system it's been weaponized by the system it's become this performative thing we put on this image of put togetherness where you carefully curate your feed and your instagram stories and your highlights

and it is an individualized solution systemic issues it's like the system turning to calm down while it continues to denigrate and exploit you none of these things address stress systematically

I'm not saying that it's necessarily bad to address stress individually because everybody has their own personal conditions but without dealing with the broader material conditions without addressing people's lack of free time

lack of access to social connection lack of access to housing and healthy food and photo medical care you know it misses the point and I haven't read much

in the field of I believe there are some anarchists who spend a lot of time writing and talking about it but I haven't read much in the field of psychotherapy and that sort of thing but it's it's kind of a realization

I've made that therapies basically focus in on fixing an individual to adjust to a sick society rather than healing the society itself fixing the society itself I mean so much about therapies about you know addressing

things that are impairing your functionality to complete your work yeah like it's all the base of mental healthness is is it inhibiting you from doing your job and that's when it becomes a problem and the only way to solve it

is through like what deems a success is if you're able to complete your job at a high level of functioning again it's not actually about your mental state it's about how much you can produce under the capitalist framework yeah and I mean not to say

that medication doesn't have a tremendous benefit in people's lives and you know helping them get back on track and take control of their circumstances but you know when you have a society that has distressed

misery and loneliness woven into it into its core trying to adjust people and adapt people to that is just responding to sickness with more sickness and you know me I like to

try and keep things on the practical helpful positive side you know it could happen here genuinely with a smile and face like it could happen here

and so I just wanted to put forward some recommendations I guess I mean obviously we can't afford to wait until capitalism has been abolished to be happy that's just ridiculous I mean that's long-term cure for a lot of the

mentalities and issues people are facing but in the meantime understanding the roots of our stress in these systems could make the boost in our political actions and connect with people who can support us

I think that in organizing spaces there needs to be special attention but towards creating support groups that allow for solidarity to be built you know allowing people to share their feelings and work through the challenges together self-care kind of frames things in a way that

makes it seem as though healing is done on an individual level when healing is communal like you don't have to go through all this alone healing is an act of communion and the world must be forced to change to reflect

that we recognize that we have each other and recognize that self-care and community care are inextricably linked and once those facts are at the forefront

once we put communal care at the forefront outside of the claws of the market accessible to all I think we can find hope and really it can start with something as simple as just reaching out

grabbing groceries or doing dishes or watching kids all the care work that is swept to the side when we think about organizing and what it means to organize but whether in your home or in your neighborhood

or at work or at school because I think in neighborhood settings developing that sense of neighborhoodness can certainly help even in a community garden being able to connect with nature again or at all for the first time

can really help life hard and we don't have to make it harder for each other so you can follow me on Twitter add on the discord saying true on YouTube .com slash Andrew is home patreon.com slash saying true

and I have been your host of it could happen here a podcast about usually bad things happening all the bad things that are happening everywhere but occasionally about good things happening and people doing cool stuff to make a better world

and this lucky you lucky all of us happens to be one of the latter kinds of episodes where we talk about good things happening with me in the studio which is more of a femoral concept than a physical studio because there's a plague going on is James Stout

and Garrison Davis co-hosting the podcast hello fellas greetings now today the thing that we're talking about we had about a week or so two weeks ago a couple of representatives from the Elm Fork

John Brown Gun Club in Dallas, Texas come in and they had been providing armed security at a couple of different Dallas area protests against Christian nationalists I do recommend checking out those episodes this week we have one representative from that organization back on

and what we'll be talking about is there have been a series of attempted sweeps in Dallas at a homeless camp generally with the concept basically people who are experiencing homelessness set up encampments in order to live with some degree of comfort

and have their stuff with them these are generally in places like parks under overpasses that kind of situation and periodically the city will come through and sweep them the city's language is always very much focused towards we're trying to help them

get into some sort of situation where they can find help but what usually winds up happening is the city takes a bunch of people's stuff and throws it in the trash often before extreme weather events it's a really gnarly thing to experience and activists

in a number of cities have experimented with different tactics to try and stop and delay sweeps and what we've had happening lately over the last week in Dallas is representatives of the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club have been showing up armed alongside

activists with Say It With Your Chest Dallas and the kind of thing that's been spreading on Twitter is of course the fact that activists have shown up with guns to stop the sweeps and the Dallas police have not shown up to do the sweeps the thing that often gets missed in this kind of Twitter level discourse

although is covered in a pretty good Dallas Morning News article on the subject is that there have also been activists as I said from the Say It With Your Chest movement who have been showing up to help people to provide laundry service, transportation food and water and essentially what they've been doing is trying to help people

get things together and organized to move to a new location in a manner that allows them to do so with like dignity and comfort and not get their stuff thrown out by the city or experience violence from the police while it's happening so that is the

broad situation I'm not going to say anymore myself I want to introduce Danny from Say It With Your Chest Dallas and Bubble from the Elm Fork John Brown Club. Thank you both for being on the show. Thanks for having me. Thank you for having us. Was that a broadly accurate summary of events?

Yeah for the for the most part the city has actually been sweeping several they're cracking down on houselessness right now. Very very aggressive and so it's not just that one camp

that we were defending the other day but the Monday before we were defending another camp and I've never seen this many sweeps happen at one time and I've been doing this for a little over two years now. I want to actually go a little bit

into how your organization formed but before that do you have any kind of can you posit why the city has suddenly ramped up sweeps so aggressively in Dallas? So normally I'm talking to the residents

I've never seen it happen like multiple times in a week usually they'll do one way a little bit we'll hear a notice later or something but multiple in a week at different spots is definitely definitely new to us

as for why the typical reasons are like the state fair comes up in October so they'll try to sweep then or they'll do it usually like a housing development and things like that where like

the land is bought up or you know something but recently the motivations have been a little bit more unclear with the aggression it's kind of the the city in terms of

how they execute sweeps it used to be that code compliance could not touch people's belongings recently it has shifted to take everything throw away everything but yeah we still don't know why all this is happening yet

it is certainly like part of a nationwide trend because we're having the same things happen in Portland increasingly and obviously Portland and Dallas aren't the only cities where sweeps have been ramped up and of course you also have oh gosh I just ran across the article today that like

there's discussion in certain cities about like yeah somewhere in Florida about putting houseless people in essentially an island compound and whatnot like basically a concentration camp right yeah that's been also mentioned by people

affiliated with like the Portland city council and the mayor's office essentially getting a concentrated collection of homeless people in one closed off area and you're like huh I wonder what they mean by that yeah it's unsettling

so I'm curious because obviously I think what y'all are doing in Dallas right now is extremely important and you've been having a lot of success so far I wanted to talk a little bit about how your organization because we chatted with the John Brown gun club folks a couple of weeks ago about how they started organizing

how did say it with your chest get off the ground so that was interesting say it with your chest originally started along with a lot of orcs and mutual aid orcs in Dallas after George Floyd was murdered

back in June of like 2020 we started I was in Plano at the time which is like a suburb that's where I grew up oh really I was in Plano at the time and you know I

me and my friends were kind of like these suburban people can turn off their TVs and not really have to worry about the protests going on downtown and things like that so we would protest on street corners and just yell at you know why people in their Mercedes and you know make them uncomfortable

on purpose then we started linking up with other mutual aid orcs in Dallas and you know was distributing food trying to carry that stuff up north and then we well I started going to Camp Ronda which was like

probably the first and like it was a very solid example of a self sustaining houseless encampment where people were just allowed to be and left alone were helping people

a lot of them are recovering and things like that and everyone looked out for each other it was a really great community for this that was such a rad project not to derail it too much but I want to tell you guys about Camp Ronda yeah

like it's politically organized on houseless camp the organizers the outside organizers were there everyday helping the camp itself was organized amongst themselves they had political theory meetings they had community meetings to solve issues and resolve interpersonal problems

fucking rad and it stayed together for nine months it lasted for a minute I know it was over six I believe but it lasted for

a while at one location and then it had to move and then the next location we ended up moving all the people to they stayed there first all the ten months before the city sold the land in like some under the table deal and showed up and swept everybody

it reminds me quite a bit of a place I worked at in Seattle for a while Nicholsville which was a plot of land a couple of acres large where houseless people had set up basically built like a tiny home village for themselves they provided solar power

they had arranged their own like trash pickup it was safe and very well organized and very comfortable like an actual fairly high standard of living good level good waste water treatment and all that kind of stuff

which existed for a couple of years before the city came in and swept it and destroyed everybody's houses and forced them into a series of camping situations yeah which is it's very frustrating

because there's this understanding that we want them in understanding you get from a number of cities is like well we do want them in one place and we want them in something that's more permanent than you know a bunch of tents but if they set that up on their own

and have autonomy and have the ability to like exist with any kind of personal freedom then we don't want that and we will send arm to men and to break it up yeah like the city was like oh yeah well I don't I genuinely do not think the city of Dallas wants to house

people otherwise the office of homeless solutions simply would not exist and they wouldn't have a way to just have money sitting around and all those people would lose their jobs you know because it's not

housing people you know people like how do you do that it's not hard it's not difficult the city is spending what two billion dollars on renovating the convention center that could house every houses person in Dallas for years

but then we wouldn't be able to have all of the wonderful things someone who lived in Dallas 15 years I can remember one maybe even two times when I went to the convention center what would we do yeah I think maybe one time

what's wrong with it to where we had like Dallas prioritizes developers over anything else and that is more than apparent in how they treat the house this population

they're definitely because it's like my problem right okay if the city the city is going to do sweeps that's something that I can't really necessarily stop them from doing on my own but we can alleviate some of the effects of

you know but when the city is sweeping people in the heat like this we're in the cold elderly disabled people it's like y'all really are just telling them to die yeah

and the least you could do and I emailed Marcy Jackson who's the community outreach chair for OHS she's been like well within three miles

you're going to walk three miles you're telling somebody who is elderly disabled to walk three miles in 107 degree heat to get to a cooling station that is only open to like five yeah there's a lot of cognitive dissonance in the city

just for a little bit of reference too because like we have cooling stations and stuff up in Portland and you have similar problems one thing that is a benefit to folks a place like Oregon is that after 5-6pm when like this cooling station starts to cool down

it actually does cool down here like it gets cool at night even when it's 100 outside that doesn't happen in Dallas during the summer yeah I've literally had it be triple digits at midnight in fucking Dallas, Texas like that's the place it is he doesn't cool down

no so you're still it's still a threat to life and limb even when the sun's not beating down on you sometimes those cooling shelters I know certainly like here we have a bunch of issues with shelters and cooling shelters and stuff like you don't have privacy, you can't bring your pets

they want you to lock all your possessions up somewhere else there are like a number of other things that really limit people's ability to feel safe accessing I don't know if it's the same there but it's not like there's necessarily a place where someone would feel safe and they're not going there I just want to make that clear

pets are a big issue and this is something that people would point out that folks would accuse them of being abusive because they had a cat or a dog that was living with them in the encampment and they'd be like number one it's okay for me to live this way but it's not okay for

a cat or a dog to live this way and also just like do I not deserve companionship and love in my life this animal is one of the things that helps keep me and I talked to a number of folks who got back into housing who were like if we had not had our cat with us

I don't know that we would have made it because just having that animal with us helped for the same reason everybody has animals right? Every single houses person that has a pet has a service animal that is a service animal

as far as I'm concerned would you separate somebody who is disabled from their wheelchair or would you separate somebody from their service animal that they need you know and it's like when you're out there I know that a lot of people have dogs

for comfort but also dogs are protection they are security in such a dangerous environment where people are always you know like it's just it is unfathomable how much trauma

goes into being houseless especially in places like Dallas so I'd like to ask you a little bit so you have been is this kind of the first collaboration this last week or so

that say it with your chest has had with the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club had you guys been working together prior to this? Yeah I recently met members of Elm Fork when Camp Rhonda first started back in 2020

and we were collaborating on multiple supplies tents and things like that I would run laundry with my org and like yeah we just you know always collaborated

to make sure like the people could get what they need if somebody had supplies someone was able to show up and we couldn't you know just working together again and I'm curious could you kind of walk us through what you see as the benefit of

having folks who are visibly armed for this kind of for these kind of actions like how did how did number one sweep defense tend to work before y'all were doing that and how has that altered kind of the way in which you're seeing this activism like

take effect? As far as I know people from members of Elm Fork have always shown up with firearms in some capacity whether it's concealed or open

but there was a noticeable difference with the open carry I know that back in February when one of our other camps was getting swept and they showed up like afterwards we had a meeting with the director of Home Solutions, Christine Crosley

she sucks and she was like people were like we were hearing reports of people that were openly armed and we really care about the safety of the unhoused residents

out there and I was like they were more afraid of the cops than of the five people out here with rifles and that's something it's like if you're going to show up with 12 dudes with guns

what's the problem with some of us showing up with a little something just in case the state should not be the only one to have access to firearms and it's very dangerous but also I don't

mean that in a two-way kind of way if that makes sense enough. That does kind of bring up an interesting point which is as you're showing up in this capacity with both activists and folks with their stuff with laundry and other needs but also people

who are carrying AR-15s and wearing plate carriers I imagine there's like a degree to which you are trying to give people a heads up before just so they don't be like suddenly there's folks with guns what's going on can you kind of walk us through the community outreach

explaining sort of like how you actually go about letting people know what's going to be happening and stuff and what the folks showing up are doing so when it comes to sweeps and normally I focus a lot

on just making sure the people are okay and defending them when I do not necessarily like ask for work to show up with guns I'm just more like I assume if y'all are going to be there

they are going to be you know sometimes there was usually the residents are like some of the residents have firearms themselves so they're like well aware

there are some cases where people will get a little bit anxious about it and we kind of have to be like if you really don't want the guns here then that's fine we can move them but in the past with this track record usually the city kind of backs off a little bit

when they know that y'all are actually protected you know because the city the city is a bully they really do like picking on people who the most vulnerable of us you know and so

lately the guns have been seeming to like have them back off a little bit I know when they pulled up like when Elmport pulled up and hopped out the car with the rifles all of the cops are at least squatted up into like a little

I don't know pig circle and they started talking and they were genuinely like what do we do hold on I thought we could only have them yeah and it's I mean that's kind of the story as we're coming into it right now

which is there supposed to be a sweep what is it five days ago now Friday and y'all have been showing up a couple of times in that period to help people get their things together and whatnot and get which is an important the fact that you're helping them

kind of move and doing it more in kind of their own timeframe as opposed to the city shows up and you've got to like grab what you can or lose everything is important because you're also you're not just showing up with activists with guns and saying like the city

we're not going to let any like no one's going to move and we're going to put a line in the sand which is not would not be a particularly safe call I wouldn't think my main priority out there because there's a lot of black and brown bodies out there

very vulnerable people is making sure they are safe and even before this last one like a lot of us were concerned about the guns because like we didn't want things to escalate and we never know

at least sometimes they get really excited and then sometimes they back off it's really we really don't know so we were also taking that into consideration and I was kind of like the young fork know like

listen there's a lot of black and brown people out here and we don't want to escalate anything and you know put people in danger and it seems like this time the city didn't really want to mess with that so that's good but

it's always important to keep that in mind anytime you have firearms oh yes and I'm curious bubble can you talk a little bit about the how this kind of organizing is sort of different than the stuff you've been doing at counter

protesting events like what are kind of the different things that y'all are keeping in mind as you as you make action plans every day like this compared to when you know you're showing up to at a protest to kind of counter groups of proud boys or whatever yeah it's pretty different

in that when we're doing security for marches or you know protecting pride events it's not like a direct confrontation with the government so it's a bit different

it's a little bit more high stakes when we do stop the sweep things you know we want to push back but at the same you know not be the first to cross any lines so it is you know it is

a more sensitive situation I think it requires different kind of planning and of course there's all these bystanders there's all the residents there who were there to help that we don't want to endanger in any way like Danny was saying I actually had

what ended up being a pretty cool conversation with a resident afterward but he was kind of an organizer in the camp and he was talking to me and he said you know I don't think we want the guns we don't want any trouble

and I leaned over to him and I whispered to him look we're just here with guns to try to get the cops to back off I think they're actually backing off now because we had actually just heard the cops were going to leave I said I think they're backing off

we're gone don't worry about it and he said wait wait don't leave yet wait till they leave um and that's uh I am interested like as the the actual folks showing up armed bubble do you guys have

kind of a like standard set of responses and stuff time to kind of explain things to people and make sure everyone's on the same page in terms of how they're doing it um yeah we have some of that worked out that's an evolving thing where we're trying to standardize

we've worked a long time with a core group of people that knows each other really well so we have like seen each other at you know dozens of these things and we we know how each other uh operate with some newer people

coming in you know we are working now on kind of standardizing those responses and uh you know sharing our past experiences and our thinking and all that um now question for for both either of you as you've

gotten more into doing sweep defenses what have been some of kind of the lessons learned things that have been like okay we went into it thinking like this was a good idea and it turned out that like that doesn't work very well so we've had to do this things that have kind of um best practices that have kind of

evolved over time doing this um honestly a lot of it a lot when when tensions are really high like that um because usually what comes to sweeps like I'm the one kind of like

dealing with um a lot of like overseeing and stuff like that and when tensions are really high like that honestly the best thing is harm reduction harm reduction is at the pinnacle of is at the core of like whatever we do

yeah um and part of that is meeting people where they're at um and making sure that we um help the people I show up I shit you not one of the best things that we started doing is showing up with packs of new

ports on god it makes it a lot um you know when you're going through trauma like that um and someone hands you a cigarette that's something that not only helps you kind of regulate yourself

when you're experiencing this high stress situation where you're being evicted from your home and you're going to lose your stuff and you're afraid people are going to steal things and it's a whole lot that helps bring people back and it makes it a lot easier for us to

work with people and still maintain the bonds that we've created and maintain the levels of trust that we have with the community um literally simple things like handing out cigarettes during because that's a way that we're like hey we're here for you

we know what you need yeah and we're not we're also we're not here to like judge what's best for you you know and do some like nanny state shit like you need a cigarette right now right like it's stressful yeah not really like hell I would need a cigarette too you know

at that point um there was somebody who was like you're asking people for Newport you need to stop doing that like that's really unhealthy and I thought you were trying to save these people and it's like I'm not trying to save yeah for starters yeah I am we're

not Captain America we're not no Avengers okay we are regular people fulfilling a responsibility and that responsibility is to be there for our neighbors that's how movements happen that's how anything happens and all of that

is rooted in you know indigenous communalism and theory and stuff like that that I think is really important is just fulfilling that responsibility and being there for people and when it comes to because you know we always try to provide

folks listening in other towns and stuff who may be like inspired by this with options for how they might move forward and trying to replicate some of y'all successes if people are looking at okay I would like to help do sweep defense I would like to do you know work kind

of like this in my own community how do you recommend because obviously there's you know how to build organizations is another matter but like if you've got a group together to help folks how do you recommend kind of starting the process of introducing yourself and just like show up and be like hey

and be like hey we're certainly not with guns but yeah that's the path to and it doesn't work um you have to develop a really really strong rapport with your community first and you also need to make sure

that's your community like you know um I I spent a really long time curating relationships with the unhoused populations of South Dallas um and that took

literal years you know expecting people to trust you off the bat and expecting people to just like be like oh you're one of the good guys it's not going to happen especially if you're white like honestly if we be and if we keeping it above because like there's a whole lot of black and brown people out there

in these vulnerable communities and usually the white people that they see are the white people who are talking down to them and not treating them as human beings the main thing that the people out there need most is consistency from you even if you don't even if one day you don't have

anything and you can just hand out water there with them and developing community that way you know and one of the things that people tell me a lot is that just it's been very shocking to me how much I've heard it is people are like you don't talk to us

like how other people talk to us you talk to us like we're people and the sheer amount of time I was really shocked by how many times I've actually heard that because I'm like you know I don't really think I talk much differently

from anybody else but then when I go out there and see other people just random people handing out McGriddles or whatever you know there's definitely a switch like if you were talking to a pet or to a child you know like you pity something

people will not want you around because honestly they don't want your pity what they want is bottles of water you know if you're just only showing up when shit's going down you don't actually have the people's trust

and I think if anything that that hurts it a little bit because it's like oh I am only here to make you feel good about yourself you don't want to be the one saving everybody it's like you got to dismantle your

savior complex first before you do anything and I think it's good to talk about kind of how this actually how these actions actually look on the ground because again the thing that sort of has gone semi viral on twitter has been the fact that like

you know people with guns stood off the cops but if you're imagining some sort of like big arm to stand off like that's not how this is like about the dallas morning news article which we will do you mean the article or the opinion piece sorry yes what's the type of the article

I am pulling it up right now just to have that there's an opinion piece already oh anytime unhoused people pop up in the discourse someone is ready to write yeah it's the the article armed activists block

dallas workers from cleaning a homeless camp that's an acceptable opinion that's not the one I was talking about the one I'm talking about is titled and it is a news article dallas delays moving homeless camp after activists show up which did a good job of not kind of

over emphasizing the armed part and talking about the actual work y'all were doing in the community I was kind of impressed with it especially given the dallas morning news's most recent like trends shall we say and considering their opinion piece they published

yesterday yeah I hadn't seen that one could you talk a little about how these these actions have actually looked on the ground during the day of yeah so on the ground some people arrived very early and you really never know when the cops

in the city are gonna show up so elm fork showed up close to nine and they're already like four cops there and that you know that's unfortunate we probably should have shown up earlier

you know if we're going to go to protect the other activists you know you don't want to leave the unarmed activists exposed to police violence but either way you know we formed up it was maybe two unarmed activists for every

armed activist and we discussed what to do some people decided to block off the streets with their vehicles the cops were there for a solid hour and a half before homeless solution

or yeah office of homeless solutions and code compliance started arriving so by that time a good number of armed activists were there and the cops had been discussing amongst themselves whatever it is that they were talking about

but when OHS and code got there they talked with the cops for about 30 minutes and then they started leaving during that time the unarmed activists were packing things up

getting people ready to move if those people wanted to move one thing to kind of go back a little bit one thing that we've learned carrying is it's very difficult to do the same things that we were doing

as unarmed activists we don't really want to be carrying tents and stuff while also trying to negotiate having a rifle in our arms so there's kind of a division of labor there but

before two hours had even passed the sweep was called off the city and the cops left and the mutual aid work continued throughout the rest of the day Elm Fork had some members switching out some people had to go to work

some people arrived around noon that was kind of the main switch out point and a lesser number of people but still a significant amount stayed there until 4-5pm whenever Elm Fork comes with guns the main thing that I like to have them do

is surveillance and be watching so that way we can focus on having other volunteers actually help people and help them move and stuff and the surveillance definitely helps because what happens when the cops leave

and when the city leaves is that they'll still have people watching and driving around and trying to surveil us and so having more eyes on that situation and having them know that they're here is really helpful Great, thank you Did anybody else have additional

questions to ask James? You had one or two more things? Yeah, I'm interested in maybe asking Bubble this because I'm just looking at the pictures on the Dallas Morning News story and credibly they didn't lead with a picture of you all suited and booted and full battle

rattle which I think is good on their part but how do you present an event like this? Obviously we should probably mention that I'm guessing it's legal to open carry where you are so you're not immediately

and therefore provoking a sort of violent confrontation with the police although obviously the police are always turning up armed and that always brings violence into the equation but are you like masks do you full this person I'm seeing

is masked, helmet, goggles plate carrier Is that generally how you present or is that just left up to individuals I wonder? We try to be pretty uniform but it definitely varies by action I think the last time we came out armed

we were not in helmets and plate carriers but everyone has one now and we discussed it beforehand we decided to go that way we try

not to park directly where we're going to get seen if possible because we do need to get out you're a walk over in all our stuff but for a lot of actions now including security

that's kind of been our go to way of presenting the full masks are very important we moved from medical style masks to all the clava style masks just to get more skin coverage

protect our identities better yeah that makes sense one other thing I just wanted to ask and perhaps explain in a context that might not be relevant in Texas I don't know in California at least you need two proofs of address to own a firearm

and if you're unhoused you might not have those and therefore people are alienated from what is theoretically their right whether you want to see that as a universal right or a constitutional right is that the case there or are these people able if they wanted to

Texas doesn't give a fuck Texas you don't have to file a 4473 to buy a gun in the state of Texas my gun literally was just given to me by somebody I didn't have to do a title transfer nothing like guns are so easy to get in Texas it's actually really

scary yeah private sale you can basically do whatever you want yeah it is hard not to wind up owning a gun in the state of Texas right easier than owning a place to stay way easier

a country okay magnificent okay well not the case in other states I guess too and nothing that we've said here should be taken as legal advice how to protest or partake

in armed activism because that can vary that varies wildly based on your zip code and everything we've talked about today is a massive series of felonies in a number of other parts of the United States like you're not going to be providing sweep defense in New York City in this manner you know

yeah yeah you do this where I live and poor title show up with the drill into consideration yeah so take obvious I mean that's a big part of what you're saying though is you have to take the situation on the ground you have to take the situation with these people as individuals into

you can't just you can't just go in and impose like this is how we're going to do sweep defense you have to be go in there like being willing to learn and adapt because um this is not you know your day to day life and it is life for the folks there and you have to come in willing to learn

and understand what they need rather than like what you think they need yeah the we never know what the city is going to show up with each time like the Monday sweep before this past one it was all marshals

it wasn't even act like regular DPD it was all marshals they were ready to arrest they had bulldozers and cranes and all types of shit um that was also that was kind of awkward because I was like wow

y'all are being mad aggressive this time I think we just pissed them off too much to the point where they were like we have to be you know meaner about it I mean but we ain't been arrested yet so yeah fingers crossed um

I do want to mention one more thing I know we've talked about how this kind of pertains to Dallas and you know had similar you know situations on increasing sweeps across the country in Portland last month there was an

episode on this show about a homeless encampment in Ohio and in terms of like similar stuff that has happened to kind of demonstrate this is like you know this is the thing going on all across the country there was a really interesting situation in Boise, Idaho earlier this year

that we may want to cover more in depth in the future but in January when it was freezing outside protesters and homeless people launched an encampment in front of the Boise State Capitol to kind of both provide

you know some type of shelter and community to help keep each other warm but also in front of the Capitol as like a protest to demand access to shelter you know while in the middle of like a pretty bad housing crisis and as it's freezing outside

they also faced a lot of basically nonstop harassment from the state whether that's police or like state state police they also faced a lot of problems from far-right militia groups the Idaho Liberty

dogs showed up to harass people there was you know militia showing up with guns so you can see like another instance where something that you know another instance where armed community defense could be could be a part in trying to keep

situations like that from not escalating if done properly obviously if done improperly that can escalate situations so it's up to you know you have to make sure that you're with people who are you know who you trust and who are responsible but it's just it's another instance of stuff like this happening

anti-fascists and other activists were able to push were able to keep conflicts from these militia groups to be relatively low at the encampment and after a few months like courts were trying to shut down

the protest that was unsuccessful because of certain laws around camping on like capital grounds for protests but after a few months the protest was able to end and the city is now been pushed by the

protest to open up possibly hundreds of units of shelter in the near future so you see other instances of these types of protests that you know rely on a lot of like radical mutual aid a lot of resistance to the state violence a lot of resistance to

far-right violence actually being something like successful so there's a lot of places to learn from in this type of thing around homeless encampments and countering state violence would recommend it's going down has a lot of good coverage of the

Idaho thing that's just like a whole other angle to this sort of trend that we've been seeing the past year I would like to say that you are not Fidel Castro

you are not the revolutionary leader you are not the one you know like you need to keep that in mind when you're moving in these spaces and doing this type of work is if your goal is to try and be like the guy you know

that does way more harm than good and that's really important to keep in mind and dismantling your savior complex is part of that of course in that case you know the houses people residents were consenting to it and things like that

but please do take into account the amount of danger that you are putting the most vulnerable populations into it is not necessarily a good idea or a morally okay idea to

make houses people into your people's army you know that is not and I want to make sure that everybody you know listening is also well aware like that is the wrong way to go about this the people's army should be people

like us not the most vulnerable of us because they are already fighting very hard so that means that's like it's the same thing like saying white people should be at the front lines protecting black and brown people during protests it's the same exact concept you protect the most

vulnerable of the group you do not make them you know your army and try to convert them into something and be the leader of that either that is not the way to go about that yeah if you're if you're entering into this relationship

with the plan that like this is a way for us to build power for whatever end as opposed to we're here to like help these people then you're putting them second to whatever your political goals are which is bad broadly speaking

and I know at least in the case of the in the Ohio encampment that we talked about earlier this month and the Idaho one as well a large number of people who are like leading up that project and in prominent

organization roles where houses people who are living at those camps like it is very important to have people who are like you don't want to go in as someone with stable housing be like okay I'm in charge of this thing now no it's like the people who are actually experiencing it need to be the

critical role in actually how it functions yeah and there we've had not we but like there was somebody who tried to do that and it definitely did more harm than good putting your political goals over

just the people is always going to fail every single time yeah listen to the people if they're not leading it don't do it you know like at that point your only priority should be getting them what they need

and defending them if necessary trying to lead stuff and you know have them putting them into more vulnerable situations than they're already at without like fully being transparent with people or being transparent with all the risks involved

you know like it's that's real grimy real not okay behavior um so that's just something I also want to caution people against and all of that definitely roots back to dismantling your savior complex and there's

a lot of good resources out there for starting with that process if you have not already some of them are on your chest Instagram I'll just peek it out and follow us or something

yeah yeah do you want to I think I mean I'm at out of questions personally do we want to um end with kind of yeah how folks can follow you and stay in touch with what y'all are doing or potentially even support you yeah um

we are at say it with your chest DTX on Instagram I also organized with the Dal separation movement which is a bigger org that mobilizes across the 9000 square miles of DFW

I run that with three of my good friends and organizers and so you can follow us at Dallas Liberation on Instagram if you're willing able and financially stable throw us

some cash please and listen to black women listen to black and indigenous women that's all I got all right um bubble did you have anything to add I think it's important to have a diverse collection of groups

um you know Danny's a hero she's out there almost every day um for elm fork we do a lot of trainings we do a lot of classes um that take up our resources but we have these longstanding relationships so that we can support

each other um when need be um you know take care of your take care of your spaces take care of your communities like Danny said um focus on the people in those spaces whether that be uh unhoused people or your own

organizers and activists you know you got to keep you got to keep things safe it's hot out here there's been a lot of stress and conflicts and you always have to practice restorative justice

and accountability um and you know just keep fighting keep loving each other all right uh well that's going to do it for everybody here at it could happen here today uh yeah go go go do something good

hey we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe it could happen here as a production of CoolZone Media for more podcasts from CoolZone Media visit our website CoolZoneMedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadioApp, Apple Podcasts

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