Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 6

Episode Date: October 23, 2021

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee 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 iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Jake Halpern, host of Deep Cover. Our new season is about a lawyer who helped the mob run Chicago. He bribed judges and even helped a hitman walk free until one day when he started talking with the FBI and promised that he could take the mob down. I've spent the past year trying to figure out why he flipped and what he was really after. Listen to Deep Cover on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm so excited to be joined by my friends and castmates, Hannah Simone and Lamorne Morris to recap our hit television series, New Girl. Join us every Monday on the Welcome to Our Show podcast, where we'll share behind the scenes stories of your favorite New Girl episodes. Each week we answer all your burning questions like, is there really a bear in every episode of New Girl? Plus, you'll hear hilarious stories like this. That was one of your things you brought back from Latvia. Yeah, I brought it back. Because all professional basketball players. Yeah, it's like a little seven foot poop.

Yeah, listen to the Welcome to Our Show podcast on the iHeart Radio 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. What? What? That's how you open a show. That's basically the same. Learning how to do your job is cuck shit. Also, to be honest, most of the time doesn't know which podcast he's doing.

They're all the same thing. Yeah, what is this? Are we doing? Is this the Daily Zeitgeist? Is that my Jack O'Brien? No. Who are we? Which one of you is Miles?

This is It Could Happen Here. Oh, shit. Miles. Me. So we're talking today about the different things that are it here being the States this time. But we're talking about basically over the course of the past few months, we have covered a few different topics on the show, some of which have already kind of had some results or have had updates to what we've already covered. So I'm going to go through a list of like three different things that we've covered and talk about kind of the updates in these stories. You know, most of what we've covered around these topics have been like a mix of original reporting and interviews.

So now there's been further work done on this and I just want to kind of update people if you know they're not as terminally on line as us. Maybe they have not heard that there's been changes to these stories and I wanted to kind of put together a nice little concise thing talking about updates to all the things we've covered. So the first thing that we're going to be talking about is the Cops City in Atlanta and the Defend the Atlanta Forest Coalition. So I think like a day after our episode dropped on that Atlantic City Council voted 10 to 4 in favor of getting the militarized police training facility Greenlit, nicknamed Cops City. There was 17 hours of public testimony where 70% of the callers spoke out against the facility. Yeah, I mean, we had that happen in Portland. Yeah, it never matters. It doesn't matter what the vast majority of people.

Especially when there's money involved. Yeah, do not ever be deceived into thinking that you live in a democracy and that you actually want to matter in any way, shape, or form. This is just not, this is empirically not true. Like 65% of Texans periods support vaccine mandates in some instances, but the governor just made it illegal to do them ever. It's that way across the board, across the nation. People ask sometimes, because when you get into anarchist discussions of politics, there's a lot of criticism of democracy. I think democracy is a lovely idea. I would like to try it sometime. It would be nice to give it a go.

It would be nice to experience. So yeah, the city council voted to lease the 350 acres of city-owned forest land to the Atlanta Police Foundation. At least 85 acres of which is going to be slated to become the police training facility. The facility is going to cost around $90 million. Jesus Christ, I could train cops much cheaper than that, although training is the wrong word. Yeah, that is the wrong word for that. So yeah, $90 million, it's going to include a state-of-the-art explosives testing facility, firing ranges, emergency vehicle operations course, a classroom space, and an emergency helicopter. At least there's a classroom space.

So we'll probably learn to read, right? I'm sure it's for teaching people to do bad things. There's going to be an emergency helicopter pad and an entire mock town. It is good that they have the emergency helicopter pad because cops shoot each other with live ammunition all the time in those training houses. That does happen. It happens constantly. Yeah, it does happen a lot. So yeah, the main backer for this project is the Atlanta Police Foundation, which is a political advocacy group that has a lot of funding from corporations and they try to sway the political power of the city and to give you more power to the police.

Oh, no way. So the interesting thing about this though is like the vote was supposed to happen in August, but it was rescheduled for early September after there was a lot of public backlash around this proposal. Then the vote that was supposed to happen on like the 13th got pushed back a whole day because there was too many callers saying that they didn't want the facility. So the vote got pushed back a day in September, but it stays still voted for it. Yeah, so $30 million is going to be footed by taxpayers and the other $60 million is going to get paid for by the police foundation, which has a lot of different corporate donors. So that's that's that's that. And of course, it's on, you know, on this forest land, which is like some of the biggest forest land in any major American city. So, you know, they're tearing down all this forest to build this concrete city to train cops.

Yeah, we should also we should also mention that at the end of our interview with some of the people resisting this, they basically said like if the vote goes through resistance is going to continue. So yeah, this will continue. There's probably going to be efforts to like actually try to physically prevent the construction of this. But the next thing we're going to be talking about is stop line three, which means there was also, you know, physical efforts to prevent that. But the type of efforts that people usually do in, you know, modern green activism usually are a lot more performative or they're specifically to pressure to create scenes that will try to convince politicians to veto the process. So it's not, you know, it's it's different from the 90s when it was easier to like actually physically stop the prevention of things. Now a lot of the people who, you know, are trying to do this, it is they're not convinced that, you know, doing a lockbox is going to actually physically prevent it. What it's going to do is create media coverage that truck that is going to hopefully convince politicians to be like, Hey, maybe we shouldn't do this.

And that's a hard bargain. Right. That's not there's no saying that that's actually going to do the thing, you know, in the case of stop line three, that did not stop line three. There was a really good critique of the stop line three protests posted in it's going down by an indigenous anarchist who lives on that land who was like younger. And they're, you know, watching all of these, you know, older indigenous anarchists, you know, keep on getting arrested and brutalized and like, but we're not actually doing anything. And the methods that we're doing the methods that we're trying to like, you know, gain public support. This isn't working in this specific context. Maybe we should reevaluate what we're actually doing.

I know it's going down and faced a bit of backlash for posting that critique, but I think that I think the critiques actually worth reading. Any other thoughts on the Atlanta thing before I move on to the stop line three stuff? Um, no, no, other than to note that I think the best brisket I've ever had came from Atlanta. Okay. Well, I'll probably be all probably visiting Atlanta in the near future. Maybe there with you. In which case, I'll get some more motherfucking brisket. Yeah, it was actually the fun story.

We were road tripping through town, me and another friend in another car. And we were talking over radios and a trucker got on like the channel we were on because we were talking about where to get barbecue. And he told us where to go. It was neat. It was like an actual nice like, like moment of CB radio connection. Like this guy was just scanning the waves and found us and was like, oh, I can tell you where to go. Anyway, continue Garrison. That was completely unrelated to stopping line three.

So the next thing is a earlier, I think in September, maybe August, I forget. It's been a while. We posted two episodes about me visiting the stop line three protests and the earth first camp and a lot of stuff has happened since then. So, you know, the main, you know, thing is that the pipeline has been finished now and is basically getting is ready to be operated or it probably already has some operation. It's unclear how much is being used right now, but it is done construction. It doubles the capacity of the original pipeline. It's going to be doing like a 760,000 barrels of oil a day. So in the carves out land through, through wetlands where people grow wild rice and do hunting.

So overall, the past few months, police arrested over 900 people. And it's there's been a lot of like felony charges specifically for locking down, which is pretty new because they're using felony theft charges for people just locking down to equipment. Yeah, that is an unfortunate escalation. Yeah. So by the time we posted our top line three episodes, we kind of already figured this was going to be the result. That's kind of how I ended the episode, saying there's been all this resistance, but probably it's going to get built. And, you know, there's other things that we can learn from this movement going on into the future. But the new developments that have happened, I did mention in the episodes how much Enbridge was directly paying cops.

That was something we already knew that was happening. But there was an article by The Guardian that really gave a lot of new information around how much police involvement there is with Enbridge. Like they are actually coordinating a lot. So overall, Enbridge has reimbursed US police almost two and a half million dollars for arresting and surveying protesters. Also paying for like food, lodging, gas. So like, I'm not just paying wages, they're paying like for extra stuff as well. So at least two and a half million dollars has been paid from the Canadian Oil Company. You know, and that includes officer training, police patrol routes, surveillance, all this kind of stuff.

The one interesting thing that was noted in the article is that the company at Enbridge meets daily with police officers to discuss intelligence gathering and patrols. And when Enbridge wants protesters removed, it directly calls or sends letters to police. So they actually coordinate when to actually get police involved during protests and they have at least daily information meetings. The one other interesting thing besides just directly paying them for food, for training, equipment, and the coordination between Enbridge and people being on the ground, is how much that Enbridge paid for like proactive safety patrols and specific like specific officer surveillance following alleged activists like home. So they would like trail specific cars for a long time and try to like do like in-person surveillance on specific people they thought were activists. And all of this time was paid for by Enbridge and was being coordinated with Enbridge. So it's not just, you know, paying for training, it's not just for paying for equipment, it's specific surveillance of certain people.

And that is, I don't know, that's something that we weren't, we did not really know the depths of that for sure, but it's pretty messed up. I know we suspected some of this coordination before, like when we talked about police showing up to the Stop Line 3 camp and blocking off access to the road. This was at the same day that drilling under the river was just being finished. And so we suspected like, yeah, there's like Enbridge is obviously talking with police to prevent people from leaving so that they can finish up this specific drilling project. That was pretty obvious to us at the scene. And now we have, you know, extra confirmation that yeah, they do like meet daily to coordinate these types of things. So it's good to have that extra confirmation of the stuff we already like suspected and stuff we already kind of like put together through experience. But now we have like, you know, court documents and like records showing the extent of the coordination.

All right, well, we'll talk about terrorism, but you know who else is a terrorist? Oh boy. The products and services that support this podcast are in a good way, you know, like, you know, like, kind of. All right, well, it's complicated. All right, do ads, just run ads, stop. Oh, so it will probably be funnier if you bleep out the name of the terrorist organization. This is how we get this is how we pick up from the ad framework is you're saying that. So garrison, we got some some critiques that came in to the old news line by which I mean people deemed me on Reddit, which I read it.

Yeah, I never respond. I almost never respond. It's nothing against people. I just don't like being communicated with. Yeah. But too many people too many people ask me to send messages to you. And like, yeah, that's an way. Yeah, garrison, you're not my secretary.

No, I'm not. That's not going to. Yeah. Welcome to the last three years of my life. Yeah, anyway. Yeah, I mean, but that's funny, Sophie. Oh, what are you going to say, Robert? I don't know.

There were people who were like, hey, I don't know if you know this, but Earth First has a problematic history with like eco fascism and that sort of stuff. Yeah, I got some messages like that too. Yeah, and it's it's one of those things. They definitely are an organization that has said things in the past that I don't agree with. There's been specific people who do organizing with them that don't have great beliefs specifically around like, you know, a lot of like in the old green movements has been, you know, a lot of like transphobia, some like racism. It's not because they're the green movements. Like all left spaces deal with versions of these issues. Yeah, a variety of stuff, you know, not like respecting like indigenous people.

Yeah, that's been that's been a thing. But the specific term eco fascism, I believe is incorrect because they don't advocate for the genocide of a specific group and they don't have like far right populist policies. So like, you can have bad opinions and bad ideas and you can actually be racist without actually being fascist, especially eco fascist. So I feel like people throw that word around a lot and they don't actually know what it means. But what were you specifically referring to, Robert? I'm trying to find the message here, but I because I got a message saying that Earth first is bad because they're anti natalist. That means they're fascist, which isn't. Yeah, I definitely got that.

Yeah, it isn't actually like, I'm just going to disagree with that because I don't think anti natalism equates fascism, especially anti natalism for like something. And anti natalism is basically saying, don't don't make people make additional. Maybe we should stop having more kids right now because you have a lot of problems to deal with and maybe we shouldn't be having like, you know, three kids, which is not it's not a take. I'm not an anti natalist. I don't actually disagree with that take though, but I think it's more in the line of like the most fundamental of all human desires for the majority of the population is to make more people. Which is kind of why I like anti natalism because it has that thing that's opposite to what a lot of humans natural reaction and like no one's forcing anti natalists don't want to force you to be anti natalist. They just want to like bring up this as an idea. Yeah, and I think it's a valuable idea to discuss and I don't think it's I don't think you're I don't think you're embracing like the massacre of human beings or genocide by saying like, I think it'd be best if we didn't make any more people.

I think that's an arguable point. Yeah, I'm not planning to have any kids because I don't see why I would, especially when there's so many like children that can be adopted. Now, Garrison, we talked about you having kids so we could experiment with making them blue. This is a separate conversation that we talked about last night. This is a separate conversation. We're not talking about the plot. Involving colloidal silver. No, we are not talking about this on the plot. We'll just include that tantalizing hint.

I also just think in general, when we talk about a group that's had a long history and a specific thing they're doing in the present. Yeah, this has happened in other situation of people like, well, you know, they did this or some one of them said this and there's a couple of things I feel about that. For one thing, it's it's like it's entirely possible that the people doing the thing in the present day have nothing to do with the people 20 years ago. Oh, yeah, like most of the people at the Earth First Gathering were like in their 20s or around my age, like they weren't in the they weren't in Earth First in 1980. Like that's not. Yeah. So I feel like silly about kind of making them be held accountable for something somebody else said under a similar banner decades ago. And on the podcast, I talked about how like people at the Earth First Gathering like talked about this stuff, like the people talked about Earth First's like history and how they haven't handled some issues very well.

There was a lot. There was a massive effort for this gathering to like to like uplift and make sure everyone focuses on Indigenous voices. Like they invited over multiple Indigenous groups to give talks on green resistance and like land back. Like that was a big focus of like making sure that this actually is something that is heard because people know like this is yeah, this is something important. This is something that actually should be done. And there are, I think in general when we talk about like holding organizations and individuals accountable for their past, what matters is like a mix of what they did and what they're doing. So obviously if Earth First had been saying 20 years ago, we need to wipe out all the Jews. I would be like, I wouldn't care what they were saying now.

You know, it'd be like, yeah, you can't really come back from that. If you want to do a completely different thing, it needs to be a new organization. You don't. Yeah. But they weren't. That's an example. But like as a rule, I think we should embrace the fact that organizations and people can change throughout time and be better than they were in the past and learn from mistakes and flaws. And I feel pretty unwilling to condemn individuals or organizations for the mistakes of their past, although that is dependent upon the kind of mistake and the harm that it caused.

Yeah. And like, and how they address it in the future. Like a lot of these, yeah, because like it wasn't like Earth First was an overall organization of specific people they were affiliated with. Yeah. Like, you know, specifically like Edward Abbey has said some not great things around different different social issues and his books were extremely influential on the beginning of Green Resistance. But that's something people talk about now. Like that's something that is like discussed and debated. And he was and he was like, even in the 80s and 90s, he was like kicked out of Earth First gatherings for kind of being a loser.

Like for for having these bad views were like, yeah, we probably shouldn't have you here anymore. Leave, go away. So like that was something that was even talked about back like back then as well. That is that isn't just a modern thing. Yeah. And I think in general, there's a couple of things. Number one, whenever we talk about like an organization in a specific context, they're doing this, that doesn't mean we're embracing everything they've done. And number two, whenever we talk about the history of a movement or a group, I hope nobody ever takes that as law.

Here is the authoritative stance on the history of this thing. Like it's when we talked about the Black Panthers, there's a bunch of stuff we left out that's very important. My hope with those episodes and my hope with anything we do is that it like inspires people to want to learn more and read more. And we're giving them a basis of understanding that they can use to expand their knowledge on an important topic. So please, there's like one thing collectively that Garrison and I have any kind of expertise on. And outside of that, you should not take anything we say as like, here's the comprehensive history of this. Because I understand one thing and it's how the internet makes people shitty. Yeah.

So yeah, yeah, I mean, this whole thing was something I thought about when writing these episodes is how much to include of this stuff. And I did not feel like it was super important to discuss this stuff because it wasn't relevant to the topic of Stop Line 3. No, I think you did a great job. And it wasn't relevant to the topic of like the current ongoing green resistance. If we want to do like a history of green activism, then yes, this is something that would come up. And I think like at some point, we probably should talk about the just like John Muir and like all of that shit. But like there's a ton of stuff we want to talk about that we haven't yet because it's a daily show. And my God, give us some fucking time, people.

Speaking of Edward Abbey, you know what sells quality monkey wrenches? Okay. All right. That's fine. That's okay. Maybe one of our sponsors. Hopefully. I hope so.

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Well, we're back. We just had a good discussion about what we're going to talk about and we realized that it wasn't after the ad break. So here we are. In early September, we had an episode about both California's climate and the ongoing recall election against Gavin Newsom. So a few days after our episodes dropped, the day the second one dropped was election day. We got the results in faster than what I was expecting. And Newsom did handily beat Larry Elder with like 60... Yeah.

Not even close. Yeah. So people voted 61% no and like 38% yes. So he, Newsom did a decent job in pushing off Elder. So this whole recall process costed California taxpayers $276 million. Jesus. Well, it's not like we needed the money for anything else, Garrison. Come on.

Yeah. So, you know, a few takeaways. What else are we going to spend it on? Firefighters? Literally anything else? Water? California needs water and firefighters, Garrison. Giving houses to people who need houses?

I don't know. No. No. Yeah. So takeaways from this, the recall process still should absolutely be amended. Yeah. It's stupid as hell. It should require more than 12% signatures of the last vote or turnout.

And the government should be requiring to get... If you're going to be elected into government, you should be required to get a majority of votes, not just a plurality of a specific, you know, sect. So there's the whole... We talked about the specific reasons why it was bad in those episodes. Those are still, like, those are still valid. Those are still relevant because there's still the same issues. Yeah. And none of the fact that this turned out well had anything to do with the Democratic Party, who very nearly bungled it. No.

And it doesn't really impact... It doesn't impact, you know, the California's climate issues so much. And like, just because Newsom's in office doesn't mean they're going to get much better. There's still things that needs to be pushed on to, you know, make the climate a little bit more habitable in the meantime. It means that we will continue stumbling towards a cliff rather than speedrunning off of it. Yeah. Yeah. So... Generally what voting for Democrats means.

Yeah. I will say it's interesting to me that it doesn't seem like you can get a... The vote was rigged thing to work unless the election is like kind of close additionally. This is the next thing I was going to talk about. Okay. Yeah. Because like in the week before the election, the Fox News, the Republican Party and Larry Elder and even Trump were really starting to ramp up this idea that if Elder loses, that means the election was rigged. This was like, they were really pushing this hard and, you know, spreading it like they were giving links to a website, like before he lost even to be like, if, you know, when I lose, use this website. It was like, okay, that's...

Yeah, that was very funny. That's weird. But on the night of the election, Elder seems to kind of climb down from the inflammatory rhetoric around the election. In his concession speech, he told supporters, let's be gracious and defeat. So once the actual results were in, he really climbed that down. So we can read into that. The other thing I want us to read into here is that could this rhetoric around, if we lose, that means it was rigged. Could that disenfranchise Republican voters from even showing up if they believe that all elections will be stolen from them?

I hope so. Will that mean that there'll be less Republican turnout if they think that it doesn't matter? So that's the other side of things. It's like, I'm not sure if the other side effects that this rhetoric could have. Yeah, there's an interesting... So during the last national election cycle, there was a bunch of interviews with people who weren't voting in Florida. And I thought it was really interesting because there were several people they talked to who were like, yeah, I don't vote because last time I voted was 2000 and they stole the election. Which, yeah, and I'd say that...

I get it, yeah. Yeah, I think it is slightly different when 2000 really actually was stolen. Yeah, like literally there was the... Roger Stone led a riot to stop the votes from being counted, whatever weird bush... I think people got a bunch of people with vaguely black names, their names struck off the voting rolls. There was a lot of, yeah. But yeah, I don't know if the effect can work that strongly when it's completely bullshit. Which I think that's an interesting question.

Yeah, I don't know. It's hard to say because it's unclear whether the voter turnout on the... Because there were times where they were polling like 50-50 between Newsom and Elder. And it's unclear, I think definitely the big advertising push that corporate donors gave to Newsom in the month before the election did help get Democratic voter turnout. People voting for Newsom... Yeah, getting people scared about fucking Harry Elder as the governor was not ineffective. That very much worked, so that did increase turnout there. But I don't know because with the whole election being stolen, that could both increase Republican voter turnout and there's also the side effect now where maybe it could decrease it because they're just disenfranchised about this concept.

But this is kind of just speculation at this point. I don't have actual data backing up this claim right now. This is just something that I thought about while writing this write up. I'm like, huh, I wonder if this could be a contributing factor in the future. People really feel like they're always going to lose. Maybe they just not even are going to bother. But it's hard to say. And the main reason why Elder lost wasn't due to Newsom's strength.

It was because Elder was the most... Wildly unqualified. Yeah, wildly unqualified and one of the more extreme candidates running. And yes, he did get a lot of support among Republicans, but among moderates and people left of center in terms of an American spectrum. They're like, yeah, no, this is going to be a disaster if he gets elected. And that's the main reason why he didn't. It's not due to Newsom being great. But I mean, Sophie did mention a few things that Newsom has done since then.

Sophie, do you want to say the specific details just so I don't have to look at? Yeah, Sophie's famously a big Newsom fan. So not... Come on. So not to give Newsom credit because this is like an obvious right thing to do situation. But at the beginning of October, the Senate bill 796 was signed into law. It was a unanimous vote and Newsom signed off on it to give back Bruce's Beach, which was owned by a black family, Willa and Charles Bruce back in 1924. Land was illegally taken away from them.

It's a beachfront plot in Manhattan Beach and I signed into law to give it back. So that's cool. That is good. I mean, yeah. Yeah, more of that should be done. I mean, that is kind of the basis of like, you know, that is one side of land back is just giving land back to people who used to have it. Yeah. Of course, this isn't specifically tied to like indigenous stuff, but you know, I've seen people make that same comparison for like, yeah, we should just be doing this more in general to a lot of people.

Yeah. Yeah. That's a, I'm glad that that was done. It's also now illegal to remove a condom without consent in California, which is. Wait, what? Really? You're going to have to change a lot of things about how you have sex with Californians. That is real bizarre.

You didn't realize that was legal? Yeah, during intercourse. It's the first state to do that, first of all. Huh. Yeah. That's wild because under any reasonable definition, that's rape. No, I mean, yeah. Yeah.

It's 100%. It's just rape. Yeah. It's absolutely rape. Yeah. California also now requires menstrual products in public schools. So that's bare minimum and great. Oh, great.

That is. Wow. I didn't realize that it happened. Yeah. And I want to be clear here. I'm not giving you some credit for this, but if he had lost the recall election, none of this would be happening. No, it's nice that he, I'm sure some of this was him kind of providing a SOP to the people who lined up to stop the recall. And those are good things that were done.

Yeah. And I think that's sort of an important thing to understand about when politicians occasionally do good things. It's like, they don't do good things because they want to do them. They do things that benefit from you because they're either in some way scared of you or it's because they need to buy you off. And that is, you know, that is a legitimate way that good things happen. I've got a couple other, there's been a lot signed in recently. So I got a couple other ones that I think are relevant to our show. California will now streamline, extend assisted death law.

So that's good. That reduces the time until terminal patients can choose to be given fatal drugs. Good. So starting January 1st, the waiting period required time a patient makes separate oral requests for medication. We'll drop to 40 hours down from the current minimum 15 days. That is, that is good. That's pretty rad. Yeah.

I'm very supportive of that. Yeah. I mean, there's just, there's, there's a, I mean, we'll see if this actually is a thing. There's a lot. There's a lot here. It's hard to be like worse than Larry Elder. Yeah. That's my point.

This one definitely would not get through for Larry Elder. No. California, California lacks a lot of strip badges from bad officers. Like very vaguely written there. Yeah. We'll see how it works. It is very vague, but yeah. We'll see what happens.

Yeah. Like none of that stuff would have happened under a Larry Elder thing. I am surprised at like, I'm surprised that some of those things actually got through. Cause I'm, I'm surprised that democratic politicians would actually vote for those things to be put into office. That's why I was like shocked. And very, very important. Specifically like the condom thing. Yeah.

Yeah. Absolutely. And very important. This is some science legislation to extend to go cocktails. Wait. All right. That's fine. Sure.

Okay. Come on. Fine. More, more drinking. Where am I? Where am I to go cocktail heads? Sorry. All right.

So at least Larry Elder's not in office. There's still a lot of climate issues and maybe this rhetoric around stealing the elections not going to work every single time they do it. No, that's kind of the main. That's the main things that I was going to talk about. And it is, it is, I mean, one of the things that people are talking about in a lot of the spaces I generally agree with is like the foolishness of voting as harm reduction. And there's been a lot of, if you want to believe that it isn't, there's been a lot

of information coming out from the Biden administration that will support that belief. Yeah. But what we're seeing right now in California is proof that can be like the, these are not, none of this is going to fundamentally change the major problems that are confronting us. And a bunch of those things are going to like, life's going to be easier for some little girls whose families don't have much money, you know, life got easier for that one family who got their land back, you know, potentially it's going to be easier to get bad police

officer or to get particularly bad police officers off the street. And that's not, that's not nothing like when we say voting can be, and I'm not saying that it usually is, but when it can reduce harm, that's what it means. It means that like, oh, some bad things that, that would be worse are not as bad because of this, not that everything is better. A lot of stuff will be the same and is the same in California. Like ecologically, nothing has really fundamentally changed, but some shits a little easier for certain groups of people as a result of some stuff that just happened that wouldn't have

happened. And specifically, I think the getting, getting more like contraceptive products and menstrual products inside public schools is one of the literally the best things we can do like, like for the whole country, that is like something that if that was required in every public school, that would make so many people's lives better, that is a ridiculous degree. Significantly reduces harm in a specific way. And I think that just because like, yeah, I mean, it's not going to stop us all from burning up.

But that doesn't mean it's not worthwhile. Yeah. So those, those are the three stories that I wanted to give some updates for. Because I know, you know, there were changes happened, you know, very soon after posting those episodes. I still think the California ones are worth listening to because they do lay out a lot of stuff around, around California's climate and the specific weird stuff that it has with it.

Specific weird things that has with its election process. I think the line three episodes are going to be pretty good to go back to as well. And then the specific cop city thing in Atlanta, that is the stuff that I am, it's going to be the most like ongoing thing stills because that's, they're going to be an ongoing project. So I'm sure we'll come back to the cop city at different points throughout the next few months. So that, that, that, that's the updates any, any, any closing notes from either Christopher Robert or Sophie?

Yeah. Just, just, I do. Well, excuse me. Sorry. Okay. Sorry, Sophie. Sorry. Go.

I just, just to remind you, we've said this earlier in the episode that like, we're just giving you brief, brief snippets about this stuff. There's a lot, there's a lot of really good articles online that go, go deep into these things and we'll post our sources on the website. Yep. Yeah. We, we, we do, we do a good job, I think most of the time. Padding ourselves in the back, Chris.

Yes. Yes. But we do. We're great. Yeah. We're, we're the only heroes in the world. I really like us. I think that's fair to say.

Absolutely. But do, do not have a podcast be the only source of information that you have about a thing. Like don't do not. Listen just to us. I am begging you. No. Like for the love of God. Read the things.

Listen to, if you want more of a left perspective that is, that, that goes in some directions we don't. It's Going Down is a lovely place to check out. Margaret Kiljoy's Live Like the World is Dying, St. Andrew's YouTube channel. He does some, some really incredible stuff. You know, there's all sorts of good people out there. And then also like history books, more than anything, like history books. History books were the thing that radicalized me.

Yeah. Yeah. If you want to read more about the, the, the NewsSim notable laws signed recently, the KCRA and Sacramento did a, did a really good breakdown article. Yeah. That all. Oh, sorry. So it's okay.

And as a note, we, we will be doing more episodes like this over time as like stories that we come. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down.

It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union is falling apart. And now he's left defending the union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Welcome to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based

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Sometimes that'll mean following up with people that we're talking to on the ground. But you know, we are trying to like keep you updated on the things that we think are important, you know, even when they end in a, in a broadly positive sense or whatever. And lastly, what was the name of that brisket place in Atlanta? Cause I'm sure people are going to ask about it. Oh, I don't remember. It was some shitty little place in the middle of South Atlanta in like a fucking strip mall.

That's really helpful. I don't remember. Sophie, it was like 11 years ago. What do you, I don't remember yesterday. It was the best brisket you've ever had and it was, but the best brisket, if you know anything about good barbecue, the best barbecue you ever have is either cooked by like your uncle or is cooked in some shitty little place with a pattern that wouldn't pass a code inspection. That is true.

That is true. The more, the more codes it violates the better the brisket. Anyway, if you see the chef actively shit on the grill, that means it's going to be incredible. That's right. Anyways. Twitter and Instagram, what happened here, pod and coolzo media. Subscribe to the feed and leave a five star review.

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Garrison, is that good? Is that the show? Nope. Just keep going though. Okay, well, it could happen here is the show. That atonal noise is my introduction this week because I'm a hack and a fraud. Who isn't a hack and a fraud is our guest this week, St. Andrew. St. Andrew, you are a solar punk anarchist from Trinidad.

You have a YouTube channel where you talk about solar punk, you talk about stuff like seed bombing. Yeah, I'm just very excited to have you on the show because I'm a big fan of your YouTube channel. Thank you. Glad to be here. Big fan of your work as well. Andrew, I kind of wanted to start with why solar punk is important because I think it's

easy for folks who just kind of skim it to see it. It's just like, oh, it's an aesthetic. It's maybe an art style or a fiction style, maybe something that's neat but not something that has like a lot of inherent value to people trying to change the world and obviously you disagree with that. I disagree with it too. A quote I keep coming back to again and again is one from Werner Herzog in the 1970s and it was something along the lines of, I think that without better myths, we're destined

to go the way of the dinosaurs. Right. It reminds me actually of, I forget his name right now, but there's this excellent, excellent book called The Truth About Stories. And I think what it really emphasizes throughout the book is the importance of stories and how stories impact how we navigate the world, which is why I sort of embraced solar punk as a story that we can work with going forward. Yeah, I think it's incredibly important to have better stories, better myths because

for one thing, I think where the left falls down a lot is not having, is accurately diagnosing the problems without providing a better look at the future. And when the problems are, when the people who do kind of propose solutions, it's often not in a way people can feel. One of the benefits that the right has, that fascism has, is that they're very good at providing people with myths and providing people with kind of a fictional look at their idealized world that draws people in, you know, you can laugh at the right, you know, concepts.

They have a lot of people that work on like meta narratives and that's very, very core to their ideology. So I guess where I'd like to start with you, Andrew, because this is kind of the first time I think we've really talked about solar punk on this show, even though from the beginning, before any of these episodes dropped, this was always a central part of our discussion about what the show was going to be. Would you kind of provide an introduction to what solar punk is for our listeners? Sure.

Sure. So I would say that solar punk is a vision of the future that places emphasis on the existing world and how we get to that future from where we are now. So it emphasizes the need for environmental sustainability, for self-governance and for autonomy and social justice. It emphasizes the need for, you know, human and egocentric ends to really be in sync and it aims to really heal the current rift between humanity and nature. It also recognizes, of course, that there isn't this binary between climate change happens

and climate change doesn't happen, rather it understands that how we navigate it will have a variety of consequences and some will be positive, some will be negative, but it's up to us to really shape that. Yeah. And it's, I want to drill into a couple of facets of that, but I want to quickly plug one of your YouTube videos for folks who kind of want a more involved explanation and background. You have a video called What is Solar Punk on your channel, St. Andrewism, like Andrew ISM, that I think is a fantastic introduction, not just to, like, the aesthetics of Solar

Punk but some of the practical, some of the practical kind of expressions of it. And two of the ones you list is like examples of, here's what this is, is like actual praxis, you know, and not just an aesthetic, is seed bombing. And then you talk about this very interesting kind of like terracotta air conditioning, which I think is, I think is neat because it's one of the problems that I think with kind of some versions of, particularly kind of on the more liberal end of Solar Punk imagining is just sort of like ways of replacing, ways of gaining the same kind of consumptive benefits that exist.

I guess not even Solar Punk, like greenwashing, right? Greenwashing, yeah. Yeah, greenwashing. Like here, let's get the same consumptive benefits we get from capitalism. Grapers with trees on them. Yeah, skyscrapers with trees on it. Same level of consumerism, same level of, you know, destructive, extractive practices, but we have some flowers and some trees, so yeah.

And that's not enough, but at the same time, there are things that aren't like air conditioning is, contributes massively to climate change. It's also not a luxury. Like if you live in a place where it's 120 degrees a lot of the summer, that's not a luxury. Yeah, this is going from someone in a tropical country. Yeah. It's definitely, definitely a necessity.

Yeah, so I wonder if you could talk about kind of those two, I mean, or if you have different ones you'd like to pick, but just kind of what you see is sort of the praxis expressions of Solar Punk, sort of beyond the aesthetic, although we're going to drill into the aesthetic some too, because I also think that's important. Right. So I think some of my favorite manifestations of Solar Punk in a practical context, things like gorilla gardening, gorilla gardening is probably the biggest one because it's one that someone could literally pick up and do today or tomorrow, you know, as soon as they

hear about it, learn about it, just get some clay, get some seeds, you know, and put those things together. And as you're walking home or walking to the store, just toss them wherever they're some free. So that's a fun one. There's also, of course, things like a bit more involved, like community gardening and particularly forest gardening, because that will provide a level of food autonomy and agency for people who have been alienated for a long time from the process of food production.

There are also practices like coppicing or coppaging, and it's like a way to produce lumber without chopping down a whole set of trees. So you are able to get the wood from the trees, but the tree remains alive. There is also things like, of course, solar powered technology, whether it be algae based windows that extract energy from the sun, or solar sails, or solar ovens, or like the terracotta air conditioning, which, by the way, I learned recently, can't really work in a human environment, but yeah, there are a lot of different opportunities there. Also, there are things like tool shares and maker spaces and seed libraries, all different

ways to sort of bring it into fruition, solar pump, that is. Yeah, and I think a lot of that's really valuable. I'm interested in, in part, sort of your attitude on what, let me think about how to phrase this. What do you think are kind of the things, as we talk about sort of the things that can be at least potentially replaced with less extractive, less consumptive methods as sort of an example of solar punk practices replacing those things. There's also things that we are not going to be able to have if we actually want to

live in a more sustainable future that doesn't contribute to some of the nightmares that we're all going to be increasingly facing. And again, I think it's telling that so much of kind of the future fantasies that are written by people who come from my part of the world, the United States, focus on kind of post-scarcity methods of guaranteeing the continuation of consumption just through, in some cases, fantastic methods, magical 3D printers and the like. You come from a very different part of the world, very different perspective. What do you see as the things that we're going to have to give up?

Coming from a country that is actually reliant on oil and natural gas production, we have to get rid of cars. We definitely absolutely have to get rid of cars, freighter ships as well, and really the whole way that global supply chains are structured right now, not to say that there won't be any sort of global sharing of resources in the future. But the way that it's happening right now, it can't continue to go on. We can't continue to structure our cities and our lives around cars and other methods of gas-guzzling transportation because we're literally going to run out.

We've known this for a long time, but the day is nearing closer and closer, and we have to find a way to do without it. Yeah, and I think there's a couple of things that are important. One of them is you can't just say, we have to stop global trade and global travel because the people have sought and done that for as long as there have been people in one form or another. It's a fundamentally human thing, but there are aspects of it, like expecting that every kind of fruit and vegetable will be available year-round, which is certainly the thing that

we in the United States expect. That's not part of a realistic future, and if it's part of the future, then it's only going to be part of the future for an ever-shrinking chunk of the country. You can see that in sort of the West, and you can see that in kind of what we're dealing with right now with the supply line shortages and failures. One of the symbols of how far we have to go in my country is the degree to which people are freaking out by the fact that Christmas presents might be late, let alone being like, yeah, you might not be able to buy coffee ever or all the time.

You might not be able to get tomatoes in December. Which reminds me, I think one benefit to guerrilla gardening and that tool set of mindset is as you learn to sow, you also learn to reap, right? So a lot of people who get into guerrilla gardening also end up getting into foraging, and there are apps and stuff you could download that allow you to learn how to identify plants in your area. And you'd be surprised the number of plants in your area that are useful for teas or for salads or for whatever purposes that can be used as replacements.

Well, I'm not sure if they could replace coffee, but they could be beneficial in recognizing how we have to live with our local ecosystems, basically. Yeah. And a big, you know, when you talk about learning how to live with our ecosystems, stuff like planting forest gardens and the like, or food forests, I think is the term. I think something that has to be discussed is the matter of indigenous sovereignty, especially when we're talking about, you know, it's not just, you know, North America, a lot of chunks of the globe, indigenous people had spent, you know, in some cases, thousands of generations

setting forests up in order to sustainably produce food. And when colonialism arrived, that was often just seen as like, oh, this is, these are wild places for us to extract or tear down and replace with monocultures, you know, single crops. And so a big part of actually building back that capacity, the capacity of us to survive off of the food that can sustainably grow where we live is looking back to those indigenous methods and also, you know, giving back land in a lot of cases. And yeah, that's something you talk about in your videos that I think is really important

to explain to people. Yeah, I mean, there's really is no way to separate the violent and oppressive institution of colonialism with the ecocidal nature of modern states. You know, those two are deeply intertwined, deeply married together. And so you can't fight climate change without addressing the issue of sovereignty, of indigenous sovereignty and land back. Yeah, it's, it's really interesting. I've been, I've been up hunting on Mount Hood with a friend who is, who went to school

for like forestry management. And as we were driving, we had to drive through a chunk of the reservation in order to get to the BLM land where we were able to hunt. And he pointed it out, and once he did, it was immediately obvious just how different the land under indigenous control looked from the land, you know, just feet away that was being managed by the federal government in terms of like how much better the forest management was, how much, how much smarter it was, it was managed in order to reduce the chances of like a ladder fire that actually kills, you know, the trees and whatnot.

There's this whole thing blowing up on Twitter right now where you've got a chunk of Marxist who are trying to frame land back as just like shifting ownership of resources, which I think is really missing the point. But I find it interesting about Twitter, the exact same discourses are repeated over and over and over again. So I remember this exact conversation happening around this time last year, around April last year, earlier this year as well, it's just the same discourses get recycled over and over again.

And it's reached a point for me where I realized that these people don't want to learn about land back, what it really means, because they are invested in the structure as it exists, and they don't want to have to interrogate that. So yeah, this fall out to be an interesting thing of note. Yeah, and it's, it's, it's, it's frustrating. I guess that that acts as like a general description of Twitter discourse, but certainly does. Yeah, I think it's, I think it's telling the degree to which people even on the left

treat it as a fantasy as opposed to doggedly pragmatic and proven so like proven by like, like, you know, like you can read UN reports that will that will essentially say land back in the space of a 500 page, you know, study on how indigenous land management functions a great deal better than, than a lot of the stuff that's like centralized by the federal government where we're like our federal government is terrible at land management. And it's part of the, it's part of the problem. I think one of the things that, that excites me about solar punk as an aesthetic and idea is, is getting back to this relationship with the land as opposed to talking about just

preserving it as, as talking about managing it, because, because none of our, none of the land that people live on is like wild in the sense that people mean it as it's been cultivated. And that's, and that's the thing, right, the whole philosophy of, you know, land preservation as was taken up by the US government with the whole, you know, you can stop forest fires kind of thing ended up leading to more forest fires down the line because we have a role in the ecosystem and not just there to stand back from afar and just observe it. So we don't do our part to manage the underbrush and whatnot and clear it away and.

Exercise, you know, control fires, but we end up in the situation we're in today, you know, cultivation, not just sterile preservation. Yeah. Now, one of the things that you talk about well, because, because one of the more frustrating discourses, this is not just a Twitter thing, this has been going on for years, is the discourse around GMO crops. And usually I would say like the two most commonly heard sides are GMOs are bad because you know, Monsanto cancer, whatever, or GMOs are good in thought.

And the thing that you point out, which is I think the accurate take is GMOs, the preponderance of evidence says that like there's nothing inherently dangerous about genetically modified crops, but the way in which they're often used is in order to create these massive monocultures is really toxic. So there's a lot of promise for GMOs in terms of keeping our existence on this planet sustainable. But what's not sustainable is the kind of industrialized agriculture where you have 10,000 acres of one thing, which just doesn't happen in nature. Exactly.

Exactly. And if you look at how genetic modification took place prior to, you know, all advanced ones in genetic modification technology, I'm not sure how many people are familiar with the dozens upon dozens, if not hundreds of varieties of just corn that were present in the Americas prior to colonization, a lot of those varieties were wiped out or were suppressed in favor of these monocultures. But if we're able to cultivate a diversity of these crops and maybe bring some of them back through genetic modification, that would really help us with, you know, food resilience

in a world with an increasingly unpredictable climate. Yeah. Yeah. I think that, I mean, I think you said it perfectly. I want to move back to kind of what I introduced the episode with, which is talking about the value of fiction and myth making in a very pragmatic sense. I guess I'll start by saying, I think one of the clearest signs of the danger that we're in and how toxic our society has gotten, and I am speaking from a primarily U.S. centric

standpoint here, but I don't think it's unique to the United States, is the extent to which... Trust me, as the saying goes, when the U.S. sneeze, Trinidad catch a cold. So anytime there's some phenomenon happening in the U.S., there are the copycats down there as well. Yeah. So. And I do think this is pretty global. South Korean films and all over.

I know what you're going to say, yeah. The obsession with apocalypse, and when we go to the future, it's always a dystopia. There's a degree to which we've almost forgotten how to imagine utopia, or even not just utopia, just a way of living that is an improvement in a lot of ways, a future that's better. We've forgotten to do both utopian fiction and any just kind of like positive fiction in a lot of ways. Yeah. It's understandable, because the world is kind of terrible right now in a lot of ways.

But there's also, there's been utopian fiction inside other terrible worlds as well. I think just the modern interconnected media sphere has really rewarded this type of like dystopian and collapse-based apocalypse fiction. Yeah. And I'm sure that's worth interrogating why, but it is a problem that needs to be solved. Yeah, and it is. And I think it's important that it's not entirely based in how fucked up things are, because like when the first Star Trek came out, we were at like the height of the Cold War.

Things were terrible. There were a lot of utopian fiction during World War II. During World War II. I will always be impressed by the fact that Gene Roddenberry saw it as incredibly important both to be like, okay, well, in the future, like in the middle of the civil rights movement, in the future, we will have overcome like racism. But not just that, but like, I'm gonna stick a Russian on the bridge too, because nations are going to end as a concept and like this stuff won't matter.

And that just that kind of utopian fiction, at least at the scale of popularity that, you know, Star Trek wasn't its time, just isn't present anymore. And I, that's tremendously worrying to me. And I see a lot of hope in solar punk for that. I guess for starters, I'm interested in your thoughts on this and you're interested in the, Andrew, what you think is like the pragmatic value of positive fiction that imagines a better world. Yeah.

So I've done probably, I think I've done like two videos on solar punk so far, two major videos on solar punk, as well as a smaller video, two other smaller videos. What I've seen in the comments and in the general social media reaction again and again is solar punk saved my life. You know, solar punk has given me hope. You know, I was slipping into despair, but this video really gave me a jumpstart to try something new and to start afresh and to pursue action, as opposed to just lying down and taking whatever comes next and that, that is it for me.

You know, I think the fact that solar punk offers like an energizing vision, it's not just a vision, it's an energizing vision because in every step of the way, it shows what you can do. You know, when you look at solar punk art or you look at the small but growing genre of solar punk literary media or, you know, you look at, well, there's not that many solar punk video games right now, but hopefully there will be in the future when you look at the various forms of solar punk media that are coming out and people's responses to them. You see that it's not like, as you're all mentioning, like Star Trek, where it's all

this far out technology that we can only aspire to for now, you know, solar punk is something that you can literally put in your backyard or your balcony or your home or your school or your community. You know, you could put these things in place like from now, you know, and you could incorporate it into your politics as, you know, as they are and they could also help to push your politics forward, you know, because through solar punk, we can open up discussions about, okay, so how do we ensure that people live comfortably within the parameters of, you know, the Earth's carrying capacity?

You know, you open up a discussions about indigenous sovereignty, you open up discussions about the relationship between the global north and the global south and responsibility with regard to our response to climate change, but you open up a lot of different discussions through the realm of solar punk. It energizes people, as I said, and yeah, I think that is its pragmatic purpose. It doesn't stand alone, of course, but it is a driving force. Yeah. Could you kind of give out a list of, if people are, you know, if this is someone's first introduction

to the concept of solar punk, what is some reading you want to draw people towards? What is some fiction? Like I know you mentioned the dispossessed by Le Guin, right? Yes. Which often gets cited. Yeah. I'm interested in kind of other recommendations you might have for our listeners, Ari, that. Right.

So I'm still getting into the genre myself, so I don't have too many recommendations. There are some decent short story collections, like Sun Vault by a couple of different authors. There's also multi-species cities, solar punk, urban futures, and the one I read most recently was Ecotopia, which is much older than all the others. It's actually a book that was published in 1975. And not all aspects of its politics are things I agree with. But I think for a first, it was one of the really the first of its kind in that sort of eco-utopian genre that really laid out what the society would look like.

The book is structured in a series of novel entries and notebook reports by a journalist from the United States who has gone to this country called Ecotopia, which is sort of where the Pacific Northwest states are. And he's basically breaking down, he's going to different parts of the country and breaking down how they have lived and how they have decided to structure their lives. And even though not every aspect of it is one that I would want to see implemented, I still think that it really sparks the imagination, really gets you thinking, well, maybe I wouldn't do it this way, but how else could this be done?

And I think the capacity for solar punk stories suggest generate that thought and generate one's imagination is very useful in a world where we don't really get to use our imaginations much, not really since childhood. And I think it's often understated the degree to which using your imagination is a vitally necessary part of actual radical politics. And I think there's a lot of people who consider themselves radicals, some of these not to slam every Marxist-Leninist on the planet, but certainly some of the ones who are coming up with these bad faith criticisms of land back.

It's like, you're not a radical, you're a conservative who wants to go back to a different kind of problematic thing, or the fact that the Soviet Union poisoned the largest body of water in Europe, and all the different things that the Soviet Union did that were horrible for the environment and extractive. I find it interesting that there are these people who call themselves radicals, but at the very first encounter with a radical idea, their first instinct is to shut down. Their first instinct is to just push back against it, whereas not to take my own horn or anything, but when I see an idea that I haven't encountered before that may seem strange

to me, that challenges for my preconceived notions, my first reaction is not to shout about how this goes against everything Lenin said. My first reaction is to investigate it and to open space for it in my mind, to really turn it around and imagine what it might look like and how it might fit with what I have learned about before. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that's great advice for radical politics, it's also just good life advice. Yeah.

Yeah, especially for engaging with ideas that you are less keen on at the moment or just unaware of. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, my whole thing is if I have a strong gut reaction to something, it might be because it may be hitting a part of me that might be benefiting from that system. I mean, I don't benefit from the system in a lot of respects as a black guy from the Caribbean, but as a man, as in as a cis-het man, I do have privileges that I must be aware of and I can't just be so quick to shut down something that might be a bit uncomfortable.

Yeah. Yeah, I think that's such a valuable thing to keep in mind, especially as a more or less cis white guy, like a significant number of people listening are. If you're uncomfortable by a new idea, is it because the idea is bad or is it because it strikes at an area in which you may not even have thought about being privileged? Like, I'm uncomfortable. Even though I have no intellectual argument against it with the idea of ending our use of cars as they exist, because I love to drive, but that's also heavily rooted in tremendous

privilege on my behalf. American culture and so on. We did talk about that a bit in the opening episodes of season two, the idea that when we had our little utopian ending, the idea that maybe you'd have a car that's communally owned and used for certain tasks, but, you know, the idea of car culture as the center of a city is death. It's just death. When we talk about getting past cars, it's not to say that people will never use vehicles

that move again. Like, obviously we will. They're necessary for some. We're not all going back to horse to run buggies. Yeah. I think one of the last things on like, solar punk and kind of tying into the whole kind of nature of the shows. I really like Andrew, your point on like how solar punk is like an energizing force.

And I feel like we have very few of those on the left and especially on the anarchist left. Like I've had my decent stint of like anarcho nihilism and the problem with that is like, it's very easy. Like anarcho nihilism is one of the easiest ideologies to grasp onto because it validifies all of your bad feelings. But it also it, most of the people who I know who are like real and anarcho nihilism, they're generally not very happy people because it's kind of it's kind of miserable all the time.

And sure, they'll like scoff at like solar punk is like some like greenwashed yogurt commercial like, you know, like utopian thing. But also like it's actually lots of solar punk that we've talked about is like actually about doing specific things. Like it's actually like actually going to do something rather than just being an insurrecto kid or just just, you know, talking about nihilist zines and books on Twitter for all day. I think one of one of your one of my favorite videos of yours is your video on the psychology

of collapse. Yeah, yeah, I think that's one of my my favorites as well. It's really just like a masterpiece and how deep you get into every different type of collapse thinking, because it's not just on the right, not not not not on the left, it's not just whether you're, you know, more, you know, anarchist, more authoritarian, it's like you get into every specific type of thinking that plays into this idea around collapse. And I think if I recommend everyone check out your channel and especially watch your solar punk videos, but specifically on the topic of collapse, you know, part of our show,

we were trying to kind of be a little bit like anti collapse. And I think your video really shows the depth of that topic and how to approach this. Because collapse is a feeling like it's a feeling we all have, and it needs to be interrogated. And I think your video does just a magnificent job interrogating that feeling. Great. Thank you. I can't overemphasize how important that is, because I one of the major failings, there were a number of victories for kind of anarchist thought, particularly within the United States

during the insurrection last year. One of its tremendous defeats is that it has become characterized in a huge number of people's eyes as breaking windows and starting fires. And yeah, that's a lot of that is because the media is trash and is trash at reporting on all of this stuff. But some of it is because a lot of people have let that be their primary praxis. And that, again, I don't care about people breaking windows. I don't care about people lighting dumpster fires.

But if that's what you're presenting to the world as your praxis, that doesn't appeal to people and you have to. You have to remember that anarchism is not just destructive, it is also constructive. Yeah. It's the constructive part we need to be boosting more than ever. And there were some, you know, from the context of Portland, some really strong examples of that last year. The incredible amount of mutual aid that was put together during the fire relief was incredible.

And the Red House, the eviction defense occupation, was a really good repost to, you know, the disaster that was the chas in Seattle, that this was like, this was an area that was temporarily autonomous from the police that did not collapse into violence, that succeeded in its goal and that cleaned up after itself and presented an option for people like, this is how it can look when we try to evict people, you know, this is what can happen. So I think there, I don't want to like be too negative, but I think that a lot of folks because of, for a variety of reasons, you know, the, there's been so much focus on kind of the insurrection, not even that, because I think that building can be insurrectionist.

I think that seed bombing, guerrilla gardening can be profoundly insurrectionist. It's like destruction has an immediate result of making you feel better, right? It has an immediate rush of endorphins and hormones. It makes you happy when you do it. It is, it is an exhilarating act and you feel like you're accomplishing something. Allegedly. What's harder is to like have that same feeling by doing seed bombing, right? By actually like improving your community slowly through these types of like sort of

ideas. They don't have the same immediate emotional reaction. So a lot of people like when they, you know, think about what insurrection is, they can a default to this destructive tendency, which destruction has its time and place. But if that's your only practice, we're not going to improve the world at all. Like, right? That's not going to do anything. There's a helping through, you know, giving out food, helping through giving out socks

and clothes, helping through all of these solar punk ways. These are things that actually like are going to improve things on a tangible level. And they're going to make more people be like, oh, hey, what are these anarchists doing? That's actually interesting versus, oh, what are these anarchists doing? This is stupid. Ignore everything they say. Yeah. You have to remember as well that, you know, there are seeds of solar funk in Kropotkin's

writings, you know, from the Conquest of Bread to Mutual Eid. And those are sort of things that should be just as emphasized as the destructive exhilarating aspects of anarchism. Yeah. There's a line in a Frank Turner song, a couple of lines actually in a song called 1933 that I go back to a lot. But one of them is you can't fix the world if all you have is a hammer. And that's, I guess, what I see is like the primary practical benefit of solar punk just

as an aesthetic as a piece of fiction is getting people to expand their toolbox. Yeah. Get yourself a trowel, you know, some screwdrivers, you know. Yeah. Keep the hammer. You need that sometimes too. But I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the

youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the

world. Listen to the last Soviet on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price.

Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up.

Listen to CSI on trial on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I Heart Podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Did you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me.

Yep, we know that Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll

never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. Let's grab some other tools, expand the toolbox thing is a really great metaphor for all of this type of thing. Yeah. Um, I think that's most of what we're going to get into today. Um, there's a couple of pieces of things I would want to read.

One of them isn't this isn't directly, I think it predates the solar punk, but it, it, uh, I think feeds into some of what I think it emotionally feeds into a lot of what we're talking about here. It's an essay from David Graber called The Shock of Victory, um, which I think is really useful. Ah, that's a good one. Yeah. Um, and I would also recommend, um, Cory Doctorow's new fiction novel, Walk Away, um,

which I think is a really wonderful piece. That was a wonderful, wonderful book. I should have included my recommendations, but it was really great. Yeah. I, I read it recently and it made me, um, it made me feel the way like as a fiction writer that a great piece of fiction should, which is like, I, I felt bad, uh, bad about some of the things that I had written because there's, there's, there's such, there's so much more courage because I wrote a piece of fiction that has some solar punk elements,

has some quasi utopian elements in the dystopia, but I didn't have the courage to kind of go as far as, as Cory did and to imagine a kind of pacifism that he, he has the courage to kind of put into the, into the hands of his, his protagonists. Like I, I really respect that about the book. I mean, the book goes in some very interesting AI directions as well, but yeah, it's, it's got some great shit. Um, and I always enjoy Cory's, uh, Cory's love of Burning Man, um, of what it could be as a kind of what the, what, what some of it's turned into.

But yeah, um, Andrew, is there anything else you wanted to get into before we, uh, we close this out? I just want to remind people to check on your friends, you know, um, we are all going through various stages of collapse as I outlined in my video and you know, we shift between them from time to time. So try not to go through it alone, you know, there's no, there's no I in solar punk. Yeah. Yeah.

Um, check out, uh, St. Andrew on YouTube at St. Andrewism, um, Andrew, is there any, anything else you wanted to kind of plug, uh, from your own, your own, uh, personal work? Yeah. So, um, other than the, you know, the solar punk videos and the collapse videos, I want to remind, sorry, I rather, I want to shout out my video on black anarchism. Uh, I think that is a pretty essential look into, uh, the history of black anarchism in the United States and in the world.

Uh, I also want to recommend, um, my video on the psychology of authoritarianism. Uh, I know a lot of people have family members who, uh, conservative or on the right or maybe leading fascist. And I think that might be helpful for, you know, helping them to, or rather helping you to understand where their mindsets at. And also, you know, check out my video on, uh, proven blitzing. I think that was a pretty fun one as well. It breaks down a lot of, it breaks down how you can go about implementing food forests

or permaculture gardens, wherever you find yourself. Awesome. Um, thank you very much for being on the show, Andrew. Uh, thank you all for listening. We'll be back tomorrow or if this comes out Friday, we'll be back, you know, another day. We'll be back at some point, you know, you know how this works. You understand podcasts. The art world, it is essentially a money laundering business.

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you get your podcasts and make sure you leave a review. Podcast, all right, Chris, you go. So welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that I think for the first time is just me and Robert. This is the very first time that this is happening. You're all here at a moment of legendary significance and historic importance. So try to face it with the requisite awe. That's all I ask.

Yes. And another thing that, man, this is a terrible transition, something else we're facing with requisite awe is weird shortages of goods and price increases. It's fucking rad. It was just at the Asian market today and they did not have the snack chips that I most prefer. Oh, no. Officially a calamity.

We've entered crisis of historic proportion. Yeah, I think, I don't think we're going to live through this one. Nope. We're doomed. We can't look without the Asian snack chips like we're done. It's the ones that are like, they're like pieces of seaweed, but that have been fried in tempura batter, completely out, tragic, absolutely tragic. I think there's a couple of things, I mean, you've got a script, so I'll probably just

let you do that in the not too distant future. But one of the things that's frustrating to me, although maybe it shouldn't be because I'm probably partly responsible for this, is that this is often kind of being talked about by people online as like, oh, it's a sign that society is crumbling. And what they mean by that is that like, oh, we just don't have stuff, like we're not able to like keep up with demand and like the ability to produce these things is crumbling. And it's actually much more complex than that and a lot less rooted in a lack of specific resources and more decisions made under capitalism about how the supply chain would work.

And it's, I don't know, I think it's important because it is, you can say it still is like a situation where this is an example of the system falling apart, but it's not falling apart because we don't have the paper to make toilet paper with. It's falling apart because decisions were made in order to increase the stock prices of companies by reducing the amount of products that they kept on hand. And that's led to an incredibly fragile system that did nothing well but maximize profits. And I think, well, okay, I think there's a couple of things with that that we should talk about.

Yeah. Because there's a lot of different explanations that are floating around for why it's happening. And I think some of them are good, but I think a lot of them are missing part of the story. And I think it's important because like my grandma called me yesterday, like called our family to talk about the supply chain problem because someone had like, she'd been like fed a conspiracy theory that like the shortages were because American dock workers like didn't want to open containers from China. Yeah, it's like, yeah, like this is not what's happening, but it's not like, if

that had happened, it would be like, well, okay, that it does scan. Yeah. Yeah. And I think, yeah. And like, I think this is a moment where, yeah, you know, okay, think things are not working how they're supposed to. And there's a lot of sort of competing stories about it, some of which are good, some of which are bad.

And I think most of the conventional accounts, and Robert was talking about this, you know, even the really good ones, they start with sort of the 80s Wall Street takeover of corporate America and the transformation of all corporate management into an attempt to like raise short term stock prices. And you know, part of this is lead in production. And this is true, and this is sort of true, but this misses about half of the story. And the part of the story that it misses that's really important, and I think is the sort of, it's the broader frame in which all of this is happening in is essentially the story

of how the working class essentially loses the class war in the 60s and 70s. And weirdly, it's also a story about Foucault's boomerang, which you have to be aware of. Hell yeah. Oh, yeah. This is a, this is a long, long. Throw in the music clip that we've all decided is going to be the one we put in whenever someone talks about Foucault's boomerang, which is probably just going to be another time machine noise.

So real quick, credit to Cody. Okay. Continue. Brief refresher on what that is. So basically, Foucault's boomerang is that, okay, if a government does something like repressive, like repressive technique, repressive technology, like in a colony, like in a war somewhere, eventually it'll come back and be used against like the citizens of that country. And yeah.

A great example would be fingerprinting was invented for the British like policing insurgents in Malaysia and has now has come back to every, you know, colonizing nation now uses fingerprinting, which is also deeply flawed as a technology. But anyway. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, and I think most people tend to think about this as armor personnel carriers, but we will eventually get to this.

The boomerang technology here is actually shipping containers, which have done like irreparable damage to the mankind. All right. All right. I'm ready for this. I don't know much about this. Hit me. All right.

I bear with you with this because we're going to talk about two threads. They're going to seem like they have nothing to do with supply chains, and then they're all going to tie together. And it turns out is literally all supply chains. So in the 60s and 70s, you have, you know, in very, very broad general strokes, you have two kinds of class war. The first kind is what I'm sort of very broadly calling the war and the factories. And this is an enormous series of sort of strikes and outright uprisings that stretch

from sort of Detroit to Turin to Tokyo. And the most famous of these is the student sort of worker uprising in May 68 in France. And they, you know, they're close enough taking the country that like French president Charles de Gaulle like flees in a helicopter to in secret and like flees to Germany in secret. And, you know, and that's like a big event, but it sort of fades. What doesn't fade is May 68 in Italy. And you know, it doesn't fade there because Italy has been in the middle of a strike wave since 1962, 64, the whole 60s have basically just been strike waves there.

And, you know, they have their own 1968 and unlike in France where Peter's out in Italy, you get the just incredibly named hot, hot autumn of 69. Which is hell, yeah. Yeah, I'll bet it was a hot autumn. Yeah, it's it's great. And so basically what happens is you get hundreds of thousands of workers go on strike. They start teasing control of their factories. And most of most of this is playing out in the fiat factories as giant car factories

in Italy's industrial triangle. You know, I mean, they're there for like, they're there for a long time, they're into like 1970 and eventually they lose. But you know, Italy is just sort of rocked by conflict and sort of class war stuff. And all of this sort of culminates in yet another enormous uprising in 1977, this one driven like in large part by people who are basically just like, fuck this, I'm not working in the factory anymore. It's awful.

But I think it's something that like, you know, if you're looking at the political landscape, you have a bunch of people who are going like, fuck this, I'm not going to go like die in these factories anymore. And yeah, those people all have, in a lot of cases, safer employing situations than many people today. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's starting to get worse than which is why people are frustrated.

But like, there were pinches. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, you know, and this is sort of interesting because there's a kind of like, a Vicky Osterweil I've had on here, it calls it, it calls it like the monkey's paw thing where it's like people in the 70s in Italy wanted like autonomy and like freedom from work. And so what capitalism gave them was like, oh, we'll give you autonomy, we'll just make you all contract workers.

And now like, yeah, you don't have to like wake up every morning and like go to a job in the factory and leave at five or whatever. But now you just, you know, you're a contract worker, so you just have no stability whatsoever. And that's your autonomy. But you know, this is really bad for the Italian ruling class. Like they almost lose control of Italy three times in 10 years. And after 1977, they're just like, fuck this. And I mean, they start just start doing mass arrests, they imprison like tens of thousands

of people, they torture a bunch of people. And you know, but it becomes clear that like pure political repression is like not going to be enough to like just destroy the section of the working class movements that, you know, God help you thinks that you should like run production for themselves. And so they start looking elsewhere for answers. And the place they find these answers weirdly enough is in the second set of wars that are going on in this period, which are the sort of national liberation wars. And you know, these are the national liberation wars are these are full scale, but these aren't

sort of a class war metaphors. These are, you know, this is this is Guinea Bissau, this is Algeria. And you know, importantly for our purposes, the US fights two of them, which is Korea and Vietnam. Now Korea and Vietnam are strategically really bad places for the US to fight wars. Like the other side of the world, which, you know, it makes it more difficult to do war crimes because, you know, if you're firebombing a village, right, you have to be able to move firebombs, jet fighters and like oil and rations to the other side of the world.

And this is hard. A lot easier when they can commit war crimes and like, I don't know, Duluth. Yeah. Yeah. Well, like even even like, you know, you got to commit a war crime in Mexico. It's like, okay, you just send a bunch of people over the border. Oh, it'd be so easy to commit war crimes in Mexico. Yeah.

And really, really up our war crime quotient. Well, I always say, we do do a lot of war crimes in Mexico. It's just that like, they're done basically by proxies. That's true. We've killed like, we've killed like a million people there in the last like 20 years in the war on drugs. But yeah, you know, so the US, you know, the US, okay, so it has this logistics problem and logistics problem is that it can't do war crimes enough.

And so it comes up with a couple of solutions to them. One of them is essentially they rebuild the whole Japanese economy in order to use Japan industrial base to fight the war in Korea. And then after the war in Korea ends, they rebuild the South Korean economy in order to, you know, fight the war in Vietnam. And this works, but it doesn't solve the problem that, you know, okay, even if you're, you know, you have an industrial base in Japan, right, you still need to be able to efficiently move things by sea to Korea.

And you know, you still need to still supplies, you need to move from the US. And so the solution for this is containerized shipping. And containerized shipping. This is the pivot point upon which the entire history of the 20th century and everything that's happened in the 21st century hinges on, like this, this is the pivot. And I, you know, like, I'm not even, this isn't even really an exaggeration because it turns out that like the ability to have uniform boxes that you can stack on top of each other like Legos and put on a ship is like, like, it's like comparable to the nuclear

bomb in terms of how important it is, which is a really weird thing to say. The only way to get things from A to B was a big wooden ship filled with doubloons, like piled bags and stuff. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know, how did we like global commerce work before shipping containers? What did we, what did we literally, like, you just like, sometimes, sometimes you would just like physically, people would just pick up the items and put them on the ship or they

would like, sometimes they put them in boxes or like you would like strap them to like the top of the ship and so with trains a lot, they would just like strap like machinery like onto a train car. And this was like not, this is like really inefficient. It's really slow. Yeah. So the U.S., in order to like do war crimes in Korea, and then, you know, it is like, oh, hey, what if we just make metal boxes?

And then they get, they progressively get better and better at it because, you know, they have to go do more war crimes in Vietnam. And by the time you're getting to the end, yeah, yeah, you know, look, lots of war crimes that do, you need good logistics networks to do all of these war crimes. I mean, it makes sense that that's where you got shipping containers, but I didn't realize I had just assumed it would have come out of the shipping industry as opposed to like, we got to get more missiles over to these places. Yeah.

Well, this is the interesting thing. We'll get to this in a bit, but basically like a lot of the logistics revolution stuff either comes out of the military or is developed by ex-fascists. And a lot of the reason for this is, okay, I mean, this is, you know, the 60s and 70s, there's still R&D happening, like there's still actual research and development, but the military is doing just an enormous amount of the research and development for all of global capitalism. And you know, and the other thing that's what's happening here, you know, this is the sort

of Foucault's boomerang thing is that, you know, so the containerized shipping logistics stuff that had been used to just like obliterate the global south suddenly starts spreading again to capital, like, you know, just into like broader shipping because people look at this and they're like, oh, this is efficient. And then the contracting companies the US is using just turns into the solution to both sort of the war and the factories are talking about in Europe and the US and in like Japan itself. And then also to the solution of the national liberation movements and sort of like communism

in East Asia, because, you know, okay, so you have this question, right? The US, like, we kind of fight to a draw in Korea, like we kill a enormous number of people, right? Yeah, about 20% of the North Korean population. Yeah. Yeah. And like, yeah, but we don't really win, right? Like we can't actually defeat the Chinese army or yeah, and, you know, and we lose Vietnam.

And so the question is, okay, so like, how are we going to stop communism? And the answer, it turns out, is to just integrate integrate the communist countries into the capitalist supply chain. And I mean, there's a lot of examples of this, like Margaret Thatcher, for example, is like very good buddies with Nikolai Chuchescu. Oh, that's nice. It's nice that they could be friends, despite the fact that they, well, I guess they weren't really that different as people.

No, not really. Like, basically, basically, the difference is that Chuchescu lost and thus got like murdered on, say, television. Margaret Thatcher won. He got the shit murdered out of him. And got a state finial. Yeah, she should have. Yeah.

The Chuchescu treatment. Yeah. That's why officials stands. They should have chowed Chuchescu. Yes. I mean, for stuff we will talk about in a bit, but yes, but you know, the archetypal example of this is actually China. And you know, there's a lot of various sort of skill diplomatic work by Kissinger.

And also the US, like throughout the 70s, just like they're just like sending entire factories to China, like like they'll take an entire factory, break it down, put it in boxes and then just like ship it to China. Great. It's a time. And yeah. So, yeah, they're just like sending technology to China. And the end result of this is that, you know, China goes from like fighting American troops

with like, like doing bayonet charges, like mass human wave shit. Yeah. Yeah. Nightmare. Yeah. I mean, just like, yeah, to, to, you know, being an American ally and like invading Vietnam as a way to like stick it to the Soviets, basically. And so, you know, so the US essentially just integrates China into the global supply chain

and they eventually they do the same thing to Vietnam, which again is another country that they couldn't defeat militarily. But what they, you know, what they actually to beat them with is the shipping container. And before the shipping container, this would have been impossible, right? Like basically it was too inefficient and too expensive. Like the cost of shipping was too high to have all of this production, you know, like some half your parts made in China, some of them made in India, some of them made in like Japan, some of them made in Korea and then shipped them all around the world, which is

how the modern system works. But with containerized shipping, suddenly shipping is really cheap. And it becomes much cheaper to pay shipping costs than it is to pay labor costs. And this is the solution to the sort of war in the factories. You know, if workers start making too much noise about pay or like, again, God forbid start talking about like taking control of factories and running them democratically like some kind of anarchist monsters, corporations could just move the factories overseas. And this becomes an incredibly effective way to just destroy the labor movement because

any time, you know, organized labor starts making demands, you can be like, well, okay, sorry, we're just going to pack up and we're going to, you know, we're going to go to China, we're going to go to somewhere else. And this coincides with, you know, the thing that gets talked about a lot in the conventional accounts, which is the Wall Street sort of corporate takeover, well, the Wall Street takeover of corporate America, which is something I think that sounds really weird to us now. But you know, the whole, the whole story here is really interesting and extremely long. And if you want to like, have a very detailed account of how this all played out, the book

liquidated by Karen Ho is just incredible, like ethnography and history of Wall Street. She like, Karen Ho is an anthropologist and she like, went and worked on Wall Street and like did ethnography there for a bit. And it is very interesting stuff, but it's kind of outside of our scope. So the very, very, very short version is that the Wall Street bankers basically figure out a way to just like buy out corporations, to like raise a bunch of money and just entirely buy out corporations. And then once they have the corporation, right, what, what, what, you know, this is corporate

rating. So they, they, they loot all the assets, they sell it off and they try to sell off their stock at a higher price. So the process of this is sort of complicated, but the net result of this is that Wall Street completely takes over the corporate world in a way they hadn't before. Like the Wall Street, the Wall Street, like finance people are now, you know, they're the people making all the decisions and, you know, and, and their, their only goal is to raise the stock price.

Like that's, that's the only thing they care about. They don't even care about making money, right? If you lose money and your stock price still rises, like you don't care. And those guys start looking at a lot of the things that had existed in corporations before that, things like pensions, particularly things like research and development. They look at it and go, okay, why are we spending money on R&D? Like this, this doesn't, this doesn't raise our stock price. This doesn't have any immediate short-term value.

So they cut it, right? They start cutting pensions. They start essentially just destroying the unions. And you know, and because this is happening at the same time as corporations really like get the ability to outsource for the first time, you know, they, they, they lean into it and they start essentially, we're just just slashing the line of people who work for the company. Right.

And so, you know, and so instead of having direct employees, they, they start working with contractors and they start moving the contractors overseas and, you know, and this, this is where we get to sort of this whole outsourcing wave because, you know, something I, I don't think I talked about enough without sourcing is why actually are the labor costs lower in the countries that these people are moving their factories to? And part of it is, you know, people talk about development, like they're moving to undeveloped countries and, you know, part of, part of, part of development is just, you know, how much technological capacity their manufacturing system has, right?

And that, you know, but, but the other part of it is that if you remove your production to say Columbia, right, or like, you know, you're investing in sort of like cocoa bean farming in Columbia and people try to do union organizing, you can hire desquads to murder them. Yeah. And yeah, yeah, it's like, you can basically just sort of like, you can, you can outsource the violence and you can, you can, you know, the, the, the corporate term for it is reducing labor costs, but really what you're doing is just like murdering people with desquads

and terrorizing them. And you know, that, that does lower labor costs, right? But, you know, I think there's, there's another example of this, like this is a lot of what like the killing at Tiananmen was really about. It was, you know, not so much in Tiananmen Square itself, I talked about this elsewhere, but like the workers that they kill outside of the square, like a lot of the reason they're doing this. I know very little about Tiananmen Square, other than like protesters, China, government

bad, the guy stands up to tank and then yeah, yeah, I, I, I, I, I've, I, I, I, I, I, I, I talked about this elsewhere more than like the, the, the very short version is, so there's a bunch of students in the square, right? And the students in the square itself, like basically they, they kind of want democracy and mostly they want like market reforms to go faster, but then outside of the square, you know, like Beijing's like whole working class shows up and there's these enormous demonstrations. They, they, they basically start like, like barricading like blocks and blocks and blocks

and like this radius outside of the street and you get this sort of like mini commune thing and those guys are like, you know, like they're, they're, they're advocating for democracy in the factory, like they're, you know, they're, they're talking about things like, like, they're, they're, like, you know, they, they, they, they, they have their like marks out and they're talking about how like they're, they're, they're calculating the rate of surplus value that's being extracted from them by the capitalists and those are the people, like almost everyone who dies at Tiananmen is, is from those guys, like those are the people that they just get massacred and, you know, and, and the reason that happens is that the CCP is looking at

this and is like, okay, this, this is, this is like, this, this is sort of, this is the return of organized labor and we need to destroy it before it like gets anywhere. And so if they do and organize labor and trying to just implode, I mean, it was already pretty weak because you have a lot of state-controlled unions, but I mean, now it's just nothing. And you know, and, and, and there, I mean, there have been attempts to do labor organizing in China sort of recently and like, yeah, this used to be just arrest everyone, right? And so, you know, this, this is how you, this is, this is the price of cheap labor, right? It's just incredible state repression.

But this is also, you know, and this is, this is sort of like macro scale thing of why the supply chains suck because everyone talks about like the efficiency of the supply chains, but the supply chains aren't deficient, they make no sense, right? If what you're trying to do is move something quickly from points A to point B, they make no sense because, you know, the supply chains are spread all over the world. Like in individual parts are being made in six countries, right? You have like people will like for tax dodged purposes, like they'll have one part of a component built in one country and then they'll move it to another country to have another

part of it. And then they'll ship all of it to Mexico and they'll ship it across the border and they'll have the whole thing be assembled in the US so you, they can say it was made in the US. Like there's, there's all of these things that are just, just nonsense, right? They're not, they're not efficient at all. It's completely ridiculous. It's just, you know, it's just completely absurd web.

And the reason why it's designed like this is as a giant sort of kind of uncertainty thing. Like the reason, the reason supply chains are just bad is because they're, you know, they're not designed to move things. They're designed as an instrument to just like solve the problem of class power, right? But they're, they're, they're designed to destroy unions or designed to make sure that nobody ever sort of like gets any ideas about wages to make sure nobody gets any ideas about like taking anything.

And so, you know, but this, this, this can work for a while. The problem is again, like they're not efficient. Like it's just, it just, it is not efficient to like move, have everything made in like six countries and then you have to assemble them somewhere else. And so, you know, in order. It's efficient in the sense that it efficiently maximizes the value of stock prices for like stock buybacks and stuff. And that's generally what is meant by like efficiency in that sense is like, what makes

the 70 people who actually own this company the most money, that's the efficient thing. But it's horribly inefficient in every practical sense of the word. And this is kind of an interesting change because I mean, you know, this isn't to say that like the supply chains that work before this were like better because they also sucked in a lot of their own ways, but all of the like efficiency stuff that we're about to talk about with just just in time production, et cetera, et cetera. Like you know, what isn't produced just in time, sorry, but it is an ad break time. Yeah.

They're not produced just in time anymore because the supply chain is falling apart. It's our sponsors. Yeah. That's what that is. Our promise about our sponsors is that they're, they're not at all in time. Who knows when they'll get your products to you. There's no way to tell. It's impossible to know.

We're back. Yeah. We're back to talk about how, you know, having, having developed an entire network of extremely inefficient supply chains that just absolutely suck and don't make any sense. People tried to make them efficient and this, this is where we go back to Japan because Japan, you know, I guess this is, this is the other Foucault's boomerang, which is that, you know, okay. So we industrialized Japan in order to like fight our colonial wars, right?

But then, you know, this turns into this huge like Pikachu face moment when Japan suddenly starts like industrializing more efficiently than the US does. Yeah. It's very funny. And then Michael Crichton writes a bunch of books that are the premise of all of them is Japan's scary. Yeah. It's really funny.

Yeah. You know, like it's interesting. It's sort of interesting thing here, which is that like all of the panic around China, there was exactly the same panic like around Japan in the 70s and 80s, exactly the same, like right down to like a bunch of socialists going like, hey, look, this, this is a model for anti capitalism. Like people, people said that about the Japanese model and it's like, it's all, it's all the same thing.

It's just, it's just happening again. But you know, what, what, what, what, what Japan did and specifically what Toyota does is create this thing called the Toyota production system, which eventually becomes known as just in time production, and this, if you've read anything about sort of the modern supply chain problems, you've almost certainly heard of just in time production or, or lean production and just in time in lean production are technically different, but the differences don't matter for us. So yeah, and this stuff is derived from what Toyota was sort of doing in the post war era.

And basically the goal of it is you're, you're never supposed to have any inventory that's just sitting there. So the whole system's supposed to be constantly, the whole system's supposed to be constantly in motion. So you have parts come in, they get put into the, immediately get put into the production line and the finished products immediately shipped out to the stores. And you know, the theory is that the stores are only going to carry exactly enough product to meet demand.

And it's supposed to be quote unquote flexible, which means that it can like react to shifts and consumer taste and demand by like increasing or decreasing production and it can't do this. This is what we've been seeing for the entirety of COVID, which is that, you know, this is why every time there's a run on toilet paper, everyone runs out of toilet paper because it turns out that these systems can't, even a 10% increase just completely obliterates this entire system and it just collapses and can't produce enough toilet paper. Yeah, and again, just because it's expensive to store things, it's pricey. This is a big part of like why actually the John Deere strike, which has the potential

to disrupt the status quo more than, more than any strike in recent history is so potent because John Deere tractors are kind of a necessary part of the agriculture industry, not just their ability to sell new tractors, but their ability to repair the extant tractors. Like if harvest season comes around and there's not spare parts to repair tractors that break, like food doesn't get harvested. It's a significant issue. John Deere, we'll talk more about this in another date, but like not only did the most that they could do to squeeze their employees, to suck out pensions, to cut, you know, expenditures

on wages, but they set up their factories in such a way that there was no extra space. So they could not scale up any of these factories to increase demand when they needed to. So that now that John Deere's going on strike, if they lose a month of productivity, they can't ever catch up. It's impossible because they can't actually expand the productive capacity of their factories. And because the strike is hitting, they didn't have any extra spare parts lying around. So if shit gets broken, they can't manufacture the parts necessary to keep tractors functioning in a lot of American farms because they didn't store anything because that was not the most

efficient thing for the economic bottom line of the CEO who gets $160 million a year. Yeah. And this is the funny part about this whole thing, which is that, you know, okay, so this whole supply chain system was based around just like destroying, destroying the organized working class, right? But it's like they were so successful at it that they've like turned around and fucked themselves with it because like, you know, this is the thing about the John Deere strike, right?

It used to be, you know, back, back, back, if you look at like, like how, how the unions were broken in the 80s or like if you look at like the giant like auto strikes you'd have in the 70s, right? And companies still do this to this day, but like, they're worse at it. The thing they would do is so, okay, so you, you know, if you're a company, you know roughly when a strike is going to happen, right? And the reason you know when a strike is going to happen is because in the U.S., like the way labor law works is that like you can, you can basically only strike like when a

contract is up. I mean, you can do Wildcats, but it's illegal. But you know, okay, so they knew that the auto unions, for example, we're about to go, we're going to go on strike when, when the contract like was, was coming up and you know, they'd have spies and you can get a sense of like, you know, okay, so are, are, are, how likely are they to, to do this strike? And you know, so, so that, that, that lets you do things like build up an enormous sort of inventory of spare parts and it lets you build up an inventory of supplies and it lets

you build up, you know, it basically, it lets you build up the capacity you need to outlast a strike, but the problem with just in time is they can't do that anymore because yeah, they've, they've, you know, they've completely fucked themselves by, by, they, they, yeah. And in the John Deere situation, because they hadn't strike, the workers hadn't gone on strike since 86. Yeah. They'd been putting funds into their strike survival fund for years, but the company had nothing like has, yeah, um, it's right and this is, you know, this, this is the other

part of, of, of why everything like good that's happening right now is happening is that they, they, they, in, you know, they, we, everything has circled back around and suddenly all of these companies are, you know, we are incredibly vulnerable to strikes again because yeah, as you're talking about the, the just in time production thing, it only works if, if everything actually comes in on time, right, like if, if, if any, if any individual part is late, the whole system starts to fall apart and then, and then you can't repair it. And yeah, you know, and there's, there's a lot of ways that, that this, this, this can be very bad.

Um, you know, we've talked about the John Deere, we've talked about the labor stuff. Uh, the other big thing that's happening is COVID, which has happened and continues to happen and has killed off just enormous parts of the working class. I mean, it was like four million dead worldwide or something. And again, that, that's also probably an undercount because that's just direct. That's not like, yeah. It's probably like twice that. I mean, we're looking at a minimum of 725,000 to the U S and again, that's probably a million

undercounted at least. Yeah. It's, it's a horror show, right? And the people they killed with that, you know, like, especially in the initial phases, like it was just, it was just, they took a chain, chain saw to the working class. And those are a bunch of people who, you know, they're, they're not replaceable. They're, they're very highly skilled and they do a bunch of jobs that absolutely suck. And now, you know, and one of, one of the places that this, this has caused a bunch

of problems is, is in the ports because the other thing that this entire supply chain relies on is being able to very quickly and cheaply move parts from, you know, China to the U S, from China to Mexico, from like Bangladesh to like Somalia, you have, you have, you have to be able to continuously like keep moving stuff around in, in, you know, you have to continuously keep moving ships around and you also have to be able to load and unload them. And we, you know, we, we saw like there, there was the, the, that when that ship got stuck in the Suez, there is that whole, yeah, that, you know, that, that was,

Yeah, sex asses were, uh, where people couldn't get sex asses because the, the world supply of sex asses for months was on that one ship. Um, it was a real crisis for the sex ass community. Those are plastic asses that you have sex with if you're curious. Yeah, it's, the world appears as an immense collection of commodities, some of which are sex asses. Yeah. Most of which in terms of the ones that matter are sex asses.

Yes. You know, sex ass industrial complex is really the lynchpin of global capital, but please continue. Yeah. Well, you know, the sex ass industrial complex falls apart and you know, and it's not just the ship being stuck in the Suez, like made everything way worse, right? And, and was very funny. Yeah, it was, it was extremely funny.

It was extremely funny. The part, the thing that's like not very funny is that like, okay, so in order to get any of this to work, right, you have to have a bunch of longshoremen who have to unload all of this shit. And you know, one of, one of the problems that is, that is happening in the sort of global supply chain right now is that the ships can't be unloaded fast enough. And part of this is like, this job sucks and people just, a lot of people don't want to do it.

A lot of people died. Yeah. And it's causing this huge problem. And there's, and there's, there's another, you know, if you want to take like the macro perspective about this, it's that this whole system is relying on logistics workers. And so it also needs, you know, you need truck drivers. And we're coming back and, you know, in the U.S. is like, there's, yeah, you know, there's a sort of a truck drivers now because again, their job sucks and they've been like just

absolutely screwing these people over for decades and decades and decades now and turning them into subcontractors, just not paying them. And, you know, and this, and when, you know, when the, when the port shut down, like not even shut down, like when the ports are behind unloading stuff and when the trucks, like that is supposed to be moving this stuff, there aren't enough of them and like the, the cost of that increases, it, it throws off the whole system. And that's, that's another big part of like why this whole thing is, is sort of imploding. And it's interesting because I remember this, there was like a decade where like every other

article will be talking about how they were going to like automate like truck driving. And it was like, ah, the truck drivers are all going to go out of business because they're going to automate. It just never happened at all. And the same thing with, with, you know, there's, I mean, there's been some port optimization, but like not in the scale that, you know, actually does anything. And part of the reason for that is, you know, I was talking about people not investing in the research developments.

Yeah. So the biggest people who aren't doing that are the shipping companies. And that's a good time because a shipping company, basically like container shipping has been taken over by what's essentially just like a monopoly of two companies. And those two companies make just an indescribable amount of money. They have like a thousand percent profits and they just pay it all out as dividends. And so they're not, you know, they're not investing in any port infrastructure. They're not investing automation.

They're just pocketing the money. And that means that, you know, we have all this. And they're spending in the case of John Deere, which I keep going back to a bunch of money lobbying to make it illegal for farmers to repair their tractors. Yeah. Yeah. They're, you know, they figured, they figured out that like the easiest way to make money is just get the state to shake people down for you.

It's like, eh, fuck, like investing in making anything that we have better. Let's just, you know, like, let's just turn the state into a debt collector. And, and it's interesting because this is the part of the supply chain crisis that like Biden's been focusing on. But Biden's plan, Biden's plan is great. Biden's plan is literally make the longshoremen work harder. So his plan is, and there we go. There we go.

There we go. There we go. Building back better, baby. Yeah. We're going to, we're going to make, we're going to keep the ports open 24 hours a day, seven days a week and like make people work weekends now. And then he also got FedEx, Walmart and UPS to do a 24 hour, seven day a week shipping. So yeah, the solution is literally just like feed more workers into a grinder and make

them work longer, which is, which is great. And, and, you know, we'll not in any way backfire. No, it's fine. I don't even think we should be talking about it. No, it's great. It's going to, it's, it's, yeah, it's, you know, but again, like this is something like this won't work and like it can't. And the reason it won't work is that like part of the reason there's a shortage is that,

you know, it's, it's, it's not, it's not just about the, like the fact that people aren't paying enough. It's about the fact that these jobs are just awful. Like you have people, you have people working like 12 hour shifts that started like 6 a.m. and then they have to wake another 12 hour shift eight hours later and they just keep having to do this over and over and over again. And it's, well, and they don't like the way that these shifts are usually put on them is that like you'll find out when you come in that instead of working 6 a.m. to 4 p.m.

or whatever, they're actually going to need you to stay until eight and then they're going to need you to come in. By the way, you're going to need to come in like two hours early tomorrow. So you realize that like in between your two shifts, you have a total of eight hours to get home and sleep. And if you say no, well, the idea is that if you say no, like you won't have the job, it's required. Now the reality is that most of these companies are also pretty desperate to have these workers

and a lot of these manufacturing and packing firms that takes time to train people up and then they quit a couple of weeks in because the work is miserable and the schedule is fucking miserable. And it's, yeah, it's all, it's simultaneously like deeply inhuman, but also is leading to a situation. There's a reason why there's so many strikes on right now is that there is opportunity because in sort of the chasing of short-term profits, a lot of these fucking oligarchs have exposed themselves in a pretty vulnerable position.

Yeah. And I think, you know, this is coming back to a sort of, the other way that when there was a crisis in the 60s, 70s, the other way they solved this was just authoritarianism. It was, you know, this is the Pinochet solution, right, like, oh, like workers are using control compromise. Okay, we'll just shoot them. Mm-hmm. Right.

Oh no, we're out of workers. And yeah, they're finally running into a point where, you know, this is the solution they've been trying to do now with this crisis is, you know, they're relying on the fact that just the workplace is just indescribably authoritarian. I mean, it's like, it's a dictatorship on a scale that is like, even to like the most despotic absolute monarch is just like unimaginable. Like your boss gets to control like when you shit, like they get to control when you eat, they get to control exactly what you're doing, like at all times, they get to control when

you do it, they get to control, like when the next time you're going to do it is they don't even have to tell you when it's going to be until like you show up. And you know, for this is, this is, this has been the gamble for, for, you know, capitalism the entire existence, which is that like you just have to take this and eat shit, or they get to take away your ability to eat, get medical care and have a place to live to live. But that's not true anymore. Like you can just say no, you can tell them to fuck off, you can, you know, you can, you can, you can organize a union, you can just fucking just leave your job, like just leave

it. Fucking walk out. Yeah, this is why we focus, I mean, this is number one why within the context of union strike funds are so important, but also a mutual aid is so important is that it potentially when organized well enough provides people with the option to like, well, how are you going to feed yourself? Well, there's people in my community who want to make sure that I'm fed because they believe in what I'm striking for.

That's the promise of all of that. That's the practical behind the kind of high minded, you know, anarchist, just, you know, whatever, theorizing is the ability that like, well, this actually is a weapon too. Yeah. And I think. You know what else is a weapon, Chris are probably, I hope we're not sponsored. Some of them. I hope we are, Chris.

Yeah. Look, look, I've said before for weapons, I'll read any ad for a weapons manufacturer as long as they send me some weapons. So come on, guys, get on it. You could, you could be, you could be in the middle of this conversation, Raytheon, you know, send me a couple of missile guidance chips Lockheed Martin, you know, you want to give me an F 35, we'll, we'll plug you, you know, that's, that's, that's the deal. That's how it works, baby.

All right, we're back. Hopefully, hopefully you have now heard the advertisement for knife missile to knife missile harder now with like five knives, a thing that I am not making up and actually exists. Yeah. Now people keeping surprised that the R 9 X is a real thing. Yeah. But there's another one. There's, there's, there's, there's one with more knives.

They put more knives. Yeah. What are you, you're not getting. Again, you can't, it's like with Apple products, right? Planned obsolescence is a critical. You have to, you can't just rest on your laurels. You're going to run out of money. So you got to make another knife missile with a couple of more knives.

Yeah. Just keep, keep adding knives. Nothing can ever go wrong. Do not ask any questions about why you're developing knife missiles. Please send me one. Send me one and like a drone or three swear to God, I'll use it for legal purposes. Yeah. So I guess the last thing that I, that's really interesting about this moment that doesn't

usually happen is that, you know, okay, so if you, if you, if you, if you read your very basic marks, right, one of the things Marx talks about is that there's this thing called the reserve army of labor, which is, it's just like, you know, there's a bunch of people who are just always unemployed and they, they, they get along by doing sort of like odd jobs of like, you know, I, like my, my, my quintessential person for this is like, if you ever go on a subway, there's, you know, it's, it's, it's the guy selling candy bars in the subway. Yeah. Right.

It's people who quasi-legal, you know, sometimes you know, right? Yeah. They're just kind of like doing whatever, you know, great. We call them in, in the West coast, you have a lot of those like, yeah, people who trim marijuana for a couple of months and then just kind of like crashing, you know, campsites the rest of the year or whatever. Like, yeah, there's a bunch of those folks for sure. Yeah.

And, you know, I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories, but there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart.

And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful

lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all

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And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life.

Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts and like the number of these people who've been just like kicked out of like the formal labor system has been increasing for a long time. But what's interesting about this moment is that, you know, every, every strike you see has a second strike behind it.

And that strike is, is, is the informal general strike, which is just again, people just quitting their jobs and leaving. And you have this weird moment where normally the sort of the reserve army of labor is this thing that like capitalism can always sort of rely on as a way to sort of solve its problems because it's like, oh, well, all right, if you're not going to do this job, we can bring another person. But, you know, this, this is a weird moment where like the reserve army of labor is like fighting on our side.

And the fact that all of these people are just like, you know, they're seeing the just incredible authoritarianism of these workplaces, the just horrific abuse, the fact that, you know, they're being in a lot of cases just asked to show up and die. And they're saying, no, is a really sort of, is a really incredibly powerful thing. And when you add that to the fact that, you know, all these companies have completely screwed themselves with how they design the supply chains, or it's all, it's all come back around. And suddenly all the supply chain stuff that they'd carefully laid out over decades and

decades and decades is a way to just like break the union movement and make sure nobody ever asks for more wages, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's been revealed to be incredibly fragile and, you know, weak to our attack. And that leads us, I think, to this other tension in Biden's plan to sort of like revive the economy, which is that so the US, technically speaking, has this like very large central planning capability, but it only has it to like build weapons. So you know, like the army has this incredible ability, like there's a lot of bullets, you know, despite the huge stress on the bullet supply chain, it really has scaled, you know,

the prices have increased, but we're still, still, still getting bullets. America's great at making bullets, yeah, it's great at keeping tractors working, but yeah, it won't be a problem. Yeah. Then you're like, even if you remember at the beginning of the pandemic, it was like the US just couldn't produce masks. And we, we never, we never like did that, right? Like the, like the government never at any point was like, we're just going to make masks

and give them to people. Like they just never did it. And so, you know, our mass supply chain, all the supply chains suck. And the only way that like the states can intervene and get the supply chains to work is by doing one of two things. It's by either doing a thing Biden was doing, which is just go to a bunch of companies and tell them to make all of their workers work harder, which is the thing that like, you know, totally won't backfire or explode in his face.

And then the second thing is for Biden basically to like do all this saber rattling about how we have to have like medical supply chains in the US because national defense or something. And that's the second thing he's trying to do. But you know, that just, that just makes the problem worse, right? Because once you, once you lose the ability to outsource, you lose the hammer you've been beating the unions with. And so, you know, all of the sort of, all of the tendencies that are, you know, making things like bad and scary right now are also weirdly making this, you know, the fact that

prices are rising, right? The fact that there's all these shortages, it's making this like the best moment to, you know, it's making this the best moment that anyone's had in ages to actually try to make something better. And the important thing is we're starting to see it happen. And yeah, and we're going to talk more about striketober and sort of the strike wave in the coming, you know, weeks and months, but yeah, we're going to be hitting this pretty hard even just next week.

We have a lot of stuff in the pipeline, kind of wish we'd gotten to it earlier, but there's a lot of stuff to talk about in the world happening that's within our milieu. It turns out when your specific focus is things falling apart, you're always behind on covering all of the things that are falling apart. But I think it is a good time to drive this to a close, to drag this episode out behind the farm, the barn, and shoot it and bury it in a shallow grave and break its bones with a hammer so that the police can't identify it. Chris, thank you for putting this together.

Got anything else to say? Quit your job and or unionize your workplace and or take it over and run it yourselves because Lord knows the people who are telling you what to do just literally do not care if you die. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, with that. Oh, sorry.

No, no, no, no. I'm just going to, I don't know what I was going to do, Chris. I don't know what I was going to do. Go do something. You know, you're listening to things. Go do something. Yeah. And yeah.

And if you want to listen to us, do more things. We are... Allegedly. Allegedly. We are at Coolzone Media on the Twitter and the Instagram. You can't prove that in court. It's true. Good luck.

Good luck to them trying to prove that we did this. Yeah. That's right, motherfuckers. All right. Bye. Bye. Bye. I call the union hall, I say it's a matter of life and death.

I think these people are planning to kill Dr. King. On April 4th, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King was shot and killed in Memphis. A petty criminal named James Earl Ray was arrested. He pled guilty to the crime and spent the rest of his life in prison. Case closed. Right? James Earl Ray was a pawn for the official story. The authorities would parade over, we found a gun that James Earl Ray bought in Birmingham

that killed Dr. King, except it wasn't the gun that killed Dr. King. One of the problems that came out when I got the Ray case was that some of the evidence, as far as I was concerned, did not match the circumstances. This is the MLK tapes. The first episodes are available now. Listen on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Give us your attention. We need everything you got fast, waiting on reparations to be the endless podcast.

Tune in every Thursday, politics and wordplay. We fight for the people because they got us in the worst way. From the hill to Brazil Bombay to Can't Yeh. From the left on clave to what the neocons say. Every Thursday cop the heady conversation and break us off with some break as we're waiting on reparations. Listen to Waiting on Reparations on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Remember your New Year's resolution to be more productive with the Before Breakfast podcast. In each Bite Size Daily episode, Time Management and Productivity expert Laura Vanderkem teaches you how to make the most of your time, both at work and at home. These are the practical suggestions you need to get more done with your day. Just as lifting weights keeps our bodies strong as we age, learning new skills is the mental equivalent of pumping iron. Listen to Before Breakfast, wherever you get your podcasts. Excellent work, Chris.

That's good. That's good. That's the kind of atonal grunting that people have come to expect from the introductions of my podcasts. I was hoping it wouldn't be that, but then it was so bad that it was great. No, Sophie. I love it. That's our...

Thrilled. That's our brand now. It can't be anything else. We've established it. Look, nobody else is doing that. The Come Town guys, I assume, aren't atonally grunting to start their podcast. I don't know, actually, but I assume not. What is this podcast, Chris?

I guess this is just how we start. It could happen here is a podcast. You don't sound like you believe it. Enthusiastically, Chris, with feeling. This is a podcast about things happening here. It's about things falling apart. Yeah, excellent. That's how we do it.

What are we talking about today? One of the things that is happening here as we have discussed briefly in previous episodes is a bunch of strikes. With us today to talk about one of these strikes, specifically the Kellogg Strike, is Mel Bewer, an independent researcher, educator, and freelance journalist based in Omaha, Nebraska, where this particular strike is taking place, who has done a lot of journalism previously on the local protest and uprising in the street in 2020, and is also researching and writing a book on alternative media.

Hi. Hello. What's up? Welcome to the show. Thanks. Strikes. Strikes, apparently, is what's up. It is.

Strikes. We're doing strikes. Strike wave, baby. Yee. Yee. So this specific strike, can you walk us through a bit about how we got to the point where this Kellogg's factory is on strike? Well, first off, it's four plants.

It's all for American Kellogg's cereal plants have gone on strike. The workers in these plants are represented by the Bakery Confectionary Tobacco Workers in Green Millers International Union. I do love that Bakery's and Tobacco Workers are in the same union. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Yeah.

Yeah. So their contract was up for renegotiation in 2020, actually. And due to a series of weird things happening, they pushed the negotiations to 2021. They renegotiate their contract every five years. And at stake this year was a sort of pushing back against a recently introduced two-tier employment system that they company sort of strong armed the union into in 2015, which essentially is not, it's not a good deal for anyone. In 2015, they pushed in this sort of two-tier system where one tier is a lower transitional

tier and one tier is a legacy or full-time employee tier. And what it is is, you know, it amounts to a difference of 12 bucks an hour and less benefits. Yeah, that's significant. Yes. Yes. Dan Osborne recently did an interview with Max Alvarez at Working People podcast and he really kind of talked about exactly what was going on there.

And you know, there's 1400 people who work in four plants. There's about 480 employees at the Omaha plant, which has been around for decades. And essentially what this tier system does is it's capped at 30% of their union workforce. And the whole idea is as these full-time employees retire or quit, then these transitional employees will sort of be funneled into the full-time tier, right? Over the last five years, it hasn't really happened really at all. There was a bad deal from the start, according to many of the workers, who sort of felt like they, you know, they were backed into a wall because Kellogg's was threatening to

close the Memphis plant if they didn't ratify this negotiated contract. So rather than experience, you know, 500 layoffs in Memphis, they just agreed to it. So they knew going to the negotiating table in 2021 and 2020 that they were going to try and sort of walk that back. Because these workers all work in the same plant. Same days, first, second, third shift, the transitional workers are working side by side with these full-time employees, working the same hours, which can amount to seven days a week, 12 to 16 hours a day on mandatory overtime.

And they are making $12 an hour less, and they are not getting the benefits that these full-time employees are getting. So really, these full-time employees are kind of going to bat for the transitional employees. Kellogg's wants to remove the cap, which the union negotiated, which is at 30% of their workforce. They want to do away with that so that they can continue hiring more transitional workers. And they want to fuck with the insurance benefits. So the union tried to negotiate this, I think, according to the local union president, Kellogg's

negotiators were at the negotiating table for 10 hours, and they negotiated eight hours a day, five days a week for two weeks, 10 hours they were at the table. So they weren't interested in negotiating a contract. They laid out their terms, and they essentially told the union to go kick rocks. And so the union said, we have until October 5th, and then our contract is up, and if we haven't ratified a new contract, then we're going out on strike. And that's ultimately what happened. So they've been on strike for, this will be their 14th day today.

I think the fight against the two-tier system, I think, is an interesting part of this, because that's been a huge part of a lot of the different strikes you've been seeing since John Deere strikes. This is part of the Kaiser strikes. And yeah, I'm wondering what you think specifically about the fact that this is the moment that people have decided to push back against two or even three-tier systems that were deduced in the last really like 10 or 15 years for the most part? Well, I think it's just a divide and conquer strategy for Kellogg's or for these other

companies. And ultimately what it looks like is it destabilizes well-established unions, especially at Kellogg's. And it pits workers against each other, particularly at Kellogg's, if they are able to remove this cap on this tier system, what they're essentially doing is they're creating a more precarious workplace for these workers. The turnover rate in the lower tier at the Omaha plant is right around 40%. And prior to 2015, you didn't really see a whole lot of people leaving the Kellogg's plant.

These are workers who are spending their entire careers at this plant. Their parents work there, their grandparents work there. Because they're all getting paid around the same amount of money, there isn't this tension on the line. So they're working with each other, they're helping each other. And with this tier system, what they're doing is they're throwing these newer workers into insane factory conditions and making it really difficult for them to feel like they have any reason to stay there.

A lot of these people will put in, some of these workers were transitional workers who weren't officially hired by the company, they aren't full-time employees, they aren't receiving benefits like the full-time employees are. For five years they work this every day, seven days a week, three months on end. They have this really punitive attendance-based point system that discourages you calling and sick. There's injuries that happen in the factory all the time. I went out to the line and wrote a piece for the real news about this and pretty much every

person I talked to showed me scars from accidents that happened, injuries in the plant. The union president himself got his hand stuck in like a mill and broke all the fingers in his hand, he had to have 10 surgeries on his hand. There was an accident at the plant two or three weeks ago where a transitional employee got both arms stuck in a conveyor belt. The thing is, is these folks super proud of the work that they do. Maybe 100% take this work extremely seriously. They're not even asking for changes to their overtime.

They are not asking for anything that, from me on the outside, I'd be fighting for more humane working conditions, but to them, it's not like as a point of pride, but they feel that they have put blood, sweat, tears, fractured relationships, time that they could be spending with their children into this factory and Kellogg's is essentially fucking them over. They see it as, we have sacrificed for this company for years and years and years and we are asking for equal pay for all and for everyone to have the same healthcare so that we can do this job and Kellogg's is saying, no, absolutely. I think the union president said that some of the negotiators called those demands outlandish

during negotiations, which I think is just incredible. Just corporate greed. Yeah, I think the other part of the story is that, it's kind of a weird consequence of it, but one of the things, one of the consequences of rising stable commodity prices like stable grain prices and stuff is that Kellogg's, they have record profits right now and they're still just doing this shit because- Yeah, they made record profits during the pandemic. They gave their CEO a pretty hefty raise bonus. There was a stock buyback program that helped happened among the C-suite folks last year.

They made a lot of money, a lot of money. These workers worked every day through the pandemic, continually understaffed, doing their best because again, they take this job very seriously and they are proud that they are feeding the American people and they are proud to work at Kellogg's and they feel that this contract is just shit. It's just shit and the only sensible thing to do is to walk out on strike because they've been backed into a corner and negotiations have stagnated completely. They don't want to back down from this.

I agree. I feel what they're asking for is fair. It's very fair. I mean, I think asking for a lot more would be fair, but not my place to be doing. One of the things that strikes me about this, you talk about this tier system that Kellogg's introduced, which I can't help but think of what happened at John Deere, where I think in 96 cut pensions by two thirds and then last year eliminated them entirely and this kind of bid to pit chunks of the workforce against each other, where you have different

groups making different amounts and sort of like, I don't know, it seems kind of like the strategy that you see in the broader economy like within the space of a company where you've got like some people who are getting pretty well taken care of in their jobs and other newer people who are getting more screwed over in kind of this attempt to create division within the workforce so that this kind of organizing doesn't happen. I would agree. You also have to think, if they are able to remove this cap on the transitional tier, what that means that is they'll be able to instead of say, say a full time employee retires,

they leave that space empty, but they still need an extra space, an extra person, right? So they can just hire a transitional worker instead of funneling one of those transitional workers into that full time space. What ends up happening is suddenly you have instead of 70% full time to 30% transitional, it starts tipping, it becomes a more precarious workforce, then say, for example, they do that in the next five years, now they have 70% of these transitional workers who don't think the union is offering anything for them, they can essentially just offer a better deal to these transitional workers and kick the union out of the company at some point.

And these folks on the line understand that and know that that's kind of Kellogg's plan, right? And they know that what Kellogg's is trying to do is essentially destabilize the power of the union inside the plants and everyone on the line that I've spoken with know exactly what's happening, you know, and these full time employees are out there every day, making sure that their transitional colleagues know that that's why they're out there because they want to not allow this to be something that divides their workforce. It remains to be seen what's going to happen, you know what I mean?

They've brought in scabs to get the plant up and running again. And most recently, yesterday, this morning, yesterday, the building and construction trades council union met with the union president in Omaha because they have about a hundred third party ironworkers, carpenters, electricians and skilled tradespeople that are union tradespeople that have contracts at Kellogg's. And they came to what Dan Osborne, the union president decided called was a tough decision that those union workers are going to cross the picket line to honor those contracts. So Kellogg's is forcing the unions in the city in like into a bind, really, because they're

they're, you know, going to lose their own contracts at Kellogg's. So that's kind of been like the most recent development here is that rather than just temps coming in, we have now skilled union tradespeople from various Omaha unions who are also crossing the picket line to honor their contracts at Kellogg's, you know, past these striking workers. So it's a bit of a mess, a little bit, you know. Yeah, there's so much going on right now. I'm kind of wondering what you think are the because we've got a number of strikes kind

of all coming due ahead at the same time. I'm wondering specifically from the Kellogg's strike, what do you think are kind of the lessons that should be taken from what's happened so far for the broader labor movement? I think the biggest thing that's kind of impacted me as I've gone to the line, I've stood on the picket line, I've covered these, you know, this strike, I've talked to people, is that when these types of actions happen, they really only can be sustained because the community comes together to support them, you know, these strike funds that are going around and folks showing up to stand on the picket line who are not part of the union are really sort

of become, you know, they are helping support these workers who can only hold out so long with finite resources, right? So the big thing to me is that past these news cycles of excitement of strike tober of, you know, these people just walked out today, well, they may, you know, they may be on the line for months and months on end, and the news cycle is going to move on, and these communities are still going to have to try and back up these labor actions, right? You really can't have a true, you know, you can't have a labor movement without, you know, support, right?

And that's kind of been the biggest thing that has impacted me, particularly, you know, Omaha used to be a really formidable union town, you know, back in the 80s, it was really something to see that the business unions and the various locals here really had some of these union leaders had more political power than the mayor, right? And that has gone downhill over the last 40 years, and it's really cool to see the level of solidarity that's happening amongst the community, you know, in the ways in which people are kind of coming out to talk to and be a part of this strike and to remind these Kellogg's workers that they're not operating in a bubble, you know, and that the rest of

the community really hopes that the strike will end quickly and peacefully and with a really good resolution for these workers, you know? One other thing I wanted to ask about in terms of sort of this kind of research into the union movements and in terms of sort of community support is the level of violence that there's been against, like against these strikes, like I've seen a lot of, like, stuff about people getting hit by buses, like, and I don't know if, I think I'm getting my strikes, I don't know if there have been direct car attacks on this specific picket line, but that's been a thing that's been happening a lot, and I was wondering-

I've noticed a couple of documented cases, you know, in all of the states. And yeah, I was wondering what you think about that and, like, what actually can be done about the fact that, like, you know, that, you know, just the fact that we're just seeing auto attacks on picket lines regularly now? I mean, that's, you know, it's a shitty development, you know. I was out on the picket line last Thursday, and they were attempting to bring in buses at shift change past the picketers who walk slowly, you know, they don't stop in front of the bus.

It's illegal to stop and, you know, make it, you know, so that they can't pass through the gates, but they slow them down for a little bit. And one gentleman was trying, you know, was standing there, and this bus just bumped right into him, you know, there's videos that have been shared through local news of buses knocking down workers as they're trying to cross the picket line. And I, you know, there are also the personal vehicles that go through and it could be the private security that's been hired, it could be managers, but, you know, they're running through these lines really quickly, dangerously.

It's unfortunate. And, you know, I don't have an answer for what the best solution for that is, you know, that vehicle attacks have become sort of more, I don't want to say commonplace. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories, but there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck

in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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

Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God.

Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Not another one.

Uh-huh. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts, but you see them happening a lot, um, both at protests last year and

uh, you know, uh, I think warrior met Cole had some bosses running through the lines and, and being reckless with their vehicles. You know, um, the problem is, is on the, on the back end, the police don't step in when they see these instances, you know, um, and in fact, last Thursday when we had a hundred plus motorcyclists from various MCs, uh, show up to support the strike, um, the police were the ones who, uh, protected the scabs and made sure that they made it through the picket line. So, you know, um, the answer to that, not sure, you know, yeah, I mean, that's a time-honored

police tradition. Yeah. They, uh, they historically don't, don't exist to protect laborers, uh, with the notable exception of, uh, of, uh, the, the, the sheriff and, uh, what was it, Madowan and, uh, during the, uh, um, the coal miner strike in West Virginia. Mm hmm. Well, yeah, they shot him. So.

Well, yeah, but he shot some people first. Yeah. Um, Sid Hatfield, that was the name. Yeah. I don't know. Um, I've gotten to know some of these folks on the line over the last two weeks and they're just fantastic human beings, you know. Um, they are accommodating and hardworking and they come from all age brackets and they

bring their families out and, um, you know, they're getting, they're getting a raw deal from Kellogg's. And, um, so far the community support has been overwhelmingly positive, um, there hasn't really been like at the John Deere strike, they're not getting eggs thrown at them. You know, um, they get a lot more, uh, honking and messages of support than they do, uh, people driving by to yell at them for, uh, you know, being a strike. So that's been nice to see, you know, um, and actually this weekend on Saturday, um, there's going to be a like cool vintage car show, cruise around Kellogg's event that they've

got planned. The fire department's bringing rigs and, um, teamsters for the fire department. Yeah. And the teamsters are bringing cars and the, there's a bunch of vintage car clubs that are going to be coming out. So, you know, those types of things have like really kind of like fired up these people to keep them out on the line as long as they need to be, you know, so communities there for them.

One of the things I'm continuing to wonder about is what it takes to close the gap between understanding that you and your colleagues, you're getting screwed over by this system and understanding that you and all of the other people striking at the same time and perhaps even a bunch of people not striking are all kind of fighting the same fight and then maybe there's, uh, grander things to achieve than, uh, the negotiation of a single contract because that seems like the big leap that, uh, is going to be the real struggle to clear. Uh, I, yeah, you know, um, I will say that some of the workers are fully aware that

this is not just about a single contract negotiation and is actually, you know, more about struggles of the working class against corporate greed and, uh, the ways in which the working class gets their asses handed to them all the time, um, um, and they know that they know that at some point, perhaps at some point in the future, someone else is going to look at their example and be inspired by it, right, um, as far as like maybe, I don't know, ideologically speaking or politically speaking for these folks, it's, uh, doesn't fit into any sort of ideology, leftist or conservative or whatever. Everyone's got their own personal politics, but they don't really talk about it on the

line. What they talk about is working class versus ruling class, um, that, you know, that's their sense. It's corporate greed. It's, um, asshole CEOs making $11.6 million a year while they're struggling to pay their own bills, you know, um, and, and, uh, you know, that conversation is more common than, um, trying to fit this into a larger political movement or revolutionary movement, if that makes sense, you know, um, but I would say that the vast majority of the workers, regardless

of their own personal politics have a very clear sense of where they sit in terms of class consciousness and understand that this is one of, one of the, uh, most effective tactics to try and, and force the hand of these assholes, you know, um, is to withhold work and withhold their labor. So. Well, this has been great. I mean, that's everything I had to ask Chris. Anything else?

Nothing. Not that I have. So is there a, is there a call to action we could have for our listeners or pages people should be following? A strike fund. Yeah. There's a go fund me and there's a PayPal setup for the Omaha strikers. I believe the BCTGM, uh, international page has like a page of each of the strike funds

for each of the four plants. So that might be something that you might want to share with your listeners. I can send you an email with that, um, because it's probably going to be easier to do. Um, but yeah, as far as I know, BCTGM has been called for an official boycott of Kellogg's products, however, they wouldn't be mad if you just didn't buy any right now. There was some talk last week that some of the picketers might, you know, be firing outside of grocery stores to try and educate the community on what's going on with this strike. But beyond that, they also are concerned about the quality of the food being produced by

scabs. So it probably would be healthy for you to not buy the food, you know, cause, uh, I think it was in what, 2018 during a works, uh, a lockout in Memphis, the same company that they brought in then that they're bringing in now, uh, pissed in the cereal on the line. And they didn't release video of that for two years after the incident. So it ended up in someone's home, you know, gross. Yikes. Yikes.

Yeah. Awesome. That's some scab shit, but yeah, that's pretty fucked, right? Um, so yeah, you know, uh, support your local strike fund. And if you are in a city where Kellogg's plant is striking, I am sure those workers would love, love to, to hear from you, feel your support. So yeah. And where can our listeners follow you?

I am on Twitter primarily at cold brood tool. I don't know why I picked that name, but, but I like it. Yeah. Yeah. I got, I, uh, haven't changed that handle since I got on Twitter. So, um, but yeah, that's usually where I'm at, uh, otherwise, you know, I teach locally and had to have a podcast that I'm developing and, and do a bunch of different projects. So Twitter is the best way to get ahold of me if you have questions.

Awesome. All right. Thanks for having me on folks. I appreciate it. Thanks for talking to us, Mel. Thanks for, thanks for joining us. I'll be back at the picket line, you know, talking to these folks and, um, gonna do my best to keep this shit in the news cycle so that they aren't forgotten.

So awesome. We've got a link to the strike fund and some other ways to help in the description. So yeah, this has been a good app in here pod. Follow us at Twitter and Instagram at happened here pod and at coolzone media for all the rest of our shows. Make sure to check out drink champs, your number one music podcast on the black effect podcast network hosts, no re and DJ EFN sat down with artists and icon, yay, which vulture called one of 2021's most significant interviews.

I literally had to go like Thanos and I don't want to have to be the villain. But when I went and did the Donda thing, yeah, it returned and everybody had to sit back and watch the real leader, check out drink champs conversation with yay and many more legendary artists each and every Friday. On the I heart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. I'm Jake Halbert host of deep cover. Our new season is about a lawyer who helped the mob run Chicago. We control the courts.

We control absolutely everything. He bribed judges and even helped a hitman walk free until one day when he started talking with the FBI and promised that he could take the mob down. I've spent the past year trying to figure out why he flipped and what he was really after. From my perspective, Bob was too good to be true. There's got to be something wrong with this. I wouldn't trust that guy.

He looks like a little scumbag liar, stool pigeon. He looked like what he was or at. I can say with all certainty, I think he's a hero because he didn't have to do what he did and he did it anyway. The moment I put the wire on the first time, my life was over. If it ever got out, they would kill me in a heartbeat. Find a deep cover on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here.

Your favorite podcaster, also legally the only podcaster that people are allowed to enjoy on the Internet. Here to introduce a really exciting episode of It Could Happen Here. So for the last bit of time, I've been in and out of touch with a number of members of the Puget Sound John Brown Club. They have provided armed self-defense groups for a couple of different protests in the Washington area over the last year in change. We wanted to sit down and talk to them about the ideas behind community self-defense, how

to do it responsibly, how to do it irresponsibly. We also had some discussions with them about the disasters that happened at the CHOP, CHAS last year. They were not involved with that as an organization, but they have some insights on the matter. That's going to be coming at you in a separate episode or maybe even a couple of episodes in the near future. Today, we're just kind of talking about the concepts of armed community self-defense, what's responsible, what's irresponsible, how people should think about it.

I think you'll enjoy the conversation. Here it is. A decent chunk of the folks listening, especially the Portlanders, will have experience with and that Garrison and I have certainly had experience with it, is people at protests declaring themselves security. There's even wearing shirts that say security and picking up a variety of weapons, often paintball guns and mace and using them often irresponsibly on other protesters, on bystanders, in the name of keeping things safe.

I think we're pretty clear and I think most reasonable people can see that that's not community self-defense, but often those people certainly claim that what they're doing is community self-defense. I'm specifically wanting to start by getting kind of a range of definitions from folks as you are all people who have engaged in community self-defense and particularly armed community self-defense. What do you see as the actual role of community self-defense and how should it look as opposed to a guy with a paintball gun yelling at kids for tagging a window?

Ray, you want to kick us off with an answer there? I do, community defense should be part of a broad health and safety infrastructure set up for a protest movement or a community, being deliberately vague here, but specifically armed community defense deals with mitigating lethal and egregious harm to members of a community. The goal is forced and foremost prevention, mitigation, and control of those threats. In my mind, ideally, community defense would involve no one doing anything, carrying around a bunch of really heavy shit and nothing happening, but deterring those from harming others.

In the absolute worst case, it means you have to actually do something that can get messy pretty quickly. I want to circle back to a couple of things. Actually, I do have one quick follow-up question before we move on to the next people, Ray. When you say carrying heavy things and whatnot, I'm wondering what do you think? I'm interested in you, and I'll probably ask other people this follow-up. When it comes to bringing a firearm to either a protest situation or some other community self-defense situation, what is going through your head when you determine what to bring?

I've seen people carry a variety of different guns from shotguns and, in one case, a Mosin Nagant to ARs or handguns. What do you think is the logic train that you would take and what is the appropriate tool to bring in this situation? That depends entirely on what the anticipated threat is and how one plans to mitigate the anticipated threat. There's no correct answer for that. Sometimes the answer to mitigate lethal or egregious bodily harm is not a firearm at

all. Indeed, firearms are applicable in an extraordinarily narrow range of scenarios, but those range of scenarios are catastrophic and need extreme measures to be mitigated. It depends on what, if you are considering bringing a firearm, what is the firearm good at, and then you get into the minutiae of what firearms good for what thing, which depends on your legal context and particular threat. But I think one has to start with the question is, is the thing I'm bringing able to mitigate the type of harm I might see happen to my community?

To get a little bit less vague, there are people who think that bringing a shotgun is a good way to stop a car speeding into a crowd when it clearly isn't. One has to make sure that the tool, whatever they have, is appropriate for the task at hand and the threat you anticipate. That was great. Thank you, Ray. Katie, you want to give us your answer next? I agree with everything that Ray said.

The only addition that I'd make is that it specifically in our cases generally doesn't mean standing between protesters and police. But more guiding protesters or activists or participants away from potential situations of harm. We can't stand in front of police and stop cops from doing their job. That just gets you arrested. Or worse. Or worse.

And that's not what we're here for. So yeah, that's all I want to add. Could you, because I have chatted with a couple of your number about this, about kind of the role that an armed contingent at a protest can play in kind of allowing an avenue of retreat, especially during confrontations with non-state actors. I'm interested in kind of what you, as you did kind of clarify this conception, you don't see your role as standing in front of the protesters at between them and the cops and like presenting a threat to the cops.

What is the utility in kind of an active protest situation that you've seen of what you all do? So that's a good question. And if we're doing our job well, then most people think we don't do anything at all. A lot of what we do is we're watching external potential threats who might try to come in. The most common factor these days is a car, but generally we're looking for folks that might cause trouble and finding, ensuring that we're not putting ourselves in a position where we're going to get cornered or trapped and really just trying to help facilitate

and work with the facilitators and organizers to keep things progressing in a safe way. So as far as what we're protecting against, threat-wise, that ranges from everything from like angry people who are just angry and trying to go home and getting blocked by a protest to people who are actively looking to do harm to a movement that happens to be involved in the protests or maybe it's something as specific as a person who's looking to specifically do harm to organizers. So most of the time we're focused outward and just making sure that our exits are covered and that we have ways to get people away from potential bad situations.

That was great. Thank you, Katie. Shannon, you want to give your answer, Nick? Absolutely. Thanks. I would add there's a really critical element to community defense that begins and ends with the word community. Obviously, there's a big difference between proclaiming yourself security and showing

up someplace and being there as an intentional community support where the community plays a role in you being there and also has some influence on that question of what are you carrying and what is the response. So I think it's just really important that you keep the community aspect at the forefront and that's a huge part of our collective work is making sure that when we're providing community defense, we're aligning ourselves with the desires of the community group that has asked us to be there. Also filtering it through our judgment as to what's safe and appropriate under the circumstances

using some of those filters that Ray mentioned when they were answering. And what do you see as like this is something that kind of gets to both what is an issue with me and kind of the folks who declared themselves as security, which is that they're often kind of separating themselves from the rest of the movement specifically in a cop like way to say like, well, it's my job to keep you safe, even if that means or it's my job to keep things orderly, even if that means attacking some other people at this protest. One of the things that Scott Crow in his setting sites, which is a really good book on community

self defense does is set out that a key aspect of community self defense, as you said, is that you're like a member of the community. And I think I guess the question I have is, because guns are what they are and have the kind of cultural weight that they have, it's you, people are always people who accept being armed as an aspect of their personality are always going to be kind of fighting, having that dominate their personality. And it wouldn't, it's clearly something that a lot of people have an issue with. The thing that is important is to be a member of the community who happens to be armed as

opposed to an armed activist whose role is being armed, right? Like I mean, do you agree with what I'm saying or kind of like, I'm wondering how you think about it, because this is something that I'm kind of going right in my head about as well, because it's clearly where a lot of the problems happen, right, that the gun becomes central to the identity of the people who bring it, which is something that happens to the cops. Yes, and also the mentality of separating yourself from the community and not being part of the purpose of being there. And so I'll defer to my, my comrades here to go a little bit further with it, but I would

just say that there's a significant difference between armed community defense and having a intentional presence of armed community defense at an event or protest and being a person who shows up with a gun, those are two really different things. And so I think that's the, that's one of the benefits of being part of an organization that does this collectively with accountability, with training, with a known role in the community so that there is consistency among what we do and why we do it and a history of folks understanding that if we're present somewhere, it's because we've been asked to be there and that what we're doing there is aligned with and approved of by the people who are

organizing the event. And then I'll, I'll let somebody else who's more eloquent than I am answer that further if they feel like they can. Yeah, I think Nova is up now. If you wanted to give your answer and kind of also comment on what we've been chatting about what Shannon and I were just chatting about Nova. Hi, thank you so much. I would say that folks like Ray and Katie and of course Shannon really put it very succinctly

very well together and answered a lot of the things that I was going to already provided things that I was going to add to it, but the specifically the part about the gun becoming the driving factor in somebody's presence at a protest or the gun being a part of the personality of somebody who is going to appoint themselves as a guardian towards bunch of people. I would, I would say that with any responsible community, community defense role within a protest context that the act of being a body in between a threat and your community has to come first and that the, that the firearm has to be secondary.

There was an incident on the 300th night of protest where many of us were at risk of being harmed by a vehicle attack and in retrospect, a firearm would not have mitigated that threat terribly well, but the idea of being in between a threat such as that and somebody else who is possibly more vulnerable than you are bore a lot more of a significance on that. So, the firearm being there to respond to a threat and perhaps mitigate an active ongoing deadly threat to your community is one thing, but I think the primary thing is going to be just putting yourself in harm's way so that you can spare that responsibility from somebody possibly more vulnerable than you, if that makes sense.

That should be the primary responsibility. And how do you avoid letting that turn people doing that into feeling like a separate and even elevated chunk of the community because that again, that's what happens with police, you know, this idea that it starts as like, well, we're here to serve and protect. And that that through a variety of toxic alchemies turns into this idea of the thin blue line. What is the way you push back on that? How do you actually stop it from going from I'm someone who is accepting personal responsibility for the well-being of the people around me and putting my body in between them on harm's

way if necessary to I it's my job to protect people to it's my job to, you know, from turning that into kind of this idea of I think stewardship in some ways that like some people in law enforcement have where like you're there, they get to tell you what to do because that's their responsibility to keep you safe. Like how do you how do you stop that attitude from evolving because I've seen it happen to people fairly quickly when they put themselves in some of these situations sometimes and it's certainly not like most people, but it is it doesn't take a long time for somebody to like, especially if they're vulnerable to get in that position.

So how do you especially if you're approaching it from an organizational standpoint, right? You're an organization made up of people who come to do this. How do you fight back against that? Like what is the active kind of counter-programming, if you will? I'd say I don't have an easy answer for that question to be completely honest with you, but I'd say that the closest thing to an answer to that would be that in almost, you know, monastic devotion to the task that was asked of you by the group that asked you there. So if somebody asks us to be a part of a march and to simply look outward for external threats

and to be willing to respond to those threats if need be, again, putting our bodies in harm's way, but also be willing to respond to lethal force and kind should the worst case scenario arise. I'd say that the ultimate accountability rests with the people who asked you to be there. And there's no easy answer as to what that mechanism of accountability looks like. But you know, in several layers that would start with your teammates, the people who are part of your organization that is asked to be there. So other members of JBGC are definitely going to try and keep each other accountable, but

it's also the larger contingent of the action that you're a part of to be ultimately willing to back down from whatever you're doing if a concern is voiced by that community. And I wish I had a better way to word that, but just the constant vigilance within oneself against overstepping the boundaries that were clearly set by people who invited you into a space. It's really the best answer I can give for that at the moment without further percolating. Well, I mean, yeah, for one thing, I think this is the reason we're having this conversation. And I'm getting ahead of us a little is because this is still very much a developing thing

on the left. And I don't think anybody has all the answers on how to do it well, although I think an increasing number of folks accept the necessity. So I think that's part of the reason for the conversation is this continuing exploration of how to actually do this responsibly. But I do think you had on something important there when you talked about that you're there at the invitation of a community as opposed to you are there to police or to maintain order.

Like the idea of approaching it as if you were a guest strikes me as a really good idea in order to keep yourself on a certain behavioral standpoint. Like I'm here at the request of this community as their guest, as opposed to I am here to protect this community, you know? Absolutely, that's a perfect way to summarize what I was trying to go for with that one. I think that the ultimately to be a verse to being put in a position of power or authority is the best way to check against that. And to simply be a servant to the community that is again inviting you into that space

and putting yourself in a servile is not the right word. I'm looking for a different word for that, but a position of service, a true position like yes, what community defense should be is ultimately a service and a burden rather than a reward of responsibility and power over your fellow community members. Okay. Yeah, great. I think next was Ray again. You had something to say there?

Yeah, to finish that thought, in my notes, I did a section of what happens when things go right. I think one thing that can go right is normalizing that firearms are just a thing that can be around and they don't have to be your entire ass personality nor do they have to be a differentiating factor. Indeed, I think one of the successes, there are not many, but of a community defense in the chop was normalizing the idea that people can have firearms and they're not an inherent threat.

I'm thinking of people who were armed often and were pointed out routinely and I was like, yeah, he's chill, he's a cool dude. Just a guy, just like things like, do you really think the black guy is going to shoot up the chop? I don't know. He's totally fine. I know him. His jokes are great.

Again, over here, any of these kind of conversations, it helps firearms become part of the tapestry of life, not this differentiating factor, not a beauty item, not something to wrap your personality around. It's just like they're there and they can be good, bad, right, wrong, or indifferent. I think that normalizing effect is one of the successes community defense can have and I'm happy to talk about other things that community defense can normalize, but I wanted to emphasize the, you just have a firearm, you're not talking about it, you're not touching it, you're not thinking about it.

People have that. It's just around and it became pretty chill and there is kind of at the chop specifically, there's an area where firearms just kind of were around and nothing happened really. That was kind of wonderful in my mind. So from my experience with the club, it's basically, even though we are the John Brown gun club, the guns are the last thing that we even consider. It would technically, if we were to actually rename the club, it would be the John Brown deescalation club.

Most of the time, anything that's gone on, even when I did visit the chop and there were some weird stuff going on, like brother Matthew being brother Matthew, people were using their skills to deescalate the situation, to calm down individuals, to make sure that whatever hostility they have would be abated through just verbal communication. Talk about that in a little more detail because I don't know who, I mean, I was at the CHAS briefly, but I don't know who brother Matthew was or what incident you're talking about. Brother Matthew is a guy who shows up up here all around the Seattle area and also, I think he's even set up in Portland as well.

Preacher guy gets in everybody's faces, usually not liked by everybody, super afraid of snakes. Thanks, Jerry, but yeah, he's a person who drives off of confrontation and uses the Bible as his mode of operation. But I remember distinctly at the chop, he was getting into it with people, but everybody who was around tried to talk him down. They tried to make him chill out, even though he was continually screaming for attention and just being weird, but in the end, that happens more often with protest situations or march situations or direct action situations where we're asked to be a part of it by the

organizers and as Ray had mentioned and Nova had mentioned, we're asked to be there and we're not just asked and then we suddenly show up. We get involved with the people who are organizing any of the partners that they bring into it. We try to learn as much about what's going on with them, who are the threats, where the event is, how the event is going to be thought of. We ask a lot of questions about it. We plan and plan and plan and plan to make sure that everything is super safe or as safe as possible based on all known variables and then the stuff that's unknown, we do our best

to mitigate that somehow. Yes, we are armed, but that's the last thing that we ever even think of and that's even in our planning. We say flat out, deescalate first, if things start to ratchet up, respond in kind. If someone tries to, I don't know, starts to fist fight, we're not going to pull out a gun on someone who wants to box somebody on the street. We're going to do our best to stop. Stop them through other means, whether if it's just to block a punch or whatever, but

the first things and foremost is deescalation. Calm that person down and tell them to go away or just to chill out or whatever is necessary. I mean, deescalation, all of the best community self-defense that I've personally watched has been deescalation. They're not the only situations I've seen. I've seen forces a couple of times in situations that were necessary, but by far deescalation is the thing I've seen actually protect people in dicey situations the most. And generally, that's going to be the case.

Yeah, I know for myself, my attitude is we all go home. Everybody who shows up there goes home. Not to the hospital, not to jail or not to the morgue, we all go home. Yeah, I think that definitely seems like the best way to look at it. So into the specific question of how not to become a cop in this position and become the gun, the only way I've been able to do anything in that regard has been to not have that be my primary thing that I fulfill. I'm part of a community and I'm a mechanical person in this community.

I try to have my mission be not that other skill set or that other access to being of an aid to a community be my actual purpose in the community, if that makes any sense. Yeah, that makes complete sense. And yeah, I think is the healthiest way to deal with it. So something I've been wondering about as so I'm like not armed at all. So I guess I'm on like the other side of the fence of the sort of community self-defense thing where people show up to protests. And so something I was wondering about is the relationship between this stuff and between

the sort of cop mentality development and the difficulty of sort of integrating the community of having organizations that are basically independent security groups and not for example, like taking like an historical example, like there was a thing in China you'd see a lot in like the 1900s where you know you'd have armed pickets, right? And so you have an armed force there, but the armed force is like, you know, this is like a branch of the union, right? And that's how they sort of like, like that was their sort of solution to how do you stop cop syndrome is that, you know, they're basically like a part of another community organization

and so I'm curious what you all think about what the sort of, I guess, the strengths and weaknesses of being an independent or having sort of independent security organizations versus having, I guess, subsections of other organizations that are armed. Yeah, I feel like I can offer a unique perspective here as someone who's been privy to multiple angles of this, including separate organizations, ones integrated with others and ones that are sort of just parts of the community. I don't think there's any like, inherent sort of best answer here. I do think being part of a separate organization makes it harder to be in the community versus

of the community, meaning you came from the community and now you're sort of kind of separate but not really. Like JB in particular has a perpetual problem with people saying, oh, you know, John Brown will do X and this is something that has been discussed. And often this is to people's immense ire. I don't want to speak for everyone here, but it does seem to be that so seldom does one wish to be said, oh, hello. It's kind of like saying, oh, the union will solve this and it's like, turns out you're

the union buddy, right? Never refer to the union in the first person. So I do think being embedded into other groups or being sort of this loose diffused group can make it easier to be part of the community because of the structural forces that make that it is easier to get there. A separate organization can help focus and codify certain procedures, training, you know, make sure that people have some sort of unified goals and values at the expense of making it a bit harder to integrate into one's community.

I think given the era we're in, I'm not surprised we see many, many approaches to community defense with varying effectiveness at different times, including Davey's perspective. Yeah, and I guess I'm interested as we move on here and one of the questions I see is, how do you, the difficulty in kind of, you don't want to have a situation where there's absolutely no where the community self-defense contingent is anyone who shows up with a gun because then anyone can show up with a gun and you as someone else who's showing up with a weapon are potentially like, if that person makes a bad decision, that's going to, I mean, as it has in the past, that has significant repercussions on everybody else and that is

one of the thornier points because I do, one of the things I see is valuable, someone mentioned earlier, like the nice thing about it just in not being, firearms being normalized not as a like gun culture thing but as this is just a thing that is present in the community and I saw that a lot in Rojava, right? Everybody was armed or at least the significant chunk of the populace had access to arms but nobody was showing off with them. They were not like anybody's, like piece of identity, they were just one of the tools like a spade or a shovel that were present in the community.

Okay, I think I've skipped over a couple of people. I wanted to give Thud a chance to talk. That's actually very much sort of in line with what the point I was going to make which is for me, a huge part of community defense is making sure that the aspect that is defending the community is not alienated from the community because it isn't concentrated in just a few people because I think one of the other things that we emphasize a lot sort of outside of direct protest actions is we try to teach people how to safely operate firearms but also to give firearms the respect that they deserve, that firearms are not there so that

you are badass firearms are not there because you're going to get into a gunfight and it's the first rule. I mean, one of the things that we stress sort of beyond the basic four rules of gun safety is the first rule of gunfight is don't get into a gunfight. You want to exhaust every possible option that you have and when the community at large is engaged and like Prey was saying that it becomes normalized that, oh, we're not relying on these several people to keep us safe but that in fact as an entire collective we are keeping us safe and that gives recognition the fact that some people it's not the right

choice for them to carry a gun for one reason or another and at the same time the power that is present in that particular tool is dispersed to the point where you don't have people getting self-aggrandizing thoughts because of the fact that they're possessing firearms and I think that's something that we work really hard to instill in people in a variety of contexts and I think is really critical to this question. So the question, I'm just trying to summarize what the question was earlier, what the strengths or weaknesses of having an organized armed response are. One of the things that I wanted to bring up is the historical context of armed response,

specifically community armed response in Seattle. I did some digging and found in a book called History of Seattle from the earliest settlement to the present time, volume two, which I started pouring through and found that there was in 1874 there was a group called the Seattle Amateur Rifle Association which at least planned for a range on current present day Capitol Hill like right where the train station is if you're familiar with the area so like right where protests always happen these days. Later on there's record record in 1877 of the Seattle Rifle team organizing and shooting contests and then later on in 1886 which is a number that probably rings a bell the Chinese

riots as they called them at the time happened which was sort of the start of the labor movement where everyone decided that Chinese immigrants were the cause of all of our woes that the low wages being paid to Chinese immigrants were because of Chinese immigrants and not racism so they decided to run every person who looked Chinese out of town literally they referred to this as the Tacoma method and I'm guessing because that's what they did in Tacoma exactly it started there and it was a February 7th of 1886 this massive angry racist mob tried to push all the Chinese folks out of Seattle or anyone they thought might look like Chinese and they tried to push them onto a steamboat but there weren't

there wasn't enough room for them all there cops got involved a bunch of other stuff happened they decided no give them time in court but in the process of making this decision you know the racists got a mob together and we're basically just going to try and put a stop to this before the legal proceedings could go forward so they reached out to local allies and arms they had the home guards which I'm not exactly sure exactly what the home guards were but I assume there's something related to National Guard later on or maybe just an extension of military but the home guards and the Seattle rifles as well as the University cadets which I'm assuming are of course soldiers in training and pulled them

out and made a community self-defense group out of them they put a rifle line and held the mob back and enabled those folks to get you know safely to have their day in court and then to protect them for a while afterward they actually organized a sort of a watch because they didn't have enough police to manage the mob they used folks from the Seattle rifles and these other groups to sort of bolster the police forces and keep peace in the town so the sort of thing that we do is long-standing historical presence but I think there's a lot of things you can look at the history of and sort of take lessons from so as Bray mentioned a unified response is of course a huge benefit of having a huge strength of

having an organized armed group and it's it's literally if someone reaches out and says we need help help is available but there are a lot of weaknesses businesses and clubs can be held liable legally and this is an endemic problem within gun laws it stands the laws are written such that they effectively they're that it comes down to situational context to determine how a gun law should be enforced and the law will never be on the side of a group trying to abolish parts of the law so you have to be very careful about how you how especially an organized or formally organized armed group has to be very careful about how they put their work in play with that in mind.

Yeah that was great and I was unaware actually I was aware of the of the riots I was unaware of that part of the history which is fascinating and I think very important. Yeah Ray did you want to explain the threat onion? Yeah the integrated threat onion so this is kind of a a well-known meme in certain circles slash actual thing and it's designed to help you understand how to like mitigate threat and sorry integrated survivability onion mitigate threats right so the teal deer is you know do you want to try to preserve life by having body armor and hoping a bullet hits you in the body armor or do you want to preserve life by I don't know not showing the fuck

up to something where you might get shot and the idea is it's a meme because so often you know people are like oh I want to get in there and get engaged with conflict and be the hero and the answer is you know you could just like not go there right and it would probably be a lot easier to do that. But there's some real weight to the survivability onion which is like there are many many ways to mitigate threats to yourself in your community and then very often the most boring and mundane answer is probably the one that's going to actually result in the biggest impact and the heroic answer is probably the absolute worst answer and only what you rely on if everything else has gone to hell so that's someone I think it was said spoke to alluded

to the threat onion and ways to mitigate harm to oneself in one's community and I had to repeat it because it's this this meme that's been coming up forever. Yeah and it is like the basic idea of the threat onion is that you have like this again you think of it in layers that's why they call it an onion of like things that protect you and the things that provide the most protection are stuff like not being seen or present when somebody wants to harm you not or being behind cover when somebody wants to harm you and the thing that offers the least protection is having body armor you know it's this the idea that like the things that people buy and focus on because they look cool are all

things that offer less protection than situational awareness and good judgment is kind of the actual like lesson I think to take out of the threat onion. That would be my opinion on the matter. This has been it could happen here that's all for this week. Find us at happen here pod on Instagram and Twitter and find the rest of our shows at CoolZone Media in the same places Hey we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It could happen here is a production of CoolZone Media for more podcasts from CoolZone Media

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