Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 61

Episode Date: December 3, 2022

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

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

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

Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, good nights. Hello and welcome to It Could Happen Here. It is 3pm in the winter, so it's all of those at once over here. That is true, that is true. It is 76 here. It's regular all evening time here. No winter included, you know, just rain and hot.

That's the two moods of the weather. Which winter is it right now? Is it rain, winter, or hot winter? Neither. There is no winter. Well, I hope that winter never comes to the island. If it does, I think we'll be in some deep shit, you know. If you guys get snow, things have really gone south.

It's time for us all to reevaluate our practices when that happens. Absolutely. It means the parrots have migrated to Alaska. Oh, god. They do a lot of movements around the evening time, so I wouldn't be surprised if they decided to pack up and leave us all behind. Well, this is It Could Happen Here, as you might be aware, a podcast about things falling apart. And today's episode is brought to us by Andrew. Hello.

Of the YouTube channel, Andrewism. Just to avoid confusion with other Andrews, you know. Oh, I did not realize that. Yeah, that's right. Son of the Queen. Yeah, you know, you could talk about Prince Andrew, you could talk about Andrew Teeth, you know. It's like, I had to distinguish myself, you know. You're the best, Andrew.

I appreciate that. Anytime, buddy. So I'd like to spend some time today, tonight, what is time, really. And to talk about the concept of degrowth, you know, where it comes from, what it means, what it needs, and all that other fun stuff. Are you guys familiar with degrowth as a concept? Yeah, a little bit, yeah. I mean, and it's, yeah, I, please, please, I mean, it's one of those things that gets a lot of like, flack on one hand for people saying that it's basically eco fascism and then you have folks being like, no, it's a, it's a perfectly reasonable response to the kind of endless growth attitude that got us into the environmental catastrophe we're currently experiencing. That's, yeah.

Yeah, I think that. I then released a video on degrowth last week. And having read through some of the comments I've received. I've come to the conclusion. That is not getting through to some people. Yeah. No, people, people love to listen to like a third of what you say and then get really angry at what they think you said. Every time we talk about like the value of things like, you know, the fourth eaves vinegar collective, you know, hacking different medicines or training people being medics. Somebody hops on the subreddit and said, I think it's kind of ableist that they think that, you know, people can replace doctors with, with street medics.

No one, no one's ever made that case. That's not a thing that anyone has ever said. I'm going to make it my entire life mission to only specifically make this case. Oh, we need some guys with some gauze and water in a bag. Yeah, yeah. Doctors are Porsche Rossi. They must all die when the revolution comes. They will only be replaced with street medics.

It's going to be great. I'm texting all of this to our friend Kava right now. Dr. Hoda. Yeah, it's just, it's just ridiculous. So people literally project what they think you said on to what you actually said. It's very, very obvious when it's taking place. I don't know how they don't feel embarrassed. You know, a lot of times I barely comment on things.

I barely like respond to things. And when I do, I check and recheck and recheck what the person has said. Then I check and recheck and recheck what I say before I make a statement. I don't know how you feel embarrassed. Yeah. Like everybody who has watched the video can see that you haven't watched it. They've just done like a term search and then appeared and yeah. And like they come to engage you.

Pretty much. Pretty much. But I mean, if I were to be asleep to the algorithm, I would say all that engagement helps, right? Yeah. Yeah, I'm sure it does. It helps. It helps one thing for sure. Yeah.

It doesn't help get us to a better place. Unfortunately. And speaking of things that do not help us get to a better place. I think it's the growth primarily is about confronting this destructive ideology of growth is something we see all around us. Something we interact with on a fairly regular basis. You see the images of the Amazon rainforest being cut down to be turned into soy farms until eventually it's made into cattle grazing fields.

You talk about the constant expansion of oil infrastructure. You talk about the constant expansion of mining operations. You talk about the continued rise of fast fashion that people are extremely defensive whenever you try to criticize it. All of these systems, all of these industries, all of these practices are part of parts and parcel of rather products of this ideology of growth is that capitalism is driven by. And I know it may be strange for some people to sort of deep program from this idea that growth is like an unadulterated good, uncontroversially positive.

Because you know, nature is like all about growth, right? You know, when you think of growth, you think of a plant peeking out to the soil. You think of a baby kitten growing up to be a cat. You talk about like babies becoming toddlers, becoming young children, becoming older children, becoming you know, tweens and teens and then finally adults and then from there, Joe Biden. But you know, there's this whole idea of growth and that growth is like a natural part of life. And that is true, but growth in life does not go on and on and on and on.

You know, organisms grow up to a certain point and then they maintain a healthy equilibrium or at least they try to. Of course, health is not necessarily a natural state of affairs because viruses are just as natural as the cells they attack. And then you could also get all ephemeral and talk about personal growth and how life is a constant journey of personal growth and whatever. But speaking materially, speaking physically, growth has a limit. People grew up to a certain height, a certain size and so on. And when growth doesn't stop, that's when we start running into problems.

As I understand the reason that cancer is so difficult to cure is because your own body turning against you. It's your it's some of the many trillions of your own cells decide and OK, time to just grow and grow and grow without limit. And what happens in most of those cases in many of those cases, rather, unfortunately, people die as a result. So in our bodies and our own bodies, we understand that growth is not always positive. And yet that sick logic of growth for its own sake is exactly what the global economy relies on. It's not just thing as too much growth, too much money, too much stuff. You have all these wealthy nations that continue to expand and grow and attempt to hoard. I heard one person use the analogy of current behood was talking about how capitalism is now attempting to the new frontiers for capitalism is to expand and colonize our own minds.

And so every economy, every sector, every industry is expected to keep growing, keep growing, keep growing no matter what. One of the responses that I got on my video on D growth is that, oh, well, you're saying that growth is this and growth is this capitalist thing. But, you know, China and USSR and they grew and they industrialized and they are just as susceptible to ecological destruction as any other capitalist country. That is true, but that's also part of why I would consider those countries to be state capitalist projects and not anything close to what I envision. But of course, the moment you introduce any idea that sounds even vaguely socially oriented, even vaguely ecologically oriented. People automatically assume you're trying to go for like New United Soviet Socialist Republic. But I think we need to explore different paths to improving quality of life to quote unquote develop in and that's a tricky subject I'll get into a bit later. We need to think of ways that we can help people and help people live better lives without relying on decimating the biosphere.

It's a tricky conversation to be had because when people think of growth, they think of it as a positive. And when you criticize that positive, they think the inverse, they think you're trying to make everybody degrade and go down to like a worse quality of life to rush back to like a lower life expectancy or to transform our mode of production back to like hunting and gathering. But the truth is that degrowth as a movement, as a system of thought is more so about trying to find that balance between a good quality of life for all, not just this unequal quality of life that we see around the world and the capitalism. While also balancing the fact that we live in material world, we live on a planet that has limited resources, we need to balance those resources, we need to consider and be good stewards of, you know, a planet that we share with other living creatures. Capitalism really is driven by this ideology of growthism because it is structurally incentivized, structurally, it's a structural imperative in the capitalist system. It's not exclusively driven by greed, as some people assume. I think that this idea that it's all up to like personalities kind of hampers people's ability to analyze systems because it doesn't matter whether we suddenly put each and every CEO in a position where they are all completely 100% altruistic. It's not that they're all being driven by greed. It's because under capitalism, you know, capitalist own capital and capital that is stagnant is capital that is losing its value. And so they look for things to invest in so they can grow their capital. Capital being anything from real estate, factories, machinery, intellectual property, financial assets, or just the money that they use to make more money. If it's stagnant, it's losing value and so they're trying to increase its value.

And so they seek out companies that have grown profits year after year so their capital will grow year after year. And if that growth slows down, they pull out and look elsewhere to invest. Companies that fail to grow will lose their investors and collapse. And so companies do everything in their power to maintain growth so they can maintain their investors regardless of how much havoc they wreak upon the world. So if any barriers are preventing their growth, they had to build those barriers. Environmental protections are barriers. Labor laws are barriers. Protectionist policies are barriers. The commons were a barrier. Additional populations were a barrier and so on and so forth. All of these acts of violence open up these new frontiers for growth, for appropriation, for accumulation. And so in comes degrowth or the French term for it is decroissant. And I know that I likely pronounced that incorrectly. It's the French we could disrespect them. There are no consequences. Precisely. I think things sit down and reflect on their nuclear empire. But anyway, this idea of degrowth really first was developed. I have to say that I appreciate what the intellectuals have come up with. They're good at sitting down and thinking about stuff.

I'll give them that. I'll give them that. So this one French intellectual guy named André Gours in 1972 coined the term decroissant, French for degrowth. Gours basically posed a question that remains at the center of degrowth. Is the Earth's balance for which no growth or even degrowth of material production is a necessary condition compatible with the survival of the capitalist system? I would venture to say no. It is not in any way compatible with the survival of the capitalist system because we have seen that in the short period of time that capitalism has existed. It has rapidly triggered the capitalist scene or as some people regrettably call it the Anthropocene. It has rapidly triggered the sixth great mass extinction event. And I do not believe that the Earth's balance is compatible with its survival. And so decroissant movement of activists mainly flourished in Lyon in the early 2000s in the wake of protests for car free cities, communal meals in the streets, food cooperatives and campaigns against advertising. It went from France to Italy where green and anti-globalization activists mobilized against this whole concept of capitalism's constant encroachment and expansion and growth.

It expanded into Catalonia and Spain in 2006. It eventually built up to the size where it could sustain a movement, a magazine rather called La Decoisson, which currently sells a few thousand copies a month. Around the same time in 2004, a research and activist named François Schneider took a year long walking tour on a donkey to disseminate degrowth throughout France and had received some media coverage. Eventually, Schneider founded an academic collective known as Research and Degrowth, along with Dennis Bayon and Fabrice Flippo, and they eventually began international conferences, one in Paris in 2008 and the second in Barcelona in 2010. So the English term degrowth was officially used for the first time at the Paris Conference, which really marked the birth of the international research community around degrowth. Following the success of the conferences in Paris and Barcelona, other conferences were held in Montreal in 2011, Venice in 2012, Leipzig in 2014, and degrowth as an idea spread to groups in Flanders, Switzerland, Finland, Poland, Greece, Germany, Portugal, Norway, Denmark, Czech Republic, I guess it's Czechia now, Mexico, Brazil, Puerto Rico, Canada, Bulgaria, Romania, and elsewhere. Degrowth as an idea hasn't some movement has been gaining ground despite the criticisms that some have that, oh, well you can't call it something negative like degrowth because people won't be happy with it or whatever.

And I'll get to that criticism in a bit, but it's been steadily growing since it was first, you know, developed in the 1970s. At this point in time, if you go on the degrowth website, you will find thousands of articles and studies in their library. And of course, this is not to say that all because a concept has a lot of followers or thinkers or published works, it's automatically OK, ultimately correct. But at this point in time, I think a lot of people are looking at the direction we are going in and recognizing that we cannot continue along this path of growth. And so they're actively looking for a way out, looking for a way to find that balance, recognizing that capitalism is not compatible with the Earth's balance. And so degrowth ultimately rejects the illusion of growth. It calls to repoliticize the public debate that has been colonized by the idiom of economism that has been driven toward as a social objective, economic growth. Degrowth is a project advocated for the democratically led shrinking of production and consumption with the aim of achieving social justice and ecological sustainability.

I think when some people care degrowth, despite all the explanations out there, despite even consuming those explanations, they might still have this idea in their head that degrowth is this thing where a bunch of armed government sponsored environmental activists roll up and take your car and your house and force you to live in a cave. But degrowth and how we degrow our economy is going to rely on the popular involvement of the people. It's not like you could just snap your fingers or just decree it and make it so. It's not meant to be like how it is under neoliberalism where you have all this austerity. Degrowth is supposed to be all of us coming together to figure out how we can live in alignment with our biosphere, with our bio region, with the planet. Scaling down our individual and our community supply chains and localizing our consumption in order to reduce the reliance on this highly extractive, highly growth dependent capitalist global capitalist economy. Degrowth also signifies a direction, a desired direction, one in which societies use fewer natural resources and organize and live much differently than they live today.

The idea is of sharing, which is something that we teach to preschoolers, simplicity, conviviality, care and the commons, primary concepts in terms of what a degrowth society should look like. In one of my previous podcast episodes, I would have discussed the commons a bit, so if anyone's curious about what the commons are, they can check that out. And of course on my channel, I also speak about the commons as an institution and about libraries of things. And so degrowth has offered a sort of a framework that connects all these different ideas, concepts, proposals with the criticism of growth, with the criticism of GDP, with the criticism of commodification, the process that converts social products and socio-ecological services and relations into commodities of the monetary value. On the constructive side, because degrowth is not just limited to criticism, degrowth imagines reproductive economies of care, the reclamation of all and the creation of new commons, man-made and natural. Caring for commons in communal forms of living and producing, liberating our time from work and making it available to caring for our communities and caring for our ecology. Because if you think about all of the activities that are currently so needed at this point in time, in terms of ecological restoration, in terms of degrowth,

they're not profitable, you know. Planting mangroves to shore up our shores, to defend our shores from erosion and from storms is not profitable. Replanting forests and sparking nature's processes of ecological restoration, not profitable. And of course, there is a whole sort of ecosystem, economic, political ecosystem dedicated to these kinds of projects, with all the NGOs and government organizations involved in replanting the Sahel region in Africa, for example, creating the Great Green Wall. But those projects tend to be rife with issues and a lack of maintenance because they do not involve local communities in the decision making surrounding that process of restoration. And on top of that, of course, these projects are not embedded in a broader project for degrowth. So a government might be planting trees and planting forests in one part of the country and extracting and drilling in another part of the country. And so there needs to be an integration of all these different projects with a broader push and direction towards degrowth. I want to go back around to this idea that degrowth is a critique of GDP as a concept. Degrowth is not necessarily the same as negative GDP growth.

But when you consider how GDP is measured, as it's counted, it's about financial transactions and not necessarily the non-financial ones. And so if we were to green our economy, if we were to degrow our society, we're not going to be seeing the yearly gross domestic activity increases of two or three percent. Yeah, there's an old like 2011 slogan that's when the bank takes your house that increases GDP. Right. That is true. That is true. A lot of positive and constructive and beneficial actions that people do on a regular basis do not contribute to GDP. Whereas entire destructive industries contribute significantly to GDP. We started this by comparing kind of the quest for endless growth to a cancer. But I almost think a better comparison is like, you know, there's that article earlier this year about how specific kinds of people, particularly like rich weirdos in the tech industry, are paying thousands of dollars to have their legs broken and like lengthened so that they can be three inches taller. Like that's that's that's that's a that's a shitload of how I like it. Yeah.

I mean, it's weaker. They can never we can never run again, but you are technically taller. So we'll count it as growth. Yeah. For you. For you. Go up. Yeah. A coward to wear platforms. Yeah. Yeah. So you don't you don't have the hutzpah to be a short king. Unbelievable. Sometimes I do think that like when anthropologists on Earth are civilization, they'll wonder why we were so fascinated about line go up. But then they realize that the whole point of the civilization was line go up like that. That was our day to you. Truly truly it's it's it's I don't know my eyes my eyes bleed sometimes thinking about how this whole system is structured and how it just continues to chug along. But that's why I spend so much time writing and reading and talking about these issues right trying to find a way out. And so that is also what D growth advocates are looking to do. They're looking for a way out, you know, a way for a better life.

But so which brings me to the whole criticism of D growth that is essentially optics. Right. They say it's not appropriate to use a negative word to signify desired positive changes. But D growth advocates deliberately choose I mean, in my video, I said that I'm fine with either quality growth or quality post growth or whatever. But D growth advocates have chosen the term D growth for a reason. The use of negation for a positive project is aimed towards creating that sort of questioning, you know, towards getting people to reconsider this idea of growth as an ultimate good to decolonize an imagination that has been dominated by this whole capitalist conception of the future, consisting of, you know, lying go up is this automatic assumption and association of growth with better that the word D growth wants to dismantle wants to deconstruct. And so D growth is a deliberately subversive slogan.

And of course, D growth is not aimed at, you know, deconstructing the most necessary sectors devolve in the most necessary sectors. We're not talking about D growing education D growing medical care D growing, you know, well, renewable energy is kind of a tricky subject. But D growing renewable energy is more so about primarily and first of all targets in the most destructive industries, you know, the financial sector. We would prefer to see institutions like health and education flourish rather than grow or develop. We want to change that is qualitative, not necessarily quantitative. We want to see a flourishing of the arts, a flourishing of philosophies, a flourishing of vernacular architectures, a flourishing of the creativity of people. That's qualitative. It's not about, oh, well, lying go up.

So things more good. You know, it's not about we have 10 industrial outputs last year. Now we have 12. That's so good. You know, we want something we want quality to change that most people really sit down and think about what they want in their life. I don't think a lot of people are going to are going to think of, oh, well, I want next year's iPhone to have a 12% increase in the camera quality. You know, it's more so that you want better, you know, rest, more connected communities, healthier commutes or healthier, I guess, city layout. There's more conducive to interaction.

It's more conducive to small scale movement. It's not about, like I said, you know, it's not about trying to get lying to go up. I can crypto currency as I think about it is like perhaps the best example or like NFTs, right? Like they created a bunch of value that literally created nothing. I have nothing other than exchange value. Exactly. Exactly. It's just nonsense.

Yeah. Pretend money. I was going to talk for a moment about like development as a concept, right? Because another common criticism of D growth is that, oh, well, what about the global south? What about the third world? What about all the poor countries and poor people of the world? You just want to leave them behind. And for one, I find it strange because the person in question, at least the video response that I got implicitly assumes that I am from like a global north nation.

I'm just fine sitting down with my, you know, same day Amazon delivery and Starbucks and sprawling suburbs and whatever it is that, you know, they imagine my lifestyle is like. But I think first and foremost, part of the whole move of D growth is to consider, like I said, raising improving people's quality of life worldwide, which capitalism is not interested in. Capitalism will maintain a perpetual underclass because they're easier to exploit. And so there's this whole idea of development, right? There has this baggage, this very colonial baggage, but it's development is really like growth. It's meant to have like a limit. It's an unfallen towards a predetermined end. You know, an embryo eventually develops into a feeder.

So she eventually develops into a baby, which eventually develops into a child, which eventually develops into an adult, who then ages and dies. But development for the sake of development with no end, with no aims, with no goals, with no sense of self critique or questioning is a disaster waiting to happen. I can look at my own country and from Trinidad, Tobago for those who don't know and think of things that need to get better, right? Things that would really improve people's quality of life. I could think about the fact that we really need to get rid of our reliance and cars and bring back our train system. There was dismantled so long ago. I could think about the fact that we need to improve our food autonomy because we are extremely reliant on food imports. Things like that, I can think about how to improve people's ability to live well and sustainably on this island.

But those things, those aims, those are goals, right? I'm just thinking, oh, development, development, development. I'm thinking, okay, there's point B, how do I get there from point A? How are we going to meet people's basic needs? And the whole Deep Growth Project is really about that whole conversation between the Global North and the Global South, right? The Global North needs to reduce the demand for a lot of the resources and goods so that they're more accessible to the Global South. But in making those things more accessible, places in the Global South are not meant to follow the same path that the Global North took that put us in our mess. The whole idea is that we need to find a different path.

We need to find a different trajectory. We need to think for ourselves instead of trying to keep up with the nuances in order to determine what a good life would mean for us in our ecological niche, in our geographical situation. We did this in China, right? We did the entire development thing and the product is now like people literally walking 18 miles on foot after having broken out of a Foxconn factory. They've been locked in and forced to make iPhones because three people had gotten COVID, so they just locked everyone in the factory. I think it's also briefly worth mentioning that development as a concept and the sort of developmental economics field was specifically developed in sort of the bowels of the American State Department as a response to kind of like simplified capitalist version of Marxist theory that they could throw out to sort of like explain what was happening in like as a way to sort of an alternative to Marxism for like all these sort of like newly post-colonial nations. And, you know, it's gone about as well as you would expect. It's been cooked up in the bowels of the State Department. Well, this has been fun. I love, I don't know, thinking about capital.

I mean, this is important because like we always need to be thinking about what comes next. This is constantly like a problem that the left has and certainly a problem the liberals have, which is that the vision of the future is very rarely anything more than fighting against kind of the demons of the moment, as opposed to like what does it actually look like to get ourselves to a better place, to a place that's more sustainable both in an environmental level and in like in a manner of human ecology too. And yeah, I think this is like this is kind of the hard work that people need to be thinking about wherever you wind up landing on on degrowth as either a concept or as a term. Like these are the paths we have to start beating out of the bush, you know. Exactly. So there are many potential paths that have already been thought up and there are many that have yet to be imagined. In Ecuador, the project of Sumac Coase, in really the rest of Latin America, the idea of Buen Vivir, in much of South Africa, the concept of Ubuntu, in India, the Gandian economy of Permanence,

all of these projects and more explore alternatives to quote unquote development, alternatives to trajectories to a good life that is rooted in environmental justice that is based in a retreat from the narrow confines of the global North's imagination and what that imagination has promoted worldwide and forced upon the rest of the world. Degrowth requires us to think for ourselves to think creatively about how we plan on creating a good life in the context of capitalism's degradation, the earth's degradation due to climate change and what that will mean for our future. We really need to sit and think about what our future as a species, what our future as regions, our future as communities, our future as individuals is going to look like, what trajectory, what path we want to take and how we begin that journey. And so in the second part of this two part series, I intend to discuss what concepts are essential for degrowth, the steps we can take to move towards degrowth and how we can integrate degrowth in anarchist politics. All right, and that's going to be the end of part one, come back tomorrow for part two and probably more discussion of that weird surgery rich people get to have their legs broken repeatedly until they're taller. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right.

I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark and on the gun badass way and nasty sharks. 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.

I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.

What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hello and welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a show where things happen. People talk about it. Yes, in this present location. That's correct. Last episode we spoke about the concept of degrowth and what it means to degrow. How degrowth as a movement came about, what inspired the critique that degrowth pushes and what degrowth means for those of us who live in the global south. How we can go about imagining new and different paths to a better life within ecological limits. This episode we will continue in that conversation talking about what is essential for degrowth. As I discussed in the previous episode, degrowth is about striving for self-determined life and dignity for all. It means an economy and a society that can sustain the natural basis of life.

It means a reduction of production consumption in the global north and the liberation in the one-sided western paradigm of development so that the global south can explore our own self-determined paths of social organization. Degrowth means an extension of democratic decision making to allow for real political participation. Degrowth means that social changes organized and oriented towards sufficiency and self-sufficiency and ecological sustainability rather than a pursuit of a line go up. A pursuit of economic growth regardless of its impact on people and planet. Degrowth advocates for the creation of open, connected and localized economies. There are several steps that need to be taken in order to achieve a degrowth society. For one, I think that as Jason Hickel advocates in his book, less is more, we absolutely need to put an end to the practice of planned obsolescence.

Whether it be in household appliances, in tools, in furniture, in computers, we need to shift away from this idea of products being produced to break down in a certain timeline and require replacement. I personally have witnessed a lot of older technologies that continue to last this day because they were invented before this whole practice of planned obsolescence really came about. My family, we have a microwave that is like a decade older than I am and it still works fine. Wow. Yeah, and I mean, in my own lifetime, I've had to purchase multiple microwaves, so it's ridiculous. Yeah, this is always one of the things that I always thought like there was a real sort of like, this is how you appeal to conservative people with this. It's just like, hey, we're going to bring back like 1960s microwaves where everything is a dial and it doesn't break ever.

Yeah. I think what's missing in the conversation about degrowth is a lot of people, they assume because they react with negatives that everybody else will. You know, they kind of project their own reaction to others, but I think political spectrum aside or political charts or how are we going to map out the unmappable. I think that people generally, as I was discussing in the previous episode, want a good life and that requires qualitative changes far more than it requires quantitative changes. Of course, there are places where quantitative changes are needed to make certain things accessible to that population. But we already overproduce a lot of different things and a lot of overproduction is completely unnecessary because it is based on planned ups lessons in order to increase profits. And so that needs to, once that is discarded, I think people will have, will best be able to access that quality of life because we look at a lot of the sudden expenses that people have to deal with. You know, your fridge suddenly breaking down, your stove suddenly breaking down, your microwave or your toaster suddenly breaking down, or your washing machine.

I think in this year alone, we've had to fix the washing machine three or four times because it's just constantly breaks down. But when instead we can save those resources, save that time, save that energy, save that money, just producing quality for the first time. You know, putting an end to those deliberate manufacturing decisions and developing long lasting modular products that can reduce our, you know, material energy use worldwide. I think in a lot of cases, we don't necessarily need more innovation. You know, I don't think we really need like a smart fridge. I think we just need a fridge that works for decades without breaking down constantly. Yeah, and like so much of the stuff that's sort of like nominally is, like is supposed to be innovation is just how can we make this product in such a way that we can sell consumer data about you from it? Exactly.

It's like, we don't need to do that. We can simply not. We can simply not. We can simply not. Exactly. Exactly. And speaking of things that we can simply not. We can simply not assault our senses constantly with advertising, because advertising just continues to save this purpose of generating social divisions, highlighting class divisions, and manipulating people into consuming stuff they don't need.

As a card carrying member of Generation Z, I have not. I do not typically watch much TV. I used to watch TV because I'm the older Gen Z contingent, but with the rise of streaming services, which I do not use. And so I have to say about that. I have not watched much TV. But there's certain reality shows that I enjoy like the amazing race. And so those since we show on TV, I like Japanese. I like to watch Japanese.

And the constant, deeply unfunny, irritating, annoying, loud, flashy barrage of commercials is quite aggravating. Honestly, the golden age of commercials being funny was a long time ago. And now it just suits. One of the things that I mentioned that in the episode that we had done on the Commons, one of the things that I, one of the positions I held even before I was an anarchist was my opposition to the advertising industry to advertising. I can't stand advertising. Everywhere you walk, everybody you scroll, everything you watch and listen to, it's all trying to sell you something. I would love to be able to go outside and not see ads all the time. I would love to be able to scroll through the incident without seeing ads all the time.

And so getting rid of the advertising industry, getting rid of all these ads that are just pushing us to consume more and more. And oftentimes just promoting a lot of really harmful societal ideas, you know, body images use and alcoholism and a lot of. Our worst practices and a lot of really terrible things are being promoted through ads. And so, yeah, tear it down and watch consumerism perish. You think about really the history, the advertising industry and how it came about as a mass communication student. That's something that I would have spent some time looking into. Advertising really came about in response to, you know, this need that people had really, that companies had to get people to consume. Because in a lot of cases, you know, people would buy something and a newer model would come out and they would really pay attention to it because, oh, well, I already have the thing. I don't need to get another thing. You know, you can't run a profitable business that way.

So they basically used advertising to push people to consume more. And so we need to get rid of the advertising industry. Another step we can take towards degrowth is to shift from ownership to use of fruct. Use of fruct is something that Marie Bookchin, a social ecologist, talks a lot about in his book, The Ecology of Freedom. And it's essentially the freedom of individuals or groups in the community to access and use but not destroy common resources to supply their needs. The term use of fruct comes from Roman property law, I believe, which would include use us the right to use. Sorry, unfortunately, I did not take Latin. Yeah, fructus is just the right to enjoy the fruit of one's property and abuse us, which is the right to destroy one's property.

So use us, fructus and abuse us. And so use of fructus is really the combination of the first two principles, right, to access and use and enjoy the fruit of commonly held property without, you know, the right to destroy it so that everyone can supply their needs. So instead of, I mean, two libraries are already a concept that exists around the world, rather than 100 people in the community, each individually or in an electric drill. One person, or rather, one library can host or three or four electric drills and effectively serve everyone's need for a drill when they need it. Because unless you're a carpenter, or really into arts and crafts, you probably don't need an electric drill all the time. Another thing that would really help in our push towards the growth would be getting rid of car dependency because the consumption of vehicles, maintenance of vehicles, the maintenance of the infrastructure that vehicles use. All of those things requires a lot of resources, you know, concrete and oil and gas and metals and materials and rather than forcing everyone to produce those things so we could consume those things. We can instead shift towards a walkable model for urban environments so that people who do need to use vehicles in rural settings, for example, can use them and use them without causing unnecessary harm, contributing to unnecessary harm, superfluous harm on the planet.

Getting rid of car dependency would also mean that fewer people would need vehicles and the few vehicles that we do produce can be shared in common to serve needs that cannot be filled by bikes or, you know, public transportation systems. Another element of deep growth would really be the reduction of our energy material use through the transformation of our agriculture systems. It is true that we currently produce enough food for, I believe, 10 billion people. A lot of that food is wasted. A lot of that food doesn't reach people. It's really an issue of allocation and not necessarily production. But at the same time, that production is extremely harmful. It relies on a lot of damaging chemicals. It relies on the stripping of our top soils. It relies on the overuse of antibiotics. It relies on the abuse of animals. The way that we currently feed the world is deeply unequal, extremely inefficient, environmentally degrading and energy-wasting. We cannot continue to treat our farms like factories. We need to find ways to feed ourselves densely and compatibly with the living world.

Scaling down to localised polymer culture can help regenerative-based agriculture systems, community-supported agriculture, urban gardens, aquaponics, cultured meats, aquacultures, and exploring other more traditional forms of food-raising will need to be the route that we take. Already, we are killing our soils. We are running out of the fossil fuels that the agricultural industry relies on. And if we continue along the trajectory, we have a big storm coming. We have probably the greatest famine the plant has ever seen on its way. If we do not aim to build food autonomy, aim to re-wild our ecologies, and aim to reconfigure our consumption patterns, our food production and consumption patterns, to sequester more carbon, to allocate to more people, to produce healthier foods, and really to recover the earth. Another important step we can take in degrowth would be to get rid of or to scale down to an especially destructive industries. There is, of course, agriculture. There is the fossil fuels industry, the arms industry, private jet industry, the automobile industry, the airline industries.

All of these industries must either be slimmed down or gotten rid of, because as the pandemic has shown, very few of the jobs that are currently undertaken around the world are truly essential to maintaining the bare bones of life. And of course, we do need to reconfigure the way that we live, the ways of life, to reflect ecological limits. But even with that reconfiguration, I think we know what industry is needed and what aren't. I always find it strange, this is, I guess, a tangent, I always find it strange that politicians are celebrated for bragging about creating new jobs when, in reality, I believe, and really the vision was in the 20th century, that we would reach a point where fewer and fewer people needed to work and that we needed to work for less time. And so that really is part of the aim of degrowth, reviving that pursuit, reviving that goal, because we have reached the point where we can scale on the amount of time each person has to work, scale on the amount of jobs that are necessary. If you've read Bullshit Jobs by David Griebel, you'll see that a lot of, particularly service economy jobs, practically worthless. And I actually saw a kind of funny video talking about how, at this point, office culture is more of a religion cult.

Yeah, it's so good. Yeah, so I'd go around making a surround on Twitter, that was really funny. But yeah, we just move around a bunch of people, move around a bunch of numbers. If you've seen the show, Succession, sorry, not Succession, Severance, if you've seen the show, Severance, it's pretty much like an r slash anti-week type show. I think more and more people are coming to the realization that, hey, this kind of sucks, the fact that we have to work this much. So we need to reduce the amount of time we work, the type of work we need to change the type of work we do. So it's a quantitative and qualitative shift. And something I spoke about in my video on anti-work or post-work, whatever you want to call it.

These changes, these steps to scale on total energy use can be taken by a broad range of organizations, groups, mass movements, popular assemblies, unions, cooperatives, not waiting for the state, but going beyond it. I think we've seen by now, I think if you have not seen by now, it needs to open your eyes. The state is not doing enough or in some cases not doing anything at all to respond to these crises and we need to take it into our own hands to do so. I have a video in store for December that as one of my patrons joked might have the alphabet agencies after me. But there are a lot of different actions that we can take to integrate degrowth, to move towards a degrowth society, to degrow our economies. A combination of acts of confrontation and non-cooperation and prefiguration. In some degrowth challenges, the dominant growth imperative, it's in the name. It is intentionally subversive in its title because it requires us to think about how we can collectively organize the restructuring of our economy and the downscaling of energy and resources worldwide to transition back into balance with the living world in a safe, just and equitable way.

Degrowth means striving for a self-determined life in dignity and abundance for all. Degrowth would mean liberating ourselves not just from the ways that the growth imperative has shaped our technologies, education. Degrowth would require that we not just liberate ourselves from the ways that the growth imperative has shaped our technologies and institutions. But it demands that we also reconsider our education, our cultural norms and values, our identities, our mindsets, our relationships. It will be a massive shift with anarchists called social revolution, but it's one that is worthwhile. As some degrowth advocates would say, it's degrowth by choice or degrowth by force. Because the use of degrowth has been used slightly differently. Degrowth by choice being, like I described, a collectively organized, democratically managed, you know, restructuring of the economy to bring into balance the living world in a safe, just and equitable way. Whereas degrowth by force is more so a combination of austerity and apocalypse. So, up to you. All power to the people.

So, there's a Japanese Marxist named Kohei Saito who's been writing, like, a bunch of stuff recently who basically, like, he's been probably the biggest voice of degrowth in Japan. And his book, Capital and Anthropocene, is finally getting translated into English pretty soon. And so, yeah, check that out when it comes out. His stuff is really good and he, like, basically has revived both Marxism and degrowth in Japan after Marxism's kind of, like, get implosion after a bunch of weird... Anyway, we don't need to get into the story of the collapse of the Japanese left, but yeah, that's coming soon, so check that out. Yeah, I'm looking forward to that book when it comes out. Yeah, me too. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations.

And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you gotta grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark, and not in the good-bad-ass way. He's a nasty shark.

He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then, for sure, he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth,

his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole.

My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match. And when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Bye. It could happen here. I don't know why I did that voice. I'm Robert Evans, host of a podcast that has many other hosts who all are on the podcast right now. We have, in order of them being on my Zoom screen, Chris, Garrison, Shereen, and James. Hey, everybody. How's it going?

Good. Great. We've brought the full crew in to talk about the worst shit. Yeah. How much of kind of not great things have happened the past week. So we took, we took last week mostly off from work due to a series of court cases. And thanks to an injunction, we're allowed to podcast again. So I figured it would be, we had a couple of, I mean, horrifying stories break in a row that we, as the people we are, kind of had specific bits of insight on that I think might help catch our listeners up to some maybe underappreciated aspects of some of the big stories of the last week.

So we wanted to start with the mass shooting in Colorado Springs, specifically talking about the family of the still alleged, but, you know, definitely did it shooter. James, you want to kick us off there? Yeah, I wanted to start out with this so that the alleged shooter is called Anderson Lee Aldrich, right? But comes from an LDS, Latter-day St. Family in San Diego. And like, I think everyone has probably seen this very viral 30 second clip of his father that went around Twitter. I did today after the shooting and his dad just so we're super clear on this says some disgusting things and there's a piece of shit for saying them. I don't want to excuse any of the shit he said. I also don't want to excuse the way that that was cut because I think it was pretty, pretty shitty.

Like there are people we should be really fucking angry at and his father is one of them. But his father didn't excuse the shooting. And if you look at that eight minute interview, he says that like what happened was wrong, et cetera, et cetera. And there are people who have excused the shooting, right? Like, I think Chris is going to speak to some of them. Tim Pool, Tucker Carlson, people who created a climate where this happened and have asked for it to fucking happen again. And are asking continually for it to happen again. His dad didn't do that.

Like again, his dad doesn't seem to have been a great dad, right? His dad was using when he was a kid. His dad was abusive, rewarded his violence. I think we all know lots of people who are raised in those climates who didn't go on to shoot up a nightclub. And it just kind of, I saw some, I don't know. I was upset by the response to that in a sense because like, I know so many people who come from families and homes like that. And like being like, oh, he was doomed to be this way because of how his dad was just like, isn't, I don't know. It just upset me.

It's not the response we need, you know? Like I think we should hold what his dad said, like hold his dad to account of what he said, but also not like allow that to explain. Yeah. I have a couple, like I have confused feelings on it because his dad does go into a long thing where he says, you know, you shouldn't, there's nothing that justifies violence. You know, these people's lives were precious. All lives are precious. But he also was like, I taught him that violence was a great way to solve problems. And, you know, expresses that he was glad to learn that his son wasn't gay.

And I don't just fucked up. Yeah. I don't know. I don't. Yeah. I don't know how much I want to like interpret that as he really meant what he said about nothing justifying this and those people's lives being precious. Because that is kind of this thing that like you get on the and this guy's obviously not a thought leader on the Christian, right? Not like he's not like a luminary.

I don't think he contributed outside of, you know, the things he may have raised his son to believe to the broader national climate of hate right now. There was just a study that was released today that from the armed conflict location and event data project data confirms that anti LGBT mobilization is now the leading driver of far right protest activity in the US. So obviously this guy didn't make that happen. But I notice a similarity between like the I there's nothing worse than my kid being gay, but also when a bad thing gets done by a Christian to gay people. Well, their lives are still precious. We just like hate what they how they live them. Yeah. I don't know.

I don't know where to where to go further with that, but you're right that like that the the 30 second clip is very dishonestly edited in order to like cut out a lot of what this guy was saying, which I have a problem with regardless of who you're doing it to. Yeah, it's just it's bad journalism and like, I would rather we point our rage at the people who are going to make this happen again unless we stop them. Yeah, like this guy, I'm this guy, the degree to which this guy contributed to this massacre by being this dude's dad. I don't think there's anyone else he's going to push into killing if he indeed did that whereas people like Tim pool are going to continue to do that. Yeah, yeah, and also I do want to say like like the the Mormon church does not get a pass for this. Yeah. Like no, absolutely. No, absolutely.

Fucking homophobic. Like absolutely. This is shit. Super racist. Like, yeah. And you know, a lot of people really haven't been talking about this and they should because they fucking suck. And yeah, this is this is as you know, like, yeah, it turns out when you fucking have a bunch of people like giving sermons about fucking musket balls, like this is what happens. Yeah.

You know, they don't they don't get off the hook for this either. No, and they're like domination of politics in some areas really needs to be seriously looked at. Talking of like domination of politics, I do want to talk about his grandfather a little bit. Yep. Because his grandfather is bonkers. So his grandfather is called Randy Vople might be pronounced verbal, but he's he was mayor of Santy. So Santy is a town east of San Diego. It's not not very far east.

I think Shereen you're probably familiar with Santy, right? Yeah. Santy is a place. That's that's about yeah, that's about it. Yeah. People sometimes call it clan tea. Definitely like Metzger was there for a while, right? And yeah, when Vople was mayor in 2001, there was a school shooting in Santy about which he spoke.

He hasn't spoken about this one yet at all. He's he's he's like, yeah, strange that strange. He's pretty much gone, which is not like when this guy speaks, he he rarely helps himself when he speaks to media who don't agree with every position he's on. So I want like I want to ground like he became mayor of Santy in 2000. In 1999, a black Marine by the name of Carlos Colbert, who is a large corporate in the Marine Corps was beaten and paralyzed by five white men at Memorial Day Party in Santy. And that doesn't represent the whole town, but that was how people thought of that town in the 2000s. It was always a place to avoid. Like you don't really want to go there.

I don't know. Yeah, I have friends who still don't want to go to Santy. Like I have friends who are like delivery drivers who are like black people who have been told like they'd used to not send black folks delivering to Santy. Like it definitely has whether or not that's the case now it's becoming more more diverse. I think like ethnically, but it certainly has a reputation of being a place where like it's not safe. And this is a place that elects him as mayor in 2000. Right. 2001 they have a high school shooting and he just kind of continues to spout some absolutely crazy stuff.

It's probably worth noting that he's not as like far from the like the norm of the GOP, which is still a long way from like good when it comes to like LGBTQ stuff as he is for other things. Like his probably his most famous crazy position is that climate change is good because most of our enemies live in I'm quoting now. Most of our enemies live in hot climates, desert climates, it will probably have a negative effect on their environment. Most of the Muslim nations are in hot areas of the world. Honest. Wow. Yeah. Just absolutely incredible.

Wait, did we find the world's first pro eco fascist? Also, yeah. No, I have met a few anti-San people who are pro climate change because it will bring on the expression of civilization. But this is this is like a whole other level. Well, there's dry us out. Do you want to know why he thinks this climate change happens? Please. Oh God.

I believe about 1% of climate change is impacted by human beings. The rest of the 99% that should not rest a 99% rest of 100% buddy is solar cycles. Quote the natural wobbling of the earth and volcanic activities. This is the classic anti-climatic stuff. Yeah. There's a couple of good ones. I personally partial to we didn't have enough CO2 and climate change is the only thing that's going to save us from the CO2 shortage. Notable other vocal bangers include I'm getting attacked out here by the Viet Cong stealing my copper and I don't like it.

It would be super funny if it turned out that the Viet Cong had sent like a deep cover special spec option to California. Just to fuck with this guy's copper. To pull copper. Yeah, just a powerful example of what happens if you lick lead paint. Yeah, just an incredible boomer. So he was voted out in 2020 by a considerable margin. I think you got about 30% of votes. Thank God.

Jesus Christ. Okay, so he's gone. 2022. Sorry. This. So he's serving out. He just got voted out. Yeah.

He's laid out. Was he left for 20 years? How many? He moved in I think 2016. He moved into the California assembly. So representing like this. Jesus Christ. Yeah.

Yeah. Statewide. This is the thing. Out here on the left coast. California, it means one thing to people who have never been to the West Coast. But if you've been to the West Coast, the conservative parts of California, like the Republican Party. They're massive and the Republican Party has absolutely locked in control. It is very difficult to move them in places like fucking OC.

And there's more Republican voters in California than most states. Yes. Than most Iran states. Yes. Yeah. If you want a slice of Eastern California, just check out Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco's Instagram, where he mostly just rides around on a horse and criticizes COVID restrictions. But yeah, this is, yeah, it's really something, incredible poster.

But this is, I think, an insight into like the side of California, the people. Doesn't mean that everyone who lives in these county, of course, is bigoted or racist. There are lots of very nice, kind people in these county. I know there are some like anarchist communes out there. But yeah, this, Vopal claims he hasn't spoken to his grandson for years. But this guy has been spouting this shit for 20 years, right? Like he became mayor of Santy in 2000. That was when this shooter, Aldrich, was born.

So like for his entire life, Vopal has been saying stuff like the Viet Cong are stealing my copper. I mean, it is true that this person didn't grow up surrounded by a constant bubble of homophobic rhetoric, dehumanizing rhetoric. And that does shape the person that you are. Obviously, that doesn't mean you're going to go do a mass shooting. There's lots of people who grew up in those environments who turn out to be very wonderful people. But yeah, that is definitely like the environment that you were raised in and around. Obviously, it doesn't obviously affects who you're going to be.

And the shooter is posting like burning a pride flag on his very limited social media presence. Right. And like every time his granddad had the chance, he voted against rights. Yeah, he was raised in an environment where hatred of LGBTQ people was not just like present, but was used as the justification regularly for like legislative action. He was also raised in an environment where all of the men around him would have praised violence in different ways. And the fact that he wound up doing violence against the queer community is not like surprising. Yeah. Yeah.

Was it his dad also like an MMA fighter? Yes. UFC. Whatever. Some sort of combat sport. Yeah. He's also in a bunch of porn movies. A lot of porn movies. I think a lot of things were normalized that were just like maybe not for other people. Yeah.

That is a man who has no barrier between the two sides of his nose due to a lifetime of snorting every single chemical he can possibly get his hands on. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Yeah. His dad doesn't seem to be like entirely lucid and since you. Well, the other aspect of this is that the shooter in Colorado was like a known figure as well. He wasn't a nobody like people had. He did like a bomb threat last year. There was a standoff with the police where he was in armor threatening to go out shooting. Yeah.

That's I was really I'm really hoping the conversation shifts more towards him as a person because I can only blame the family so much. Yeah. He's done some terrible things. I think that's getting glossed over by the fact that he has people in his family. The number one thing we should be pointing out because I also don't believe we should be focusing entirely on his specific actions. We should be focusing on the fact that it would have been incredibly easy to stop this guy. He was the most obvious candidate for a mass shooting imaginable and nothing was done to stop this. Like that's that's the biggest answer is that like whiteness is very helpful when it comes to hate. But yeah.

And get away with crime. In all of the time I've been following mass shooters. I can't think of one that more directly talked about wanting to do a mass shooting in a way that was immediately obvious to all of the law enforcement in his area and had already forced a response from them. So and and again for talking about his gun control always comes up in this Colorado has red flag laws like Colorado has the restrictions people say should be. But the problem is that none of them were actually used against him anyway. And that I think comes back to like again the problem like one of the largest problems again with gun regulation is that you're relying on the police to enforce. Exactly. Yes.

95 percent of the same shit that this guy does. So you know. Yeah. Letting these people come to pride like this is this is going to go great for you. They just assumed he was an excitable boy and it was going to be you know he just needed to get it out of his system that time he had to stand off with the police over a bomb threat where he talked to his mom about wanting to go out as a mass shooter. Like most young men. Yeah. Should we.

Should we take a break. Yeah. Do you know what else. Nope. Nope. Here's how to break. Yeah. Do some insulin.

We're back. I hope everyone took insulin. Everybody. It'll. I don't know what it'll do. Get sleepy. Very hungry. Sleepy and hungry pilled.

Look James as a podcaster it's my job to tell people to take medicine not to have any responsibility for what happens when they do. Well I'm just going to go fly up to Canada and get some free insulin and then come back. Smuggle it down. That actually. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe consider. Just have them fill up your car.

What are we talking about next. Yes. So I want to talk a bit about the reaction to this on the right because. Yep. This is something. Okay. So like the far rights reaction to mass shootings has never been good. Like I sort of put this out of the baseline.

It's usually been like oh this is this is still unfortunate that it has. Yeah. Yeah. It's usually like well this is like a mental illness. This is like the pills or something. Like they are just. Pretty open. Here's the thing.

What I originally did this right. I had a Tim pool tweet. That I had pulled. And then he made like every successive time we were about to record this episode. He had. He makes another even worse. He really. So here.

Yeah. Okay. First off. I do want to. We have to. One of the things I want to try to keep in mind is we are more online. That a decent chunk of our audience. Tim pool is a guy who attained prominence.

Livestreaming during the Occupy Wall Street rallies. He kind of framed himself as a broadly progressive kind of liberal. Journalist. He's like a skateboarder and he's doing shit. You know he's live streaming a lot. He's doing. You know, experimenting with all these like novel ways of covering. Things like that.

You know, we're talking like 2012. Obviously people since then have pointed out that like he was kind of a giant dick at Occupy. I know people who were there who fucking hated him. Yes. Yes. He had a big platform as a result of that. He got hired by vice for a little while. Most serious journalists who have worked with him will point out that like.

He's a giant asshole and like kind of. Not good at anything. Just like not very smart. Like doesn't really know what's going on or deliberately obtuse. I've heard people like the anyway. He gained prominence as he kind of increasingly through the Trump years would lean in on hard right stuff while still claiming to be liberal and progressive and just that he was increasingly lost by the progressives who have gone crazy far.

Yeah. Anyway, he's just gone so that he's he has a huge audience. He does a lot of like live streaming. So the primary way that like when I say that he used to do live streaming where he would show up at a thing. He's rich now. He doesn't leave his his house in Maryland. He sits there and he like plays clips from the news and looks at articles written by other

people and then talks about them really usually wrong. Yeah. Poor commentary on it and has millions and millions of followers. Yeah. And is constantly and continues to platform people who are self-described fascists, far right people. He's kind of he's like a he's like a vector point in that whole. He's very large.

He's fairly influential within the social media algorithm of particularly Twitter. He's able like he's he's able to get shit trending a lot on Twitter. So he's not someone you can entirely ignore. He has he has an impact on like national discourse and he's a lot of people on the right see him as a valuable person to she's had Alex Jones on. He's hanging out with Kanye and Nick Fuentes now, which is what we're about to talk about. But the thing since since the Colorado Springs shooting, he's gone kind of completely mask off about the groomer thing.

And most of his comments have been along the lines of like, well, these people were hosting a groomer event. And so violence was inevitable. Yeah. I mean, like, like that's not exactly I mean, I'm just going to read one of his tweets to get like that. That's that's not an exaggeration or any kind of reading of subtext. Literally what he said was quote, it seems around 10 p.m. Club Q posted that they were

having an all ages drag show the next day. About two hours later, the shooter came in. People keep calling for woodchippers. And this is what happens. Yeah. Like open. And this has been this has been a thing across the entire right. Like they're just there's openly either like very, very openly celebrating this or you

get, you know, like this is one of like one of the things that it's inevitable because the gays are so degenerate. Yeah, Jimmy fucking door has gone like just completely like I literally started with it like started this thing on this with a giant rant about how like how like disgusting it is that like drag queens around kids. It's like they are just openly into full scale just openly into the like we need to get these people killed. This is in some ways the most horrifying.

Instant like this because this is the first time that the reaction widely on the right has been either this was a good thing or this was this this obviously was going to happen because gay people are evil and are grooming children. So violence has to happen against them. And like that is that was that such a popular sentiment on the right in the aftermath of the shooting, whether it's whether it's implied and whispered or whether it's just said completely outright like it was a very clear consensus that this is what the Republican reaction was going to be and anyone farther right of the Republicans.

Like it wasn't it wasn't even just like a Nazi talking point. It was just like regular Republicans in office were talking about this this style of rhetoric in response to the shooting. And for that reason, it's kind of the most horrifying instant we've had because, you know, like in the aftermath of like the pulse shooting, we did not have rhetoric like this mainstreamed in the way that it is happening for the Club Q shooting. It was a very, very different response to the to the pulse shooting. Yeah.

Also probably because the shooter there wasn't white. Yeah. Yeah. They had to talk about this connection. Yeah, they'd be like, no, the problem here was immigration, right? And no, for this, he's like, he is obviously a white dude. His lawyers are pulling bullshit to get his hate crime charges pulled. But like, it's obviously it's it's obviously this white guy and the rights response is,

yeah, he was probably justified in doing what he did. Yeah. I mean, I I feel like they're setting him up to be the next Kyle Rittenhouse where like he's just going to become like this kid's celebrity that profits off of killing people. I don't know if we're there yet. Yeah. Partly because he got the shit kicked out of him. But I think I should raise.

No, not by police by a trans lady and yeah. I think you've made a good point that like what they did get away with some shit with Kyle Rittenhouse that like, I think they would not have pulled even five years before that. Like I think you wouldn't have found in 2015 people being like, yeah, he shot people in the street and this is good. Fuck them. And it is like the slippery slope fallacy isn't always a fallacy. But like, you know, once you start there, I don't think it's a massive leap to being

like, yeah, this kid shot queer people in the nightclub and that's what they had coming. Like even if they don't make him a hero, like I do think that that like the Overton window moved with Rittenhouse and it's moving again with this little fucker. Yeah. I think he's slightly too toxic to go through that same celebrity status that Rittenhouse is. He also can't speak. I think he's been like in his court appearances.

He's like not capable of saying got beaten very badly to shit. Yeah. The thing that you get the thing that scares me as like a potential Rittenhouse event, but kind of in the in the anti queer mass shooter vibe is like, you have some father or something who's separated from the kid and their other parent takes them to a drag queen event and dad shows up and starts shooting. And like, that's a thing that's a lot easier to get the right to pile on. Yeah.

That's that's the instance where that person now becomes a cultural figure in a way that's more similar to what has happened with Rittenhouse. And that just is like the hell scenario. And I think the other important thing is like they're deliberately trying to incite this. Like this is this is deliberately. There's an interesting thing like Nick Fuentes had this interview. I mean, this is partially just this is just who fucking Nick Fuentes is. We had this thing after the election where he was like, well, like we can't take power

via like, we can't actually get our agenda done by voting. We have to do it by like theocratic fascism. Right. And and I, you know, okay, so obviously this is Nick Fuentes, but I think this is part of what's happening right now, which is that the reason that they're doing this, right? The reason that right now the thing that they're trying to do is incite a genocide is because they're fucking losing every. And they know it, right?

Every single day church attendance drops. It's been dropping for fucking 20 years. It's never coming back. Like 9 11 didn't do it. Like Trump didn't do it. Nothing. Nothing is ever going to bring people back to these churches. Like unless maybe they solve their sexual assault problem, but that's not good.

Like they structurally can't do that. Right. So, you know, every single day religiosity drops in this country. Every single like every single day very slowly. And we have been doing this roughly for about 15 years now. We are winning. And this is what they're fucking terrified of. Right.

They have to move right now. Like exactly in this moment is the moment they could exterminate us if they wait any longer. They're fucked because they're, you know, the base for this kind of sort of like, like this specific kind of Christian fascism isn't going to be there. Like there will be other fascisms, but you know, every, every, every single day that they fucking wait, like another person leaves the church. And so, you know, like right now in, you know, and they, they can't do it electorally. Right.

We just saw that they got fucking destroyed trying to lean into this shit because, and then this is the other thing, right? Like the other thing that's been happening since the 2000s. And this is the thing that is very different about this moment than any other moment that has happened in US history is that the vast, vast majority of people are pro crewwides or pro LGBTQ or pro gay marriage, gay marriage, post consistently at about 70%. Right. And even with this shit, that hasn't moved the needle on it.

Right. They know that they have to right now. Right. They have to fucking kill us. All they have left is. Yeah. They solely have left. They have, they have no argument.

Direct action basically. Yeah. It's like, they see no other viable way to, to mainstream this. And that's why we have hours after the shooting, Libs of Tik Tok posting about queer events in Colorado because they're, they're trying to get this thing to happen. They're trying to do more stuff. They're trying to press the attack. Yeah.

And I think, I think, I think this is, this is like, on the other hand, like this is a sign of their weakness. Right. And like, again, like the number, the physical number of people who are pushing this shit is not that large. Right. And, and, you know, again, like this is, this is, you know, I've talked a lot about how sort of the, the silent majority in this country doesn't fucking agree with this shit.

And like, they literally are not that fucking many of them. We can stop them. Yeah. This is an actual thing. Like, you know, like there, there, there, there's a limit to which we can even sort of talk about this, but like, okay, we've been doing community self-defense, like as, as sort of like the big principle of the left since the Trump era, we have reached a point where like, you know, we can defend ourselves, but if we, if, if, if we're limited to just

defending ourselves, they're going to kill a bunch of us first. And that means that we, like, we actually have to start taking the fight to these media platforms, right? We have to start taking the fight specifically trying to get these people fucking off air and then, you know, failing that, like fucking showing up and like blowing a fucking air horn in Chaya Rychek's like ear every single time she leaves her house, right? Because all of, all of these people fucking their entire lives depended on our labor, right?

Every single fucking Uber they take, every single meal they eat is all prepared by us. And you know, we can fucking find them and we can, we can make their lives fucking hell if this is what they're going to do to us. Garrison, do you want to, do you want to talk about focus on the family at all? Because it's and Colorado's. Oh yeah, there was speaking of the kind of direct action Chris was talking about showing up where these people are and making it very clear that they don't get to pretend anymore to not be complicit in murder.

That's a story. Yeah. Some people did, did show up at the Colorado Springs, focus on the family headquarters, did a, did a graffiti, left some, left some messages out front and posted a communique of sorts. I think they called them Dibonic, which is pretty funny. I'm remembering the message written the thing, right? Yeah.

That is a weird place. It talked about how Satan just can disguise himself as an angel of light. Oh yeah, yes. That's, that's talking about the types of like self righteousness that these Christian fascist groups put on and in, but in effect, they're all kind of murderous snakes. That was the people trying, trying to use the Bible against these guys, which is, is funny in an ironic way. And I don't think they actually care because they don't actually care.

I don't think they actually care what the Bible says. No, they don't give a shit about what the Bible says. They give a shit about, yeah, but that's, you know, showing up and doing, doing a little thing outside, outside their headquarters is definitely a good first step when me and James went there. You know, like in terms of this is just an interesting, interesting comment, like police did not help at the club queue shooting at all. They came afterwards and they held and they, they, you know, as, as they usually do, they'll

they arrest the person who, who, who helped, who helps stop the mass shooting. And me and James went to the focus on the family headquarters last summer. There was a Colorado police officer inside the building the entire time, constantly there, mostly watching me because I was the obvious, obvious outcast inside there, but that police are stationed at focus in the family all the time, 24 seven, to make sure nothing bad happens there, but they're not going to do shit to help queer people getting murdered, but they're going to stay, they're going to have a police car outside of the focus in the family building and have an officer inside all the time because that's what the police

actually do. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's like, it is increasingly obvious if you have been paying any attention in the last decade, the only consequences that exist in this world is us. And you know, it is in our hands to decide what the consequences for these people fucking attempting to incite a genocide are. All right, yeah, that's going to do it for us here. It could happen here until next time, uh, I don't know until next time.

During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aaronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys, as the FBI sometimes you get to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters

in Denver. But the center of this story is a raspy, voiced, cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And on the gun badass way, a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen.

Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts, I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message

that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. The wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI.

How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus, it's all made up? Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello everybody and welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and occasionally about how to put them back together again. And today we have a special episode, we're going to be talking about a place where things did in fact fall apart and people are, you could say, still in the process of putting

them back together again and trying to do it in a way that is much more equitable and better than things had been before the collapse. That is Rojava in Northeast Syria. I'm going to introduce kind of that concept in, I'll do it right now. If you don't know anything about this, you might check out our podcast, The Women's War. But it is an autonomous region, not a state in Northeast Syria that is not under the control of the Assad regime or of any other state in the area. It's an independent community that is based on some pretty radical, its organization is

based on some pretty radical political philosophies. In large part ones that were sort of initially explored by a man named Murray Bookchin, who is an American social theorist and anarchist political philosopher. And some of his ideas were adopted by the leader of a militant group in the region called the PKK. And the leader of that group was a guy in a Turkish prison named Abdullah Aujalan, who was, you might say, a Kurdish freedom fighter. Aujalan encountered Bookchin's ideas and started writing his own books of political

theory that were kind of based off of them. And then when 2013, you get the Syrian civil war reaches its kind of height, ISIS becomes a thing, suddenly the government's not in this area that has a large Kurdish population Northeast Syria, and people who are followers of Aujalan takeover and start, as they're fighting ISIS, instituting this kind of radical, feminist, egalitarian vision of society, which is currently under attack by the Turkish government, which is what we're going to be talking about. But I want to introduce our guests for today. First off, we have James Stout, and we have Chris on the call from our normal cool zone

team. And then our guests today are Debbie Bookchin. Debbie is a journalist and author and co-editor of the Next Revolution Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy. And then we also have Megan Baudette from the Kurdish Peace Institute, where she is the director of research. Welcome to the show, Megan and Debbie. Thank you.

It's great to be here. Thank you so much. Really appreciate it. Yeah. Thank you both for your time. I think maybe to start us out, Megan, would you be willing to talk a little bit about why the Turkish government is so aggressive towards this independent region in Northeast Syria and kind of what the situation on the ground is now?

Yeah, absolutely. So for some background, essentially, since the division of the Middle East into the modern nation states that exist there today after World War I with the agreements by European powers, the Kurdish people have been divided between four different states, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. And all of those states have had governments that have been ethno-nationalists, that have been repressive, that have not provided Kurds and other ethnic and religious minorities equal citizenship rights to participate in politics and to practice their culture to

speak their language, in addition to denying many of these rights to many of their other citizens of different ethnicities and religions as well. And so as a result of this repression, and the repression in Turkey was some of the strongest and most systemic, the Kurdish people in these regions have continued to struggle for and demand self-determination and freedom in different political forms. What happened in Turkey in the 1920s and the 1930s, there were Kurdish revolts against the new Turkish Republic, which was a very autocratic nation state that denied the existence of all non-Turkish ethnicities.

And these revolts were all violently put down with attacks that not only targeted those who tried to resist these policies of assimilation, but that also resulted in Turkish mass violence against Kurdish civilians in these regions. You had forced deportations, you had ethnic cleansing, you had all kinds of brutal violence against civilians in order to specifically create this homogenous Turkish ethnic identity in Kurdish regions. And so after this period of time, there was a period wherein there was less resistance. And I think the Turkish government believed that the Kurdish problem had been solved

by force. They had successfully been able to kill or assimilate all of the Kurdish people. But in the 1970s and the 1980s, sort of concurrent with many national liberation movements around the world, you had the beginning of the PKK or the Kurdistan Workers' Party's national liberation struggle. Now, they began as a socialist movement seeking an independent and socialist Kurdish state, and they saw Kurdistan as a colony that was occupied by Turkey. And with the colonialism of Turkey in Kurdistan was supported by imperialist powers in the

rest of the world as well. And they sought to write that as other national liberation movements in Africa, Asia, Latin America, many places at the time did with an armed struggle for independence. And in responding to the PKK's formation and armed struggle, the Turkish state once again, rather than exceeding to any Kurdish demands, they responded with brutal violent oppression of not only Kurds who were active in the armed struggle, not only politically active Kurds, but on all forms of Kurdish identity. After the military coup in Turkey in 1980, the Kurdish language was banned.

Kurds were imprisoned on false charges or no charges at all. Torture was prevalent, show trials were prevalent. Any kind of publication or other public interaction in Kurdish was completely illegal. So there was this full-scale effort to repress the Kurds and any other progressive segments of society in Turkey that would have supported them. And as the conflict went on, Turkey did very little to change. By the 1990s, the success of the Kurdish movement had forced the state to recalibrate, as had developments in Iraqi Kurdistan with Kurds there achieving autonomy.

And so you started to have the ability of Kurdish political actors to work within the system. You had the development of pro-Kurdish legal political parties at that time. But there was still very severe repression of any and all things Kurdish as they made their demands, even of those who increasingly attempted to make demands peacefully. So the conflict went on throughout the 1990s and the 2000s. And to this day, despite a peace process between the government of Turkey and the PKK and the Kurdish movement between 2012 and 2015, that process failed when Erdogan's government

saw that it was allowing for Kurds to take advantage of expanded democratic space in Turkey, organize and achieve electoral political success. The government abandoned its commitments and sadly returned to war. And the conflict has been going on ever since. It has included, again, not only this military component, but this component of crushing all forms of organized Kurdish political and cultural expression. So what we've been seeing in Turkey over the past nearly a decade now, more than a half decade, is the repression of the pro-Kurdish political opposition in parliament, the People's

Democratic Party or the HDP. We've seen repression of Kurdish media, attacks on Kurdish journalists. We've seen any kind of Kurdish activism, not only that that's explicitly political, but any kind of acknowledgement of the Kurdish language, of Kurdish colors, of Kurdish clothing, very readily criminalized. And this campaign of attacking and repressing all things Kurdish has, of course, expanded beyond Turkey's borders. So Turkey opposes North and East Syria because the Syrian Kurds have created a form of autonomous

governance that protects and promotes Kurdish rights. Because they have done so in the framework of the Kurdish freedom movement that has its roots in Turkey and in Otulon's ideas, as you explained. And because they've been able to create a successful alternative to the very sort of nationalist project that the modern Turkish state is based on. I would say that the Turkish-Kurdish conflict, and I don't like to call it that, but that is what most people call it today, is really a conflict now over two competing visions of regional order with turkeys based on the right-wing neoliberal nation-state and the

Kurdish movement's vision of a Middle East based on self-determination, liberation, equality for women and other values, not only for Kurds, but for all people. So because North and East Syria represents both Kurdish success and in creating an autonomous region and it represents these ideas of the Kurdish freedom movement that challenge Turkey's nationalist project, Turkey has been trying to destroy the autonomous administration of North and East Syria by all possible means for a very long time now. They've invaded Syrian territory twice to attack the autonomous administration and the SDF, the Syrian Democratic Forces.

Once in Afrin in 2018, Afrin is in Northwestern Syria. And then once in 2019, after Trump and Erdogan's phone call that we all infamously remember in Sarikhaniye and Talabiyad in northeastern Syria. So you've had these two invasions and occupations of North and East Syria's territory that have included not only the terrible violence of invasion and occupation, but also all kinds of crimes against civilians who remain. We've seen uptakes in violence and abuse of women, ethnically motivated, religiously motivated hatred and persecution that's driven virtually all of the non-Arab and non-Muslim

people living in these regions to flee their homes, attacks on anyone who is perceived as having collaborated with the prior administration, all being carried out by Turkey and Turkish back Syrian militia groups. So we've seen the persecution of the civilians in these areas with the intent of changing demographics and installing not only a government sympathetic to Turkey and the military structure sympathetic to Turkey, but also removing the social base for the autonomous administration's project. And then in addition to these all-out attacks on the autonomous administration in these regions,

Turkey continues to threaten the territory that North and East Syria does have left, which is still nearly one-third of Syrian territory concentrated in the northeast. There's been an escalating campaign of drone strikes targeting leaders in the autonomous administration and the SDF as well as Syrian civilians. Turkey is cutting water access to North and East Syria by restricting the flow of the Euphrates River. This is an agricultural region. People depend on that water for all aspects of life and certainly for the economy.

That's caused a great deal of suffering. The entire Turkish-Syrian border is very heavily militarized. When you drive by it and you see the wall and very lit up at night with the barbed wire and everything, and you just look at these civilian towns very peaceful on both sides, it's something very disturbing to see. But it's a highly militarized border and it is a completely sealed border. Turkey does not trade with North and East Syria and supports an international economic blockade on the region, including by pressuring its allies to restrict the access of goods

to North and East Syria. So there's economic there going on there. There are really every tactic that Turkey is able to use, whether military, economic, environmental, political, or anything else, in order to crush and destroy North and East Syria's political project and force the Kurdish people and the other peoples of that region to flee so that there is no base for such a project again in the future. They're doing everything they can to achieve that outcome. So the situation is very difficult and it is a direct result of Turkey's century-old

Kurdish question that it has been unable and unwilling to honestly and in good faith seek a peaceful solution to. And we'll get to it later, but the international community has played a very big role in ensuring that that conflict goes on with all of those negative consequences for North East Syria. Yeah. I mean, and that's one of the, so obviously Turkey is the second largest military in NATO and it has, you know, one of the things that is such like so messy about this is that on paper and on the ground, in fact, the United States has been supporting the autonomous

region in North East Syria, and particularly the YPG and the YPJ, which is, you know, the militia essentially as partners in the fight against ISIS. And still to this day, right now, there's an operation going on in the Al-Hol camp, which is where a lot of ISIS prisoners are held, that is like a coalition supported operation. And at the same time that the United States is doing this, we're selling weapons to the people who are have essentially declared the folks that our military has been aiding a terrorist organization, which is a peculiar and frustrating situation to say the least. Yeah.

And actually, the other thing that's happening, Robert, is that, you know, Turkey, while it's threatening a full scale invasion, they've been doing all of these things that Megan described sort of on this sort of low intensity warfare scale, a kind of military strategy that uses a whole variety of tactics that are short of, you know, a full scale invasion, which still may come. So, you know, there's these extrajudicial killings of some of the leaders of the SDF, which is the Syrian Democratic Forces, which is the sort of umbrella group of the two militia, Kurdish militias that you described, which also includes many Arab fighters and others

who have been central in defeating ISIS. At the cost, I might add, of about 13,000 lives, you know. And, you know, and the use of their proxy groups like the so-called, you know, SNA Syrian National Army, which is really, you know, a group of jihadi militias that Turkey has kind of assembled and now completely is responsive to Turkey and are the sort of shock troops for when they went, did go into Afrin and for these other invasions, you know, economic pressure as Megan described. But the point is that this kind of warfare, it produces these sort of ongoing low-level

attacks, but it keeps it sort of off the radar of the bigger political and media machine, and therefore it keeps it from getting the attention that it really deserves in Western societies. It also has the impact of displacing hundreds of thousands of people and, you know, and many hundreds have also been killed. I'm sure probably you're familiar with some of the recent bombings by drone that have been occurring in Rojava, which, you know, including many civilians, schoolchildren. Yeah.

Turkey is, doesn't care at all about who gets hit, and they have been very aggressive without any respect for civilian casualties as well. So, you know, so, I mean, I think it's important to also just note that this democratic project is in Syria is a deep threat to Turkey because, and that every time Erdogan steps up these military sort of this aggression, it leads him to rise slightly in the polls, which is something that's important to him because he has an election coming up next year. So there's that sort of political dimension to it, but the fact is that Rojava is basically a women's revolution.

Women are involved in every aspect of running society there, the political, the social, the economic, and Turkey is essentially a femmocidal state, you know. It not only reviews women within Turkey is less than human, where husbands can basically get away with murdering their wives. But, you know, it targets girls with drones, as it did on August 18th when a Turkish drone bombed a UN-supported education center for young girls in Haseke in Rojava. So, you know, it's very much, as Megan said, a war of ideologies as well. Again, one of the things that's so frustrating with this, so historically, the reason why

Turkey was, it was so important for NATO to get Turkey as a member is because that's essentially NATO's eastern flank. If you're still thinking about that big theoretical conflict between, you know, Russia and the Western democracies, that was why, you know, part of why initially like Turkey was such a valued partner, and then as time has gone on, it's primarily, one of the big things is we have a massive air base in Turkey, in Cirlik, where a number of US nuclear warheads are kept. So there's a tremendous fear, cowardice might be a better way to say it, on behalf of politicians

in the United States and other Western countries to actually engage with the ethnic cleansings and with the human rights abuses that the Turkish government, particularly under Erdogan, has continued. And one of the things that's really frustrating about this, you know, if you think about the way in which ISIS was discussed by US media, was discussed by, you know, conservatives, by Donald Trump during his campaign, you know, it was this ultimate boogeyman, well, a huge chunk of the support for ISIS, and in fact, even logistics for some of their fighters came allegedly courtesy of the Turkish state, and there's some evidence for this, there's certainly

evidence of support for wounded fighters and kind of a lax policy that allowed a lot of people to come through Turkey and get into northeast Syria to fight. And you know, as you noted earlier, 13,000, somewhere around there, fighters, men and women in the YPG and J, died fighting ISIS in, you know, and we're not just fighting ISIS kind of with the backing of the United States, but prior to getting any support, one of the most important things they did, the while ISIS was on the move in Iraq as well as Syria, they were carrying on an active ethnic cleansing, a genocidal operation in Mount Sinjar against the Yazidis.

And that was only really stopped because while they were fighting a defensive war in northeast Syria, the YPG sent fighters into Iraq to stop the genocide. And they were successful in this, you know, you talk to, as I have a lot of Yazidis survivors of the genocide, and they'll say the only reason we got out is because of, you know, the YPG. And the PKK, by the way. Well, and that is the, it is, so we should, we could talk a little bit about the PKK. They are, the YPG and J and the SDF, which is kind of the umbrella organization, are

not recognized as terrorist organizations by the United States or by most Western democracies. The PKK is recognized as a terrorist organization. Turkey's allegations would be that the YPG and J and other, you know, militias are just PKK affiliates. The reality is that they are in quite, in fact, quite closely tied. And you will, you know, but also there is not the exact, like when you're in Rojava and you encounter people who are PKK, people will speak about them differently than they will talk about other people who are kind of, you know, they're the folks from the mountains

is the term that I hear used the most. But the thing is, see, here's the problem. The problem is that, that whatever the PKK's history is and has been, and it's way more than we can get into, the PKK made a dramatic shift in its ideology and has done everything possible to try to restart peace negotiations with Turkey. So first of all, you know, there are several, as Megan mentioned before, there was a peace initiative that went on for a few years that then Erdogan decided wasn't, you know, beneficial to him.

So he stopped it. But the PKK and as recently as I think a year or two ago, the leader of the PKK in the mountains right now, Jamil Bayek, wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post saying, we want to have talks. We want to have reconciliation with Turkey. We're not asking for a separate state. All we want is some degree of autonomy and, you know, and it's actually to the enduring shame of the Western media, including the New York Times, that they continue to talk

about them as a separatist organization, but that's another story as well. The fact is that these ideologies that they both subscribe to PKK and the YPG, YPJ, regardless of whether to what extent they may be related, the political ideology is an ideology about direct democracy. It's about empowering people at the local level. It's about making sure that every adult and also the youth have a say in their communities. And it's as grassroots democratic as anything that you could ever imagine. And so really, you would think that the United States, you know, would understand that there's

certainly no threat that neither the YPG nor the YPJ has ever shown any aggression towards Turkey, which is what makes this idea of a buff, the idea that they need a buffer zone, kind of a joke, you know? So really, it's an ideological shift that's so profound and so empowering to local people that it's also something that, frankly, those of us who are on the left should be much more supportive of, I think, than people have been so far. Yeah. I mean, the thing that is most remarkable, because I spent a lot, I spent more time certainly

in Iraq than in Syria. And we should note here that we're talking about Syria today and we're talking about Rojava, Turkish aggression against particularly, against the PKK, but against, you know, Kurds kind of in an ethnic sense, extends beyond Syria. Iraqi has illegally attacked Iraq and in fact moved troops into Iraqi soil a number of times escalating within the last year and killed a substantial number of people in the Kurdish regional government territories. So that is also occurring here.

Although it's worth noting, again, because people mix this up a lot, what's happening in Kurdish-controlled Iraq is profoundly different from what's happening in Rojava and they're extremely different political organizations. Yeah, and I think it's also worth mentioning that it's not just Kurdish groups they've been attacking in Iraq, there've been a bunch of attacks like on these survivors. Yeah. Yeah. They've killed a bunch of those people too.

It is. Yeah. They're doing the genocide again. Yeah. Yeah. And it's interesting, you know, it's also kind of worth, the thing that was perhaps most surprising to me there was the degree to which people I would meet who were just like, in many cases, just like kind of, you know, terrorism police, Asaish guys or people

who were like working traffic checkpoints or working in the farms, people were really careful to not refer or talk to like what the project was as a state. And it's not on a state, a state, it's an autonomous region. That's one of the terms I heard the most is the autonomous regions, which is really interesting to me. I'm sorry, if something certainly like mainstream media writing about it seems to have trouble grasping, as you say. And it's interesting because obviously Debbie, in case folks haven't put it together, you

are the daughter of Murray Bookchin, who is the political philosopher whose ideas formed a significant core of sort of what the organizational structure in Rojava is. Well, I just want to say, first of all, thank you for that. Yeah. I just want to say that I really want to remind everybody that, of course, you know, Abdullah Uchalan read hundreds and hundreds of books, not just my dad's. No. So, I mean, I appreciate that, but you know, they have, he has really especially placed

emphasis on the need for any revolutionary project to have the liberation of women at its core. My dad talked a lot about hierarchy and patriarchy, but Uchalan, by making women central, has really done something unique, I think, you know, in the history of, because in the history of sort of revolutionary, you know, movements, because as many women who have participated in those movements in the past can tell you, it was always sure fight with us and we'll deal with the women's issue when the revolution is over. And Uchalan turned that upside down, you know, and he said, it's got to be a women's revolution,

it's not a revolution at all. And the women in those movements over there really fought for that themselves, too. And one of the things that was most interesting for me to see was when I would go into meetings there with women in all kinds of different, you know, military and civilian institutions in different cities across the region, that before I would even bring it up as a researcher, you know, women would say to me that if it weren't for Uchalan's theories, we wouldn't have the organizations that we have. We wouldn't have the political power that we have.

And they had this incredible articulation of how they use these ideas, you know, as inspiration for their own work and also as almost political cover to do kinds of things that wouldn't be accepted in other places, because they can go to men who they work with who might be suspicious, but who, you know, have this public stated claim to this ideology. And they can say, well, Uchalan's books say that society can never be free without women's liberation, that women's can have their own separate institutions. So they've been able to really take these ideas and expand on them and, you know, push them and use them with their own practice.

And the way that the ideas came about themselves, one book that I would recommend anyone interested in the Kurdish movement in revolutionary women's movements anywhere in the world and really any topic related to any of this to read is the autobiography of Sakina Janses, who was the only woman present for the founding of the PKK and was really instrumental in organizing both the armed and civilian sides of the Kurdish women's movement in Turkey. There are pictures of her everywhere in Syria. She was assassinated in France in 2013 by Turkish nationalists affiliated with the state, likely suspected, you know, hoping to disrupt the peace negotiations that were ongoing at

that time. But she's remembered everywhere in Northeast Syria for her role. And you can see in her book, her talking about seeing the inequalities that, as Debbie mentioned, women in socialist movements and revolutionary movements often faced, where they were asked to, you know, be as committed to the struggle as their male comrades were, but were still treated in very patriarchal ways by men that they worked with because, you know, the patriarchy embedded into these societies. And you see her talking about organizing women to overcome this.

And when you look at the history of the Kurdish movement moving into what you see in Northeast Syria as well, you know, women were really able to do so much in practice that the theory had to move to catch up to them. And then to take this new incredible theory of, you know, women's oppression being the basis of all oppression and the form of oppression that, you know, must be addressed to free all members of society in all ways, you know, they took this and they continued to expand it. So in a very difficult place in context to do so.

I mean, we know that in more, there's more violence against women, there's more discrimination, there's more emphasis on traditional gender roles that this holds true across different societies in different conflicts. So they have, they face many challenges. They're up against a lot here, certainly, you know, with all the problems that they're facing in Northeast Syria because of conflict and poverty, everything that Turkey's doing that we've discussed. So they're up against a lot and it's not easy, but they've really, you know, they've come

incredibly far and seeing how, you know, they've taken very high level theoretical ideas and then done so much in practice and how their practice in theory is for each other is really one of the most incredible things to see over there. And it's another reason why Turkey wants to destroy them because Erdogan does not believe that women can be equal to men, he does not see male violence against women as a problem. And yeah, you know, as we've discussed, Turkey and the Kurdish movement couldn't be any more different on this question. No, and it's, I think the thing, because, you know, going over there, I went with the

I as a journalist where like I had heard all these things and then Rojava has kind of become among some chunks of the left, chunks of the left, a cause celeb in part because of, you know, the achievements of the revolution in that space. And I wanted to see how legitimate is it. And part of why, you know, I kind of went in with that attitude is that I spent so much time in the Kurdish regions of Iraq. And if you remember, when the fighting against ISIS was at its height, there was a tremendous amount of coverage of the female Peshmerga and the fact that, you know, the Kurds in

northern Iraq, who were the first force in Iraq that collapsed the least when ISIS was on the advance. It's overstated how well they did. That's why the YPG needed to rescue the Yazidis at Sinjar as the Kurdish military in northern Iraq just kind of bounced at that point. But you know, I had heard about, you know, these that the women's rights situation is great in northern Iraq. It's very egalitarian.

There's women fighters. And it is, it's certainly, and anyone who lives there will tell you much safer and easier to be a woman in the KRG, the Kurdish region, like control, Kurdish regional government parts of Iraq than it is further south in the country. But that doesn't mean it's good. It is more like certain things are somewhat more tolerated. There's more freedom, but it's still a very traditionalist society. And for example, I didn't see any female Peshmerga.

They did not make much of a presence on the ground and their involvement in the fighting was exaggerated somewhat as part of a conscious PR strategy. As soon as you cross into northeast Syria, you see women manning and running checkpoint stations. You see, as you go in, because they're like, you know, they, like, you get like passport and stuff like looked at and you get like stamps and whatnot. When you kind of come into the region, you see a lot of women like running that part of the operation.

You go in to the actual country itself and there's we visited a restaurant that was run by a collective of women who had all lost husbands in the fighting. We went to a farm that was all young women who had left their families who were very traditionalist in their religious attitude and go on independent. And of course, you see female military units and female, we saw mixed male and female like military policing units and stuff. And it's, it's one of those things that if you are going there kind of with a critical eye to try and see how extensive the revolution can be, I can't imagine not being convinced

of the reality of it because it's, it's just so stark. Well, also, Robert, you know, first of all, just to again, you could say a lot about what's going on in, in Iraqi Kurdistan, but just to very quickly sum it up, I mean, it is a capitalist petrol state run by a clan, the Barzani's, you know, who, who accrue basically all the wealth to themselves and you can't even begin to compare it with, with the kind of revolutionary project in Syria. So I mean, I just want to, in case it's so people understand, I mean, I don't want to use, I hate to use the word socialist because it's such a, it's so fraught, but you could,

the closest thing, you know, it's, it's built on a socialist economic model, except a better one, more like what my father and what Abdullah Jalan have in mind, which my father called Communalism and this democratic and federalist model is based on cooperatives, you know, where people really do have the means, control the means of production as much as possible. I mean, it's obviously all, you know, still in formation, it's still growing and there's areas like the energy sector where things, you know, are less like that, but I hope, you know, give it a move in that direction. Yeah.

And obviously, no, this is certainly not some kind of perfect utopian. Of course not. It's still in the middle of a war zone, but, but as you pointed out, what you see when you go there is women so active in every aspect, I would add to, to what the great examples you gave the women's houses. Oh, yeah. I wanted to talk about that. Right.

Where they, they are literally resolving so many problems for both men and women, you know, at the community level. And so it's, it's really quite an extraordinary, you know, I guess what I want to say about it is that like, if, if we all got on board of, you know, one of that, that Cretan Elon Musk space ships and found a colony, you know, where they were doing this, we'd be cherishing it. We'd be going, oh my God, you know, look at these people. They're like, they have a cooperative economy and they have women's councils at every level.

Wow. Men can't overrule women on a decision that comes to say women's bodies. Think here, the Dobbs decision, right? On the Supreme Court, women, only women can, can decide those issues that are related to, to women. And there, there are councils at every level and people sending delegates, you know, meeting in their little villages and towns and communities and electing delegates to the next level. It is a true grassroots democracy and it's ecological and it's feminist.

It's like, if Ursula Le Guin were writing about it and the, yes, we'd all be going, wow. So, so really, you know, it's something that I think, especially anybody who considers themselves a feminist, you know, should be supporting and, and certainly, and I hope all of us do, you know, and, and certainly anybody, you know, I would think who's an anarchist to me, it's pretty close to any, every anarchist's dream, you know. And so I think, yeah, I just wanted to make that contrast with Iraq because I think it's really important that it really goes to why the Kurdish project really needs very badly

the support of people in the United States because in so many ways, the United States kind of calls the shots about what can and cannot happen over there. If you look at the problems they have, you know, to all of that, because of course, all of these places are not perfect and have, you know, these serious issues alongside these serious achievements. Every issue that they have is an issue that any society would have if that society had been through 10 years of war, were impoverished and blockaded from virtually all economic activity with the outside world.

If they had had to not only, you know, fight the occupation of a group like ISIS, but then immediately turn around to fight a state army much larger than them, you know, bent on taking and occupying their territory, a society where people fear going outside because they don't know if they'll be in the wrong place at the wrong time, when there'll be a drone strike on a local military leader, going around doing their job, keeping their communities safe from ISIS or a local political leader, going around doing their job, trying to, you know, build this new system. So I think when we look at the flaws, they're flaws that are the result of in large part

poverty and conflict and all of the compounding crises that the people of North Syria have to face because of what they've gone through, you know, as Debbie mentioned, much at the hands of larger powers. So much of what happens in Syria is up to what the United States wants, up to what Russia wants, up to what Turkey wants. All of these countries and regions, you know, with different priorities, different outlooks, but it somehow happens that at the end of the day, you know, the one thing they can all agree on is that it's okay to sell out the autonomous administration.

It's okay to have consequences for them. You know, if the Kurdish people suffer, the Yazidi people suffer, the people of North Syria, all of these different demographics, if they're the people who are victimized, you know, because they don't have a state, because they're fighting for something different, because they're challenging the status quo, it's okay if they're the ones who face the consequences. We saw this, you know, with what happened with ISIS. We saw this with the complete international silence when Afrin was invaded, with the,

you know, piecemeal response that stopped the Turkish invasion in 2019, but allowed them to convert what they were doing to this kind of low intensity war, you know, with a terrible ceasefire, you know, with undefined lines, and with these drone strikes being allowed in areas where Russia and the United States, both of which have agreements with Turkey, are active, you know, and both of whom tolerate this. So essentially, every powerful interest in Syria can agree on, you know, ensuring that the autonomous administration comes in last, and as people in the US, you know, anyone who considers themselves on the left, who considers themselves a feminist, who cares

about persecuted ethnic and religious minorities, who opposes endless war and militarist foreign policy that props up autocrats and, you know, props up far right regimes, anyone with any of those values should be very concerned about the situation in Northeast Syria right now, and should be looking at what we can do to get our government to stop supporting some of these very harmful policies against the region, you know, even while it claims to be supporting their fight against ISIS. What can people listening here, presumably most of you are in the United States or Canada or Western Europe, what can people listening here, particularly in the US, do to have an

impact to help? Well, we could talk about that. We could have an entire other podcast episode on that because there's a lot to be done. But, you know, to summarize in a few words, the way that the United States supports Turkey's war on the Kurdish people, all the peoples of the region and the Kurdish national liberation movement is through military cooperation and support through diplomatic cooperation and support intelligence sharing and these pro-war legal pretexts. So go tell Congress that you don't want them to send weapons to Turkey.

There's an F-16 sale right now that it was really great to see the majority of Congress, including all of the squad members, people like AOC, Rashida Tlaid, Ilhan Omar, all opposed that sale. So opposing arms sales, very important, something that there's momentum there for and that there's momentum among progressives, therefore, which is very heartening. Opposing military aid and security assistance to Turkey. You know, I've done research on this. US security assistance has trained senior Turkish officials, including the country's

current defense minister and several perpetrators of the violent repressive 1980 military coup. Obviously, we should not be training coup plotters and war criminals. That is not something I think most people listening to this want their tax dollars to go to. So calling for an end to US security assistance to Turkey, very important in addition to ending those arms sales and challenging the pro-war legal pretexts and designations that allow Turkey to get this kind of Western support. You know, a wonderful thing that we saw a couple weeks back was the Democratic socialists

of America, the largest socialist organization in the US, saying that they oppose the terror designation of the PKK and believe that it should be delisted. That's something that progressive support very strongly in Europe. We've seen, you know, calls from places like Ireland and South Africa, where people know a lot about, you know, what terror designations and, you know, the criminalization of struggles, you know, can have impacts on conflict resolution. You know, people who've participated in these kinds of post-conflict processes in some of these places saying, get rid of the designation, it's harmful per piece, you know, it will

be difficult to end this less violently without it. So that's something where, you know, it seems the international case for it is something that's rather obvious and where presser in the US on the US designation to remove it would be an important step for facilitating dialogue and a negotiated end to this conflict. So understanding how the US supports Turkey's wars on the Kurdish people and opposing all of those different policies and programs is one of the most important things that we can do to say this war is not in our name. We stand with the people of Northeast Syria, with the people in Turkey suffering from Turkish

authoritarianism, with the people in Iraqi Kurdistan, Yazidis and Shingal being bombed by Turkish drones. When we say that we don't want to support this war, we stand with all of those people. And I think that that kind of action against arms sales security assistance and pro-war legal pretexts could be a really great base for solidarity, opposing endless war in the Middle East and standing up for, you know, peacefully ending this conflict. And it would align us with progressives all around the world and, you know, people who really believe in peace and in ending these kinds of things.

And if I could just add, you know, one element to that would also be really pressing for a diplomatic solution to the whole so-called Kurdish question because Rojava will remain in danger as long as Erdogan and his party think that they can basically, that they have to be fighting Kurds because, you know, to them, as Megan said before, Rojava is an extension of their own Kurds and of the PKK. So what really needs to happen just as it happened in South Africa is there has to be a negotiated settlement. One of the things that would help with this and there are movements that people can get

involved with if they want would be Freeing Ocalan who has been sitting in a Turkish jail for the last 22 years because he is sort of the Nelson Mandela, really, of the Kurdish freedom movement and he should be involved in these negotiations and was, even while he was in jail, but really, you know, a jail person can't really do that properly. So pressing for a diplomatic solution because basically Erdogan uses the PKK and the listing of the PKK as a terrorist organization to basically kill all Kurds everywhere and in order to stop that somehow there has to be a break in this. And so I think that, you know, people, there are certainly plenty of peace organizations

and people who want to work on peace and I think this is a really important demand that they begin that the United States and the United States has nothing to lose by pressuring Turkey to engage in negotiations with the PKK. This is an hour war. The PKK has never done anything to the United States. It would make, as Megan said, for a lasting peace in the entire Middle East. And so what I would say is, first of all, folks, I would be great if people who want more information about any of this could contact the organization that I helped co-found the

Emergency Committee for Rojava, which is at defendrojava.org. And we have scripts to call Congresspersons resources and we even have fun monthly meetings that people can come to, you know. And there's, of course, a lot of information at Megan's website, also, Kurdishpeace.org. But you know, one of the things that people could do is go out and talk to their communities, whether it's a religious community or a labor union or a food co-op or your kid's nursery school or reading group, women's group, and sort of talk and help. Because there's a lot of people who surprisingly really don't know much about Rojava, I think

maybe because the Zabatistas are a little closer geographically. That project is a bit better known, you know. So talking to people and getting people engaged. And for example, if there's anybody listening from New Jersey, Bob Menendez is the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. And he's been pretty hostile towards Erdogan and keeping on him with phone calls, emails is a great way, you know, for somebody who worked in Washington for a while when I worked for Bernie Sanders.

I know that these guys listen to their constituents, you know. And if they get enough calls, they start to pay attention to those things that come around. We could even get, you know, somebody to send a letter around to their colleagues in Congress saying, you know, it's time to start peace negotiations. Those kinds of things do have impact because, as I said before, unfortunately, the United States is really at the helm in so many ways of what happens internationally in these geopolitical battles. Well, thank you so much, Debbie.

Thank you so much, Megan. I think that's going to do it for us today. Please, you know, continue paying attention to this. Did you want to, you know, Megan, did you have anything else you wanted to kind of add? Or let people know, actually, both of you would let people know where they can follow you on the Internet. Yeah, well, I mean, I think that that about covers it. Look, the only solution for peace, democracy and self-determination in Turkey and in the

wider Middle East is a just and democratic negotiated settlement to the Kurdish question. And I think that just, as Debbie said, learn about what's going on, reach out to your communities, talk to your local Kurdish community if there is one, find the opportunities that there are to engage with people in Turkey, in Syria, and all of these places, you know, working for peace and standing up for these ideas. And then no efforts too small because ending this conflict would benefit everyone in Northeast Syria, everyone in Turkey, and all of us here, you know, knowing that our government was no longer supporting this terrible unjust war.

So just get out there and do something to see the work that the think tank where I work is doing on this issue. You can go to Kurdishpeace.org where we have research and analysis on everything related to do related to the Kurdish issue from all different perspectives. And you can check out our work there. And you can follow me on Twitter, Megan Bodette. And the Twitter handle is at five underscores, MJB. Excellent.

My Twitter is simpler. It's just Debbie Bookchin at Debbie Bookchin. And again, I just want to say that, you know, people we do at defendrojava.org, and we are also on Twitter at defendrojava, we have so many ideas and so much information about how people can get involved is Megan said, if nothing else, no more weapons to Turkey until they begin peace negotiations. Give Rojava political recognition. That would be another thing people can be demanding also that Kurds have a place at

the bargaining table and any discussions about the future of Syria. So we have all those kinds of ideas, scripts, as I said, model emails and more at defendrojava.org. Awesome. Thank you all for being on. And yeah, that's going to do it for us here. It could happen here for the day. Thank you for having us. Thanks.

During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters

in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. He's in a good and bad ass way, in nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your

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

that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI.

How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, everyone. The audio is not great. We had some technical issues on my end, not on Matt's end, but we wanted to put it out

nonetheless because we felt there was a very important episode and things are developing very rapidly at the UC and we thought that our listeners would like it. So apologies for the poor quality of the audio. We hope you can get through it anyway. Bye. All right. So, I'm talking today with Matthew Erlich, who's a seventh year PhD candidate in the history department.

Matthew, would you like to explain a little bit of who you are and what you've been doing with reference to the strike in the last three weeks and maybe before as well? Yes. So I studied Spanish history in the San Jovi Empire. I've been a UCSD for seven years. I was doing research in Spain for two years during the COVID pandemic. So there was a sort of break in my university participation between my qualifying exams for the first three years I was there.

And then I left when I came back and I found the campus was quite different, both from COVID and from the increase in economic hardships. So in the last year, we have all been bargaining, trying to buy a new contract, as I'm sure all of you listeners are aware by this point, that bargaining went on for more than a year, 18 months in some cases, without a successful resolution and with a ton of unfair labor practices on behalf of the UC administration. So on November 15th, I believe, was the day we walked out on strike. I had signed up several months earlier to be a strike captain for the history department.

I was assisted by a sort of informal committee of five of the younger people, sort of due to the pandemic, a lot of my colleagues in my cohort were not able to go and do their research. They're generally out of the country right now doing their real research. So we have a really great department of primarily first through third years that are participating and leading the effort. I also had signed up to be a ticket leader that boiled down to what I've been really occupying myself, as we've been saying, has been being a food captain.

So we have been cooking for about 150 people at our location on campus. We've been getting lots of great donations of food and cash, and we've been reinvesting that to feed the hundred picketers and spread it to other local occasions. That's really cool. Yeah, I think that's really nice to bring up, actually, because like we were speaking about before the call, so many people are familiar with and supportive of the concept of unions and unionization and workers' rights, but I think relatively few people have actually been on strike and seen what it takes to organize and all the little things you have to take

care of. So did you just step into that food captain role, like kind of ad hoc? Yeah, more or less, I showed up on the first day and I realized we had been marching around and shouting ourselves for it. There was no water. So I ran down to the grocery store and I bought a bunch of water and that sort of snowballed into cooking. Now we have about eight or nine people.

We rotate shifts and meal planning. We actually use the history of our graduate lounge, sorry. But yeah, you know, that's actually been our experience of picketing is for all the organization and signing up for different tasks that we did beforehand, hitting the ground, and seeing what is needed to sustain that on an A level, because it's been a journey. Yeah, I bet. But it seems to have been largely a successful one. Like everyone is out, energetic.

There have been some really impressive actions, actually, like I don't know if you were part of the La Jolla Village Drive, shut down, I don't know what you want to call that yesterday, but did you take part in that? No, I was, I was, I was, okay, yeah, yeah. Amazing, yeah, yeah. We actually found a faculty spy the day before who went in and asked what time that was going to be. I gave us our, our sort of, our window, there's been a lot of direct action and it's been very

successful from both the morale perspective and conversational and I'm sure you're where we approached Chancellor Kulsala yesterday or the day before and even though obviously we didn't get a promise from him that he would raise our wages or tell President Drake to raise our wages, it was very energizing for people who have been, you know, been not able to show up because Thanksgiving break or felt like a lot between there, to build a direct action is, is one of our strong suits at this point. Yeah, yeah, it is, it is wonderful to see actually, like so many of us spent so much of our lives like studying workers movements and unionization and strikes and it's cool

to see people walking the talk out a little bit. And also very applicable, like what are the really great things about going on strike with a bunch of statues, smartest minds in practically every field, you know, common communications that are working on emails and liars and such, you've got philosophy who are, you know, being philosophers, you know, quoting working class movements of the past to help shape our strategy. Yeah, yeah, it's a cool thing to see. I remember a long time ago in like 2010, when last time we were on strike and yeah, it was

very cool. And one of the professors I was working with was a lit professor and she came and read some stuff and then, you know, I made people listen to me talking about Derruti for a while and I enjoyed myself, even if maybe they didn't. And so yeah, I want to talk a little bit as well about like you're in week three now and you said like you've been maintaining the energy and you're feeding people, which is great. How has obviously like strikes come with an element of economic hardship and that's somewhat

offset by union strike funds, but it's given the economic precarity of people who are graduate students anyway, it could be really tough. So how has that been with not quite a December 1st yet, which would that be the first missed paycheck if people are going to not get paid? We are, most of us convinced that the UC will not have gotten their house in order. By this point, we were working until November 15th, so at least you would be entitled to half a month's pay, but because there's no real way for the UC to determine exactly which workers are withholding labor and exactly which workers are on strike, it seems like

the majority of workers will be receiving their first, they're no better paycheck tomorrow. We have also received a strike resistance from the union, which is way W. We're all aware that if we do receive our paycheck from the university, we will have to return that money so that we can fuel future strike assistance and we're by and large okay with that. So for this month, one way or another, we are all very hopeful that we'll be able to make ends meet. Next month is if the strike does continue, sort of rich that will happen across. I spoke to a lot of workers in the industry department who are very concerned about this

paychecks, particularly also in the program that I teach for the making of the modern world, which recruits heavily from the history department, so it's non-stupid to TAs and are not covered by the union and are not eligible for strike, they're pulling their labor in solidarity, but they're very concerned that they're primarily working as their full time job. Yeah, that's tough. Actually, I've taught in that program too, both as a student and a non-student and it's a good program, but it doesn't pay a time and you don't save a lot of money living in

Southern California. So it could be tough. Is there a way to contribute if people want to contribute to those people who are sort of withholding labor in solidarity? Yes. So there is a UAW strike hardship fund that you don't have the information right now. Yeah, yeah. I'll include it in then.

There's a lot of people. UAW hardship fund, and there's also a bad mode that we're attacking donations for. Yeah. We're distributing that to the nine decades on the UCS. The embassy moment we had just overwhelmed with goodwill and taxes. Yeah. But you know, depending on how long the strike goes, this would definitely be something that we do with like larger public support.

The thing I think that the public at large can be doing is concerning political pressure on donations to the public sector. Yeah. Yeah. I hope they continue to do so. And let's talk a little bit about everyone we've talked to so far has been a science or engineering person. And obviously the experience is a little different when you're a historian or a humanities person

because you don't go to a lab, right? You don't, your research is a bit different and your work is a bit different. So can you explain a little bit about the work that one does as a history grad? Student that the labor that one does for the university and what the difference is in what it's like withholding that labor. The difference is that when we are the vast majority of us that are in the history department are ASCs. We are TAs.

And of that, the majority of us teach for either the writing programs for the history department. So when we look at what we contribute to the strike, we are looking at the withholding not only of grades, but of the type of grading that cannot be replaced. Of course I'm teaching for now there's five or six EAs, there's 650 students, I'm responsible for 60 of those students. Each of those students has a weekly discussion panel of five or six hundred words. They have a content analysis papers, which there's now two of them that are missing.

Those are things that cannot be reverted to Detroit since the writing program is not a formula. It's not something that can be easily placed. We are aware that there has been some tension in terms of strategic planning, between the ASCs and SRUs in the STEM fields that on the one hand in their teaching duties, they are very afraid that their professors will be able to co-opt the teaching process by making use of multiple choice or something else. I'm not sure how that would work.

I know that that's just not really possible in the humanities. And the other issue, which I can't really speak to, but I'm sure your other contributors have explained this, is we don't work in labs. Our research is much more long term. We primarily conduct that research either in absentia during this warrior with external fellowships or during the summer, whereas SRUs tend to be working in their labs more or less constantly. I heard it said that one of the reasons that SRUs are rumored to be less committed to a

long term strike is because missing two weeks in a lab sets them back by six months in their lab career. For the vast majority of the humanities, ASCs and I talked to, two weeks is very difficult. Some may have to be picked up, you're reading a book in years' time, it's not something that we need to be in with Bunsen burners and S2 and mad animals. So there seems to be material conditions divide between SRUs and ASCs and the stem and humanities from them. Right, yeah, yeah.

There are definitely like two week periods I spent on my research and stuff that I never used in any of my final projects, trying to get an archive to open in Spain can often take that long. So I think one thing I'd like to talk about is like the, as it stands now, what you're hearing from the bargaining team and how that's being received, like I know there are a lot of different demands, a lot of different things that brought people to the strike, right? The access needs, COLA, the unfair labor practices, et cetera, et cetera. So yeah, what are you hearing on the picket line and how is it being received?

So the news for the first week was on day four, the SRU bargaining team agreed to accept a 7% yearly increase versus a adjustment that would be paid, and I believe to the median rent increase in I think in the most expensive cities in California, which means San Diego and San Francisco. And to be honest, the strike was sold to the vast majority of the unradicalized, uneducated bank and file as being about the 54,000 base pay, as well as the access needs, as well as yearly employment for some units and various different things. But there was a lot of consternation in on day four, and I think a lot of us became very

radicalized when we realized that not only had the SRU bargaining team apparently made it in session. On day four, what was supposed to be a very powerful strike, but that concession didn't really resolve the issue of skyrocketing inflation and rent costs, and different campuses were weighing in to say if Santa Cruz went up something like 65% in the last year, 70% flat increase doesn't help us at all. The University of California is the largest employee and the largest landlord in the state of California is raising their wages by a flat rate, and all the landlords in that area

will continue to raise wages even higher. So a lot of us were, I wasn't around for the 2020 COLA Wildcats strike, but in the process of this consternation of the SRUBT giving off this COLA that's fixed to the median rent, a lot of us became very, I was so disillusioned, but very radicalized and started looking into it more. In humanities, I can say, I think in line, where we have philosophy, literature, history, a number of others related departments, it was very militant. That was the first kind of moment of consciousness of awareness, I think for a lot of us.

And over the last week, it's not the last two weeks, it's kind of internal struggle over tactics and strategy, whether it's reasonable to expect that we can hold out for our aims, the bargaining teams, on our campus at least, and there are exceptions, have generally advanced a sort of moderate line that, yeah, 54,000 is high in the sky, is great to me, but the way the bargaining works is you offer something high and you get something low. I think we're all willing to accept that that is how bargaining works, but we have at least in my opinion, at least in the humanities, been very concerned by the tactical decisions to make certain possessions at certain stages without letting the full power of our strike

take hold, especially the withholding of grades, which is not enough this week and next week. Another thing, which most of us have not been on the bargaining team, a lot of us have just kind of checked in the end to this very long-term process, pretty late today, would be to watch these bargaining possessions and see what you see is operating. Definitely does not seem like the bargaining strategy of operating in session or to get something else bigger, it is working at all. I think we've made some compromises on accessibility needs in the hopes that would provoke the UC to offer a comprehensive economic package last year we did, it included a 1.5% increase

for the SRUs proposal and nothing for the ASCs. Oh, wow. Wow, yeah, that's, that's, you're still a long way apart then. So in both, in both the removal of COLA on day four and the bargaining, I think there's a real concern that the bargaining team is getting the short end of the stick. Yeah, that's tough. If people don't remember from last time, by the way, COLA is the Cost of Living Adjustment and that was the initial cause of the 2020 Wildcats, right?

Yes, COLA is Cost of Living Adjustment and there is a lot of really interesting discourse about kind of what that meant. People who are chanting no COLA, no contract, they define COLA as, as meaning specifically a yearly percentage increase that is tied to ex-median rent, I believe that is the ex-median rent. Whereas, bargaining team had argued that a 70% yearly increase qualified as COLA was a yearly increase. Right, but maybe less than inflation given, certainly less than rent given what rent

has done in the last couple of years and these universities are in very desirable places to live with very high rents, they don't offer subsidized, they don't offer significantly subsidized housing, especially to grad students often, especially not to all grad students. And so yeah, it becomes very difficult to live even on what would seem like a decent wage, unless you want to commute a long way. Something like 90% of the work, and again I'm a historian, not a political scientist, believe that a vast majority of graduate students who were cold said that they were rent perfect, that 50% or more of their money went to rent.

Most people I've talked to, it's more like 70%. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and you can find yourself in that situation working for the university and with the university also as your landlord and you're paying the census, which it has control over both ends, and it's not doing much to help anyone. Let's talk about withholding grades, because that's coming up, right, and that's kind of the next level of escalation, I suppose, or like the next hurdle that's coming up. So what does withholding grades look like, and can you explain why there's sort of a pedagogical reason that people would be obviously like worried about doing that, or is it this

sort of barrier, and what it would do to the university, and what it would do to your students as well? Yes, so fundamentally the withholding grades is the withholding of the altered condition product of our labor. We can talk about pedagogy and ideology and, you know, highly ivory towering, you know, as much as we want, but at the end of the day, when an undergraduate at the University of California pays their tuition, they expect to get grades and transcripts in return. And the reputation of the UC that makes it one of the premier public institutions in

the world is that that grading is accredited to be reflective of very high quality of education. We are saying that we are not providing that ultimate record, which in the end is what a student would demonstrate if they were applying to graduate school, if they were micro-internship, really anything that reflects their college experience would be tied to that grade. We are also saying that, you know, in addition to that very brutal kind of explicit result, the pedagogy itself is also a suffering that, you know, students are here to learn and they might complain that they didn't get through a class, but by and large they do get a lot from their education, and if they are not being actively taught by their teaching assistants,

they are suffering. In the MMW program, you and I both talk for the lectures, but they are very, you know, it is a very large lecture hall. It is kind of a general dispute, the vast majority of instruction, both in the historical, cultural content of the course, as well as in the writing aspect, which is the point of the program to develop a skilled analytical academic writers, and they are not getting that at all. That is a burden that is carried 100% by the TAs and by holding that. It prevents the students from receiving quality education, essentially. So we are hoping that, particularly in the humanities where our labor is completely irreplaceable, that we will pressure the universe. Now we

have been hearing that some universities have been, you know, laterally extending the deadline for final phase, and I believe that either Riverside or Irvine, I just saw a message about this, had extended January. There is a lot of sort of confusion about what that would entail. If this strike is over, we all go back, we then have to go back to the post-facto. It seems like some faculty have, either in solidarity or in desperation, decided to move final exam, change the format of those exams. We are, I think, at root, the most afraid that the university will grant some sort of capacity. You know, as it is reported that everybody gets passed, it would, in theory, weaken the university's power, but it would

also weaken the university's capacity to require those rates to progress in their knowledge education in their life. It would be a huge blow for them to receive, not a letter they received. Yeah, just a P. Yeah, that would be a massive step for the university to take and undermining their own status and the well-being of their students. If you have a required class or a required grade in a certain class to progress to graduate school or to progress to a vocational degree, then that would make it, that could have long-term implications for those students. Yeah, that would be a big step for them. So we'll, I suppose, yeah, that's interesting. If they extend it, what are you required to go back and redo? That's

a huge amount of labor that you would then be doing in a very compact amount of time to grade three M.O.W. assignments is an endurance challenge. Grades are normally due in, like, mid-December, right? Is that still the case at UCSD right now? This is week ten. Yeah, the clock is ticking. So how does the, how does the strike look if you go past week ten, right? If you go, not just in terms of withholding grades, but obviously campus is very different when the undergrad's on there. Right. I don't think that we've had really, we have had discussions about whether or not we're in it for the long haul. We are, I think, at the moment, hedging our bets on the next two weeks being, in some

ways, decisive. Yeah. There is an action, a sort of action that feels that once finals are over, our power dramatically becomes, certainly, if the UC did decide to sort of bypass the grading for this, it seemed like that would be a half analysis. I'm not convinced that they would do that. In my view, the longer that we withhold those grades, the more we continue to have them leverage. I don't think the UC will just throw up their hands, you know, who they can finally say, oh, well, it's right off. See you next quarter. Yeah. Yeah. I think we have been about trying to hold you out. I'd love to know, like, to close out what you've learned through the three and a bit weeks you've been on strike and

what you think, like, people should take from this. Like, it's an unprecedented era for workers organization. In the last 20, 30 years, we've seen more strikes in the last few years than we have in decades. So what can people learn from the UC experience? Yes, absolutely. One of the things that I have learned, which is very salient, in my mind, as somebody who started organizing about three or four months before the strike, I was approached to be a strike captain. And then, thankfully, I went to various trainings. I went sat in on campus organizing committee meetings. And we were given kind of before the strike began was that we had an incredible amount of power. The strike ratification vote, where we more

than three quarters of the graduate students voted overwhelmingly in 98 percentile to strike. We all went in with a very powerful sense of the historic nature of the strike and our bargaining power and our solidarity. That seemed to be driven by any of the UD leadership as a finite resource, as something that we, one of us pulled the trigger on, sent the workers out, hoped for a smart resolution. And if we didn't get it, then worked to wrap it up as quickly as we can. I'm sure that I'm giving them short shrift. And this is probably ultimately an unfair analysis, but very much the percentage, even if you're trying extremely hard at that, that, you know, this isn't sustainable, that we are reaching

our peak power, that now is the time to start pivoting to maybe these concessions. And we're all, I'm saying that, you know, this, the organizing doesn't stop when you walk out. The organizing begins when you walk out. And for people like me, who, you know, had some knowledge, I've experienced in organizing, I've been docking by who I consider myself very well educated, radical, but just the fact of getting on the picket line, experiencing a day that I'm talking to my fellow workers across campuses, across picket lines has been energizing and radicalizing all on its own. And I don't think that the union leadership really knew what to do with that and how to leverage it. The bushes were efficient, the

horses or whatever. I think that a lot of school with the our campus leadership ought to have done a better job with the day to day energizing. One issue that, you know, the campus team specifically on on a specific bargaining unit or even the UAW 265. But the union rule comes from above is that you do not pick it, you do not actively sign up or picket shifts the campus around. You do not get strike day and for a lot of us who who have accessibility needs or are not close to campus or are withholding their labor and active in the strike in other ways, they feel like there's not really a place

for them in the strike. And they're doing equally crucial work. Yes, it's good to have people pick it up and have that visibility. Ultimately, if there were two people picking and everybody else was withholding their labor, we would still win the strike. So there seems to be a overwhelming emphasis

on the visible symbol of our power and our solidarity. And the concession that was made in day four was explained by the dwindling amount of people who were showing up for pickets from day one to two to three to four. And a lot of us tried to push back on that. So yes, it's hard to sustain that physical presence. But we should be also working to bolster and encourage

and harness the power of those workers who can't make it and pick it up every day, but nevertheless doing a crucial labor stop. Yeah, is this still a remote picking option, does that count? Yes, yes, there is. In any organization that's owned by, you know, a massive workers, there will be some growing pains and there are issues in the first week of kind of

dueling remote coordinators with separate lists that resolve, and they seem to have been resolved by now. Same thing with some delays in a process that strikes pay, account disbursements. Again, there's no shading that's happening here. There's just thousands of workers doing this for the first time. But for people who are, you know, sort of on the fence

or saying, I can't really afford to miss a paycheck, that was a real big stressor for them and it depends on their willingness to kind of be out there every day. Yeah, that totally makes sense. Yeah, it's already a stressful time. But like you say, these things will have, people will learn in the process, right?

Like it's new for so many people. It's unprecedented to have like 10% of the graduate students in the country withholding their labor. And so like they will of course be growing pains. And I think often when we look at strikes, like both you and me as historians and as consumers of the news, we like, we see one photo of a bunch of people

like in high viz standing around a brazier and then three weeks later, we read another story about a resolution contract, right? And in fact, what makes a strike powerful is feeding people and being showing up and looking out for one another. So like that's what we're trying to document. And thanks so much, Matt.

I wonder where people can find, if you'd like to give your own social media or where people can find strike updates from the UC and from UC San Diego. Anything like that you wanna plug? Yes, I'm partisan in this, but I would highly recommend not getting strike updates from UC San Diego.

And you're sorry, yeah, from the campus, not from the university, yeah. So there you see now.com or.org. Yeah, I think it's an org. I think it's kind of on the ground. Yeah. I've been dealing with documents too much. That's a great place on Twitter.

It's also been very despite all of its current and getting up to date information. Can you tell us the Venmo where people can, in the true Spanish historian fashion, feed everyone? Have you got a giant pie out there? Are you like with the spade? So I will clarify, this is an unofficial. Yeah.

This is not the UAW Worldwide Venmo, but the ticketers on the UCSD campus who have been organizing meetings across the big lines, our Venmo is at UCSD-Strike-Cood. Nice, yeah. Easy to remember. Hopefully you get some donations. Thanks for your time, Matt.

I appreciate it. 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, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. 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 were 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 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 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. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space

with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.