Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 71

Episode Date: February 18, 2023

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. 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 and 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 Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Take your own decisions. Around 8am, Wednesday, January 18th, a forest defender who went by Torte Guita sent out a text message that read, Morning Raid, Please Help. Just minutes prior, a multi-agency coalition of heavily armed law enforcement officers led by the Georgia State Patrol

began a raid on the Wallani Forest in southeast Atlanta. Encampments have sprung up throughout the forest since November of 2021 in protest and militant opposition to a proposed militarized police training facility with a mock city to practice combating civil unrest in the wake of 2020. The corporate-funded Atlanta Police Foundation seeks to control over 300 acres of the Wallani, or South River Forest, to construct this sprawling state-of-the-art police compound with a starting budget of $90 million for its first phase of construction. The police raid on January 18th, 2023 started off pretty similar to previous raids that had taken place in the prior months. But for the Georgia State Patrol, seemingly it was their first time leading such a raid in the woods. Police shut down the parking lot at Entrenchment Creek Park and nearby streets before entering the tree line with guns drawn.

Within the first hour, SWAT teams arrested two people in the woods and destroyed multiple tents. And then shortly after 9am, forest defenders in the woods reported hearing a rapid sequence of about a dozen gunshots. Quickly news spread that Georgia State Patrol officers shot and killed a protester in the woods who was defending the forest, and that a state trooper was being sent to Grady Hospital with a bullet wound. After the gunshots rang in the air, police were quick to publicize a palatable sequence of events depicting an exchange of gunfire. Rather predictably, the police claimed that the deceased forest defender had surprised the armored SWAT team and fired first. This is Peter, a forest defender I talked with a few days after the shooting. So, luckily I wasn't in the woods on that day.

Just on a whim, I decided to stay in town. The day of the shooting was really jarring. Trying to figure out who was safe and who was unaccounted for was like the main thing on my mind for most of the day. And by the afternoon, I realized that it was probably tort. The last message they sent was at 8am saying morning raid, please help. And the shooting was at 9am. It was a weird space to be in of knowing that it was likely tortigeta that had died, but not being able to grieve yet because not really having confirmation.

The only eyewitnesses were the police, and then all the other witnesses just like heard noises. In contradiction to the exchange of gunfire narrative, activists on the ground reported hearing a single burst of gunfire and suspected that the injured trooper was hit by friendly fire and cautioned against taking police narrative as fact due to cop's track record of lying about police killings and covering for fellow officers. Here's Sam from the Atlanta Community Press Collective for more information about the sequence of events that day. We know from speaking to people who were in the area on that day that PD, the various police agencies that were involved in the raid, began the operation around maybe 7.30 or 8. Records show that two people were arrested maybe 30 to 40 minutes before tort was shot.

Tort was shot around 9am. Some of our sources that were in the woods at the time say they only heard like one, I guess you could call it a volley of gunfire, followed by a large boom. You can speculate a lot about those statements, but they were pretty independent. They were almost all identical and independent of each other. We know that, sorry, it's hard to talk about. It wasn't until late into the night that people in the movement were able to confirm that the person killed by the Georgia State Patrol was Manuel Tehran,

also known by their forest name, Torteghita, which means little turtle. Torteghita was a young queer Afro Venezuelan 26-year-old forest defender described by friends and loved ones as your friendly neighborhood anarchist, as a kind, earnest, fierce, welcoming, funny, exceedingly helpful, and brave person. They were an artist, an urban farmer, a trained street medic, and heavily involved in mutual aid all across the south. This is It Could Happen Here. I'm Garrison Davis, or just Garr,

and after checking in with friends and various people I know in the movement, I made my way down to Atlanta late Wednesday night. I've been reporting on and writing about the defend the forest and stop-cop city movement since summer of 2021. Last year in 2022, I put out around six hours of audio related to the forest encampments, protests, organizing, weeks of action, and the forgotten history of the prison farm that operated on the land Cop City is slated to be built on.

But these new episodes serve as a follow-up to the two-part series from last May, titled On the Ground at Defend the Atlanta Forest. But the various updates put out since then will certainly help fill in the gaps. This four-part series will feature interviews with forest defenders, audio clips from On the Ground in Atlanta, and accounts on what's changed the past few months. Episode 1, which you're listening to right now, will largely cover the events around the shooting itself.

Episode 2 will get into who Torteghita was as a person, and the stories about them from friends and comrades. Episode 3 and 4 will cover protests in the wake of the police killing, state repression, and how the movement might evolve going forward. Due to increasing state repression, we will be using a mix of voice distortion and redubbed voice replacement for some of the interviews and discussions I had with forest defenders on the ground in Atlanta.

Speaking of, the next forest defender you're going to hear from is Cricket, talking about their experiences the day of the shooting. I mean, I can only obviously only speak for myself. For me, it was terrifying. We had obviously already lived through the raid in December, but when we heard someone had been shot and killed, it was terrifying, in part because of the complete lack of information. We had so few details for so long, and it wasn't, at least for me,

it wasn't until the following day that I found out that it was Tort. And it was just devastating. I mean, there's not really words for it. It was like, it felt like the world stopped and then kept going, but it shouldn't have, like it felt like it should have stayed stopped, like it shouldn't have kept turning. After the deadly shooting in the morning, the police continued their multi-agency raid of the Wallani Forest in a pretty regular fashion,

with cops reportedly firing pepperballs at people up in treehouses and making arrests throughout the day, into the night, and even the next morning. I think a total of seven folks were arrested in the forest that day. It might have been six. Six arrested on the day Tort died, and then one person remained the last tree sitter. The last person arrested in the deadly police raid

was up in the trees overnight and surrounded by police for about 20 hours straight. All seven people arrested in the forest were charged with criminal trespassing and domestic terrorism. There was one person who remained in a tree set because we had some communication with them throughout the night. They were just like perched in their climbing rig in a tree for about 12 hours until a little after sunrise

when DeKalb County SWAT moved in and took them into custody, I guess you could say, as they were trying to repel back up the tree. They had been in the tree pretty much the whole day, and then all night they ran out of food and water, I think sometime after nightfall, and then after dark, they were turning their phone on and off to conserve battery, so it was a little sporadic.

They were able to send us some pictures of two cops standing in the platform of a truck you would use to work on a telephone pole, and they both had the SWAT operator helmets on and one of them had a long gun. And then later on in the evening, four or five police cars just backed up to the tree and just surrounded the tree

and shown their spotlights up in the tree. And the cops didn't, they were overnight, they didn't say anything. They were just waiting. They were just waiting for the sun to come up so SWAT could move in. The night of the shooting, before we even knew who was killed, there was a small vigil turned to March

in the Little Five Points neighborhood of Atlanta. The first 24 hours after the shooting were extremely hectic, as many people were not even sure who the police had killed. Obviously, the first thing on everyone's mind was who was killed. And by late Wednesday night, some folks that helped us source our reporting came to us saying that they believed it was this person,

that they believed it was tort. A lot of people's friend was just murdered by the police. And folks wanted to get ahead of the police narrative. And as a community press collective, of course, we wanted to support the community in that. So we just immediately offered to post whatever towards family, and I believe their partner consented to. That was the primary thing once the community

had kind of definitively identified that it was tort, was obtaining consent from those closest to tort to publish their name, any pictures, details. And we wanted to give people a way to help tell everyone who was about to be paying a lot of attention to the story who tort actually was, and not who the police would like people to think tort was. State agencies were swift in their attempts

to control the narrative surrounding the deadly raid. Hours after the killing, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation set up a press conference as the raid was very much still ongoing. First, a GBI spokesperson explained the purpose of the raid. The operation's goal is to secure the site of the future City of Atlanta Public Safety Training Center. Next, GBI Director Mike Register gave his account

of the day's events so far. As you are aware, a few weeks ago, several individuals were arrested for domestic terrorism in the area around the future site of the Public Safety Training Facility. This morning, the GBI, with other local, state, law enforcement agencies such as the Cab PD, Atlanta PD, the Georgia State Patrol, and Georgia DNR conducted a planned clearing operation

to remove them individuals who were illegally occupying the area. At approximately 9 o'clock this morning, as law enforcement was moving through various sectors of the property, an individual, without warning, shot a Georgia State Patrol trooper. Other law enforcement personnel returned fire and self-defense and evacuated the trooper to a safe area. The individual who fired upon law enforcement

and shot the trooper was killed in the exchange of gunfire. The GBI is working, the officer involved shooting, and the investigation is still active and fluid. The circumstances was an individual confronted law enforcement, and I don't think that he was seen until he fired. I'm not sure, right? Later that day, a GBI statement claimed that officers located tort inside a tent in the woods

and that they did not comply with verbal commands from law enforcement officers. The day after the shooting, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation also announced that there is no body cam footage of the incident. They also claimed that 25 campsites were located and removed Wednesday, and that, quote, mortar-style fireworks, edged weapons, pellet rifles, gas masks, and a blowtorch were recovered, unquote.

After people pointed out that the list of recovered items was absent any firearms, the next day, the GBI released a photo of a 9mm handgun allegedly found at the scene of the shooting. It was the only firearm police claim they found in their extensive sweep of the forest. The GBI has been, as the independent agency investigating all of this, has changed their story a little bit,

which it was a breaking news story. I think they first went before the cameras at noon when it happened at 9am, not to grant the police any kind of leeway at all, because fuck them. But it was a rapidly evolving situation, as they say. That said, the story changed kind of dramatically over the first few days. They released an initial list of, like, items that had recovered, but it didn't mention a gun. And then when the community kind of said,

hey, you said torch shot this trooper, where's the gun? Then a gun was produced. Then when people still didn't believe it, the GBI said that they had a bill of sale for the gun. The GBI and Georgia State Patrol have also come out and said that they won't release the identity of the trooper for concerns about their safety. Results from an independent autopsy were released on February 3.

It found 13 gunshot wounds. Attached to the report was a statement from Tortegheta's family, of which I will read, the GBI has claimed that Manny shot an officer, and that the bullet matches the gun possessed by Manny. But even if that is true, there are still many unanswered questions. The GBI has selectively released information about Manny's death, says civil rights attorney Jeff Silapovitz.

They claim Manny failed to follow orders. What orders? The GBI has not talked about the fact that Manny faced a firing squad, when those shots were fired, or who fired them. While the GBI has publicly stated there's no body camera footage of the shooting, it has not stated whether there is any audio or other video from other sources, such as aerial drones or helicopters that were used during the time of the incident. The family has contacted the GBI and specifically requested that it release

whatever audio and video exists of the incident, or any other information that would shed light on what happened. Any evidence, even if it's only an audio recording, will help the family piece together what happened on the morning of January 18th. This information is critical, and it is being withheld, said Brian Spears, a civil rights attorney with nearly five decades of experience litigating police shootings. Unquote.

Whatever you believe about the exact series of events that led to Torz's death, personally, I doubt that we'll ever know what happened for sure. But regardless, the killing of a force defender at the hands of police, coupled with the domestic terrorism charges, marks a significant escalation in the fight against Cop City. And even environmental activism in this country at large, as this seems to be the first killing of an environmental protester by U.S. law enforcement. As horrific as this escalation is,

it's not out of the blue as one might think. All the way back in May of 2022, police were already talking on scanners about using deadly force against Stop Cop City protesters. Oh yeah, right? How old are you? Deadly force encounter. So last time I was like in the woods for a decent amount of time, was like last spring, last summer. What, how is... In what ways has like living in the woods changed since then?

Like what sort of developments, I guess, has there been... One thing that's changed in the day-to-day life in the woods in the past several months is that the raids by the police have been more thorough. And so it's required a lot of more vigilance to live in the woods and a lot more being aware of places to run and hide and escape routes. The past few months, police raids have been increasingly violent and destructive. From the demolition of the gazebo in Wallani People's Park to the flattening of community gardens and the trashing of makeshift cafes and kitchens within the forest.

Using consistently escalated violent tactics, police have routinely attacked protesters with chemical weapons and rubber bullets, have cut tree limbs and safety lines from under them, and reportedly threatened lethal force, often targeting just peaceful people who were sitting in trees or walking through the public park. In an article for The Bitter Southerner, an unnamed tree sitter spoke about a police raid in September of 2022 where they described their interactions with law enforcement as such.

Quote, They threatened to shoot me. They didn't draw their guns, but they talked about it. Several showed their sidearms while locking eyes with me. They very easily could have killed my friend in the other tree-sit. It was fucking nuts. Quote, And here's a bit from Peter again.

Ever since the beginning, it's been on my mind that, you know, there's a possibility of people dying in the woods. Ever since I started living in the woods, beginning of the encampments, it was just something that kept coming up into my mind as a possibility. I think before this happened, though, people were generally under the impression that the police wouldn't murder forest offenders because it would look bad for them. Just a month prior to the deadly January raid, another police raid took place a couple weeks before Christmas,

which resulted in the first domestic terrorism charges being levied against people arrested near the forest. In the aftermath of this raid, a spokesperson for the Atlanta Solidarity Fund talked about the developing pattern of police escalation against the protest movement and warned that steadily increasing police repression would lead to protesters being killed. And it's clear that if the public doesn't respond, if the public doesn't do something about this, that escalation is going to continue.

Are we going to end up in a situation where the police are murdering protesters in order to advance not public safety, but their particular political agenda in building Cops City? The use of inflated charges like domestic terrorism not only make life for the people charged living hell, it also lays the narrative groundwork to justify extreme physical escalations of force and increasingly brutal crackdowns. Take it from the GBI director himself.

As Director Miles said, I'm Director Mike Register of the GBI. And over the last several months, law enforcement in portions of our community have experienced growing criminal behavior and terroristic acts committed by individuals and groups concerning the building of Atlanta's new Public Safety Training Center. These individuals and groups have attempted to disguise their activities as being protest against the building of this facility. I'm going to read a short quote from an article for the Inhabit Territories newsletter that sums this up nicely.

The violent escalation which led to this murder comes during increased and coordinated repression against the movement to defend the Atlanta Forest. Where the movement has built a diverse and welcoming community through years of organizing, the police have used every tactic to badmouth, harass, threaten, surveil, criminalize, and attack participants. One of the force defenders I spoke with who goes by NOAA talked about coming to terms with something that everyone kind of knew was a possibility but still had this element of shock and disbelief. I think it was really shocking. I think anytime you introduce police into a situation, you have the possibility of somebody dying. That's what cops do. They murder with impunity.

So I think anybody who was out in the forest, anybody who spent time around activism against the police knows that this is a thing that can happen to people fighting against various types of state power. But it was really, really shocking. I think everyone was just kind of at a loss. I personally, I mean, I just kind of sat with it for a really long time. It was just kind of like, there was an area of disbelief to it, just kind of knowing that, like, these were the people we were, that we are, we're fighting against them. Like, this is the type of thing that they're capable of, but she's being very shocked and really scared that, like, this is where we were,

that, like, the police were now killing activists and, you know, in a likelihood going to get away with it was a really terrifying implication for the future of the movement and for the future of all social status in the US. Following news of the shooting, the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, which provides bail and legal assistance to political prisoners, protesters, and activists, put out a statement saying, quote, Georgia State Patrol's story is suspect. They've released few details. We are concerned a police cover-up could be underway. We are preparing a legal team to investigate and pursue a wrongful death suit, unquote. Here's Cricket again talking about the trustworthiness of the official information being released about the shooting.

And I mean, we still have so little information, and the information that we do have is so tainted. It's so untrustworthy that it doesn't actually feel like information at all. It doesn't feel like information we can trust. That's sort of the long and short of it. Last month, over 1,300 climate justice and racial justice groups from across the United States joined Atlanta residents and community organizations in calling for an independent investigation into the killing of Tortequita. In any police shooting, you'd like to see an independent investigation because how can you let the person who shot the gun investigate the crime, right? So it was a pretty easy thing to call for, but especially given the inconsistencies in everyone's story. You know, the GBI has changed a couple times like the sequence of events,

and that first, like, Torte surprised them, then they surprised Torte, then Torte was in a tent. You know, the narrative has changed a couple times. GSP, Georgia State Patrol also does not wear body cams, and that's just a day-to-day thing for them. That's, I hate to say it, but that's not something they did specifically for this raid, just to screw the movement over. It's actually the pretty well-known issue in the state. They refuse to wear body cams considering how many people they kill every year. It has come out that APD says that they have body cams after the incident. Yes. We know the raid was kind of a joint operation between Georgia Bureau of Investigation, Georgia State Patrol,

Atlanta Police Department, DeKalb County Police Department, and some other state agencies. Georgia State Patrol seems to have been the ones in the immediate area when it seems to have been a trooper that shot Torte. Atlanta Police first came out and said that there was no body cam footage that they weren't there, and it seems to be true that they weren't in the immediate area when the shot was fired, but they kind of later had to correct themselves and say, well, we have body cam of the incident, but we're not going to release it. Like of the incident itself, or like during the time of the incident? Yes, of what their officers were doing and the part of the raid they were enacting when Torte was shot. I have seen claims from both local media and law enforcement that the GBI investigation does qualify as independent,

framing the GBI's investigation into the actions of the Georgia State Patrol as this separate, non-biased operation. Despite the GBI being fellow participants in the deadly raid. As an interesting little side note, the Georgia State Patrol and the Bureau of Investigation began in the late 1930s as two branches of the same agency, the Georgia Department of Public Safety. So the standard in the state, I'm sure a lot of places when a person is shot by the police, you get a supposedly independent agency to review it in Georgia. It's usually the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. But the GBI was a participant in the raid. The GBI has been involved in, the GBI has been present for several forest raids.

Open records requests show that they've been involved in emails and conversations about the forest for quite some time now. We know their agents were on scene or probably in the woods when Torte was shot. In addition to that, they're both state agencies. In addition to that, they're still police. Police are going to cover for each other. We know this by now. A day after the shooting, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation stated that there was no body cam footage of the incident. But open records requests were filed asking for body cam footage from the forest around the time of the incident, not only from the State Patrol, but also from the Atlanta and DeKalb County police departments. Two days after the police killing, an Atlanta PD spokesperson said that APD officers were not in the area of the shooting

and that no footage from Wednesday's operation would be released citing the ongoing investigation. And then a whole three weeks after the shooting, on February 8th, the Atlanta Police Department released body cam footage from four officers who were in the woods at the time of the shooting. An officer in the group estimated that they were just 100 feet away. I'm not going to play audio of the gunshots or any use of police weapons, but I'll be including a few brief snippets of police chatter that I and others found relevant. Most of the clips will only be a few seconds long, so you can skip ahead if you want. I'll give you a heads up. At time of recording, there are four videos released and they show a self-described quote-unquote clearing operation being done by a single group of APD officers.

Shortly after tearing apart and slicing up two tents with a pocket knife, suddenly four gunshots are heard nearby, followed a second and a half later by a large volume of gunfire. I estimate over 30 gunshots fired by multiple weapons. No verbal commands were picked up by the microphone. Two chest-mounted cameras were rolling before the shooting. 45 seconds after the gunfire, APD officers were told to turn on their bodycams, and two more cameras began rolling at that point. Officer down started getting repeated over the radio,

but initially there were questions among officers about how much of the sounds heard were fireworks versus gunshots. Multiple officers identified hearing suppressed gunfire, meaning the use of a quote-unquote silencer. Here's two clips totaling around 15 seconds. Just minutes after police opened fire and killed Torteghita, an APD officer on the ground said this in response to the Georgia State Patrol trooper that was shot. You fucked your own officer up, possibly said in response to other officers noting that the gunshots sounded suppressed. Confirmation spread on the ground that a state trooper was shot,

but never once mentioning anything about a protester firing. Police continued advancing toward a nearby tent with guns drawn, and officers yelling back and forth to check their crossfire. As teams were organizing the evac of the injured trooper and warning about crossfire, police stated that they did not want to cause another incident. At this point there was a great deal of intentional coordination of officer movement and a lot of effort being put into preventing police officers from being in each other's line of fire. This next batch of audio will be a little bit longer about a minute.

Hey, Sergeant Hill, Potter, come this way, we're gonna shift this way. Potter, come on. Go around, okay cool, we're going around the other side. Got you, got you, got you. Hold on, hey, hold on, hold on, wait right there, wait right there. I got you, I got you, wait right there. I got you. Keep coming this way, keep coming back this way.

Police started firing off flashbangs and prepping chemical weapons as they moved further into the woods near where the deadly police shooting just took place moments prior. From another angle you can hear a cop laugh in response to his fellow officer threatening fuck around and find out just minutes after police killed a protester. If you listen carefully you can hear an officer muttering about how large the police presence is saying we've got so many resources, we don't need to rush this shit. Cops shot off quote-unquote less lethal pepper balls at an unoccupied green tent and only ended up gassing themselves as they had to walk through the peppered-up trees on their way to the tent.

Literally there was over a minute and a half of just straight coughing. When they arrived at the tent, officers got into a brief conversation about the deadly shooting that just took place and the injured trooper. Remember that just two hours after the shooting, even before the Georgia Bureau of Investigation's first press conference, the Defend the Force Twitter account said, quote, we have reason to believe the officer shot today was hit by friendly fire and not by the protester who was killed, unquote. In an extremely uncharacteristic move, the GBI put out a statement commenting on the evidence during their ongoing investigation, cautioning against quote-unquote speculation and that quote, memory and perception are fragile and a myriad of factors can influence perception and memory, unquote.

The morning after the body cam footage went public, a statement was released by Torteghita's family saying, quote, the videos show the clearing of the forest was a paramilitary operation that set the stage for the excessive use of force and also call into question previous reporting regarding the events leading up to the police shooting, unquote. Tort's own mother, who recently arrived in the United States on an emergency visa, said weeks ago in an interview for The Guardian, quote, I will go to the U.S. to defend Manuel's memory. I'm convinced that they were assassinated in cold blood and I'm gonna clear Manuel's name. They killed them like they tear down the trees in the forest, a forest Manuel loved with a passion, unquote. There is an official GoFundMe for Torteghita managed by and for their family, with funds going to funeral expenses plus travel, legal costs and to support the family in general during this time of events grief. The fundraiser will be linked in the show notes.

This first episode has been a lot, tackling many of the most gruesome aspects of the struggle thus far. Cricket talked about one way of responding to this influx of anger and grief that everyone's been experiencing since the shooting. Yeah, I mean, there's just been so much grief and so much anger and so many people coming together and so many people trying to support one another. There's been a, at least among the folks I know, a lot of trying to think through like what would tort do, WWTD and like loving one another and supporting one another keeps being one of the first things on that list. We will hear more about Torteghita in the next episode, memories and stories from friends, partners and comrades based on conversations and moments from the vigil. But today I'll leave us with the words of Torteghita, quote, The abolitionist mission isn't done until every prison is empty, when there are no more cops, when the land has been given back. That's when it's over.

I don't expect to live to see that day necessarily. I mean, I hope so, but I smoke, unquote. Music for this episode by the Narcissist Cookbook and Propaganda. See you on the other side. Yeah. All of us derive from it when empires learn and can't withstand fire. We return to the land where our ancestors raindanced. We are all the creatures.

We still bear her features. The one and only reason all living things is breathing. The city's deceiving leave. Go see the dirt. Young will be among the lungs of Mother Earth. Music for this episode by the Narcissist Cookbook and Propaganda. 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 not in the good and 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 happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeartRadio 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 offending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeartRadio app, Apple 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 iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. A lot of things have changed in the woods since I visited last year. The Intrenchment Creek Park trailhead at Wallani People's Park is now basically a massive mud pit. The trees cut down and all the grass gone. Sidewalks and bike paths have all been turned into rubble.

As we talked about in the last episode, the police have been increasingly destructive during their more and more frequent raids on the forest. In the past year, the cops have demolished dozens of treehouses and targeted protesters with escalatory tactics. The last 13 people who have been arrested near the forest have all been charged with domestic terrorism for their mere association with the Stop Cops City movement. As hard as the cops are making it to continue being in the woods, there is still something undeniably special about being in community in the forest. Or else people wouldn't be risking life and legal consequences. Living in the woods for me was like a dream. I came to the woods because I was homeless and unemployed and was actually living in different woods by myself. And TORT actually came to the woods for similar reasons. TORT lost their housing in Tallahassee and decided to give this place a try as a place to live.

In the forest, there was always a, you know, over time just developed like, you know, people built coffee shops and like a kitchen that people used and places for people to just like hang out and do shit and that continued the whole time. It was as comfortable and as welcoming as a community as possible. That's really the best thing I feel like I could speak to on it, is that no matter what was going on, people were always working to make the forest as welcoming a space to as many people as possible as they could. In the late of the December 13th police raid, Tortugita went back to the camp in Wallani People's Park to start rebuilding after police tore down the encampments and protest infrastructure just hours prior. I've never experienced such emotional and material security as I have living in the Wallani forest because there are a community of people that are dedicated to taking care of each other and making sure that we all have our needs met. And that was something that Tort and I did for each other often, making sure that we had enough water and food and rides to places. It's really a wonderful place to live and I've also deepened my relationship to the earth. Being there, like living with same trees for over a year is a really profound experience and also it's a really stressful place and people are always butting heads in really interesting ways. But we're committed to remaining in relationship with each other as part of the magic too, is that if you get into a fight with someone at camp, you don't just move to a different apartment and stop talking to them.

They're still around and they're still a comrade, so we're committed to each other in a way that's rare to find in the society. Here is Cricket talking about the type of support everyone has for each other in the movement and how Tort really embodied that. I think one of the things I've seen in my experience with the movement is just the tremendous amount of care that everyone has for one another. You don't have to know one another. We don't have to be on a legal name basis and we still fight for one another. We still protect one another. We still try to save one another and that is something I saw Tort embody regularly. And I'm grateful to everyone who has helped keep me safe and I always, yeah, I'm always trying to keep everyone else safe in any capacity that I can. So we've done a lot of safety trainings. Something that Tort was a really big part of was medic trainings, making sure that people have access to life-saving techniques and skills that are often kept away from really vulnerable folks. So that is something we've been trying to contribute and that we're trying to continue now that Tort is no longer with us.

We were supposed to meet yesterday to put together a curriculum of marginalized, vulnerable people who face gun violence, both from the state and from right-wing neo-Nazi fascists. You name it and we'll be continuing that work in their name. When spending time in the Wallani Forest and even for the many peripheral aspects of the movement, people will choose a forest name. It's like a nickname that helps hide your legal identity and nom de plume. Many chose Torteguita, which is Spanish for little turtle, but it wasn't just chosen for its cute animal association. I'll read from Bitter Southerner. It was a nod to the colonial-era indigenous military commander of the same name who led Native American forces to one of their most decisive victories against the then-nacent U.S. Army in 1791. Now, Tort was allegedly apprehensive to share the meaning behind their chosen name with a journalist who was interviewing them because, quote,

that does not make us look like peaceful protesters. We are very peaceful people, I promise, unquote. There are a few other quotes attributed to Tort across various articles that seem to espouse a belief in non-violence as a tactical strategy, quote. It's incredibly important to continue having popular support. Cop City is incredibly unpopular already. We're very popular, we're cool, we get a lot of support from people who live here, and that's important because we win through non-violence. We're not going to beat them at violence, but we can beat them in public opinion, in the courts even, unquote. Based on frequent phone calls with Tort about force defense, Torteghita's own mother has shared similar sentiments about Tort's politics, saying they, quote, carry no malice, unquote. I'm going to read one more quote from Torteghita about this topic. The right kind of resistance is peaceful because that's where we win. We're not going to beat them at violence. They're very, very good at violence. We're not. We win through non-violence.

That's really the only way we can win. We don't want more people to die. We don't want Atlanta to turn into a war zone. During my time in Atlanta, I wanted to learn as much as possible about Torteghita, about who they were as a person, what kind of stuff they enjoyed doing, what they were to the movement, but mostly just listen to people's stories and memories of Tort. Peter met Tort just shortly after they moved to Atlanta. So I met Tort in May of 2022, around the time when they first got to the forest from Tallahassee. I met them during that week of action and they were like insanely enthusiastic about being there. We met around a fire and talked about how our enthusiasm for life sometimes offended people. That was something that we had in common. They talked about their mom a lot. I won't say I was a close friend of Tort's, but I was a dear comrade to them and being in relationship with them really sharpened my conflict skills. I was in a few different conflicts with Tort and also on the sidelines for some conflicts that they had with other people. And I learned a lot about how to be more gentle with my comrades and how to give people more grace in times of high stress.

This is a snippet from my conversation with Cricket on what Torteghita brought to the movement and how they really lived their politics. Tort was hilarious. They were someone who always brought fun to whatever they were doing. And I'm sure through the folks that you're seeing, the folks that people can see on social media with the outpouring of support for Tort, that they were involved in so many different groups, like so many different causes. And they were an incredibly dedicated activist, but someone who really felt that resistance could be fun, could be joyful, could be celebratory. It was always an opportunity to meet new people, to hug new people. They were a big hugger. They were someone who was always checking in on other people. They were someone who was always there to lend a hand, either literally or metaphorically. And they really inspired, I think, a lot of people. And I think that that was something huge that they contributed to the movement, not just as a person, but also bringing that joyfulness, bringing that energy, that passion and excitement really inspired me. It inspired a lot of people. It's funny, a lot of the people I've talked to have mentioned, just because of the different affinity groups they've been in and stuff, a lot of people I've talked to have mentioned a lot that they would, not like regularly, like every once in a while, get into conflicts with tort. There was someone who you would sometimes, who there would just happen to be disagreements with. But despite disagreements, they were one of the kindest people that they vet,

even when they're arguing about something. It's like they would go so far to make sure that other people knew that they were cared for and would go, I don't know, just be very open towards everybody they meet. Yeah, I think they really tried to live into and walk the walk of abolition and non-carceral conflict of it's okay to disagree and disagreement doesn't mean that you got to get kicked out. It does not mean that you're a bad person. They allowed for complexity and allowed for processes of working through things, of talking through things. And that's a huge gift. I mean, I think anyone, regardless of their level of activism, can relate to the idea that it's hard to disagree. It's hard to be in conflict sometimes. But I do think that they were really committed to building relationships of trust where you could disagree, where you could have differing opinions, but that there was still so much love and still so much care and that those things were not themselves in conflict. Those things were actually very, very much related. And yeah, no, it was, they're special. And yeah, I'm just, I'm just sorry, I'm just heartbroken. Tortuguita's partner and a close friend of theirs recorded a video shortly after the shooting, just talking about who Tortuguita was and how they lived in community. I got permission from their partner to use clips from that video in this episode. Tortuguita was always a very welcoming presence. They're always one of the greatest organizers we had out there. They took care of everyone who came through. They always wanted to make sure everyone was taken care of.

They were the ones who would welcome you into the forest and they would make sure you have a sleeping bag, a sleeping pad, a tent, whatever you could possibly need. Always making sure people were getting fed and just kind of like the transparent you've never had. One of the people I spoke with, Noah, also talked about how Tortuguita was quick to welcome people into the movement. I knew Tortuguita through various actions that are in the forest and doing medical work with them. I think a lot of people have heard this, but I remember them as being one of the kindest, most welcoming people that I ever met working on the forest. Whenever we had new people come in, it was very often one of the first people to greet them and it was always very open to letting people come and see and be a part of the community that had been established in the woods. It was an extremely welcoming place and they were a very welcoming person. I was always willing to put down to help somebody out and to do the work it took to make sure that the community was safe out there and that it could continue. So much of the stuff around the forest, it's all about like the militants in the woods and Tort kind of fell into that category, you know, people who are wearing balaclavas camping out in the forest. Most of the people I've interviewed are also more on that side of things, but not everyone feels like they have the ability to put on a ski mask and live in the woods. One of the people I spoke with was a mother named Karen who started doing local neighborhood organizing after connecting with Torteghita last summer.

So I met Tort less summer and there was like lots of things happening in the park and, you know, I'm a neighbor and so I was the who really fought for, you know, tried to get the city council to vote against it. And so I was interested, you know, curious and interested about all of these events happening at the park. They were all like mostly at night time and I have a toddler and so I'm like boring and have a strict bedtime so I don't, you know, go out at night time. So I was like trying to find a place for me and like people like me and they're boring, you know, parents. So I got connected with Tort and we started, I guess, going during the daytime and I'm taking my toddler over there to the park to explore. And, you know, we, Tort and I talked a lot about, well, first they were really excited about all the, the idea like children being at the park. They really wanted it, the park to be for everyone. I'm very much like a neighborhood mom. I was new to activism and I didn't even know I was like, you know, I thought we were just like visiting a park. But, you know, there's like a whole lot of different things about being in it that Tort really kind of helped me navigate and showed me around. In my experience, it takes a special kind of person to onboard somebody new to this sort of thing. Some anarchists can come off as a bit pompous sometimes or at least hesitant to welcome new people in. Karen spoke on how Torteghita kind of showed them the ropes and helped educate on everything from local organizing to security culture.

Well, I didn't have signal before. I was like, okay, I want to reach out to try and make my neighborhood aware. I made flyers and just like put like the environmental effects, you know, and I send it to Tort. And they were like, okay, yeah, this looks good. And then I was like, should it just be like anonymous or should I, you know, like make like an Instagram or should I put my name on it and you know, all those things. Should I put my number on it? And they were like, okay, well, get a Google voice number and you can set up like an email for it, maybe use proton. Then I was like, should I just like, I don't have to put any information on it. But like, what if, you know, there's people like me in the neighborhood. I guess like, how do you balance that? And they said, no, I think if you got to like organize a neighborhood group, it would be sick. So yeah, you know, they were conscious of all those things, but also like new where, when, and where it was like appropriate. And we just like bounced ideas back and forth. They really helped me like navigate that. I really think it just shows how inclusive they were that they like, how they were engaged with me. I'm like, you know, an older neighborhood mom, but they were really supportive and you know, I guess made me feel valued never made me feel embarrassed about anything.

I think it was just like, if it wasn't about like the party or I don't know, like being cool or anything, they just really wanted the forest to be for everyone and just how they were like willing to engage with the community. My conversations with Karen and others in Atlanta really showed tort as a person who was always thinking about others and how to support the people around them. Not even just focusing on themselves while living in the forest, but working to expand that care outwards. So yeah, I made this flyer and tort called a bunch of other. I don't even know if they were people that were living in the forest or just people and you know, friends or whatever, but um, and was like, hey, we're all going to go canvas. And I think they slept in that day. We met at the park, but me and a couple of neighbors met like, you know, and I was like, I had zero expectations and and they texted me later and was like, I'm so sorry but we'll do it again. But yeah, just that, you know, like they were willing to come put flyers door to door and yeah, just like support me in that way. Karen has continued to do neighborhood organizing since meeting tort last summer and is a great example of the variety of people involved in the Defend the Atlanta Forest movement.

Based on the many local people she's spoken with Karen says the stop cop city proposal is pretty unpopular in the area. So yeah, we've just been like dropping flyers off and just letting them know the environmental effects and everyone we've talked to like, you know, no one wants it. And I think lots of people, lots of them are called in, you know, to city council, but yeah, I guess tort and I and our kind of idea was like if we can make a space, it's like, you know, they may not want to go to the forest, but if we can kind of create a space for them in the movement. Cricket talked about the many projects that tort had a hand in and its willingness to just go out there and do things, not just sit around and wait for the world to get better. They lived anarchism in a very active way. I don't know if anyone mentioned the trans sanctuary that tort built and helped built and and helped organize. I just wanted to uplift that as just another sort of amazing project that they were involved with. I remember hearing about it, tort talked about it and they were like, oh, yeah, you know, we're going to have a volunteer day.

And then two weeks later, we had like another little check in and they were like, oh, yeah, no, we, we like did it. And I was like, excuse me, like I just just, I don't know, they were just like this, this Tasmanian devil of social justice. Like I felt like they were just constantly on the move, getting stuff done, supporting people. It's just, it was, I don't know, like that's just another memory that I keep revisiting of just being like, oh my God, they are not paralyzed. Like they are living, they were living day to day, right? Like they knew that tomorrow could bring another raid. Like they, yeah, they weren't stupid. They were really actually brilliant and they could just, they just lived every day so fully and brought everything they had.

A friend of tortiguitas that goes by the name Levitate the Pentagon, which is definitely in the top three force names that I've heard. But they gave a statement to Rolling Stone where they said, quote, tortiguita was a proud and fierce anarchist. The struggle for total liberation came as their first commitment in life. We must honor that commitment. From a lot of the medical trains that we did together and times out there, they were just, I know, they're really funny, they like to make people have to be like a very common presence during stressful times. And that they could make like a joke related to like any situation, but a lot of, I remember like a lot of conversations just about what we were doing in the forest and their like reasons for being out there. And they're, you know, just kind of echoing these ideas of combating the, you know, the state and then the state's push for, you know, destroying the forest for the effects that have on the climate for the increasing ability to place militarize and to suppress not just people in Atlanta,

but law enforcement agencies from across the country coming to train at this facility to better clamp down on our presence. Yeah, they were just, they're really kind of very tenacious. That's like the two things I can always kind of come back to as a person. Towards capacity for wit under high stress situations is something I heard from a lot of different people, including towards friends and their partner. Like give you like a cigarette or professional shit poster. Yeah. Yeah. I mean their meme game on point on point. Yeah. And just always like doing a lot of things. And so they were running around a lot like getting things for people and then handing it off to them. And so like, yeah, I think a lot of the times when we would run into like four, like oftentimes we run into each other and be like, oh, hey, hi, hi, okay, we're doing a thing. And then like, okay, gotta go. But, you know, and there's always like, yeah, signature. They were super into that.

Oh, that smile. Yeah. They love fruit snacks, loved them couldn't get enough of them. And they always helped do the dishes. Can I just say like, that's a big deal. Yeah, like no one likes doing the dishes is like they were always they're doing the dishes. They were like, oh my God, running water, hot water. Like, I mean, like, like, oh my God. And just like, yeah, that's, that's what I want people to know fruit snacks and dishes. Fruit snacks have come up a lot throughout my conversations with people. Torteghita's partner and friend also talked about how tort tried to balance helping other people with their own self care. They were always so passionate because they wanted to help people so bad that they would put their all into it. It took a toll on them in a lot of ways. But they always were so fucking strong and took on so much more than I ever could. They, they're an inspiration to us all.

They also knew to like disappear for like hours or days at a time and just like recharge. They read a lot. Oh yeah. I have one of the, like, one of the things. They'd be sitting in their hammock at our tent near their tent and just be reading, doing whatever it was they were doing. Shitpost and whatever. They got to de-stress. They were good about taking care of themselves. But they did get into some conundrums where they'd get stressed out and then you just see them like go off on their own and then come back in a few days and then they're all good again. Happy go lucky. I've heard them described as kind and they definitely were. I think the word that comes to mind the most is earnest.

They were just like incredibly earnest. I think like the earnestness I'm talking about is like they truly live their politics. Like anyone can talk about like inclusivity and love and fighting for the future. But they actually, you know, just in how they carried themselves and interacted with me, they really did that. And lots of people might be like cynical about it or maybe call them like optimistic or naive. But they actually lived, I feel like love sounds corny, but yeah, just like a love for people and nature in the forest. What was that piece we were talking about? Revolutionary death? Yes. Yeah, they read that this last summer and it really had a strong impact upon them.

And they, I think you were sharing as well that they had spoken about how they knew it was very possible that they were going to have this revolutionary death and that... Back to them kind of giving their all. They were prepared and they unfortunately paid the ultimate price. As said, as we all are, I'm sure Torch Kito, wherever they are now, was happy to know that they gave their all all the way to the end. They were always, you know, they were a true revolutionary and gave their all to this movement. And I think now it's our job to take up that banner and carry on his name. In multiple ways, escalatory actions of police last December led to the current fatal scenario, not just with the domestic terror framing as a pretext for using increased force, but also the physical destruction of treehouses resulting in people being out in more vulnerable positions. They were very calculated in their risks and they would never have had to be put in this situation if their home in the trees hadn't been destroyed.

They lived in a treehouse and the treehouse that they were really holding down and staying in was bulldozed in the mid-December raids. On November 21, 2006, undercover Atlanta Police Department officers executed a no-knock warrant on the home of 92-year-old Catherine Johnston in the Bankhead neighborhood of Atlanta. Police claimed to have evidence that crack cocaine was being sold out of the house. Officers in plain clothes cut off the burglar bars to Johnston's home of 17 years and broke down her door. According to the police, the 92-year-old woman shot several officers. Multiple cops were treated for gunshot wounds. Catherine Johnston was shot and killed by the police in her own home where police then claimed to have found marijuana, thanks to an informant who said that they bought drugs at the house.

Except every single thing the police claimed was a lie. Earlier that day, an officer had found bags of marijuana in the woods. The drugs were planted on a suspected dealer who didn't have any drugs on him. The officer threatened to arrest the suspected dealer if he didn't give up information leading to an arrest. The man gave the police an address on Neal Street and a fake name to buy cocaine with. The APD claimed the police were raiding the house because an informant had bought crack at Johnston's home. It turns out all of the injuries to officers came from friendly fire. They fucked up their own guys. The cops fired a total of 39 shots, five or six of which hit Johnston. As a 92-year-old woman living alone, she owned a rusty revolver for self-defense.

As these unannounced strangers in plain clothes kicked down her door, Johnston did fire once and missed. Three police officers in Atlanta executed Catherine Johnston as they shot each other with friendly fire. To cover this up, they lied and planted evidence. They ran a smear campaign against Johnston, further victimizing the old woman that they killed and who the cops knew was innocent. The police in Atlanta have a track record of shooting each other, killing civilians, and lying about it. With that history in mind, this next part might get a little complicated, but I think it's important. A lot of the people who knew tort have talked about how they often advocated for non-violence in direct action. Many have said the sequence of events put forth by police just doesn't sound like something tort would do, and I very much understand this reaction. Police lie all the time, especially when it comes to people the cops have killed. It is very likely that tort really was just murdered by the cops.

But I also think there's part of this reaction that's almost like a self-preservation mechanism, stemming from a worry that if a certain Pandora's box gets opened, what that would mean for the movement and for the struggle against militarized police and ecological collapse more broadly? There's also many scenarios that can lead to a brief exchange of gunfire, especially with the Georgia State Patrol's relative inexperience conducting raids in the forest. You can spend days just thinking of various possibilities for what could have happened, as I'm sure many people in Atlanta have. The recently released body cam makes some things more clear, but also opened up many possibilities to endlessly ruminate about, especially with on the ground chatter indicating cops shot each other. This next person is one of the original Forest Defenders I interviewed for my previous Defend the Atlanta Forest series from last May. To it, as their partner stated, as its friend stated, what's open about being moved by a piece called Revolutionary Death, they did not shall away from the idea that they could die for the things that they believe in. They did not shall away from the idea that they could be murdered for the ideas that they believe in in the life they want to live.

We should have disness, the possibility and reality that people can, and maybe even should, look at this world, look at the police murdering three or four people a day, of the climate catastrophe that we live in, of the rising tide of fascism, of the absolute fucking hell that we fucking live in, and think this can't go on. And I'm willing to do anything and pay anything to make it stop. We can't dismiss that that is a very real, passable grievance, that is a very real and passable state of mind, and not if that was tort. If that was tort to greet us, if that was to kill us, if that was its position, that it is not alone, that it and I, undyably, are not willing that, and our willingness to die for what we believe in. Torta Gita, both privately and publicly, talked about an appreciation for non-violence as a long-term strategy. And the flip side of that is, tort has also been described to me as somebody who acts with intention, acts with great thought, and if they did decide to do something, they would have had a good reason to, and they would not have chosen to do something if it had the potential to put fellow force defenders in unnecessary danger. Based on some of my conversations, while tort advocated for the potential of non-violence as a political strategy, they itself were not solely non-violent. The Atlanta Police Foundation have lied about every single aspect of this project's development since the start. The GBI said that there was no body cam footage, and the police have spent the last year fine-tuning their propaganda to frame the Defend the Force movement as a criminal enterprise, and anyone protesting against Cop City as a dangerous terrorist and threat to public safety.

But there is a difference between mindlessly believing the police narratives and trying to not retroactively take away somebody's agency, especially if they did make a decision that they thought was the right choice given the circumstance. Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about the discourse around the ideas. I think a lot of people have been talking a lot about trying to, you know, there's narrative flaws in the police's story about what happened on that raid, and there's inconsistencies. We just now got photos of the gun that their alleged alleging was used just like a couple days ago, and it was days after the GBI's initial evidence fine report. It does all look suspicious, but I think a thing that's bothered me is that I would never want to take away agency from someone who cannot speak for themselves for an act that they may have committed. If Torch shot that cop, there was a shot fired in liberation against the state that murders thousands of people and destroys millions more through the car service system, the same state that seeks to help the South River flood and to make the soil 20 degrees hotter and to make Atlanta's air quality go down. I would never want to take agency away from my comrades who have done that when they cannot speak for themselves and I don't think anybody should try and make it seem like it would have been an unjustified act. A shot fired at the police in defense of the forest is a shot fired in self-defense. Cops shoot each other all the time. I'm asking if they're terrible with firearms, they're just not good at their jobs. GSP, I think as a specific agency, is something that needs to be focused on and more here. I've seen a lot of people kind of wrap up GSP and APD and like the CAB PD as things like very like, just as one agency. GSP as a Georgia State Patrol is under the direct command of our governor and do not wear body cams as an agency policy. They were the governor's strong troopers when he wants something done violently and without accountability, that is who he sends.

And, you know, my reaction all of this whether or not what the events transpired is that our comrade is dead or comrade was murdered by the state whether or not they allegedly fired. I'm an officer. I think the solidarity and rage that people should show should be the same either way. If there were to come out that officer was in fact shot, I would be so disheartened if people turned their back on our comrade who was slain by the police for what I'd see as an act of self-defense. With all of the unknown around what happened the day of the shooting, what we do know for sure I've heard boiled down to two simple points. Tort was killed defending the forest and they died doing what it loved. The first event type thing I went to in Atlanta was a noise demo outside DeKalb County Jail Thursday night for the seven people arrested as a part of the deadly raid. All seven of whom are now facing domestic terrorism charges for being in the forest. The next day, Friday the 20th, there was a large public vigil in Wallani People's Park. Last time I was there, it was for the Muskogee Creek Summit near the end of last spring. It was sunny. I was hanging out in the gazebo listening to ecological presentations. There was a large tent kitchen in the grass and I got to sit around a table and eat food with people. When I arrived Friday evening for the vigil, the first thing I saw was the destroyed remains of the gazebo almost on display by the entrance of the torn up parking lot. It was such a clear visual indicator for how things have changed since the start of last summer.

Near the treeline, a few hundred people were gathered around a sort of outdoor shrine. A few large stone slabs overturned. Candles, flowers, forest plants, little turtles, pictures, art, cigarettes, and yes, fruit snacks, forming an orange glowing mound. People gathered and shared memories of Tortuguita. Many spoke of its kindness and solidarity with struggles across the South from the defense of drag shows in Tennessee to mutual aid work in Florida, where they helped build housing in low income communities hit hardest by hurricanes. I feel like Tortuguita's compassion was something that really shifted the culture in the forest and touched all of the lives of the people that they met. They lived what they believed, which is something that I hope we can all be inspired by. There are so many stories of people who were just mentioning to Tort, like, oh, I'm in this situation or this happened to my friend, and they would just immediately be thinking of ways that community could help them or that they could help them. And someone just shared a story with me that the last time that they saw Tort, they were telling them about how the unhoused folks in their community were getting their tents and sleeping bags, like, swept. And then Tort gave them $200 to replace the sleeping bags in tents. And I feel like they had such a sense of kinship with people, even people that they didn't know.

They were so connected to the ways that we are all a part of this web of life and so committed to living in a way that can bring us all into a better community with each other, whether it be us and our fellow human beings or us in our forests. And they loved these woods. And I feel like the fact that these woods were where they departed from this realm into the next just makes it that much more important that we protect them and that we make sure that this forest remains intact. I know that that's what Tort would have wanted. He died doing and I think that in all of the chaos and desperation and devastation that this loss is bringing our community. I think that one of the things that has been keeping me going is remembering the love that Tort had for people and for all living beings and just feeling really connected to their compassion. And I hope that that's something I know that that's something that is touching has touched all of us and the ripples of it are continuing.

The love that Tort brought to this world is still here and is continuing to grow. So I think that they're I think that they're here with us and I think that they always will be because they brought so much joy and goodness and love into this world. And that's something that never goes away. It only grows. It's gotten permission from a few of the people that spoke that night to share some of their stories of Torteghita. One of the small things that stuck with me was how someone described Tort as possessing a playful, rebellious energy. Tort and I watched this Yugoslav film together called My Father the Socialist Kulak, which was this joyful Yugoslavian film from the 80s about the transition after World War II in Yugoslavia to autonomous self-rule and breaking apart with the Soviet sphere. And in it early on in the film they're changing their social customs.

They've adopted a new way of greeting each other in Yugoslavia where they they say, good morning, death to fascism. And from that time when I would see Tort always they would, death to fascism comrade, death to fascism. And Tort, when I first met them, invited me to teach aikido in the forest, which is called, it's a martial art that's called the art of peace. And so while we train as warriors, we train as peaceful warriors. But as many people have said, we for instance did defenses of drag shows in Tennessee from assemblies of Nazis and proud boys who showed up in body armor with assault rifles. And Tort was militant but joyful. It took all of the, always it was with the utmost gravity and yet with the utmost lightness. We as well arranged a weekend of conflict resolution training here where Tort rallied and was the one that brought a half a dozen people, was always rallying people, brought people to the drag defense, brought people to the trainings, brought people to my aikido class.

Maybe brought two dozen different people through over the course of several dozen classes. They were a peaceful warrior and they were my squadmate and they got shot dead. And I'd like to, I'd like to lead a chant in that spirit to honor some of Tort's warrior spirit tonight. And I know one that they liked is Auntie Capitalista. And we could start together slow and quiet and build together a powerful voice and pierce the night. Auntie, Auntie Capitalista. Auntie, Auntie Capitalista. Auntie, Auntie Capitalista. Throughout the night, many songs were sung alongside screams of rage.

Torteghita actually left a tag with a little red sharpie on the guitar being played at the vigil. It's a little doodle of a cat face next to the words, all cats are beautiful. Somebody at the vigil read out a few of the messages sent in to the rememberTort at protonmail.com email address, many of which you can now find collected at stopcop.city. One of the things about Tort that was really inspirational is that they weren't just against capitalism, they weren't just against the police. They made abolition about what they were fighting for. And on the We Remember Tort protonmail, a lot of people have been sending in stories about how they contributed so much to each community that they were in. And I want to read this one that came in from someone in Tallahassee. Everyone in Tallahassee knew Manny. I'm not even exaggerating. They were a part of almost every single organization they could get their hands on in town. Food not bombs, the plant, live oak radical ecology, international workers of the world, Tallahassee Community Action Committee, Free Dan Baker, stopping HB1, ETC. With every person who was lucky enough to be graced with their presence, they felt safe and free to do whatever they could for the community. They ran a cold night shelter for the homeless practically on their own when the Kearney Center couldn't do it. They helped do grocery deliveries for those in the south side of town for free.

They showed up to almost every single meal share that F&B hosted. And this is only a fraction of the work that they did for the bond community here in Tallahassee and beyond. Manny, I always watched you from the periphery with awe. I always wanted to be your close friend. I wish you could have seen the vigil that we had. You would have been proud. The large overturned stone by the flowers, candles, and fruit snacks at the Wallani vigil had a message written on it that I read when I returned to the park a few days later. The big boulder reads, erected in memory of all whose lives were lived and unjustly lost in Wallani forest. You live on in the trees and are remembered by the land. You will never be forgotten. Until every prison is empty, until every slave is free, until all live without fear, until Earth has healed, our work is not done. If it's okay, I'll share another of the messages that I sent. Manny was a close friend, comrade, and above all constant fighter for working people. I knew them in Tallahassee through the IWW, Food Not Bombs and Live Oak Radical Ecology, and I will never cease to be amazed by their tireless activism, their extreme empathy, and their ability to make everyone feel welcomed in radical spaces. They died as they lived, fighting for a better world and defending the forest from destruction in the name of a fascist militarized police force. I hope their name will not be forgotten and that their killer is brought to justice. But more than anything, I hope the cause that they fought for is victorious.

Now we mourn this great loss to the Tallahassee and Atlanta communities, but tomorrow we will fight back twice as hard against capitalism in the state so that Torchigita did not die in vain. This is another one. They were kind and fierce. They were sweet, extraordinarily funny, conscientious, tender, silly, loving, and one of the most generous people I have met. And that contagious smile and laugh, three exclamation points. I went to bed last night, hearing their laughter in my head, loud and beautiful. They somehow were still there to add levity and joy as I screamed, cried, and choked on my own spit all night. They killed you. You are gone, comrade. I missed you. I miss you. They had a deep understanding of solidarity and struggle. When the cops swept an encampment in my neighborhood without hesitation, they shared their forest funds to get more tents and sleeping bags, because they knew that these are not individual battles, but that these struggles are inherently tied to one another, that they are part of the same struggle.

This is a lesson for the movement that must be carried forward, for them, for all of us, for the strength of the fight to stop Cops City. I will miss how we greeted one another and our meager attempts to make it a thing, death to fascism, liberation to all people. One of the people playing the Torchigita tag guitar at the vigil played a version of Bella Chow, and I'm just going to read out the way that they described the song. Bella Chow means Goodbye Beautiful in Italian. The song was originally about an Italian partisan who goes out to fight the fascists in the mountains during World War II, and I'd like to dedicate this version to somebody who laid their life down to fight against fascism, militarism, and against the expansion of the police and against the destruction of nature. Somebody who lifted up all of the people they were around knew so many people, was involved in so many communities, and was just so funny, so loving, so friendly, and they laid their life down for their community, and to stop Cops City, and to stop militarism, and the destruction of nature.

They really believed in what they were doing, and the way we can honor them is by continuing their fight. Death to Fascism. See you on the other side. Chow, Bella Chow, Chow, Chow, with my friends now, in the forest, we're gonna shake the gates of hell. And we will tell them, yeah, we will tell them, yeah, Bella Chow, Bella Chow, Bella Chow, Chow, Chow, that we lawnies, not for the franchise, and wish the bastards dropped and dead. Next time you see me, I may be smiling. Oh, Bella Chow, Bella Chow, Bella Chow, Chow, Chow, I'll be in prison, or on the TV, I'll say the forest called me here. The world is waking, I sign my window. Bella Chow, Bella Chow, Bella Chow, Chow, Chow, drive my senses into the sunlight, for there are things that I must do. Wish me luck now, I have to leave you.

Bella Chow, Bella Chow, Bella Chow, Chow, Chow, with my friends now, in the forest, we're gonna shake the gates of hell. And we will tell them, yeah, we will tell them, oh, Bella Chow, Bella Chow, Bella Chow, Chow, Chow, that we lawnies, not for the franchise, wish the bastards dropped and dead. Next time you see me, I may be smiling. Bella Chow, Bella Chow, Bella Chow, Chow, Chow, I'll be in prison, or on the TV, I'll say the forest called me here. The world is waking, I sign my window. Bella Chow, Bella Chow, Bella Chow, Chow, Chow, drive my senses into the sunlight, for there are things that I must do. Wish me luck now, I have to leave you. Oh, Bella Chow, Bella Chow, Bella Chow, Chow, Chow, with my friends now, in the forest, we're gonna shake the gates of hell. And we will tell them, we will tell them, Bella Chow, Bella Chow, Bella Chow, Chow, Chow, that we lawnies, not for the franchise,

and wish the bastards dropped and dead. Next time you see me, I might be smiling. Bella Chow, Bella Chow, Bella Chow, Chow, Chow, I'll be in prison, or on the TV, I'll say the forest called me here. Next time you see me, I might be smiling. Bella Chow, Bella Chow, Bella Chow, Chow, Chow, I'll be in prison, or on the TV, I'll say the forest called me here. 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 on the gun badass 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 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.

The few days leading up to Saturday, January 21st felt like the calm before the storm. Nobody knew exactly what was going to happen at the weekend protest in downtown Atlanta, but there was a sense that something would. Shortly after the Wednesday shooting, a flyer went out calling for a gathering at Underground Atlanta on Saturday, January 21st and to wear black clothes in morning. This is It Could Happen Here, I'm Garrison Davis, and I arrived at Underground Atlanta just a bit before 5pm. The crowd was still slowly growing, and a bunch of big news cameras were filling up the central area. As more people filtered in, some who knew TORT went up in front of everyone to share memories of Torteghita and talk about the continuing fight to defend the forest. Obviously we're all here because TORT was an amazing person, and their life meant a lot. But TORT also shared something in common with all of us, and that was the values and things that they were fighting for.

And all of us are fighting for a great cause, and we all have it in common, but it makes us all targets. They will always target us because they don't believe in the things that we believe in, and they will always be after us. And we all have to stand here and stay together and stay resilient to fight for what we believe in, and never let TORT's memory go without honor. If they would kill an innocent person like TORT, someone who loved their community, they won't stop to kill us. They won't stop to kill everyone in that forest. They won't stop to kill anyone who defies them. And that is pretty much all I had to say. A few people from the Atlanta Resistance Medics, a local street medic group dedicated to the liberation of medicine, and providing medical resources for underprivileged and marginalized people, spoke about TORTeghita, who was a member of their collective.

If there's one thing that we want people to remember TORT for, it's that they were somebody who protected the people around them, who went through the training along with the rest of us to be able to provide medical resources to the people that were around them that may not have access to us. No matter what else the news says about TORT, they were a protector. Everything they did was out of love. Everything they did was out of hope for a better world. And I don't care what the police say. I don't care what the media says. I don't care what anybody says. TORT is out here working for a better world. They may want to smear them as an extremist. They were not. They were out here protecting their fellow people. And that's what we want everybody to remember about them. They were out here trying to build a better world no matter what anybody else says. I'd love y'all to repeat after me. TORTugha vive la lucha sigue. TORTugha vive la lucha sigue.

TORTugita was a medic in our collective. They were a forest defender. They were a friend. They were funny. They were kind. TORTugita was constantly thinking of others. They were constantly trying to protect other people, trying to protect the forest, trying to protect everyone who was marginalized. They centered voices who were on the margins and brought them into the center. They recognized that our struggles are interconnected. They recognized that cop city will never be built. They died defending that forest. The memory of TORTugita that I keep returning to is after the police destroyed the gazebo at Wilani Peoples Park in the parking lot. They were at a meeting and they said, yeah, so the cops think they can destroy our morale? They can't. TORTugita was one of the most resilient, strongest people I know. They hugged everyone. They were so kind and so giving. And even as the state tries to assassinate their character in addition to their body, they were a freedom fighter.

They were a person that I am honored to have known, that I am honored to have called a friend. About 400 people eventually gathered around underground Atlanta. It seemed like slightly more people than were at the vigil of the previous night. Everything in modern life serves to atomize you, to make you feel like you are an individual, divorced from any sense of collective identity, divorced from any sense that you have a purpose and that there is good in the world. The fact that you're here means that you're fighting against that. Don't let go of that. That is powerful and that's why cop city isn't going to be built. It's because we have love for ourselves and for the people around us. Alright, so I'm sure all of you are fairly upset about this. I am. TORT was a friend of mine. They were a friend of the community. Their death will not be in vain. By 5.30, about half the crowd gathered at underground Atlanta were in Black Block and the rest were a variety of activists, organizers, and random people who decided that it was important to be at this event.

After some speeches, chants, and stories of TORT, the gathering of people turned into a march and took to the streets. A march is starting just left underground Atlanta. Around 300 people, maybe more, are marching down the street. There's a mix of people in block. There's medics here. People just kind of in regular clothes holding signs. There's a banner in the front that reads, they can't kill us all. Firework. Banner at the front that says, trees give life, police take it. After just a minute of marching down one street, the crowd suddenly stopped. Looks like the march is turning around, going to the other side. Some more small fireworks being launched in the sky. Banners getting moved to the front.

Looks like the march is now heading north into downtown. Organizers from the Party for Socialism and Liberation attempted to take control of the march and lead the group south, in the direction of the state capitol building, or possibly looping around to the CNN center. But autonomous activists in the crowd turned the march around and the group, 400 strong, headed north. It sounds like the PSL people who were gathered at the underground tried to lead the march in one direction and everyone was like, no, we don't want to go that way. The PSL people were going to lead everyone into the federal building section of downtown, going south. And very quickly they turned around. Well, other people turned around and were like, no, we're not going that way. They're taking a right down Peachtree, heading north into downtown, right beside the Coca-Cola sign on Marietta.

The march entered the commercial district, a section of the city, completely gutted out by years of the Atlanta way neoliberal policies that we talked about in the Defend the Forest episodes from last May. The area is populated almost exclusively by business people, university students, and unhoused citizens, and was a common site for Atlanta's 2020 BLM protests. Now that the march is moving, it's easier to see everyone in black, all people in black. It's looking more just like a large, large mass of people in black now. I have not seen much police presence downtown yet, because that's just a few patrol cars. It's really unclear how Atlanta police is going to respond to this. Got some flares, a lot more of those smoke fireworks, or smoke grenade things.

It's not a grenade, it's like a cardboard tube shooting smoke out. The block continued to travel north. Road flares and fireworks lit the path in the darkening evening. Graffiti quickly sprung up on walls with phrases like, R.I.P. Little Turtle and Stop Cop City. The march is now approaching an Atlanta police vehicle who is trying to back up. The cop car is right in the middle of where the march is going to go. They're like less than 100 feet away, just one single cop car that happens to be in the path. They are trying to back out of the street. The march has the trees give life, police take it banner.

There's a big cardboard cut out of a tree right behind it. Police have their lights turned on now. Looks like the cop car is turning around. Yeah, and the cop car is leaving rather quickly. The sun was just starting to set as the block arrived at the main goal of the night. The Atlanta Police Foundation headquarters at 191 Peach Tree Street. They've stopped in front of Atlanta Police Foundation headquarters. People are throwing stuff at the windows and doors.

Broken windows at the Atlanta Police Foundation headquarters. Stopped in front of the cop city. Firework thrown. Umbrella's moved in to block local news cameras as windows shattered. Rocks emerged from backpacks and smashed into the front of the building. Hammers met the glass entrance as fireworks lit up the scene. Another firework at the Atlanta Police Foundation. The march is tightening up a decent bit.

March is definitely tightening up. A lot of people just in block now. Shouts of bee water kept the mass moving forward as bank windows received a similar pelting of rocks and hammers. People chanting to move like water. A few Atlanta Police cars right beside the march. I'm guessing they're going to pull in behind the march. Two Atlanta Police cars right there.

People hitting Chase Bank, another stuff being dragged into the street. Chase Bank's head of regional investment banking, John Richard, serves on the board of the Atlanta Police Foundation. Police officers exited the two cop cars that were trailing the march and quickly ran away from the crowd, leaving their vehicles abandoned. Corporers trying to keep track of where the police are in relation to the march. Looks like I got some cars pulling up behind. The police car pulled up behind the march. It's got their windows broken, fireworks thrown under.

Another firework. Another Atlanta Police vehicle had their windows smashed, so there's two. The two that was behind the march. The two Atlanta Police officer cars that were behind the march just got hit. Wells Fargo, one of the main cop city funders, received special love and attention from the block. The Atlanta area president for Wells Fargo, Mitch Groll, is also on the board of trustees for the Atlanta Police Foundation. A few other banks hit around this area. Wells Fargo, one of the contributors to the Atlanta Police Foundation, one of their big funders and backers.

A lot of the media here are very, very thirsty to get stuff put into people breaking windows and shit. It was kind of surprising that the crowd made it this far without any real police response. Time almost stretches during these brief moments of uprising. About seven minutes after the first window shattered, Atlanta Police finally arrived and made their move. Police are in front of the march now. Police are in front of the march. People might be turning around if they want to do a float like water type thing. Yeah, multiple cop cars are approaching the march on the front. Unclear what the crowd is going to do. Atlanta PD is now approaching the march.

They're getting closer. They're going after one of the banners. They're dragging somebody down, pulling someone to the ground. They're chasing people. One person's being arrested. March is splitting in two different directions. Officers started randomly tackling and arresting anyone they could get their hands on. More police arrived from the south and chased down a small section of the march that branched off. Atlanta police coming from behind as well. They got Atlanta police on both sides. Not many officers though. Just a few officers.

Looks like the majority of the march went... Out of the street! Get the fuck out of the street! Get out! Out of the street! Out of the street! Keep moving! Dispersed! Dispersed! Dispersed! Get out of the road! Police getting more aggressive. Pushing a lot of people. Footage and audio of these violent arrests were shared by the Defend the Forest account, Unicorn Riot, and myself. Police getting more aggressive. Get the fuck out of here! Get the fuck out of here! Get the fuck out of here! I hear screams coming from multiple directions. Looks like the march kind of split in two.

Get out of the street! Out of the street! I've seen a lot of arrests. The individuals targeted likely committed no crime other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The majority of the march split away in a different direction from the cops. So I stayed where the cops were most of the march. I was able to get away by going through two different directions. We have, it looks like an Atlanta PD vehicle is on fire. Atlanta PD vehicle burning in the street.

Burning cop car. Police with AR style. AR style rifles. So I feel like most of the march headed on that way. It seems one of the cop cars that got smashed also spontaneously lit on fire. When the police first confronted the march, most of the block was able to peel off and disappear into the night. Affinity groups reconnected, block was shed, and protesters evacuated out of downtown as the police flooded the mile-long stretch of Peach Tree Street that the crowd marched on. After a fire truck put out the burning cop car, police taped off the area, and as they were pushing people out, I recorded an officer saying this amazing line. The whole thing's blocked. There's fireworks and like bombs going off.

Bombs or discount New Year's Eve fireworks. You choose. All in all, the actions that night only took about an hour and crews made it home in time for dinner. Six people were arrested at the protest Saturday night. Five were tackled and pinned down as the crowd initially scattered, and one other person was chased by a cop car. Sam from the Atlanta Community Press Collective has more on that. A protestor who was subsequently arrested was witnesses state they were basically followed through the streets by an Atlanta police vehicle before witnesses say that they were hit by the same vehicle and they were then taken to jail. So the Unicorn Riot released that video and we were able to speak with a few witnesses because as I'm sure everyone saw on social media this weekend, the arrests were a familiar brutal, a familiar brutal site.

Before we continue, I do want to play two short clips that were circulating the night of the protest. First is police scanner audio of the cop whose car spontaneously combusted. You want a car? Yeah, we are here with these protesters. They blew my damn car up. I ain't never go getting on to eat longer, you know. This next one is from live news coverage of the March and this clip became an instant meme. So they're now saying GBI suck my dick. GBI is the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Mayor Andre Dickens and the chief of police gave a press conference hours later, which gave us a look at how the state was going to try and frame the protest and acts of targeted vandalism.

My message is simple to those who seek to continue this type of criminal behavior. We will find you and we will arrest you and you will be held accountable. We have arrested several of them this evening and Chief Sheerbaum will give you the details on that. And some of them were found with explosives on them. You heard that correctly explosives and that has led to a police officer's car being set on fire. During the press conference, the chief of police clarified that no law enforcement officers were injured as a result of the protest and neither were any bystanders, which means the only violence against people was done by the cops who randomly tackled any protester that they could chase down.

And so it doesn't take a rocket scientist or an attorney to tell you that breaking windows and setting fires not protest. That is terrorism and that they will be charged accordingly and they will find that this police department and the partnership is equally committed to stop that activity. We already have prosecutors in the room as we speak and we're reviewing everything and we have a lot of evidence to still go through. So even charges you see tonight, those can easily be upgraded and they will be upgraded if appropriate. I brought up the police chief's comments to a few of the forest defenders that I spoke with. After the protest on Saturday in downtown, police chief Schneierbaum? Schneierbaum? It's hard. I've read it before.

I'm scared. Anyway, the police chief said that breaking windows and setting fires is terrorism. I'm curious to get everyone's thoughts on that. So I think the police and Andre Dickens are doing what a lot of city governments have done, especially during 2020, which was do things like call property destruction terrorism, which it's not. You can call it a rewind. You can call it property destruction and call it terrorism. There's a very specific political strategy that exists. I think the right one does it a lot and it would be worth calling that.

Because Defend the Forest doesn't have a body count. The police have only murdered an activist for Defend the Forest, which Defend the Forest has not struck in our violent lead. It's anybody except in defense against the police. You cannot do violence to property. You cannot be violent towards a police car. It's the same way that Andre Dickens is now getting on TV and claiming that, like, calling fireworks explosives. It's like, yes, they are objects that explode, but this is very clearly being done in bad fifth.

Because it is, it is, it justifies, it is the same way like the DOD and the FBI does a lot of other shit. You call something terrorism, the money just pours out. You get funding, you get justification to do things like that. And you can arrest people and charge them with domestic terrorism. That makes continuing a movement incredibly hard. That's a really dangerous implication that any act in dissidents to the state could be called domestic terrorism, should really scare the shit out of everybody, not just here, but around the country, and should not be allowed to stand and should be combated against on every front.

I talked with Peter about how if the police are viewing vandalism or destruction of inanimate objects as domestic terrorism, if breaking a window is terrorism, that makes the question, what exactly is destroying a forest? That juxtaposition of what the police consider violence and, like, what sort of, like, destruction of objects is violence. To me, this demonstrates what they see, like, as valuable. And also, this demonstrates the police state and the corporation's inability to understand the aliveness of all things and how sacred the earth is. It shows that what they consider sacred, what they hold as sacred, is property, and specifically their property. I think they fear the woods in part because it moves in ways that they can't comprehend. It moves in nonlinear ways.

Cricket also had something to say on this topic. Well, and what is destroying a forest? What is destroying a person? They're more upset about the destruction of property than the destruction of a person, a whole human being, who was 26 years old. They were young. They had just started. And that does not seem to measure up against some glass panes. That doesn't seem to register. And what about the terror they inspire in the forest? What about the... I mean, obviously, there are these rhetorical questions when I'm preaching to the choir. But, I mean, God, no, it's just infuriating.

I long for the day when the line is not drawn at, well, you can do anything except touch private property. Noah mentioned the juxtaposition of broken windows being terrorism, but violent actions that actually hurt people, seemingly not mattering nearly as much, at least compared to a cracked window. So it's a clear double standard in the same way that, like, you know, during 2020, people setting fire to police precincts was insurrection and anarchy and all these things. But when the National Guard would shoot people, it was a tragic error or a justified shooting. And right when vigilantes would drive cars in the crowds and, you know, they couldn't... ...poor them to pipe bombs at protests, it does not get treated with the same levity because the powers that be can never... ...will never, well, obviously never hold themselves to the same standards that they will call us as their enemies.

The meaning of words does not matter to them. What matters is being able to get good sound bites to put on, like, antifoaction shit and make themselves. Because the city's decided that they can't back down from the pro-cop people that they're not willing to, like, back down on that front, that this is where they're gonna stick their flag and try and hold it out. From the start of the movement, the police have aggressively arrested and persecuted protesters associated with the struggle to stop Cop City, starting all the way back with the first arrest of 11 peaceful protesters snatched off the sidewalk during the city council's vote to approve Cop City. As corporations and the state move to push Cop City's development forward, despite all public opposition, repression has increased dramatically over the last few months.

Since December, everyone arrested in connection with the movement against Cop City has been charged with domestic terrorism. It's not a huge surprise. In terms like terrorism and ecoterrorism have been coming up, I mean, in private conversations probably since the beginning, but we can trace it back to at least last summer when, and some emailed emails we've obtained through open records requests where a city council member at the police foundation were just kind of pejoratively throwing around the term terrorists in response to, I think it was graffiti or something, I hope they catch these terrorists soon, the terrorists who graffiti the building. It has also shown up in a couple different public meetings that are about the training center, you know, committee members who are pro public safety training center, anti-anyone being opposed to it have also used the term ecoterrorism.

The dangerous escalation of protest suppression is not limited to people engaging in passive resistance or direct action. Some of our open records requests have even shown that since last fall for several months now, anyone who participates in like a write-in or a call-in campaign, sometimes those very simple emails of, hey, I don't think your company should be participating in this project will get forwarded up to the chief of police, you know, people's names, emails, just very, very simple call-in campaign type stuff. The most innocuous stuff gets forwarded as part of, you know, security alert. This is the anti-democratic chilling effect in action. Politicians and police are trying to create a political climate where people are too scared to exercise their right to protest, organize, and take action. Georgia's Republican governor, Brian Kemp, has bolstered this alarming escalation of violence and repression against political speech

by blaming out-of-state rioters and a, quote, network of militant activists who have committed similar acts of domestic terrorism across the country, unquote. Rhetoric that has been mirrored by liberal politicians in the city of Atlanta. The broad labeling of environmental and racial justice movements as, quote, quote, terrorism, and those who get associated with such movements as domestic terrorists, is an extremely dangerous precedent designed to stifle public opposition and scare anyone concerned about police militarization and climate change away from protesting. It's a crude attempt to use as powerful tools as possible to crush opposition and remove the protests from public spotlight while creating cover for intense suppression of protest movements. Police are making an example out of people by trying to pin the actions of autonomous individuals in a decentralized movement on anyone that was unlucky enough to cross paths with the police by threatening 35 years in prison. Let's talk a bit about the role of the domestic terrorism charges and how they are being applied, because they're not even being applied to people that are tied to specific acts. You specifically, we have evidence that you burned down an escapade, like a construction equipment. That's not how they're being used.

Not even being used for, like, we saw you break this window. That's not even how they're being used. In the people restaurant Saturday, all six of them got the same exact charges. How can all six people have done all the exact same thing? So they're obviously not being used for any type of factual evidence-based way. It's all about us trying to turn the movement itself into a criminal association. APD has even said that themselves in a public meeting that's supposed to provide advice on how the public wants this project built. In the December meeting, which I think took place a day after those raids, they bragged about pulling someone over illegally for filming the police. They said they were very proud of themselves for taking that person to jail. And then they just blatantly said that anyone arrested for this in connection with this movement will get a domestic terrorism charge. Which creates an equivalency that being opposed to this project is domestic terrorism. The chief of police, Darren Sheerbaum, went before cameras on Saturday, and I think pretty much verbatim said breaking a glass window. That is terrorism.

A lot of people have opinions about how to protest, right? But what people have conveyed to us is that even those who are horrified by property damage, it's just not domestic terrorism. It's just not. Being opposed to the police wanting the police to do something differently is not terrorism. The Atlanta Solidarity Fund said of the six people charged after Saturday's protest, quote, protest, even disobedient protest, is not terrorism. It's tragic that we're at a point where this even needs to be said. But that makes it all the more important that the public speak out against this divisive and dangerous rhetoric. We have reason to believe these activists were arrested at random during the march. All six face the same blanket charges. They are being held responsible for committing the same crime by virtue of simply being present at a protest where property damage occurred, unquote. Twenty people have been charged with felonies under Georgia's domestic terrorism laws since last December. Police affidavits have detailed the alleged acts of so-called terror, which include, quote,

criminally trespassing on posted land, sleeping in a forest, sleeping in a hammock with another defendant, being known members of a prison abolitionist movement, unquote, and aligning themselves with Defend the Atlanta Forest by, quote, occupying a treehouse while wearing a gas mask and camouflage clothing, unquote. A review of the 20 arrests showed that none of those arrested and slapped with terrorism charges are accused of seriously injuring anyone. Nine are alleged to have committed no specific illegal acts beyond misdemeanor trespassing. Instead, mere association with a group committed to defending the forest appears to be the foundation for declaring them terrorists. The seven people arrested during the police raid where the Georgia State Patrol shot and killed Tortuguita were given a bond amount totaling $117,000. Escalating repression is taking form as egregious bail amounts for protesters, inflated charges, and, as last month saw, the killing of an activist. The environmental justice attorney, Stephen Donzinger, said, for weeks, these people were called terrorists, which is a complete misuse of the word.

The police have been conditioned to believe these people are terrorists. And what do you do with terrorists? In the United States, you kill them. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, unquote. A whole bunch of bail information just got released for the six people arrested at the protest in downtown Atlanta on Saturday, January 21. And it's pretty high. It's the highest bail for a protest that I've ever seen. Two people that are slightly more local to the area were granted $355,000 each for their bonds, over $700,000, with ankle monitoring and a 24-hour curfew.

So that's a lot. Four other people who were arrested were determined to be from too far out of town and deemed flight risks by the judge, and they were completely denied bond. So they're going to be held in jail in perpetuity until both further legal challenges like this is going to get pushed up to a higher level judge. But who knows how long they're going to be in pre-trial detention now for pretty ridiculous charges. Like arson, riot, felony jaywalking, essentially. Like, pedestrian. Yeah, pedestrian. And therefore, assembly, I believe, was one of them.

Domestic terrorism. Yes, domestic terrorism was across the board. When they're going over the bail hearing, they were talking about how this hearing is not for going over evidence. This isn't for actually... No. We are not in a time to mitigate facts. Yeah. They're not interested in dealing with what the facts actually were, because there's no evidence that any of the people arrested did anything wrong besides marching the street, which has been a staple of the history of Atlanta for almost a century.

There's absolutely no evidence, but that doesn't matter. And that's not really the point either. The point is that this is a brutal form of punishment and a deterrent for other people to say, but if you're going to go to a protest, if you're going to go to a march, you don't need to do anything at all, and we'll give you bond that's worth almost $400,000 per person, or we'll just hold you until this case gets litigated. Yeah, so if you want to come from out of town to just go to a march, you could do nothing else and get arrested for a pet roadway slap with its domestic terrorism add-on, and then they decide that because you're from, I don't know, like an hour and a half away and just happen to be across the stair line that you're now at a flight risk and are going to be hired indefinitely on the pretrial, which means the Atlanta court system that this could be, it would be talking years. Which is nonsense because there's no evidence, but if it does get carried all the way to trial, that could take over a year, that could be just being held for things that you clearly didn't do, but because the police and prosecutors have decided to use these intense charges as a deterrent, it's just extremely blatant, like abuse of legal system, abuse of power, but I say abuse, but this is the way it's also designed, like this is the purpose of prosecutors, this is the purpose of police, they're doing their job as it's supposed to be. They just make it unfeasible for people to participate in dissidents and to make it so any chance at getting bail for people is made so near impossible, because I think for most people, like looking at an amount like $355,000 is just an impossible amount of money to come up with,

like it's so out of the realm of what is possible for so many like normal everyday people who are participating in acts of protest that it's just designed to hold people for as long as possible. It's not even people who like this, this would be in many ways just as horrific as if these charges were from people who were like in the forest, so people like in a downtown marching like this is like the most serious thing that happened was that a car spontaneously caught fire, like that is it, and there's no evidence that any of these people had ever been involved in that. It was even noted inside during these hearings that many of these people were arrested before the car even caught fire. And the judges just decided that again they were not ready to litigate facts of any kind, that this was not, and making it so obvious that the point of this is not to in any way treat this with any realm of like reality or what happened, but just to make sure that we are, that people who are as punished as possible for any actions taken by a group that they were like intentionally just even with the vicinity of downtown. Affidavids for the seven people arrested at the deadly police raid on January 18, in which Torteghita was killed, begin by alleging that the defendants were quote, participating in actions as a part of the Defend the Atlanta Forest group, a group classified by the United States Department of Homeland Security as domestic violent extremists, unquote. But a DHS spokesperson has responded to media inquiries by saying, quote, the Department of Homeland Security does not classify or designate any groups as domestic violent extremists, unquote.

The Atlanta Solidarity Fund responded to this news by saying, quote, when police brought terrorism charges against stop cop city protesters, they justified it by claiming that Defend the Atlanta Forest had been designated a domestic violent extremist organization. This was a lie. DHS has never designated any movement aligned organization in this way. What does this mean? It suggests that police and prosecutors have been lying not just to the public, but to judges in an effort to justify outrageous sensational charges against activists. This cannot be tolerated in a free society. The public has a long process ahead of unraveling the tangle of lies, distortions and coverups that the police, prosecutors and their private backers have woven to suppress the right to protest. We are determined to follow that thread to its end. Injustice cannot go unchallenged, unquote. To date, the Atlanta Solidarity Fund has supported over 60 people arrested for protesting the proposed cop city development. Just a few days before the killing of Tortuguita, it could happen here, released an interview with people from the Solidarity Fund and Anti-Repression Committee if you want to learn more about those organizations.

The Solidarity Fund is dedicated to continue supporting protesters in Atlanta, but with the unprecedented $700,000 bail for just two people, they need help to continue supporting activists with bail and legal counsel, while they are also supporting civil litigation against unjust arrests and police violence, including an independent investigation into the death of Tortuguita. In a statement released after the bail hearing, the Atlanta Solidarity Fund said, quote, The arrested protesters and all other future protesters targeted for political activity in Atlanta need your help. Please, host fundraisers, reach out to your networks and donate to the Atlanta Solidarity Fund. We especially encourage you to consider becoming a recurring donor. Solidarity means all of us supporting each other for the long haul, until we are all free, unquote. If the state is successful in creating this precedent of domestic terrorism, protesters across the country could be facing similar speech-chilling charges. Activists and civil rights lawyers have called for everyone to strongly reject this extreme level of repression, here and now, before it becomes the norm for activists in every movement. What happens here will have legal implications for the whole nation.

It creates fear. It creates a chilling effect. It was after the December raids, a lot of folks in the community were really questioning what was next. And it is scary to think about, but it's been really heartening how people have seen through the bullshit, right? Atlanta has an incredible resilience, and so does this movement, even with domestic terrorism in mind. Peter also mentioned how the increased charges have inadvertently shown just how strong the community is. After domestic terrorism charges first got laid out in December, what was people's reaction to that? Because that's a pretty substantial legal state repression effort. You're in the woods, you hear that your friends are now getting these ridiculous charges. How does that change what's on the ground? I think the terrorism charges, well, I'll say I was out of town when the terrorism charges happened, and hearing about those was actually what motivated me to come back to Atlanta and move back into the woods, because I knew that the terrorism charges were a scare tactic to try and discourage people from participating in the woods and the movement at large.

As the repression has intensified, and especially since the terrorism charges started coming in, the resolve and the strength of this community has intensified even more, and the increased repression has shown me the strength of this community, and also how deeply committed people are to being a part of this fight, no matter what. You can go to atjail underscore support on Twitter for information on how to write to incarcerated protesters in Atlanta. The terrorism charges being brought against stop-cop city protesters stem from a 2017 law passed in Georgia in the wake of the Dillon Roof Massacre. This law, allegedly created in response to a white supremacist mass shooting targeting black people, is being used for the first time as a bludgeon against anti-racist protesters who are fighting against the expansion and further militarization of police facilities. And that the state is just as a concept as a whole is pretty much incapable of doing things for altruistic means. This is the same government that just so often uses, like, that completely simplifies our issues, for example, with far-right mass shootings in this country into just a gun problem, to take away the abilities for the marginalized people to defend themselves by oversimplifying it into a non-ideological issue.

And it's so, like, there's such a clear pattern of who is perpetrating these things. It's all, like, the state at any moment it can grab a power. It will do so, and that looks better sometimes because it might be a law, like, going after somebody like Dillon Roof, but it gets turned around later and used by them to murder activists trying to defend the forest and make sure that people cannot make bail. For doing nothing more than asking the city to not do something that a vast majority of people in Atlanta do not want to happen. Laws that are put into effect to stop far-right violence will inevitably be used to repress left-wing movements. Any expansion of state power will always come down the hardest on people who are actually pushing back on the power structures of the state, like the police. And now this domestic terrorism law is being used against forest defenders for mere affiliation with Stop Cop City. The way the state is using these domestic terrorism charges is relatively unprecedented within the United States,

but this stuff is not completely unheard of. It's new for white Americans who are protesting. It's new in a very specific context, but it's not new for many other people who've experienced state repression and have experienced state repression in other countries around the world. It's very similar to the way that the U.S. would... We had a lot of people who, over the years during the global war, were lacking up thousands of people, so many of them were just... The U.S. Army rolls into a country and it's like all of these people are terrorists. They do not have time to litigate the facts. They are looking at people as flight risk with no evidence, with unsustainable claims about affiliations to whatever the hell it is, and then they... The most extreme examples end up detaining Guantanamo for the next 20 years or in... It's pretty about the connection to all of this to the IDF. It's the similar ways that the IDF persecutes their warren as a Palestinian people, wage an award on a population, and then taking as much... Using as much force against the people who choose to fight that state power, and then just arresting huge numbers of people for claiming that they're affiliated with Hamas,

or something for litigated living in the same neighborhood, and just throwing the QA. This is very similar to tactics that we've seen used across the world, specifically during the global war on terror, just to lock up huge numbers of people with impunity, without the ability for people to get proper legal representation, or for there ever to be a moment to litigate the facts of what happened. And it's a really troubling development to have happening here. This has been so destructive in other countries all across the world, and we shall be extremely concerned that this is happening anywhere. Not just that it's touched the US now, but this type of legal system should not find comfort anywhere in the world. One of the topics of the original It Could Happen Here series was Foucault's boomerang. The idea was also brought up during multiple conversations I had in Atlanta. It's about how the types of imperialist and colonialist violence that are done in other countries don't just go away, they get transported back to the homeland. This boomerang effect resulted in a whole series of colonial models being brought back to the quote-unquote West, so that it could endlessly practice something resembling colonialism, or an internal colonialism, on itself. The forces of extreme gentrification can be seen as one of these frontlines. In that way, it only makes sense that this is happening in Atlanta to such an extreme degree.

So the idea of when it comes to Foucault's boomerang is that any strategies, tactics, equipment, the US is the best example of where there has been tactics and equipment thus far, that are used overseas in a country's colonial wars, imperial wars, will one day find their way returned to the core of said empire to subjugate their own dissidents and their own people. The best example of this in the US was militarized policing. Copsity is a huge example of this. We've seen a return of weapons and equipment from the DOD to US police. Just days ago, we saw a man murdering his trailer by a SWAT team using night vision goggles and equipment that looks like it came off of army rangers in 2014. It is a return like the tactics and the equipment and the strategy and the mindset of an occupying army come back to the center of the empire and are used to subjugate its people. And in this case, Copsity is a huge expansion of this because of what it's designed to train people to do, which is urban combat. And even more so, the legal system that the US has used overseas to prosecute thousands of people with no evidences about being returned to prosecute those defending the forest. The man shot by SWAT in a trailer last month did end up surviving. But what Noah is talking about is that there is no true other. There is no true awareness. This new military urbanism that seems to be necessary to sustain hyper capitalist gentrification is providing zones of experimentation through which the state is able to try out and hone their techniques of oppression.

In my conversation with Cricket, they talked about this phenomenon. It comes back or it starts here and we're the training ground and then they export it. And I think you're absolutely right that there is no true other. That is a construct to keep us out of solidarity with one another. That is a strategy to keep us out of alliance at the same table and demanding more. It's something that I remember. I think it was maybe something Buddha judge or some other politician talked about in the wake of 2020 saying military weapons should not be used in our streets or something like that. It's like, okay, but the logical extension of that is that they should be in other people's streets. Those are also civilians. Those are also people's towns and cities and homes. Why are we deciding that it's okay for them to be there and not not here? And obviously we're not actually deciding that they're not okay to be here. But I feel like even the sort of attempts to try and address the insane militarization of the police still rely on that other as if this is not a global issue, as if this is not something that affects everyone.

The Solidarity Fund has said, quote, invoking terrorism is a dog whistle calling for more police violence. Ever since 9-11, American policy has been to hunt and kill terrorists by any means. Applying this same terrorism label to activists in our communities is prompting police to approach protests as war zones, prepared to kill at any time. This can be seen in the way GSP stormed the Atlanta forest with militarized equipment and killed tortiguita. And God, I think there's also this tendency to think of the assassination of environmental activists as something that happens elsewhere. Like this is something that happens in Central America. This is something that happens in the Amazon. Like this is not something that happens in the U.S. and it absolutely is something that happens in the U.S. And I think just sort of to the name of your podcast, right? Like it happens here. It's not and it could be any of us.

I think that that's another sort of possible strategy or idea behind this. Like, oh, they're outside agitators thing of trying to create this scary stranger danger and trying to make people think that the person who was murdered couldn't be them because they're from here. Like, oh, like I'm local. Like I wouldn't have been murdered. No, like, like, no, absolutely not. Like they will murder with impunity and it's really scary and it's really enraging. Like I think it is both to me inspiring and because if they're going to kill us no matter what, then why not cause as much good trouble as we can. On Thursday, January 26th, Governor Brian Kemp declared a state of emergency in response to protests Saturday night sparked by Tortuguita's death. Under that order, 1000 National Guard troops were mobilized to quell protests and police the streets of Atlanta. Once again, I'll end with the words of Tortuguita, quote, Dear comrades, we are in the trenches of the class war. The capitalists would rather see us dead or enslaved, so we must fight like hell.

Billionaires are causing a mass extinction and can only be stopped by collective action. Copsity can and must be stopped, but we need more help. We need people on the front lines and robust supply networks. We need to love and support each other, unquote. Now that the war is here, how are we going to fight it? The rain on leaves tickling, the earliest of instruments, the melody we mimicking is the sound of wind whistling. Long before the sapiens chanted under the stars, camped under work canopy, she sang her own song and she was far from silent. No virus or violence, but the fragrance of her flowers, it continued to invite us. The medicine materials are vitamins of minerals and all that is essential, it just grew right beside us.

And Tisa started fighting over the gifts that she provided us, scorching the very soil that all of us derived from. And when empires learn and can't withstand fire, we return to the land where our ancestors raindanced. We are all the creatures, we still bear her features. The one and only reason all living things is breathing, the cities deceiving, leave, go see the dirt. Young will be among the lungs of Mother Earth, cause before you found your voice there were eyes of coolness. Before you take your throne, you must restore it. Before your flesh and bones, before you build a home. Before they chop them down, they were the forest.

Before they chop them down, they were the forest. 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. The FBI sometimes 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. 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 a good badass 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 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. In the early morning of January 31st, news started to proliferate that the city of Atlanta, the Atlanta Police Foundation, and DeKalb County reached a quote unquote compromise regarding the future of Cop City.

Word spread that city officials in Atlanta were about to announce a major scaling back of the Cop City project. That the project's size would be dramatically reduced and focus more on fire department and first responder resources as opposed to the original plans for the militarized police campus. Many were skeptical about this news and saw this simply as an empty promise masquerading as a compromise in a savvy PR move. But even some who were pessimistic at least saw this as a sign that the movement is having a substantial impact. Activists rallied outside city hall holding stop-cop city signs and defend the forest banners. Some reporters were denied entry into the press conference and protesters stood outside Mayor Andre Dickens office and chanted. Andre Dickens! Blood on your hands! At the press conference that afternoon, the mayor of Atlanta and representatives of DeKalb County announced an agreement to allow the previously announced 85-acre Cop City project to proceed as planned with land disturbance permits to be issued.

The rest of the land parcel of forest leased to the police foundation will be allegedly set for preservation, a claim that was already previously promised by officials involved with the project. DeKalb County and the city of Atlanta released a memorandum of understanding for the building of the site containing a quote, statement of principles, commitments, and intentions, unquote. Mayor Dickens framed the facility as an answer to demands for police training reform during 2020's George Floyd uprising, saying, quote, this training needs space and that's exactly what this training center is going to offer, unquote. The mayor also responded to environmental concerns by claiming the area of forest slated for destruction contains only, quote, invasive species, softwoods, and weeds, unquote. Officials said the so-called compromise agreement would contain provisions for preserving parts of the south river forest. When asked how the environment would be protected, Mayor Dickens mentioned that it's a 385-acre set of land. Cop City is 85 acres. The rest is green space and that quote, the environment will be protected in that way, unquote, with no indication given on how it would be protected or by whom. Among the few environmental promises are, quote, replacing any removed or impacted specimen trees with 100 new hardwood plantings on the site or elsewhere, as well as one specimen tree for any invasive species tree that was removed, unquote.

It's unknown if they have even counted how many trees have been felled so far. Activists called this a ploy to hastily push through a sequence of land disturbance permits. The most up-to-date site plans has the Public Safety Training Center spread out over a parcel of 171 acres with about 87 of those acres slated for disturbance. There is nothing in the lease agreement that restricts the police foundation from building outside of those 171 acres, though they promise it will be protected green space. This compromise PR stunt is not even a new tactic. In August of 2021, after initial protests against the project delayed the City Council vote, the Atlanta Police Foundation claimed a similar, quote, unquote, compromise. Instead of clearing the 380 acres that they are leased by the City of Atlanta, they would reduce the footprint of buildings and disturbed surfaces to only 90 acres while more of the land would be cleared and turned into turf fields, shooting ranges, and horse stables labeled, quote, unquote, green space. And wouldn't you know that sounds almost exactly identical to this new plan for compromise unveiled at the end of last month. Upon such rhetoric and empty promises, the movement didn't falter but continued to demand and fight for the full cancellation of the project, whether in the Wallani Forest or elsewhere.

After the January 31st press conference, organizers in Atlanta called for a week of solidarity actions starting February 19th through the 26th, quote, calling on all people wherever you are to take action in solidarity with the movement to stop cop city. Protest, sit in, call and email the contractors building cop city. Every action has an impact, unquote. At stopcopcitysolidarity.org, there are guides for various actions people can take from calling cop city contractors or investors to posting flyers around town, or planning direct action using the interactive target map. If you do go on any movement related website, it's strongly recommended to use a VPN and a tour compatible browser like Brave. The national spotlight on the movement has certainly increased a great deal in the past month, both with an influx of scrutiny and support from across the country and even the world. The press collective has always had kind of a hybrid hybrid role both of reporting on the movement and researching the movement, researching the prison farm. But a lot of media outlets don't quite understand the autonomous nature of the struggle. So we have kind of found ourselves in a role of kind of liaisoning between media and the rest of the movement.

But thankfully, it's not just us doing it because, boy, is everyone interested all of a sudden. No one was talking about the movement at the beginning. So we were like, all right, we'll talk about it ourselves. We've been able to use our platform to publicize a lot of solidarity events, and not just share memorials and what people want others to know about tort. But, you know, publicize these things across the nation and across the world. Statements and solidarity have come in from radicals in Italy, Germany, France and Rojava. After the killing of Torteghita, vigils happened in cities all across the United States. A wave of targeted vandalism and direct action against cop city investors and contractors happened across the country in response to tort's death. In Atlanta, there's a concerted effort to not cede perception of the movement to the state.

People have an intentional collaborative way to affect how the movement is seen externally. This media strategy is simply one prong of the fight, along with the encampments, sabotage, vandalism, pressure campaigns and canvassing. I think it's really representative of the type of people that are dedicated to this struggle in general, the way that anyone and everyone has come together to handle the influx of media requests, to make smart decisions about it, to make sure that decisions are made with the consent of those involved, be it sharing the stories of people who were arrested that day, sharing the stories of tort's family and tort's partners, and making sure to respect their boundaries in space. Despite the diverse nature of requests, there always seems to be somebody in the movement who is able to speak on whatever aspect of the struggle is needed. You need someone who's got a master's in environmental engineering. There's someone in the movement that can talk to you for 45 minutes about the good environmental reasons to stop cop city.

You need someone to talk for three hours about the history of the place. There's someone for that too. You need someone to talk about how the project is a pretty good example of why the Black Mecca is a myth. The movement has people who can speak to that too. There's been a tremendous amount of attention paid to the movement all of a sudden, and again, the way folks have just stepped up and come together to handle it, I think speaks to the communal nature of the movement. It is dedicated to building, it's not just about saving the forest, it's about saving the forest for the community. When I spoke with Karen, the neighborhood mom who started canvassing and organizing in her community, she mentioned how even her older family, who are longtime Georgia residents, haven't totally bought the state's talking points.

I can say my mom and my mother-in-law and family, they know that I care about this. They're boomers, but I've been surprised how there's a lot of skepticism in the police narrative, which I found really interesting. Normally when something like this happens, it's just 100% police narrative. Mayor Dickens, the day Tort died, put out a pretty infamous tweet that just expressed their condolences to the family of the trooper that was injured, and not one single word about the person that died. And in most fatal incidents with police, you at least get some kind of boilerplate language about, oh, we're sorry that someone died. And a lot of the initial statements from government and larger organizations just said nothing. But the media, even local news, in pretty much every single report, there's at least a line or two,

if not a pretty decent chunk of whatever 5PM news story it is that say protesters have questions, people have questions about Tort's death. And given the pretty universally negative way that Atlanta media in particular has covered the Defend the Forest movement, the fact that even those outlets have to respond to the overwhelming amount of folks speaking out about how what happened doesn't make sense, about what kind of person Tort was, about how none of this had to happen in the first place. I'd love to say that someone who pays attention to how the media covers this, that I could have predicted that would happen. Three members of Congress, Rashida Talib, Corey Bush, and Senator Ed Markey, have joined in calling for an independent investigation into Torteghita's death. Like I saw a screenshot from NBC News this morning. NBC News, and like the Chiron was, protesters still have questions about Tort's death.

Like that's from this morning, even after. After the riot, quote unquote, after the arson and property destruction and almost like a week after the incident. Yeah, like, I mean, it was, it's hard to remember now, but I think it was like almost a month after George Floyd died before folks really, before it really got national attention with when Ray Shard was killed here in Atlanta. It was a little more immediate because of a lot of things. In a rally at Underground Atlanta, while people were speaking in front of the dozen or so news cameras, someone talked about how there are still people in town that are just learning about Cop City and the fight to prevent it from being built. Today at work, I had four different conversations about the Wallani Forest in regards to everything that's going on with four different people who were unaware of what was happening.

As big as this seems right now, a lot of people are still unaware. And as long as we keep being loud, as long as we make sure that Cop City will never be fucking built. We just got to keep talking about it. Mayor Dickens, Ryan Millsap, you have blood on your hands. Fuck Cop City. I think we're about to really see how how the national media is going to pick up on the domestic terrorism. And frankly, the fact that they're talking to us at all, or the fact that they're talking to the movement at all, I think speaks to the strength of the movement and the simple truth of it, which is that tort didn't have to die. And this is a very wide ranging movement with a lot of people who have some very good reasons for being opposed to the project. And I think those reasons are so compelling that I don't want to say it's easy to see past the noise, but it's not that hard.

I remember one conversation with tort where I was like, and this might just be like a egotistical or something, but I really think this is like a lot bigger than you, you know, just a little neighborhood struggle. And yeah, we talked about we're like, yeah, no people don't know it yet, but it's the intersection of so many things. And you know, if more people realize that it would be huge. And it's, you know, really heartbreaking that I think they were they were right. You know, they didn't get to see it. One of the main talking points the state has been trying to push through to the media is condemning cop city protesters and force defenders as outside agitators. There's a good crime think zine titled the making of outside agitators that focuses on the use of the term as related to the 2014 Ferguson uprising that gave birth to the modern Black Lives Matter movement.

For this next section, I'll paraphrase a little bit from that zine. The state and media's invocation of the term in Atlanta has been accelerating rapidly since the raids last December, using it alongside notions of terrorism to justify the police's violent escalation of protest suppression. For example, this clip from the cop city community stakeholders advisory committee meeting held days after the December raid that introduced the domestic terrorism charges. Speaking is the assistant chief for the Atlanta police department. And so one of the things we charge them with to include criminal trespass was domestic terrorism charge that we put on them. So going forward, that will that is one of the charges we'll be using, because that's exactly what they are. None of those people live here. They do not have a vested interest in this property.

And we show that time and time again. Why isn't an individual from Los Angeles, California concerned about a training facility being built in the state of Georgia? And that is why we consider that domestic terrorism. There's a darkly prophetic sentence from that crime think zine I mentioned, quote, when we hear them say outside agitators, we know the authorities are getting ready to spill blood. A pretty consistent talking point by the police foundation police, the state in general has been that a lot of the people they've arrested for incidents related to defend the forest have had out of state licenses out of state addresses. And what they describe as no connection to Georgia. They have been sent here to stir up trouble, right? They aren't from here.

They're just they're just here to because they don't like the cops, right? They have no they have no stake in the struggle. So there's some pretty obvious problems with that. And there's some pretty lengthy historic racism tied to the term outside agitators. That makes it, you know, especially heinous to to use in the south, the term outside agitators was used to describe the freedom writers. So it's got a little bit, got a little bit of history there. Governor Brian Kemp declaring a state of emergency so that the National Guard can be on standby to occupy Atlanta. Sure, seems like outside agitation, but even the Atlanta Police Department's use of the term carries with it a great deal of hypocrisy.

APD has since 2020 really made a big deal out of stepping up its recruitment efforts. And if you go back and look at those presentations to the media, to city council, they consistently talk about, oh, we went to New York for three days, we went to Miami for a week. I believe it was what have been September, just after Darren Sheerbaum was officially installed as chief of police. He went before the city council and talked about how he was so proud to have personally recruited someone from Detroit per basically a part of their loan application because they're applying for a loan to finance part of Cop City by their own numbers. 43% of recruits that will be trained at this facility will come from out of state. They are 43% from outside the state of Georgia. Again, in APD's own statements about the facility, this facility is built to bring in people from out of state. It's built out of the country even because Atlanta participates in the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange, which is basically an exchange program with the IDF, with the Israeli military, where we go there, they come here, we teach each other.

News articles claiming that a majority of those arrested are residents from other states might sound like convincing evidence to middle class readers, but anyone who has been poor and precarious knows that the permanent address you give when you're arrested may not be the same as the place you actually live. You might give a different address because you aren't sure your current housing will last because your landlord doesn't know your place has more people in it than are named on the lease, or simply because you don't want local vigilantes to know where you live. Instead, you might give a more reliable long term address, perhaps from another state. I mean, on a human level, like, how many times have you moved somewhere and not changed your address? How many times have you going to the DMV sucks? Yes, going to the DMV sucks. So a lot of people don't have the privilege to be able to go to the DMV or don't have a permanent home address. A lot of people are dealing with housing instability. Yes. There's so many aspects of this that makes it pretty egregious.

Not only, of course, is this a struggle that is deeply compelling regardless of where you call home, it just doesn't match up to, like, the facts of life. Like, it's a little bit bizarre, their insistence that the local populace couldn't possibly be that opposed to it when grab any one person in the movement who's from Georgia and they know 10 people who's opposed to it. That person knows 10 people. And also, you have statistics like during the, what, 17 hours of public comment, 70% of people who called in were opposed to it. Basically, the only people who weren't were people who self identified as police officers, firefighters, and those who lived in Buckhead. And it's not that simple, but it's pretty clear that maybe you'd be okay with building the facility somewhere else. Maybe you're an abolitionist. Maybe this, that, and the other, but Atlanta doesn't want this.

Atlanta doesn't want this here. Let's imagine that some of these arrestees who gave out of town addresses are in Atlanta for the very first time. Would that make them outside agitators? Maybe if the issue was specific to Atlanta alone and they had no stake in the cause. Cop City would be a place that police agencies from all around the country and world come to to train and practice urban militarism. Climate collapse and the destruction of forests is similarly a worldwide issue and one of apocalyptic magnitude. It's a false narrative in one sense because climate change affects everybody. Cutting down a forest would make climate change worse.

That's a very, very, very obvious talking point. If environment, if protecting the environment is important to you, it is obvious that this is a very key struggle right now. Especially in the context of Atlanta being a growing and also gentrifying city. And this being in a largely black and brown, middle to low income neighborhood. And this being such a vast green space in those communities that don't have the manicured Piedmont Park in their backyards. When people are suffering the same forms of oppression everywhere, it makes sense for us to come into each other's assistance. This is not outside agitation. This is solidarity.

Solidarity has always been the most important tool of the oppressed. This is why authorities go to such lengths to demonize anybody who has the courage to take risks to support others. Cricket spoke at length about the outside agitator narrative that the state has been employing. I think one thing that comes to mind is something that I've heard a lot, is that the people in this movement are not from here, quote unquote, that they're outside agitators. They're not from this community. They're not, you know, and it seems to me very clear to be an attempt to sort of discredit what is a very clear majority of the community that does not want this forest destroyed. Does not want cop city built, you know, 70%. And that argument infuriates me because, I mean, first of all, the US military is the biggest, like, outside agitator in the world.

And I just, I find that irony sort of unbearable. And then I think there's this question we can get into, questions of what does it mean to be from somewhere? And what I think is a more helpful question is how are you somewhere? How are you in relation to a place? And I think tort was someone who was always trying to be in the right relation with the land and in right relation with their neighbors and right relation with the communities here. One story that I keep revisiting of them is when we were checking in and people were asking them, you know what, what do folks in the forest need? What can we get them? Do they need food?

What, you know, what do they need? And tort was like, oh no, actually, you know, we have everything we need, but it would be great if people could start. We could make sure they're giving food to the poor folks in their own communities. Like make sure you're giving food to the people in your neighborhoods. Are you checking in with the unhoused communities in your neighborhood? Like they were just, I think, constantly seeking to be in right relation. And I think regardless of where all of us are from, if we can claim to be from somewhere, I mean, arguably, if we're not Muskogee Creek, none of us is from here. But I think it's a more helpful direction to think about what are we doing once we're here?

How are we trying to be here? Yeah, I mean, that specific argument really, it really frustrates me because I think it really obfuscates how much this is a local movement and also having solidarity from across state lines, from across national lines speaks to the intersection of our, the intersections of our oppressions, the intersections of our movements. It doesn't speak to the fact that this is co-opted or it doesn't indicate anything other than that none of us is free and to all of us are free. The ultimate goal of the police is not so much to brutalize and pacify specific individuals as it is to extract rebelliousness itself from the social fabric. They seek to externalize agitation, so anyone who stands up for themselves will be seen as an outsider, as deviant and anti-social. Noah mentioned how the outside agitator narrative is rooted in stripping people of their own autonomy. I mean, and even some of the people who are out of town, they're not even two hours away from where the prosecutors are claiming where they're from.

The outside agitator's narrative only works if we have this sense of otherness that we talked about in the last episode, this disconnect and separation from neighboring struggles, as if lines on a map change the morality of actions. Keeping people in pretrial jail for an unknown amount of time could be literally over a year because they are deemed non-locals, so the judge thought they were a quote unquote flight risk. Beyond the charges themselves, which are innately kind of absurd and the brutality is the point, the sheer audacity of keeping people with no evidence and cages for years for going to a protest is just not surprising, but it still is incredibly upsetting. No, and it would be completely decried for happening in any other country, right? And a massive human rights violation. If those were happening in China because of the US-China relations, absolutely not there, there'd be an entire, I don't know, national outcry. But because it's people who are resisting this government and this state, then yeah, it doesn't get the same kind of empathy. It doesn't get the same outcry. When I talked with Karen, she spoke about how thankful she is that there are people from across the country, people like tort, who care about the south of her forest enough to travel to Atlanta to defend it. In terms of the narrative of outside agitators, I'm really grateful that people are coming to protect the forest in my backyard. I am. I have so much gratitude. It is so meaningful. Yeah. I think after the first raid, I told tort that and I'm glad I did. But yeah, it really is just so much gratitude.

The framing of outside agitators is meant to keep people away and stifle solidarity, just like the domestic terrorism charges are meant to. The state is trying out every tactic to scare people away from participating in the movement. So it feels like just the past month, there's been such an intense increase in the level of state repression and state violence. How do you see things evolving in the next few weeks and months or even days at this point, just with how both physical violence is definitely increasing with the raids and now killing somebody, and then the types of judicial abuse of power giving people $700,000 bail, keeping many others just in jail and perpetuity for who knows how long. Yeah. I mean, I think it's clear looking at this movement that the state, the cops, police have always been the first to escalate and have now murdered someone, have now assassinated someone and are the ones who are constantly sort of making, putting other people's lives in danger. They're really the people who are making folks unsafe. And TORT was a street medic. TORT was someone who went through street medic training, was someone who was passionate about protecting their community. And in street medic training, one of the things that is taught, there's a whole section on police weapons and state weapons, and sure, we cover tear gas, we cover bullets, we cover anything that you can sort of commonly see protests or in raids. And one of the biggest weapons that we always cover is fear. And that is really what I see happening with this escalation is that, yes, there's a sort of increase of literal weapons of arms of just everything that we've heard about in the forest.

But I think when you take that in combination with the ludicrous charges, what they're really trying to weaponize is our own fear as our own emotions, making us think that it's too dangerous to be in the forest, that it's not worth it, that it's too risky. Making us think that the forest itself is somehow an unsafe place. Making us think that the people who protect it are unsafe. And I think that's the sort of trend that I'm seeing. I think in terms of what's coming next, I think they're going to keep leaning into the weapon of fear. I think it's not ha ha funny that they accuse protesters and the people who've been charged with domestic terrorism of intimidation, when clearly they're using those charges to intimidate people, but the people who are charged with it and anyone who might consider themselves an ally or a friend of the forest and a friend of the forest defenders. So what I see moving forward in terms of carrying Torch's legacy forward, in terms of carrying this movement forward, is not buying into that bullshit. Very much being fear walking and not trying to say people shouldn't be scared or not have those feelings. But one of the memories of Torch that I have is them very clearly refusing intimidation, whether it was cops, whoever the sort of representative of the state was, they never gave into that. And I think that's what I'm trying to carry forward. A lot of us are trying to carry forward.

Noah spoke similarly about fear being a powerful weapon of the state and a very insidious one, because it doesn't punish people for actions they may or may not have done, but instead works to prevent people from taking action in the first place. Fear is the number one tool that the state brings to bear. All of their toys and their guns and shit do not have the reach and do not have the capacity to stop acts of liberation as fear does. Making people afraid of the idea of revolting, of the idea of dissidents is extremely powerful, and it's something that we all have to combat in our own ways. It's something we all have to resist in our own ways, because obviously the state is capable of murdering and of putting people in prison for a very long time, and that is scary, and that is a valid thing to be afraid of. But we stand to lose so much if we do not combat that fear to face off with them, that it's just something that I've found I have to manage. It's something that, because we, I'm so much more afraid of what we all lose if we don't stop them here than I am of myself being harmed or going to prison. We all stand to lose. Tens of millions of people stand to lose everything if we allow climate apocalypse to bear, if we allow the powers that be to get significantly more effective at combating dissidents in the streets from there goes not just for in the United States, but for Cops City, this is an international struggle. I mean, this is the same police department that does cross training with the IDF. If you think the IDF wouldn't be coming to this facility to train better how to, you know, kill Palestinians and dissidents,

I know you're joking with yourself, like this will mean something to every foreign military, to every foreign police force, and every police force in the US. There's a quote from tortugita talking about how to deal with fear. What I'm about to read also demonstrates, as their partner said, that tort was very aware of the risks inherent to resisting the state, especially as a non white forest defender. But with an understanding of that risk and the fear associated with said risk, they chose it was worth it to keep on fighting. Quote, am I scared of the state? Pretty silly not to be. I'm a brown person. I might be killed by the police for existing in certain spaces. Fear is the mind killer. That's a quote I think about often. I must not fear. Fear is the mind killer. Fear is a little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I'm ready to pass over me and through me. To continue what tort said, quote, I am scared, but you can't let the fear stop you from doing things from living from existing from resisting unquote. In the early 1960s, Atlanta was dubbed the city too busy to hate. The phrase can be traced back to a civil rights era marketing slogan attributed to Mayor Ivan Allen, who spent millions of dollars in the 1960s to promote Atlanta as a business oriented city, a city moving forward from its racial past and into a hopeful new future. This was the beginning of the Atlanta way. Still today, you can find the city too busy to hate everywhere on murals, posters, and t-shirts. It's become part of Atlanta's identity, or at least Atlanta tries to tell itself that. Within the slogan lies this admission of the belief that racism and oppression can be beaten by hyper capitalism, meaning the first and foremost goal of the city is economic progress.

Equality and racial justice must take a backseat because the city is just too busy. There's few better examples of this in action than the black neighborhoods that were demolished to build infrastructure for the 1996 Olympics and later the Mercedes-Benz stadium. Since then, the Beltline's original vision of public transit, green space, and affordable housing has been abandoned in favor of developing luxury apartments and gentrified retail joints. As Foucault's boomerang brings the internal colonization of gentrification and increasing police militarization to Atlanta, it only makes sense that Cop City and the battle to stop it is happening here. TORT died two days right after Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Day. We're in Atlanta. There's this whole section of the Delta Airport in Atlanta dedicated to John Lewis. You can hear his voice on a loop saying, good trouble. And yet, as soon as the festivities are over, as soon as the fundraising is over, when someone is shot, resisting the state, and a peaceful, nonviolent direct action, they're labeled a terrorist. I don't understand how someone can possibly reconcile those two things. They seem to me to be grotesque. I mean, it's it's disgusting, but I don't see that reflected in any mainstream narrative. Noah talked with me about how he first got involved in the Stop Cop City movement. Um, so my introduction to Cop City started where Miss Peoples in Atlanta did when it got first leaked that this was a thing that the city was planning. I remember having just a very, like, oh my God, what the fuck, like, reaction to realizing, like, they want to destroy the largest urban canopy in the country to build a big, fake city for them to practice doing urban combat.

And that's, like, purity, dystopian. And very quickly, people were organizing in various different ways to stop them, to make their voices heard that this was not something that Atlanta was okay with. This is not something we were okay with having in our communities. This is not something that anybody wanted. That took a lot of different fronts for me. I mean, that went from working, whether that be on the streets to just doing food destroys and medical trainings to, you know, stamp run around the woods with my friends, like that took many different forms just as all forms of resistance do. And over time that has changed and evolved, but I still think it's something that I work in a lot of different fronts to be as effective as a person as possible when it comes to resistance. The sheer resiliency we've seen in Atlanta post 2020 has been incredibly impressive and inspiring. After 2020, the radical communities in a lot of cities dealt with pretty extreme burnout due to such a grueling summer. And ever since then, people seem to be recovering and anticipating the next cycle of mass uprising. As news spread of Memphis police's brutal beating of Tyree Nichols, which resulted in his death, there was renewed discussion if it was going to spark the quote unquote next 2020. But Atlanta is one of the few cities where things really haven't halted since 2020. And to defend the forest stuff has been going pretty hard ever since like 2021. And it's been a very like impressive amount of resiliency. Can you can you kind of talk on that aspect of how people have been able to do that?

I think it comes down to having a really good support network of people with people who are willing to be support activists who are jailed support activists medically financially like who are able to make this possible. And it also comes down to that the defend the forest movement is so it is so important to anybody should be so important to anybody who looked at 2020 as a strike back against police violence. What capsity means for all of us is a world in which it is much harder to resist police, especially in cities and for a lot of activists who came out of 2020 defend the forest became an extension of that fight. It became its own. And I don't fight to protect the forest and extension of the battle against the violence of the state and against the ability of the police to further militarize. I think that kept a lot of people going. But it certainly happens. I mean, it is, it can be really exhausting work. It can be really defeating at times and it's been really important I think for people everywhere and here to have friends and things that they can do to decompress and take time off when needed to stay to keep the ability to keep doing this and to not bring up completely and to be able to keep going against what feels like all ads at times. Also just activists here pretty fucking resilient. Just, I'm continually so impressed by the people I see just continuing to go out the after day and working behind the scenes doing everything possible to make sure that we can keep going. The Solidarity Fund has a couple of things. I'm getting money on people's commissaries and the past has done like later writing campaigns for political prisoners across the country, which is certainly like a thing that, you know, we're, we're looking at it.

People will be held very long term. That's absolutely going to be something in the coming weeks that I hope people spring to do like obviously these people who are incarcerated need our support in every way we can possibly, possibly do that. If the people currently incarcerated are granted bond during the appeal process and it's set to the same amount as the last two individuals, that would be $355,000 per person for at least five more people. That included with like the previous bond amounts that were set for previous raids, I mean we're approaching $3 million in potential bonds, which is just designed to drain people as much as possible and make the idea of protest as seeming possible. And again, this is just another, they're tactic. This is how they perpetuate power is to fear and making it seem as impossible to protest and making it seem like if you were to get arrested that you would never get out because that's terrifying. That's the number one tool that they bring to bear. There have been a few semi distinct stages in the struggle against cop city. In summer of 2021, the initial stage was trying to get the city council to vote no on the project. There was a lot of canvassing, calling representatives, involvement from large above ground organizations like the DSA and Sunrise, you know, people trying to quote unquote campaign the right way to get the project shut down before it even started. And then, even despite 70% of the local people who called in not wanting this, the city council voted for it anyway.

And then starting two months after the vote, and for over a year now, we've had this forest occupation or encampment stage, people going into the woods and having their continuous physical presence there itself be a deterrent for construction. Concurrently, there have been random acts of sabotage with construction equipment spontaneously bursting into flames alongside pressure campaigns targeting subcontractors and cop city investors. With the past few police raids having been increasingly violent, the last one resulting in the death of a force defender. I asked the people I spoke with if they saw any forthcoming new stage of the movement, considering the cops are trying really hard to make it very dangerous to camp in the woods right now. What's your sense from on the ground how stuff might, you know, with these increasing charges, increasing amounts of elephants, increasing use of force, what's some kind of ways that you feel stuff might start changing on the ground? Do you think the encampment style will continue or will it kind of evolve in a new kind of unexpected direction? It remains to be seen how the approach to living in the woods will adapt to these changes. The DeKalb County Police Department has claimed that they're going to increase their surveillance and patrol of the neighborhood that the woods is in. It remains to be seen what that will mean for the encampment and how active they're going to be in, you know, repressing people in a day to day sort of thing. And also, I think one change is reconsidering what on the ground means and what the bounds of the forest are. There's more woods that Black Hall plans to develop on nearby.

So reconsidering what on the ground is, you know, Brassfield and Gory construction sites could be considered an on the ground site, you know, for actions. And, you know, I think there's a lot of room to grow in that direction as well. How do you see this moment as like a substantial turning point? I think so. I mean, I don't think it could be a turning point. I think that every every escalation of violence that has happened has been perpetrated by law enforcement. There's never been a moment in which the people combating law enforcement have been the ones to escalate the violence. And I think that this marks a willingness of the government here in the city government that this is the hill that they're willing to die on. This is where they're going to stand their ground and where they are proving to us that they are committed and so committed to the idea of building cap city that they are willing to kill people. And I think that that is a turning point in how we as a movement have to be willing to respond to the state and how we have to be willing to look at them, not just as the this entity that we are basing down like in like the courts and doing fun blasts, because that clearly doesn't work. They are just going to murder us. But as a force that is a, you know, like offensive militarized force coming after us, I think that is a that it marks a really big shift and generally looking at what the city government here is willing to do to get this done. I think that a variety of tactics will always be in play and people are always going to have different ways that they feel comfortable and safe and responding.

But I do think that I think what we saw on Saturday was a response that people showed up and they made it very clear that we were not going to take this line down that people weren't going to be willing to let the state go unanswered and that they weren't going to let the police go unanswered for this act. And I think from now on and going forward, I think we will. I think I hope at least that we see more and more people taking up acts of physical resistance to law enforcement and to the state to prevent them from building Cops City and prevent them from committing further acts of violence in this regard. So far, the forced occupation has proved effective in delaying the construction of Cops City. In the past, barricades have inhibited the movement of construction equipment machinery left in the woods has been sabotaged. And during attempts to fell trees, force defenders have put their own bodies on the line by climbing into the tree tops to prevent them from being cut down. Other prongs of the movement have similarly produced successes. Pressure campaigns focused on getting contractors and businesses to divest or pull out of the project resulted last April in Reeves Young Construction, the initial contractor for Cops City, severing ties with the project after months of pressure. And just this month, Quality Glass Company announced that they would not be working on Cops City, as well as no longer doing business with Brassfield and Gory, the current contractor for the facility. These pressure campaigns can include protests at company offices, phone calls imploring them to drop the contract, or actions more along the lines of vandalism at job sites, or visits to the neighborhoods of company executives, even to simply drop off flyers or banners. This is a battle that we went on multiple fronts, and that includes having physical presence in the forest and preventing machinery from coming in, but that also includes acts of sabotage, making sure that contractors who are signed on to Cops City do not feel comfortable and do not feel safe

signing on to this project and making this economically impossible for the city to continue doing. As far as it being like a new strategy, I don't know if it would be new as we've already seen, you know, equipment spontaneously combust and such things, but I do think this marks a point and potentially like the frequency of these things happening and also a necessary, I think, evaluating of where we are now and thinking realistically about what our next steps are to make this an untenable situation for the city to continue prosecuting. Well, one evolution that I see happening is a consensus amongst long term organizers in Atlanta that we want as many people coming here to participate as possible. And also that I think one change is being less picky in who we invite to participate and encouraging liberals and moderates to be a part of this. They've always been a part of it, but really emphasizing that side of the movement more. Back in the Defend the Atlanta Forest episodes from last May, I talked about the Shack model, the aim of which is to make construction economically untenable by maintaining a presence in the forest, sabotaging work, and targeting specific subcontractors locally and elsewhere. In addition to contractors, corporate funders affiliated with the APF can also be targeted to disincentivize affiliation with the project.

Solidarity actions targeting Atlanta Police Foundation contributors have been happening nationwide. As mentioned at the top of the episode, a week of solidarity is coming up on February 19th, and stopcopcitysolidarity.org has many resources. In the past, actions have included everything from office protests, divestment campaigns, vandalism, and actions by workers within these companies to pressure them into cutting ties. No action is too small or too ambitious. An analysis on tactics published recently on It's Going Down said this regarding the targeting of cop-city investors. In other campaigns, banks like Wells Fargo have been forced to divest from police and prison expansion, but these efforts often take years and lots of resources. Atlanta Police Foundation supporters like public universities, Georgia State University, Georgia Tech, or Emory University could be lower-hanging fruit. Comrades should identify which cop-city funders are most vulnerable to pressure, where potential allies like student groups and unions are positioned and share this info and synchronize actions. Bureaucratic red tape can also be effective in delaying progress.

Ongoing zoning appeals could result in an official stop-work order, but it remains unseen if such an order will even be followed. As currently laws around zoning appeals are being ignored by the contractors and the Atlanta Police Foundation. Artiguita had spoken of a theory of theirs concerning the potential for intense police repression and how the aftermath of that might play out. Quote, they could come in and completely destroy the place, raise it, arrest everybody they could find, kill anybody who resists arrest. They could do that, and then days later, there would be a shitload of people back here. For every head they cut off, there would be more who would come back to avenge the arrested, to avenge the… tort did not finish that sentence, but resuming. What I'm saying is, if they do a huge crackdown and completely try to crush the movement, they'll succeed at hurting some people, they'll succeed at destroying some infrastructure, but they're not going to succeed at stopping the movement. That's just going to strengthen the movement. It will draw a lot of attention to the movement. If enough people decide to do this with nonviolent action, you can overwhelm the infrastructure of the state. That's something they fear more than violence in the streets, because violence in the streets, they'll win. They have the guns for it. We don't, unquote. No matter how the movement continues, the weight of tort's absence will be felt as long as this fight carries on.

It's such a huge loss, but as we keep thinking about, you know, WWTD, what would tort do, it's continued to support those projects. It's continued to uplift the spaces and groups that are supporting the most vulnerable amongst us and uplifting their voices, uplifting their safety, and they're going to continue to be trainings offered, training specifically for folks who are marginalized and afraid of gun violence and want to know how to be able to protect themselves and protect their friends. This came about specifically in the wake of the shooting at the gay bar, I guess a few months ago now, Jesus, and that was something that tort was helping organize. So yeah, we're going to keep doing that work. How do you think you're going to continue on without tort there now? You know, I think they set me up. The hardest thing to navigate, like, okay, what can I do? Where can I fit in? Like, I'm shorter, you know, living in the forest. And I think with just like the canvassing, I feel like I've really figured out the ways I can, you know, my place in it, enough to keep me busy. Was tort kind of very instrumental to having you help figure out, like, your role in this? I mean, honestly, I would just like spitball, you know, an idea and they'd be like, yeah, you should do that.

Or we were like, yeah, that'd be sick. And that gave me the confidence to be like, okay. And also, like, I think this movement is interesting because it's totally different from any other organization or anything I've done in that. Like, if you want to volunteer in any other thing, like, you know, you make a graphic and you check it and you send it to someone and get it approved, you know. And just like the kind of deconstructing that thinking was like, I mean, tort was really instrumental in that. And it can be like difficult to navigate, but really just walking all that back and being like, if you want to like, you know, canvas your neighbors, like, you just do it. The stop cop city movement has called for a fifth week of action to be held on March 4 through March 11 in Atlanta, Georgia. They are asking all those opposed to cop city to come participate in a variety of events and actions, both in and out of the forest. And if you're able to bring a tent, if you're unable to travel, there's still calls to support people in your own community who might be able to do so.

This week of action will be a key moment in the next phase of the fight to defend the forest. I want people to know that being in the woods, even if just for a few days will transform you in unexpected and delightful ways. And that's something that we witnessed with tort. Tort lived in the woods for less than a year and they transformed and blossomed into their purpose in unexpected and beautiful ways. And so if you have the opportunity to come and spend any amount of time in these woods, I encourage you to do so because I think that you'll find that it will nourish you and aid in your growth as a human. The police have not succeeded in scaring everybody out of the forest. Wallani People's Park is still legally required to operate as a public park. Last month, I saw regular people jogging the trails. People still come every day.

The movement has only grown despite the repression and now forest defenders in Atlanta are urging people everywhere to organize for the upcoming mass convergence. A large list of resources and movement websites I'll be putting in the description for people to learn more and stay up to date with information regarding the week of action. I'll end this series by reading from a Defend the Forest poster that I saw around Atlanta. It is your mission to stop a cop city by all of the means at your disposal. Without hesitation, defend the forest from destruction, the city from commercialization, the future from ruin, the imagination from conquest, and the heart from resignation. Do not wait for further instruction. Reality is the battlefield. We just grew right beside us and ties have started fighting over the gifts that she provides us. Scorched in the very soil that all of us derive from. And when empires learn and can't withstand fire, we return to the land where our ancestors raindanced. We are all the creatures. We still bear her features. The one and only reason all living things is breathing, the city's deceiving.

Leave, go see the dirt. Young will be among the lungs of Mother Earth. Before you take your throne, you must restore it. Before your flesh and bone, before you build a home. Before they chop them down, they were the forest. 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 not in the good and 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. God fucking dammit, I just got another fucking message about the gold ads. Leave me alone. Now look, people, if you aren't currently putting all of your money into gold, and I mean all of your money, then you're just leaving cash on the table. Gold is such a good investment vehicle that if you had bought $10,000 worth of gold 20 years ago, you would have roughly the same amount of money. Can you beat gold? I've replaced most of my teeth with gold and I have roughly the same amount of teeth, so it's a win-win.

Wow, wow, incredible. Gold is perfect for a number of reasons. Look, if you're worried about instability, obviously if society collapses, gold is the thing that you want to have, because of course you'll still be able to trade what is fundamentally a useless rock for goods and services in the event that there's no civilization. That just makes complete sense. Don't stock up on ammunition, stock up on gold. What about gold ammunition, Robert? Now see, if you want to kill super vampires, that's what you want, is gold bullets. You know, there is something like, maybe it's like survival of the fittest. I'm allergic to gold, so if I touch it, it gives me a rash, so I can't survive in a world of gold. I love you. So if you need to take out Shireen in the apocalypse, make sure, make a gold spear or something.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, just gift her jewelry. Okay, it's a good idea. According to one of my friends who has read much more Marx than I do, Marx predicted that we would go back to the gold standard. So, yeah, look, it's going to be great. The immortal science wins again. Thank you with Carl. This is actually, today we are talking about collapse, but not the collapse of the economy, because the economy is kind of always collapsing. That's part of what makes it the economy. Instead, we're talking about the fact that the market for eggs has gotten insane. People are paying crazy prices for Juevos these days. Beautiful.

And there's no good reason for it. Obviously, egg production in some places was impacted by the bird flu, but that is not why eggs have gotten more expensive. It's pure corporate greed. But regardless of that, people are finding themselves thinking about like, wow, eggs are expensive as hell. Should I maybe get some chickens? And today we have several chicken owners on the podcast, myself and James Stout, and several people who don't have chickens, but are chicken curious. So we're going to talk about having chickens. James? Hi, yeah. Yeah, I do. I've been training for this my whole life. This was your idea.

Yeah, this is very much my baby. So if you guys want to sit back and learn about chickens, I'd be happy to do that. Your baby, James, or your egg? Well, that's the thing, isn't it, Robert? One could be the other if given enough time. Yeah, people have talked about this, I've heard. Yeah, it's been a discussion for some time in the chicken community. Alright, let's talk about chickens. So I want to start out with, like, if you're thinking about getting chickens, and I have written a script for this, thank you. I did.

Good, yeah, I'm ready to roll. So the most important thing, obviously, when you're getting animals, you're getting any animals is that you're responsible for a living thing and you have to take care of it, and you have to be kind to it, and you have to treat it well, and make sure that if you're not able to look after it, like, if you travel a lot for work, then someone else can, right? Yes. I think chickens are particularly useless, or they're useful, and they're very nice, but they're not like the most practical of animals. Like, if you leave them alone, they will die. If it gets too hot, they will die. If it gets too cold, they will die. Like, you do have to look after them. They're not like a wild animal that comes in sometimes and lays eggs. They're an extremely domesticated animal that's been domesticated for, I don't know, probably thousands of years.

So it's a responsibility, I guess. I'm just going to go through some of my stuff. If you guys have any questions as we move along, please feel free to ask them. I want to start out with the breeds of chickens, which I think are a good idea. So when you're looking at chickens, the first thing you're going to want to look at is your space, right? Like, how much space do I have? And there are websites where you can calculate, like, you're working with your acreage, or how many yards you have, how many chickens are appropriate. James, the level of prep in this dog is beautiful. I'm like so happy. Very organized.

I will note, be careful about getting too many. When I got the place that I got, I inherited 14 chickens, and that is a tremendous quantity of chickens. And there was especially chickens make, you know, kind of in their prime egg laying can make one, sometimes some chickens will do two a day. So there were weeks where I was getting, like, close to 100 eggs, which is far more eggs than a human being can possibly consume. You can consume, I can consume 100 eggs. Well, then they will consume you. They will kill you eggs. I always do more eggs. Eggs are like eight. I walked into the grocery store, okay, I'm now doing the bed.

I walked into the grocery store, and the eggs were 850, and I was like, what the fuck is going on here? Man, I'm going to make a fucking bank. I have, like, literally 60 eggs sitting in my kitchen right now. Robert's going to sell eggs on the dark web. You're goddamn right. This is how I fucking leave this damn podcasting bullshit behind. I'm going to become the Eggman. You cajoo, bitches. Finally, a use for cryptocurrency. Egg coin, it's tied to the value of eggs as you own the cryptocurrency. That's completely collapsed.

Yeah, don't over chicken yourself, like starting out, but also don't get too few. You do want at least three. Oh, they'll be sad, or they won't get along. And if you're like a normal household, three is probably a great number of chickens. Like, you will probably be quite happy with three to four chickens. Yeah, you'll get, like, if you estimate, like, six eggs per chicken per week is like a fair kind of estimate. They'll take some time off during the year, or seasons change or malt and stuff. So, 18 eggs, like, yeah, you're going pretty hard in a normal household if you're eating that many. So, I think if you start, people like to think that they should get Bantams to start off with.

Do we know what Bantams are? Non-chicken understanders? I have a lot of chickens, but I don't know anything about the kinds of chickens. So, we've had a few Bantams. They're not great, to be honest. Bantams are mostly showing birds. So, it's a smaller chicken. Think of it as, like, a half-sized chicken, right? And if you've seen, like, a really fancy, and you can go ahead and Google some Bantams, like, some different... Oh, that's a little guy. Oh, that's a little. Yeah, they're really pretty.

I like large chickens. Now, look, I don't engage in cock-fighting. I think it's immoral. But I like to know, theoretically, if they had to, my chickens could handle themselves in a fight. Did anybody ever think Robert would be like, you're a big chicken guy? Like, what? Yeah. Yeah, you want big chickens. Some breeds to look for are Orpingtons, like Buff Orpingtons. You can remember they're big because they're buff. Hell yeah, jacked-ass chickens.

Yeah, I could get a yolk to Orpington, get a hench, Rhode Island red. People in America don't say hench, do they? Oh, look how cute the Bintam is. Oh, yeah, we used to have a couple of those. So one of the things about Bantams is you can't get them point of flay. So point of flay is when they've been sexed, right? So you know that they're girls and they come to you just to when they're about to lay, right? You get Bantams younger and you don't get them sexed.

So in our case, we had one. She crowed a lot, so we thought she's a rooster. She wasn't, and the other one was a rooster. So that's going to be my question. Do you need to get a rooster also? No. So the chickens are going to lay regardless. I can't, I don't understand how that works.

Okay, so the chickens are going to lay regardless, right? Why? How? They just do. The eggs aren't fertilized, right? Yeah, so they won't make chickens. They won't be baby chickens. Oh, it's like, okay, I get it. I have to have a human doing it.

Yeah, but I don't know. It's kind of like their equivalent of menstruation effectively. Yeah, I understand that now. Everything's coming back to me as far as like vegan talking points go. Chickens, by the way, because chickens are, as James said, these are animals and you have to take good care of them. That is your responsibility. You do low-key realize the longer you have them, but they're monsters.

Like, their favorite food is their own kind. They love eating each other. They're cannibals? They are tiny fucking dinosaurs. Yeah, so like... Don't go outside with your chickens. Like the other day, I was cutting down some bushes and I had to, I was wearing shorts.

I had a little cut from the thorn. And when they see blood, they are just like fucking exocet missiles. They go nuts. What? Does that affect the egg? Yeah, I mean, what you feed them... Yeah, we butchered a deer last year and we wound up with a lot of deer fat

and kind of like meat that... You gave it to the chickens? Well, yeah, we had some stuff. Because the deer had been hit by a car, there was some meat we couldn't eat. So we wound up giving several pounds of meat to the chickens. And those eggs fucking ruled. Wow. Okay, it's not advised to feed them deer, but...

Yeah, so you want to stuff, actually, if you... So they do believe there's stuff called purple spray. I'm sure it's not what it's actually called, but it's purple and it's a spray. And you can, we already called it purple spray, but you can spray it on them and it just stops it looking like blood. I'm sure it's like an antibiotic or maybe a antiseptic. But yeah, you could spray that on the chicken. So like one of mine, she's just got this little thing on her wing

that opens up every now and again, and I just make sure I spray that. And that stops her from the other ones from pecking her, right? Yeah. So yeah, they have to be tiny dinosaurs. We had last year some kind of animal. I think it was probably like a possum or something. I don't really know. Some kind of animal got into the coop and attacked my chickens. And we had... I had one chicken.

We called it the anarchist chicken because it could always escape. It like never was in the cage. And when they got attacked, the anarchist chicken leapt to defend the rest of the flock and fought off whatever it was it attacked. But she wound up with a hole in her side. And so I like took her and I dressed the wound and I put her back in the cage and they all immediately tried to eat her. You want to have a separation cage.

Yeah, that was the lesson that I learned. I had to take her out because... Yeah. We have a tiny rabbit hutch that we use. It's called the Meryl Peep Memorial Chicken Hospital because Meryl Peep is one of our chickens who died. And you just put them in that for a few days until they're better and then they can reintegrate just fine.

And so, we've made very little progress on my script. Okay, so you want to get buff orpingtons, reds are good, Plymouth rocks. Your counters are nice. Have you guys seen those? No, what? I don't know anything about what you're talking about. Yeah, I don't know any chicken. Sounds like a different language.

What do they teach you in school? So they're called Easter Eggers sometimes. They lay different color eggs. Like pastel color eggs, like blue and green eggs. No. Have you not been exposed to this at all? No. I grew up next to Cornfield, but also I...

I guess I was around a farm, but we didn't interact with the chickens because you don't... I don't know. They were like, here, deal with cows instead. That was like... Yeah, chickens are good. Don't go... Go straight into Catholic if you're, you know, getting into animal husbandry. But yeah, Americana is a funk say ladies colored eggs. One of my friend's dad's had them when I was a kid

and he made bank selling them around Easter. So yeah, if you're looking to get into a chicken hustle. And then leg horns are like really good. They're like hardy chickens, but they are loud. So if you live near people, I would consider not... You should also check your local laws. Like where I live, you can't have a rooster. You can have up to five chickens within city limits.

You can't have a rooster. You don't really want a rooster unless you're allowed to have chicks. No. And one of the things roosters can do is like peck at your chickens and effectively like wear holes in there. Like, yeah, they wind up like... They're little bastards. All in parts. Yeah, they're little sons of bitches.

They're loud as shit. We harvested ours as soon as I got the place. Harvested. Yeah. That's the term. Okay, this leads into a question that I've been wanting to ask, which is that, okay, it is my firm belief that I could defeat a chicken in single combat.

It would send me to the hospital, but apparently this is the thing you need to do with your chickens. So how practical is it to defeat a chicken in single combat if you have to extract another chicken or something? I've never actually had any kind of aggression from my chickens. When I'm bleeding, they'll peck my leg. Yeah, yeah, yeah. How's that not aggression?

For a while, we hadn't realized that like... So a thing that you want when you get chickens is a rodent-proof feeder, right? So you don't want to just put the food in a bowl. If you have an issue with rodents, you want to have the thing. So like basically she comes up, she stands on a step and that opens up the feeder and she can peck and eat, right? You want to get a rodent-proof feeder.

You can just buy them a tractor supply. But ours gummed up with rain and we didn't realize. And the chickens were obviously not getting food. They were upset with us. So they would attack me every time I came outside. They'd attack me and I'd be like, go away so I'd give them treats, right? I'd give them like worms and apples.

A kitten has arrived. I have to. She was wanting to hold or to be held. I'm holding my cat for anyone that's like, what's happening? She just wanted to be snuggled. That's okay. She's giving you a kiss? Yeah, so the mine would attack me for a while

and I just gave them meal worms when they would attack me. So unconsciously I was reinforcing the attacking behavior and so they would attack me for a while. But I think you could take them, just keep swinging. Yeah, you don't have to. Most of the time, at least mine, I hand feed them. So like a nice treat for them is I'll cut a melon in half and I'll chase Shireen because she's allergic to melons.

I am, that I am. And then you just hold it out and they'll come and eat it. And they love scraps, like that's often, like what I do with basically all of my food waste is give it to the chickens and they tend to be very happy with that. Yeah, it's a very sustainable thing. Let's get on to space because I want to talk about that. Hold on, so before we get into this,

speaking of sustainability, do you know who else is incredibly sustainable? Oh, wow, I don't think we can say that. Capitalism? Yes, inherently so. Shiny stuff. It will last a thousand years. All right, we're back. Buy some gold. Buy some gold.

Want to reinforce that. Because gold, when you're starving, will be more useful than chickens. Because it's shiny. That's right, that's right. It'll make you forget that you're slowly starving to death. It's the foundation of all of this shit. It's shiny. Talking of shiny things, I want to talk about chicken coops.

Oh, yeah. There's a shiny thing, section one. I love a good coop. I do love coops. I love to make a coop. I love to buy a coop. I love to help my friends buy coops. It's a great conversation area.

Anyway, so they do need a coop. They need a place where they can go at night. You want it to be shut off from predators, right? So you don't want your possum, your raccoon, your fox, your stout, your weasel, whatever you're dealing with, snake. So once you get above three chickens, you might want to have more than one nesting box in there.

But this doesn't necessarily mean that you need to go out and buy, you can buy them on Amazon now, but they're quite expensive and they're often quite shit. The pre-made chicken coop is a very poor quality. If you have a shed or a kennel or something like that, you can pretty easily make it into a coop. You can just put a drop down door on the front so you can close them in at night and let them out in the morning.

Or I've seen people use drawers, like dresses. Just open those and use them as nesting boxes. You want to put down some straw in your nesting box. Yeah. I have, I think, four for the chickens that I have now, which is about, I think we've got about 11. Yeah. And they are, two of them are large enough for two at a time,

and then two of them are smaller. Although chickens, and sometimes, one of the things you have to do occasionally is come in and take them out of the, some of them out of the nesting boxes. Some of them get stuck in a loop where... As they get broody. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so I just take them out and set them down where there's some stuff to peck at. And they seem to, it kind of resets their little chicken brains. Silky bantams, which are one of the show bantams, get broody as fuck. And it's like, I've had friends who have had them and they will not eat and not drink because they're just like, no, I'm sitting on this egg.

You can't stop me. And you have to lock them out. There's not even an egg there, chicken. What's wrong with you? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, they'll take another chicken's egg. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or even silky bantams.

Silky. That's cute. Look them up. They're real, they're floofers. They're very cute. So you want to build them a run too, right? A place where they can say if you run around, have their food, have their water.

I would suggest using construction netting when you build a runway that people call chicken wire, which is like maybe one inch. Size holes. But like a lot of stuff can get through that. You'd be amazed. Like rats, mice, snakes can all get through that. And if you use construction netting,

which is like maybe I'm not very good at inches, but like about one centimeter size, a lot less is going to get through it. And you might want to bury it down too, like a foot or two below the run if you're building something permanent, just because things can dig underneath, right? Like we had a fox dig underneath when I was a kid.

And don't, it's preferable to do that to putting it on the floor of your run because they don't like the little wire and the little feet. Yeah, no, no, definitely not on the, you want them to have access to dirt and ideally sometimes grass too. One thing that they, because I will let them out sometimes during the day.

And I have a barn that has like, like it's kind of dust in there, like not dust. Like almost like sandy dry dirt. And one of their favorite things, especially during the summer, is to just kind of like sit down and rub dirt all up. And they kind of need to be able to do some version of that in order to be like healthy.

Otherwise they, yeah, it's good for them. It's good for their skin. It's good for them existing. Yeah, it's good for their mental health. I think they're like, people keep cooking in terrible conditions commercially, but it doesn't mean that you have any excuse to. So, yeah.

When I got these chickens, they had been, the people who'd had them before, I don't know what the fuck was wrong with them. They had a sizable outside run, but whoever, the folks who had them had covered the entire bottom in stone. So they were just like living on stone. Yeah.

No, they were in a horrible shape. And when we harvested the rooster, his gizzard was full of automotive glass. What? Yeah, it was fucked up. I spent, because they all had huge patches of them that like were bald. I mean, we dealt with that partially

by getting rid of the rooster and partially by making sure we gave them. I still do mix in oyster shell bits with the calcium's good for them. Yeah, so you'll know if they need that. They start coming, and it's actually really dangerous. An egg can rupture inside if they're laying it, and then that can be fatal.

So you want to make sure, if we can cover through quickly, I guess. So they do like to grub for worms and stuff like that, right? Look for insects, and they love to have scraps, but for a laying chicken, you want to make sure it's getting a decent base diet of layers pellets, which should be somewhere between 60 and 18% protein.

Sorry, what kind of pellets? Layer pellets. Yeah. There's a number of brands of it, but yeah, they're called layer pellets. Yeah, some of them will already have oyster shell and grit, and like Robert said, they do need those. If not, you can augment them,

but it's probably just going to be easier to just get one sack and just dump it all in. They do need access to water as well, that they can get out all day. I think it's better to use like a nipple type drinker, which is a... You can take a bucket, any bucket, right? Fill it up, and then you put these little nipples,

and they're red, and again, they like to peck at red stuff, so they'll peck at them, and then they get... When that stops, they can't put their feet in the water and get their shit from their feet in the water and get sick. And they're not clean animals, so...

And then I like to put a little bit... It's hot where I live in San Diego, so I put a little bit of electrolyte stuff in there for them, and they don't seem to mind, and it just seems to help. And then, yeah, like, it's good to... You can feed them kitchen straps, but you don't want to overload them,

especially on carby stuff. Like, they do need enough protein to keep up their laying, and they definitely need enough calcium. One thing I will say, if you're going to buy something, if you're going to buy a chicken coop, there's a company called Eggloo, which is like, Eggloo,

they make some really nice pre-vebcoops that are pretty good, and you can buy an attachment which puts a little door on it that it uses a solar panel, I guess, to charge itself, and then it will open at daylight and close at sunset.

So if you're the sort of person who knows that you'll forget to bring your chickens in, obviously they're at risk at night from predation and things, and they become completely fucking useless at night. When they go to sleep, you can pick them up and turn them upside down. Yeah. The interior of my coop has,

it's really cute, it's basically like a ladder, like a very wide ladder going up the side of the building, and they just all stand on, as like a group of 20, like at different levels of the ladder, and just sit there as they sleep at night.

Yeah, they need a pair to sleep on, actually, that's a good reminder. You can't just sit on the floor. Yeah, they don't like just being in the dirt. No. And then something to entertain them, so a good thing to entertain them is, if you have CDs still,

young listeners may not remember having CD collections, but if you do have CDs, or you can find CDs, you can just hang those, and they'll packet them and stuff, because they're kind of shiny, and they move around, so it's a good thing to do with your Lannis Mara CDs.

So I just tore out what was left of my front lawn in order to grow more stuff, and I just tossed all of the chunks of like soil and grass in there. They love pecking at that shit. It's like one of their favorite things in the world.

Yeah, we put them on, I have some planters out back, and they're like fenced off, so the chickens can't get in, and then when we turn them over, and we replant them, we'll put them in there, and it's a huge worm, so I have no idea how they got in there.

But yeah, they love that stuff. Yeah, and I let them out into the yard periodically, and it's always whenever I have to like walk them back in, because you kind of just like loop around them to like guide the flock as they move, because they'll kind of instinctively go away from you if you're walking towards them.

One of my hobbies is to like pretend to be an old b**ch. Oh, let's go back. We should stop this immediately. Yeah, buy some gold. Okay. Sometimes I pretend it's the Shawshank Redemption,

which is why I'm giving my chickens a boat by the coast for when they escape. Yeah. All of us love having health insurance. Please stop. Can I ask a question about

space? How much physical room do they need? How much land do you have to have? So you can look up. There are pretty good calculators online where you can look up how many square yards or whatever you have.

The unterrible estimating size, but I don't have very big garden. We've had up to six chickens, but you do want to just look it up. And it's not like the square yardage you have isn't as important as the access they have to get sunlight.

Can they be out in the dirt? Something that feels like where a chicken would want to be? This is not something you could burn from an apartment, right? No. Unless you need to be outside.

If you live in an apartment that has a yard or something that shared you potentially could, but no, you do need some amount of dirt and grass, essentially. You get there. So mine just go all around my yard all day and

you guys have noticed also come into my office. They'll put themselves to bed at night. They know where their home is. They'll just go back to bed at night. I want to talk a little bit about health because there are definitely some chicken health things and it's very expensive to take chickens to the vet

actually because you have to go to an exotic and avian vet and they're quite rare. What about vet? Exotic and avian vet. You could take them to a regular vet, but most of the time. So actually if your chickens get sick in most states, there's a state run

helpline you can call and it's free and they'll put you on to a vet right away and they're very, very helpful. And that's because of the danger of different avian flus like infecting large numbers of animals. Does something similar to pet insurance

exist for peeps, farm animals, or not really? It does, but I don't think you probably wouldn't want to be investing in that for your chickens. If you're breeding livestock and that's the thing you can have. One of the things you do have to keep in mind is that

at some point you will have to kill them because they will get old enough or sick enough and some form of euthanasia will wind up being kinder than continuing to let them be. That's true of any kind of livestock.

At some point if you don't just want to let it die naturally, which again in a lot of cases will be prolonging its suffering you do have to be willing to take care of that one way or the other. Yeah, you can give them the best life you can give them and look after them as much as you can

but often times they will. Or they'll get hurt if some species gets in there or whatever. Well I think that's a good reality to remind people of that. It's actually like a serious thing to have a chicken and then be responsible for its life and death and also like the egg comes out of their butthole, right?

Yes, well it's their cloaca. I'm just saying it's not just like cartoon chicken laying you know what I mean? I think I had to probably remember that a while ago. It's not that game everyone played in Covid where you're in Ireland and you build stuff. I just think people usually are

really flipping with stuff like animals. It's a living animal and like you have to take care of it. And it's your responsibility, right? You need to think about that. You don't want to let the bumholes get too poopy when talking about health so they can get worms that way and that's really bad.

So if you see that, just pick them up and that's why you want to handle them when they're young so that you can handle them with stuff like this. I'll just pick them up and use a spray bottle or a little hose with a bit of warm water and they don't mind that at all. At least they don't give me any shit.

Some of the common things you're going to see are gape worm. It's called gape worm because they'll gape. You'll see them gapeing. They can be egg bound and then depending on where you are they can be too hot or too cold so you do need to make sure they have shade.

I found this thing. I found it. Someone was moving out. It's like a mister. They have it at restaurants. When you go to a restaurant in L.A. and it's hot and they have annoying whens. What? Yeah. That's a thing? Yeah.

Have you ever been to an amusement park in a line to have them too? It's really hot. Sometimes in the fruit and vegetables when you go to the supermarket. They have those in restaurants? Yeah, they have them at restaurants. Not inside.

Outside. There's misters to make it. You're in Phoenix or somewhere. Yeah. You can find a lot of this shit by the way. If you live in a place that is gentrifying like unfortunately this happened in the park of San Diego

I live in. For instance, all the wood for my chicken coop won't pay for that shit. There's rich people doing stuff to houses. It doesn't need to be done. Just obtain wood from their building sites. Obtain. It's like those pallets of bricks.

If they didn't want you to use them they wouldn't leave it out there. I would live with Warren and have sent the pallets if she didn't want you to use them. Obviously health wise you want to make sure you have that purple spray on hand. You want to be giving them

some electrolytes in their water. You want to make sure they have shade if it's hot and that their coop is warm. They don't like it much below freezing. No. I keep a heat lamp basically all winter in there. With a red bulb so it doesn't upset their sleep patterns.

Yeah. The way battery people do it battery chickens they do more day and night cycles using artificial light to make the chickens lay more. The chickens will lay at an accelerated rate. It'll keep them laying during the winter

at a lower rate. Don't be doing that. That's not particularly good for the birds. I let them rest this winter. Yeah. They're animals. They don't just exist to provide you food. A question on this. How cold

is there a point it gets in the winter where you probably shouldn't have them? You just want to keep the coop warm and then when we were at Tenacious Unicorn Ranch they have chickens. I don't know how cold it was

but I went to bed every night with a now gene full of boiling water and when I woke up I was hugging an ice baby. It was that cold. The heat where I was staying didn't work the first time. It was cold AF and the chickens had a nice warm coop

with a heat lamp and they were fine. People keep chickens in every imaginable climate as long as you're careful about making sure that you have a warm place for them to sleep they will be okay. Can you let them out in the snow

and stuff? They have fun with that. It snowed yesterday and my chickens are having a great time out. They like it actually. I remember at home my chickens love the snow and when you're buying the chickens

consider that in your breed choice. Some of them are going to do bad and cold some of them are going to not like the heat. Honestly one of the better things you can do in that situation I live in some weird ass part of the world where it's freezing half the time Google

backyard chickens whatever the name of your area is and then reddit. You will find people talking on reddit this is the breed that I picked and this is what I do. People love to talk about their chickens backyard chickens reddit was one of my resources.

Exactly. It's a good place to look. If you have a coop you're going to want to clean it you can use that chicken poop as fertilizer It's some of the best in the world. If you're into this sort of growing your own food this all works well.

You give the chicken to scraps, chicken to make you eggs say poop. You put that into your plants you have nice plants. You want to balance it out it's a bit acidic I think just using the shit so you want to be combusting with other stuff as well checking your soil chemistry before you go ham.

You can do that you do want to make sure I've got a poultry helpline we spoke about that. California's is great though don't hesitate to call the poultry helpline if you need help there's people who are being paid to help you. I know most pet owners

unless they're very wealthy will have had to make horrible decisions about their pets health versus their own income and it's shit so that helpline is free and like Robert said it's because they're very scared of infectious diseases so take advantage of your

taxpayer funded chicken vet and give them a call I don't know if it's in every state but I know it's in a lot of them go ahead are you going to talk about giving them the shake and bake treatment for

what do you call it if they get mites go ahead and talk about it chickens can get there's like a skin it functions similarly to like a skin infection there's like little mites

that will get on them you'll notice bald patches it's bad for their health obviously you would not want to be covered in mites and so there's this kind of mite killer called promethrin and the way that you

can apply it in a number of ways but you basically need to coat the entire chicken it's essentially a white powder so what we did when we had to do it is we just took a large feed bag and we filled it with promethrin and we put the chickens in it once at a time and they give them a little shake so they got covered

you've shaken baking all of them and then they're just wandering around confused and covered in this white powder like what the fuck happened it's very funny it's the best way because they get covered very quickly that way with mites

and dust and stuff you do want to make sure that where they're living is not too moist or not too dusty because they can get respiratory conditions from that so yeah you want to make sure that they're living in a nice environment they also like the biggest health thing you're going to see is that they will peck at each other

especially when you first get your birds they're going to establish what's called a pecking order which people have used heard and used in order well I didn't know the meeting I didn't understand what that met completely until right now this moment that's my gift to you

very helpful today a lot of learning that's what they call a knowledge transfer so they'll do that, they'll peck when you get a new bird you don't really want to introduce one new bird at once this is how you get fucking conned into having bantams because let's say

your garden can support four chickens and then one of your girls dies and you're sad and you want to get more birds so you're like well we can't go to five full size chickens so we'll get bantams two half size chickens and that is good for the social dynamic one won't get picked on

one won't be the new girl but then you've got bantams and then you just it's not very pro-bantam they're just difficult so how do they establish the pecking order they peck at each other well basically one of the

well it's just like any other physical confrontation they peck at each other and they're like okay well you're harder than me I'm not here for that they're back down you really start picking on one and then you do have to separate them for a while so you've got to watch out for that

and you've got to be vigilant and when you first get them you're going to be excited and you're going to want to go outside and interact with them so you'll be watching that anyway so just make sure you have treats and stuff and separate them and don't be scared they can't hurt you the chickens but yeah it's normal

for them to peck at each other you've got to keep an eye out for if they do draw blood like Robert said they are fucking dinosaurs just hone in on that so that's when you have to separate them or come in with your purple spray so yeah you have to make sure that you're aware of that

you said that they pecked at your leg when it was bleeding does that hurt? you wouldn't do it recreationally yeah maybe some people would you do you I'm not going to yuck your yum if you are turned on pecking isn't exactly like

it's not full body attack I walk in everyday to feed my chickens and I don't get pecked or anything they're fine they're not attack animals and chickens by the way

are like every other creature some of them are assholes any kind of animal that you have some of them are dicks I remember on that subject I was writing about rattlesnake behavior for this story and there's this one fucking rattlesnake

which literally every time I ride past it it's just like BAM I was talking to this snake behavior expert and he's like yeah man that one's an asshole some of them are just jackasses I don't know what to tell you dude you've just come across a bell end like it is what it is

so yeah sometimes you're just going to have a chicken which is mean and you just got to hope it doesn't you got to make your choice then it's really causing chaos in the flock what are you going to do with it that may be a chicken that you eat by the way

one of the things you learn keeping chickens is how wildly we have fucked up the chickens that we use for meat because like a normal chicken does not produce breast meat that is that size it is the size of like a normal grocery store chicken breast those are from monsters that we made

well yeah breast meat was popular so they made like they inserted like a hormone or whatever to make that part of the chicken grow I mean I've seen videos of like the chicken toppling over because that's so heavy it's not supposed to be that way it's madness

bones are not fully developed it's very cruel I don't eat meat I'm not really like down with the way the American commercial agriculture raised animals I grew up on a farm and I raised animals my whole life I'm not fucking touching

cheap meat in the store I understand other people do, you go to feed your families and obviously one way or the other if you're raising chickens and you at some point the chicken is going to die if at all possible I think you do kind of have a responsibility to find some use for that meat

they're sick in which case yeah obviously if they get like I had to kill two last year because they got like some sort of avian flu the state people will come and take them away and do an autopsy and do you get sick like that so that's nice to know

do I have to worry about the rest of my flock what is this is there something in the soil if you have concerns like that it's nice to have them do that that's a really good note but yeah, if you are responsible for them you have to give them the best life they can

and the kindest death you're responsible for some suffering as little as possible in their little lives we used to buy chickens when I was a kid chickens for a battery farm and we'd go and get them as chicks and just be like you, you, you, you are going to run around our farm all day

and have a wonderful life and I'm so sorry the rest of you have this fucking horrible existence but it was nice to save some of them so it's going to be hard to get chickens right now so my last thing was really like when you're buying chickens right where you're going to get your chickens from so hopefully where you live you have like a farm shop

steal them, liberate them from a battery farm shoot your way in it doesn't matter it's worth it you will probably, well I actually think people have literally gotten domestic terrorism charges for that well I think it was pigs wasn't it

chickens are not charismatic enough for people to go to prison over I know it's unfair, it's unfair it's racism really there's one thing we could tell you as a group of individuals legally responsible for what we say it's

become yourself and liberate poultry fight your way in the only not the only but the most concrete evidence of dinosaurs have now devolved into these chickens that is so funny to me that out of all the animals

that is the closest thing we have to a dinosaur tiny velociraptor they are dinosaurs and again their favorite food is their own kind and also like every now and then I will give them some of their eggs just because it makes them so happy to eat well I was going to ask like what

you said that it tasted different when you gave them meat like what is the difference that you caught in the taste when they do eat their own eggs versus like just the feed their own eggs don't, I've never fed them enough for it to be a meaningful component of their diet if they're sick they will eat scrambled egg we call it cheese they like too

when they're sick can you like taste a difference if you give them herbs so like one thing that people do is give them little bundles of herbs and you can taste that in the egg it just kind of richer you'll notice different

if they are calcium deficient the eggs are really fragile and if they have a shitload of calcium in their diet like my eggs are you have to want to crack those fuckers if you feed them flaxseeds then the eggs have a higher

omega-3 content like if you it's like interesting super interesting yeah you can give them flaxseeds that kind of thing you can mess with their diet a bit and they like that stuff so yeah when you're buying them what you want I think as a beginner is like a point of lay bird

and you can say point of lay and that's what they'll give you they're going to try and give you pellets they're going to try and say it's nice to raise chicks and it is it's really nice to raise chicks but some of them will die and that will be upsetting for you and it's hard

that's a general note any lifetime if you if you decide that you want to be a person who has livestock you have to be okay with them dying and it being an experience that is more direct to you than like obviously it's it's not as emotional as like when a cat or a dog dies but

it will not involve a vet with the kind of frequency that like a dying pet does like you will have to deal with you know animals die because animals just die sometimes they wind up with the same kind of ailments people have or like an animal's heart will give out or something and you didn't do anything wrong it's just

an animal was born with a heart defect right it's just like a thing that occurs if you have enough animals yeah we used to say if you have livestock you have dead stock one day yeah like it's just something you have to face up to but like yeah someone else is already doing that shit and they're probably doing it with less compassion

than you if you're buying you know warmer eggs so you like I say you can't you're not god but like you owe these animals like a decent life and yeah it's little suffering as you can so yeah by the point of lay chickens make sure that they're sexed right you don't want

to rooster you might not legally be able to have a rooster and then something like a dog container it's fine I bought them home in a shoebox before like I'll just put them next to me in my truck and they're pretty chill like you know I give them give them a little bit of water in there but generally they don't you know want to drink

you can kind of swaddle them I've seen people swaddle them and you know if they're really panicking or whatever I'm swaddling it's like when you wrap them like you would with a baby and people do that I know when they have to move them in like a hurricane to try and calm them down but I've always just put

them in a dog container are we gonna talk about a storing eggs oh yeah yeah yeah cause people don't fucking yeah it's a weird American thing yeah so this doesn't happen in the rest of the world but you guys get your eggs refrigerated and that's because

they're washed before they come to you you don't need to do this normally no you shouldn't wash your eggs nor should you refrigerate them just I have a little helter-skelter thing it just looks like a spiral and you put the egg on the top and it just rolls

its little way down until it gets to the bottom and that way I always take them from the bottom and that way I'm always sort of getting the oldest eggs first so I don't end up with like one at the bottom of the basket right so you don't wash them no just just bring them in not until you're ready to eat them obviously wash them

before you cook them cause some of them will have poop and stuff on them right but before that just keep them normal they'll last for months like that like I've never had an egg you can there are a couple of other ways to obviously you could pickle them be very careful with that if you are

canning them I would recommend just pickling them and putting them in the fridge because eggs in like hard boiled eggs in particular are troublesome to can because there's always if you think about hard boiled eggs there's always little bitty cracks in like the white of the egg

and that is where botulism can live so be extremely careful if you are pickling eggs I would recommend don't can them specifically just pickle them and put them in the fridge they'll last a pretty good amount of time pickled eggs are delicious

is the thing about not refrigerating the eggs do you actually still have to refrigerate if you can in this country yes you can roll them in vegetable oil and I think ash which replicates the way that they have

a membrane on them but they're fair like all intents if you're buying them yeah when they come out like a little pole basically yeah like it kind of fills the pores on the outside of the egg I think as I understand it so if you really wanted to store them

you didn't have access to refrigerator you could do the oil and ash thing you should look it up the other thing you can do because again if you have any quantity of chickens there's a good chance that they will produce like I have a problem with this significantly more eggs

than you can consume are you going to talk about water glassing oh no talk about it though you can look it up I'm not going to give you a guide over this because preserving stuff is something that you should take care on but you can google water glassing it's basically a way you can keep eggs

for like up to a year that way in like crackable, friable condition but I think we are getting the note that James and I should stop talking about chickens for now we can continue in another episode James and I will talk about chickens

privately after this and you all aren't I mean James said it people love to talk about their chickens they do they do love to talk about chickens maybe we'll start a side podcast for Patreon chicken cast anyway

poultry pod until next time take a lesson from the chickens and eat your own young oh my god hey we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe it could happen here as a production of cool zone media

for more podcasts from cool zone media visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeart radio app, apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts you can find sources for it could happen here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources thanks for listening

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 protest it involves a cigar smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse and inside his hearse with like a lot of guns

but are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? he was just waiting for me to set the date the time and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen listen to alphabet boys on the iHeart radio app, apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts what if i told you that much of the forensic

science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price two death sentences in a life without parole my youngest i was incarcerated two days after her first birthday listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts